Wanderlust (30 page)

I turned off of Queen Street and sat down at a café on a pedestrian passageway called Vulcan Lane. Of course it was, I thought. I was in outer space. The lane was brick-paved and charming and the waiters wore tight black aprons, as urbane as waiters anywhere. I began a letter to Kristin, who was still dating Jeremy and trying to get a job at a bank. She'd gone somewhere safe, whereas I'd gone into the deep end. I started to cry. For Justin, for the possibilities I feared I was closing off, and for the subtle way in which the quality of time had changed. I was still rich, could still spend my time without much thought. But I was watching it now, aware of it going by, sensing that I should put some aside. This trip had been a digging in of my heels against the passage of time. So much of my traveling—in Egypt and Yemen; New Guinea and Australia—had made me feel present in the moment. In fact, that feeling of being absorbed, not thinking of past or future, as consumed as I was when I was having sex, was part of the reason I loved being on the road. But now, instead of feeling present, I felt like I was missing out on something I was supposed to be doing somewhere else.

Quietly, as secretly as the bank account I'd hoarded in Seattle, a seed of ambition kicked in. I'd get to the place I was meant to be, even if I wasn't sure where that was.

Stu had started over. He'd created a good life, maybe better than the one he'd had in Seattle. Being away from his family, from the endless projects on their houses and his own, had done him good. He worked at the Wooden Boat Workshop, where his coworkers welcomed and admired his talent. His skill had never been so appreciated. His Seattle coworkers, the carpenters and roofers and
dry wallers, had never seen what a craftsman he was. He might not have even realized it himself.

He'd rented the ground floor of a house with a roommate named Noah, a New Zealand–born, U.S.-raised kid, who was cheerful about his job as a cleaner at Stu's boat shop. He had also acquired a girlfriend in Auckland, a German blonde with a motorcycle and a scar like a scimitar on her left cheekbone. When I arrived he was easing her out of his life. He mentioned her name a few times, and I saw her picture, but I never met her; she just hovered like a shadow in the corner of my eye. Jealousy tightened my chest on the couple of occasions he went to see her, but I knew I had no right. In any case, I knew I just had to be patient a little while, and that the German girlfriend would be gone. It wasn't a competition for his affections; I was the one who compelled him. I knew, after a couple of weeks, that she was gone; felt it so completely that I figured she must have left town. I sensed that I had a scary kind of power over Stu, one that I was in danger of abusing. It made me feel responsible for his actions and feelings, and paradoxically hate that responsibility.

And so I moved into Stu's life. We slept on a mattress on the floor, awkward and asexual as siblings. I accidentally called him by Justin's name, repeatedly, then swore he was just a friend. That had been true, I rationalized, when I'd first planned to come to New Zealand. “Do you love me?” Stu asked. It was the most important thing, all that mattered. And I did. But if I hadn't loved him, I still would have had no choice. We had responsibilities that made us mutually dependent, and I thought that this tainted our bond. I was a love purist. When material need removed free will, the emotion was defiled. When I untangled it all, the situation came down to money, which meant that I was, in a way, selling myself, doing this to get that. I'd never compromised like this before.

Our house was on a street of bungalows, right where the road dipped into a shallow valley. Our backyard opened up onto a grassy park. We had a car: an unlicensed blue Datsun, rusting out in foot-wide patches all over the body, so worthless that a colleague of Stu's had given it away. He drove it over the hill and down to the harbor each morning. He helped me get my first job, as a hostess on the
Manu Moana,
an elegant new motor yacht that companies rented for parties. I served canapés made by a chef in the galley, and opened and poured bottles of champagne. My favorite times were when Patrick, the skipper, asked me to help him with something vaguely nautical, like pulling up the fenders, or tying off the lines when we got back to the dock. Sometimes after a party Stu and a few boat shop friends would join us on the top deck, and Patrick would serve us port.

Our plans were vague. I felt that my life was not as it should be, but Stu's was closer to the mark. He had respect. It wasn't even just a local respect—people from all over the world had yachts refurbished in Auckland. It was a sailing capital, a country where the boat-to-person ration was something like one to three. For Stu it was a center. It was a pit stop for cruisers, that flotilla of ordinary people who'd rejected normality back in Stockholm or Dallas or wherever, and put to sea. They followed a roughly similar global itinerary to one another, because of the trade winds and a desire for friendly faces in new ports. As well as big jobs, Stu's boat shop did small jobs, repairing a mast here and a tiller there.

We would go home at some point, maybe. Our plans were vague: We knew we had to go, but we put off talking about it the way some couples stay silent for years about commitment and marriage and children. At least it was easy enough to make money. I got an office job, and between the two of us we were able to wire money
back to the United States every month to cover the mortgage. My brother, now a college student, was living in the house, ostensibly maintaining it, renting or loaning the basement to assorted friends. He didn't mind the tears in its fabric, the places where the insulation showed or a board covered a hole in the floor.

In December we traveled, to the hot water beaches of Lake Taupo and to Wellington, where on Christmas Day we woke up on the floor of a friend's van, parked in a marina. Somewhere around the time we were hitchhiking from Nelson to Picton, Stu and I became a couple again. His suspicion and anger dropped away, and my lust for him flickered back to life. In Taupo I folded my sarong in half and wore it short, so that he could easily hike it up. I could love two men at once but not desire them both, and now enough time had passed since Justin that I could want Stu again.

