All Over the Map - Laura Fraser [52]
I tell her I’ve dated a couple of people since then, cautiously, the most successful being Matthew, a psychologist I liked for his bright orange cashmere sweater and goofy smile, but wasn’t attracted to right away. He is a gentleman, well traveled, well read, and funny, full of stories, so I relaxed and told him we should be friends. We went out every few weeks for dinner, having a great time, swapping travel tales, drinking French wine, until one evening he held my hand and it startled me so much I hailed a cab, jumped in, and barely waved good-bye. It wasn’t until he took me to a Patti Smith concert—something akin to a spiritual experience for me—that we danced closely and then actually kissed.
For the next few months, I enjoyed being with someone eccentric and adventuresome; we drove down the coast to ride the roller coaster in Santa Cruz and then up to Napa to eat the season’s best peaches. We sped through the curves up Mount Tamalpais at night in a convertible and walked barefoot on Stinson Beach. Then we decided on the spur of the moment to go together to Asia, where I had never been.
Matthew promised that the trip would involve cocktails at a resort by the beach in Thailand. He is such a great traveler, always off to Egypt, a beach village in Mexico, or some other remote, steaming place, that I told him to go ahead and make all the plans. I was frantically finishing up a big project and thought it would be an interesting experiment to have Matthew take care of everything, including me.
But when we landed in northernmost Malaysia, after a cramped and sweaty night on the Jungle Express from Singapore, one stop after all the locals keep motioning us to get out of the train, we found ourselves in a seriously Muslim neighborhood where Americans, particularly a guy with Howard Stern hair and a woman whose only head covering was a hoodie, were not particularly welcome. I no longer felt so protected. Our trip over the border by boat into southern Thailand had a similarly bad vibe, which got worse when we found a ride in the back of a pickup truck and the police stopped us, with great fanfare, to force one guy out, slap him around, and throw him into the back of their van. When we made it into town, it turned out that not only had Matthew, as eccentric and endearing as he is, not made reservations at a resort, it was hurricane season. Muslims and monsoons: no cocktails on the beach.
We spent a couple of days wandering around Narathiwat, with no other tourists in sight, me huddled under my hoodie. There was a time when I might have found that kind of travel exhilarating, but on that trip I felt fearful and exposed. We made the best of the situation, sampling exceptional street food, visiting a giant golden Buddha, but the atmosphere was vaguely menacing and I was happy to return to Singapore. As cities go, Singapore has amazing street food, a colorful Indian section, and some nice orchids, but otherwise it resembles a giant mall from which you cannot escape.
Our romance did not survive the long flight back to San Francisco, and we took separate taxis home. Three weeks later, when I read about extremists burning secular schools in Narathiwat and people killed, I e-mailed Matthew to tell him what danger we’d been in. “So what?” he e-mailed back. “The Twin Towers were safe on September 10th.”
Kathy stops midhike, turns around in the trail, and crosses her arms. “Laura,” she says, “you need someone who can take better care of you. Especially after what happened. There’s no shame in wanting to feel protected; we all need that.”
“I know,” I tell Kathy. I’m not sure I should tell her about my other short-term relationship. “I actually did date someone else who wanted to take care of me, but it was kind of the wrong way.”
Since this is a ten-mile hike, I launch into the story about the artist I met on a trip back from Switzerland, in the Frankfurt airport, browsing in the duty-free shop. The scruffy short man in a photographer’s vest chatted with me, and since he had a seven-hour layover, I invited him