The Opposite of Serendipity

By Vicki Zatarain

The Opposite of Serendipity is essentially a coming of “old” age story. Iantha embarks on her fifth decade of life, distant from her previous somewhat blissful quiddity of her hometown New Orleans.

As the door closed on many aspects of her old existence, Iantha encounters the world of tango, quite by happenstance, in her new environs of Washington D.C. Through tango Iantha develops lifelong friendships, including a brief yet oddly eternal “fairy” tale (not “fairy tale”) romance with a young Brazilian, Gabriel. By living quixotically, Gabriel teaches her that there is poetry in an otherwise prosaic world.

In her journey to retirement and beyond, Iantha experiences joy and love, in their many forms. However, it is in the misfortunes she confronts (those non-serendipitous events, if you will), that Iantha learns even more about love of an unearthly variety. The legion of earthly angels God placed in her path pulls Iantha through her most difficult times. Meanwhile, Gabriel reveals the secrets of the “drops of rain” (and other ethereal yet relatable tales) through his poetry.

Iantha’s musings on navigating both a “Happily” and an “Ever After” are often humorous, poignant, and authentic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Apr 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781662933974

Book preview

PROLOGUE

While walking to the Eastern Market Metro on Labor Day 2008, Gabriel stopped suddenly and, with the urgency of hummingbird wings, asked me, What is the word in English for when a man is traveling by train while a woman waits at the station for the man to arrive, but the train is delayed, the woman waits and waits and waits, but finally, after waiting a very long time, she leaves, and just after she leaves, the train arrives?

After thinking a moment, I answered, I don’t know if we have a word in English for that, but it’s the opposite of serendipity.

CHAPTER 1

Ionce read a magazine article about real women’s favorite Valentine’s gifts.

One woman wrote that her husband called to tell her to leave the cats outside. When she got home, there was a trail of boiled shrimp on cocktail napkins leading to the bedroom. There lay her husband clad only with cocktail sauce in his navel. How romantic! How goofy! How goofy-romantic! (This actually happened, folks.) So now, every time I meet a potential soulmate, I envision how he would look with ketchup and horseradish decorating his belly button. (Hope he has an innie.)

But alas, I’m also a sufferer of RCS—reverse Cinderella syndrome. RCS is when you kiss a prince and he turns into a frog (and you consider yourself lucky if you only get warts).

RCS, in my opinion, is an acquired disease. It roots back to childhood.

Growing up half Cajun and half Italian in New Orleans, I was fifteen years old before I realized that shithead and the more endearing behunkushead are not terms of endearment. After all, that’s what Mommy called Daddy all the time. And in our family, we lived on love—that is, we looked at each other and got fed up. The genetic combo of Cajun/Italian defines the epitome of romance with ketchup, horseradish, and boiled shrimp (lots of garlic). Other cultures use garlic to ward off vampires! And whoever heard of horseradish as an aphrodisiac?

And if relationship angst can be attributed to the environment that we grow up in, what havoc has Barbie (by Mattel) wreaked upon the lives of many a female? If she were to be proportioned to average female height, she has D-cup bosoms, and her feet remain forever arched even after her shoes are removed. That’s not natural. She never needs to shave, pluck unwanted hairs, wax a bikini line, or wear makeup (it must be tattooed on). And Barbie doesn’t age; she just becomes a collector’s item. Talk about clothes for any occasion. At age nine, my Barbie was better dressed than I was or ever will be (ask my Dad). I thought for sure that I’d grow up driving an orange convertible (instead of a gray Honda with a bullet hole—long story, I live in New Orleans) with my dreamboat boyfriend Ken (instead of … well … ehr … never mind). By the way, where do you buy orange convertibles?

If you really want to track the roots of the Missing Marlboro Man problem, you must go back—waaayyy back—to the beginning, where there was Light. Well, I’m convinced that God is a man. (I know, I know, I also consider myself a feminist.) So here’s proof positive of my allegation:

Women go through PMS, periods, pregnancy, labor, childbirth, bloatings, cravings, stretch marks, varicose veins, cellulite, pantyhose, the Wonderbra (Wonder who created this bra?), makeup, high heels, yeast infections, waxings, and thongs. Men may go through balding, beer bellies, and jock itch (that they can scratch in public). If you’ve ever had a yeast infection, you know why women wiggle when they walk. So I’m convinced of God’s masculinity. And women are considered the fairer sex—no fair!!!

So even with nature/nurture stacked against me and that macho God (who’s probably pissed off at me), I still search for that perfect cocktail-sauce container—Mr. Right (Orville or Wilbur).

So, what’s a gal to do? Well, there’s the personal ads. I saw an Oprah episode on that subject. As I recall, Oprah asked this guy who ran a Tom Cruise look-alike ad just what exactly on him looked like Tom Cruise. Then there’s dating services that service themselves very well. Check out their prices—I’ll keep my firstborn son, thank you.

One can always rely on fate: Across a crowded room, he glances my way. Then compellingly, he makes his way toward me … I have to stop hanging around the men’s room. But if justice is blind, fate must be deaf. At least my pleas have gone unanswered.

