Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  “Leonard,” I say, the name coming to me suddenly, as I mop around with bleach. “You have to learn to be with people. I know about basements. I spent a lot of time in the basement. And let me tell you, you’re out of the basement. You’re in your homey apartment now.”

  He cocks his head.

  “But so you know, I travel. I can’t be here all the time.”

  He cocks his head again, in a way that’s just so sensitive and understanding, and, quite frankly, noble. It’s true, apparently—somebody can look at you, just once, in the right way and you can sign up for a lifetime with him. I make Leonard and me a nurturing beef stew for dinner. I let him sleep in my bed, even though the beef stew runs through him and comes out as … beef stew. For Halloween, he and I will be Julie of the Wolves. I will be Julie. And he the wolf. Or vice versa.

  I go to Copenhagen. I go to Milan. I go to the Bahamas, and fall asleep on my stomach in the sun. Back in New York, Leonard seems to have little sympathy for me. Now that he’s relaxed and developed some solid bowel movements, he’s developed certain undeniable personality traits. One is the ability to trot rapidly around me and laugh as I try to blend dark orange foundation over the half of my body that did not get violently burned.

  Tonight, this is not so helpful. Tonight is my date with Tender Intelligent Man. Which isn’t a date, not really. It’s just a dog walk with a man: a date-walk.

  I try on a sweater. The sweater looks stupid. It is also hot, since it is July. But there is an actual demarcation line between my skin colors.

  Leonard laughs a little harder.

  I’m somewhat dreading this date-walk. It is not a good idea, not a good idea at all. If you can’t be yourself with yourself, how can you be you with other people?

  My dog, on the other hand, can be himself with everyone, even if they might prefer if he acted like somebody else. He is not afraid of expressing who he is and who he likes (me), not to mention what he likes (barking and whipped cream from a can sprayed directly into his mouth). The things he doesn’t like, he’s also extremely vocal about: brooms, garbage bags, shadows on the sidewalk, reflections in the mirror (including his own), people in wheelchairs, people who get too close to me, people or trees or streetlamps or cars that might come too close to me. After all, one of them might try to shove us into a basement.

  Leonard will know what to do about Tender Intelligent Man. He will sniff him, find him either unworthy or too worthy, and drive him off via a series of terrifying barks, lunges, and growls. I pull on a coat—a corduroy coat, a snuggly fall jacket, but I’m out of ideas for skin camouflage. Off the two of us go, claws and heels clicking over the cement.

  The East Village dog run is a pit of fenced-off mulch surrounded by drool-slimed benches. In the center towers a giant sculpture of a dog bone, carved out of a single log with a chain saw by a manic-depressive neighborhood artist off his meds.

  Like Leonard, I love the dog run. I love the ambient cloud of humid, rotten poop. I love the dog freaks, all of whom I know by both dog-freak name and dog name, who rehash daily their animal’s latest bowel movement (stringy, chance of chicken bone) and savage the innocent young children who attempt to enter the dog run to pet the dogs, screaming, “No non-dog-owners allowed! No non-dog-owners allowed!”

  Today, as usual, a gleeful mass of dogs is running in clawed, homicidal circles around the surrounding fence—the pack! the pack! the pack! the hump! the hump! the hump! Like any good bully, Leonard sits on the bench, trembling in fear. Next to him sits Tender Intelligent Man, who has shown up with a bag of mini cheeseburgers. He is tossing them, like rubber balls, into Leonard’s slavering maul.

  “Nice dog,” says Tender Intelligent Man.

  I stand off to the side, with my plastic poop-scooping bag. It might look like I’m blowing off this date, but, in reality, I’m in shock. In the daylight, Tender Intelligent Man is very, very handsome. He has a jaw like the jaws of men who ride wild mustangs across the plain. And yet, he smells like a sensitive, mom-loving boy—fresh and cottony, as if he’s not afraid to do his own laundry.

  I’m not sure why I didn’t notice all this the night we met. Maybe his outfit distracted me. Today, Tender Intelligent Man is wearing pegged, stonewashed jeans cut off at the knee, along with a striped shirt and a plaid cotton jacket, all of which is topped off by a baseball cap with a huge, vertigo-inducing spiral design on the center. A kaleidoscope of unfortunate clothing.

