Wanderlust (7 page)

G
raham was moving across
the world toward me, a glowing dot on the map in my head. I tried to push him out of my mind so that I wouldn't be overtaken by longing. The danger was that I would become so hopeful, so excited, that if he then failed to materialize, the blow would be too crushing. I hadn't seen him in more than a year, and one of my coping strategies was to focus on the time and place where I was. I couldn't live with my head somewhere else. I had to embrace my surroundings, because this time was only going to go by once, and I didn't want to spend it wishing for things to be different.

No one had email back then. Graham's progress reports appeared in the form of postcards and aerograms in my mailbox in the student lounge. They had him boarding the Trans-Siberian Railway in Beijing at the time of my arrival in Cairo. Then he was in Moscow, from where he sent a postcard of St. Basil's Cathedral. From there he took a train to Istanbul, where he planned to board a boat. I couldn't make long-distance calls from my apartment, but I could receive them, and Graham called late at night a few times, from jangly phones in train stations and ferry terminals, on lines that ticked and hissed and cut off when the paid-for time expired. From Istanbul, he told me, he would arrive, give or take, in two weeks. The date was uncertain because he
wasn't sure of the ship's schedule, and once he disembarked at Alexandria he'd still have to make his way to Cairo.

A group of students I knew was planning a boat trip out of Hurghada, a small town on the Red Sea. Graham's arrival was imminent, but I didn't know exactly when it would happen. I couldn't bear it. I couldn't stand my own anticipation any longer. So I decided to go away and forget the waiting.

On the first weekend in October, eight of us—two Egyptian, two French, four American—took an overnight bus down to Hurghada, where our ringleader, Sharif, had chartered an inelegant but roomy motor yacht with a captain and first mate. For three days and nights, we sailed out and back into Hurghada, swimming and snorkeling, sleeping on the boat or deserted beaches, and eating grilled fish and drinking rum. I chased one of the French students, Xavier, who had no interest in me, which made me chase him harder. I talked to him every chance I could, urging him to swim with me, and trying to impress him by playing chess, which he won. His lack of any romantic interest in me whatsoever, his resistance to even befriending me or flirting back, gave me a focus and a challenge. While I fretted over Xavier's disinterest, I was, at least, not thinking of Graham. Rejection by Xavier took my mind off my biggest fear, that Graham would reject me by failing to appear.

One night our crew left us on an island with little to eat but lots to drink. We were cold but managed to build a fire. I finally wore down Xavier and we made out roughly on the sand, then had dry, drunk sex. Afterward he said he'd never felt so sick. I hoped that he just meant from the rum, but it cut me that I'd elicited nothing in him, that he would still not even put on a pretense of liking me. I'd never had sex with so little feeling, without even desire. I felt stupid. As we motored away from the island the next day, my sweatshirt
blew off the deck and I dove after it into the turquoise water. I was hungry and hung over. I swam hard and down, chasing the white blur, but it sank too far too fast. I surfaced, resigned, but saw that the boat hadn't stopped to let me climb back on board. I looked to the shore, maybe a mile away, a yellow line on the surface of the water. I could swim it if I had to, I thought, but then what? It had no people, no fresh water. I looked back to the boat, which had grown smaller, then back to the island, then back to the boat. Finally it began to turn in a painfully slow arc.

In Hurghada on the final day, we had a long wait until our bus left, during which I called Michelle at our apartment. She answered quietly and paused. I could tell she was dragging the phone into her room, and my heart jumped at what this meant. She spoke to me in a whisper. “He's here.”

My mood soared. I felt magnanimous even toward Xavier, and played another round of chess. My anticipation had tipped over the knife edge from pain to joy. I no longer needed to distract myself by every means possible. On the way to Cairo, our bus broke down, as Egypt's long distance buses generally did. I rapped my fingers on the window and stared out at the desert. We arrived at the central station at four in the morning, and I shared a taxi as far as Tahrir Square, then proceeded on foot. Qasr al Aini Street was deserted in the dark, and the
thwack
of my leather flip-flops echoed against the walls. Though I lived here, and was the hostess, I'd let homebody Michelle do the welcome. I'd arranged to be the one coming home with a backpack in the dark of night.

I turned into our street, and into my cement lobby, where the
bawab
slept in a corner. I climbed the single flight to our floor, and on the door to our apartment found a taped note from Michelle, advising me to act surprised—she hadn't told Graham that I knew
he was here. But I didn't have sufficient rein on myself to act one way or the other. I let myself in, and could see across the dark living room that the light in my bedroom was on, and that there was a guitar on my lumpy green sofa. I went in. He stood in the half light near the bedroom door, hair around his shoulders, in loose blue cotton pants. I stopped several feet from him and we stood and stared. After a long while I set down my backpack and stepped toward him, and we held each other without words, reconciling all those phone calls and letters with flesh.

