Wanderlust (4 page)

The first time I let Pepe kiss me we were parked—he had borrowed his family car—on a quiet hillside road in El Portet, somewhere up from the beach but below my house. We had gotten out of the car to gaze down at the bay, and Sinead O'Connor, singing “Nothing Compares to You,” was playing on the stereo. The pining romance of the song made me think of Graham. I was annoyed at Pepe's insistence; I had thought I would probably kiss him at some point, but later. After we kissed I was still annoyed and he was mollified. He dropped me off at home.

We went one night to the summer house of a Belgian friend of his, who had a heart-shaped swimming pool in a terraced yard. It was after midnight, the air was warm, and the turquoise pool was lit up from within. I stripped down to my bra and panties and dove off the diving board, not caring about the inconvenience of wet clothes. It was the sort of thing I couldn't
not
do. A dim sort of logic was at work: If I became the kind of person who jumped into swimming pools in her underwear after midnight, in a terraced garden on the Mediterranean, then a life that presented these sorts of opportunities would accrue.

In a nightclub in Gandía, the youth of Europe danced in the strobe lights to acid house music, vocalists crying out over throbbing electronica. Every ten minutes I'd see a boy from some Nordic country, with long blond curling hair, and feel desperate for him to turn around and be Graham. I carried these feelings with me like a shadow self, always walking along beside me, riding on the motorcycle with me, swimming in a pool or the sea. I imagined him seeing me see whatever I saw.

One night we went to Casa Dorita after hours. Chairs were stacked on tables, and the glass-doored refrigerator gave off a glow.
Pepe spread seat cushions on the floor. The illicit place excited me, and we fucked in a beam of light filtered through orange soda. Afterward he fetched ice cream bars from the kitchen. As one melted, he dragged it along my collarbone, then lapped it up. It seemed like a kind of dare: What could we dream up next? Our bodies and minds were landscapes, and I could do anything at night.

When I saw Pepe during the daytime or early evening now, I wanted to touch him or be touched. But we couldn't kiss during business hours at Casa Dorita, nor when he pulled up at El Portet in the Spanish coast guard's Zodiac.

Giddy at our discoveries, we had sex with sweet ingredients from the restaurant kitchen, sex with an empty glass soda bottle, and sex on a large, flat rock that flanked the pier at the marina. It was like marking territory—both the physical terrain of Moraira and an experiential map I was forming in my own head. The night at the marina, my house key fell down between the rocks. I was appalled that I would now have to knock on the door and wake someone up, and that Maria José and Toni would now realize just how late I was coming home. I knocked with dread at about 4:00 AM. The door clicked open, and as I pushed it in I glimpsed Maria José hurrying away naked from the foyer. They had a new key made for me the next day.

I stopped monitoring the time going by. On the beach at El Portet one day I saw Abby, the girl from California I'd met my first week. She spotted me from a distance and marched in my direction, wearing enormous green shorts over a blue one-piece. She wanted to speak to a fellow-sort-of-American. “Did you hear?” she asked. “There's a war.” Iraq had invaded Kuwait. I hadn't heard. I hadn't seen a television or newspaper in weeks. The whole subject seemed very far away, and I couldn't identify with the lumbering
ambassador from the United States. This beach was my world now. People knew me here. I looked askance at the sunburned and topless Brits; I was tanned and be-topped. My boyfriend came in with the coast guard, and a Spanish child held my hand. I enjoyed my sense of pseudo-belonging, even as I knew that I'd leave. The traveler always betrays the place.

Pepe had a small apartment over Casa Dorita that he shared with a friend, and when the friend was away we sometimes went there. I found it exotically domestic to be in a bed with a man in his actual home, even if it was just a cramped bachelor pad. We'd managed to evolve a sort of banter. He was trying to explain to me why he found the English-language word
sure
so comical. It was because if you drew it out, and said “shuuuurrrre,” it sounded like an engine revving.

“Pepe,” I said.

“You know, it's been a long time since you've said my name like that,” he said. I completely forgot what I'd been planning to say, and something else jumped to my lips, something he'd said to me recently, which I'd pretended to ignore and later checked in my dictionary:
“Te quiero mucho.”
And I meant it—meant that I loved him.

How had this happened? In eighteen years I'd never fallen in love with anyone, and now, just six months after I'd fallen in love with Graham, I was in love with someone else. It was different, but it felt definitive. Did love open up your heart, so that you became more susceptible to falling in love again? I wondered at the elasticity of my own feelings. I didn't think that this second love contradicted the first. I didn't even think Graham would begrudge it. For one thing, my love for Graham was the clearest feeling I'd ever had. It didn't
seem vulnerable. For another, it seemed that to love me, as Graham did, also meant wanting for me the things I wanted for myself, and what I wanted, at the moment, was to experience life, to discover its pleasures and excitements. No, Graham wouldn't withhold this from me. Graham and Pepe were not even relevant to one another. They were in different languages, and I was a different person with each one. They belonged to two separate worlds.

