“You didn’t get hurt?”
I shook my head. “They must have used a machete, a nice, clean cut. Amazing, right? But funny.”
“Christ,” you said. “I think Laurie would have gone nuts.”
“Then,” I went on, “we ended in Europe. The Greek islands, up through the Balkans, then to Western Europe. We went as far north as Wales and flew home from London. We landed in New York only a few days ago.”
“All that,” you said, and shook your head. “It is amazing. I want to go to those places. I’d love to see Asia.”
“You will. And you had your Fulbright to England. You traveled afterward, right? It’s not as if you’ve never been anywhere.”
“Only a little in England. But Laurie was waiting. The wedding”—you grimaced and made a small wave toward the picture on the coffee table—“and then law school right after. Anyway, I mostly studied when I was over there. What you did was completely different. Two years. Even more, wasn’t it? No agenda, no itinerary.” You stared at me, as if seeing me for the first time, and said, “Wow, Judith, you look great. Fantastic.” You went to the kitchen and poured the coffee. “Tell me about everything. And Scott. What’s he like? Where is he today? He didn’t want to meet me?”
“Seth,” I corrected. “Not Scott. He’s with his cousin, where we’re staying. It’s unreal being back in the States, Elliot. Everything moves so fast. So much noise. We both feel shell-shocked.”
“What was your favorite place?” you asked.
“I loved the South Pacific the most. We actually lived in a grass shack in Fiji. Down the Rewa River. I’d look around and wonder at being in such an exotic place. To wake up in a jungle. I could never have imagined it.”
“The South Pacific.” You stared at me again with that look of discovering me.
“There’s this mosquito repellant,” I told you. “They used it everywhere. A green coil. Lion Brand Coils, they’re called. You light one end and it burns slowly through the night until in the morning there’s nothing left but a snake-shaped ash. They work well, mosquitoes hate them. I can still see that ember burning at the end—like a cigarette left burning in an ashtray. They probably fried my brain—those Lion Brand things. God knows what’s in them. I’ve never seen them sold here. But there was always that ember when I’d wake up during the night.”
You said, “Tell me about somewhere else. I want to hear about another place.” I felt like Scheherazade.
“Malaysia,” I answered immediately. “The island of Penang. The beaches had the softest sand. So different from our beaches near Lake Michigan. Tea grows on terraces in the hills. And monkeys everywhere.”
“Monkeys?”
I nodded. “Once we were hiking through a forest of tea and we saw a beautiful woman sleeping on top of a wooden plank. There was an umbrella rigged up beside her to shield her from the sun. We didn’t wake her, just walked by. Later, I asked someone why a young girl would be sleeping outside like that, in the daytime, on a bare plank. They told me that at night, someone has to stay outside to guard the tea. To scare away the monkeys. Otherwise the monkeys might destroy the crop. She must have fallen asleep in the morning, exhausted after lying out there, awake all night warding off monkeys from the tea.” I laughed. “I’m talking too much, Elliot. Sorry. You shouldn’t have started me.”
You still stared at me. “No,” you said. “I want to hear. I’m living vicariously, I want to know everything.” You cocked your head and asked, “Like what did you eat? You were always such a fussy eater.”
“I was?” I was amazed that you knew that fact about me. I thought only my mother and father knew how picky an eater I was. When we’d been on dates together, I used to pretend that I liked everything. “Curries,” I answered. “I’ve become an aficionada of curries. They’re different everywhere. Red. Green. Yellow. One time, at a roadside restaurant in Penang, I pointed to something on the menu. It turned out to be the very hottest curry they had, but I didn’t know. The owner shook his head, tried to warn me off it, but I stuck with my order. When I ate it, my eyes streamed with tears and I gasped, sweat poured from my forehead. Seth was astonished. All the local people in the restaurant were staring and laughing, but I finished it. Spooned up every bit. It was painful, yet the most delicious thing I’ve ever tasted.”
“Travel agreed with you,” you said. “I can see it. You look as if you were made for it. And you were gone for so long. Over two years. I can’t even get Laurie to agree to go to Mexico for two weeks after I take the bar. She wants to go out to the Hamptons with her family. As usual.”
