Wanderlust (21 page)

There was copious employment to go around for young people on “working holiday” visas. You could waitress or temp; there were even signs advertising for workers in the lobby of our twelve-dollar-a-night hostel in Sydney. It was like it had all been set up just for us. When the Australian social critic Donald Horne wrote
The Lucky Country
in 1964, he meant the title as an ironic indictment of his homeland. Its citizens just happened to get lucky, he was trying to say, insofar as they could get rich on natural resources without having to innovate much. Australia was “run by second-rate people,” he wrote, though fortunately for them, the place was difficult to screw up. But Australians merrily adopted his term in the positive sense, and it came to mean that the country was charmed, sunny, wellendowed—and far from the problems of the world. To travel in Australia was a little like that.

Once I took a look around Sydney, I knew I couldn't stay. I'd just been living in a rainy city on the Pacific, going to an office every day. So I urged Kristin north, but not before she'd worked a few shifts in a nightclub in the red light district. There she met a customer, Jason, who unlike the rest of the patrons was young and attractive, small but perfectly formed, with sandy, floppy hair and a tight black T-shirt. He was high on who-knew-what, something euphoric and chatty. He gave Kristin his number and told her to come up to Noosa, the Queensland town where he lived. We caught a bus up the coast to Byron Bay, slumping against each other, saving our money by traveling overnight.

Everything was so easy. The availability of work. The twelvedollar-a-night places in every town, with shared girls' rooms and breakfast included. The English guy who appeared at the bus station
in Byron Bay and ushered us to a hostel. A dozen other travelers got off the bus and we followed him like baby ducks. We weren't on a guided tour, but we might as well have been. It was like a conveyor belt through an amusement park ride.

Outside the hostel there was a sandwich board with a menu of bookable activities and trips in ascending order of danger. Bicycle rental, surf lessons, white-water rafting, bungee jumping, sky diving. This was the kind of danger that was pursued here, planned out and guided by experts. During the day we walked to the beach, and at night we all went to the same bar. In the morning we crowded next to each other at outdoor picnic tables with our fried eggs and pancakes, like we were at summer camp. A brunette next to me with a Yorkshire accent wondered what to do about her boyfriend: He was insisting on coming out to see her, but, she said, he didn't understand: about the bungee jumping or about the options rolling out before her every day. I knew what she meant. We were the same people we were at home, but somehow here, in a different climate, we had permission not to be.

Ah yes. My boyfriend. Fiancé. In Malaysia I'd been too overwhelmed by my surroundings to think about missing him. When we talked on the phone when I was in Melbourne, we both cried. I told him the story about the witch doctor and the spell he cast on the cough drops. I thought at first that he would think it was romantic. As it came out I realized that telling the story was a mistake. Stu put too much store in spells and symbols.

I missed Stu without wishing that he was with me. As I moved toward the warmer weather I felt the thread between us spooling out and growing slack, like the line that connected me to the anchor at the bottom of the Malaysian sea. Kristin seemed to be going through something similar, trying to stay connected to Jeremy amid flickers
of ambivalence. Sometimes, for convenience, we called them at the same time, ducking into side-by-side phone booths with our calling cards. I didn't know if we were doing it because we really wanted to talk to Stu and Jeremy, or to preserve the sense of being fastened. I mailed Stu letters and a couple of postcards; he asked for an address where he could send me a letter, but I didn't have one to give. Other travelers used
poste restante,
which let you receive letters held in the care of a city post office. That was how I'd sometimes sent letters to Graham, at a time that now seemed long ago. But I told Stu I didn't know where I would be from day to day.

We took a bus to Noosa. We stayed one night in the Koala Blue, and called our boyfriends back home. Stu had words to send me and insisted that I give him the hostel's fax number. I stood by the machine as the pages poured forth. One, two, three, curling into the tray. A fourth, a fifth, and a sixth. I felt a rising alarm. I felt responsible for this outpouring, and I didn't want to feel responsible. I felt exasperated that he would try to reach me this way, forcing me to pay attention to his words. He was assaulting my snatched freedom, my one breath of air before settling down, rather than letting me be. I took the pages and Kristin and I went to a café, where I bought an iced cappuccino with whipped cream, a special treat because it cost around an eighth of my daily budget. The pages were repetitive, manic, generously loving. They made me uncomfortable. Stu felt me drifting. He was on to me even from thousands of miles away, even before I was on to myself.

Kristin called Jason, the high guy from the nightclub in Sydney, and he invited us to stay in his house. Just like that we'd jumped the conveyor belt. Jason had an airy two-story place with tall windows and sliding doors, with a broad back deck shaded by eucalyptus trees, five minutes up the hill from a sandy swimming cove.
He lived with two housemates, Moo and Ben, both training to be chefs. Jason was a sometime waiter, with plans to open a nightclub, or start a T-shirt company, or move to London. There was a little spare room with a single bed, and Kristin and I took turns night by night, alternating between the bed and the floor. The first night we overheard Moo saying to Jason in the kitchen: “Backpackers? Are you serious?”

Kristin announced that she was almost out of money, and got a job waitressing at a restaurant called Mariposa. It was on Noosa's refined Hastings Street, where fruit and eucalyptus trees shaded low buildings in sherbet shades of stucco. Well-heeled tourists from Brisbane and Sydney dined on Hastings, in open-air cafés, before hitting the beach. Nearby enclaves were called Noosa Heads, Noosaville, Sunshine, and Sunrise, as though the city fathers had been addled by the gentle landscape and sunny days.

I decided to do nothing. Nothing because I'd always done something.

