Wanderlust (38 page)

Three years after I hang up on Justin and five years after I've seen him, I decide to send a Christmas card. In response he calls in the middle of my night, I pick up the phone, and he says, “Beth.” He's the only boyfriend who's ever called me that, and instantly I'm on the floor of a tent in Papua New Guinea, insides molten, wet as the jungle. I'm affected, and it's real. Suddenly we're talking all the time again.

When we met no one used email; now we do. We're flirtatious, casual, friendly. He talks a little about his wife, not in glowing or disparaging terms but in a matter-of-fact way; I find myself not caring as much about the subject as I once did. It's as though I've acquiesced to seeing our relationship in a new way: It's
supposed
to be fantasy, detached from any reality that includes wives or boyfriends. I hadn't gotten it before. I hadn't distinguished my actual life from this man on the phone. Justin flirts with me and flatters me, boosting my ego, and needs only the same in return. There's no downside. It's like
hearing from an old friend, with the added frisson of desiring and being desired, but with no consequences. It's the safest sex there is.

He says he'll visit me and doesn't. We say we'll reunite in the Pacific—Hawaii, Vanuatu—and don't. Once I call him from Heathrow and, to tease and test him, begin by saying, “I'm at the airport.” There's a long, serious silence on the line—he's still married—and then he asks, suspecting my prank, “Which airport?” Whenever we speak, the world around me dims, and I feel high with the thrill of anticipation.

He has a wife. He has nicknames for my boyfriends. Paul is “the Marine,” and the Englishman becomes “the Yorkshireman.” It's not like we hide much, as far as I can tell. It's not like we pretend that we're single when we're not. We're just playing out a drama in our heads.

The time when Justin seems most serious about visiting me is when things are just beginning with Dominic. Since I left Australia, Justin's business has evolved from a one-man gardening outfit into an environmental consulting firm, and he has upcoming meetings in the United States. He gives me a date.

He's backed down from our bluff before, but this time I'm the one who has to ask him not to come. I'm not sure if it was a bluff or not. We go quiet for a while.

I burnish a desire to reunite with Justin, but I'm not completely irrational. I recognize that this man isn't really part of my life. I know that I don't know him anymore, that my idea of him is just an idea. I've taken a brief time with a real, sweating, crying person, and embellished it over the years. I've stitched memory with beliefs: that he shares my sensibilities, has a certain kind of intelligence, is an honest man. I know that he's done something similar with me. I'm
the imaginary, perfect love that he can go to as a touchstone. Over the years, our ideas of each other have floated away from the actual people we've become.

Theoretically, I could fly to Australia to sort out my feelings. That would end it all, I'm sure. Confronted with the real person, all the intense emotions would go away. I would know that he was just a guy, someone for whom I might feel, at most, friendly affection. The solid mass of longing would dissolve, and then I could get on with my life.

It's not all that often that I simultaneously have a week to spare and a few thousand bucks, but that's not really what stops me. I'm proud and stubborn, and I believe that since I went there and found him, it's the least he can do to come to me.

There's probably something else at play too: I'm not really sure I want to give up my want.

I begin to wonder how different “real” love is from my imaginary affair. In any relationship there's both reality and the perception of reality. As long as I see the other person as smart or sexy or handsome or good, and as long as I can hang on to the feeling of loving and being loved, then it's real. But somehow we're able to hang on to those feelings and beliefs even when objective reality diverges. Actions don't necessarily alter beliefs, and beliefs matter more.

Before you fall in love, you begin to imagine the other person. You create your lover, extrapolating on reality, dusting him or her with gold. You embellish to the point of perfection, and then fall hard for the image you've made. With all my traveling, I may have spent more time imagining than others. But a huge amount of
all
love takes place in the head. In the middle of any relationship we can spend more time,
hour for hour, thinking about the other person than we spend in his presence. And after any breakup, there's no telling how long we might pine for someone. Love itself is in the mind's eye.