  “Uh,” says Tender Intelligent Man. “Are you hot?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I mean, temperature hot.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re wearing an overcoat.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s summer.”

  “It was chilly. At home. By the way, I like your spiral hat.”

  Tender Intelligent Man looks at me, then breaks out the chocolate shakes. They are thick, towering shakes, with a fine sweat of ice on the outside of the waxed-paper cup. Leonard experiences a fit of ecstasy and falls off the bench. He sits up, looking quickly in both directions to see if anybody else saw.

  “Are you a banker?” I say to Tender Intelligent Man, now to be known as Tender Machiavellian Man. “Or maybe a management consultant?”

  “I work at an architecture firm.”

  Leonard is the whore of Babylon, the slut of Santiago. He is slurping down the chocolate shake, which Tender Intelligent Man is letting him drink straight from the oversized straw. I, too, let Leonard slurp the straw. But only at home, where it’s more hygienic.

  “Well this was nice,” I say. “But I’m in Italy next week.”

  He laughs.

  “No, really, I’m in Italy. Florence, then Tuscany.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure is right.”

  “Who are you dating? You can tell me. It’s not like I’m looking to get married.”

  “I’m going to Italy!”

  “Okay, then I’ll come, too.” He laughs. I laugh. He gets up. I get up.

  “I gotta go,” we both say, at the same time. But I frown first. Then pull Leonard off down the street.

  “About Italy,” says Tender Intelligent Man. “I wasn’t kidding.”

  This is why God invented certified-humane choke collars. For tearing your dog away from people he might end up loving more than you. As I drag Leonard down the street back to our homey apartment, I remind myself that I am not taking my first date in two years to Italy. That is ridiculous. Not to mention unsafe. I don’t even know this man. He could be anybody, really. He could be a psychopath or polygamist. He could actually be tender and intelligent. Or rude and dumb. Or kind and sweaty. Or boring and good in bed. Or sad and artistic. Or silent and mean. Or loud and funny on the outside but lost and alone and confused and needy and self-sufficient and chanting leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone over and over on the inside. Even if, on the outside, he is already calling me up and asking about a second date.

  CHAPTER 11

  Love and Altitude

  The morning of my wedding, I’m on a ladder, hanging Rajasthani lanterns, screaming for the garland of Japanese origami cranes and the extra-long extension cord. I’m down on my knees, slapping dance-floor tiles onto the black oozing mud. I’m deep in the pond, trying to plant tiki torches in the toxic fertilizer manure gunk on the bottom, which has sludged down into the water from the cow pastures.

  “What do I do about the pump?” says my groom-to-be. “There are wasps in the pump.”

  “Pretend you’re—”

  “We’re not on some stupid desert island, Leigh! We’re getting married!”

  I ignore him and charge on—cursing, kicking things, bossing around close friends who have come up expressly to help us, yelling at random tiny children not to throw their goddamn Popsicle sticks in the daylilies. The tractor for cutting the grass has broken; part of the porch roof on the farmhouse has collapsed due to the weight of the daisy garlands. The signs directing guests to the wedding have blown off in the wind.<
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  There are not many weddings in this cow-rich, cash-poor, dairy-dependent valley in upstate New York. Milk is literally cheaper than water. People are born in Sullivan County; they do not move here. In fact, the locals do not understand why that young couple from Manhattan would have wanted to rent this farmhouse for so many summers when there is a perfectly acceptable faux-brick rancher right on the property. With plastic stained-glass windows.

  Even for our Great Alaskan Wedding Guests, comfortable with claw marks from bears on their cabin doors, getting married at the farmhouse is a stretch. The walls are home to bats and mice and moths and raccoons and squirrels and—once—a bobcat who thumped around in the attic, screaming with dark hot fury. There are large gaping holes in the floorboards that you can fall through multiple times and still fall through again.

  But Tender Intelligent Man and I have spent the past four summers here. It is the only place we ever considered getting married. For some mysterious reason neither he nor I see the falling-down part.

