All Over the Map (16 page)

“Here’s to a great year,” she says, and we clink glasses. We revisit the guests—who was funny, who was the handsome guy with the gray hair, who didn’t show up, when did so-and-so get divorced. “There were some really nice, interesting, smart men here,” Sandra observes. “Why aren’t you dating any of them?”

“There’s a different, complicated reason for each one,” I tell her. “Let’s just say I’m lucky to have a lot of great friends.”

“Things haven’t exactly been easy for you in the past couple years, especially with men.” She folds a dish towel. “I suppose it doesn’t get easier for any of us after forty. It’s tough terrain.”

I nod. She’s faced a lot of challenges herself: a child with learning difficulties, trying to keep her family afloat financially, having to move to the suburbs to find an affordable school. Almost anyone who is middle-aged can give you a long list of things that have gone wrong or that didn’t turn out the way they expected. But at least by now we have some measure of experience and wisdom to deal with it all. “Things definitely aren’t easy for anyone.”

I have made progress, I tell her, in getting over my setback, a difficult experience that left me skittish with men, more aware of my vulnerability. I have even come to think that it’s probably not such a bad thing that I am more in touch with that side of myself. But though I’ve dated a couple of men, even for a few months each, I still feel buffeted around by my fears. I’m also still unsure how to reconcile my wanderlust and desire for companionship and a home. In other words, I am right where I started when I headed out into my forties.

“Now I only have a year until I’m forty-five,” I tell Sandra, “and that seems like the expiration date.”

“For what?” Sandra asks.

“For finding a husband, a home, a family.”

Sandra shakes her head. “We adopted Aldo when I was about your age,” she says. “Your friend Ben adopted a kid when he was sixty. Nothing expires until you do.”

S
TILL, AFTER
S
ANDRA
leaves and I go to bed—the mattress dips on my side, unbalanced—I decide I need to wage a campaign to find a real boyfriend before I turn forty-five. I’m not sure where to begin. The obvious place to start would be with the usual resolutions about losing weight, but I’m in good shape and by this age I realize that my problem with relationships is heavier than fifteen pounds, convenient as that excuse has been.

Actually, thinking about my weight reminds me that I did have a big success with a previous campaign, in my thirties, to learn to eat normally and feel better about my body. Having had a grim history of chaotic eating and hating my body, I decided, at thirty, to reinvent the way I eat. That involved going to Italy to learn to cook and eat like an Italian, with a good deal more discipline, sociability, and appreciation than I was theretofore accustomed to, always sitting down for meals instead of compulsively grazing by the light of the fridge. I managed to completely turn my eating around, learning how to respect and love food, becoming a good cook, even doing some stints as a food writer. I also developed a lot more appreciation for my healthy body, which is something I glimpsed only occasionally, in dance classes, in my twenties. That willful, positive change in my thirties—a serious personal accomplishment—is something I can hang on to now, to give me hope about this new campaign to improve myself, settle down, find a man, and somehow become a more balanced adult by forty-five.

But learning to eat properly and appreciate my curves was much more under my control than the prospect of finding a guy,
which is kind of left up to the universe. Plus I’m still much more distrustful of men than I was before Samoa. And it’s never been exactly easy to meet men in San Francisco. I’m particularly wary of dating online; there’s no context for the person you’re meeting in cyberspace, no longtime friend to assure you that he’s a nice guy, not a psycho. The process is much more emotionally fraught and time-consuming than it would seem, just browsing a Man Catalogue, clicking on the witty architect who loves skiing and Italo Calvino, and having him delivered right to my door.

I already know from numerous attempts that I’m not very good at meeting strangers on blind dates. It’s even worse than being in a small group and going around in a circle explaining what you want from the experience. You show up for a simple glass of wine, and for the next hour a guy evaluates all the ways in which you don’t measure up to his ideal female. You walk in thinking that your various quirks and attributes—pug nose, edgy humor, smile lines, healthy ass—are all part of a package that makes you irresistibly lovable. You walk out, just one drink later, with a magnified awareness of your many defects. Eventually it all gets to be pretty defensive, not a great forum for showing what a giving, sweet woman you are. You arrive at the appointed time having not bothered to brush your hair, and right off your attitude is, You want to have a drink with me? Well, fuck you.

There has to be a better way to find a partner, but I have no idea what it is. I suspect it’s not going to be a simple numbers game, a matter of sifting through enough online profiles. Somehow I think it’s going to be more internal than external, that it’ll
take some kind of psychic shift. I burrow into my pillow and close my eyes; I have a year to figure it out.

A
FEW WEEKS
later, I drive over the Golden Gate Bridge into the headlands to go on a long hike with a dear friend, Kathy, who is a decade older than I am but who went to the same college and into the same profession and shares the same temperament and astrological sign. We are so much alike that we love each other fiercely as friends and at times get as strongly annoyed. She is not a traveler like I am, flying to different countries, but she is always off on another exploration into herself, whether through spiritual practices or a variety of self-help programs.

Independent, strong-willed, and softhearted, Kathy is in a long-term relationship but struggles because her boyfriend, though smart, doesn’t have her intellectual thirst and sometimes just wants to drink beer and watch football with the boys and have that be okay. Conflicted, she stays, because she likes the coziness of their relationship, even if she refuses to get married and always has one foot partly out the door. She, too, is looking for balance between being a bright, strong, independent woman and making a relationship work.

While we’re walking along a path between ferns and redwood trees, we talk about our relationships. We haven’t seen each other in many months; I may have been avoiding her, because the last time we hiked, when I told her about Samoa, she reacted so strongly it made me feel as if I were permanently damaged, that I’d have to spend years in therapy to deal with the
repercussions, when I just wanted to treat the episode like a bad case of food poisoning that I’d recovered from, except that I still shy away from eating scallops. Now that story is present but in the background.

