I forced myself to continue. “You saw me kissing Ed, but there’s nothing between us. Ed and I are just friends. He’s dating Karin now.”
“Ed was dating Karin before,” David said. “Ed’s always dating Karin. Whenever he’s not dating the rest of San Francisco, that is.”
His glum tone stopped me. Was David also secretly harboring feelings for Karin? God, that would be just my luck.
On the other hand, Karin had made it clear that David was just a passing idea for her. I moved a little closer to David, resting my hand on one of his knees as I leaned over to kiss him. It was a long kiss, cool at the start and then so hot my mouth felt as if it were burning.
The dog continued to issue muffled distress calls from the back of the house. We kept kissing until I didn’t know when one kiss started and the other ended.
I moved on top of David and tugged both of our t-shirts up so that I could rub my breasts on his chest. He was hard beneath me and breathing fast. I removed his glasses, which by now hung crookedly over one earpiece.
Suddenly, David wriggled out from under me and moved over on the couch. He retrieved his glasses and settled them above his nose. “I can’t do this,” he said. “I’m sorry, Jordan.”
Mortified, I glanced down to where his body had been just seconds before. The cushions were warm and I was still resting on my arms, my t-shirt hiked up over my bare breasts, which now bobbed in the air like floats at the Macy’s Day Parade.
I yanked my shirt down and sat up on the couch again, so far away from David that the wooden sofa arm bit into my hip. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Don’t know what got into me.”
“Don’t apologize!” David begged. “Look, I lied. I do want an explanation.” He swallowed hard. “I want to know whether you slept with Ed.”
“Why?” The word was out before I had time to think. Damn. I took a deep breath. “Never mind why. Of course you want to know. I was with Ed. Just one time. We didn’t do anything, not really. I didn’t even spend the night. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know how. I was afraid you’d think what you’re thinking now, which is that I want to be with him instead of you, or that I’m the kind of woman who hooks up for the fun of it.”
David stood up and paced the room, played a few agitated chords on the piano, then came back and stood in front of me with his arms crossed. “How did you find time? Just tell me that much! You and I were apart for what, a total of six hours?”
It dawned on me then. “Oh, no! I didn’t go with Ed after sleeping with you! Not that same day you saw us! Only before I was ever with you, and only one time! And we didn’t have sex.” I didn’t know how much more clearly I could spell things out for him.
“Before?” David rubbed his chin, then plopped down beside me on the couch again. “Okay, yeah. Yeah, that’s better.” He leaned his head back against the couch. “How long before?”
“What difference does that make?” I demanded, feeling suddenly tearful, unduly accused. I rested my face in my hands, thinking hard. Did he need every detail? Maybe he did. I would, in his shoes.
“The point is,” I said, choosing my words carefully, “I only tried sleeping with Ed before there was anything between you and me. Ed is with Karin now, and I’m glad. I want to be with you.”
There. Now the guy had a road map, a shortcut straight to my heart. What more could I give him?
David had closed his eyes. I poked his arm. “Hey! Wake up!”
“I’m awake,” he said softly, his eyes still squeezed shut. David’s long, dark lashes were the sort princesses have in storybooks. “Just in a state of emotional paralysis.”
After a few more minutes, I stood up and left him. I needed to get my wits back. I wandered down the hall to the bathroom. It was as minimalist as the rest of the house: one blue towel, a shred of soap, a mirror the size of a saucer.
I glared at my reflection. I had the rosy cheeks and red nose of a boozer and my hair was matted on one side. Jesus. What a mess. Between taking care of Paris, searching for Cam, and making plans to fly to Kathmandu, I was wrung out. I started to cry and turned the shower on full blast to hide the noise, sinking down onto the floor with my head in my arms.
The bathroom door opened and David poked his head in, squinting through the steam. “Can I come in?”
“It’s your bathroom.” I spun out a length of toilet paper and blew my nose. The evening was getting more romantic by the second.
David closed the door behind him. “Want the water off or on?” He gestured at the shower.
“Off. Sorry. Didn’t mean to waste it.”
