by Jennifer Cox
Toi took me to a traditional Thai festival for our date.
Loi Krathong took place during the first full moon in November. Across Thailand, people gathered at rivers and floated boats made from banana palms as an offering to the river goddess. It was a huge occasion, and in Bangkok thousands of Thais came to the banks of the Chao Phraya river by the Shangri La hotel, all looking for the best spot to launch their krathongs from.
In Bangkok, krathong-making was a thriving cottage industry since people buy rather than make their own. The stall-holders that lined the street were doing brisk trade in what looked like colorful cakes, but were in fact huge lotus flowers. Their green outer petals were folded neatly back, creating a frame of little green triangles around the flower’s center, which was then studded with marigolds, orchids, candles, and incense sticks. I exclaimed they seemed far too beautiful to float. “Ahhh, but we float them for love, and what is more beautiful than that?” Toi replied.
I laughed, thinking how Toi’s head may have been Thai, but his heart was pure Italian.
There must have been five thousand people on the street around us, pushing their way down to join the thousands already on the riverbank. We stepped out of the crush to buy krathongs of our own.
“You see,” Toi explained, “krathongs are an offering to the river goddess, but they also tell the future of your love.”
I stopped trying to choose from the stall’s array of krathongs, each more beautiful and delicate than the next, and listened more closely. But Toi shooed my attention back to the stall, clearly intending I should listen as I chose.
“When single people place their krathong on the water, it represents the baggage of old relationships. It floats away, leaving them free to find someone new.” Toi sounded very serious as he described the ritual. “And then when you’ve met someone new, you come back the next year and place your krathong in the water as an offering of thanks, and to ensure a happy future together.”
I inspected the krathongs even more closely on hearing this; I wanted to say the best possible thank-you for finding Garry.
I looked up to tell Toi this, but then suddenly thought maybe he didn’t know about Garry. I wondered if he’d mind that I’d already met someone. I could tell he liked me, but, now I came to think about it, the vibe I was picking up from him was one of preoccupation rather than of interest. I watched him as he talked and wondered what could be the reason.
“When you meet someone, you should bring them here,” he continued, “and you both launch your krathongs into the water. How far they float downstream together tells you how long you can expect the relationship to last.”
It was a beautiful story and one that felt extremely pertinent to me. But I was now also intrigued by Toi. Maybe because I knew of his Italian connection, there was something about his tone that reminded me of sorrowful Solimano in Verona, weighed down by the thought of playing Romeo in perpetuity.
But the stall-holder had no time for our poetry-of-the-soul moment; she was in the business of selling krathongs, and so far we were all talk, no action. Growing impatient with my distracted dithering, she grabbed the nearest krathong, shoved it into my startled grasp, and held her hand out to be paid.
I was too shocked to be polite. I shoved it right back at her in indignation: I was picking the krathong that was both the thanks for meeting Garry and the down payment on our future together. Was she mad? One wrong krathong, and that was my love life sold down the river, gone forever, thank you very much.
But fair enough, it was time to make up our minds.
Toi and I picked out—to our eyes anyway—the nicest krathongs and once again joined the dense crowd of families, couples, teenagers, and pickpockets squeezing over the bridge to the water’s edge.
There was such a crush we could hardly move, so as we inched along, we chatted about my journey and how much traveling Toi got to do as a model.
Impetuously, I suddenly asked: “Toi, is everything okay?” We couldn’t move much because of the crush, but even so, Toi jerked around involuntarily at my question.
“Why do you ask?” he demanded, not angrily, more intrigued, as if I could see something he couldn’t.
“I don’t know.” I shrugged neutrally. “It was just a thought.”
I’d learned two things on this trip. One, my dates always seemed to be at a crossroads and therefore thought (probably rightly) that I was too. Two, they agreed to date me because, in my role as pair of ears today, gone tomorrow, they wanted to talk to someone outside their circle about the cause of their crossroads.
Toi sighed, turned to face me, and assumed an expression of you asked, so…(Mentally I checked all the aforementioned boxes.)
