Wanderlust (42 page)

Dominic dubs Rimini the Jersey Shore of Italy. We eat mozzarella and tomatoes in a beachside restaurant and rent an umbrella of our own. We lie down with our towels and books, and take turns going into the water. There are no epiphanies here, but there are no epiphanies anywhere anymore. Except for this: When traveling stops changing you, it's time to go home.

chapter thirty-four

D
ominic and I are sitting at
our flimsy pine table, the one I'd wanted to replace with something more substantial. I've made a wintery, slow-cooked beef stew that he likes. Christmas is approaching, and we've booked separate vacations, an idea that was my suggestion. In the past we visited our respective families together.

Since returning from Umbria we've grown more peaceful. It's as though we've had all the arguments we could think of, and now, knowing how each one will end, we don't need to have them anymore. Who has more life experience, and when we're going to get a dining room table, no longer matter. He's set on continuing his State Department track, moving from country to country every couple of years, and I know that following him would be hard even if everything else was just fine. Which it isn't. I got together with Dominic in a moment of emotional crisis, but since then I've struggled toward something lasting with him—something that in retrospect may have never had a chance, but that we wanted to try for nonetheless. At some point I recovered: recovered from the Englishman, and from my sense of despair. I don't know exactly when it happened, but Dominic healed me. Now, though, I'm ready to give up the struggle and let the current take me away.

“I'm not coming back,” I say. We look at each other, both surprised, me with tears in my eyes and him turning red. He stands up and walks in a circle, then sits back down. There are no shouts; nothing is thrown across the room. After some time, he whispers, “I've kept you for too long.”

Later I'll think about that phrase again and again. On the one hand it sounds too lighthearted for the end of a two-and-a-half-year relationship. It's something you say when someone drops by for a minute, en route to somewhere else, and you ramble on for half an hour. But it also says that maybe this relationship was always just a way station for both of us, and that maybe we both knew that. We were on trajectories that would inevitably take us apart—like meeting someone in a Peruvian nightclub or on an Australian beach. Maybe we've overstayed our welcome with one another, but that's the only serious mistake. Dominic's phrase suggests that just because you know a thing is going to end, doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it. I'll come to believe he's right.

In the next few days, we alternate between falling into our old patterns and looking at each other like strangers. We don't know how to behave. Does he help me pack? Do we sleep side by side in bed? We rattle around the apartment, wondering what's next.

I have no stable job. I don't know where to live. I haven't cultivated people or places, so there's no one here for me but myself. There's no desire—no man, goal, experience, place—to compel me. Earlier in the year I covered marches against a change in French employment law. The students at the barricades said they wouldn't stand for
“précarité,”
or precariousness. I thought it was dubious grounds for protest, since how could you banish uncertainty? But now I wish I had a little less precariousness in my life. I wish I could demand that it be banned. I want to go home, but I don't have one.

I've booked my ticket so that I leave Paris a few days after Dominic. The apartment is empty when it's time to go. Early on a Friday morning, as the Christmas lights fade into the mist, my friend Toby stops by on his way to work and helps me bring my four suitcases downstairs.

When I was a kid, and into early adulthood, I loved being on planes. I loved the sense that time was suspended, that I was in between, and that I would land somewhere and find everything strange—roads and faucets reconceived, language a jumble of sounds, the time of day out of whack. Then flying became tedious, and all too often I had a pretty good idea of what things would be like where I landed.

On the flight from Paris, though, maybe because I haven't got a clue about the future, I feel some of that old happy suspension. The clouds seem symbolic again, signs that good things might lie ahead. The fear of precariousness has been replaced. I remember that feeling of being open to the world, ready for anything to happen. I've created perfect freedom, which is scary but also exciting.

You could say that I forgot to make a life. Forgot to get a steady job, or belongings, or a family of my own. I forgot to choose somewhere to be. My friends in New York are getting married two by two, and Kristin, in Vancouver, is a banker with leisurely weekends, and about to buy a five-bedroom house. I forgot to do the things that, despite decades of feminism, I still feel the niggling weight of, in a way that I imagine men don't. My parents wonder what will become of me, because the way I've chosen to live fits no pattern they understand. My father had the same job for thirty-five years.

But I created
my
life. If you choose one path you can't choose another. I'll never wonder what it would be like to sail across an
ocean or move to Europe or just take a year off to chill out. I'll never doubt myself in a strange land, never be scared of languages or funky rooms. America's foreign wars won't seem quite as alien as they might have, because of the places I hitchhiked when I was barely grown. I won't be cynical about human nature, because strangers have helped me so many times. My ripped suitcase, as it tumbles onto the carousel, is bursting with life.

I followed my wanderlust. It bruised me sometimes, and took me to all kinds of highs. Now that my thirst is slaked, I get to start anew.

Elisabeth Eaves
is the author of
Bare: The Naked Truth About Stripping,
and her travel essays have been anthologized in
The Best American Travel Writing, The Best Women's Travel Writing,
and
A Moveable Feast: Life-Changing Food Adventures from Around the World.
Her writing has also appeared in numerous publications, including
Forbes, Harper's, The New York Times, Slate,
and the
Wall Street Journal,
and she holds a master's degree in international affairs from Columbia University. Born and raised in Vancouver, she lives in New York City.

For their support and wise advice,
I'd like to thank: Ruthie Ackerman, Jim Benning at World Hum, Trevor Butterworth, David Farley and the regulars at the Restless Legs Reading Series, Betsy Lerner, Merrik Bush-Pirkle, Jessie Sholl, Melissa Silverstein, June Thomas at Slate, Brooke Warner, and Elizabeth Weinstein.

For more than thirty years, Seal Press has published groundbreaking books.

By women. For women.

 

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by Cami Ostman. $16.95, 978-1-58005-307-5. The story of an unlikely athlete and an unlikely heroine: Cami Ostman, a woman edging toward midlife who decides to take on the challenge to run seven marathons on seven continents—and finds herself in the process.

 

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WANDERLUST

Copyright © 2011 by Elisabeth Eaves

 

Published by
Seal Press
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
1700 Fourth Street
Berkeley, California

 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review.

 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

 

Eaves, Elisabeth, 1971-
Wanderlust : a love affair with five continents / by Elisabeth Eaves.
p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-580-05397-6

1. Voyages and travels. 2. Eaves, Elisabeth, 1971—Travel. 3. Women—
Identity—Case studies. I. Title.
G465.E22 2011
910.4—dc22
2010039812

 

 

The author has changed some names and personal details to protect the privacy of those mentioned in the book.