Wanderlust (2 page)

If buildings could look so radically different, with their Ottoman minarets, Byzantine domes, and serpentine blue-tiled halls, then it stood to reason that much more could be different too. Seattle was disappointingly unexotic; its palette was gray and green like Vancouver's. Since I was raised to regard college as obligatory, it didn't occur to me that I could leave and do something else instead,
even as I envied Graham his freedom. But I could take Arabic, and a language was another kind of new world. Through study I hoped to quench that urge that he was satisfying through actual travel.

I joined a sorority and gravitated to new friends: to Kim, whose goal in life, at eighteen, was to get to Germany and a boy named Sasha, who had been an exchange student at her high school; and Katerina, the daughter of Czech émigrés, who told us about the Velvet Revolution unfolding that very fall. It was 1989, and we were all hearing from our parents and teachers that the world as we knew it was changing. But we didn't really know what it had been like in the first place.

As sorority sisters we were expected to participate in the Greek system. Inside the house that meant occasional meetings and sometimes dressing up for dinner, and outside it meant an endless round of drinking parties at the neighboring fraternities. I considered all new experience good experience, and threw myself in, carousing up and down the leafy streets with Kim and Katerina, looking for the party with the biggest crowd, the best music, or the most freely flowing alcohol. Sometimes I'd meet someone funny or interesting, with a story to tell about driving his car to California or spending a semester in France. The Greek system, though, quickly came to seem like a bubble, and most of the stories in which I pretended to seem interested revolved around the last drinking party. Here we were, released from adult oversight for the first time in our lives, and our social activity of choice was to rove the same five-block radius over and over, drinking insipid beer. The novelty of moving from Vancouver to Seattle quickly wore off, and I couldn't shake the feeling that the world was elsewhere.

My sorority mail room, which also housed the telephone switchboard, was the node that connected us to the outside world. Juniors
and seniors took turns staffing it, sorting the mail and announcing phone calls and visitors over a PA system that reached through the upper floors. If a “visitor” was announced, that meant a girl; “guest” was the code word for boy. I was thrilled the first time a letter from Graham found its way to my sorority mailbox, and afterward started checking my mail more often and with more eager anticipation. He'd arrived in New Zealand and was hitchhiking from town to town. His letters put me in touch with a way of living that was more spontaneous and adventurous than my own.

It was my mom who first floated the idea of Spain. Her friend Janet, a Canadian who'd married a Spaniard, worked as a preschool teacher in Valencia, and she mentioned that some parents at her school wanted English-speaking summer nannies. My mother had barely finished saying the words when the idea took visceral hold: I wanted to—I
had
to—go. I was surprised that it was she, whom I still associated with curfews and groundings, who proposed the Spanish scheme, but she was more sensitive to my restlessness than I knew. And my parents trusted Spain; they trusted Janet and her husband, Manolo.

For me, Spain was a happy childhood memory. It was the place that had showed me, for the first time, that when you were somewhere else, you could be someone else.

I was nine and my brother Gregory was five when my parents moved us to Rocafort, just outside of Valencia, where my father would work during his academic sabbatical. We lived in a white stucco villa, and other than a handful of houses on our dirt lane, were surrounded for miles by orange groves. The scent of oranges mingled with diesel fumes to this day makes me think of Spain.

My parents enrolled me at a three-room public school in Rocafort. I spoke no Spanish, and at first spent my lunch hours sitting on the banister of the stairs leading down to the concrete school yard, surveying my running, shrieking classmates from on high. When they tried to talk to me, I gave them blank stares, but they were persistent. One day a ringleader named Maria Teresa approached me again and started talking. This time, to my surprise, I understood what she was saying: She wanted me to come play hopscotch. After weeks of incubation, my Spanish had sprung to life fully formed, and it operated like a reflex, subliminal and involuntary. I hadn't heard Maria Teresa's words and translated them into English; I'd just understood.

At home my father brought my brother and me Tintin, Asterix, and Smurf comic books in Spanish, as well as
Guerreros del Antifaz,
a clash-of-civilizations-themed comic in which a Christian hero battles the Moors. At first he read to us from them, in part to practice his own Spanish, but I complained and rolled my eyes when he stopped to explain grammatical points. Soon Gregory and I were reading the books ourselves.

Tintin, with his wild foreign adventures, was one of my first literary heroes. With his sidekick Captain Haddock, an irascible drunk, Tintin went to America, Egypt, Congo, Tibet, China, a South Pacific island, the ocean floor, and the moon. He also solved scientific mysteries and ancient archaeological riddles. In my favorite book,
Tintin en el Pais del Oro Negro,
the intrepid boy-explorer discovers oil in Arabia. I reread books like
Vuelo 714 Para Sydney
and
Tintín y el Lago de los Tiburones
dozens of times, looking for some hint of how I might make my life more like his.

A few months after my language breakthrough on the hopscotch grid, I was playing in the yard of my friend Amparo's apartment, in
the next village over from Rocafort. Her friends asked me where I was from. I told them Canada, and tried to explain about it being a foreign country, near the United States, but they howled in disbelief. “You're from Rocafort!” they screeched. When I absorbed the meaning of this turn of events, I was electrified. I still stood out as a white-blond, selfdressed ragamuffin among my groomed and cologned classmates, but I sounded just like them. I could pass as something I wasn't. I could be two people. It could be that all my subsequent travel has been an attempt to recapture the feeling of that first time.

