Wanderlust (23 page)

Finding a job wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. The town was tiny and remote, with fewer well-off tourists than Noosa. Budget travelers flowed through at a constant pace, but the restaurants and bars were wary about hiring them, because they tended not to stick around.
People who had proven they could stay six or eight months had the good jobs, the ones in hotels and on boats. After I'd asked for the manager in more than a dozen restaurants, the chef who ran the kitchen at the local yacht club agreed to hire me for two weeks, while someone else was on vacation. If my point in Noosa had been pointlessness, here I harbored an ambition: I wanted to get on the water. The yacht club was not a yacht, but it brought me closer to my goal.

I called the order numbers over a loudspeaker, and when the well-roasted patrons came up to the counter for their fish and chips or daily lasagna special, they asked me where my cute inflections came from. Having the icebreaker of a foreign accent was like finding a forgotten twenty-dollar bill.

One day I ended up in the morning debrief, having followed Stewie into Laurie's room and been forgotten. I pulled back into a corner. Laurie was still in bed, and the house residents surrounded him, courtiers waking the prince. He'd moved the marijuana plant, which was communal property but too often raided, from the living room to his bedside. His didgeridoo lay right there beside him.

“I had all my dirty magazines out,” Nathan said. “I was planning to masturbate, but my hand fell asleep.”

“I came in here at just the right moment,” Brendan said in his hoarse morning voice, talking to Laurie but playing to the group. “You were naked and she still had her clothes on, and she was all turned on. I really made her squirm. I made her think I wanted a triangle.”

“You mean a threesome,” someone said.

“You had your hands between my legs, mate,” Laurie said. “At first I thought it was Dog Woman. Getting a bit twisted.”

“Did you have a fat?” Nathan asked.

“No, Nathan, I didn't, not anymore,” Laurie said, and added, “Brendan punched a hole in my door.”

“Brendan, why'd you punch a hole in Laurie's door?” Stewie asked.

“Because I was pissed stupid.”

“And what if it'd been my face there, eh?” Laurie asked.

“He woulda punched a hole in your face,” Stewie said.

“And I woulda driven these scissors through his face,” Laurie said, fingering the scissors he used for snipping buds.

“You know Laurie's had a woman the night before when he's got his guitar in bed with him,” Nathan said, and everyone laughed.

“And if he's got the baseball bat, you know Crazy Dog Woman's been around,” Brendan said, and they laughed more.

I didn't ask about what the didgeridoo meant. I felt included. I'd become Jane Goodall among the chimps, with the boys now saying anything in front of me or to me. Nathan told me he missed his girlfriend so much he was getting a callus on his palm. Brendan asked me which girls he'd have the best chance with. Dutchie, the mean one, told me someone-or-other better not find herself alone with him. “You know what I mean?” he growled, and I backed away.

I went to a crowded backpacker bar with Tracy and Stewie and some others, the kind blasting U2 and serving a four-dollar beer-andpizza special. I was restless. I lived in a house full of boys who talked about sex all day long, but I wasn't having any myself. I couldn't sleep with one of them, or I'd lose the status I'd carved out as snow-whitemascot-sister.

I decided early in the evening that I'd take someone home with me. I'd never reversed the order like this, deciding to have sex before I knew whom I wanted to do it with. I thought it would be a
grand experiment. I watched the door until a group of Italian boys came in, one of them with long brown hair and baggy pants. He looked like a skater, and I thought he was adorable. For the sake of benchmarking my challenge, I told Tracy and Stewie that he was the one I was going for.

By the time we were leaving the bar, I was a little bored with the whole idea. The problem with trying to be hunter rather than prey is that boys are by and large easy lays. There's no thrill in pursuit. Before taking the Italian out back to my shed, I traipsed him through the house, showing off my catch. It was a typical late Tuesday night: Brendan making instant noodles, a couple of stoned girls watching a movie, some boys already gone to bed. While the Italian talked to Brendan in the kitchen, I went into Laurie's room and told him what I was doing. He foraged in his bedside drawer and gave me a fistful of condoms. I would use two. It would be just okay. The next day Brendan told me he couldn't have been more proud of me if I'd been his own daughter.

One day as I meandered away after my yacht club shift, along a path that curved through palm trees and manicured grass, in no rush to get anywhere, a man skipped into view with a yellow flower in his hand. He was older, sinewy, and thin as a whippet; he had followed me from the yacht club. He presented the flower to me with a little bow, which instantly made me laugh. Then he asked me out on a date and told me to meet him at the marina.

