Wanderlust (18 page)

Stu and I always went grocery shopping together, a ritual I found soothing, even soporific. We bought cilantro and green onions and limes, and made fresh salsa from our own recipe. We disdained the store-bought kind. He taught me to make the dishes he knew, like killer-hot Thai shrimp curry; I taught him to make the dishes I knew, like tabouleh; and sometimes we learned a new one together. On weekends and evenings we were never apart. We lay on the couch, embracing and watching television. Every now and then I felt a twinge of suffocation, but I didn't like separation, either. We'd spent so much time alone together, so quickly, beginning in Pakistan and continuing right after we returned, that I still didn't know very many people in Seattle. The friends and college acquaintances I'd managed to cultivate, between time abroad and trips to Whistler, all seemed to have gone away. Kim was back in Germany; Jeff had gone to Washington, DC, to look for meaningful work; a few had joined the Peace Corps; and at least one had gone off to law school. I sometimes thought I should have done any of the above, but then Stu was right there in front of me, blotting out thought. And now I had a house—I couldn't just walk away. Every now and then a fisherman friend of Stu's would have a barbeque, and we would lie in the grass, eating king salmon flown fresh from Alaska, grilled with lemon and thyme.

His circle was scattered with young men starting careers as fishermen or builders. They seemed to know what they were supposed to do, but their girlfriends and wives were less sure. Several worked as waitresses or baristas, and if they'd finished college, they had office jobs like mine. Some of them were already talking about having babies; I felt more likely to build a spaceship and fly to Mars. When anyone asked us about children, Stu and I told her that we were on the “ten-year plan.” A year or so after moving into the house, I
overheard Stu telling someone “the nine-year plan.” “What?” I asked. “When did it become nine years?” And he pointed out how long it had been since we started saying ten. I thought his literalism was funny, since I didn't quite believe we were using up time.

I felt out of place, maybe even more than I had in Egypt or Pakistan. It was harder to know who I was in Seattle. Anywhere exotic, as a permanent stranger, I could define myself against everything around me. In
The Global Soul,
Pico Iyer explores why he feels so at home in Japan, an alien and unyielding “uniculture” that will never regard him as one of its own. Iyer comes from India, England, California, the globe. He comes from cultural fluidity. And so Japan's rigidity makes him feel at home because it tells him where he stands: “It's not always easy for me to explain that it's precisely that ability to draw strict lines around itself—to sustain an unbending sense of within and without—that draws me to Japan. In the postmodern world, to invert Robert Frost, home is the place where, when you have to go there, they don't have to take you in.” Egypt would never take me in. The boundaries that encircled me there had also made me feel at home.

Sometimes I felt like a tourist in my own life. I had tried living elsewhere, and now I was trying this Seattle, settled-down thing. It was just another place to visit. Part of me didn't believe it was
my
life, but rather thought that I was observing it from the outside. The difference between here and stranger places, though, was that Seattle would take me in all too easily. It disturbed me that my life looked so much like those of the fishermen's wives. I said I was going to travel, go to graduate school, go write, but now that was all just lip service. The masquerade was too real. What if I
was
like them? I couldn't bear the idea that this life might be my only one. I couldn't bear the thought of being ordinary.

Not that it wasn't a seductive life. On weekends we went to Stu's grandparents' second home on a small island in the San Juans, sometimes with friends, where we sailed and soaked in a wood-fired hot tub. Stu showed me how to split wood and patch a hole in a fiberglass boat. He had a knack for gathering food from the sea, and showed me how to set crab pots and shuck oysters. Stu, it seemed, had a knack for every practical skill. You knew you'd be safe if you were lost in the woods with him. I lacked similar abilities, and I hadn't met many women who had them, either. Nor had I known many hyperurban men, the kind who know the right cut of a pair of trousers but can't cut wood. (The coinage of
metrosexual
was far in the future.) So I associated Stu's savoir faire with manliness. I wanted to learn it all myself so that I could be self-reliant in the same way, so that you wouldn't mind being stuck in the woods with me. But to get there I needed to attach myself to a man so that he could teach me. It was a certain kind of trade: Without a romantic relationship, I didn't see why anyone would invest in tutoring me like this, long-term and for free, like a parent. Young people in every field—usually women—have extracted life lessons from older romantic partners—usually men. Stu wasn't much older, but he knew a whole world of things that I didn't. I liked that with Stu I got to learn things that would make me more independent of Stu.

At the island in the San Juans, glossy green water stretched away from the beach. Underneath there were powerful currents, hundred-pound lingcod, and even giant squid, but the surface was placid. In the foreground, seals basked in the sun on Posey, and across the channel the hump of Spieden, covered in long grass, took up the horizon. Stu taught me to pilot the Boston Whaler; he showed me how to watch for rocks when the tide was low, and how to slow, turn, and throw the engine into reverse, the most graceful technique for
sliding up to a dock. When I wanted to be alone I took a neighbor's kayak across a slender channel and tooled around the water's edge. We slept in the cabin on the property reserved for the grandkids, and after Stu got up in the morning—always before me, always to do something useful—I lay in bed and looked out the windowpanes across the blue-gray rocks and strewn kelp, to the shimmering surface beyond. In the evening we would build a fire and Stu's family would gather and we'd eat fresh crab dipped in butter.

Everything I was supposed to want had suddenly accrued: the boyfriend, the job, the house, the weekend house, and the wedding plans. It had been that quick and easy. We lived that way for a year and a half.

chapter fourteen

A
s it turned out, I would be
the car that barreled into the living room.

Stu was a proponent of marrying at his grandparents' island, with a pig on a spit with an apple in its mouth, but he said he would go to City Hall if that was what I wanted. I advocated City Hall because, as I told people, I didn't want to think about planning a wedding. The process seemed onerous and unreal. One of the few weddings I'd seen had been my cousin Kellie's extravaganza, which occurred right after I returned from Spain. She and her husband married straight out of college. The day before the wedding she threw all twelve bridesmaids an elaborate brunch, and on the day itself we wore emerald green satin with leg-of-mutton sleeves. A hundred guests toasted the couple in the penthouse ballroom of a Portland sky rise, and I wondered just where it was that girls learned how to do these things.

A few years later Stu's friends began to get married, and while the weddings weren't as elaborate as Kellie's, they were significant events, with gazebos in gardens and tuxedos on the boys. I was intimidated. A big wedding would have been like the cake platter writ large: I could probably give a convincing impression of someone who would have one, but it wouldn't feel real. I felt like everything
that had occurred in my relationship with Stu so far had happened
to
me, by accident and without intent. I'd fallen in love, and things had taken their headlong course. But if I got married I wouldn't be able to pretend that it was happenstance. Marriage required a conscious choice, after which I would be called on all my declarations of intent. Marriage, as I understood it, was when you had to stop bluffing and go all in. You had to choose one man, and through him—as I understood it—one life. Our settled, committed, home-owning existence would stop being a grand experiment. I still wanted to believe that there were other possibilities.

As these thoughts began to well up, it was also easy to keep going along with the television on the couch and the weekend trips to Home Depot. I developed an internal life that contradicted the placid surface. I went back and forth, sometimes telling myself that I just needed to get comfortable. I loved Stu, after all, and he wanted to travel too—after the house was done. I thought maybe if I squirmed around enough, this life would feel like the right fit.

But instead of trying for peace and cooperation, I began to pry up our differences like they were loose floorboards. I picked fights over his pot smoking, which bothered me intensely for reasons I couldn't at first put my finger on. Addiction was a weakness, and I hated weakness. Later I would also see that my desire to control him came from a desire to control my own life, over which I seemed to have lost all command. Sometimes I found a small stash or a pipe hidden in the bookshelf, which made us both miserable. He hated to be caught, because I would get angry, and I hated myself in the schoolmarm role. We played a game of cat and mouse, in which I both sought to find evidence and dreaded the possibility that I would.

