At first, things had been too exhilarating to be frightening. Though they were a little frightening.
Larissa left her house at 11 a.m. that Friday, with a small bag, just bought, clothes all new, passport, license, and crisp cash. She didn’t turn back to look at her house one last time, she didn’t turn her head to glance at the golf course. She just
kept her eyes to the ground and her feet steady. It seemed like forever to walk that one mile to the train station. But it only seemed that way. Because she powerwalked, was almost running. She left the house at eleven, and by 11:16 she was already on the train, at the window, her face pressed to the glass as the train glided away, gaining speed, its urgency calming her, comforting her, as she dreamed of the life she was about to live the only way she wanted to—together with him, somewhere where it never got cold. She was a gothic traveler, her pounding heart full of lush imagery of the future, heading not east to New York City, but west to Hackettstown, the last stop on the Jersey Transit Rail, where he was already on his Ducati, waiting for her and her little bag. “You okay?” he said. “I’m great,” she replied. That was one of the few times they had discussed
IT
, the thing that would not be discussed, the unnamed disarticulation. Why talk when they had wilderness to explore? She hopped on, and they sped away with the wind in their hair; she clutched to him with both hands like she did during love, and pressed her cheek to his leather-jacketed back. They had jumped on his bike like baby joeys. He had sold his gift Jag; they had money. Larissa wished she could have sold
her
gift Jag for being a good wife seventeen years out of eighteen. She was filled with equal amounts of terror and elation. She had never felt more alive.
For four glorious hours through the Alleghenies, in full late spring, the wind in her face, she gulped for breath, holding on to him. The open road, the greening sloping fields, the up and down of the rolling hills, the breathtaking beauty of western Pennsylvania. They stopped for food and gas in the field country store in flat Ohio. They stopped for good when it got dark near Indianapolis, found a cheesy motel off the Interstate and made abandoned love on the white sheets until four in the morning, and then slept till noon.
They didn’t want to leave; they hadn’t ever had this, a night
together, waking up together, mornings, a full day stretching out ahead.
“How can I be so lucky?” whispered Kai, caressing her bare stomach with the tips of his fingers.
You are my salvation and my refuge, she wanted to say to him. It sounded like a psalm Maggie might sing. She closed her eyes, losing herself in her own romantic posturings. This was all just prelude to the boundless adventure about to begin. Nothing was known, not a single day. There was no certainty, no plan. Every minute was strange and new. By the time they finished pancakes and French toast at Waffle House, it was nearly three, and they giggled like schoolgirls, like Che and Larissa at the playground, about the indolent decadence of not having to get up for work, for school, for
anything
.
They rode through Illinois, spent another purgative night at a roadside motel in Des Moines, Iowa, and it was there, at a deli on Capitol Avenue with a full view of the gilded capitol dome, that they had their first disagreement. She wanted to ride all the way to the west, across the country she’d never seen. “I want to be the bike girl from Chico,” she said, reaching for his hands. The girl from Chico rides the back of a man’s bike, and never thinks of tomorrow. Where did this dream of herself come from, this hazy yet clear definition of herself?
But he, pulling his hands away, wasn’t interested in the Chico girl. He wanted to get to San Francisco ASAP because a ship was leaving for Maui and he wanted to be on it.
“We’re going to Hawaii?” That was news to her. She told him she’d never seen the Great Divide, or the salt flats of Utah, the endless expanse of the Western sky in Nevada. The Pony Express, Kai, she pleaded into his indifferent face. She wanted to see these things all the more, partake in the exploration of the wilderness because she would see them from the back of his Ducati, pressed against his back, the back she
grasped at night. What about this was so hard to understand? I want to get lost with you, she said to him.
“They’ll kill us in the west for my bike,” he said. “We’ll be good and lost then, won’t we? I can’t leave it anywhere. What about
that
is so hard to understand?”
She sulked. She said let’s get a gun to protect ourselves. Larissa said this. “
Get a gun
.” She, who’d lived in Rockland county, in a little suburban house, who’d gone to college in New York City, who lived in Hoboken, and then tranquil Summit, who’d never even
seen
a gun up close, was now advising her twentysomething lover to get a gun to protect them against the forces of evil in the lawless west. Afterward she was sore and raw from love, the excitement of her life pouring into night, the excitement of the night spilling over into life. It was all one, and the gun was part of it.
