Wanderlust (35 page)

London feels like the capital of Europe. My neighborhood is called Clerkenwell, which I never learn to pronounce quite right. It's on the edge of the City, which is what they call the one-square-mile financial district, and is packed with financiers from around the continent. I work in a sleek white-glass office building on Gray's Inn Road. My company also has a building on Fleet Street, next to St. Bride's Church, so I sometimes go down there. All the big newspapers have moved out to the suburbs, but a bookstore obligingly sells me a copy of
Scoop,
Evelyn Waugh's great satire of the foreign correspondent's life. One of the old editors tells me how in the printing presses of yore, you could smell the ink coming out of the brick walls. I stand on the Fleet Street sidewalk and imagine that I can smell it too.

The apartment is in a brand-new building, with floor-to-ceiling windows and wall-to-wall carpet, on the incongruously named street Herbal Hill. My flat mate is Indian, and his girlfriend comes from Germany. We have friends from Holland and Israel come stay with us, and our apartment feels like an upscale youth hostel.

I get a Swedish boyfriend named Stefan. He's twenty-four,
works in animation, and has a trendily asymmetric haircut. We don't have a sustainable well of things to talk about, but he's sweet and there's a pull between us. I'm fond of him but I don't feel compelled; I know that he, Stefan, the individual, isn't essential to my life. I'm still seeing Paul, flying back and forth on Virgin or BA.

Raphael and Peru were otherworldly, but London feels like an extension of life in New York. It's magnetic like New York, a full cornucopia of finance and fashion and everything else, and my colleagues here could be my colleagues there. There's an ocean separating me from Paul, but we're running in the same cosmopolitan world. And maybe that—the sense of cheating on home turf, with no obvious end in sight—is what makes me start to interrogate myself about just what the hell I'm doing.

In the wake of an infidelity, someone always asks, why didn't you just break up? It seems like the sensible solution amid all of our modern free-will arrangements. If I were married, wouldn't it make sense to inflict the (possibly) lesser pain of walking out, before creating the (possibly) greater pain of deception and jealousy? And I'm not married; I've been in a relationship with no children, no shared home, no greater joint obligation, really, than a favorite brunch spot and a Sunday talk show. So why do I bother with deception at all? Why did I create a relationship based on an understanding of fidelity, then undermine it? And what does it say, anyway, that with no marriage in sight, I'm pondering how to handle my own infidelity if I enter one?

No one forced me to be in any of these relationships. All I have to do is be true to my word. It's not like I'm some Yemeni girl sold into a bigamous marriage. It's not like I live in 1750, 1850, or even 1950, struggling under the burden of social mores, having to lie to keep myself sane. All you have to do in relationships anymore is what you said you would. That's the only rule left.

I know it's not strictly sex that accounts for my straying, the motive usually attributed to men. I think it's just too tempting to have two lives rather than one. Some people think that too much travel begets infidelity: Separation and opportunity test the bonds of love. I think it's more likely that people who hate to make choices, to settle on one thing or another, are attracted to travel. Travel doesn't beget a double life. The appeal of the double life begets travel.

With two lives, you're always escaping back and forth. Why did Houdini keep building more and more elaborate confinements? He could have just stuck with a few ropes, but he had to escalate to a trunk wrapped in chains. Deep down, I know that it's not some unforeseen circumstance that causes Paul and Stefan to overlap. It's not that my emotions are confused. When Stefan leaves in the morning, and I stuff the cream sheet into the hamper and snap the purple one across the bed, knowing Paul will be here when I get back from work, I'm not in turmoil. I
like
it. I'm turned on by this moment in between, almost more than I am by either of the guys. Maybe this is why I wanted Stefan in the first place, so that I could have two men, two possibilities, instead of one. I like that I have to be careful, especially with Paul, with whom there's more at stake—with whom I still imagine a possible life in New York. Stefan could have left a sock in my room, or we could see him in the street. Paul could ask me where I got the rock climbing book Stefan gave me, which I happen to leave lying around, as though courting disaster. I have to be careful not to say the wrong thing, and then when Paul leaves I can let down my guard again. In between the two men, I'm not presenting myself for either one. I'm not talking about art with Stefan or politics with Paul. It's getting into and out of these different selves that gives me a kick, more than actually being in one or the other.

I don't trust Paul, and I can see that this is one of the paybacks of infidelity: Being untrustworthy makes me suspicious that others are too. I start to lose respect for him, because I've outsmarted him too much now, which wasn't possible during our old feisty debates. I get lazy about the relationship, and when I utterly fail to plan a getaway to Bath, which I forgot that I said I'd arrange, he's so angry that I think he must feel more than he knows. We fight as we walk around the ancient city, knocking on the doors of fullybooked hotels.

But whatever I may think of him, I start to not want to be a person who treats people like this. I resolve to break up with Stefan and Paul at the same time, to wipe the slate clean. I do break up with Stefan, but I lose my resolve when it comes to Paul, and we keep flying back and forth.

And then things happen with the Englishman. He's my age and my colleague. I was attracted to him from my first day of work, six months back. I'm drawn to his rugby-trained body and curiously high forehead, and he makes me laugh when he anthropomorphizes, attributing free will to notebooks and dogs. Our company is experimenting with hiring non-Oxbridge graduates, and the Englishman, who's from outside of Sheffield, comes via the University of Glasgow. He's also studied in Russia.

