Andrew Bertaina
After the divorce was final, he took a long train ride from Washington, DC up through the Hudson River Valley, endless bays, light falling in bars through the train’s windows in search of whatever had been missing in the latter years of marriage. In Montreal, he walked the streets all day, warm mid-summer, slipping into a brewery to escape the heat, sitting in the cave like dark, chatting with the bar tender to stave off his loneliness, which had followed him up the long ride and through those river valleys. He had moved out of the house he’d shared with his ex-wife, where they’d had two children, planted a garden, bought furniture, carefully constructed in purchases, in cleaned up vomit, in arguments, a version of life he had eventually decided he did not want. And so now here he was, in the aftermath of that dissolution, following his resolution to travel solo more, to see more of the world in his stints when the children were gone, collect rapidly the kind of life he had missed when he’d been married at twenty-three, narrowing the contours of a life.
In truth, it was impossible to tell if what he felt was true or not, in part because his own mind, not to mention the minds of others, were often opaque to him, and secondarily, because his family had never traveled when he was a child save one cross country trip from California to Oklahoma, a trip where he’d gone on his first hike, where he remembered, if memory could be trusted, hiking along the spine of a mountain while coyotes called out in the distance, a chill running down his spine at their unfamiliar howl. In fact, it was his wife’s family who had introduced him to travel, to the life he’d never imagined, they’d taken him to Utah, slept in tents, the sky an avalanche of stars, with her family they’d seen black bears in Yellowstone, stood on the boardwalk while Old Faithful erupted, and with her, he’d traveled to Italy, seen the majesty of the David in Florence, laid down on a bench in the Boboli gardens.
So maybe it was from her family that he’d learned to miss the life he didn’t have, sowing the seeds in those travels of his marriage’s own destruction, an awareness that the constriction had begun to materialize after they’d been to Italy, watched the elegant gondolas in Venice, the mansions with flooded floors, the pigeons bobbing around Saint Mark’s, eaten sweet, rich gelato on the steps of Trevi Fountain. After that trip, he knew their world could be more expansive than he’d previously believed, knew they were missing out on some other version of life.
This thought troubled him as he walked the streets of Montreal, buzzed after two beers in the brewery, admiring the spiral staircases made of wrought iron and ivy climbing the railing. At a fancy cocktail bar that night, a place he’d found on the internet renowned for its drinks, where they lit his cocktail on fire before serving it, he sat next to two women, both dark haired and attractive who, after a few tentative smiles, asked him what cocktail he’d gotten that was so flamboyant.
The women were from Spain and only one of them spoke English well, the other one, a hauntingly attractive woman, in halting words, which was more than he could say for his Spanish or so he joked as they all tried to communicate. They chatted for a while in the bar, and, before leaving, the women invited him out for a night of salsa dancing.
He stirred his drink, thinking of the constrictions marriage had forced on him, that in fact, one of the key fights had been about her refusal to take a trip to Spain, which he’d romanticized in his mind, salsa dancing, warm tapas, and now, here he was, in this new version of life, prepared to seize a kind of facsimile of it. He said no.
After they left the bar, he realized the cataclysmic mistake he’d made, and he ran out to find them, to listen closely on the quiet streets for their Spanish accents, but they had already disappeared into the darkness.
He walked the streets alone afterward, wondering if anything in his life could have ever been different or if the radical constriction he thought was imposed by marriage, his wife, his religious upbringing, was really something he imposed on himself. The streets were quiet, save the rush of tires, leaf rustle, moonlight on the bark of trees. They told him nothing he did not already know.
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Andrew Bertaina is the author of the essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and The Best American Poetry. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC.