Wanderlust (29 page)

“I'm leaving,” I said, and got up and marched out of the restaurant.

“Beth!” he called.

I stepped into the road, which was dark and deserted, suppressing the fear that threatened to rise up and send me back to the restaurant.
Rape capital, rape capital, rape capital,
I kept hearing in my head. What exactly did that mean, in practical terms? But I wouldn't go back. It was maybe a half a mile to the hotel, and I walked as fast as I could. I jiggled the hotel key chain in my pocket, then took the key and clamped it between two fingers and made a fist, so that the business end stuck out. Someone had told me how to do this in college; the idea was that if you punched someone, you would also gouge them with the key. Of course, I'd never actually tried this.

The street, lined with a few low hotels, the closed post office, and the silent and empty marketplace, was surreally deserted. Where
was everybody? I couldn't decide if the underworldish quiet was good or bad for safety. There was only one street lamp along the route, and here and there a yellow flicker from a window. A man, stocky in a skirt and suit jacket, appeared out of a doorway and made me jump; I glared at him but he ignored me.
I have redefined stupidity,
I thought. Patricia's words. But if I went back now, it would only prove Justin's contention that I was vulnerable.

Finally, I passed our bored-looking hotel clerk, climbed the wooden stairs to our street-view room, and shakily unlocked the door. I locked it behind me and turned on the light. Never had a single bulb cast such a reassuring glow.

When Justin arrived back, I was sitting at the small desk writing a letter to Stu. One man to deflect another, so that I didn't need anyone too much. I wrote that we'd emerged from the jungle, and enclosed a piece of string tied in an approximation of a love knot, thinking he would get the reference: We'd both read the same novel that mentioned this sailors' symbol of true love. (In fact Stu, in his embrace of signs and symbols, would find the knot sinister.) I sealed the envelope; I'd mail it the next morning. I wasn't mad at Justin anymore, but I wasn't about to let him know that.

I propped my feet up on the table and looked out at the deserted street, thinking about the last fortnight. Before we learn to channel our emotions into the accepted routes, we see how messy they are. I hadn't loved Justin when I first met him; I'd wanted to keep him at arm's length. But then I grew comfortable, and trusting, and suddenly I desired him, and once I desired him I loved him. I also still loved Stu. Justin loved me. Patricia loved Justin. I was pretty sure that she didn't love Rupert, but maybe he loved her. Do people get married, I wondered, because all this volatility goes away, and they finally know, without a doubt, that they only love one person? Or do
they get married out of hope that they can rise to the occasion, and then, if other feelings arise, tame them into submission?

Justin didn't hold grudges. He could be infuriatingly calm, but it also made me feel safe to know that he forgave all. I turned out the light and crawled into bed.

Sweat- and dust-covered again, after another journey in the back of a truck, we arrived carrying our backpacks at the entrance to a dive resort outside the town of Madang. The main building was a luxurious take on a traditional longhouse, with a high thatched roof and a flagstone floor.

The resort offered an almost unbelievable level of comfort. In the past six months I'd slept in hostel dorm rooms, group houses, a metal boat shed, a sports utility vehicle, a hut, a tent, and as a guest in people's homes. I was about to gorge on hotel ease.

We had our own waterfront cabin to ourselves, raised on stilts in deference to the local aesthetic, but scrubbed to a gleam and endowed with crisp white sheets and curtains.

The next few days were as easy as the jungle had been hard. To go for a dive, I only had to wander from our cabin over to the dock, put on my gear, and climb into one of the outgoing boats. Or, if I felt like it, I could tumble right off the dock. There was a World War II bomber just a short swim offshore.

One evening Justin and I were on the bed in our room, clothed, with me sitting astride him. “Tell me a story,” I said.

“There was a man, and there was a woman, and they'd known each other throughout all time,” he said. As so often with him, I wanted both to cringe and to believe every word. I bent down and kissed his neck. “Go on,” I said.

“They saw something in each other that they'd never seen in anyone else,” he said. “Go on,” I said, smiling into his neck.

“And they fell in love,” he said. I kissed under his chin, the side of his stubbled jaw.

“Will you marry me?” he asked.

I froze. Were we still playing our game? Were we ourselves, or were we each pretending to be someone else? Part of me wanted to say yes, to give in to the desire to be swept away. But what if subsequently neither of us ever backed down, never ventured to suggest that it had all been a game? And what about Stu? We were broken up, but what a mess. I couldn't get engaged to Justin when I was barely unengaged from someone else. This whole trip, beginning with my flight from Seattle, had been a flight from marriage. I'd betray myself if I suddenly embraced that kind of commitment again. It would just be proof that I couldn't stand alone. And there was still so much of the world I hadn't seen.

“Beth?” Justin whispered.

I willed myself to be responsible. I felt glued to him. But then I sat up and climbed off with heavy regret. It was like refusing to go up in a hot air balloon. I said, quietly, “No.”

We went to dinner, and he didn't bring it up again. Nor did we ever talk about whether he'd been serious or not.

The next night we joined a group night dive on the wreck of a small cargo boat. “If we're lucky we'll see phosphorescents,” the divemaster said.

Flashlights in hand, we took turns tumbling off the gunwales. At the divemaster's signal, we descended the anchor line into what might as well have been outer space.

Floating in the void, free of gravity, I made my way along the side of the ship. Justin floated somewhere near me, but darkness made the water doubly isolating. I listened to my own breaths. It was so dark, and I was so weightless, that I had to look for my bubbles to be sure which way was up. I swam backward a little, away from the boat and into outer space, and waved my arm through the water. Sure enough, the phosphorescents appeared, trailing my movement like the tail of a shooting star. I let myself tip upside down and floated there, watching the gentle snowstorm, marveling that a world of such strangeness existed here all the time, just under the surface.

On December 5 we flew from Wewak to Port Moresby, and the same day caught our flight back to Brisbane. I had four more days until my flight to Auckland. At Justin's house in Coolum we did little but rest. The infected cuts stopped festering and began to heal, and the scabbed mosquito bites that covered my body in pointillist arcs began to fade. I stopped applying calamine lotion and began to feel strong again.

As my body healed, my heart grew apprehensive. I was flying from Justin, whom I undoubtedly loved, to Stu, whom I'd loved at least as much, but whom I'd wanted to run from. My heart was aching—literally—my chest hurt after Justin left me at the airport. Why did I have to go to Auckland? I wasn't sure; I just knew I did.

No one ever explained how to deal with this kind of pain. All the examples of what I was supposed to want were about channeling emotions, funneling them carefully into marriage or at least monogamy. What if I didn't work that way? I felt like I was trying to funnel
a river delta after a hurricane into an irrigation ditch. The jungle, with its never-wavering pattern of life and death, its seasons and routines, its clarity about what would kill you, was a rational place compared to my own heart.

chapter twenty-two

I
walked up Queen Street in
downtown Auckland, so slowly I almost came to a stop. I looked at people's faces, noticing them like I never had. I looked especially at the young women. I watched one come toward me and imagined her world: She's doing errands; she works in a shop. I shifted my gaze to a man in a suit, then a girl with matte black hair. They were at home. To me New Zealand
felt
far away. Familiarity made it strange. So much was similar to home, from the language to the Union Jack to the place names: Queen Street, Nelson, Stewart Island. It was just like my corner of Canada. Then something would jar me. A fern the size of a tree. Steam seeping from the ground. The other names of places: Waiheke, Wharariki, Whangarei.

All these tweaks made me feel more isolated and adrift than radical difference. I thought of the game I'd played as a child when I was too young to be afraid of much. We spent two weeks every summer on the Oregon Coast, in a house in a tiny beach town with the outsize name of Lincoln City. I spent hours every day in the surf, tossed around like a lost toy. The game was this: Ride in on a wave. Take a deep breath. Be pulled down underwater to the sand. Then ride the undertow back out, as far as it would take me, until I was running out of breath. Kick, surface, and repeat. Now, in Auckland,
I felt the undertow. I wondered if I'd let myself be pulled too far out. I wondered if I'd already closed doors.

I'd left Justin in the middle of love, tearing out the stitches of a seam. The threads were loose inside me, sickening me, like a shifting deck at sea. I was out of money. I'd let the time limit on my return ticket to Vancouver pass by. How many full moons back had that been? What had I been doing that day? It would cost more than a thousand dollars to get from here back to there. The place where I'd lost all momentum was on the far side of the world.

I stood on Queen Street wanting to be anyone else. I wondered how I could have screwed up so badly when I was only twenty-four. I had to step up to our house in Seattle, the ball and chain to which we'd shackled ourselves, and through which we were shackled to one another. Or we could let our house foreclose and go into bankruptcy in the United States and never return. I'd wanted to let my life be changed, but suddenly I was on the precipice of letting it all go too far. I saw various lives unspooling before me. In one I was free to build a career, move to a big city, be young and aspiring at the center of the world. In another I never left the southern hemisphere. I was overtaken by ease and beauty and let it hold me here.

You could adopt New Zealand and have it instantly be yours. You could shed off whatever skin you wore back home. You could make up a new self, maybe even shirk a debt or two. It was all temptingly easy. But then you would have cast a lot. You would have chosen a life far from the center. Antipodeans with high ambitions leave, for Los Angeles, London, New York. I could see already that the exotic stimulation of tree ferns and hot water beaches and black swans would become mundane, and then I would want to get back, and by then it might be too late. Back to where, and too late for what, I didn't know. I just knew that I was far from home.