All Over the Map (2 page)

“Happy birthday,” says the Professor, and he pulls out a necklace he bought from an Indian vendor, a lovely string of turquoise and amber. I try to remember if any man besides my father has ever bought me a piece of jewelry. Aside from my first boyfriend in college, who gave me an opal pendant as a parting gift, I can’t recall any. I was outraged once when my friend Giovanna told me her husband had never bought her any jewelry during their entire marriage, with all the toys he bought for himself, and maybe I was so mad because mine didn’t, either. So this gift, at forty, is a delightful surprise. The Professor clasps it, hands warm, on my neck. “What do you wish for?”

So many things. I wish we could stay in Oaxaca and be the lovers we used to be. I wish I could still fall in love or even believe I could. I wish for great food, adventure, and soul-scorching sex. Maybe a child, still. I wish for it all.

“Romance and adventure,” I say. I do not say what else I wish for, maybe what I wish for most, because it seems contrary to everything else, which is to be with one man or in one place, to have something settled in a life where nothing is settled.

“Do you think you can have both?” asks the Professor. “Who is the man who will let you roam around the world, meeting your old lovers?”

I shrug. “Maybe he’ll travel with me.”

“Good luck,” says the Professor, and he is sincere.

I twirl my glass between my fingers, sniff the smoky mescal, and wonder, as I always wonder, whether we will see each other again. I ask the Professor if he thinks we might travel together again.

“You never know,” he says. He reaches over and strokes my
hand.
“La vita è bella e lunga,”
he says. Life is beautiful and long. We clink glasses.

After dinner, we go back to the hotel and snuggle together like contented old friends.

“Buenas noches,”
I tell him, and he is already snoozing.

I can’t sleep. The moon is peeking through the wooden window frame, and I wonder about my wishes for romance and adventure. This man I have loved, off and on, is leaving tomorrow, and, as usual, I don’t know when or whether I’ll see him again. The men in my life are always like the countries I visit: I fall in love briefly and then move on. I visit, regard the wonders, delve into the history, taste the cooking, peer into dark corners, feel a few moments of excitement and maybe ecstasy and bliss, and then, though I am often sad to leave—or stung that no one insists that I stay—I am on my way.

Here on a sultry night in a foreign country, with a man sleeping next to me, casually throwing his skinny leg over my soft one, I realize I don’t have someone whom I can call home. I wonder if it’s possible to have everything I wished for on my fortieth birthday: adventure and romance, wanderlust and just plain lust.

I turn in the bed. Actually, it isn’t exactly romance and lust that I wish for. Finding a fascinating and attractive man on the road, going from being perfect strangers to holding hands, sharing stories and bites of dessert, gazing into each other’s eyes over dinner, and then stopping for a moment to stare at each other again in bed—that’s romance, that’s lust. That’s exciting and wonderful, but it’s all too brief, like a vacation. Of course, you can travel the world and find romance. What’s more elusive is real
companionship, someone who’s always making the same dent on his side of the bed, who knows how you like your coffee in the morning. It’s much harder to find comfort and stability, to be held, to be secure in the knowledge that someone is taking care of you and even—old-fashioned as it sounds—protecting you.

You can’t grow old with someone if you’re always off searching for new experiences. And I’m not getting any younger.

I roll over again, facing the Professor, who echoes my disturbance with a few deep, skidding snores. I’m restless and agitated. I face the Professor and then turn toward the wall; I don’t feel comfortable anywhere. My desires—to be free and to belong, to be independent and to be inextricably loved, to be in motion and to be still—pull me back and forth. The Professor sleeps soundly while I wrestle with the two sides of myself until I am worn out and the moonlight dims, replaced by the cool light of dawn.

H
ome from Oaxaca, I drop my bags in my San Francisco flat and suddenly everything seems urgent—sorting the mail, straightening the house, finding a man, having a kid.

For four years I’ve tabled the issue of settling down by having an affair with a romantic Frenchman who was available only for jaunts to Italian islands, British art museums, or Moroccan medinas, not for buying groceries or paying the gas bill. At the time, that suited me fine: he brought me back to myself after a painful divorce, made me feel desired again, and helped me experience the simple pleasures of the sunset, the sea, grilled calamari, reading on a hammock with someone, a midnight swim. He took care of me when we were together, and even apart, he let me know that someone on the other side of the world was always thinking of me. But now he, of all people, has settled down, leaving me—at forty—with only my independence for company, along with more wrinkles and severely decreased chances of fertility.

I suppose I knew all along that having a part-time international lover was a temporary solution. You can’t go on buying
plane tickets forever, treating your life at home as if it’s dead time between vacations, always living in anticipation of being with somebody somewhere else. At a certain point you want to wake up with your head on your own pillow and have that somebody be snoozing right next to you.

That’s what I always assumed would happen, anyway, and it catches me by surprise to be alone at this age. In my twenties and thirties I figured I would find someone as full of wanderlust as I am, and we’d intersperse our forays into foreign cultures with intimate nights at home, making risotto and pulling out a special bottle of Italian wine on a regular Tuesday. Turning the corner of my twenties, I met a fellow journalist whose Italian grandparents made their own wine and who let me know from the start that tofu is no substitute for gnocchi. Our four-year relationship seemed to promise that it would always be possible to mix adventure and comfy domesticity. We were similar physical types—sturdy, energetic dirty blonds who love to eat just a smidge more than we love to exercise—and both game to take off for a train trip through Italy, to mountain bike in the red rock canyons of Utah, or hike in the high Colorado wilderness. We were just as happy to stay home, spending an evening rolling out homemade linguine, inviting friends over, or lounging around drinking beer and watching basketball. I might have been more interested in the hiking than the hoops, but it evened out.