Apparently, he wanted time out from modeling. He’d gone into it because it was easy: He’d been spotted by a scout when he was twenty and had worked regularly ever since. “But you know, Jennifer,” he said without a trace of irony, “I keep thinking to myself, ‘Is how I look all I amount to? Am I really just a face and a pair of shoulders?’ ”
It would have been easy to tease Toi but I didn’t; my conversation with International Correspondent Will in Beijing was fresh in my mind, and I didn’t doubt that glamorous jobs could be lonely.
We were over the bridge by now, but Toi and I walked slowly, resisting the surge of the crowd that pressed all around us. He seemed disoriented by his confession and I was waiting to see if he had anything to add. But he remained quiet and troubled.
“So what are you going to do about it?” I asked. He looked up and studied my face. I thought instinctively how beautiful he was; if people had said that his whole life, I could see how it could get on his nerves after a while.
“What do you mean, what am I going to do about it?” he asked slowly, suggesting he knew exactly what he wanted to do, but was too scared to come out and say it.
Suddenly, a chill hit my stomach: I had the most awful premonition. Oh no, I thought, he’s going to tell me he wants to be a priest and give up this life of vanity. I forced myself not to roll my eyes, imagining all those poor women looking at this exquisite man’s face and having to confess to impure thoughts every time they clapped eyes on him. Every day there’d be queues around the confessional box, like the first day of the Macy’s sale.
Toi took a deep breath. So did I. “I want to be…” he started. I was still holding my deep breath. “…a foreign-aid worker in Africa.”
My breath shot out like I’d been given the Heimlich maneuver. “Great idea, do it,” I shouted, almost before he’d finished the sentence.
Toi raised one perfectly shaped eyebrow, like a rainbow made of black silken threads. “Really? Wow. Jennifer, I wasn’t expecting such encouragement. You really think it’s a good idea?”
Actually, now that the shock of thinking Toi was going to be a priest had passed, I did think it was a good idea. I mean, why not: Why shouldn’t he follow his heart and do some good? We talked about various schemes I knew; the type of experience and training he’d need; the reality of life in a refugee camp. Toi borrowed my notebook and wrote down all my suggestions. He listened carefully to what I said and asked a lot of questions; he’d obviously been thinking about this for some time.
All around us people pushed and squeezed, carrying krathongs carefully in front of them, or in some cases over their heads out of the way of the crowds.
As we joined the throng, Toi whispered in my ear: “I really want to thank you for taking me seriously, Jennifer. It means so much to be able to see a way forward.”
I smiled and squeezed his arm. “You’re very welcome, Toi. If this trip has taught me one thing, it’s that, however freaky it feels, sometimes you’ve just got to take a leap of faith.”
“Like you meeting Garry?” Toi stated. He’d known all along.
“Yes.” I nodded firmly. “Exactly like me meeting Garry.”
And maybe more than that besides? I thought, realizing that the Date Doubt I’d experienced earlier was—as for Will and Toi�
��a feeling of isolation, a sense of momentum without connection. Talking with Toi had helped me feel connected again.
And with that, we both went down to the moonlit river. Standing on the bank, we lit the candles and joss sticks in our krathongs, and, reaching down into the dark, placed them carefully in the water.
I didn’t ask Toi whether he was letting go of old baggage or wishing for new. Instead I watched my krathong gently bob on the water’s inky surface. It was soon joined by another krathong, then another, then ten more, then fifty. They were all swept into the current and glided like swans into the center of the river and gradually out of sight. They were joining the thousands of wishes and dreams, launched in hope and carried by Fate, in the current under the moonlit sky that night.
At times, the dates appeared to me like pieces of a jigsaw, helping me build a picture that, although tantalizing me with glimpses, would remain obscured until I had completed the whole puzzle.
Toi was Date #68, and there were twelve more pieces of the jigsaw to find.