I tell her I’ve dated a couple of people since then, cautiously, the most successful being Matthew, a psychologist I liked for his bright orange cashmere sweater and goofy smile, but wasn’t attracted to right away. He is a gentleman, well traveled, well read, and funny, full of stories, so I relaxed and told him we should be friends. We went out every few weeks for dinner, having a great time, swapping travel tales, drinking French wine, until one evening he held my hand and it startled me so much I hailed a cab, jumped in, and barely waved good-bye. It wasn’t until he took me to a Patti Smith concert—something akin to a spiritual experience for me—that we danced closely and then actually kissed.

For the next few months, I enjoyed being with someone eccentric and adventuresome; we drove down the coast to ride the roller coaster in Santa Cruz and then up to Napa to eat the season’s best peaches. We sped through the curves up Mount Tamalpais at night in a convertible and walked barefoot on Stinson Beach. Then we decided on the spur of the moment to go together to Asia, where I had never been.

Matthew promised that the trip would involve cocktails at a resort by the beach in Thailand. He is such a great traveler, always off to Egypt, a beach village in Mexico, or some other remote, steaming place, that I told him to go ahead and make all the plans. I was frantically finishing up a big project and thought it would be an interesting experiment to have Matthew take care of everything, including me.

But when we landed in northernmost Malaysia, after a cramped and sweaty night on the Jungle Express from Singapore, one stop after all the locals keep motioning us to
get out
of the train, we found ourselves in a seriously Muslim neighborhood where Americans, particularly a guy with Howard Stern hair and a woman whose only head covering was a hoodie, were not particularly welcome. I no longer felt so protected. Our trip over the border by boat into southern Thailand had a similarly bad vibe, which got worse when we found a ride in the back of a pickup truck and the police stopped us, with great fanfare, to force one guy out, slap him around, and throw him into the back of their van. When we made it into town, it turned out that not only had Matthew, as eccentric and endearing as he is, not made reservations at a resort, it was hurricane season. Muslims and monsoons: no cocktails on the beach.

We spent a couple of days wandering around Narathiwat, with no other tourists in sight, me huddled under my hoodie. There was a time when I might have found that kind of travel exhilarating, but on that trip I felt fearful and exposed. We made the best of the situation, sampling exceptional street food, visiting a giant golden Buddha, but the atmosphere was vaguely menacing and I was happy to return to Singapore. As cities go, Singapore has amazing street food, a colorful Indian section, and some nice orchids, but otherwise it resembles a giant mall from which you cannot escape.

Our romance did not survive the long flight back to San Francisco, and we took separate taxis home. Three weeks later, when I read about extremists burning secular schools in Narathiwat and people killed, I e-mailed Matthew to tell him what danger we’d
been in. “So what?” he e-mailed back. “The Twin Towers were safe on September 10th.”

Kathy stops midhike, turns around in the trail, and crosses her arms. “Laura,” she says, “you need someone who can take better care of you. Especially after what happened. There’s no shame in wanting to feel protected; we all need that.”

“I know,” I tell Kathy. I’m not sure I should tell her about my other short-term relationship. “I actually did date someone else who wanted to take care of me, but it was kind of the wrong way.”

Since this is a ten-mile hike, I launch into the story about the artist I met on a trip back from Switzerland, in the Frankfurt airport, browsing in the duty-free shop. The scruffy short man in a photographer’s vest chatted with me, and since he had a seven-hour layover, I invited him into the airport lounge as my guest. We had a pleasant talk for twenty minutes before I had to leave, him mostly saying something unintelligible about physics that somehow related to his art, and we exchanged e-mail addresses on the back of napkins.

When I get home I Googled him and realized that though I didn’t particularly care for his art, all surface and no soul, he was rather famous and quite wealthy, for an artist. He flew to San Francisco to take me to lunch at one of my favorite places, where we ate two dozen oysters with a delicious bottle of wine. He marveled at how down to earth I was when I told him I could hop a bus home—no one he knows takes the bus. He was fascinating, with a huge imagination, telling me about his projects all over the world.

I heard from him several times, calling me with updates from Japan or Greece or an island in the Pacific. Then he sent me first-class tickets to see an opening of his show in Bilbao, and of course I went, staying in a luxury hotel right by the Guggenheim Museum, enchanted by the city’s art and architecture, finding a wonderful place to eat squid in its own ink, chatting in Spanish with young strangers at the packed opening. After the opening, I ran into the artist having dinner with some donors or gallery people. I congratulated him, and he acted as if I were a stranger, shaking my hand, not bothering to introduce me to the people he was seated with.

“Please tell me you didn’t see him again,” says Kathy.

“I did.” We met up a few days later in Sardinia, staying at a four-star inn tucked up against granite cliffs near Nuoro, in the middle of the island, going to the ocean to explore its coves by boat, visiting villages, watching a parade of local costumes.

On our last evening, the artist told me he was in love with me and wanted to buy me a house in Ojai to live in so that I could always be there when he returned from his trips. But I don’t know anybody in Ojai. I realized it would be easy to stay with this guy and be wealthy for the rest of my years. I could get used to the $600 bottles of wine he orders at dinner, especially if every sip didn’t remind me I was drinking up half my rent. I could fly with him to one of his islands when he wanted me to come along, or to the Biennale in Venice or the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg when he had a show. I could travel whenever I desired, not worry about having to make a living, and have time to write what I please. It was tempting.