I showed up at high noon on a day as blue-skied as all the rest. With springy, quick movements, Mark ushered me to a forty-foot fiberglass sailboat with sparkling clean white decks, a bareboat he'd borrowed from a friend at the charter company. Before we set sail, he
went to his car and got a platter of sliced cheese, cured meats, and fresh fruit, cadged from a caterer friend. He threw off the lines, motored us beyond the breakwater, and raised the mainsail in a light breeze. He sailed like it was walking, chatting to me all the time. He glanced up at the weathervane and suggested we visit a shoal he knew, since the tide was low enough. The water was calm and clear: The Whitsunday Islands are protected by the Great Barrier Reef, forty-odd miles offshore, which acts as a sixteen-hundred-mile-long breakwater.

He asked me questions, and I explained my accommodations. “Really, a boat shed?” he asked. It did sound a little flimsy, now that I said it out loud. I was suddenly aware that not everyone in Airlie Beach was exploring that place where youth, poverty, and freedom reach their logical, feral conclusion. Adults lived here too. “So what do you want to do when you grow up?” he asked. He had an amused lilt in his voice, like he was teasing a child. He had sussed me out too quickly, like he knew that I knew that I wasn't really one of the boys, or a sailor, or likely to stick around very long. He knew that I was one of the many, many tourists, that this was all a flirtation and I would go and have a real life somewhere else. I was one of Airlie Beach's customers, friendly and cheerful and never to be heard from again.

But I was caught off guard enough by his question to say the first thing that came to mind: “Be a writer.” I hated to admit to ambitions I might not achieve.

“What kind?”

“Um, writing about, you know, traveling. And stuff.”

He laughed. Why did he keep finding me so funny? “Isn't that what everybody wants to do?”

I squirmed. “What about you—what do you want to do when you grow up?” If he could mock my age, I could mock his too.

Mark had all this game, the kind the boys in my house did not,
because Mark, it turned out, was impossibly old. He was thirty-two. And he was embedded in a town that looked transient at first glance. He'd lived here for an unbelievably long time, six years, working mostly as a skipper, taking visitors around the islands for money. There'd been a girl and an engagement that had gone awry, and now she'd gone back south to civilization. Mark's mother mailed him books from Sydney, his link to a culture beyond boats. He told me that the newsagent in town carried a small selection of paperbacks in the rear.

Mark said he was thinking of finally leaving town. He was deeply tanned and had a permanent red sunspot in one eye. His skin, eyes, and ambition would eventually dissipate if he stayed here. You couldn't just live in a beach town like this forever, or at least you had to decide if you were the kind of person who did. Mark said he'd reached his conclusion. But he was still here.

I exulted in being on the water. My fingers skimmed the Coral Sea, and I looked at all the shades of blue, widening my eyes behind my sunglasses as though that would let me take in more. My happiness was doubled by the knowledge that the physical world
could
bring on this kind of pleasure. It made me content to know that I could be moved by nature, independent of human relations. It was a one-way relationship, but beautifully simple.

The water was so clear I could see the bottom even as it got deep, like I was looking through a tinted window. Mark pointed out islands to our west and south and told me little things about them. Whitsunday had the most sugary beach I would ever see. Hook was uninhabited, and Hayman was a luxury resort. The homely distant lump once called West Molle had been rechristened Daydream, and South Molle was being renamed Adventure Island, for the tourists. “But I still like to call it South Molle,” Mark said. Captain Cook
named the Whitsundays when he sailed up this way in 1770, before his ship foundered on the Great Barrier Reef. Later, on his final voyage, Cook landed in Hawaii, where his crew traded nails for sex, and he was killed by an angry mob.

Most good travel stories are about discovering the unexpected. The traveler goes abroad with an illusion, the illusion is shattered, but then she learns something new, and after assorted challenges and humiliations, she achieves a satisfying epiphany. When we dropped anchor on the leeward side of a white sandbar, though, I skipped straight from illusion to satisfaction.

It was the teardrop from the cover of the magazine. The very one. My mouth fell open and Mark smirked again, thinking I was just dazzled by the prettiness. But I was also thinking of the perversity of the fact that my airbrushed fantasy had come to life. Things are never just what you hoped for. We jumped into water so clear and warm that it was like jumping from air to air. The sand rose up under us, and we floated to where it met the sea and walked out of the water like creatures in an act of evolution.

We walked from the wide end to the tapered end of the disembodied beach, and Mark bent down to pick up a hard, brittle white object, which he put in my hand. I weighed it, wanting to please, wanting to solve his little puzzle. It seemed too light to be a bone. I felt again like a child as I looked up for explanation. He said it was the remains of a cuttlefish, a special find, and showed me how you could draw on it by scraping the calcified surface. We sat down and watched the sandbar shrink around us as the tide rose up, until the land was gone.

A few days later in his apartment, a tidy grown-up place with a balcony and a crisp duvet, Mark was retiring and shy, as though he didn't know what to do with me now that he'd gotten me home.
So I signaled the first move, moving my face next to his, letting him know that he could.