Daniel (Date #69), Mr. I’ll make you change your mind about Garry when you get here in Kuala Lumpur, turned out to be a nonevent: He had been forced to go to Bali on business and wasn’t able to take me on the elaborate date he had planned. He insisted we meet at the airport for coffee, though, and after a long time spent to-ing and fro-ing with airline schedules (I was off to Perth afterward), we managed it. Daniel was stressed and apologetic. “Jennifer,” he said wretchedly, “I had it all planned. I was going to take you sailing.”
Of course you were, I thought with a little smile (boats and fish, boats and fish—the man may vary, but the date remains the same), as I nodded sympathetically.
Perth, Australia
I’d flown into Perth when I’d come out to Australia in the eighties for my three-month visit that turned into six years with Philip. I’d spent my first year here, and although I’d been back to Australia at least once a year since I left (Lonely Planet’s head office was in Melbourne), I hadn’t spent much time in Perth, and I couldn’t wait to see my old and very dear friend Jude, whom I also knew from my puppet-theater days.
I was also dating one of the puppeteers I’d vaguely known from that time. It was years since I’d seen Toby (Date #70) and I was looking forward to catching up. But the date ended up making me rather uncomfortable. I’d met Toby roughly the same time I’d met Philip. He was convinced that I’d made a mistake marrying Philip and spent the whole date quizzing me as to why our marriage had broken up.
When Jude came to pick me up from the Esplanade Hotel that night, I was still irritated and slightly perplexed by his behavior. “I mean, honestly, Jude, Philip and I got divorced over ten years ago,” I told her exasperatedly, as we sat on the sea wall watching the sun disappearing into the Indian Ocean in a blaze of red, orange, and purple, “but Toby was going over it all like it was just yesterday. And what the hell does it matter to him anyway?”
But I was too happy to see Jude, and the night was too beautiful to waste getting agitated. We talked about more recent relationships, one that Jude had just ended and the one I had just found. And Jude listened carefully as I talked about the reasons behind my journey and the adventures I’d had since leaving Britain. “Had you ever really thought about who you wanted to be with before this?” she asked thoughtfully. I admitted I hadn’t: Thinking about who you wanted either seemed too calculating or just impossible to achieve.
Wistfully, Jude said she hadn’t either, and she really wished she had.
“But, Jude,” I said with some feeling, “even if I had given it some thought back then, it wouldn’t have made any difference: I would have assumed the man I wanted didn’t exist, or if he did, that I wasn’t pretty, smart, or lucky enough to get him. That’s why I needed to go on this adventure: I needed to feel good about myself before I could meet the right man. Also, to realize the right man wasn’t someone so different from me he’d be out of my reach and I might as well settle for less.”
But for now, though, the man of my dreams really was out of my reach: Garry was touring the States with the Sonics, and as both his and my time differences constantly shifted, trying to catch up with each other was proving harder and harder. And I was forced to admit that, although now back in tune with my journey, I still missed him horribly.
Seven a.m. the next morning found me on the edge of my bed nursing a scalding cup of black coffee and an evil hangover. The coffee was too hot to drink, but the pain of holding the cup was forcing me to focus my attention on that rather than on how desperately I wanted to go back to bed.
And I couldn’t go back to bed: I had a date with a surfer at 8 a.m.
Surfing Western Australia was a school based about forty-five minutes north of Fremantle. They gave lessons to members of the public, but since surfing was on the school curriculum, they taught students as well. (Can you imagine being taught surfing at school? When I was a student, we thought we were lucky if we got to hold the school guinea pig.) Jude knew someone, who knew someone, who had a friend who taught there. He’d agreed to date me as long as it was a surf date.
Steve (Date #71) was an ex-champion and looked incredible. With a rock-hard body, he had short, sun-bleached hair, luminous periwinkle-blue eyes, and a rugged, handsome face, etched deep with lines from a lifetime spent in the sun. He looked uncannily like a young Samuel Beckett, so much so that I dubbed him Salty Beckett (but not to his face).
I struggled into a full-body wetsuit (imagine putting on rubber gloves that’ve got water in them, on your entire body, with a hangover), and after the rudiments of surfing had been explained and demonstrated, we plunged into the ocean.