I swam in the cove and ran on the trail through subtropical forest, in a national park that began near Jason's house, and continued for miles out to a cliff over the ocean. I took day trips inland to nouveau hippy towns, with Moo on the back of his motorcycle. I went from the house to the beach to Hastings Street, and back to the house, where Jason rolled joints for his friends, girls and boys, on the back deck. There was Leoni, a bartender Jason had worked with down on Hastings Street. There was Summer, who had a breathy voice and yellow-blond hair. There was Johnny, the heir to a shoe fortune. He was younger than he looked, a fortyyear-old who looked like he was sixty, but he still seemed too old to be hanging out with us, a haggard party boy who'd never stopped. His woman friend, Sandra, always showed up with him, guiding
him like a nurse. One day Sandra said that she'd found him facedown in the sand the night before and taken him to the hospital. Everyone worried about Johnny.

I spent days as though I had a million of them, wasting them—it occurred to me—like I'd always wanted to. I wasn't training for anything anymore—I wasn't even working. I ate time like a gourmand king, not even trying to keep my appetite in check. Time has a different meaning before your first intimations of mortality, and mine were a long way off. I wasn't even in denial, which would suggest that somewhere deep down I knew what I was dodging. I didn't believe in death at all. If I did, I might have seen Johnny as a ghost from the future, a cautionary what-notto-do. But I didn't believe I could ever definitively fail, because when time is inexhaustible you can always try again. There would always be a later. I could spend a spare seven hundred days in Seattle, because there would always be more days. I could spend dozens here in Noosa and it wouldn't mean a thing.

Jason's friends' talk bored me. It was almost, but not quite, fascinating in its dullness. They gossiped about the people they worked with, most of whom I'd never met. They talked about where to get pot and ecstasy. Jason talked about going to London and caressed the latest issue of
The Face
. Sometimes he would retrieve a back issue from the stack in his bedroom to make a point, like a father trying to convey a passion to his kids, but he was as successful as I would have been if I'd started talking about the Middle East. Jason was going to be a DJ, he said. Late at night I went back to my room and tried to sleep while dance music from the living room vibrated the floor. I had no idea how he paid the rent.

I developed a recreational crush on Jason, mostly because he was there, and because all the other women in his circle seemed to
have one too. And somewhere deep down I knew I needed a catalyst, someone to jostle me free. I had to break the sexual bond of the last two years.

Jason didn't seem to mind either way, he could have gone with Kristin or me or neither of us, but I was the one who was around more. Nobody expected anything of anyone in this house, sexual or otherwise. It was the opposite of living in a repressed society: There, young men were aggressively, overwhelmingly, angrily horny all the time. Places like Australia were all-you-could-eat buffets of liberty, and so the young men were chilled out. And there was something gratifying about wanting a man who didn't care. It made you feel like you were exercising free choice. Stu had always been so certain of our joint destiny that I'd never had time to reflect. Maybe this whole trip was about wanting a chance to think straight.

I started trying to stay up as late as Jason did, watching him fiddle with his turntables. It was a paying of dues, required before the attention turned to me. How many girls, I wondered, had waited for boys to finish with their stereos, their videos, their guitars. But if I hadn't had to wait, my desire might not have accrued. And maybe his wouldn't have, either, if he hadn't first been admired. “Do you want a massage?” Jason finally asked. It was just unobvious enough, leaving room for either of us to retreat; people were always giving each other massages around here. He came around behind my chair and kneaded his fingers into my back. I moaned and lolled my head, and rolled it to the side so that my cheek touched his hand. Then he put his fingers in my mouth. He might as well have pressed a trigger. Now I'd want him inordinately for that one little act. I'd want him until my desire either dissipated or was denied.

One night Jason and I went down to Brisbane to go to a rave. The next morning Kristin told me that Stu had called the house
and asked her why I was away. I was glad to have missed the call. Something in me had been finally dislodged. I tried to call Stu back at his grandmother's island home, but she said he had already left. She asked me how I was.

“Fine, fine,” I said.

“Stu's been talking about your wedding,” she said. “He's got this idea for a pig roast.”
She's on to me,
I thought.

But I couldn't muster the feeling that anything mattered. I was carrying around my bruised copy of Kundera's
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. He writes: “ . . . the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” I thought I'd detached from the earth and was floating through the air.

When Kristin had a day off, we went shopping on Hastings Street and bought identical miniskirts. They were checkered black and white and grazed the tops of our tanned thighs, and we nicknamed them the dish towels. She was several inches shorter than me, petite and athletic. We were both blond with green eyes, but hers were a pale, minty shade I've never seen on anyone else. We went out together like twins. We had both always had a mania for attention-getting and inappropriate clothes, but here nothing was really inappropriate. You could walk around in a bikini or go barefoot for days, and no one would mind.

About two weeks after we arrived in Noosa, we lay in our little room—it was my turn on the floor—and talked. I'd met her boyfriend, Jeremy, only a few times and had taken an instant dislike. He'd told me that he was spending time with her because he was a doing his psychiatric rotation in med school, and she'd seemed like an interesting subject. I never found out if he was joking.

I was getting tired of our long and tearful conversations with our boyfriends, and since the multipage fax, I'd let the days when I was supposed to call go by unnoticed. I wanted a partner in my abdication from life back home, and Kristin talked a good line about the guys she wanted to screw over here. Though Norwegian on her father's side, she was obsessed with Swedes, who were plentiful on the traveler trail. She wanted tall blond boys. So, I asked her, why didn't she just break up with Jeremy? “You're planning a wedding,” she countered. “You might not be quite ready for that.”