Wanderlust (37 page)

My credit card debt mounts. Every month I lay out my bills in the kitchen, and hope that some overlooked asset will magically appear. Three hundred dollars seems like a good fee for a story, then I do the math and it doesn't. I shelve my passion projects—that unreadable novel, a magazine pitch—sunk by the imperatives of working to live. I do legal research and work as an usher, and the math still doesn't work out. I try to open an account at a new bank, and it turns me down. In Astoria, each of several blizzards traps me far from anyone I know. My apartment trembles when the elevated train goes by. My coat is only wool, not down. When I have to go outdoors, which is all the time, I wear tights under my jeans and layers of intermediate sweaters. Aside from a few stellar Greek restaurants, Astoria is inconvenient to everywhere I want to go. It's convenient, though, to La Guardia Airport, which lies a quick shot away on the bus. Seeing the M60 plow through the slush gives me a little trill of warmth. The airport could be a way to escape the piles of bills and the shaking flat. Escape is my usual path, though, and
I'm determined not to do it this time. Yet stuck in place, I start to feel desperate. My love for New York has gone from the flush of reunion to sick dependence, but I beat against the city like a moth on a bulb.

As my career and finances become more and more tenuous, I start to think of Dominic as a lifeline. I have nothing else solid. When we first got together, I made a few efforts to maintain my independence. I refrained from inviting him to a friend's wedding, and when I was routed from one apartment after another, I never suggested we move in, the way so many New York couples resolve their real estate woes. But by the winter I've given up. I'm pushing the relationship into tighter, more intertwined territory, more like the one I had with Stu. Dominic seems okay with this. He's a rescueman, the kind of guy who responds to need. We fly to visit each other's families. I spend more nights in the East Village, and he spends more nights in Queens.

I suspect that I've misused my freedom. My friends from graduate school have incomes and jobs, some of them very good, the very ones we predicted for ourselves. They're advising on where in the world to plunk a million bucks, or campaigning for human rights, or running for office. Even the journalists are on their way, producing television that people watch, and writing things that people read. They're flying first class. I, on the other hand, have screwed up.

The State Department finally confirms Dominic's acceptance; it's March now and he's supposed to start training in May. We've been together for a little less than a year. I tell him that I don't want
another long-distance relationship, and that I don't want to break up. Does he agree? He does. We decide that I should follow him to Washington.

We begin planning the logistics. I talk to my landlord and friend, who says that he's coming home from Senegal soon. In the meantime his girlfriend will move in. Many of us went away after finishing our degrees, but now the ones who want to live in New York are coming back and settling down. “Settling down.” I'm not sure what it means, and I didn't used to think it was something I wanted. I went to almost violent lengths to reject it. But now, going away makes me uneasy. I don't feel the thrill of escape. For the first time I wonder if I hadn't better put down roots. But I can't. I feel like Dominic is all I have, and he's moving away.

I tell myself and others that this is all just fine. A diplomat plus a writer make a perfect pair. I need no fixed location, so together we can go off and explore the world. It sounds romantic and glamorous. We'll be like Dick and Nicole Diver, with all the glamour but none of the crazy. The story I tell makes sense. But the truth is that New York has chewed me up and spat me out.

chapter thirty

T
here's always a parallel story.
The paths not taken go on in our heads. It's just like when my grandmother died, and I heard about it from a phone booth in Malaysia, she never really died for me, but lived on as an idea.

Justin and I stayed in touch. I talked to him on the phone from New Zealand, then from Seattle. We discussed how and when we would reunite. By the time I moved to New York for the first time, in 1997, it was almost two years after he drove me to the airport. I'd unloosed myself from Seattle, and felt triumphant and free. Before, my relationship with Justin had been overshadowed by my connection to Stu, but now we could finally be together without any encumbrance.

In my first weeks in New York, I had fantasies of what it would be like when Justin came. I imagined what I would be wearing (tartan miniskirt) when he walked up the steps of Columbia. “So?” I asked him when we spoke on the phone that fall. Soon, he said. He had to finish up some work.

In December I called his family's home and reached his brother. “Have you heard the news?” his brother asked. “Justin's gotten engaged.” I noticed the way he drawled out the “a,” but I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing. It had to be a joke. Or a misunderstanding. In our phone calls we never pretended to be beholden
to each another; I talked to him about Stu and he told me about other girls. Surely he would have said something if he were heading toward marriage.

“Can you have him call me?” I managed to ask, and hung up the phone. I put it out of my mind. The absurdity of the news made it hard to take seriously, and I had plenty of distractions. I had classes every day, new friends, stacks of homework. The days turned from crisp to bitingly cold, and I took the bright, screeching, grimy subway down to Soho to shop for a real winter coat. Queensland seemed unreal, like a place I once read about in a magazine.

