Wanderlust (33 page)

That feeling had dissipated by the time we got back to Seattle. The place was dauntingly familiar. As I walked through our house and back to the ramshackle deck, I felt like I was watching my own life again, just as I had when I arrived in Malaysia, riding through green fields to the coast. I was experiencing reverse culture shock, waiting for my mind to catch up to my physical presence.

I didn't feel sad or entrapped, though. I felt optimistic. I began planning to leave Seattle as soon as I got back.

chapter twenty-six

T
he lights streak by, bright
and beautiful as fireworks. Shop windows pulse like stars. We're cruising, frictionless, four in a taxi, night-sailing up the Avenue of the Americas. We were so far downtown, and we live so far up. I hope that we'll cut through Times Square, because when your vision is blurred and it's four in the morning, it's like flying to the heart of the sun.

The ride from Houston Street to the hundreds is the end to more and more of our nights. We don't yet understand what a deal we're getting on our apartments. We blow our meager funds on alcohol and taxis, but we know that everything will turn out. We'll get jobs someday, good ones. It's 1997 and we're twenty-seven, and we know beyond doubt that this
is
the right place at the right time. Those shy hopes that we're special, chosen, lucky, are coming to fruition. We think we're smarter than everyone else. We expect our careers to be glamorous, not fashion-glamorous or music-glamorous, but the running-the-world kind. Uptown in the classrooms or downtown at night, I'm never bored but happily consumed. We've found each other, pulled like asteroids from Barcelona, Cote d'Ivoire, the South Seas. These are my people.

We're all the more ardent and wide-eyed because we were late to the party. We didn't come to New York after college. Instead we
went away, on what we now choose to describe as personal odysseys, even if we were bored out of our skulls in some impoverished hinterland, or jobless and ten-to-a-flat in the wrong part of Europe. It turns out that the road in all cases led to this modern Rome. And if you'd lived at the time of the Roman Empire, wouldn't you have wanted, at least once, to live in Rome? At four in the morning especially, it's a playground made just for us. With the zeal of the converted, we literally dance on bars. We borrow limousines. We look for the gayest clubs, the grimiest dives. Cabs appear—I can't get over this—right when we want them, at whatever time of night. And our New York is just a tiny sliver. The city spreads away forever, rings coddling the core, every layer a core itself, Bengali or Korean or Greek. It's a whole cosmos; you could explore it your entire life. It's the center of the world, and it's ours. The taxi turns into Times Square, and the waterfalls of light rise above.

My surreptitious visit to the library stacks in Auckland eventually led me here. Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, SIPA for short. Like my first degree, this one is intended, in part, to lay a veneer of respectability over my desire to travel. It's the final coat. We take classes in history and economics, but I suspect that many of my classmates ended up here for the same reason I did. Insatiable wanderlust met the need to get a real job. My new friends will vie for positions at the UN, the State Department, the international banks. But first we have two years to spend like this, in the cycle of papers, exams, and internships, interspersed with the discovery of New York.

Early in the New Year I get a boyfriend, a fellow student. He's studying finance, and he's very good with logic and numbers, and
he helps me get through economics. First we take macro: inflation, unemployment, GDP. The inner workings of the world. Then micro: supply and demand.

I'd stitched together a vague fantasy of my life in New York before I came, of how it would be. It was mainly this one static image: looking out a floor-to-ceiling window on a cold morning, still undressed, and seeing the glinting cityscape. There's a man in the background, someone fascinating and successful. This sophisticated apartment is not mine but his: My fantasy of myself is as a visitor.

Paul is tall, blue-eyed, from the outskirts of Boston. I like him partly because he's smart, one of the smartest people I've met. It's not just economics; he's also widely and deeply read. He studies Japanese and aces history.

He's the only Republican among just about everyone we know at graduate school, and I suspect sometimes that he just wants to be contrarian. He likes to spar over politics, and we do. (I think of my own politics, which are still evolving, as unconventional, not really fitting in to the American spectrum, with its arbitrary alliance between social conservatives and economic liberals.) I know sometimes he's just trying to provoke me, like when he tells me to watch an interview with a young, female conservative star, who argues that women belong at home. I let myself be provoked. We wrangle over whether the IMF should bail out Thailand, and over Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and Kenneth Starr—I don't give a damn about the blowjobs, and he'd like to see Clinton disgraced—and it's partly just because we like the fight. His girlfriends have never pushed back enough, and he wants it. I like that he can be overbearing, because it's like giving me a hill to climb.

He likes that I'm feminine and also not, and I like that he likes this about me. I remember that in my late teens I thought there was
something inherently male about me, some way in which I didn't fit in with girls. It was such an ingrained and inarticulate thought that I'd never wondered where it came from. I wasn't a tomboy; I looked girlish; I loved makeup and short skirts. I just instinctively knew that an emotional component was missing. I never had the wedding fantasies I'd always heard about. When I was dating a boy, I always felt like a timer went off inside me, after which I was done, just done. I thought sentimentality was cloying and domesticity suspect. Without knowing why, I'd internalized the idea that these traits were male. But when I said to a friend that I was unfeminine, he asked me what on earth I was talking about. He said I was one of the most feminine girls he'd known. And I saw that the way I was seen wasn't necessarily the way I felt inside.

