Authors: Laura Fraser
I know that ayahuasca, like peyote or mescaline, acts as an emetic, but I figure it will just make me burp, tidily empty the contents of my tummy, and then I’ll be ready for the visions the shaman is conducting, open to whatever revelations about self, nature, the universe, and the oneness of them all that the vine is willing to offer. What I don’t expect is four hours of psychedelic barfing. My skin becomes clammy, I have a tweaky sensation around my jaw, someone hands me a bag, and I begin my first round. It isn’t disgusting, exactly, but curious; I intently notice everything, as if vomiting in slow motion, the sound of the crinkling bag heightened, the expulsions colorful, my physical sensations coming from afar. The shaman, who is whistling, makes soothing sounds every time I retch. At some point, when I can close my eyes long enough not to have to aim into the bag again, I have visions, like a rolling, writhing picture of the jungle, which I could have seen had I just stepped outside the door and twirled
around until I was dizzy. Given my recent gastrointestinal distress, I am distracted from these transcendent visions by an immanent need to use the bathroom, which, though only a few steps away, might as well be across the piranha-infested river for all I am able to move.
Finally, when I cough up the last bilious drops from my stomach, dry heaving for good measure, the visions stop, my intestines settle down, and I take a nap on the mattress. I am chilly, and all I can think about is how I want someone next to me, someone who will hold me close and take care of me. It is a desire that is much bigger than the moment and, in my state, seems profound. When I wake, I make it back to our hut, finally use the bathroom, shower, and toothbrush, and crawl under the mosquito netting with Evan. I cuddle up to him. “I like you this way,” he says. “You should take that vine stuff more often.” He is drunk and chatty about his evening with the English guy, and somehow I don’t feel the deep closeness I need—the one strong message the ayahuasca managed to deliver—but I’m glad to have him spoon me to sleep.
In the morning I am renewed; I have a ferocious appetite for breakfast, and whatever bug has been dogging me since Arequipa has been decidedly driven away. The shaman tells me that though I shouldn’t have taken the ayahuasca when I was still ill, now surely the bug is cleaned out—the healers use it in small doses to rid people of amoebas and parasites. We leave that lush and mysterious world on the same boat to town and then take a bus to the airport, where Evan and I depart for Cuzco, flying over a dozen microclimates in a short hour, from deepest jungle to high arid desert.
Cuzco is a spectacular city, red rooftops surrounded by high, rugged mountains. Its colonial houses remind me of what I remember of San Miguel de Allende in the high desert of Mexico, though the buildings are older and more imposing for their enormous hand-hewn stones. We explore the town and nearby ruins, eating in colonial haciendas, ex-monasteries, and modern art museums. After spending time with Guillermo, who travels light and is as fast to get up and go as I am, it is difficult to adjust to Evan’s pace: when I’m ready to head out the door, he has another forty-five minutes left of organizing his gear. You always have to compromise when you travel with someone, so I write postcards or explore the gift shop, but when he is willing to skip the Sacred Valley and Ollantaytombo, perhaps Peru’s second greatest ruins, to save taxi fare and be sure we are back in time to pick up our laundry, I say I’d like to go and he can join me if he likes, which he does.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
we take the train to hike the Inca Trail, with our guide, Narciso, an easygoing and dry-humored Inca descendent who is an amateur anthropologist. From the first day on that ancient trail, passing ruins and villages, ascending into the high Andes, we are awed by the experience. Along with nuggets of history and mythology, Narciso passes out coca leaves to villagers we see along the trail and to our group, to help us with altitude sickness and to give us energy (I am not interested in trying any more local drugs). Evan and I snuggle in our tent during the cold nights and encourage each other up the difficult trail.
We climb up the highest point, Abra de Huarmihuanusca, Dead Woman’s Pass, more than 13,000 feet high, and marvel at the view. On the last morning, we wake at sunrise to watch the dawn hit the Cordillera Blanca, the white-topped mountains, including the 20,500-foot Nevado Salkantay. Evan is elated at the morning and greets it bare-chested, arms raised in an animal howl of appreciation. At that moment, I am crazy about him. That last day, when we finally climb the ancient, tidy stones to the Inti Punku, the Gateway to the Sun, we are both wonderstruck by the sight of Machu Picchu—that something so grand could exist in such an astonishing setting, that human beings could create and inhabit such a magical space—me with tears rolling down my cheeks, him giving me a big bear hug.