When Justin called a few days later, he told me that it was true. “How did I not hear about this?” I asked, straining to sound lighthearted. “It happened really quickly,” he said. A whirlwind romance. I thought of our own whirlwind, of how quickly it had turned into love, and his strange proposal of marriage. Now it was early December again, the same time of year we were in New Guinea. I still didn't have a watch, but I no longer marked time by the full moon. Even if I were in the southern hemisphere, I could no longer have told you how to find and use the Southern Cross. “I've never spent Christmas with someone before,” he said. Only later would I remember the plaintive note in his voice, and feel sympathy for his desire to bring a girl home. When he said it, though, I just felt angry. I was supposed to be the girl, the one. He'd promised to come. How could he do this?

There was a series of phone calls, more frequent than usual, almost daily. He told me contradictory things, and with each new statement I became more alarmed. It hadn't occurred to me, before now, to doubt his word. But I had no choice. I longed for his calls because he always told me something I wanted to believe. I dreaded his calls because they gave me more evidence of duplicity. I wasn't the only one addicted to the double life.

He told me he would still come to New York. He would come before his wedding, or maybe after. His wedding would be very soon, or many months away. He'd told his bride-to-be about me, he said, but told her that I was a lesbian, and ugly. He praised her—she was smart, beautiful, kind. An environmental lawyer. He complained about her. She didn't understand him the way I did, he said. I wanted to lap up his praise for me and disparagement of her, but I knew that something was very wrong. The Justin I imagined didn't do this, didn't get engaged to someone and then complain about her to his ex-girlfriend in the United States. I was chagrined on her behalf as well as my own. I remembered Patricia and how besotted she was with Justin even when he was with me. I remembered his stories of how she'd flown to see him and declared her love. I remembered how powerful and confident I felt then, and sorry for Patricia. I didn't want to be Patricia.

I knew nothing about Justin's new girlfriend—fiancée—except for what he told me. They could, for all I knew, already be married, or she could, for all I knew, not exist. My attachment to Justin over the last two years had been nurtured with the droplets he'd chosen to present. That was all I'd had. Now I understood that what he'd said might have deviated wildly from the full picture, and it made me feel dizzy.

One day Justin confirmed my fear: They were already married. I hung up the phone on him, enraged by the marriage itself, and by our running conversation of shadows and feints. It felt like a breakup. I cried all night, mourning his disappearance from my life. I wondered if real-life adultery was easier to deal with. In that situation everything was tangible. There was a firestorm, but then it was over.

Then I tried to bury my pain under study. I didn't talk about the rift to anyone, because there was no version of the story in which
I didn't sound like a fool. There was no way to explain my sense of loss, since I hadn't seen the guy in two years. He was my inexplicable secret. Even though the relationship felt real to me, I could see how it might look like I mostly dreamed it up. So much of it must have been my own invention. I djinned up a Justin who would join me in New York, fantasized about him coming into my new life. He gave me encouragement, to be sure, but I'd needed very little. Now I hadn't been widowed or divorced or even broken up with a boyfriend. All I'd lost was an idea. I was crushed, but I thought no one would understand.

After several months, my anger at Justin dissipated, and other memories buoyed up. Recollections of pleasure and excitement, so much preferable to our weird end game, made me forget why I was mad. My thoughts of him abated, so that soon I was thinking of him only once a day, then only every few days. I never stopped thinking of him entirely. If we'd had a chance to settle down and become irritated by each other's idiosyncrasies, maybe things would have been different. But we separated at the precise moment of falling in love, and now those feelings seemed to have frozen into a solid, permanent thing.

What did I call this? What did I do with it? It didn't count as a relationship. I could never have brought him to meet my family or friends, and if I were honest with myself, he wouldn't have fit in in New York anyway. He wasn't malleable and wandering like me; he belonged to his beaches, his business, his mom. I had nothing to show in my day-to-day life for the mental space he took up. There was nothing that anyone besides me could see. He should just have been an old story, someone I once met. (I thought of how often, when we were together and later on the phone, he would ask me to tell him a story.)
And yet . . . Was a thing unreal, just because it existed only in the mind? Weren't our imaginations part of our lives too? If I spent years thinking about someone, wasn't he a part of my world?

I liked to imagine him watching over me. A change in environment could set me off thinking about him more than usual, and when I moved to London, he entered my mind at the same time every day. It was always in the same stretch of my walk from my apartment to work: heading up Clerkenwell, past St. Peter's Italian church and the Italian grocery store, before turning onto Gray's Inn. Why right there? Maybe something reminded me of him one day, then the next day made me think of how I'd thought of him the day before, and then I just fell into the habit. My memories of memories became as real as my memories of actual events.