Paul sees both sides, and one of the things we want from a lover, always, is to feel like we're known. He likes the outward femininity in an uncomplicated way, but he also sees my cocksure side, and he falls for me, in part, because of it. It's as though there's something he can't get to or break through, and the challenge goads him on. He gets under my skin too, an itch that can't quite be scratched.

He also falls for me because I have something he doesn't. For all his brilliance, Paul doesn't have a passion. As my ambitions come into focus, I'm driven. Writers write because we have to. My other grad school friends are likewise motivated; their nascent careers are their callings. Paul, on the other hand, gets A's without much effort, but isn't impelled to do anything in particular. So he falls for people who are driven to create.

Paul went to a private school and then Princeton, where he belonged to an eating club and rowed crew. Here in New York he has a dozen childhood and college friends, for which I envy him. They didn't fish in Alaska or get married, but came here, apparently with a sense of direction, to start careers. Their parents may have bought
them apartments. If the boys sometimes mention ownership of a tool belt, it's to make themselves stand out. The girls have picked jobs in philanthropy or PR. I have the feeling that Paul belongs to a world I've only heard about in novels, of Northeasterners at the top of the American food chain. He's the quintessential WASP. And yet he's done something that no one of his class does anymore: Before graduate school he went and joined the Marine Corps, and I respect this deviation from the norm. I'm drawn to both sides of him, the irrefutable physicality of his military service, and the way he belongs to a certain slice of New York. He's not in student housing but shares a spacious apartment, with real non-Ikea furniture and saturated colors on the walls. The windows are not floor-to-ceiling, but I do sometimes look out them on cold mornings, at the silhouettes of the rooftop water towers against the pale winter light, thinking about brunch or going back to bed, and telling myself a metanarrative of my own life, about how looking out at the city and pondering these options make me finally feel like I've arrived. Your first months, or maybe years, in New York, you can't help thinking,
I'm in New York.

Once again I feel like I've come from nowhere, and arrived on the scene as a blank slate.

The damp woods of Vancouver, my Home Depot days, my Middle Eastern and Australasian years, are all irrelevant now, more parts of me to be cut off as I move into this new milieu. Especially Seattle, from which I feel like I made a narrow escape. Slowly, over the year between New Zealand and New York, I convinced Stu to buy me out of the house, and we said good-bye. New York is full of moths to the flame, and there is a kind of solidarity in our erased pasts. Like all twentysomething arrivals to New York, I am, without even realizing it, animated and energized by the fear of being sucked back whence I came. Paul helps to anchor me, to make me feel like I belong here.

I don't fit into Paul's world, but I think that with a little study I could. The way I dress is still too provincial, too Gap-based. The sarongs and waitress uniforms and hiking boots left me with no urban style. I wear too-tight T-shirts to restaurants; my idea of pretty is sexy, and my idea of sexy is cheap. But I can figure this out, the way I learned to wrap myself up in the Middle East, or broaden my vowels into an Australian drawl. There's a scene in the Woody Allen film
Annie Hall
where Alvy Singer takes one look at a woman he's just met and then runs down his list of assumptions about her—Central Park West, Brandeis University—to which she sarcastically replies, “No, that was wonderful. I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.” I
want
people to look at me and reduce me to a cultural stereotype, one specific to New York, because it will mean I've successfully passed. When we graduate, Paul's parents will give me a bracelet from Tiffany's, and this small nod to the fetishized jewelry store, the go-to cliché of girlish romantic achievement, will signal to me that I've arrived.

For a career path I choose journalism so that I'll finally be able to get paid to write. During the summer between our first and second years, everyone is supposed to get an internship, and I get a position reporting for Reuters in Jerusalem, a city I visited during the year I studied in Egypt. That time I came via Jordan, over the Allenby Bridge and through the West Bank. This time I'll fly to Tel Aviv. Now, finally, something starts to make sense. I see continuity in my life. That year, all that time studying Arabic, is leading me back to the same place, making it real again. The last time around may not have been a fling after all, but something more like a building block.

When I'm offered the position, Paul buys me a dozen red roses. He's good at observing the rituals of romance, better than I am, but I guess that's more imperative on the guy. He's been trained in traditions I don't well know; he's dated girls who expect them. Graham once gave me a fully stocked toolbox, with each implement separately wrapped. Justin gave me a sleeping bag, and Stu bought me a plane ticket and sailing clothes. But Paul gives me flowers. When we'd barely started dating, he mailed me a postcard to ask me to Valentine's Day dinner.

Paul accompanies me to the airport, and we sit holding hands near the security gate, and he promises to come see me at the end of the summer. He'll be coming across the world from Hong Kong, where he's landed his own summer job. This is getting to be familiar. Travel equals longing equals love.