No baggage, p.1
No Baggage, page 1
© 2016 by Clara Bensen
Published by Running Press,
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015945197
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-5725-0
987654321
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
Designed by Frances J. Soo Ping Chow
Edited by Jennifer Kasius
Cover illustration by Anna Morrison
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To my best boy.
May the wonders never cease.
Contents
CHAPTER 1 | Weightless
CHAPTER 2 | Now We Wander
CHAPTER 3 | Sunbeams and Snapping Jaws
CHAPTER 4 | The Space Between Us
CHAPTER 5 | Pink Ring
CHAPTER 6 | The Oak Tree
CHAPTER 7 | Greek Expectations
CHAPTER 8 | Wanted! The Outlaws
CHAPTER 9 | Know Thyself
CHAPTER 10 | The Long Bus
CHAPTER 11 | The Road To Sarajevo
CHAPTER 12 | A Problem Like Maria
CHAPTER 13 | Yin Yang
CHAPTER 14 | Ethereal Gain
CHAPTER 15 | The Middle Ages
CHAPTER 16 | It Is Not Certain
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 | Weightless
“So, do you actually know this guy you’re taking off with?”
Jaime looked at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes were hidden behind his dark sunglasses, but I could tell he was teasing. The “guy” I was taking off with was his old college roommate, Jeff, who was sitting right next to him in the front passenger seat of the Volvo station wagon. The three of us were winding through the cement maze of Houston morning traffic on the way to George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where Jeff and I were scheduled for a flight.
“Jaime, no,” said Jeff. He said it with a half smile, like a reprimanding mother trying to hide her amusement over a childish misdeed.
“Just saying,” continued Jaime, “that as one of the few people who’s had the ‘pleasure’ of traveling abroad with you, I think she deserves to know what she’s getting into.” He took a hand off the steering wheel, grinned, elbowed Jeff, and then returned to my reflection in the rearview mirror, waiting for an answer. Do you actually know this guy?
I didn’t know how to answer the question. I evaded instead. “Is there anything I should know?”
“How many hours do you have?” joked Jaime. “I bet he ‘forgot’ to mention the time he ripped the saline IV out of his arm and jail-broke out of that hospital in Paris. It was the morning after Bastille Day. Jesus, he was running down the hallway in one of those little paper gowns. You know—the kind where you can see the ass? Didn’t even stop to put on clothes, just barreled out the door and booked it right out of France.”
“Jaime, no!” yelled Jeff, with pretend horror. “That was twenty years ago. Our balls had barely dropped.”
“I don’t know, man,” said Jaime, shrugging his shoulders. “Let’s just say my rosary is going to get a workout during the next three weeks.”
I sat in the backseat, running my fingers along the embroidered hem of my dress. Out toward the horizon, past the half-built subdivisions and empty cement lots, I could see a line of tiny planes lifting off into the smoggy morning sunrise. We were getting close. In a few hours my plane—our plane—would be taxiing onto the runway. It was a fair question: did I actually know the man who would be sitting beside me as the wheels lifted off the tarmac?
Yes. And no.
I knew Jeff was a science professor and a sixth-generation Texan with a wild glint in his eye. I knew I’d thought, “Oh, you again,” when I met him for the first time, like I’d just bumped into an old friend. I knew our relationship had escalated into a flashing, tilt-a-whirl circus after a single round of tequila. I knew he liked chocolate with flecks of sea salt. I knew that he’d been married six years and separated for two, that he had a five-year-old daughter with bright, brown eyes, and that he chased the unconventional life like a migratory bird flying north for winter instead of south. I knew he was a sparkling provocateur, but Tupac’s “Dear Mama” made him cry and he occasionally stopped the car to gently lift dead cats from the road and deposit them under bushes—a tender-hearted joker, if there was such a thing.
But did I truly know him? I had no earthly idea. How well can you know someone you just met online?
Maybe time and circumstance didn’t matter so much in this story. In the handful of weeks since our first irreverent online dating emails—batted back and forth like tennis balls—Jeff had managed to penetrate my formidable wall of reserve. A rare feat. After a week, I agreed to meet him in person. Our first date was more like a reunion than an introduction.
Given our stark differences, the connection was surprising. I spent the first thirteen years of my life in rainy Portland, Oregon. There were seven of us: my parents, my three sisters, my brother, and me. We lived in a 100-year-old, one-bathroom Victorian house on Tillamook Street, named after an indigenous tribe in the Pacific Northwest. My parents chose to homeschool us, partially out of concern over our quality of education and partially out of a deep religious conviction. (I genuinely imagined the local middle school as a den of iniquity littered with condoms and needles.) My mother was devout, but she ensured that all five of us were well educated and socially competent. We bore no resemblance to the breed of Christian homeschoolers who were clad in long skirts and denim and forbidden to date or dance. The summer that the Twin Towers fell, we moved to Fort Worth, Texas. I came of age in Cowtown, where a storm could turn the sky boiled spinach green and snakes rattled in the grass. People loved football (almost) as much as Jesus.
