Wanderlust (36 page)

The Englishman wants to study Spanish in Cuba, and I say I'll probably go with him, but after that we have no scheme at all, together or alone. So I think back to the place that felt the most right: New York. It's just been attacked in an act of war, with thousands killed—that's the reality from which we've checked out. We're startled when the gardener says
“la caída”
because we think he's said “Al Qaeda,” but then we realize he's only talking about “the fall,” the stairs where the bougainvillea tumbles down to the beach. I have the same thought I did while sailing across the Pacific: Are
we obligated to do something useful in the world, or just not mess it up? I want to run to New York, like it's my lover wounded in battle. I make a decision: I'm going to move back there. I suggest to the Englishman that he come with me.

I still want him so much. I want to touch him, feed him, fuck him, and talk all day about the writers we love. I've never wanted someone so much for so long. In my most serious relationships, with Stu and Paul, both times the sharp edge of love went blunt. (That never happened with Graham, but I don't think to wonder why, or whether it had anything to do with all that time apart.) The loss was okay—I still felt safe and companionable. I saw that there were other important things. I knew in theory that a grown-up chooses to leave her highs behind, in favor of a stable life. But I missed my desire. I missed my thirst. I tried to heighten what was left of them, hoping to feel the way I had before. I took off across the world, I cheated, and—this possibility came like a revelation—realized that you could play games in bed. You could become the stripper, the slave, the teacher's pet. Sex became a portal to another place.

But with the Englishman so little of this is even necessary. I've finally found the man with whom I'll never get bored. It's been almost two years, and I still want him like I did when our forearms first brushed at the office. I have everything in the Englishman: a travel companion, an intellectual partner, and lust.

I'm anxious while I wait for him to answer me about New York. I fear that he won't want to come. It's a huge decision, and I practically feel like I've asked him to marry me. I convince myself that he's going to say no, trying to prepare myself for the worst. I want him more than ever.

One night we're in the big white bed with the reading lamps
on, our books lying all around. The rhythmic sound of the night sea floats in through the window screens. We're calm and friendly, getting ready to sleep. “I'm going to do it,” he says. “After Cuba, I'm going to come to New York.”

“That's great,” I say. It hasn't quite sunk in yet, and I don't know how to react. When I've had a moment to absorb it, I crawl over and tickle him and say, “Yay.” We laugh together in surprise.

Then a strange thing happens. We turn off the lights and I face away. I stare at a moonlit square of white wall, which frames the black silhouette of a gecko. While I'm watching the reptile, I know suddenly that the feeling is gone. The sweet, painful, overwhelming desire that I've carried these last many months has been snuffed out. There's a caring companion beside me. But that sharp craving, which I need to have so that it can be fulfilled and I can feel ecstatic, has disappeared.

I'm so disappointed I could cry. Not just because I miss the desire itself. I'm also sad because I was wrong about my feelings for the Englishman. I thought he was the one who could stop my wandering heart. I thought that this relationship was different, that I could go on loving him the way I had so far. I thought I could be happy with just one man. I'm sad because I see now that I'm the problem. I'm perverse. I wanted him until I knew that I could have him, and as soon as he made me a promise, my want went away. I'm sad because this might mean that I'll never be satisfied. I can be satisfied for a moment, or even a few months. The Englishman satisfied like crazy. But it can't last. Nothing, with me, can last. I mourn for all the things that can't last, and I mourn for what I've discovered about myself. I can seek bigger and better thrills, but in the end I'm bound by the same thing that binds everyone else. Love is only a moment passed through, not somewhere you can go
and live. That's why people build those scaffolds I've so disdained. They make homes, families, networks of colleagues and friends. They're infrastructure projects unto themselves, connected to others by rods and beams. They know they can't stay on the crest of a wave. They build their worlds to get through all the rest. Maybe I should do that too.

chapter twenty-nine

I
run into Central Park and up
to the reservoir, a wide shining pool with a path on its rim. In the middle distance on the east and west sides, the crenellated tops of buildings rise in two-mile-long rows, anchorless above the trees, as if they're going to float up and away. The painstakingly carved balconies and turrets are like castles in the sky, more impressive than any of the ruins I've ever seen—Roman, Sabaean, Indus Valley—because they still hum with life. I wonder if, in half a millennium, they'll be empty and crumbling too, artifacts for the archaeologists to read. For now I feel once again like the city is my playground. I've reunited with friends from graduate school and go out almost every night. It's seven months after 9/11, but there's a vigor in the recovery, a grand fuck-you to the world.

The exertion clears my head, but when I get back to my studio sublet I start thinking about the Englishman again. I'm both ambivalent and impatient pending his arrival. Even after that moment in Mexico, of realizing that desire had ebbed like it always does, I've hung on to the belief that he's different. He's my best-ever shot at long-term love, maybe even marriage. Not in the sense that I know he wants those things, but insofar as I, for once, think that I do. I've seen how different I can be with him. I could commit. I could say okay to a lifetime. I think. I waffle back and forth on the subject to
close friends. Only part of my ambivalence comes from thinking about these lifetime plans. I'm also afraid that he'll change his mind and I'll lose him, and I'm trying to shelter myself in advance.