So statistically, more people have met their mate through networking (the same way that they land a job). You know, I know a friend who knows a friend who knows a friend and so on. So if any of you friends know a behunkushead named Ken with an innie navel, driving an orange convertible, emitting the faint aroma of horseradish, let me know, okay? (Where’s my Compound W?)

My name is Iantha Rosso, and yes, I’m half Italian and half Cajun. I used to write articles for a humor e-magazine. That was my first article and, basically, a synopsis of my dating life. Its title is Looking for the Marlboro Man—Smokers Need Not Apply. Also, I received my very first fan mail from it; but as you can imagine, that fan mail was of the creepy variety. Ironically, I have an outie.

I was named Iantha after my mother’s sister who died before I was born. My Mom, the Cajun one, had six sisters and one brother. Iantha is Greek for purple flower (I guess her parents ran out of French girls’ names when Iantha came along). Rosso, my Italian surname (cognome) means red. So I guess my aura is mauve.

As a child I was called Antha (like my Aunt), but in school it got shortened to Ann. In college I went back to Antha, and as an adult I took on the full Iantha, which often got shortened to Ia or I. It was wonderfully confusing. I didn’t say that; I said it. (So I’m [or is it I am] writing this in both the first and third person.)

Generally, I consider myself quite average. I’m average height, with average hair and eye color, and have slightly less than average weight. I’m what The Lovin’ Spoonful would call that mousy little girl. So I guess I have the capacity to steal hearts (or at least have my heart stolen).

Admittedly, my tragic love life is partially my fault. I can be annoying (or at least that’s what I have been told). But on general principle, I never like those people who are universally liked. They must never take a stand on anything controversial (and that makes them unlikable to me).

CHAPTER 2

Late at night when I simply cannot sleep, which happens more frequently than I care to admit, I count loves and lovers. I used to name all the states and their capitals (Chicago is not the capital of Illinois; Springfield is), then every state I’d been in (they only counted if my feet hit the ground in that state, not if I drove through it without exiting the car), then every country I’d visited and their capitals. But as I’ve gotten older and my insomnia worsened, I began counting lovers and categorizing them. One must know the love-takers from the lovemakers, right? Such are the musings of an insomniac.

Well, in my imagination, it wound up being a Venn Diagram—those I’ve loved, those who loved me, and those I’ve had sex with. That imaginary diagram would resemble the one below. The name placement on the diagram may change over time. Forget love triangles—these diagrams intersect with a very select few. And yet, of these few, only one would even contemplate becoming a human cocktail-sauce container—Gabriel! That intersection of the three circles contains a tiny pinpoint of an area (depicted by that small o) that only Gabriel fits in.

Gabriel did have a proclivity for grand romantic gestures.

Innocuously enough, our meeting was fairly nondescript. It was at the Tango Inferno (or so I called it) in the spring of 2008. This Practica where one practiced their tango steps was in the West End Library. Yes, that’s right. We practiced tango—music and all—at the library, second floor. Regardless of the weather outside, it was always blazingly hot in there.

Libraries offer portals to enchanted lands, usually through the books they offer. But the stairway of the West End Library could transport you to the exotic, rapturous, alluring, and bewitching microcosm of tango. Just bring something cold to drink because it almost certainly would be hot in there.

In May of 2006, I began living in Washington, DC, after nonserendipitously losing my home and most of my belongings to Hurricane Katrina. Before that, this New Orleans native lived in a quaint mid-city neighborhood near City Park and Bayou Saint John until that existence was unceremoniously destroyed. After moving to DC and experiencing the housing market shock (as one of my coworkers told me, If you can afford the condo, it means the neighborhood isn’t very good), I settled into a modest two-bedroom condo just about a block north of the Eastern Market.

Gabriel came to DC in the spring of 2008 on an internship at Google. He was a University of Berkeley PhD student and some kind of computer genius, but I didn’t know that yet.

That midspring afternoon of 2008, I exited the Metro at the Foggy Bottoms stop with my tango shoes in tow. After a quick stop at the nearby Trader Joe’s for chocolates (I’m a firm believer that chocolates and tango go together like, well, chocolates and tango.), I climbed the stairs, each step lured by the shimmeringly luminous, suggestive, hauntingly beautiful music (and lyrics) of Piazzolla, Canaro, Pugliese, and di Sarli (to name a few of the illustrative composers) and the possible intimate tango encounters. Downright awkward encounters or even abject incompatibilities were also possible and much more likely.

In any case, there would be chocolates.

And as fortune would have it, Gabriel traveled that same portal just moments beforehand. He was tall, very thin, and curly-haired, and although physically he, too, could be considered ordinary, he caught my attention immediately. Maybe it was his newness to the scene, maybe the air about him.

I noticed how he never followed tango protocol yet never offended anyone—a feat not easily accomplished. Typically, it’s appalling if you break a tanda (a tanda is a set of three or four songs generally of the same type that you dance with one partner until the interlude music is played). No matter how politely you leave a tanda, it generally means one of the partners did not like, or more emphatically, hated dancing with the other. But Gabriel could graciously end tandas without offense.

That afternoon, when we finally had our first dance, the first thing I noticed was Gabriel’s eyes. Most would call the color hazel, but the glint of gold seemed to reveal an unhidden treasure gleaming in the sunlight. I felt that his eyes could look right through me and uncover any and all my secrets; there was no hiding from his gaze. I have always