  Then again, we are the only two people I know who would consider our fourth date—lost in the dark forested hills of Tuscany, with no water or functional map or food—to be the greatest date of our lives. Because, four years ago, Tender Intelligent Man—to be known, now and henceforth, as Lawrence—was perplexingly not at all dissuaded by a sudden trip to Italy with a woman he didn’t know, a woman who had dragged her large, very odiferous dog along on their three previous dates (a dog who sat between them, eating both their food). Lawrence simply bought a ticket to Florence and flew over.

  I wasn’t sure about this, not sure at all. People traveling with you can make you do things. Like check your bag. Like take you to a dinner show of Tuscan folk dancing. Besides, I thought, what if I want to do something? For example go forty miles out of the way to eat wild boar? What if he resists? Somebody who isn’t interested in traveling to eat wild boar isn’t somebody I could fall in love with. I’d never tasted wild boar. However, common sense told me: You were either into wild boar and raw oysters and fresh sweetbreads and goose-fat drippings or you weren’t. You’d either come to Alaska one day and meet my family and suck the marrow out of a caribou bone (which no man had yet done). Or you wouldn’t.

  At the airport in Florence, all was solved. Lawrence wasn’t jet-lagged (check!). He’d brought only a carry-on (check!) and he was ready to hit the road (check!). “We should rent a car.”

  “Why?”

  “To get to the boar” (check!).

  “What about a train?” I say. “I love trains. Driving is so stressful.”

  A look crossed Lawrence’s face. I knew this look. He was deciding something. In fact, he was deciding about me, via an interior dating rule about cars. It was true! I wasn’t a driver. I could only fall in love with a man who drove a stick shift. But due to my proclivity for daydreaming, I couldn’t drive the vehicle in question. While at the wheel, I’d backed into other cars; I’d sideswiped gasoline pumps. I’d hit my own house once, crumpling a canoe-sized dent across the side of Dad’s Dodge king crew cab.

  “I’ll drive,” Lawrence said. “Just don’t rent us an automatic” (check!).

  Speeding away from the airport—at terrifically high speeds, even for Italy—Lawrence displayed such a decisive, masculine way of changing gears. His arm was pretty much chopping wood, except he was driving a car. I was all aflutter. Not to show it, I studied the vineyards on the side of the road, the yellow, dusty, earth tones of Tuscany whizzing by.

  Up we went, through twisty, narrow roads, at faster and faster speeds. The car rocked. The guardrail trembled. I was intensely carsick. I was going to vomit. And Lawrence was not my father. He was not going to hold out the hood of his parka and tenderly motion for me to puke into it because we couldn’t land the plane. “Let’s pull over!” I said. “That town on the hill looks … historic?”

  Bagno Vignoni is home to hot springs where Romans used to lounge, steaming away their ancient cares, eating grapes. The whole village reeked of faded decadence and crumbling stone. A tiny, jeweled blue stream dribbled out of the bathhouses. The sun throbbed overhead. We stuck our feet in the water. Lawrence studied a posted map. “You know what? Boar town is only two towns over. We could hike it.”

  The trendy style of purses at the time was a little backpack that fit a wallet and keys. I threw a toothbrush and a bottle of water in mine. “Let’s go.”

  On the map, in fact, it showed a trail between the towns. But with an arrow pointing in the direction opposite to the one that we were headed, from the boar town to Bagno Vignoni instead of the other way around. “Hmm,” Lawrence said. “Let’s not rush into anything.”

  “Oh please,” I said. “What’s an arrow? We better head out, it’s like ten klicks to the pass.”

  Lawrence looked over. “Were you ever in the army or something?”

  “Airborne. Forty-Ninth Regiment of Dad.”

  The hill leading out of town was steeply pitched and dry. We shuffled down the powdery earth in a zigzag to slow our speed. At the bottom started the trail. Trails are one of those little non-Alaskan pleasures that I will never get over. The tidiness of a trail, the transparency, the joy of not having to brutally cut your way through the bush or just shoulder through, behind a parent who is bigger than you and faster than you and whose pushed-aside branches whip back in your face, leaving you two choices: (1) drop back and get separated in the wilderness, or (2) stay up to pace and fantasize about making that parent pay for the cosmetic surgery you will need once the scars develop from all the stinging, bleeding cuts all over your forehead and cheeks. Not to mention, the relief of not worrying about running into a bear, tucked away just ahead of you in the impenetrable greenery.