Kai refused to get a gun, citing registrations and records and waiting periods, reminding her they were on the run, on the lam. Did they want to be found? Is that what
she
wanted?
No, she admitted. That was the
last
thing she wanted. To be found. That was the truth of it. Lost is where she wanted to be.
Kai told her they would come again to these parts, would see the things she hadn’t seen, there was so much time, not now, not today, but in the boundless future. He was ardent and persuasive and she believed him. I don’t care where I am, she whispered to him in anonymous motels, as long as I’m with you. They took a train from Omaha to Union Station in San Francisco, and alighted a ship headed for Wailea, Ducati in cargo. It took three days to cross the Pacific, and Larissa spent most of the daylight hours on deck, standing at the rails, looking out onto the vastness of the slate ocean, just sea and horizon in every direction, humming to herself a vague, half-forgotten Marianne Faithfull tune that she stopped humming immediately upon realizing what it was: “Falling from Grace.” She deemed it inappropriate. Of all the things to hum!
Kai was less impressed with the sea. “I liked the train,” he told her. “I like looking at people’s lives outside the train stations, imagining if I could live there, too. Here, there’s nothing to imagine.”
“Yes,” she said with a falling face. “But lots to think about.” She had had no way of telling Jared that Michelangelo couldn’t go anywhere without his blue bunny, no way to remind him to take the bunny when they went to Lillypond or to Boston to visit her brothers, or to Piermont for dinner with her mother. There was no good way to nudge him about something like that. But that wasn’t even the truth.
She
had forgotten all about it. Had she remembered, she would’ve figured out a way to slip in a sentence about the importance of the blue bunny to the blond boy, but she was preoccupied and didn’t. And now Jared had no idea. They were so absent-minded, both father and son, they’d be halfway round the world before they remembered that the little boy couldn’t sleep without his bunny. What could Larissa do about it now?
“Thinking? Not a good thing,” Kai said, smiling, prying her clenched fingers away from the railing. He was besotted with the idea of love on the open sea. He said it felt like Bacchanalian debauchery. He couldn’t get enough of her.
Kai and his joyful welcoming smile, like he hadn’t a care in the world, just a guy rolling through life. He was a magnet, an instant polarizing elixir against the plagues of the heart. Smile, Kai, pull me away from the bottomless ocean. When I see you, there is nothing else but you. The ornery stubble, the soft mouth, the frizzy hair wet from shower, the restraining hands, the unforgiving bounty. For Larissa, her journey had already begun and this was part of it: learning how to take responsibility for her life unstoppably intertwined with his. It was on the ship through the Pacific that she flung herself in the waters, cleaving herself into the Larissa before and the Larissa after. It wasn’t her sins she wanted the water to wash
away, because that would imply there had been wrongdoing, and there wasn’t, there
wasn’t
; there was choice and freedom, and owning her actions, all virtues, admirable, dignified, every one. They were full of goodness—look how profoundly still the ocean and the skies were around them. Kai and Larissa were one with nature. They were in sync with the earth. Long after she had ceased to be, nothing would change in the great Pacific. That was reassuring, for she felt herself to be part of a larger creation, a freeform tone poem in the center of the classical symphony that was the ordered universe. What the vastness of the ocean succeeded in doing was to wash away her past life so that the mind didn’t fly to it, didn’t wallow in it, didn’t stub the toe on it; it was put in a compartment inside, locked, excised and heaved into the salty straits, so that by the time they alighted in Hawaii, Larissa was reborn and new. Such a clean break, not even the nerve endings twitched. The limb of Past was severed and healed during the passage over the sea.
They were barefoot wanderers, plunging into the waters, foregoing the expensive wine. They didn’t need it. Kai was like air. Without him Larissa could not live.