“That’s all right. It’s nice and warm in here now.”
David turned off the water, sat down on the floor beside me, and handed me the blue towel. “I think we’ve got sort of a Russian Baths thing going. Steam the air, cleanse the pores, make big decisions.”
“Look, I might as well sweat out the rest of my confession right here.” I took a deep breath. “I went home with Ed after Karin’s party for lots of reasons that had nothing to do with wanting to be with Ed, but I’m not sorry. I was trying to leave my old life behind, and I needed a dramatic finale to how I was living before. Does that make sense? Or does that screw things up between us?”
David’s glasses had fogged in the steam. He took them off and wiped the lenses fruitlessly on the hem of his t-shirt. “Here’s the thing, Jordan. I appreciate how honest you are. I really do. But I was into you. I mean, like really into you. And now, after seeing you kiss Ed and knowing you were with him, I don’t think I can be with you. Not until there’s a certain level of trust between us. I was born a century too late. When I make love with a woman, I’m usually
in
love with her. I have a low tolerance for loss. I don’t know why. Maybe my dad’s death makes it impossible for me to trust that someone will stick around.”
David was in love with me? Was that what he meant?
I joyfully crab-walked out from under the sink and sat against the wall across from him. He was in love with me! “What happened to your dad?”
A rock climbing accident, David explained. “I was fourteen then. A long time ago. Long enough so I don’t think about him every day.” David flashed a grin. “Except when I’m climbing mountains, of course.”
“Your mother must have a fit every time you do it!”
“Her worries are over now that my knees have given out. But I hate not being able to climb. I’ve lost the only connection I ever had with my father.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.” I put my hands on his knees. “I wish I could heal you. Still, I’m glad you’re not climbing. I wouldn’t be able to follow you.”
“Sure you could. I’d teach you.” David patted my hand. “Come on. Can we give the couch another try?”
I followed him into the living room, where I let him sit on the couch first. “Where do you want me?” I asked, hesitating.
“Right here.” David patted his lap.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. I just want to hold you. Is that all right?”
“More than all right.” Already, I was listing towards him, as if a web had been spun from my belly to his. I sank onto David’s knees and rested my head on his shoulder. We sat that way, talking more about his father, his music, my mother, Paris, and Cam. Finally, I told him about Nepal. “Do you think I should go?”
“Of course. You’d never be able to live with yourself if you didn’t make one last try to sort this thing out with your brother.”
David always made things sound so simple. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m confused about my own motives. Part of me wants things to stay just as they are, so that I can have Paris without really taking on the full responsibility of motherhood.”
“But you’re too responsible,” David suggested.
“I don’t feel very responsible right this minute.” I pressed my lips lightly against his neck. David’s curls were damp from the steamy bathroom and he’d taken off his glasses. He trembled slightly. “Want to give me some Kathmandu travel tips?” I asked, putting my lips close to his ear.
“Here’s one.” David’s arms tightened around me. “Come back in one piece.”
“That’s my travel tip?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be waiting for me?” I pressed my face to David’s neck, unable to resist his smell, his skin. I traced the length of his throat with the tip of my tongue. David tasted of salt and lime.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think I can promise that. I need more time with you before I can let my guard down. And that seems kind of pointless in a way, doesn’t it? Since you’re going back to the East Coast? I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” I said miserably. “I understand.”
And I did, since I couldn’t make promises, either. What would I do if Cam granted me guardianship of his daughter? Where would I live? How would I work? I didn’t know the answers to any of those questions. So how could I possibly promise to be reliable as a lover?
David ran a hand through my hair. “God, Jordan,” he whispered. “The things you do to me! And you’ve got such a wild mane of hair. I love your hair. Sometimes it looks like your hair is on fire.” He traced my lips with one finger. “Will you sleep with me?”
I sat bolt upright. “Sleep with you? I thought you just said…”
“I mean just sleep.”
“I’m not sure I’m capable of that.”
“Of course you are. And so am I. Would you stay with me until I go to work?”
I thought about my mother and her breakfast with Louise. “I have to be home by eight.”