The Englishman, after equivocating on dates—first it's one Monday, then it's the next Monday, then it's Saturday afternoon—arrives on my doorstep five weeks after I do. He's nearly finished writing his novel, and when he's done, I press him. What are we doing? What's next? Is he staying in New York? I can't believe I've become a woman who asks these questions. Who asks for that dreaded and amorphous thing, commitment. I can't even tell if I want it, or just think I'm supposed to want it. I can't envision exactly what I want. But still I press ahead.

My ambivalence doesn't protect me from being devastated when, a month after his arrival, he leaves. I asked him to choose a particular life, and he said no. I think about how bad I've always been at choosing. I think about how he was a very safe person for me to want, because, like me, he was always going away.

These thoughts are buried in tears, because I'm crushed like I've never been before. I'm thirty and it's late in life to be left for the first time, but I know it's not because I've been more wanted than anyone else. It's just because I've protected myself by always exiting first.

Some days I feel like I can't breathe. I have no idea how to handle this, so I try to suppress my sorrow the way I try to stop heartburn on the running trail: I suck in my solar plexus as hard as I can, squeezing the pain away. The problem is that as soon as I let go, the pain comes back.

It's around this time that I meet Dominic. Remeet, actually; we were acquaintances in graduate school. The second time I see him, he's
heard about my breakup, and he tells me that if I need someone to talk to, he's there and he cares. Over time I'll learn that he's shy, and that he was being bold when he said that. I know it's way too soon, that I have no capacity to make judgments. I know that I'm trying to erase one man with another. But I can't stop myself. I don't know how else to get by. I'm falling and he reaches out to catch me.

I'm emotionally numb when I enter our relationship, repeating some dimly recollected pattern, this time underwater. I'm grateful that he's the kind of person who, being undemonstrative himself, doesn't seem to notice. As best I can, I close off the subterranean caverns where the Englishman dwells, and while I don't convince myself that I'm okay, I'm able to convince others that I'm okay. I rarely talk about the Englishman, because to even open my mouth would let grief come pouring forth. I will myself to become okay, which will take a very long time.

Not that that's all there is to it. There's a spark with Dominic, weaker in degree than some other sparks I've felt, but genuine; I think maybe I can fan it into a fire. Our attraction flares at a Swedish bar in a former Chinese restaurant, after they push tables out of the way and the DJ starts. It continues at a nightclub called the Bulgarian, where they play gypsy punk and always exceed the fire code. I'm smitten at first with the fact that he can dance; it's been a long time since I've been with someone who would. I like his taste, the way he mixes vintage everything with an unabashed pursuit of the cutting edge. He ferrets out new music, clothes, and neighborhoods, then feels vindicated and annoyed when they come into fashion. I don't feel very cool, but I think that he thinks I am.

Early on, after we've been out all night, he's driving me uptown on his motorcycle, when it breaks down under the old raised railway on the West Side. I sit down on a curb and watch him try to affix a bolt, which
takes a while. A couple of skinny boys in tight T-shirts walk briskly by, heads bopping. Daylight begins to spread, slanting down under the obsolete tracks, bouncing off the Hudson that flows just beyond my sight. Later Dominic will tell me that at this moment he thought our relationship wouldn't survive. Women are irritated by this sort of thing, he'll say—falling ceiling tiles, hand-to-mouth budgets, broken bikes. I'll tell him that I'm not like that. I try to be in love with Dominic, and I think it starts to work. It's like that moment when you've taken a drug of dubious quality, and you keep asking yourself if the high is coming on. There are different kinds of love, I tell myself, and this one is calmer, quieter, reserved—but maybe much more steady.

When we begin dating, he's trying to get into the State Department. He scores high on the exams, but that only gets you on a list. He enters the long, uncertain waiting period before you're assigned to a training class. I think of my State Department internship a decade earlier. I think even further back, to my college year in Egypt. Dominic also studied Arabic and worked in the Middle East; if he's accepted he'll eventually be sent to the region. I think of how I could have taken Dominic's path. When you're twenty-one, all possible lives are still ahead. Dominic and I even have the same graduate degree, in international affairs, another whisper that in an alternate universe, I might have been able to go his way. But by now I've cast my lot as a writer. I've closed doors. Not least of all, I wouldn't pass the State Department's security clearance. But being with someone who's taken the other route will let me experience it by proxy.

I'm a sort of proxy for him too. He can't face the twin risks of chaos and poverty that inform a writer's life; his childhood was unstable enough, and he still helps out his sister and mother back home. He's a talented writer, but writing will only ever be a hobby for him. Through me he'll be in touch with a life he can't live.

My sublet expires when the owners come back from France. I move to a shared apartment in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where my unhinged roommate hurls verbal abuse. I leave in the night to stay at Dominic's apartment in the East Village; then to a place on West 103rd, emptied by a friend who's gone to Holland; then to a sublet in Astoria, Queens, belonging to a friend who's in Senegal. In the small community I've formed in New York, someone is always going off somewhere. Pinging around from place to place, I feel as though I can't stop the momentum, and I become exhausted. I'm also impoverished, having overestimated what I can earn from freelancing, and underestimated the cost of living in this town.