We returned to Auckland, where I got a job with a shipping company in a position that was almost exactly like my job in Seattle. I bought office clothes from a secondhand store and thought that I passed all right. I called Justin from the office, or had him call me there. He said he wanted to come down and drag me back to Australia by the scruff of my neck. On Tuesdays Stu and I went to the home of our new friends, Christine and Sam, to watch
The X-Files
on television, and on weekends we ordered enormous lattes on Ponsonby Road. Stu's coworker Abel had a house on Waiheke Island, and we went there with Noah, Abel, and Abel's wife, Laura.

Stu and his coworkers could always talk about woodwork or sailing; I didn't have much to say. I began to write, stories about my adventures, about Papua New Guinea and Lake Taupo. I wrote them by hand in my notebook, typed them at work, and mailed them to airline magazines. I was happy just to get back the rejection letters because they let me know I existed.

It dawned on me that there was a university in Auckland. Even when I was lonely on the road I'd never felt homesick, but now I realized that a university might be a comforting place. I'd grown up on and around the campus where my father taught. Vancouver and Auckland weren't such different places. They both had the feeling of being far-flung outposts, but universities connected them to something bigger, to the whole English-speaking world.

I didn't go to the campus just for comfort though. I went to its library one afternoon, and asked for the catalogs of graduate schools in the United States. The librarian directed me to a hefty volume, and I sat on the floor and leafed through. I looked for journalism and political science. I ran my finger over names: Baylor, American, Columbia. I wrote away for information.

The boat builders discovered that, across from their workplace, there was a gourmet produce company that supplied restaurants all over Auckland. At the end of the day the company discarded cartons of leftover food, almost undamaged, into the Dumpsters between the two sheds, so Stu and I began checking them every day. We dove for oyster mushrooms, champagne grapes, and tiny yellow tomatoes shaped like lightbulbs, thrilled with each find. I loved the silly, shameless ease of it, the way one could just get by so simply. We carried our treasures back home, invited friends, and made stir fries in our wok.

We'd re-created our Seattle life.

chapter twenty-three

E
rik Weisz was born in
Budapest in 1874, and emigrated to America with his family in 1878. It was his first escape, into a land of reinvention, the America where any life was possible. He gave his first performances at the age of nine, calling himself “Ehrich, The Prince of Air.” Later “Ehrich” turned into “Harry,” and the great escapologist Harry Houdini was born. Throughout his career he created more and more elaborate situations from which to break free: handcuffed, padlocked into a trunk, hung upside down from a building. The point wasn't so much to
be
free as to
get
free. When you escape from something, you don't abscond into nothing—you escape from one place to another. The excitement is in the instant of deliverance itself, because that, not the final destination, is the only moment of being free. It's the moment of feeling most alive and most oneself, unburdened by the expectations on either side.

Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst and the author of
Houdini's Box,
writes that “what one is escaping from is inextricable from, if not defined by, what one is escaping to.” Likewise, my need to escape seemed to have an opposite pathology to go with it: I had, for the second time, created a home. I'd feathered a nest, hanging postcards on the wall and cooking up ragout. I'd have argued that this box had sucked me in, but it's as likely that I made it myself so that, like Houdini, I could perform an even greater escape.

chapter twenty-four

I
ran up to Ponsonby Road
and down to the marina, where I paused to look at the bulletin board. Usually there was nothing of interest, just the day's menu at the Ponsonby Cruising Club, so I'd walk along and look at the sailboats, sizing up strengths and faults. Length, material, number of masts, width of beam. I composed a dream boat in my head: fifty feet long, low and narrow with teak decks. Normally I just looked, the way you might flirt with handsome men from the point of view of monogamy. This day, though, there was a sign: Crew wanted, sailing to Tonga. Call Ian and Helen, or stop by the
Copper Lady
on pier three. I would just stop by.

“Ian and Helen” had a nice, reassuring ring. You couldn't just throw yourself on any old boat, as Jess, a girl sailor I met in Auckland, had warned. She told me that the slang for girls who volunteered as crew on ocean crossings was “screw.” Once you were out there, you were out there; there was no jumping out the door.

Ian and Helen were from Perth, and had sailed all the way around Australia and then New Zealand. He was brown-skinned, the product of an Indian mother and Scottish father. Helen was tall and lanky, barely tanned for so much time on the water, with long brown hair and bangs. They planned to follow the usual route: northeast to Tonga, then westward across the Pacific, on to Fiji, Vanuatu,
and Nouvelle-Caledonie. I knew all the names, because they'd popped up as ports of call when I'd been at the shipping company in Seattle. Then as now, they'd sounded terribly romantic. It was almost June: The
Copper Lady
was leaving a little late in the season because they were waiting on repairs. Someone from the Wooden Boat Workshop was coming that day to install a new tiller.

We had tea in the cockpit. It shouldn't be too complicated a voyage, Ian said. Maybe five or six days, a week at the most. They just needed an extra set of hands and eyes, to handle the night watches.

In Auckland I'd once again developed outer and inner lives that didn't match. In my outer life I made love to my boyfriend, sat in cafés, and went to the office. I even once brought Stu to a company picnic. In my inner life I read graduate school brochures and walked up the road to call Justin. I had all the dialing codes memorized. He was my little escape hatch, giving me something to look forward to—I was sure we'd reunite—and lightening the feeling that I was getting mired down again.

Now, presented with an opportunity, my inner life reared its head.

The story I told Ian and Helen I made up as I went along. I'd sailed, I said. No blue water experience, but I'd been part of a delivery crew down the coast of Queensland and sailed in plenty of regattas. Depending on what you meant by “plenty.” Then I told them that I was on my way home, and had planned all along to get there by sail.