David glanced at his watch. “Four whole hours,” he said. “An hour more than last time. Will you?”
I laughed. “There’s no place else I’d rather be,” I said, thinking how rarely in my life I’d ever been able to say that.
T
hree days later, I flew from San Francisco to Hong Kong, and then on to Kathmandu, where the plane seemed to hover over the Himalayas.
David had told me that each mountain had its own personality, and he was right. Some peaks rose gracefully above the clouds, their folds as delicate as white skirts. Others gleamed like pink church spires, a few stern black cones standing between them like castle turrets. Glacial lakes gleamed sapphire against the darker wrinkles of the terminal moraines.
“The pilots don’t fly through the clouds here, because the clouds have rocks in them,” the Nepalese businessman beside me confided.
The Kathmandu airport was a tiny, burnt orange stucco building with yellow flowers draped over its roof. The customs officers examined my backpack with Boy Scout efficiency, then ushered me through the door.
Outside, I was immediately swallowed by a sea of gleeful, shouting taxi drivers. I chose one and directed him to the Hotel Everest, Cam’s last known address. This turned out to be a two-story brick building with tiled floors and thin, damp mattresses on wooden platforms. The family who managed it included three underfed boys with the mournful look of abandoned kittens.
Cam had already been to the hotel and gone, the owner said, showing me the guest register. “Maybe he changed hotels?” he said. “Many tourists, they change. You want a room?”
I booked a room and saw at once why tourists might switch hotels after arriving here: the rooms were cold and damp, with cement floors and pitiful lumpy mattresses on string beds. I had bought a Nepal Telecom SIM card at the airport for my cell phone; now I used it to call my mother and tell her I’d arrived safely. Then, exhausted by the journey, I fell onto the mattress and slept.
It was still dark outside when I opened my eyes. I looked automatically to my left to see if Paris was asleep in her crib. It was all I could do not to cry out when I saw that the room was empty except for a white cardboard bureau and my own dusty backpack, which bulged with clothing that my mother had insisted on ironing. My mother had issued warnings with each stroke of the iron, making me promise not to walk through dark alleys; eat in empty restaurants; or take any drugs other than the malaria, cholera, worm, sulfa, and antibiotic pills David had gathered for me in a drawstring nylon bag that weighed as much as a bowling ball.
Now I felt out of synch and sore besides. David had insisted on giving me multiple immunizations. He had promised to protect me against Hepatitis A, meningitis, tetanus, and typhoid, wincing himself as he pressed each needle against my skin.
A rooster crowed in the courtyard below. Someone in the communal bathroom across the hall started the shower and sang in German. I swatted mosquitoes and lay there, paralyzed by anxiety as I listened to the rumble of Australian, German, English, and French voices. Travelers were emerging from their rooms and waiting in line for one of the toilets down the hall. Horns were already blaring in the darkness and a cow lowed on the street between a rooster’s hoarse calls.
I was in the Thamel district of Kathmandu. Thamel seemed to translate from Nepali as “Tacky Tourist Central,” given my brief glimpse of it yesterday as I hurtled down the streets in a taxi with no muffler. The driver pointed out sights, but of course I couldn’t hear anything he said over the ear-splitting grind of the engine, a sound that even now seemed trapped inside my own skull. There were guest houses, lodges, and hotels every twenty feet in this part of Kathmandu, along with ethnic restaurants, souvenir shops, t-shirt stands, English bookstores, and backpacking resale shops.
I could venture just half a block to the next lodge, I decided now. Then I’d check the next hotel, the next, and so forth, until I’d combed Kathmandu’s maze of streets on foot and found Cam.
On the street below my hotel window, a processional band began to play a loud, tinny march punctuated by flailing cymbals as it proceeded along the road. I climbed out of bed and knelt at the window to watch. The robes of the musicians gleamed ghostly white against the final edge of night.
I dressed and plunged into air that was steamy from last night’s rain. The streets were dotted with metallic silver puddles. My head throbbed. I felt hung over just from being surrounded by such a din.
