Wanderlust (39 page)

We grow closer. It's not that there's no conflict: We gripe over what to buy for the apartment, and whether to eat out or in. But it's real. I don't feel the intense, irrefutable desire that I've felt in the past, but I think that's a good thing. I don't feel like I need to get away from him, either, like I did from Stu and Seattle. It's a happy medium, where I can be calm and stable and not get crushed. We're a good fit, deeply interested in one another's work. We call each other multiple times a day. On weekends we ride around new neighborhoods on his motorcycle, with me navigating from the back. We make a good team.

I'm starting to achieve a delicate balance. There's no reason to rock the boat.

I haven't thought about Justin all that much, not since I ignored his letter. The spell is finally broken. How else would I have been able to resist his plea? Now I'm clear-eyed and realistic. I see that nothing was ever going to happen there.

I get an email one morning when I sit down at my desk. It's six months after the valentine. Justin says he misses me and that he wants to talk, and signs off “your love.” This raises my hackles. Now I see him as an interloper, wanting to intrude on my domestic tranquility. He went and got married on me, back when we were making promises that still seemed true. Now I've found what I want. Or at least what I need. I email back with carefully platonic words, and tell him that I'm living with my boyfriend. No “love,” no x's and o's. He emails me back, but this time I don't reply.

How dare he,
I think. He's been nothing to me in real life. I desperately need this harmony I've found, and I was never going to get it from him. Saved from drowning in New York, I'm just regaining emotional and financial stability, and those are the most important things. I feel like I finally have a little breathing room, to figure out what's next. I have some more of the mental space I need to write, and I'm grateful to Dominic for helping me get it.

And yet . . . I'm a little bit bored. Dominic is high-functioning in bed, always up for it, but robotic and silent. I sometimes feel like I could be anyone. I know that just-okay-in-bed is supposed to be okay, that that's how you stay in a relationship. I count my blessings—my clean, calm apartment; my nice, calm boyfriend; and my time to write.

I lie in bed that night and think of Justin. It's harmless to think;
we're all allowed the privacy of our own minds. I think about when he became feverish under our mosquito net on the Sepik River and started saying delusional things. I think about Justin's hair, and how Dominic never lets me muss his. But I know that Justin is just a symbol. He represents a carefree time in my life, that's all. Now I have a few more cares; I've had more successes and failures. I may think my life is dull, but that's just because I'm a freak for escape.
Was
a freak for escape. I'm getting over all that now.

I keep thinking about Justin in bed.

I decide I'll just email him back, and do so the next morning. He replies right away.
Fourteen hours ahead,
I think.
What's he even doing up?
He says he wants to talk to me. I think about that, and decide to acquiesce. I give him the home phone number, and I tell him when to call: not before 9:00 AM my time the next morning, which happens to be when Dominic goes to work.

I don't think there's really anything wrong with this; after all, why can't I talk to an old friend? But my judgment is blurred because that thing is happening again. The faster heartbeat, the sense of anticipation. For what? It never comes to anything. But anticipation of pleasure is a kind of pleasure itself.

I sit down at my desk the next morning while Dominic is getting ready to go to work. I open my email and there's one from Justin: He says he can't wait to hear the sound of my voice. Dominic glances over my shoulder, or maybe it's more than a glance.

Dominic has never been very trusting, not just of me but of the world in general. I know he has a jealous streak even though he's subdued and ever-reasonable on the surface. It's already forced me into weird contortions.

Several months into our relationship he asked how many people I'd slept with. I was dumbfounded. I didn't think anyone asked that question beyond the age of twenty-three. We were in our early thirties. Who cared? How many people you'd been in love with—now
that
was an interesting question. But sex could mean anything. The person you fucked could have been forgettable or life-changing. Counting lovers was as inane as ticking off countries, when what mattered was what had made an impact.

We were walking down Avenue A toward a Mexican diner, and I stopped and turned to him and asked if he was kidding. But I saw on his face that he wasn't. We resumed walking, and I suddenly thought much less of him. A month earlier in our relationship his question would have been a deal-breaker, a sign of an anxious, visceral sort of sexism that I wanted nothing to do with. By the time we had the conversation, though, I was already sliding into dependence. I remembered a friend, years earlier, warning me to always, always, always make my number less than the guy's. I'd scoffed at her for insisting I carry on such an absurd double standard. But now I hesitated and decided to play it safe. As I did so, my old self dropped her jaw at what I'd become.

