You frantically tugged my bra to the side and spent what felt like hours tracing my left nipple with your tongue, lightly grazing it with just the tips of your teeth, before continuing down my stomach in a trail of torturously slow kisses. Just as your lips got to the top of my lace panties, you paused and looked up at me. You smiled, teasing me, and I don’t think I’d ever been more turned on in my life. Overcome with desire for you, all I could do was moan and offer one barely audible, but desperate, word: “Please.”
Still looking me in my eyes, your breath and expression hungry and urgent, you gripped my thighs right above the knee and slid my skirt up to my waist as you ripped my fancy black underwear, the ones I’d worn to impress you, into two pieces and tossed them to the ground. I was so wet as you buried your face between my legs.
“Don’t stop,” I begged.
A jolt of electricity shot up my spine as you made the slowest circles with your tongue that wiped away any possible thought of who could be watching us. It didn’t matter anyway. I didn’t care who saw, or who heard. I screamed in shock and pleasure and felt a release inside me unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
We practically ran back to my apartment, desperate to make the most of our time before you had to leave. I pulled you through the streets as fast as I could because I couldn’t wait to feel you inside me.
But once we were there you took your time, removing each item of my clothing with care and curiosity, devouring every inch of my skin with your eyes and your mouth, making me feel like the most perfect woman in the world.
Just when I thought I couldn’t wait any longer you pulled me on top of you as if I weighed next to nothing and expertly guided yourself into me. I let out a slight cry. No man had ever filled me up like that. It felt like we fit perfectly as we grinded together, sweaty and focused, my nails pressing into your back, making half-moon indents that would remain for hours.
I came quickly, but you weren’t finished with me yet. You flipped me over, gave me a fierce spank, and we were back at it again.
I wanted to do anything with you. Everything.
Karl, that first night together I’d never felt so close to someone, so satisfied. We pleased each other in every way we could think of for hours (and in ways I’d never trusted anyone to try before) and even though we were strangers it felt like our bodies had known each other forever.
At some point, I was aware of time again. “Don’t you have to get to the airport?” I whispered.
“I’m not leaving you today,” you said, and disappeared beneath the covers again.
I bawled when you left three days later, despite our promises to see each other again soon—for a proper first date. I didn’t stop until I discovered you’d left me on my bedside table sticky notes inside the novel I’d been reading. In your surprisingly elegant handwriting were two lines from Andrew Marvell:
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
That was the man I fell in love with, the hopeless romantic who made me come in a public garden, who left my underwear in tatters on a park bench, who skipped his flight home to hole up in my apartment for three days.
The woman you fell in love with was wild and crazy and adventurous and ready to change the world with her prose.
I want us to be those people again. I want us to get back there.
Ever since I got on this plane an old Edna St. Vincent Millay poem has been rattling around in my head. You used to read it to me back in the days when we still read to one another before we fell asleep at night:
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.
Love,
Kate
Chapter Four
* * *
My fantasy of the Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok was nothing like the reality. In my ignorance of modern Thailand, I’d anticipated something exotic and chaotic. I didn’t expect a run-of-the-mill, sleek and modern international terminal that could have been in Denver or San Diego, complete with a gleaming Dean & DeLuca featuring plastic containers of organic hummus, wasabi peas, and sea salt kettle corn, the likes of which I could have purchased a few blocks away from my house. I’d traveled halfway around the world to experience something new, something different. I said a quiet screw-you to the individually wrapped black-and-white cookies, even as I purchased three of them.
I turned on my phone and waited for the network to switch to a local carrier, but the no-service indicator remained stubbornly lit up in the left corner of the screen. In the past few years I’d traveled with this phone to London, Berlin, and even Hong Kong on work trips with Karl and never had a problem with coverage. I wondered if I could buy a phone card. The last time I traveled alone people still bought phone cards. That’s how long it had been.
Because the McDonald’s in the food court promised free Wi-Fi with a purchase, I bought a large coffee and checked my e-mail, hoping for a response from Karl and an encouraging message nudging me along this journey from Nina. My new messages were mainly spam, a reminder from the girls’ school that parents should not, under any circumstance, send gluten-filled pastries for their children’s birthdays, and an e-mail from my colorist at Sally Hershberger asking if I needed an appointment the following week. Nothing from Karl or Nina.
It had been more than forty-eight hours since I’d slept, and the adrenaline of embarking on this adventure had faded, threatening to be replaced by exhaustion or worse—regret. I had to stay in motion, to forge ahead. When I saw Nina and this magical zen center I knew it would all fall into place. I had come this far. I just had to keep going.
I made my way to the car rental counter, selecting Hertz, where I knew we were Gold Plus members.
“May I help you madam?” the clerk asked me in perfect English.
“I want to rent a car?”
“Are you certain?”
I blinked through my exhaustion, confused as to why he would ask me that. Was it because I was a woman?
“I am certain.” I spoke slowly even though it was more than obvious that he could understand me.
He shook his head a little and smiled. “OK. It’s just that American drivers hate driving here. Where would you like to go? Will you be leaving Bangkok?”