In contrast, Jeff had always been a Texas boy. He and his three sisters grew up four hours to the south in Houston and San Antonio. He spent summers fishing and hunting for Apache arrowheads on the Hill Country farm where his great-great- grandparents built a split log cabin. In college, during his more conservative days at Texas A&M, he was a card-carrying, tobacco-chewing Young Republican who could tear up the country dance floor.
His personality was like Texas. Larger than life. As a kid, he confided to his doctor that his secret fear was not tarantulas or kidnappers, but spontaneous combustion (like the drummer from Spinal Tap who vanished in a cloud of smoke after a particularly epic drum solo). He was a live conduit, electrifying to everyone he met. (And he’d met a lot of people.) He delighted in sudden intimacy, adventure, spectacle, and flashy colored prints.
Subtle was not in Jeff’s vocabulary, though it was a go-to in mine. All members of my family were dyed-in-the-wool introverts (myself included). If he was the torrid, restless yang, I was the sensitive, introspective yin. For every pair of Jeff’s brightly shaded chinos and lightning-spangled socks, I had a cardigan in heather-gray or cream. My houseplant-to-friend ratio was 10 to 1. I could happily go an entire day without uttering a syllable.
A few weeks into our nascent romance, we took a personality test confirming my suspicion that we had diametrically opposed personality types: he was an alpha go-getter who could charm a gate off its hinges while I was a quiet dreamer who could listen to all thirty-three hours of James Michener’s Poland on cassette tape without dozing off.
At times, people mistakenly interpret my introversion as haughtiness. But Jeff was different. From the first date he made it clear that he was in holy awe of my capacity to sit still and reflect. He treated my penchant for silence as one might treat an alien species under care-ful observation.
“Just curious. How many words did you speak out loud today?” he asked a week after we met. We were sipping pints in a dim Austin bar.
“Before this beer? I guess I ordered a coffee from the barista this morning,” I said, counting on my fingers. “So, five?”
He shook his head in wonderment and jotted a few anthropological field notes in the little notebook he always kept in his pocket. “And how many words went through this?” He tapped my head with a wicked smile.
“Enough to make me wish there was an off switch,” which had always been true.
We were sun and moon, but it didn’t matter on the night we met: 7:52 p.m. on April 5, 2013—the exact moment of sunset, though I didn’t realize it when he texted me this exact meeting time, a pair of coordinates (30.2747° N, 97.9406° W), and a reference picture of a clay star crudely baked into a block of cement. Meet me on the star, he wrote. It was a plain-looking star with five ter ra-cotta tips revolving around a bright blue square with a crack down the middle. The plainness was deceptive. When I typed in the coordinates, they revealed the terra-cotta star inlaid right in front of the most ostentatious building in the entire Austin skyline—the Texas State Capitol.
At 7:20 p.m., I checked my lipstick, practiced what I hoped was a seductive smile, and walked out the front door of my one-room studio. The pink-granite dome of the Texas State Capitol was typically a thirty-minute walk, but that night I covered it in twenty. I moved in long, brisk strides down the sidewalk—an attempt to shake off nerves. I wasn’t nervous about the usual things one might worry about when meeting an online suitor—that Jeff would turn out to be a balding C++ programmer, or secretly married with a dozen kids, or really into latex, or the proud owner of every Beanie Baby model since 1993. I was nervous because I had the impression that some interplanetary body was barreling toward the Capitol, preparing to sweep me into its orbit.
I reached the star before Jeff did. He didn’t appear until dusk, when the streetlights along Congress Street flickered to life. I saw him then—a pair of canary yellow pants winding their way toward the front steps of the dome where I was waiting. He walked right up to the star and boldly kissed me on the cheek. That’s where it started, in a small world that contained everything within itself: long canary pants, a terra-cotta star, the perfect arc of the dome, and above it all, the last streaks of the April sun.
. . .
We were inseparable after that night, though there was never any formal arrangement. Both of us agreed that, at this stage of the game, defining our romance was passé and unnecessary. It was all very modern.
He taught environmental science at the University of Texas at Brownsville, five hours to the south on the Mexican border, but he was applying for a new position in Austin and drove up or took the Greyhound whenever he could. On the weekends, we’d lie in my bed and compose far-fetched stories. We’d guess the ways our paths had crossed in other bodies and eras. Maybe he was the calico cat that once purred in my lap. Maybe he robbed my stagecoach on the road to Flagstaff. Maybe we warmed our hands at the same fire on a frigid night on the Mongolian steppe. Maybe one day we’d fly a starship across the universe divide, like that old Highwayman song.