For months we went out in groups, to the dim, brass-trimmed pub that our bosses liked, or to movies and night clubs in the West End. We talked about our roommates, our colleagues, and the minutiae of work—my trips to the Bank of England, and his to the commodities exchange. We talked about books; both of us were in a Martin Amis phase. I discovered that, like me, he saw
the wire service as a springboard to something else. It was a way to get around the world, a place to learn how to interview people and organize words.

We first kiss while waiting for our respective night buses on Charing Cross Road, and I see that the months leading up to the moment were one long run of anticipation. We try to keep it under wraps at the office, but we arrange to meet outside at lunch, and usually end up making out on a park bench. We're big on public displays of affection, not really by intention, but because we can't keep our bodies apart. He makes me feel like I have a thousand extra sensors per square inch of skin.

Now I have to break up with Paul, because I'm free-falling into love. I'm consumed by the Englishman, and it's stronger than any thrill I was getting from my own duplicity.

My decision is made. And when I look back I see all the evidence that I should have done it much sooner. With the way I was acting—the way I evidently wanted to act—how could I have thought the relationship with Paul might work? The need to break up becomes so madly urgent that I do it on the phone, right before Paul and I are supposed to go on a trip to Morocco. The fact that we've been planning the trip makes it all the more bizarre to him that I'm doing this now, and so there's incomprehension in his anguish. I'm anguished too, because while I'm resolved, I know that I'm letting go not only of a person who understood me, but also of a possible life I'd entertained. I'm shutting that door and jumping into the Englishman's arms, with all of its unknowns. After Paul and I have cried, I know that I've been callous. But I also feel purified.

When the deed is done I still have the week of vacation I'd booked. The Englishman and I go to Sicily.

chapter twenty-eight

W
ith the Englishman it's different.
I haven't felt this physical magnetism in a long time, at least not since Justin, whom I think maybe I can finally stop thinking about. The Englishman and I read the papers together for an hour or two on Sunday mornings, and sometimes we read poetry out loud. He loves Ted Hughes, with all his birds and wolves, which I think must remind him of an imaginary Yorkshire, his own having been suburban. He says he wants a dog, and then says the thing that travelers say when asked about pets, which is that our lifestyles don't permit them. Maybe we don't really want them all that much.

A separation hangs over us. After twelve months in London, the Englishman is supposed to be sent to Russia and I'm supposed to go back to the United States. I don't give much thought to what this might mean, since long-distance love has become my norm. I don't consider not choosing it. I don't believe that love is a choice. It doesn't occur to me that that our pending division might be one of the things that makes me want him so much. Maybe after being bogged down in Seattle, I'm afraid to love anyone who might stick around.

In the meantime, while still based in London, we take vacations. It's the dawn of the budget airline era, and we can get cheap tickets to anywhere in Europe. After Sicily we go to Croatia, and late in
the summer we cycle around Scotland. Our first six months together are a blur of food and sex and travel. After antipasto and prosecco in Taormina, he feels me up on the train until my shorts are soaked. Somewhere near Loch Lomond, after a full Scottish breakfast of sausage, eggs, bacon, beans, mushrooms, black pudding, and tomato, the proprietress has to kick us out, because it's 11:00 AM and we had to use the bed one last time. In London after ravioli, in a deserted lane just minutes from my flat, we push and pull each other into a doorway and I suck him off. Once the floodgates are open, neither of us ever wants to stop. It's my kind of sex, our kind of sex. We don't race to the finish but just go on and on, because we both understand that anticipation can never disappoint; it just gets better and better. And when we finally come because we can't go on another second, as well as the physical release there's the mental release of compulsion, of having been made to do something against our will.

I crave him in my body and heart. I don't think I can bear detachment. But we separate because work is taking us in different directions; he doesn't question going to Russia any more than I question going to the States. After that things just speed up: more countries, more food, more sex. We meet in Barcelona and Ireland. We visit each other in Moscow and Seattle. After we've both quit the wire service, we decide to spend two months in Mexico.

Staying on the Sea of Cortez, neither of us really has a plan. Writing, travel, love: These seem to be the most important things in life. I'm finishing my first book, and my idea for what to do after that is to write more. That's as concrete as it gets. The Englishman is studying Spanish, which will be his third language after Russian, and he's working on a novel, that first messy, unreadable, necessary attempt. While I'm waiting on edits, I work on an unreadable novel too. We're here but not really “living” here,
and I don't know where we'll go next. It's time between time. We wake up to blue sky and undulating white curtains. We eat tortillas, chorizo, and avocados, and maybe some fresh squeezed juice. We swim then write, or we write then swim. We fuck at midday, maybe in the red-tiled kitchen, then read in the afternoon, cracking all those classics we never got around to before—Herodotus, John Steinbeck. Then we eat from the same basic ingredient list as breakfast, have sex in bed, and maybe read some more. We see few other people. We've checked out of the real world, and I think I could probably live like this for a very long time.

As for what to do next, we're like two people going on a date, saying back and forth, “What do you want to do?” “I don't know; what do you want to do?” Except that it's more than a date; it's a life plan. When you're two people living in the same city, you're not forced into this kind of decision, because you've each built up a life where you are. You'll stay put with or without the other. But when you've come together in a foreign country, from homes far away—not that either of us could have told you where home was—the decision carries more weight. The practical implications alone are huge. Buy plane tickets, rent a home, move furniture across the world? Settle down in a foreign land? Settle down at all?