In the middle of my cold, broke, miserable winter, I get a letter. A valentine. I take it up to my fifth-floor window. Outside, the snow looks like a great white silk duvet, and I remember the word
doona,
an Australianism for quilt. Even the elevated train is muffled tonight. Somehow the years since I've seen Justin have piled up to seven.

The letter is longing and romantic; he says he loves me. He says he looks in the mirror and knows he made a mistake. I was the one who got away. He says that he wants to see me and that he's ready to really do it. No more talk. Oh, and he's getting a divorce. This will become our pattern: When our real-world relationships are starting to slide, one of us reaches out.

I wonder, wishfully, if I played a tiny role in the divorce. Of course, there must have been all kinds of big, real-life things, about sex and money, hypothetical kids, dishes in the sink. Mundane things I never got to have with him. We never got to break up over ordinary disputes, because our love is perfectly preserved. But maybe I represented some little seed of doubt about his marriage. Maybe there was an escape clause in his head, and I was its face.

When I get the valentine, saying things I would have longed to hear even just the summer before, I don't feel the usual excitement. I feel sick. I have a real-life boyfriend, and I believe he's the only rope out of a crevasse. Dominic is not some fantasy of meeting in a tropical paradise, but a potential, realistic future. I knew Justin for two months, that's all, a brevity I find astonishing for all the time I've spent thinking about him since.

I leave the letter on my desk and revisit it a couple of times the next day. I move it to my bedside, then to my dresser drawer. I feel like I need time to think, to fit the letter somehow into the context of my present life. Dominic and I are planning our move to Washington. Justin is half illusion; he can disappear from view. I think of how he failed to tell me about his marriage, and the times he said he'd come to me and didn't.
Now it's too late,
I think with frustrated regret. I'm getting my life together. Dominic is my man. He's been there for me, from the breakup through the blizzards, and now he's invited me to follow him.

A few more days go by, and I realize I've decided what to do. I ignore Justin's valentine. I don't call or write back. I can't bring myself to throw it out, so I put it in its own unmarked file, wedged between manila folders of freelance contracts and credit card bills.

Transplants from New York to Washington always have a hard time. The trick is to not wish that Washington is New York, to not even compare them. Like I really shouldn't compare Dominic to the Englishman. If you accept Washington on its own terms—a swampy, suburban, Southern company town—it has its charms.

I take to it more easily than Dominic does. I'm apprehensive about leaving New York, but I'm not as attached. My life went haywire there, and I feel a little like I would about a romantic rejection: Oh yeah? I'll reject you right back. Dominic didn't care for the job he had while waiting on the State Department, but he has deeper friendships in New York than I do. And after ten years, his love for the dense buzz of the place, and the neighborhood that made him feel on the cutting edge, is still intact.

I miss the way the buildings in New York swaddled me up.
Washington is horizontal rather than vertical, with broad avenues and low-rise apartments slightly too far apart. But in Washington I spend less and have fewer distractions, so I can write more. Our apartment has hardwood floors, big windows, and a view of Meridian Hill Park. We go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and buy a shower curtain and rugs. We hire a cleaning lady.

Dominic and I get up together every day. He rides to work on his motorcycle and I settle down at my stainless steel desk. I meet his entering class, which is full of people with boyfriends or girlfriends trying to decide whether to stay together. The foreign posting looms ahead of each pair, and Dominic and I talk about it too.

Shortly after we move, I get coveted assignments from two different publications. And I've begun to write about lobbyists, so it's really a good thing that I'm in DC. It seems like I've made the right move. I'm still in a hole, but I feel like I'm finally digging out. I've gripped the rung I was flailing for, and there's no way I'm letting go, even if I have to live in Burkina Faso. Especially if I have to live in Burkina Faso, which would fulfill my desire for the strange and make me exotically saleable as a writer. Maybe this will work out after all. I can travel the world and still have a home base, not in the form of a place but of a person.