I'll Seize the Day Tomorrow (10 page)

Honeymoon for One

(26 weeks)

SATURDAY.

“So you're off to Puerto Rico,” my friends say.

“You mean Poo-errrto Rrrico,” I say, rolling my tongue with sensual languor.This is one of the many reasons why I do not have a lot of friends; but it's true: I'm off to San Juan for a week-long holiday.

Lately I've been spending so much time sitting at my desk that I fear I've become some kind of Greek mythological beast—half man, half office chair.

I polled my friends and family for a suitable destination, but in the end, it was my parents who won me over. Puerto Rico it was—the place where they spent their honeymoon in 1966.

Before leaving, I call them up to pick their brains for some indication of things I should see and do. My mother
answers, and I tell her to have my father pick up the extension. He's in the middle of watching
Jeopardy
, but he does so, begrudgingly.

“What did you know about Puerto Rico before you went there?” I ask.

“That it's where Puerto Ricans come from,” my mother says uncertainly.

“There's a soda shop on San Felipe Street that makes an egg cream to drop dead for,” my father says. “Ask for Little Pepe.”

“That was over forty years ago,” my mother yells. “Little Pepe's probably a skeleton hanging in a Puerto Rican high school biology class.”

Before getting off the phone, I tell them that a part of this trip is a tribute to them. And their love. A love that bore me.

“That's nice,” my mother says.

“Who is Henry Kissinger?” my father says.

SUNDAY.

My flight leaves at 6:00 a.m. and, in keeping with the alacrity and caution of my ancestry, I've arrived at the airport three and a half hours early. As a result, I'm functioning on about fifteen minutes' sleep.

Onboard the flight it's too early for whisky. So I order a Heineken, which helps steady my sleep-deprived
nerves for flying. It's always been my belief that if we were meant to fly, we'd have been born with fold-out food trays embedded in our backs.

In San Juan, I unpack my bags in the same hotel that my parents stayed in and head down to the hotel casino, where I decide to join a game of bingo—or what the hotel calls Bingie, Bingie. (“Sounds fancier,” the woman calling the numbers explains.)

My adversaries are three women in their seventies, and after twenty-five minutes of fierce combat, my heart racing, I cry out, “Bingie, Bingie!” I am so exhilarated that my voice almost cracks.

The only thing sadder than a grown man on a honeymoon with himself triumphantly calling out “Bingie, Bingie” is that same man
mistakenly
calling out “Bingie, Bingie.” It seems I mistook an
ocho
for a
nueve
.

“No Bingie, Bingie?” I ask, no longer exhilarated, and my competitors nod and smile at me with good-natured, holiday-spirited
schadenfreude
.

MONDAY.

I've spent the whole day eating so much Puerto Rican food that I dare not enter the hotel pool for fear of cramping. So when I haven't been eating—which really couldn't have been for more than fifteen minutes of my waking day—I spend my time in the hot tub, a body of water probably invented for people too full to swim. I consider getting
myself one of those arm floaties and wearing it like a neck brace, so I can doze in the tub without drowning after a large meal of tamales.

TUESDAY.

I'm told there's always something going on at night in the hotel lobby, and there is. In the middle of the ballroom-size room, I find a woman in her mid-sixties dancing with a man in plaid shorts and suspenders.

I can't help wondering what my parents might have looked like dancing here all those years ago. I've only seen them dance at bar mitzvahs, where my father does this kind of kung fu kicking thing and my mother frantically hops from foot to foot as though standing outside an occupied toilet stall.

I find a pay phone in the lobby and call Montreal.

“What's the matter?” my mother asks.

“Nothing's the matter,” I say. “I was just wondering whether you and Dad danced when you were in San Juan.”

“Your father made me,” she says. “He and his brother Sheldon took classes at the Arthur Murray dance school. One of the seminars was on the cha-cha.”

“I never knew Dad took dance lessons,” I say.

“Your father was always afraid of being a wallflower,”she says.