“I will. I’m going north, toward the mountains.” I named the retreat center and pointed at a spot on the map that was encased beneath a thin sheet of fingerprint-smudged plastic on the counter. “I’m going here.”
“Oh, you do not want to rent a car then.” He shook his head with greater force.
“I do,” I insisted.
“It’s a terrible idea.”
Well, here was the worst rental car agent I’d ever met. I glanced left and right at the other rental car counters, all with long lines of impatient travelers. Maybe there was a reason this one had no line.
“Why? It’s a couple hundred miles. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
He ran his finger along the line I had just traced. “These roads are hardly even roads. Sometimes they turn into rivers. There are other roads, but you will never find them. Even if you knew which way to go it would take you seven, eight, maybe even as long as fourteen hours of driving. There will be no signal. No GPS. You do not want to rent a car.”
“Does your boss know you tell people not to rent cars?”
The agent smiled cheerfully.
“Of course. We do not want you to get lost and die. This is what we call excellent customer service.”
My first instinct was to reach for my phone and call Karl. I despised that instinct. I wished I could pinpoint the moment I became so dependent on my husband as a traveler. Before we met I had hitchhiked my way across Eastern Europe. I knew when to get in a car and when to pretend my gang of friends was just peeing in the bushes while we waited for a bus. And then I moved to Paris on my own and negotiated my own rent for a small attic room in th
e Marais that I could hardly afford on the pittance I made teaching English and waiting tables at the Au Coeur du Marais. I walked everywhere and fended off the advances of more than a few Frenchies who figured American girls were an easy lay. Self-sufficiency once came so naturally. I did not need to call Karl. And besides, why should he help me now when I had just flown thousands of miles away from him and our life together?
I decided to play the rental clerk’s game rather than head over to the Avis counter and see if they felt like renting me a vehicle.
“OK, then how should I get there?”
“My cousin will take you,” he replied matter-of-factly. “I can call him now.”
Skepticism must have trumped the exhaustion on my face.
“He is a taxi driver,” the clerk promised. “This is what he does. You will be safe, and he will give you a good price because you are my friend.”
“We just met,” I said.
“But we are already friends. Hold on while I text him.”
I wondered how much it would cost for a taxi to drive me seven, maybe fourteen hours to a tiny mountain village. I excused myself to find an ATM where I withdrew the local equivalent of five hundred dollars.
When I returned a nearly identical man wearing crisp jeans and a green polo shirt stood next to the clerk. He had closely cropped hair that reminded me of a marine and kind brown eyes.
“This is my cousin Kasem. His girlfriend lives in Chiang Mai, so he drives that way often. He knows the roads.”
“I would like to take you to the mountains,” Kasem said, his smile wide and eyes shiny like a new penny. “I have my taxi outside.”
“How much will it cost?”
“Four thousand.”
It took me a minute to access the Thai currency in my brain. It was the baht. I’d just seen it written on the screen of the ATM along with the exchange rate.
“It’s just over one hundred US dollars,” the clerk said helpfully.
With nothing more to go on than gut instinct, I appraised him. Nothing felt off or particularly rapey about the clerk’s cousin. We were standing at the Hertz counter, for Christ’s sake. I was carrying a paper bag filled with Dean & DeLuca cookies and charcuterie.
“Let me text my husband and tell him I will be driving with you,” I said. I reached for my phone and pretended to type a message and press send. “My husband always likes to know where I am.”
Well that was a giant lie!
I finished pretending to text then asked where he was parked.
“In the taxi kiosk. Where is your luggage?”
“This is it.” I pointed to my suitcase, which contained a pair of linen slacks, the wrap dress I had worn to the wedding, jeans, a button-down blouse, and a sweater, all of them worn and dirty from my days in Big Sur. I had no clean underwear. I’d wanted to buy some back at the airport in San Jose, but underwear is the one thing you can never purchase in an airport. Maybe I should mention that to Lois Delancey when I got home.
“How long are you staying?”
“Not long, maybe a week,” I said as he grabbed the suitcase’s handle from my hand and pulled it behind him. There was no reason to tell this stranger I hadn’t purchased a return ticket yet.
“Everyone says they are staying for a week. You’ll be here longer.”
“I really can’t. I have to get home.”
“You have a husband?”
“Yes. He’s meeting me. I texted him, remember.”
“He’ll want to stay too. It’s very beautiful where you’re going. You’ll fall in love all over again.”
“We’re still in love,” I insisted as Kasem popped the trunk of his car, saying it louder than necessary. As the Hertz clerk had promised, Kasem owned a proper taxi with official-looking Thai script on the side. I hadn’t expected it to be a bright Pepto pink. A bumper sticker declared in English HONK IF YOU LIKE TO HULA.
“We went to Waikiki two summers ago,” Kasem explained with a small shimmy of his hips.
“How long do you think the drive will take us?” I asked once I’d settled into the backseat.
“A couple of hours.”
“Your cousin said at least seven.” I tried to cover a yawn with my hand.
“A couple to get out of the city. It’s rush hour. If you’re sleepy you can nap.” Kasem sipped from a tall metal travel mug. I realized too late that I’d left my large McDonald’s coffee behind on the rental car counter.