My own weakness was for him. I wanted to hold him tightly to me. I blamed the pot for his falling asleep on the sofa, which made
me unhappy because then he wasn't with me in bed, and I couldn't fall asleep until he was. I blamed Stu for making me into a person I didn't like, who was insecure when he wasn't around. We were so enmeshed that I couldn't fathom losing him. It dawned on me that if I escaped the relationship, I might escape these feelings too. If I lost my love, I could lose my anxiety and anger, or so I suspected.

In my confusion, I began to understand how a person could go off in two directions at once. For someone who liked to please, it would be easy to end up with a concealed life. You just did what your boyfriend wanted, and got on with your own thing inside. You might end up with a case of cognitive dissonance, when two versions of your life came crashing together. Or the twain might never meet. Years later, when I would cry over some perceived contradiction in a lover's behavior, and ask him how he could have said X but done Y, I would try to forgive by remembering my own turmoil, without much success.

I found more things to pick on. I insulted him for his inability to do the dishes or hang up his clothes. I got mad when he came home late from work and didn't call. I asked when he would finish all the half projects he'd begun around our home, which, alarmingly, showed no signs of nearing completion. But none of these things were exactly the point. Underlying it all was my wish to go away again. The idea of roaming intoxicated me to the extent that I couldn't look at the glossy cover of a travel magazine, or browse the travel section of a bookstore, without getting a lump in my throat.

And so I developed my own secret. It just took a quick stop, every few weeks, on the way home to Stu. When I wasn't committing the act, I barely acknowledged it to myself. If I had, it would have exposed the fundamental contradiction of my life, my promise to do one thing while planning something else. I would have had to
admit I was a sneak, even though I believed I was a basically honest person. I would have had to admit I was plotting escape, even as I embraced my Seattle life. My two worldviews would collide.

Our unspoken understanding was that our resources should go into the house. Stu's did: His time, energy, and the money he made from building jobs mostly went to our joint project. My secret, though, was that I'd opened a bank account apart from the one I shared with Stu. I was saving money on my own. Half of every paycheck went into my personal bank account. Aside from an occasional piece of sports equipment, I bought no luxuries—no clothes, no stereo or television, no upgrades to my Ford Escort. I was saving to travel like it was a silent fever. To pursue the thing she needed to do, Virginia Woolf wrote, “a woman must have money and a room of her own. ....” I needed money and a backpack.

My wanderlust had only been in abeyance, like a briefly dormant volcano. There was so much of the world I hadn't seen yet. There were lives—so many—that I hadn't experimented with. What if I was meant to be an aid worker, a dive instructor, a spy? What if I was meant to be a writer in New York? And forget even what I was meant to be. What would it feel like to just wander the world, free of all responsibility, knowing I could stand on my own two feet? I resented Stu for keeping me from all those other possible lives.

There was no noble purpose in my wish to go away, no practical aim. There was no longer the fig leaf of an internship, college course, or job. It was just eyes-glazed-over desire. I bought a copy of
Outside
magazine with a picture on the cover of a tiny teardrop island photographed from above. It was a white sand shoal fringed with underwater coral and set in a turquoise sea, part of the Whitsunday Islands, which sat just off the coast of Queensland. I looked up the islands in an atlas and ran my fingertips over the smooth, shiny page.
I saved the magazine, my own secret stash, so that I could revisit it again and again. He had his escape and I had mine too. The photograph was a physical provocation.

Around Christmas of my twenty-third year, I began to tell Stu that I wanted to take a trip. I told him—and myself—that I just needed this one adventure. I would travel with my high school best friend, Kristin, a scheme I tried to play off as wholesome, even though he knew her too well for that. I would go away for two months, or four at the most, and visit a place I'd always wanted to see. I likewise told my parents that it was just a short trip. Then I would come back to the house, get another job, pay my share of the mortgage, and get married. I had somehow—I still thought of things as happening
to
me—embroiled myself in all this responsibility, but they couldn't begrudge me this one thing. And I was nine-tenths convinced that a trip was all I needed. I would get this travel thing out of my system. The words “sex and lager” were still at the back of my mind, but I didn't mention that to Stu.