  The dry, rambling wilds of Tuscany smelled of rosemary, warm and heady, massaged by sunlight. We started uphill. It was a long, grinding, relentless uphill. Out from the trees came a group of Germans marching downhill with walking sticks. And water. And hats. And sunscreen. And woodsy woolen outfits. Then came another group. And another group. All headed downhill.

  “I can’t stand Germans,” I said. “They’re always so equipped and organized.”

  “My dad was German.”

  “Oh.”

  The uphill went on and on. And then there was a downhill. For fourteen seconds. And there was more uphill! And more uphill. It was becoming clear why the arrow pointed the other way and the Germans were walking in an orderly line in the opposite direction. We were on a ten-klick death march straight up.

  I wasn’t about to admit this.

  Lawrence, it appeared, wasn’t either. He, I found out, as we chatted and climbed and broke through the forest to a fresh round of hills, belonged to a species of human known as the Badass Twenties Traveler. The Badass Twenties Traveler is similar to a Walk-About Australian, only American and thus on the road for a shorter time period. The Badass Twenties Traveler spends his postcollege youth sleeping in the park benches in Yugoslavia, at the start of the Balkan War. The Badass Twenties Traveler wanders Europe and the Middle East for two years, on a budget of two thousand dollars. He lives on sardines and stale bread. He speaks a little Hebrew, a little Arabic, a little German, and a few key words in Greek. He worked for a year on a kibbutz in Israel, right after which he also floated the Nile on a falouk with no running water or toilet, roasting tomatoes on a brazier for food. “And then,” Lawrence said, “I came to New York and turned into your average working guy.”

  Now was not the time to brag that, due to the hard-hitting nature of my current job—a job I was doing at this very moment, writing a roundup of 10 Terrific Tuscan Inns!—I could accurately guess the number of stars that a hotel had earned with one quick sniff of the turn-down treat left on my Euro-sham pillow: mint? chocolate mint? or chocolate?

  On we go—up and up and up. “This is so relaxing!” I said.

  “Yeah!” he said.

  Without looking at each other, we both began to laugh. We laughed and climbed and panted and laughed and took a
wrong turn and went uphill for another four or five klicks and then up another wrong hill because, apparently, there were a lot of trails in the Tuscan hills (which were mountains by the way), and the one sign of civilization we found was a beautiful medieval monastery, where the monks weren’t allowed to talk or even open the door. The next was a crumbled stone barn with swallows and an old rustic man sitting on the step. “Water?” we said, making all kinds of drinking gestures. “Help?”

  “Sì!” he said, nodding, running off, coming back with two huge bottles of cold, thirst-quenching—wine.

  We sipped the wine (me white, Law red) out of politeness, but we were so dehydrated and had been hiking so long, our sips turned into a long, glugging gulps. The old man clapped with approval. We smiled dopey drunk smiles at him. We headed off into the forest, holding hands, on our way to a night that I was pretty sure we were going to spend sleeping in the dirt, holding on to our stomachs, having caught Beaver Fever by drinking cold refreshing sobering water from a fetid stream.

  “L’amore!” the old man said, calling out to us. “L’amore!”

  It was official: We were in love in a foreign language.

  Over the next four years, certain things were confirmed. Lawrence actually was tender and intelligent. Add to this: He swam fast and believed in cheating while racing from one end of the pool to the other. He knew how to tease you very drily and accurately, almost without your knowing it. He could speak accents from every place he had ever visited, Israel to Czechoslovakia, including a very funny, slow, ungrammatical version of Québecois based on a maple-syrup farmer whom we met one night in the woods. He drove a completely smoking hot ancient manual Jetta with little paint, and no heat or front grille. He skied fast, he snored quietly, he bought cheap antique chairs and girlie-flavored soaps, he stopped in the middle of dinner between courses to kiss me over the table, and while he didn’t eat oysters on the half shell, he’d fake eating one in order to placate me, then let me eat the rest of his half dozen, as long as he got to eat my dessert.