All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [4]
That relationship ended during that odd phase women have in their early thirties when they think they have no time left but all the time in the world: I wanted to get married and have a child right away, yet, when Leo was more than ambivalent—my frustration pushed him further away—I also thought I still had plenty of years to run into someone even more exciting to settle down with. I believed that the balance of exotic travel and cozy home life I found living with Leo would always be easy to find. And though there’s little I regret about our relationship or breakup—we had a wonderful four years, parted amicably for good reasons, and always wish each other well—I only now appreciate that whatever else we had together, that balance was rare.
No sooner had Leo and I contemplated splitting up than I was off with another man, who dazzled me with his wit, intelligence, and brilliant smile. He was smitten, lavishing attention on me like a spotlight illuminating my best self. The fact that I loved to travel seemed to make me all that much more fascinating to him; my Italian friend Lucia couldn’t understand how we could love each other and be apart for an entire month while I studied in Florence, yet he seemed more ardent than ever when I returned, speaking better Italian. But when we set off into marriage, a journey for life, I didn’t realize he had a return ticket hidden in his back pocket. It turned out that all the qualities that had initially attracted him—my exuberance, my independence—were exactly the things, in the end, he admitted, that he’d wanted to extinguish. Then he turned that spotlight of his, that projection, onto someone else, someone he’d grown up with, who felt more like home to him.
Now I’ve been divorced for about four years, and it takes a good couple of years to get over losing the guy you thought you’d be holding hands with through old age and to rouse yourself from a crushing depression when you never thought you were the kind of person who could be depressed in the first place. Being with the Professor during that difficult time was like having a luxury liner float me over choppy seas, all the while sitting up on deck in lounge chairs drinking wine and watching the stars, impervious to the waves, then landing safely on the other shore.
But now on the other side is forty, the most foreign place I’ve ever visited, and suddenly I’m all by myself. They take your passport at the gate, confront you with a clipboard, and ask, “Where is your husband?” and “When, by the way, are you going to have kids?”
Consult the map. Get your bearings. I manage to change money, catch the bus, find a meal and a pensione by nightfall in most foreign countries. How hard can it be, finding a husband, a house, a family at forty? You just have to set out in the right direction. Who knows: for all the bleak wilderness here I might stumble across something unexpected and delightful, something I didn’t even know I was looking