“I liked everything about traveling,” I agreed. “Maybe not the smelly toilets, but everything else. The accomplishment of figuring it out. Where to sleep. What to eat. Each place had its secrets. Meeting other travelers and looking at maps by candlelight. Following with your finger to see where someone has been and where they’re going next. Then, just like that, changing your plans, and deciding to go there with them. Seth’s really spontaneous. I felt such satisfaction when we navigated through the challenges.”
“Like what?” you asked, your eyes never leaving my face. “Tell me what kind of challenges?”
I loved the attention you were lavishing on me. Your apartment was so quiet. I was surprised that any place in the middle of the city could be so still. The windows were shut tight against the heat and all I could hear was the soft hum of the air conditioner unit. I was glad you were asking me these questions, that you seemed truly interested and that Seth wasn’t with me. Seth, the master storyteller. Even if I started telling a story, Seth would take it over. He was admittedly wonderful at it. People in the room would stop their own conversations and listen. But now, it was just me, alone with you in that quiet, spotless apartment.
“Once, when we were in Indonesia,” I told you, “the military junta confiscated all the airplanes. A coup was threatened. We’d come from northern Australia, Darwin, to the island of Timor and we were stuck. No way to fly from there and get to Singapore, where we were headed. I talked to some locals and I found there was a ferry to the next island. Flores. So we hopped, ferry by ferry, through the islands, each one more beautiful, more lush than the one before it. The ferries were just floating barges. Flat, no seats. So we had to stand the whole way, balancing our backpacks, falling against people and their animals and their baskets of fruit. When we finally got to Jakarta, we were so proud of ourselves—like we were astronauts landing on the moon. People said we wouldn’t make it, that we’d have to turn back to Australia.”
“You made it, though,” you said, then called me by our old nickname. “You got yourself where you needed to go, Rocky.” As you studied me, I could almost hear you asking yourself if you’d made a mistake and underestimated me. I became embarrassed and picked up my coffee cup.
“I haven’t been called that in a long time,” I said, and shrugged. “I guess I’m persistent.” Like with you, I thought. Never giving up on you. Flustered, I kept talking. “I kept looking for boats and eventually we got there. To Bali. Once I start out on a path, I don’t like turning back. But it was Seth who dreamed up the trip. I never imagined that I’d actually get to those places. You know how much I wanted to travel around the world. I’d never been anywhere. You did have that time in England. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, England,” you said dismissively. “But it wasn’t monkeys and hopping ferries to Bali or living in thatch-roofed shacks. Nothing like what you did. The most exciting thing that happened to me was when I got picked up by some actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was hitchhiking near Bristol.”
“You love Shakespeare,” I said.
“I know. This actor was driving an ancient Morris Minor with his girlfriend. They stopped for me.”
“What were they like?”
“They were really funny,” Elliot answered, almost grimly. “It was the best part of the trip. That whole afternoon I was doubled up with laughter in the back seat. They did voices, characters
. He and his girlfriend tried to get me to go with them, to keep traveling with them. They said they were going to kidnap me. But I went back to Cambridge.” You shrugged. “Like the good boy that I am.”
“Then you came home and married Laurie,” I said. “After England. I got your wedding announcement and I was surprised.”
“Why surprised?”
“I didn’t expect you’d marry young,” I answered. “I imagined you’d be the fifty-year-old bachelor. Lots and lots of girls first.”
“Ah, Rocket,” you said. “Who knows anything? All I know are torts and constitutional law.”
“That’s a lot,” I said.
You refilled our coffee mugs, rubbing your neck. I’d never seen you so exhausted, so beaten down and old looking. Your posture had changed and your shoulders slumped forward. Here I was, exhilarated from travel to exotic places, having nearly circled the globe. In all those years before, when we were in high school, I was the one who’d watched enviously while you were having experiences: flying around the country as a teenager, speaking to crowds in hotel ballrooms, practically running a summer camp. I was the audience, on the periphery of your accomplishments, nervously dipping my toe into the water, while you dove in confidently. At Michigan, I felt so backward and provincial. You were the sophisticated one on the East Coast. Now it was different. You were listening and admiring. Oh, I must admit, I savored the moment.