When the school year ended, we spent the summer touring Europe and Morocco in our Volkswagen van. My parents made us feel like we were helping direct the expedition. I'd study maps and go through lists of campgrounds, urging them to take us to one with a swimming pool. Gregory collected bottle caps from everywhere we went, and I begged to have my picture taken with a cobra. By day we traipsed around cathedrals or Roman ruins. At night my brother and I took the top bunk and my parents took the one below, and as it got hotter, we slept with the door open to the night. Every day we were in our home, and every day we were somewhere new.

I had a game I liked to play in the campgrounds, many of which were set up as vast grids, echoing the Roman fortresses that once dotted the region. (I learned my Roman history from
Asterix
.) Once I was permitted to walk to the bathhouse by myself, I made getting lost a deliberate goal. For example, if I knew I should go right to get back to our van, I'd go left instead, and take a series of wrong turns with the aim of becoming disoriented. I'd wander amid the maze of tricked-out campers and families grilling their dinners, admiring accessories I thought we should have, like a tent that attached to a parked trailer to create a covered front porch. When I knew I was really lost, not just pretend lost, I'd try to find my way back. The best
moments in this manufactured joy were when I confidently believed I was on the right trail back to our van—then discovered that I was lost again. Really lost.

We returned to Canada the next school year, and to the house we'd rented out. My mother cried: She couldn't find some of her things, while others had broken. I entered the fifth grade, where I took an immediate dislike to my teacher. Getting home was an allaround disappointment. I was outgrowing comic books, but Gregory carefully collected and organized all of our Spanish literature on his shelf. I'd sometimes go and pick one of the
Tintin
s, and mull where to someday go.

In February of my freshman year of college, Graham returned from his twelve-month trip. Our relationship had been mostly chaste before he left, no more intimate than kisses. As it became purely epistolary, though, my longing to see him had built up. My desire was inextricable from his having gone away. When he called and told me he'd returned, I made a plan to see him on my next trip to Vancouver.

He had no car, so I borrowed my parents' Taurus and picked him up on the road outside his father and stepmother's wooded trailer park. It was a typical Vancouver winter day; a granite sky pressed down. He looked very different from when I'd first met him, now deeply tanned and with curly blond hair past his shoulders. It was pulled back into a ponytail, and he wore a heavy dark overcoat against the chill—an oilskin, souvenir of Australia. I thought he looked great on a superficial level, and his transformation was also reassuring deeper down. It told me you could go and invent yourself. Our parents and schools, these wooded roads, this city, didn't have to be the whole story.

I felt skittish and excited as he got into the car, and we spent a long few moments staring at each other and nervously laughing. He'd brought a mix tape with no heavy metal whatsoever, and envelopes full of photographs to show me, but we had no idea where to go. Around us the cold damp forest of Anmore tapered into suburban sprawl. The idea of a mall was abhorrent. We decided to drive all the way across Port Moody, Burnaby, and Vancouver to one of the beaches of Stanley Park, for no reason, really, other than our need to have a destination.

As he told me his stories, images lodged in my mind as surely as if they had been my own memories: Graham waiting on a table in a long white apron; Graham jumping off a bridge over a gorge; Graham driving a Volkswagen van—which he called a “combi”—at sunrise, with two English girls asleep in the back and Roxy Music playing on the tape deck. He'd gone until he had no more money, worked, then gone on again.

Around the time of Graham's return, my summer plans were falling into place, and so I had exciting news to share. I'd spend the months between my freshman and sophomore years working for a Valencia couple with a two-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy. They had a summer home in a beach town called Moraira, on the Costa Blanca between Valencia and Alicante. Graham beamed, taking pleasure on my behalf. He, too, was already set on going away again. At first the idea had been just an inkling. After all, he'd only flown home a few weeks before. Now, after penniless, carless winter days in an isolated trailer park, failing to connect with the friends he could rustle up, he was confirmed in his plan. He'd stay only long enough to save up money. This time he'd go in the other direction, to London. His antipodean trip had stoked his desire for more, clueing him in to how much more of the world there was to see.

A high school friend of his attended my university and lived in a fraternity house nearby. Several weeks after we first reunited, Graham borrowed a car to drive to Seattle, and arranged to stay with Paul for a couple of nights. For a few hours I was able to smuggle him upstairs in my sorority, to the living space I shared with several roommates (I slept elsewhere in the house in a dorm room), where we lolled on a quilted bunk amid an upperclassman's cushions and teddy bears. Apropos of nothing, he looked up and said, “I love you,” and it dawned on me: That's what this was—this longing, this excitement, this frisson at the sound of his name, the wanting to talk about him all the time to Kim and Katerina, who always indulged me and listened. I had had boyfriends, but this was something new. I was happy but also alarmed, suddenly and for the first time realizing that I had no control—of my feelings, or of this other person with whom they were so bound up. I felt immensely vulnerable, and wondered how I could make myself feel less so. I asked him to always be honest with me. I thought we could last forever—not necessarily as lovers but as something, maybe friends, maybe in some new form of relationship I'd never heard of. Maybe this was when people starting calling one another “soul mates.” Of course he couldn't promise not to hurt me, but he didn't know that at the time.