OkCupid, the online dating site where we met, has a black-box algorithm that seemed to support our chemistry (at least in this lifetime). Our online profiles had been assigned a generous 99-percent compatibility rating (though for all I knew, the metric was generated in a cauldron of rose petals and blond locks of cherub hair). Sound or not, the number gave me an extra hit of confidence when, after just a month, we found ourselves sitting at my kitchen table in a state of morning undress, apprehensively eyeing my laptop screen. We were one click away from reserving two one-way tickets to Istanbul and a pair of return tickets from London.
The trip was his idea. He was already planning on traveling from Istanbul to London for his annual summer trip, but over the last week his “I’m going to Istanbul” had evolved into “we’re going to Istanbul.” That’s how we ended up hunched over my table, daring ourselves to hit the purchase button.
“This could be a huge mistake,” I said.
“Running off with some guy you just met online? What’s the worst that could happen?” he said, slipping his hand around my waist like an old habit.
We laughed and hit the button.
At the time, it didn’t seem unreasonably reckless to travel to the opposite side of the world after a month of dating—risky, maybe, but not reckless. Jeff was one of those rare figures who simply appeared and assumed his place, as if the bond had always been there and he was just confirming it with his corporeal form. We could skip the intros and get on with the adventure.
On the other hand, even if we had perished together on an eighteenth-century schooner, there were still practical details that had to be worked out. There were histories to exchange and timelines to establish: family trees, past lovers, old wounds, long-held quirks, the source of the jagged scar on his lower back, the origin of my crooked smile. We needed to catch up on our current incarnations.
One thing was guaranteed: the road would pry the stories out of us. Travel, with all of its glorious disorientation, shifting time zones, foreign skylines, and incomprehensible exchanges, had a way of wearing people down to their raw, messy (sometimes drunk, sometimes sick) under-layers. If Jeff had Parisian hospital escapades lurking in his past, I had my own trunk of secrets waiting to spill out in the open. Jaime should have also quizzed Jeff on how well he knew me.
. . .
“I have a minor mental crisis on my record,” I’d confessed in an early OkCupid correspondence with Jeff. It was a low-key mention, carefully dropped in a stream of brazen flirting. “Sounds interesting,” he said. I hadn’t been particularly forthcoming on the finer details—like how deeply I had tumbled down the rabbit hole after college graduation or how very recently I had climbed back out of it.
When we booked the tickets, I didn’t mention that the trip to Istanbul was the first major flight I’d been stable enough to board in years. I said nothing about how radical it was just to leave the confines of my studio. He didn’t know that I was still registering the reality of a recovery I never expected to reach, that the trip to Istanbul was an expression of a new, insatiable hunger for the world beyond my door.
Only a ravenous woman would agree to the sort of summer trip Jeff casually described in his third OkCupid email (long before he knew my last name or if I actually looked like the solemn, crooked-mouth girl in my profile picture). He didn’t do luxury summer vacations. There were no resort packages or palm-thatched cabanas on white sandy beaches. He flew into one country and out of another with zero hotels, zero reservations, and zero itineraries between Airport A and Airport B. In my eyes, the fly-by-night style was adventure enough, but for Jeff it was just the beginning. He typically boarded the plane with nothing but a credit card, iPhone charger, and passport stuffed into his back pocket. What would happen after that was anyone’s guess—that was the thrill.
Wandering the world with no baggage was one of the more radical pitches that popped into my OkCupid inbox (in the running with so many BDSM sex invitations and marriage proposals), but I didn’t dismiss it right out of hand. I’d taken my post-recovery mantra from the poet Rilke’s Book of Hours. “Let everything happen to you,” he wrote. “Beauty and terror.”
In the initial four weeks of definition-free dating, Jeff and I had accounted for beauty with weekend drives through the wildflower carpets of the Texas Hill Country and long, desultory walks down the back alleys of Austin. Terror was crossed off the list the day Jeff officially asked me to come along on his baggage-less jaunt. The proposal came without warning as we were crossing the Congress Street Bridge. I was studying the red and yellow kayaks scattered across Lady Bird Lake like candy sprinkles when he suddenly announced, “I wasn’t joking about the trip. You should come with me.”
I stopped breathing when he said the words. Jeff had been traveling since 1996, and of the seventy countries stamps in his passport, he’d stepped foot in sixty of them by himself, with no companions. He prized his freedom of movement like a Tea Party Republican prizes the constitutional right to bear arms. Leaving backpacks and suitcases behind was shocking, but it was even more shocking that he’d asked me to come along at all.
The intensity of his request reminded me of the scene in Love In the Time of Cholera when Florentino Ariza proposes to the love of his life, Fermina Daza. Fermina, wracked with uncertainty, goes to her Aunt Escolástica, who passionately advises her, “Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.”
I had plenty of reasons to say no. I hardly knew Jeff. My income constantly flirted with the poverty line. I was still tending to my fledgling sanity. And yet the words flew out of my mouth and into the warm lake air as if they had wings of their own, “Yes. I’m in.” It was an instinctual, physical “yes”—a bone level, gut-guided judgment that preceded the speed of thought. I was getting on that plane. Even if I was sorry later.