The thing I couldn't quite figure out was when, exactly, I'd gone from mild annoyance at Pepe's advances to genuine affection. Nor why this had happened. I understood that sex could result from love. But it hadn't occurred to me that love might result from sex. Was that what had transpired? Or was it our accumulated time together that had led me to feel this way? Or was I just grateful for what he was doing, taking me around the coast? My heart wasn't as reliable as I'd thought.

I'd been dimly conscious of physical risk. One night we ran across Pepe's sister Nuria in the cathedral plaza, after everything was closed, with a male friend of hers. They'd been in a fender bender and she said she was okay, but seemed shaken as she recounted the story. Pepe touched her shoulders like she was a delicate doll, and asked over and over,
¿Estas bien?
He glared at her friend, the erstwhile driver. Yet Pepe liked a drink before he hit the road, liked to speed, liked to get high on cocaine. Twice we did wheelies. I held his back on the motorcycle as he took on the straightaway south of town. He picked up speed, then picked his front tire up clear off the ground. The pitch of the engine rose to a whine, air whipped my cheekbones, and I squeezed my arms and legs for life. Afterward, my eyes teared from the sting of the air.

There was a popular brand of clothing called Pepe Jeans, and Pepe semi-ironically wore one of their T-shirts, which bore his name in big rose-colored letters across the front. He knew I coveted the T-shirt, and near the end of the summer he gave it to me, freshly laundered and folded. I placed it reverentially in my suitcase. I was still in Spain, still able to see him. And yet I was already anticipating my own nostalgia, looking forward to the moment when I would look back. I learned the meaning of
echar de menos
and used the phrase regularly to tell Pepe that I would miss him, and ask if he would miss me.

A few nights before I was to leave I stayed with Pepe in his apartment until dawn, at which time he drove me home on his motorcycle. After I got in, Maria José came to me, infuriated.
“Oye, Eleesabet,”
she said, and I thought she was finally going to call me out for my ridiculous hours. Instead she told me that Toni had just called from the office: On his way to work, he'd passed Pepe and me on our way home, and observed that we weren't wearing our helmets. “I'm serious,” she said, “you two really need to smarten up.”

Physical injury, though, was the least of my concerns. My idle adventuring had become an attachment, and now the letting-go loomed. Pepe had slipped into my affections when I thought the risks lay elsewhere.

One day late in the summer, my friend Kim, from my sorority, called the Moraira house. She was traveling around Europe on a Eurail Pass; could I meet her in Valencia? I couldn't, nor could she come down to Moraira. Though I'd see her in the fall, this missed connection, and consciousness of her roving freedom, tugged at me. It reminded me of my own captivity. I formed wild plans—
fantasies with no hope of success—to invite Pepe and catch a train, to the South of France or to Italy.

I took the train from Valencia back to Madrid, speeding through artichoke fields to catch my flight, with new confidence: I knew my way around here. But it was with a sense of loss, because I didn't want to go back to Seattle and school. I didn't want to stay in Moraira, either. I wanted to travel. Pepe would soon transform in my mind to a part of the Costa Blanca landscape, intrinsic to white stucco, fried fish, and the particular blue of the water. But a desire had been whetted by my summer in Spain, and left unfulfilled.

chapter three

W
hen I was five,
I thought I was Chinese. My mother and father were WASPs who had migrated to Vancouver from Oregon and New York, respectively. But my mother had told me that all Chinese people had black hair, and since my father had black hair, I made the natural assumption of someone who didn't yet have a strong grasp of “if-then” reasoning. My skeptical first-grade teacher was the one who figured out my logical error and set me straight.

Then I thought for a while that my father must be Jewish because he made my brother and me watch the PBS Holocaust documentary whenever it aired, with its piles of emaciated bodies. I thought this implied some sort of identification with the victims. But when I asked my father about Hanukkah—which sounded like a good opportunity for present-getting—he said that this wasn't our religion.

So I wasn't Chinese or Jewish. I knew kids who went to Croatian, Swedish, and Korean community centers, and to mosques and temples, but there didn't seem to be any such institutions for Anglo-Americans.

As I grew up I had trouble identifying with Vancouver, too. While dramatically beautiful when the clouds parted, with its backdrop of snow-topped peaks, it always felt a little transient to me, like
its residents were all in the process of moving on to somewhere like Srinagar or Toronto. The whole metropolis had sprung up quickly in historical terms, beginning in the late 1800s, atop a blank slate of evergreens and a handful of native Squamish and Musqueam people. Later I'd be drawn to cities with ancient underpinnings, like London and Damascus.

Nationality wasn't much help either. I always had two: American from having been born to U.S. citizens, and Canadian from having been born in Canada. We went south to visit my mother's family, up and down the I-5, back and forth over the border. As binationalism goes, there are many more awkward combinations: the dual Iranian-American citizen, the German-Turk. Even if you're from two countries that are much alike, though, binationalism affects your perception of the world. In the back of your mind you always know there's another option.