The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  When I came home I put my notepads in the back of a drawer and didn’t look at them. But the idea grew.

  I knew someone who knew someone, and I met a man named Keith Bellows, the editor of National Geographic Traveler magazine. Keith is a barrel-chested lion of a man with a mane of silver hair—exactly the kind of man who had intimidated me in my youth. He agreed to meet me over drinks in an East Village bar, where I told him of my desire to write about travel for his magazine.

  He looked at me funny. “You’re an actor.”

  “I know that,” I said. “I also know how to travel, and I know what it’s done for me.” I was forthright in a way that I never had been able to be when talking about my acting.

  “Can you write?” He still wasn’t giving the conversation much weight; he was looking at a young woman down the bar.

  “I can tell a story.” This got his attention. “That’s what I’ve been doing for twenty years as an actor.” I shrugged.

  It took another year of cajoling, via e-mail, on the phone, and over dinners, during which we became friends. Finally, after a meal at a restaurant in SoHo, Keith looked at me and said, “I still don’t understand why you would want to do this. You’re not going to make any money. There’s no glamour.”

  I shrugged and offered up a vague, “It’ll be fun.” As with my first acting role in high school, something was calling me, and I kept that knowledge to myself. I had no way of knowing where it might lead; all I knew was that it made sense to me.

  “Where do you know well? What place speaks to you?”

  “Ireland,” I said quickly. “The west. There’s a place in County Clare—”

  “Then that’s where I’m sending you.”

  And so a second career began, traveling and writing about those travels.

  It was on that trip to Ireland, for my first writing assignment, that I met D for only the second time, and we decided to spend our life together.

  The first time I saw D, she was in the lobby of the Great Southern Hotel in Galway, in the west of Ireland. Tall and striking, with a confident stride, she approached me as I waited for a taxi to take me to the airport.

  “I really liked your film yesterday,” she said, and stuck out her hand. (I had written and directed a short film adaptation of a Frank O’Connor story that was playing in a local festival.) I was acutely aware of her fingers wrapping around my own—the strength and presence of her grip galvanized my energy. I felt as if I’d been met—with her handshake, D reached in and pulled me from my isolation.

  She too had shown a film at the festival—I hadn’t seen it.

  “Your taxi is here, sir,” the doorman said.

  I turned back to D, we exchanged first names, and I left.

  She was beautiful and had a clear, direct manner that got my attention, but she wasn’t the kind of woman I had ever dated. Yet her handshake stayed with me.

  A few weeks later, I e-mailed the festival director and mentioned my meeting with a “fellow filmmaker.” I’d lost her e-mail address, I lied. Would she be able to pass it on? Even in the moment, I was aware how out of character this was for me.

  E-mail obtained, I wrote out a tentative query of reconnection while sitting in the business center in a hotel basement in Barcelona, Spain, where I was acting in a film. I remember clearly leaning back in the chair and saying aloud to the empty room, “What are you doing?”

  And then I clicked “send.”

  Several weeks passed, and then a reply came. Yes, D remembered and had enjoyed our brief meeting as well. She hoped I had a nice time in Ireland and at the festival. Her e-mail matched my tone of cordial formality. She signed her name at the bottom.

  Then I scrolled farther down. After a large space, she had typed a simple question in an otherwise impersonal response—“Who are you?”

  I e-mailed back, saying I would be in the west of Ireland in a month’s time to do a travel story; perhaps we could meet for a coffee.

  “I live in Paris,” was the cryptic reply.

  “Excuse me,” I responded, hoping playful sarcasm reached through e-mail.

  She e-mailed back. “I’ll actually be only a few miles away from where you’re doing your story on that weekend, at a family reunion. Coffee would be fine.”

  The plan was to meet for an hour at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis when my friend Seve would be joining me. Yet four platonic and charged days later—with my friend acting as an unintended chaperone—we were still together. I finally put her on the train east and I walked a foggy and windswept beach at Lahinch and knew that my life was about to get complicated.

  I was still married to my first wife. But we were drifting. I knew she was frustrated. I felt like I had to leave 20 percent of myself outside just to walk in the door of our marriage. We had met in college, a youthful love, and had been together, on and off, for years. Twenty years after we met, we married. It seemed that instead of our marriage being the beginning of our life together, it had been the culmination. The subsequent birth of our son was its finest moment. We loved each other, but together, we were under a rock.