I quickly discovered that I loved surfing. As the waves crashed over me and the board—tied to my ankle—dragged me back into the surf and ground me into the sand, I felt invigorated and energized (and discovered a new beauty treatment cum water sport: Extreme Exfoliating). With Steve’s patient encouragement I finally figured out how to snatch my feet out from underneath me and spring from a lying position to standing upright on the board riding the wave to the shore. I was completely euphoric.
And then utterly exhausted.
We collapsed onto the sand afterward and chatted. Steve talked about his life surfing and how, although it had knocked out his teeth, wrecked his knees, and destroyed his shoulder, it made him feel alive and he couldn’t live without it. As he talked, my sinuses endlessly and uncontrollably emptied the gallons of saltwater I’d sucked up through my nose. It wasn’t a good look, but no amount of sniffing would keep the water from coming out.
At that moment, one of the young girls having a lesson walked past, three of her girlfriends crowding in concern around her. She had possibly the worst nosebleed I’d ever seen in my life; blood streamed from between her fingers as she held them protectively around her face. Steve watched carefully as they all disappeared inside the office.
“Board to the face,” he observed sagely.
I had a suspicion I was far too vain to be a surfer chick.
Melbourne, Australia
From Perth I went on to Melbourne to stay with my closest Australian friends, Linda and Dale, and their children, Grace and Patrick. It was wonderful to see them all. Dale brought Patrick and drove me down to Phillip Island, seventy-five miles southeast of Melbourne, where I was dating one of the Penguin Rangers.
Phillip Island was home to a colony of wild blue or fairy penguins. Each night at sunset the penguins, around forty-five hundred of them, waddled in from the sea and scurried for the safety of their burrows. Over dinner, Jervis (Date #72) told me that as a ranger, among other things, his job was to gather on lookout posts along the beach and count the penguins as they came in each night. I thought he was joking, but after dinner we went and counted penguins.
Dale and Patrick joined us and we all stood in the observatory tower, watching the penguins emerge from the fog-shrouded sea. They were tiny, vulnerable things and there was something incredibly heroic about the way
they waddled drunkenly from the cold sea; then, suddenly alert to danger, scuttled in terrified huddles from clump of grass to clump of grass, peeping little the coast is clear messages to the ones still sheltering one clump back.
Jervis was actually extremely cute and we had a wonderful evening. He clearly loved his job and was devoted to the penguins, though I wasn’t sure how he or any of the rangers would have time for forty-five hundred penguins and a woman (unless the woman was a ranger, of course).
I felt really lucky to be able to have this time with Linda. She was my best friend in Australia; we’d both lived in Brisbane and had managed to see each other regularly and stay close even when I’d moved back to England and she’d moved down to Melbourne. It had been good to see Jude, too.
At the same time, though, I was starting to feel pulled in all different directions. In Australia, I was seeing friends who’d known me when I was married. Logging on to my computer, I found my friends at Lonely Planet’s Melbourne office had heard I was around:
Don’t you dare leave town without coming to see me: so much has happened since you’ve left I’m dying to talk to you about and I reeeeaally miss you. Lisa xxxxx
Plus friends in London had (not unreasonably) lost track of my travels and assumed I was at home:
Not sure where you are, Jen, but James and Ian and everyone else are going over to play table football at Exmouth Market tonight. We’re meeting at 7 p.m., do you think you’ll drive or take the tube? See you there, Love Glam Tan xxxxx
There were also the rest of the Dates:
Hi, Jen, I’m really glad you’ll be arriving in Queenstown a day late: I’ve got something very special lined up and it gives me more time to take care of details! Sorry to be personal, but can you please tell me how much you weigh? Love David, emailing from New Zealand
Talking to some people about my long-divorced ex-husband, to others about what was going on at a company I didn’t work for anymore, and to another set arranging a social life in a country I’d just left or was yet to arrive in was a real juggling act. Every group felt or assumed I was around and available because technology made it so easy for them to get hold of me.