“I’m fine.”
Soon we were in bumper-to-bumper traffic on a freeway outside of the airport. Motorbikes carrying three or more passengers, sometimes women clutching small children, even infants, whirred dangerously close to my window. I checked my phone for service as we got closer to the city, but I still had nothing. No matter how kind and legitimate my driver appeared I was determined to stay awake.
However, despite my best intentions, the soft humming of the motor combined with my physical and emotional exhaustion lulled my restless body into a deep sleep. When I woke I was surrounded by an enveloping blackness. I knew I was in a car, but it took a moment of catching up to realize I was in a taxicab hurtling into the northern mountains of Thailand.
“You snore.” The man in the driver’s seat laughed.
I ticked through the things I knew about the present moment. This man’s name was Kasem. We were driving to the Dawna mountains. I was in Thailand. I was going to visit Nina, a friend I’d only just reconnected with after twelve years. I had left my husband and daughters behind in the States.
I was fucking crazy. I once read a story about what happens to the synapses in the brain when a person has a mental breakdown. The mind tricks the patient into believing everything they’re doing is completely rational. Even though the breakdown is obvious to everyone around them, they believe they are completely sane.
“I’ve been told that before.” I squinted into the dark beyond the taxi. Karl reminded me of my snoring often, even after years of sharing a bed. Early on he’d recorded videos of me sleeping that he would play back for me as he told me I sounded like the most adorably constipated moose he’d ever heard.
“Where are we?” I asked Kasem.
“Not so much farther now. You slept ten hours.” My stomach grumbled and I cursed myself for finishing all of my airport snacks the second I got into the taxi.
The road beneath the tires was bumpy and I was suddenly grateful for Kasem. It would have been madness to drive this alone, with no idea where I was going. I’d wanted to be adventurous, but driving these roads would have been reckless. I’d forgotten there was often a fine line between the two.
“Your girlfriend lives in Chiang Mai.” I remembered this much from our introduction. “That must be hard, living so far away from one another.”
Kasem laughed. “It is wonderful.”
“Oh yeah?” I could smell my breath and tried to remember the last time I’d brushed my teeth.
“It gives us the chance to miss each other. I see her every other week. Time apart is a blessing. We have our own lives. Naw, my girlfriend, is very independent. We do our own things. When we come back together it is all brand-new all over again.”
“That must be nice. It will be harder if you ever have kids. To be apart so much.” This sounded uptight and preachy coming out of my mouth. I knew the words were meant to conceal my own guilt.
“We do have kids. We have two boys.”
“Oh?” I tried to hide my surprise.
He reached his arm back toward me and offered his phone to show me the smiling faces of two handsome boys. I guessed their ages at about five and seven, not too different from my girls.
“They live with your girlfriend?” I asked.
“And her mother and her sisters. My girlfriend works as a tour guide. She also does treks and takes visitors, mostly Germans and Danes and the Dutch across the border. She’s very adventurous. Like you.”
“I’m not very adventurous.” (Well, I used to be, I thought, the old me. But not anymor
e.)
“You’re here in Thailand on your own.”
“My husband is meeting me.” Why was I bothering to maintain the charade?
“OK,” Kasem said. He didn’t need to tell me he knew I was lying. “I will write down Naw’s number and her e-mail in case you need a guide. She can come down to you. She is very reliable.”
“I’m only staying a week,” I said.
“Just in case,” Kasem insisted.
Suddenly Kasem slammed on the brakes, thrusting my head forward into the driver’s-side headrest.
“Fuck!” I rubbed my forehead. I hadn’t said the word fuck out loud since Isabel was a toddler and began parroting everything we said.
Kasem shifted the car into park right there in the middle of the road and twisted his head around to look at me with a mix of panic and concern. “I’m sorry! You OK? Are you hurt?”
I rubbed my head, expecting to find a cut, to feel blood, but there was just a sore spot. “I’m fine. What the hell is happening?”
“It won’t be long.”
When I peered through the windshield I expected to see the red taillights of another car. Instead I glimpsed dark shapes shifting slowly in and out of our headlights.
“It’s just the elephants.” Kasem sat patiently and began to peck at his phone. “They see me. They see the lights. We are safe. They won’t charge. This is why it’s bad for Americans to drive alone. Two tourists killed this year. They didn’t know to slow down and just watch.”
“What happened to the elephant the tourists hit?” Now that I knew what I was seeing I could make out each individual giant shape lumbering in front of us, silhouettes of legs and trunks and ears.
Kasem laughed again. “The elephant is always fine. It is like a fly running into a human.”
“Are you sure we don’t need to worry about them stepping on us?”
“They’re smarter than we are.”
I wanted to lean out the window and record a video for the girls. It was the way I processed most of the world these days, finding ways to give my own experiences to my daughters. But I didn’t pick up my phone. Instead I sat frozen and just stared, admiring the giant beasts a few feet from the car. It was humbling and majestic. This is why I came, I thought. To experience this, to see things that were both new and awe-inspiring, to feel real emotions about something other than my children. The sight loosened the tension I’d been holding inside me. I felt free and unburdened.
Marriage Vacation Page 7