Before we get off the phone she asks me what number sunblock I'm using.

“Seventy,” I say.

“Don't be a hero,” she says. “Get ninety.”

As the music blares, I imagine taking off my jacket and whirling it above my head like a helicopter propeller. I imagine doing one of those life-affirming, leg-kicking things. But in the end, I find a nice wall against which I allow my inner wallflower to blossom.

WEDNESDAY.

I've booked a trip to the Río Grande to see the rainforest.

Our tour guide is a man named Hector. Hector starts many of his proclamations with “In Puerto Rico, we have a saying,” as in, “In Puerto Rico, we have a saying: A grape is a raisin that forgot to die.”

Almost none of these sayings make any sense. But still, Hector makes learning fun. As we ride through the countryside, he teaches our small group a little Puerto Rican history.

“We imported snakes to Puerto Rico to eat our rats,” he says from the front of the truck, “but the snakes got out of control, so we imported mongooses to eat the snakes. But they all come out at different times in the day, so now we have rats, snakes,
and
mongooses.”

Back at the hotel, I email a picture of myself beside a rainforest waterfall to Gregor.

Five minutes later, the phone in my hotel room rings.

“Why're you wearing white leotards under your shorts?” Gregor asks when I pick up the phone.

“How'd you get this number?”

“And why are you wearing a man purse?”

“It's a travel bag,” I say. “I keep all my important documents in there.”

As Gregor goes on, I open my laptop so that I can study the photo along with him. In it, I stand before one of the most beautiful natural waterfalls I've ever experienced, yet all I can see is my inability to properly accessorize.

THURSDAY.

With my vacation nearing an end, I sit at the hotel bar watching the Lakers play on TV.

A couple in their early twenties is seated beside me. The woman chastises the man for eating bar peanuts.

“They're nasty,” she says.

As we get to talking, they share with me the details of their relationship. They had a fling and she ended up pregnant, then they split up; but after their son's first birthday, they started dating again. This is their very first trip together.

I tell them about how my parents had their honeymoon here, and as I do, it occurs to me that they're sort of on a honeymoon, too. I tell them this and they both smile.

“I guess we are,” he says, reaching for a peanut.

“How romantic,” she says, taking it out of his hand.

I try to imagine my parents here, kids in 1966, still doing what they always do—bickering, watching TV in bed—except wearing tropical cabana wear and travel money belts cinched so tight they can hardly breathe.

FRIDAY.

Back home in Montreal, I call up my parents.

“Do you still feel like the same people you originally fell in love with?” I ask.

They both say no.

“Your father was so good-looking then,” my mother says.

“What becomes of a person,” my father says.

“Don't say that,” my mother says. “You're still good-looking. Better looking. Back then I liked the cologne he wore and the way he looked. But now I really love him. Now I know what kind of a person he is.”

“How long did it take to find out?” I ask.

“A long time,” she says. “But it grows every day. He's become like my mother and father.”

She asks if I understand and I tell her I'm not sure. “I've known him longer than I knew them,” she says.

“He looks out for me. Now I'm going to cry.”

“What is the Suez Canal?” my father asks.

“Still with that show! ‘What's this and what's that'!”

“It's almost over.”

“It's always almost over!”

I put down the phone and start unpacking.

The Power of the Written Word

(25 weeks)

SUNDAY.

I've gained five pounds in Puerto Rico, and so I join the YMCA near my house.

My favourite station in the workout is the water fountain. About to take a drink, I read the sign above it.

“Don't spit in the fountain.”

One of the problems with seeing someone spit in a fountain is that it makes you think about spit when you just want to be drinking water. The same can be said of a sign that reads “Don't spit in the fountain.”

As I drink, I try to fill my mind with random things to blot out thoughts of spit. A suitcase full of bird whistles. A pony soaked in ketchup.

Sometimes knowing how to read can be a burden.

THURSDAY.