Barely wide enough for two cars to pass, the street was clogged with wheels: rickshaws, bicycles, motorcycles, cars. The motorcycles carried entire families; I saw a small boy fly off the back of one as his father careened around a corner. Horns blared but nobody stopped, only swerved to miss him. Cows and dogs did their bit to confuse the traffic as well. There were no sidewalks; I pressed against the stone walls of the ancient buildings, thinking that I was more likely to get run over than find my brother in all this mess.
I stumbled into the first open restaurant and ordered Tibetan yak cheese, honey bread, and tea from a menu written in five languages. I wolfed down the thick bread, licking honey off my fingers and relishing every bite in the relative quiet of the restaurant until the woman at the table next to mine–the only other customer–launched into a coughing fit that caused her ceramic tea cup to rattle in its saucer.
She was a stringy blonde with a dancer’s muscles and pretty features, her eyes so light gray that they had the silver cast of the street puddles. She wore a short denim skirt and a skimpy black t-shirt. She coughed for several minutes, finally spitting up into a napkin.
The woman glanced at me, then crumpled the napkin onto her untouched plate of eggs, and apologized in a prim British schoolmistress’s accent as she lit a brown clove cigarette. She wore a dozen or so noisy silver bangles on each arm and a silver dot in her nose.
“Sorry,” she said, beginning to cough again, but this time managing to stifle it with a pull on her cigarette. “Too much bloody time in India. This cough and the bloody trots, those are my souvenirs. I’ll never have a normal stomach again. I’m Leslie Gallant, by the way.”
I told her my name. “India must be fascinating. How long were you there?”
“Seven, maybe eight months. Long enough to know I’d skip the whole mess next time ‘round the world. Bloody hell!” Leslie waved the entire Indian subcontinent away with the sweep of one hand, jangling her bracelets.
“What made you go to India in the first place?” Despite seeing the international stew of lodgers crowding my own hotel, it was still difficult for me to grasp the idea that people voluntarily boarded planes and flew dozens of hours to wander unfamiliar countries.
Most of these wanderers seemed short on money and common sense. It seemed like traveling through Asia with a backpack was less about taking a vacation than about plunging into your own personal underworld. That’s probably why Cam was here.
“Why does anyone go anywhere?” Leslie was saying. “In my case, the reason was a man, a Swedish Buddhist I met on a beach in Thailand. A really yummy man child. I couldn’t resist. We lived in an Indian Ashram where a guru performed our spiritual marriage. Then my spiritual husband broke my spiritual nose during one of our very spiritual knock-down fights, and I hopped on the next train out of Nirvana.” She coughed again, the sound rattling in her chest like dice in a cup.
“So why did you come to Nepal? Instead of going home, I mean. Or at least resting somewhere until you’re well.”
Somewhere with clean water and fewer mosquitoes
, I nearly added.
“Too many places left to see. I’m on my way to Australia, where I’ll find work someplace. I’m a software engineer, so that shouldn’t be too difficult.”
“But why Nepal?” I asked again.
She shrugged. “I’m on a sort of women’s odyssey,” she explained, “since I’m off men at the moment. Nepal is one of the safer countries for women going it solo. Nothing like the Muslim countries. My plan now is to score a Sherpani to carry my gear into the mountains.”
I couldn’t imagine this woman reaching the summit of a staircase, never mind trekking the Himalayas. “Maybe you should stay in bed for a while and eat bland foods before you go,” I said. “You know. Bananas and rice. That sort of thing might settle your stomach.”
Leslie snorted. “My, you’re a right little mother, aren’t you?”
“Nearly,” I agreed, digging around in my pocket for rupees to leave on the table. This took some time; I still wasn’t used to the currency, and both of my arms felt like they were on fire from the immunizations.
Leslie helped me count out the money. “What d’you mean?” She fixed her pale eyes on my face. “Not pregnant, are you?”
“No, but I’m thinking of adopting my niece.”
My own bald admission stunned me. Still, in this place, where nobody knew my history, it seemed possible to reveal anything I wanted to about my life. The thing about foreign travel was that you could assume any personality you wished and try it on for size, because the odds were slim that you’d ever see these people again.
