All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [3]
After dinner, we go back to the hotel and snuggle together like contented old friends.
“Buenas noches,” I tell him, and he is already snoozing.
I can’t sleep. The moon is peeking through the wooden window frame, and I wonder about my wishes for romance and adventure. This man I have loved, off and on, is leaving tomorrow, and, as usual, I don’t know when or whether I’ll see him again. The men in my life are always like the countries I visit: I fall in love briefly and then move on. I visit, regard the wonders, delve into the history, taste the cooking, peer into dark corners, feel a few moments of excitement and maybe ecstasy and bliss, and then, though I am often sad to leave—or stung that no one insists that I stay—I am on my way.
Here on a sultry night in a foreign country, with a man sleeping next to me, casually throwing his skinny leg over my soft one, I realize I don’t have someone whom I can call home. I wonder if it’s possible to have everything I wished for on my fortieth birthday: adventure and romance, wanderlust and just plain lust.
I turn in the bed. Actually, it isn’t exactly romance and lust that I wish for. Finding a fascinating and attractive man on the road, going from being perfect strangers to holding hands, sharing stories and bites of dessert, gazing into each other’s eyes over dinner, and then stopping for a moment to stare at each other again in bed—that’s romance, that’s lust. That’s exciting and wonderful, but it’s all too brief, like a vacation. Of course, you can travel the world and find romance. What’s more elusive is real companionship, someone who’s always making the same dent on his side of the bed, who knows how you like your coffee in the morning. It’s much harder to find comfort and stability, to be held, to be secure in the knowledge that someone is taking care of you and even—old-fashioned as it sounds—protecting you.
You can’t grow old with someone if you’re always off searching for new experiences. And I’m not getting any younger.
I roll over again, facing the Professor, who echoes my disturbance with a few deep, skidding snores. I’m restless and agitated. I face the Professor and then turn toward the wall; I don’t feel comfortable anywhere. My desires—to be free and to belong, to be independent and to be inextricably loved, to be in motion and to be still—pull me back and forth. The Professor sleeps soundly while I wrestle with the two sides of myself until I am worn out and the moonlight dims, replaced by the cool light of dawn.
Home from Oaxaca, I drop my bags in my San Francisco flat and suddenly everything seems urgent—sorting the mail, straightening the house, finding a man, having a kid.
For four years I’ve tabled the issue of settling down by having an affair with a romantic Frenchman who was available only for jaunts to Italian islands, British art museums, or Moroccan medinas, not for buying groceries or paying the gas bill. At the time, that suited me fine: he brought me back to myself after a painful divorce, made me feel desired again, and helped me experience the simple pleasures of the sunset, the sea, grilled calamari, reading on a hammock with someone, a midnight swim. He took care of me when we were together, and even apart, he let me know that someone on the other side of the world was always thinking of me. But now he, of all people, has settled down, leaving me—at forty—with only my independence for company, along with more wrinkles and severely decreased chances of fertility.
I suppose I knew all along that having a part-time international lover was a temporary solution. You can’t go on buying plane tickets forever, treating your life at home as if it’s dead time between vacations, always living in anticipation of being with somebody somewhere else. At a certain point you want to wake up with your head on your own pillow and have that somebody be snoozing right next to you.
That’s what I always assumed would happen, anyway, and it