“You’re wonderful to travel with,” I tell him.
“This is easy,” he says. “It’s being together at home that’s difficult.”
O
NCE BACK IN
the Bay Area, photos developed and organized with scanned topographical maps, then put away, I realize he is right. Evan has a fun streak on vacation and on the weekends—when, superenergetic, he’s happy to dance, take bike rides, make love, and head out skiing—but his week is all routine. He microwaves his Lean Pocket at a precise time each morning, watches sports highlights for a few minutes, catches the bus to work, comes home, gets stoned, walks his dog, and crashes. Anything that breaks his regimen—going out to dinner, staying at my house—is a hassle. Still, as much as I like every day to be
its own little unpredictable journey, I also appreciate the stability and regularity of someone to sleep with, to help me put up shelves in my office. At a certain point we talk about moving in together, and he cheerfully appoints me Director of Aesthetics, saying I can toss whatever of his postcollege furniture I like as long as he has a corner of his own to work in. We’ll live in my flat, he says, until we can buy a place we can afford, probably outside the city, where we’ll have a dog, maybe adopt a kid, and he’ll take a longer bus ride into the city every day. Since that seems like a distant day to me (and I am very fond of the city), I am willing, in the meantime, to empty a sock drawer for him and talk about getting cable.
So I have managed what I said I wanted before I hit forty-five: a man who is interested in building a life with me, with all the trimmings of successful middle age—child, dog, and house in the suburbs. But the nine months of our relationship are starting to feel like nine years. We are no longer making love so avidly, with the red tango shoes on, but complain of being tired before we roll over, facing different directions. Though I thought our trip to Peru was the first of many adventures to come, I now realize it was the first and last foreign trip he’d take in many years. Instead, he is committed to seeing his parents in Florida for most of his annual two weeks’ vacation time, and though he insists that I join him, he makes it clear that it will be no fun.
“My mother is going to hate you,” Evan says over dinner one evening when we are discussing the trip.
“Great,” I say. “Why?” Normally, I’m good with parents—polite and interested in them, and I write charming thank-you notes on cream-colored stationery.
“You’re not Jewish, you’re not a lawyer, and you’re probably too old to have children,” Evan says.
“Well,” I say. If I had known those were the qualifications for the job, I would not have applied. I will leave it to him to figure out with a shrink why he is dating a woman with precisely all the attributes his mother would hate. “There’s not much I can do about any of that.”
It is far too late to start trying to be someone else for the sake of a man. This isn’t the first time I’ve been called a shiksa, and it annoys me: if a Jewish guy is interested in me, as happens rather more often than demographics would suggest is proportionate, for whatever reason, that’s his issue to debate with himself and not my fault for luring him away. I’m too old to apologize for being who I am, a zaftig shiksa with a fair dose of chutzpah. Anyway, we WASPs don’t believe in guilt.
“If we got married, my mother wouldn’t come to the wedding,” says Evan.
This is the first time the phrase “if we got married” has popped out of his mouth, and I decide to ignore it for the time being. My first marriage demystified the glories of connubial bliss, and though I am eager for companionship, I am in no hurry to repeat any major mistakes. Plus it doesn’t seem like a good sign that the first time he’s bringing it up it’s negative, a problem already.
“So your mother will hate me but you want me to come to Florida to visit her anyway?”
“She’s my mom. It’s important to me.”
“Right.” I’m not sure what’s going to happen between us, but I know I’m not going to visit sunny Florida anytime soon. There
are compromises that you make for your man, and then there is masochism.
F
OR OUR BIRTHDAYS
, his forty-second and my forty-fifth, Guillermo and I throw a Peruvian fiesta, celebrating our recent trip. We—mostly he—make aji de gallina, a peppery chicken stew, Peruvian tamales, and a trio of causas, piles of cold mashed potatoes topped with olives, fish, and sauces; his sister whips up a soufflé of lucuma, a Peruvian fruit that tastes like sweet Thai iced tea and is reason enough to visit that country. We pour pisco sours and celebrate our friendships; I clink glasses too with Evan, who, a couple of days before my actual birthday, I can say is my boyfriend, even though the thought lurks that you have to be careful what you campaign for.