We didn't sleep that first early morning, just talked until noon, and then he came to class with me. The guards didn't give him a second glance as we passed onto campus, nor did the teacher in my crowded, dim classroom. That night Graham lit a candle beside my bed, now our bed, a wide wooden thing with a headboard painted in pale yellow and faded gilt. We found that we could lie together, talking in the dim light and ardently kissing, for hours, but were shy about sex itself. It seemed almost beside the point. We slept from exhaustion, woke, and slept, as though we'd been through an arduous trip.

He began to tell me about his journey, and again I saw images as though they were my own recollections. He'd moved from Thailand back to the east coast of Australia, where he worked in a restaurant that played Nina Simone. He tried speed, stayed up for three days, punched a wall, and slept for three more, all of which upset his housemates. He was in Brisbane when I told him for certain that I'd be coming to Egypt. From there he plotted his route: the flight to Hong Kong, then the “slow boat to China,” which he delighted in saying, though neither of us knew where the expression came from. He spent cold vodka-infused weeks on the train across Siberia, and
saw Moscow in the first flush of capitalism. Because he was there and everyone was doing it, he stood in line outside of a new Estée Lauder store, and bought eye shadow that he gave to me. He took a train to Istanbul, sleeping through Bulgaria. Then another boat, which had stopped in Haifa, where passengers were banned from leaving the port's customs zone, and finally Alexandria. Ultimately me. I was heartened, flattered, and impressed by this odyssey made on my behalf. I absorbed it as proof of his love. At the same time I understood that the goal of the journey could have been something else. A voyage has to have a destination to give it shape and flavor. We quest for something desirable, but we also desire quests. I was wanted, but Graham also wanted to want.

Traveling with a lover creates a sense of forward momentum where it might not otherwise exist. The relationship adopts the motion of the physical journey, eliminating the risk of boredom and making the travelers complicit. It shows each person in a new, maybe sexier, light. A journey can drive two people apart, as they realize the different ways they handle fender benders and lost luggage. But if it doesn't, it binds them in a filament of romance and camaraderie.

We didn't know we were creating a crucible, just that there were places we wanted to go. Unknown territory was practically a command, a dare that couldn't be ignored. We shared equally in wanderlust and so didn't need to explain it to one another. We just needed to get on the bus. As soon as my midterms were over, we did.

We went to the Sinai, to St. Catherine's Monastery, to Alexandria. Each time we returned, Cairo welcomed me with its overbearing hug. It was too much and it was home. Some of the American students who'd begun the school year with me would go back to the
United States in January, after just one semester. I couldn't imagine leaving. I felt like I was just sinking into Cairo, finally letting it take over. I had no homesickness whatsoever.

Between trips, Graham and I talked about the fact that he wouldn't stay in Egypt. Another kind of boy—one with a parental safety net, or a desire to study Arabic or start his first novel—might have amused himself for longer. If he'd been more like me, he might have lingered. But for Graham the only things in Egypt were travel and me. He wanted or needed to go back to Vancouver. He was making plans for his next adventure, and it wasn't mine. Our differences didn't concern me; I loved him without reservation.

The El Madina hotel, in Siwa Oasis, remains the cheapest place I've ever stayed, at two and a half Egyptian pounds a night, or seventy-five U.S. cents. The foul bathroom was down the hall from our cell-like room. At night Graham lit a mosquito coil, and instead of setting it down to burn, he toured our room in his boxer shorts, climbing onto beds and chairs, chasing insects. Whenever he found one he held the burning poison up to the bug until it fell from the wall. I watched him from the bed, a book unread in my hands, patient, knowing that he'd come to me soon. He came when his conquest of the mosquitoes was complete. The bed was too narrow for two people, and there were two beds in the room, but we didn't want to be apart. The rough blanket became tangled among our legs while we fucked. We weren't shy anymore. We had to fuck everywhere we went, at least once per hotel, at least once every day, as though making each place our own. We slept embraced, as if a centimeter between us would be too much. Whenever I hear the words
romantic hotel,
I still think of the El Madina.

My mental image of an oasis was of one or two palm trees and a pond set amid a vast and endless desert. Only the second part of this image applied to Siwa. It was perched in the northeast corner of the Sahara, about as vast and endless a desert as there was, but it wasn't small. When Graham and I climbed an old tower on a hill, we could see that the date palms stretched out for acres, a sea of dusty green, and that there wasn't just one pond but several bodies of springwater, each one feeding networks of makeshift irrigation. The town was a tumble of low sandstone buildings, many crumbling in the dry air, which gave the whole settlement a soft, organic look, as though human life had bubbled up from the ground. It was a place that supported life, on the fringe of an unimaginably huge expanse that didn't. It was the inverse of an island in the sea.