“What is it?”
You sighed. “I don’t know how you do it.” As I nestled back to bask in another paean to my amazing adventurousness and courage, you must have sensed my mistake, for you added hastily, “Leave. Leave all the time for so long. Leave me.”
“But I don’t like to.”
“I wonder.”
“Franklin, I didn’t contrive my company to escape your clutches. Don’t forget, it predates you.”
“Oh, I could hardly forget that.”
“It’s my job!”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
I sat up. “Are you—”
“I’m not.” You pressed me gently back down; this was not going as you planned, and you had, I could tell, planned it. You rolled over to place your elbows on either side of me and touched your forehead, briefly, to mine. “I’m not trying to take your series away. I know how much it means to you. That’s the trouble. The other way around, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get up tomorrow to fly to Madrid and try to discourage you from meeting me at the airport three weeks later. Maybe once or twice. Not over and over.”
“You could if you had to.”
“Eva. You know and I know. You don’t have to.”
I twisted. You were so close up; I felt hot, and, between your elbows, caged. “We’ve been through this—”
“Not often. Your travel guides are a runaway success. You could hire college students to do all the grubbing around in flophouses that you do yourself. They already do most of your research, don’t they?”
I was vexed; I’d been through this. “If I don’t keep tabs on them, they cheat. They say they’ve confirmed that a listing is still good, and don’t bother and go get slammed. Later it turns out the B&B has changed hands and is riddled with lice, or it’s moved to a new location. I get complaints from cross-country cyclists who have ridden a hundred miles to find an insurance office instead of a hard-earned bed. They’re furious, as they should be. And without the boss lady looking over their shoulder, some of those students will take kickbacks. AWAP’s most valuable asset is its reputation—”
“You could hire someone else to do spot checks, too. So you’re going to Madrid tomorrow because you want to. There’s nothing awful about that except that I wouldn’t, and I couldn’t. You know that when you’re gone I think about you all the time? On the hour I think about what you’re eating, who you’re meeting—”
“But I think about you, too!”
You laughed, and the chuckle was congenial; you weren’t trying to pick a fight. You released me, rolling onto your back. “Horseshit, Eva. You think about whether the falafel stand on the corner will last through the next update, and how to describe the color of the sky. Fine. But in that case, you must feel differently about me than I do about you. That’s all I’m getting at.”
“Are you seriously claiming that I don’t love you as much?”
“You don’t love me in the same way. It has nothing to do with degree. There’s something—you save out,” you groped. “Maybe I envy that. It’s like a reserve tank or something. You walk out of here, and this other source kicks in. You putter around Europe, or Malaysia, until it finally runs low and you come home.”
Yet in truth what you had described was closer to my pre-Franklin self. I was once an efficient little unit, like one of those travel toothbrushes that folds into a box. I know I tend to over-romanticize those times, though in the early days especially I had a fire under me. I was a kid, really. I’d initially gotten the idea for Wing and a Prayer halfway through my own first trip to Europe, for which I’d brought way too little cash. This notion of a bohemian travel guide gave me a sense of purpose in what was otherwise disintegrating into one long cup of coffee, and from then on I went everywhere with a tattered notebook, recording rates for single rooms, whether they had hot water or the staff spoke any English or the toilets backed up.
It’s easy to forget, now that AWAP has attracted so much competition, but in the mid-sixties globe-trotters were pretty much at the mercy of The Blue Guide, whose target audience was middle-aged and middle class. In 1966, when the first edition of Western Europe on a Wing and a Prayer went into a second printing almost overnight, I realized that I was onto something. I like to portray myself as shrewd, but we both know I was lucky. I couldn’t have anticipated the backpacking craze, and I wasn’t enough of an amateur demographer to have taken deliberate advantage of all those restless baby boomers coming of age at once, all on Daddy’s dime in an era of prosperity, but all optimistic about how far a few hundred dollars would take them in Italy and desperate for advice on how to make a trip Dad never wanted them to take in the first place last as long as possible. I mostly reasoned that the next explorer after me would be scared, the way I was scared, and nervous of being taken, the way I was sometimes taken, and if I was willing to get the food poisoning first I could make sure that at least our novice wayfarer didn’t stay up heaving on that first electric night overseas. I don’t mean that I was benevolent, only that I wrote the guide that I wished I’d been able to use myself.
You’re rolling your eyes. This lore is shopworn, and maybe it’s inevitable that the very things that first attract you to someone are the same things with which you later grow irritated. Bear with me.
You know that I was always horrified by the prospect of turning out like my mother. Funny, Giles and I only learned the term “agoraphobic” in our thirties, and I’ve always been perplexed by its strict definition, which I’ve looked up more than once: “fear of open or public spaces.” Not, from what I could tell, an apt description of her complaint. My mother wasn’t afraid of football stadiums, she was afraid to leave the house, and I got the impression she was just as panicked by enclosed spaces as by open ones, so long as the enclosed space did not happen to be 137 Enderby Avenue in Racine, Wisconsin. But there doesn’t seem to be a word for that (Enderbyphilia?), and at least when I refer to my mother as agoraphobic, people seem to understand that she orders in.
Jesus that’s ironic, I’ve heard more times than I can count. With all the places you’ve been? Other people savor the symmetry of apparent opposites.
But let me be candid. I am much like my mother. Maybe it’s because as a child I was always running errands for which I was too young and that therefore daunted me; I was sent out to locate new gaskets for the kitchen sink when I was eight years old. In pushing me to be her emissary while I was still so small, my mother managed to reproduce in me the same disproportionate anguish about minor interactions with the outside world that she herself felt at thirty-two.
I can’t recall a single trip abroad that, up against it, I have truly wanted to take, that I haven’t in some way dreaded and wanted desperately to get out of. I was repeatedly forced out the door by a conspiracy of previous commitments: the ticket purchased, the taxi ordered, a host of reservations confirmed, and just to box myself in a little further I would always have talked up the journey to friends, before florid farewells. Even on the plane, I’d have been blissfully content for the wide-body to penetrate the stratosphere for all eternity. Landing was agony, finding my first night’s bed was agony, though the respite itself—my ad hoc replication of Enderby Avenue—was glorious. At length, I got hooked on this sequence of accelerating terrors culminating in a vertiginous plunge to my adoptive mattress. My whole life I have been making myself do things. I never went to Madrid, Franklin, out of appetite for paella, and every one of those research trips you imagined I used to slip the surly bonds of our domestic tranquillity was really a gauntlet I’d thrown down and compelled myself to pick up. If I was ever glad to have gone, I was never glad to go.