In response, she stomped off to the airport and immediately tried to sell her husband’s plane ticket back home to a perfect stranger.
They worked it out in the end, happily. Decades later, this makes for an amusing dinner-party anecdote, but it’s a cautionary tale, too: You kind of don’t want to let things get to that point. So I gave Felipe’s hand a small squeeze and said, “Quando casar passa,” which is a sweet Brazilian expression meaning “When you get married, this will pass.” This is a phrase Felipe’s mother used to say to him as a child whenever he fell down and scraped his knee. It’s a small, silly, maternal murmur of comfort. Felipe and I had been saying this phrase to each other a lot lately. In our case, it was largely true: When we finally got married, a lot of these troubles would pass.
He put his arm around me and pulled me close. I relaxed into his chest. Or as much as I possibly could relax, given the slamming momentum of the bus.
He was a good man, in the end.
He was basically a good man anyhow.
No, he was good. He is good.
“What should we do in the meanwhile?” he asked.
Prior to this conversation, my instinct had been to keep us moving at a fast clip from one new place to another with the hope that fresh vistas would distract us from our legal troubles. This sort of strategy had always worked for me in the past anyhow. Like a fussy baby who can fall asleep only in a moving car, I have always been comforted by the tempo of travel. I’d always assumed that Felipe operated on the same principle, since he is the most widely traveled person I’ve ever met. But he didn’t seem to be enjoying any of this drifting.
For one thing-though I often forget it-the man is seventeen years older than I am. So we must excuse him if he was feeling moderately less excited than I was about the notion of living out of a small backpack for an indeterminate period of time, carrying only one change of clothing and sleeping in eighteen-dollar hotel rooms. It was clearly taking a toll on him. Also, he’d already seen the world. He’d already seen great huge swaths of the damn thing and had been traveling through Asia on third-class trains back when I was in the second grade. Why was I making him do it again?
What’s more, the last few months had brought to my attention an important incompatibility between us-one that I’d never noticed before. For a pair of lifelong travelers, Felipe and I actually travel very differently. The reality about Felipe, as I was gradually realizing, is that he’s both the best traveler I’ve ever met and by far the worst. He hates strange bathrooms and dirty restaurants and uncomfortable trains and foreign beds-all of which pretty much define the act of traveling. Given a choice, he will always select a lifestyle of routine, familiarity, and reassuringly boring everyday practices. All of which might make you assume the man is not fit to be a traveler at all. But you would be wrong to assume that, for here is Felipe’s traveling gift, his superpower, the secret weapon that renders him peerless: He can create a familiar habitat of reassuringly boring everyday practices for himself anyplace, if you just let him stay in one spot. He can assimilate absolutely anywhere on the planet in the space of about three days, and then he’s capable of staying put in that place for the next decade or so without complaint.
This is why Felipe has been able to live all over the world. Not merely travel, but live. Over the years, he has folded himself into societies from South America to Europe, from the Middle East to the South Pacific. He arrives somewhere utterly new, decides he likes the place, moves right in, learns the language, and instantly becomes a local. It had taken Felipe less than a week of living with me in Knoxville, for instance, to locate his favorite breakfast cafe, his favorite bartender, and his favorite place for lunch. (”Darling!” he’d said one day, terribly excited after a solo foray into downtown Knoxville. “Did you know that they have the most wonderful and inexpensive fish restaurant here called John Long Slivers?”) He would’ve happily stayed in Knoxville indefinitely if I’d wanted us to. He had no trouble with the idea of living in that hotel room for many years to come-as long as we could just stay in one place.
All of which reminds me of a story that Felipe told me once about his childhood. When he was a small boy in Brazil, he used to get scared sometimes in the middle of the night by some nightmare or imagined monster, and each time he would scamper across the room and climb into the bed of his wonderful sister Lily-who was ten years older, and therefore embodied all human wisdom and security. He would tap on Lily’s shoulder and whisper, “Me da um cantinho”-“Give me a little corner.” Sleepily, never protesting, she would move over and open up a warm spot on the bed for him. It wasn’t much to ask for; just one little warm corner. For all the years that I have known this man, I have never heard him ask for much more than that.
I’m not like that, though.
Whereas Felipe can find a corner anywhere in the world and settle down for good, I can’t. I’m much more restless than he is. My restlessness makes me a far better day-to-day traveler than he will ever be. I am infinitely curious and almost infinitely patient with mishaps, discomforts, and minor disasters. So I can go anywhere on the planet-that’s not a problem. The problem is that I just can’t live anywhere on the planet. I’d realized this only a few weeks earlier, back in northern Laos, when Felipe had woken up one lovely morning in Luang Prabang and said, “Darling, let’s stay here.”
“Sure,” I’d said. “We can stay here for a few more days if you want.”
“No, I mean let’s move here. Let’s forget about me immigrating to America. It’s too much trouble! This is a wonderful town. I like the feeling of it. It reminds me of Brazil thirty years ago. It wouldn’t take much money or effort for us to run a little hotel or a shop here, rent an apartment, settle in…”
In reaction, I had only blanched.
He was serious. He would just do that. He would just up and move to northern Laos indefinitely and build a new life there. But I can’t. What Felipe was proposing was travel at a level I could not reach-travel that wasn’t even really travel anymore, but rather a willingness to be ingested indefinitely by an unfamiliar place. I wasn’t up for it. My traveling, as I understood then for the first time, was far more dilettantish than I had ever realized. As much as I love snacking on the world, when it comes time to settle down-to really settle down-I wanted to live at home, in my own country, in my own language, near my own family, and in the company of people who think and believe the same things that I think and believe. This basically limits me to a small region of Planet Earth consisting of southern New York State, the more rural sections of central New Jersey, northwestern Connecticut, and bits of eastern Pennsylvania. Quite the scanty habitat for a bird who claims to be migratory. Felipe, on the other hand-my flying fish-has no such domestic limitations. A small bucket of water anywhere in the world will do him just fine.
Realizing all this also helped me put Felipe’s recent irritability in better perspective. He was going through all this trouble-all the uncertainty and humiliation of the American immigration process-purely on my behalf, enduring a completely invasive legal proceeding when he’d just as soon be setting up a newer and much easier life in a freshly rented little apartment in Luang Prabang. Moreover, in the meantime, he was tolerating all this jittery traveling from place to place-a process he does not remotely enjoy-because he sensed that I wanted it. Why was I putting him through this? Why would I not let the man rest, anywhere?
So I changed the plan.
“Why don’t we just go somewhere for a few months and stay there until you get called back to Australia for your immigration interview,” I suggested. “Let’s just go to Bangkok.”
“No,” he said. “Not Bangkok. We’ll lose our minds living in Bangkok.”