That relationship ended during that odd phase women have in their early thirties when they think they have no time left but all the time in the world: I wanted to get married and have a child right away, yet, when Leo was more than ambivalent—my
frustration pushed him further away—I also thought I still had plenty of years to run into someone even more exciting to settle down with. I believed that the balance of exotic travel and cozy home life I found living with Leo would always be easy to find. And though there’s little I regret about our relationship or breakup—we had a wonderful four years, parted amicably for good reasons, and always wish each other well—I only now appreciate that whatever else we had together, that balance was rare.

No sooner had Leo and I contemplated splitting up than I was off with another man, who dazzled me with his wit, intelligence, and brilliant smile. He was smitten, lavishing attention on me like a spotlight illuminating my best self. The fact that I loved to travel seemed to make me all that much more fascinating to him; my Italian friend Lucia couldn’t understand how we could love each other and be apart for an entire month while I studied in Florence, yet he seemed more ardent than ever when I returned, speaking better Italian. But when we set off into marriage, a journey for life, I didn’t realize he had a return ticket hidden in his back pocket. It turned out that all the qualities that had initially attracted him—my exuberance, my independence—were exactly the things, in the end, he admitted, that he’d wanted to extinguish. Then he turned that spotlight of his, that projection, onto someone else, someone he’d grown up with, who felt more like home to him.

Now I’ve been divorced for about four years, and it takes a good couple of years to get over losing the guy you thought you’d be holding hands with through old age and to rouse yourself from a crushing depression when you never thought you were the kind
of person who could be depressed in the first place. Being with the Professor during that difficult time was like having a luxury liner float me over choppy seas, all the while sitting up on deck in lounge chairs drinking wine and watching the stars, impervious to the waves, then landing safely on the other shore.

But now on the other side is forty, the most foreign place I’ve ever visited, and suddenly I’m all by myself. They take your passport at the gate, confront you with a clipboard, and ask, “Where is your husband?” and “When, by the way, are you going to have kids?”

Consult the map. Get your bearings. I manage to change money, catch the bus, find a meal and a pensione by nightfall in most foreign countries. How hard can it be, finding a husband, a house, a family at forty? You just have to set out in the right direction. Who knows: for all the bleak wilderness here I might stumble across something unexpected and delightful, something I didn’t even know I was looking for.

So I take off walking. Right away, I realize I’m completely unprepared for this place; everyone else seems to have a house, spouse, children, and a retirement plan, and I’ve only thought to pack sunscreen, a water bottle, and a good book. I take in the sights, the new terrain, and over there I see the loss of youthful good looks that I can no longer afford to dress down. I wander in another direction, and I see my precociousness losing its early blossoms, flowers fading; I haven’t accomplished what my young, spectacular, A+ successes predicted. I look around at the houses, and I notice that I’m still renting; I haven’t managed to own one by now. Over there, I watch toddlers chasing butterflies at the
playground, and—it’s something in the air here—my eyes well up with tears.

Which direction to go in? House, husband, child? I have no idea. Since I got divorced, friends have asked why I don’t go ahead and have a kid on my own, adopt a baby from one of those Third World countries I’m always visiting. But I’m not one of those people who always knew I had to have children. I always knew I wanted to be like Brenda Starr, ace reporter, traveling the world, having liaisons with the mysterious, one-eyed Basil St. John, playing gotcha with evil heads of corporations. If I found the right man, it would be a wonderful adventure to have kids; but if that guy didn’t show up, it wouldn’t be a tragedy, it would just be a different kind of adventure. Even if, deep down, I always assumed that I’d wake up one day with a baby bouncing on the bed, I can’t do it on my own—especially given my personality, which is not the most patient and stable one in the world—because it wouldn’t be fair to the child, who would deserve two parents. It wouldn’t be fair to me, either; I would wither without some help and a little taste of freedom now and then.

I’
M STARING AT
my suitcase, not yet unzipped, full of dirty sundresses and jungle pants, trying to figure out where to go next. I finger my turquoise-and-amber necklace, parting gift. The truth is that I don’t have the first clue where to look for a new man or a new life; I have so sense of direction whatsoever. I feel too fragile to try to meet anyone new. I don’t
want
to meet anyone new. I want to rewind, go back to Oaxaca, back to that Mexican
garden, where the Professor would tell me in Italian that I’m the love of his life, I should come back to Paris, learn to speak French, and we could spend summers in a little house in southern Italy. I want my vacation to go on forever, to
be
my life. I wonder if the Professor ever suspected that’s what I wanted; I wonder if I ever let him know.

The last thing I can do is sit here with these feelings. I have to get up and go somewhere, or I’ll explode. I know I have a habit of running away from a broken heart and that it usually tags along. Maybe it’s an addiction. But buying a plane ticket is a lot healthier than binge eating or drinking for heartache, and sometimes you can even manage to outrun it on the road.

I think about the first time I flew away from a disappointment in love, just after college. I was enchanted with a guy named Edward, who told me—kissing in the rain in Little Italy—that he was sorry, he just didn’t love me. Crushed, I had to get away. I took an inheritance from my grandmother—$1,500—and left New York to travel around the Mediterranean by myself. My more practical older sisters used the money for a car or toward a down payment on a house, but I figured Grandma would’ve been tickled to know that I took the meager savings she’d been able to tuck away as a teacher and single mom and went off to Europe, the place where she’d had the jolliest time of her retirement, accompanied by her two best friends, dressing up in hats and gloves and big rhinestone earrings and taking tea in grand hotels as if they did it every day.