  My meeting D had stirred a feeling that sent my wife and me into therapy, but the marriage was over. She wisely took some time to find a relationship that suited her adult self better than I did, while I rushed headlong into a relationship with D.

  That was seven years ago.

  We came to the decision to finally get married without drama. It was soon after we had returned from Vienna, a family trip with D’s parents. She was sitting at the dining table, drinking tea. I was across the room at the desk, going through e-mail. The kids had just gone to bed.

  “So should we get married?” she asked, without warning.

  I stopped typing and turned toward her. She was smiling—the smile where her lips don’t part and her head tilts a bit to the right. The smile she gives when she is playful and confident.

  We hadn’t broached the topic much in the last few years. I had proposed on a moonlit beach in the Caribbean four years earlier—six months after the birth of our daughter—after which we began to make plans that went nowhere. Date conflicts, location issues, family members’ attendance—all masked an unpreparedness that we had been unable to address. The plans floundered, then so did our relationship. It took time to acknowledge how off course we were, then time to let it heal, and then here we were again.

  This time, when she spoke, I looked at her face for a while. It was a moment we hadn’t had before. I knew my response would lead us in one direction or the other.

  “Yeah,” I said, “we should.”

  That night I awoke at four A.M. I couldn’t breathe. I got out of bed and opened the window and lay back down. It was pointless—I was done sleeping. I got up and brushed my teeth, then looked in on my sleeping children—perfect, both of them, the way children are as they sleep. I went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. I splashed cold water on my face in the sink.

  I wanted all this, I had fought to get it. I had lost a lot along the way and gained even more. I was where I felt like I should be, but something was wrong. Why was I still filled with so much doubt? Was all my resistance really just a typical male fear of intimacy? Maybe the idea of who I was, who I wanted to be, simply didn’t match up with the person I had become. Was this just a midlife crisis, was I simply a walking cliché?

  But this questioning and these feelings of doubt weren’t new. They had been shadowing me my whole life. I simply couldn’t outrun them anymore. I was tired of all the ambivalence, tired of being a slave to it.

  Yet, staring out the window waiting for the dawn, I found myself reaching for my computer. I began going through story ideas, some new ones, others I had long wanted to do, places I yearned to experience and write about. Quickly, I reached out to editors, and within the space of a few short days I had assembled a string of assignments, in some of the most exotic places in the world. When I laid out the half dozen and more stories I planned to write in the time leading up to the wedding
, D simply looked at me.

  “Well,” she said with a shrug, “I guess I’ll see you at the altar.”

  What was it in my nature that pulled me in opposing directions with seesaw regularity, sometimes simultaneously? How many things had I walked away from in my life because I hadn’t been able to commit? A teacher once implored me to jump: “You’re wading in the water and it will drown you. Dive into the deep end.” She was speaking of my acting, but what she said could have applied to my entire life.

  I was a parent, I was in a committed relationship—I was engaged, for God’s sake—but I was still fighting it, still keeping myself separate. In the middle of a family, somehow I was still going it alone. And my signature ambivalence created unease, not just in myself, but in those around me, in those I loved. It had to change. I went to cancel my writing assignments—but D stopped me.

  “No,” she said. “Go.” As usual, she was one step ahead of me.

  I went through my first marriage withholding myself—without even understanding that that was the issue—and it had doomed us. But I have two children whom I want to see grow. I am engaged to a woman I love—with whom I want to share my life. I have to move beyond this habitual position of singularity—but I’ve followed my own rules for so long I don’t even know if any other way is possible for me. And yet I need to try to give those I love my complete self, without ambivalence, fear, and doubt.

  Emotion has been the tangible currency of my life. I have made a living—both in acting and in writing—exploring my feelings, at times dredging them up, bringing them to the surface. Faced now with a decision that will deeply alter the lives of both myself and those closest to me, I can’t afford to back away from the challenge of uncovering what it is that keeps me from getting where I need to go.

  I stand on the precipice of the rest of my life. My constant vacillation has kept me dancing along that edge—I need to step back and stake turf, for D, for my kids, for myself. And so I’m going on these journeys, not to escape the commitment I recently made—but quite the opposite, I’m going to use them the way I have always used travel: to find answers. I’m setting out in order to gain the insight necessary to bring me home.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PATAGONIA

  “I Hope You Like to Be Alone”

  “You do understand that as soon as we decided to get married you’re going as far away as you can get. Literally to the end of the earth,” D says.