The Peruvian birthday party is a big success, everyone complimenting the food and the photos of the trip. Guillermo has made perfect pisco sours with a little egg foam on top. Evan is his usual gregarious self, all my friends tell me how it seems as though they’ve known him for years, we have a rousing romp at the end of the evening, and I go to bed happy to be forty-five, or at least satisfied that I’ve arrived at middle age in good spirits.
My actual birthday is two days later, and I have plans to meet Evan at my favorite kind of place, a southern Italian–style trattoria with locally grown food and an honest wine list. I go to a yoga class and am feeling balanced and flexible. When Evan shows up at the restaurant, late, he is carrying a Hallmark bag covered in pink roses.
I open my present. Inside is a bar of chocolate. A large bar, to be fair. It is not, though, Turkish gold earrings, tickets to an Elvis Costello concert, the new Murakami novel, or a CD of love songs he compiled just for me. It is not even artisanal French chocolate or Fair Trade single-estate 72% cacao. It is not any of the words that go perfectly well with “forty-fifth birthday,” “girlfriend,” and “present.” But it is dark chocolate, which is my favorite. I thank him, lift my glass, and focus on the tiny prosecco bubbles.
I’m not quite sure what turn the conversation takes between the appetizers and the main dish. I know I get pensive around birthdays, trying to sort out the big picture—what do I want in life, who are we together, have we examined all the red flags, why don’t you like broccoli rabe with anchovies—but somewhere two-thirds of the way into the Barbera, I hear Evan say, “Maybe we should just break up.” He isn’t asking for my opinion.
That definitely isn’t the way I imagined things: breaking up on a birthday—a multiple-of-five birthday, no less—over dinner, in public. I can’t believe it’s happening. But there he is, moving his mouth, apologizing, saying he is just a guy, I’ll find a better one, none of his relationships lasts long, it isn’t the end of the world, it just didn’t work out, we aren’t in love. All of this is undeniably true, no matter how I might have tried to see it otherwise, but it is my birthday, my forty-fifth f—ing birthday, the finish line in my campaign to better myself—and I don’t like having those particular facts pointed out right now.
When the server approaches the table, I am embarrassed that tears are rolling down my cheeks, pooling into my new coral satin bra—which, now, no one will admire (and which cost the equivalent of forty big bars of chocolate).
“I’m sorry,” I tell the waitress in Italian, which Evan does not speak. She gives me a kind smile and a shrug.
“Non fa niente,”
she says. It’s nothing.
“Can you believe,” I go on, trying to explain why I have completely lost it over the excellent milk-fed pork, “that this stronzo is breaking up with me? On my forty-fifth birthday?”
“Him?” she replies, pushing back her black curls. Without skipping a beat: “I thought he was gay.”
I retreat to the restroom to wash my face, and when I return, she’s put a piece of serious dark chocolate cake on the table, with a candle. This is one of those occasions when you can rely on both Italians and really good dark bitter chocolate—not a big bar of grocery store chocolate—to comfort and cheer you. “He’s not worth it,
cara,”
she says. “You’ll find someone better.”
Evan reaches his fork over for a bite of the cake, but I intercept, push it away, cut him a sliver, and place it on his plate. There will be no more sharing from the same dish. There will be no more living with jock talk in the morning and no more moving to the suburbs. I realize I am going to miss his dog. I tell Evan we could be friends, which I know probably won’t turn out to be true, and blow out the candle.
But what can I wish for? I’m forty-five. Game over, time’s up. My boyfriend—my last hope for some conventional semblance of adult life—has just broken up with me. I don’t know if I’ll ever have another relationship—or sex, for that matter—again.
But what did Sandra say on my last birthday? Nothing expires until you do. I may not have succeeded in my campaign to find a husband and cozy stability, but I have succeeded in realizing that at least this version of that goal isn’t really what I wanted.
The year and the campaign have hardly been a total waste. If I learned anything from tango, it’s to be alert and receptive and not jump to any conclusions. And if I’ve understood anything from meditating, it’s that all we have is the present and all we can do is appreciate the moment, not live with an eye to the future, full of attachment and desire, or regret about the past.