A physical burden, too. In a last-minute bid for erudition before middle age, I've begun reading
War and Peace
, and schlepping it along to read on my metro ride to work feels like a part of my new workout regimen.

As I'm only on page three, I fear my fellow commuters are silently judging me, thinking I look neither smart enough nor committed enough to make it all the way through. Being on page three feels like a public failure.

There's something inherently embarrassing about starting things—new jobs, gym memberships, new books. There should be a press that publishes books with a couple dozen blank pages at the beginning so it never has to look like you've just begun.

FRIDAY.

At the café table where I'm seated, someone has knifed the word “beer” into the tabletop.The letters are small and look like the product of a focused, if not slightly deranged, mind. It's a hard wood and must have taken time, determination, and great daring. The engraver was not content to stop halfway at “be,” not one to convince himself, penknifehand sore, that the word had a certain existential elegance. No, he persevered, risking a possible police record. And for what? So that I may look upon his handiwork and think: beer.

Sometimes being able to read is a good thing, and at home, I ensure that the engraver's written campaign is heeded well into the evening.

SATURDAY.

I'm at my parents' house with a hangover. I'm helping them clear space. As such, I spend the day holding up objects, asking if I can throw them out, and being told, no.

A decades-old almanac? It's bloated with water damage, as if it was last read in the shower.

My father shakes his head.

“It's a keepsake from the year your sister was born,” he says. “I can't throw that out.” He drops it into the “save” pile.

We rummage through laundry baskets and shoeboxes loaded with VCR instruction manuals, expired toaster warranties, and pens empty of ink since the nineties.

“Look what I found,” my father says, a jewellery box in his hand.

He passes it over and I open it. There's a key chain inside that says “Christian Dyor.”

“It's a Christian Dior,” he says.

“It's a key chain,” I say, “plus it's a fake.”

Still, it makes it into the save pile.

By evening, we still haven't begun cleaning up anything. Sure the day's been a failure, but at least it's been a private one.

Irreversible

(24 weeks)

SUNDAY.

Tucker lives around the corner from me, but he doesn't like to leave the house very often, so I introduce him to video chatting. After getting him to install the appropriate software, within minutes I'm staring into my computer screen and Tucker is staring back. The experience is unexpectedly unsettling, but I still try to convince Tucker of its virtues.

“See?” I ask. “If chatting on the phone is like a game of chess, then video chatting is like a game of threedimensional chess.”

“I've always thought chatting with you in any form as being more like a game of Sorry!,” he says. “Can we stop this?”

“I guess so,” I say. “I'm not too crazy about your ‘listening face' anyway.”

“What you're seeing is my ‘pretending-to-listen face,'” he says, “ and either you've got poppy seeds in your teeth or I really have to clean my computer screen.”

Sometimes when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back; at other times, it is Tucker who stares back. I'm not sure which fills me with more angst.

WEDNESDAY.

I meet Gregor for soup. I show up in my new vest which, I'm informed, makes me look like a children's entertainer.

“Strike that,” he says. “A children's entertainer's monkey.”

“It's reversible,” I say meekly, not exactly sure why I'm defending myself. “And vests are practical, what with all the pockets.”

“So when you strip down to eat a mango, the vest stays on or off? With it on, you have a place to keep your toothpicks and paring knife.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Didn't you once tell me you hate making a mess with mangos, so you eat them naked in your bathtub?”

“No. No I didn't.”

“And what is this? Your five hundredth vest? Keep going this way and you'll end up on that TV show about hoarders.”

“What are you talking about? This is the first vest I've ever owned in my life.”

“If you can manage to get a little more famous, I can pitch the network on a
Hoarders
celebrity edition.The first episode could be Bret Michaels swimming waist-deep in bandanas, cross-cut with you trying to decide which of your twenty thousand vests to wear while eating a mango in your bathtub.”

FRIDAY.

Tony and I meet for coffee downtown. He's carrying a bag from Victoria's Secret, a present for his fiancée.