Jindabyne was cold. Larissa hadn’t expected it. This was incongruous to her about Australia. It was like Africa being cold. How could there be snow on the ground, pungent air filled with woodsmoke, ice around the edges of the recessed span of the lake, blue cold winter light reflecting on the distant hills and the paved roads? It was
August
when they got there! It was supposed to be only gold hues, orange, red, yellows and greens in Australia. Where did this violet cast come from, this aberrant chill? Larissa shivered as she asked these questions of Kai, who was cheerful and unbothered. “It’s winter. Of course it’s cold.”
“But I thought we were going to live somewhere warm.” Like Hawaii. Why couldn’t they have stayed in Maui a little longer? He didn’t want to; Larissa could tell. Hawaii was like the 7-Eleven in the strip mall off a suburban tract highway for him. He didn’t see anything in it. His associations to it were not a balm on the soul, the way beauty is supposed to be. Not the warm water, nor the fire flowers or the mangoes.
“It’ll get warm soon. You’ll see.”
But it was still wrong. It made no sense. In the cheap Lake Jindabyne Motel they stayed at, the cast-iron radiator was on, pumping out heat! What was this, winter in Jersey?
Larissa had no warm clothes. No sweaters, no parkas. Wistfully she thought of all the winter jackets she left, the downs, the Thinsulate, the thermals, the furs hanging in her closet, the cashmere scarves and gloves, the woolen hats, the ear muffs. Maybe she could write away for them.
Dear Jared. Sorry I’m gone, but be a dear, forward on my favorite sheepskin, it’s freezing here in the Red Center
.
It’s not the Red Center, said Kai. It’s the Snowy Mountains. These are Australia’s Alps and skiing villages. This is where the Australians come to enjoy the winter sports. Thredbo and Perisher Blue is where they ski. Let me take you there, so you can see. It was icy atop his bike, with the wind chill frosting up the windows of her eyes. Pressing her face against his leather jacket didn’t shield her from the bitterness. Were they really planning to
stay
here?
He took her to a waterfront cottage on the shores of Lake Crackenback where they remained two weeks, sleeping, making love, pretending to figure things out, and every morning the frosty mist rose from the lake like a shapeless Loch Ness, and the lake underneath the rising haze looked like a winter glade, crystal bright and sparkling clear.
“What are we going to do? Do you know someone here?”
“I told you. My friend Bart and his wife, Bianca. They love it here. You’ll see. It’ll be stupendous.”
“So we’re definitely staying?”
“At least through the summer.”
She listened to Kai’s bold plan: a tour through the rivers and the mountains, legends of times long past, fishing, fires, songs and stories. It did sound remarkable, every syllable.
“But what about the wintertime?”
“We’ll make so much money in the summers, we won’t care. We’ll hibernate and recreate. Come here. I’ll show you what we’ll do.”
She came, but she wasn’t convinced. Still, she didn’t want to be a spoilsport. It just wasn’t what she imagined. It wasn’t quite what she had signed up for.
Larissa made dinner for him who didn’t come home at six or seven or eight or nine. She didn’t know what was going on. It was Tuesday, and he wasn’t getting paid till tomorrow, and yesterday they’d already gone out. After they came home, he felt so dirty and broke, he said he wasn’t going out again for a week. And here it was the next day and he was out—without her. He didn’t even call. Perhaps the phone had been turned off; Larissa picked it up. No, the damn dial tone. She didn’t have enough money for a cab, and she wasn’t about to walk to town, seven kilometers without a shoulder or a sidewalk in the dark. After she angrily ate her hamburger, she thought of throwing his out, but hunger and frugality stopped her. She sat and waited in the silent house, without even the TV on to break the silence.
At ten, she went next door to Mejida’s house. Mejida and her husband owned a car service business; sometimes Mejida helped her out and rolled the car fare into the rent.
“Sorry to bother you again,” Larissa said. “But I think something is wrong with Kai’s bike, and I can’t get in touch with
him. I’m afraid he might be stuck in town. Would you mind terribly…?”
“I don’t mind driving you,” Mejida said. “But it’s three weeks into July and you haven’t paid the rent.”
Larissa was shocked and embarrassed. Kai usually paid Mejida; Larissa thought it had been all taken care of.
“Not only
not
taken care of,” said Mejida, “but Kai paid me only half of June. I won’t even mention the hundred dollars in cabs you took between then and now.”