So I told Leslie about my breakup with Peter, my sudden move to San Francisco, my discovery of Cam’s baby, and now my search for him. Leslie listened without comment, then generously offered to search the city with me.
“I know every traveler’s favorite pit stop in Thamel,” she said.
I was glad for her company, since being in Kathmandu was like being inside a kaleidoscope. I took a deep breath as we stepped outside into the flow. Rickshaws rattled past, tugged along by spry men whose muscles ran like ropes along the lengths of their thighs. Most of the rickshaws carried foreign tourists or recently butchered, bloody animal torsos.
From every alley, shadowy figures hissed temptations: “Change money? Good massage? Good fuck? Clean hashish?”
The tempo and clamor were terrifying. I kept turning my head away, looking at the sky, at the buildings, even at my feet–anywhere but at the people living their lives so openly on the street. In my New England neighborhood of white clapboard houses, we had curtains and fences to ensure privacy, and San Francisco secrets were often guarded behind walled gardens. In Kathmandu, though, there were few secrets. I saw people haggling with vendors, men shaving and urinating, a naked child vomiting. In one shadowy alley, next to one of several Net Cafes offering free WiFi to travelers, a man defecated into a trash pile.
Everywhere we went, children followed, demanding pens, sweets, and rupees. Some were no older than six, yet carried skinny babies with fly-infested eyes. The babies looked hungry, but how would you know? They dangled placidly from the arms of their brothers and sisters, occasionally grinning toothlessly in my direction.
I thought of Paris, of her lusty howls for food and of how she had been nearly as skinny as these babies when Nadine first left her at my door. Now her limbs had the plumpness of newly risen dough. Paris was a fighter, I’d always thought, but perhaps that was only because I’d gotten her soon enough. If Nadine had taken her to Oregon, would Paris have been as listless as the poor infants living here?
Depending on where they’d come from, the women of Nepal wore heavy cotton Tibetan striped aprons over dark skirts or bright silk saris, colors blazing against the dusty streets. The Hindu women had rings in their noses and the third eye, the red dot on their foreheads, while the Tibetan women from the mountain villages wore long, heavy necklaces of turquoise, some with stones as big as robins’ eggs. They smoked cigarettes in a protective way, cupping their hands over pungent brown stalks. I felt big-footed and clumsy, striding past them in my clownish pants and hiking boots.
Leslie and I stopped at over two dozen budget and medium-priced tourist lodges and hotels over the next three hours. The desk clerks greeted us with wide grins and that sideways head shake that could mean yes, no, or maybe so.
A few tried to prolong the conversations, glad to have a diversion from the bookkeeping they did in huge clothbound ledgers behind tall dusty counters. I studied each guest book for my brother’s name and showed clerks a photograph my mother had given me out of her wallet.
The clerks were happy to try their English with us. One elderly man with black hair short and stiff as a carpet told us that he was happy to help tourists. “I learn many things from tourists.” He grinned, examining the photo of Cam, the corners of which were beginning to melt in the steamy heat. “But I have not seen your man.”
“What kinds of things do you learn?” I asked.
“Oh,” he bobbed his head, “I learned all about the AIDS. I am not borrowing any more t-shirts from people now, oh no.” He grinned. “I know Lady Gaga, yes? And Britney Spears. She is hot. Someday I will buy an iPad and watch videos here.” He gestured at his scarred desk.
The guests in these shoestring Kathmandu hotels were mostly under thirty, all of them information traders: the best beach in Thailand, the cheapest hostel in Jakarta, a German woman’s mugging in Delhi. None of them remembered seeing Cam.
“He must not be on the regular tourist trail,” Leslie said finally. She suggested taking a break, then trying the American Express Office after one o’clock, when the daily mail arrived. If Jon was getting mail in Nepal, that’s when he would show up to collect it, she said.
“Let’s go to the Monkey Temple,” she said. “It’s a nice walk, and you want to see something of Kathmandu other than all this bloody tourist rigamarole while you’re here, right?” She hung a skinny arm around my shoulders.