Of course, I knew much of what happened was because of Seth. Life ratcheted up once he entered my world. After Michigan, I’d gone to Los Angeles for that internship in social work. A friend from school, a boy who’d transferred to UCLA, suggested that I phone Seth. (Much later, after Seth and I were married, I found a letter about me from this same boy. I wasn’t snooping, it was tucked into a book on our shelf. He’d written Seth that if he wanted to meet a girl with “a big rack,” he should check me out. A big rack! I was devastated when I read that letter. I thought he’d … oh hell, never mind; who needs to hear my pious outrage? It was fraternity boy talk and we were all of twenty-two. What did I expect?
But then Seth makes such an easy target. I’ve done very little honest talk about him, neither to myself or others in my life. I’ve drawn him in the harshest of lights—my evil first husband. He fathered my twins, Miriam and Evan, and, of course, that could be enough to redeem him right there. However, he left me for another woman, a much younger woman, and he’d been a womanizer for all of our relationship. That makes him the villain, right? That’s what I always claimed. Well, the truth is not that simple. I can’t forgive or forget the infidelity. Yet, my deepest self knows it wasn’t love that bound me to Seth. It was the tantalizing life raft he gave me. I leaped when he offered a chance to travel—the dream I’d always had, but not yet envisioned how to make happen. In those days, it seemed impossible for a girl alone to have the kind of adventures Seth promised. This offer of travel, backpack strapped on, crammed with maps, but no itinerary, was tantalizing beyond belief. Perhaps Seth sensed that I didn’t love him absolutely and without qualifications. He probably realized that I had used him as a way into a bigger world. Maybe that even had something to do with those other girls, maybe he wanted to feel love greater than what I gave. He looked confident, Seth did. But underneath, he so desperately needed the approval of women. You could see it in the way he performed for women—how much he needed conquests. Oh, Elliot, I am getting old. Feeling sorry for that bastard of a first husband of mine. Shame on me.
Before Seth, I knew what waited for me. If I returned to Chicago after college, life would be no different than it had been before I’d left. As much as I hate giving Seth credit for anything, I know I’d not be the person I am today if our paths hadn’t crossed. The grand around-the-world journey, his impetuousness, his creative spark—it changed my life. It is also true that there was terrible yawning pain, pain that lasted nearly the entire time we were together. Sometimes it was like being on the inside of a washing machine; the adventure full of chaos and frenzy. I got bruised and eventually I wanted the emotional highs to stop, because devastating lows always followed. Yet, with the distance of years, I remember less of the hurt from all that buffeting and see more clearly how the experiences with Seth gave me resilience and even wisdom.
“What will you and Seth do now?” you asked that afternoon in New York. “Another National Geographic–worthy journey?” You pursed your lips in a small smile.
Oh, I definitely liked this. You were jealous, hanging on to my every word. “Seth is planning to start medical school now. Maybe, when he’s finished, we’ll travel more. And,” I added casually, “we’re thinking of getting married.” I pulled a wisp of hair back behind my ear. “Do you recommend it?”
You looked shocked. “Marriage? Sure, yeah. If that’s what you want. But your stories, those postcards you sent from everywhere. You have no idea how much I looked forward to seeing where you went next. Envied your experiences. Why marriage? Why stop the adventure?”
“Oh, we’ll travel again,” I replied airily. “Seth never wants to stop that. We’ll go back overseas and help people. Poor people. Maybe”—I hesitated again for dramatic effect—“maybe even have a kid. We met lots of people traveling with children. Seth loves kids. He’s great with them. Do you and Laurie think about children?”
You laughed a short bark of a laugh. It wasn’t a kind sound. “Laurie does. She thinks about babies nonstop. She’s on a real campaign about it.”
“So, what’s the problem?” I asked.
“Judith, what isn’t a problem? Every damn thing with us is a problem.”
I put down my coffee cup. “What’s wrong, Elliot? Tell me.”
