Wanderlust (25 page)

I met Justin in a bar in the village of Sunrise Beach, where he stood out in a fringed suede jacket. He claimed he'd seen me before, at the cash machine in Airlie Beach, but I didn't remember.
A few weeks later I quit my waitressing job in Noosa and went to work for him. He had a landscaping company made up of himself, a small trailer, and a clutch of shovels and rakes. His mother was a real estate developer, and her company gave him all its business. After it razed an area, say a eucalyptus forest, to pour dark new asphalt and sprawling one-story homes, it hired Justin to prettily refoliate the area around the houses.

We drove around the developments planting nursery-reared bushes and palms, and unfurling strips of lawn that came in neat packages of one-foot-wide rolls. It was hot, wearying, physical work, but I preferred it to waitressing, because I didn't feel incompetent, and I could spend all day talking to Justin.

It was in the third conversation after we met, when Justin took me to dinner at a game restaurant and ordered the kangaroo, that he first mentioned Papua New Guinea. Before he had finished asking “Have you heard of the Kokoda Trail?” I told him that I wanted to go.

“Let's go,” he said. “I have a friend there I've been saying I'd visit. She can help us sort it.”

“Okay,” I said, and that was that. Like when I'd made up my mind to go to Spain, or Yemen, the choice was instant. We started planning. Even our decision to have me work for him was in part, ostensibly, so that I could save money for the trip, which I couldn't finance on my diminished bank account. I had what John Steinbeck, in
The Log from the Sea of Cortez,
called “the curious boredom within ourselves which makes adventurers or bridge-players.” Easy had become too easy, and I wanted to be somewhere hard again.

Eschewing suburban Australia, we would leave for the South Seas and expose our blood to strange viruses.

Justin had been to Sydney for university, where he studied waste management, and made a few trips around Queensland and one to Hawaii. Like me, he was twenty-four, the age at which every other Australian I met was saving for a lengthy trip abroad or just returning from one, but he was a homebody. He thought about entrepreneurial plans or maybe getting another degree. But his dreams were all based around where he lived. He even occupied the ground floor of the large family home shared by his mother and teenage half siblings, Aaron and Samantha. Just six months before we met, his stepfather had been killed in a motorcycle accident, after which Justin had moved back home to be an anchor for his family, and they for him. His life made me think of the mug a bank manager had given me when I left a part-time job in Seattle. It commanded, “Bloom where you're planted,” which I had thought contemptible, and taken as a rebuke.

Justin was tall and broad-shouldered, with curly brown hair that grazed his shoulders. He had a strangeness that suggested he was either oblivious to what others thought of him, or that, at least, he
was living in a world of different social cues and fashions than everyone else. In daylight hours he wore a black patch over one eye; it had been damaged by a dog bite and now was hypersensitive to light. The patch aroused my annoyance. He had a legitimate and practical reason for wearing it, and yet I was convinced that he also liked the way it looked; he liked that it made him look like a swaggering pirate. Why else would he also wear long, blousy white shirts with crisscross drawstrings? I was even more annoyed that I, too, liked that it made him look like a swaggering pirate, a fact I would have never admitted for fear of mortal embarrassment. I suspected there must exist some discreet modern way of protecting a damaged pupil from sunlight. I wrote in my journal that he was “too much, too intense.”

Justin was intelligent, but if you didn't believe in things like past lives or telepathy—and I was determined not to—you might have considered him crazy. I was torn; I thought his supernatural convictions were stupid but also seductive. He told me that the quick, intense bond we formed suggested we'd met in a past life.

He was a misfit: His closest friends were at least a decade older than him. He took to me because I listened attentively when he talked about his latest esoteric interests—a book about chaos theory, another about ancient Egyptian architecture. I took to him because he was a rich vein of knowledge amid the intellectual wasteland of chefs, waiters, and drug dealers I'd so far met on the Sunshine Coast. We fell easily into a sense of complicity.

Justin liked to listen to me too. “Tell me a story,” became his favorite refrain, often spoken as we were driving in his Jeep or hiking up a trail. Whenever he asked, I tried to satisfy the request. I
should
have had stories to tell. But I was often at a loss. All of my experiences to date were piled up like shiny baubles in my backpack, but I had no ability to string them together.

Our planned trip expanded to encompass a grand tour of Papua New Guinea. We got inoculated by a doctor friend of his, Ken, who also gave us malaria drugs. We bought lightweight sleeping bags, hiking boots, and boxes of Band Aids. We trained, driving from Justin's house in Coolum down to the Glasshouse Mountains, gray monoliths that shot up from the flat coastland like fingers, where we ran up and down the trails. Instead of going back to my rented room in Noosa I began sleeping on Justin's sofa, a tweedy sectional in a tile-floored room with a patio.

Three things happened in the week before we were to leave.

The first was that Stu and I decided to meet in Auckland. I'd fly there as soon as I got back from PNG. Stu would help me out with the ticket.