I thought back—put on the spot, I wasn't sure of the precise figure. I tried to think of what I'd told Dominic about past relationships, the major boyfriends, and then added a handful so that my number wouldn't seem implausibly low. I thought rapidly, knowing that my hesitancy looked bad. I had a premonition that we were introducing a new poison into our relationship and felt a flash of hatred. I hated him for doing this to me, showing a part of himself that forced me to lie. I hated myself, because I knew I was going to stay with him anyway—that I was lying in order to do so.

“Fourteen,” I finally said, low-balling it, hoping it would be a
little less than his number. Unfortunately it was a few more. His pale skin reddened. “I haven't gone out with anyone who'd slept with that many people,” he said. “As far as you know,” I shot back. I felt knocked off kilter, not quite believing that we were having this conversation.

Dominic stowed the figure away as a resentment, to be trotted out every now and then under the guise of another gripe, specifically that I'd “done more” than him in life. He'd say I'd been to more countries, or had more adventures, which wasn't really true. But his overarching pathology was that he'd missed out, and the idea that I was more sexually experienced played right into his fear.

Maybe this was one of the very things that drew me to him. Someone who's jealous, suspicious, watching like a hawk, gives me one of the things I've always craved: something from which to escape. And Justin was the escape hatch I'd held on to, polished to a shine, for any time I thought I needed another life. Justin and I had served each other well over the years. I thought we'd both started to know what we were really doing. We must have known that we were never going to meet. That would have made our relationship real and therefore imperfect. We were just on call to provide relief. We were each other's safety valve from the pressures of normal life.

I don't know if Dominic just accidentally glances at the computer, or if he's peering over my shoulder, trying to confirm his worst fears. But he sees the words “I can't wait to hear the sound of your voice.” He'll claim later that at first he thought it must be from my mother. But he looks more closely, and sees that it's a guy's name I've never mentioned.

And now the placid surface explodes like I never knew it could. “What. The. Fuck?” he shouts. I'm stunned into immobility. He
demands to see the rest of the email chain, and I don't want to show him because I know the one thing he'll catch, my only incriminating words, in which I tell Justin specifically to call after 9:00 AM, Dominic is enraged. He walks back and forth, roaring. He's saying “fuck” and “goddamn,” and then he picks up a heavy boot and hurls it at the wall. I've never seen him like this.

I feel panicked, like my lifeboat is sinking. I've screwed this up in a totally unnecessary way. Through stupid little acts, from emailing Justin back in the first place, to opening my browser before Dominic had gone to work, I've threatened my whole life. And I was so good when I ignored the valentine! Now I might have destroyed what I've made.

When we've calmed down, I plead my case. I haven't seen Justin in more than seven years. It was dumb and wrong of me to flirt with him online, but the whole thing is imaginary. He lives in Australia, for God's sake. He means nothing to me, I insist. This is a lie, he obviously means something, but even if I were to admit it, I wouldn't be able to explain just what. It's in my head. How can he rail against something that's in my head? How can he even know it's there? Well, in Dominic's world, maybe you can know. When he went out for another government job, he had to take a lie detector test. But it's true that I haven't seen Justin in years. This is the irrefutable fact. And if I haven't seen someone in this long, how could he possibly mean anything to me? How could this be a real thing? Lie detector tests, I remember Dominic telling me, pick up the physical symptoms of lying—the sweat and the higher pulse. And even though, in the scale of infidelity, I know that what I've done is minimal, I also know that I'd flunk a lie detector test. I'm not lying about what happened, but I'm lying about the way I feel. Justin makes me sweat and pulse.

Dominic says that he overreacted; he shouldn't have thrown the boot. But he's infuriated and deeply hurt. When he leaves for work, I think our relationship might be mortally wounded. Justin, who should not exist as a part of my real world, has had an all-tooreal impact, like a dream that makes you sleepwalk off a bridge.

All I can think is that I have to save my relationship with Dominic. Without him I know that I'll flail. I'll be back in Queens with the snow and the debt, or I'll have to retreat somewhere else, maybe all the way back to Vancouver. I'll do anything to hold on to my life. I must become meticulous. Tonight I'll start to mend fences; I'll plead and declare my love. Eventually this will work, if with a lingering scar of distrust. But right now I have to clamp down on all risk. The first thing I do is block Justin's email address. The next is to open my filing cabinet. I thumb the manila folders until I find it: the letter he sent last winter. I look at his rounded cursive and the smudged ink. I must have smudged it myself. Had I cried? I'm crying now. I take it and leave the apartment, walk two blocks down Sixteenth, and choose a public garbage can. I know I'm acting irrational, but I look around as though Dominic could be watching. I tear the letter into pieces and throw them in the can, tears streaming down my face. There, that should do it. That was the only physical artifact I had of him, the only thing he'd touched. Now he'll cease to exist.