You sighed and gestured again toward the photograph on the low table. “Even at the wedding, I had concerns. Laurie’s a sweet, giving person. She tries so hard. She wants us to be happy more than anything. But I see it all laid out in front of me. I’ll get a job with some firm here in the city. Her father knows everyone. We’ll stay here a while. Until we have our second kid. Then we’ll move to the suburbs—to Connecticut or some town near her family in New Jersey. I’ll have an ungodly commute into the city and Laurie will stay home with the kids.”
“What’s so bad with that scenario?” I asked.
“I hear you talk, and it makes me think about the other things I always wanted,” you said. “Like making a difference somewhere. Maybe travel.”
“So do it,” I said.
You sighed. “Laurie hates traveling. We actually did go to Jamaica. On our honeymoon, to an all-inclusive resort. They practically lock people in, so you never even see a Jamaican—except the people working at the resort. And she refused to leave the place, said it scared her and she was afraid of getting sick. I’d like to go back again, to really see it. You traveled the right way.”
“What about politics? You always wanted to go into politics and change the world,” I said.
“I still think about it. Maybe someday. But not yet. Now I just want to stop for a while,” you said. “I have this fear of getting stuck in the wrong life.”
“What do you want instead?”
“I’m not sure. Write, maybe. I want a bigger life than Laurie sees us having.” You looked at the pile on your desk and grimaced. Then you lowered your voice. “Listen, don’t mention this to anyone, but I did apply for a Supreme Court clerkship. One of my professors at Harvard recommended me. I’ll hear soon. But I doubt it’ll happen. It’s a crazy pipe dream.”
“The Supreme Court. Whoa. You’re kidding! That’s certainly big.”
“It’s such a long shot, I didn’t even mention it to Laurie. She’s so happy to be back in New York, she won’t want to leave, not even for Washington.” You paused. “Judith, I made a mistake marrying so young. We don’t want any of the same things. Whatever the next step is, I can’t see it being with Laurie.”
“Then why did you do it?” I asked. I had never seen you so unhappy with where you were in life. “Why did you get married?”
 
; “For one thing, I’ve realized how susceptible I am to parental pressure. You know me—keep the grown-ups happy. Wasn’t I always doing that? I acted like I was forty when I was sixteen. Remember the suit and the briefcase?” You finally smiled a little.
“You did impress the grown-ups,” I said. “You impressed everybody.”
“Every weekend, we go to Laurie’s parents’ summer place in Bridgehampton. It’s beautiful there. An estate. I used to think I wanted that kind of life. Big, happy family. Her older sisters always come out as well. Three of them. All married, with kids. The longer Laurie and I were together, the more they looked at me expectantly. Waiting for the announcement. The hints they dropped. Honestly, it was intense. When I told them I was going to England, it was clear I was supposed to give her a ring before I left. Her father even asked if I needed money for a ring. I actually like the guy. He’s in extermination. He keeps mentioning how perfect it would be to have an in-house lawyer.”
“Extermination? Like the mafia?” I asked.
“No, no, of course not.” You laughed. “Bugs. They kill bugs. Cockroaches. Rodents, too.”
I shuddered. I absolutely hate cockroaches, though I saw my share of them in Asia.
“Hugely successful. No shortage of bugs in New York City. He’s got all the big contracts. His three sons-in-law all work for the company. They talk as if I’ve decided to join them already. Pretty soon they’ll start asking when we’re going to start a family.”
“Oh, Elliot,” I said and of course I felt sorry for you. I leaned over to put my hand on yours.
Instead, you pulled me from the couch and we ended up embracing. It felt as it always had. I inhaled your smell, which, if the truth be known, was a bit stale that day: the wrinkled shirt and lack of fresh air in the apartment. Yet, even stale, it was still your familiar smell. I don’t think Seth’s embraces ever did this to me, made me feel so woozy and fluttery. Damn, from the beginning I’d kept asking myself if what I felt for Seth was love, and here was my answer. This was love. Once again, you and I were kissing. Your tongue explored mine, and I felt your hands rising up my back, under the flimsy Indian shirt. Your touch on my clammy skin felt electric. Yet, after a minute or two, I stopped and pushed you away.
Love Is a Rebellious Bird Page 10