The second was the change in my relationship with Justin. Our conversations were still geeky but his look had become longing, a fact I willfully ignored. To me our relationship was still fraternal, and I recoiled the night on Ken's balcony when he first leaned in for a kiss. I pushed him away and said “no.” He tried to ask me something, but then Ken appeared with fresh Bundaberg and Cokes.

The next morning I braced for awkwardness, or another annoying romantic push. But everything continued as normal: We drove to a work site in his Jeep, had lunch at McDonald's, went for an evening run up a hill near his house. I basked in his attention—I could feel him watching me strew wildflower seeds across a patch of bulldozed dirt, or hike up a hill ahead of him, and I liked it. The fact that he'd so gracefully accepted my rejection made me more intrigued by him. A little later, while we were hanging around with his sixteen-year-old sister, Samantha, I counseled him on what to wear on a date that coming evening. He was taking a woman he had just met to the game restaurant. “That's where you took me!” I said. “Are you going to order the kangaroo?”

“Of course,” he answered. “I like to establish baseline conditions.” He smiled.

Samantha looked at us warily and said, “You guys are weird.”

A week later I was planning to crash at his place again, and we each lay on one leg of his couch, head to head, watching the movie
Legends of the Fall
. In it Brad Pitt plays Tristan, the wild son of an early twentieth-century Montana family, who has a talent for taming wild horses. At one point, which would stick with me far more vividly than the rest of the plot, Tristan leaves his father's ranch and says good-bye to Susannah, who has an unrequited passion for him, to go find himself in the world, which takes years. The viewer is treated to a glorious montage of Tristan abroad: smoking opium with lolling Chinese women, carving on the wooden deck of a boat in the South Seas. The wise old narrator uses a metaphor about Tristan that I've always remembered. Water courses over rock, flexible and flowing, but when it freezes, it's so strong that it breaks the rock.

At the end of the movie we thought we'd been spoken to personally. We were like that! Willful and wild and so strong that others would break themselves against us rather than the other way around. Swept away on this mutual delusion of self-regard, Justin rolled over and kissed me, and this time I found it seductive. I was surprised, because I'd become blasé and bored in recent months. I'd told Justin that I'd gone “off men,” and meant it. I hadn't realized the capacity for pleasure could reassert itself so easily.

The third thing that happened that week was that Patricia called. She needed his friend's name—mine—to help clear us through customs. He began to spell it, slowly.

“E ... L ... ”

I watched him from across his bedroom.

“I . . . S . . . A—”

On realizing that my name was not “Elton” or “Ellis,” she hung up on him. It was only then, after I questioned him, that Justin confessed to their past affair. Obviously, it was still a burning concern for her, but there wasn't much any of us could do at this point; we'd be arriving in New Guinea in a few days. I almost told him to tell her we weren't a couple, which almost felt true. But I refrained; the truth was I was excited and giddy about the new turn of events, wanting to grab Justin and bite him at any given moment. I wasn't about to pretend it hadn't happened. It was Patricia who forced me to acknowledge our status as lovers. Knowing that Justin might be desired elsewhere required me to take a position.

They say that three kinds of white men go to Papua New Guinea: missionaries, miners, and misfits. Save for a few adventurers and anthropologists, the white women who turn up are usually following their husbands. Patricia was different; she'd moved to Papua New Guinea from Australia as a child, and the family had settled in Lae, on the north coast, where her father launched a software company. Patricia went to university in Australia but returned, and at twenty-seven was living in Lae, vice president of the family business.

Patricia and her friend James met us at the Port Moresby airport. Patricia was pretty in a milky way—in another climate she would have been called an English rose. She had a slim build and thick, dark-blond hair, but it was cut short in a way I thought was unflattering. She was dressed for modesty and comfort in the heat, not fashion, in loose trousers, a long T-shirt, and a vest.

“Welcome to sunny Port Moresby,” she said, in what seemed to be a sarcastic drawl. The place was notorious for shantytowns and an obscenely high rate of crime. Patricia spoke in the slow cadences I
associated with the tropics. She gave no indication that she'd recently hung up on Justin in a fit of jealousy, or that I was the object.

James had brown hair and the kind of deep, ruddy permanent tan some white people acquire when they're perpetually in the sun. He was from England, and had for five years worked as a mining company geologist based in Lae, where he and Patricia had become friends. Patricia had invited several people on the trek, and they'd been enthusiastic at first, but James was the only one up for it in the end. He'd hiked other trails in New Guinea and even spoke a few words of pidgin, and had done a lot of organizing for our trip.

Port Moresby, ramshackle around the edges and hilly, might have been unique among capital cities in that it wasn't connected by road to any other place in the country. The roads that led out of town all petered out somewhere in the jungle. Armchair anthropologists attributed all the thievery and rape and murder to the effects of rapid urbanization. Young people, mostly men, came down to the cities having only ever known their tight-knit tribe and its wars against other clans. In the city nobody was a
“wantok,”
a kinsman, so everyone was fair game.