  “What’s your point?” I ask.

  I’m already waiting by the elevator when I put down my pack and return for one last good night. I slip into the bedroom and can hear D singing to our daughter. When my eyes adjust to the dark I can see that D is lying beside our daughter in bed. She’s crying softly.

  “Sweetheart, what are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she says, wiping her tears.

  I sit on the edge of the bed and lean in to embrace her. I brush our daughter’s fine blond hair back from her face, tell her I love her, and rest my hand over D’s heart. Her hand moves to cover mine. The three of us sit for a while like this in the dark, with only the sound of our breathing, back and forth.

  On the corner in the fading light, I search for a cab. My arm, extended out toward an approaching taxi, feels frail and insubstantial in the still-too-cold March air. I’m aware suddenly that this is my departure, the moment my trip begins. I look at my watch. I toss my backpack across the seat, climb in, and experience my first flash of excitement about the journey ahead.

  “Kennedy,” I shout to the driver through the Plexiglas partition. I sit back and open the window; a harsh late-winter blast burns my ear.

  The day has been long and fraught with the usual strain of imminent departure. My nine-year-old son from my first marriage had to go back to his mom after lunch today. On “transition days,” as we’ve come to call this weekly switch-off, my son and I often get into a fight. I’m upset he’s going away and he’s upset—about what, I’ll never truly know. Usually, the fights are easily resolved and we hug and I tell him how much I love him. He says, “I love you too, Dad,” and I feel I have at least one more day before our relationship deteriorates the way mine did with my own father.

  We were playing soccer in Central Park. He beat me ten to nine. “Did you let me win, Dad?” he asked.

  “My knee is still bad, but when it’s better you’re in trouble.”

  Then we waited on the sidewalk in front of our apartment for my former wife and her partner to pick him up on their way out of town. The switch-over usually takes place at school, where the moment of handoff is invisible and easier on everyone. Or we wait upstairs and my son’s mother and her partner come in, occasionally for a cup of tea, but more often we just stand around and fill the time with casual chatter as we wait for my son to get his shoes on. But today D was working and when I suggested that my son and I wait downstairs, she kissed him good-bye and we slipped out.

  My son was hugging his mom hello when her partner pulled me aside and stuck out his hand. “Congratulations,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “Oh, well, you know . . .”

  “Oh, right.” Last night I told my ex-wife that D and I were finally going to get married, in August—after the nearly four-year engagement. “Well, I mean it’s no big deal, at this point,” I lied.

  “Hey, listen,” he said, “at this age—you know.”

  I nodded. My ex-wife’s partner is a solid guy, and I’m sure he does know. I myself have never been able to be so sure. I thanked them and waved good-bye as they drove off.

  Back upstairs, I found D silently moving around the apartment. I tried to engage her in conversation, asked how her work was going, what she was thinking.

  “When you’re going, I wish you would just go,” she said. “You’re asking me all these questions but I can feel you’re already halfway to Patagonia.”

  She was right. Whenever I’m about to leave on a trip, I’m distracted and overcompensate. I’m too solicitous and overly interested. Morning departures are easier—I just get up while everyone’s still asleep and slip away.

  At Ezeiza international airport in Buenos Aires I funnel toward customs. Down a long corridor, I move quickly past people shuffling along after the ten-hour overnight flight. I didn’t sleep. I never do. It has become impossible for me to relax on a plane. Once carefree in the air, flying has become the receptacle for my anxiety and fear—an obvious desire for an impossible control. The higher the levels of stress in my life, the greater my yearning for such control, thus the greater my discomfort while flying. That I can see all this does nothing to alleviate my irrational responses. Images of calamity race through my mind and even the slightest turbulence has me jumping in my seat. I decided long ago that my fear wouldn’t stop me from traveling, but still, flying haunts me, even when I am nowhere near a plane.

  I have a recurring dream of being in a low-flying jet as it races along, swooping down, flying beneath highway overpasses and tilting wildly to slip between buildings and trees. Often, in mid-dream, the wings are sheared off. Other times the dream starts earlier in the scenario. The plane is about to take off, I’m boarding but can’t find my seat, and then we’re in the air and the low, drastic maneuvering begins. Rarely am I aware of others on the plane. Only occasionally will an air hostess appear and behave as if everything is completely normal, raising my already elevated stress level. These dreams always wake me with a start and have only intensified in recent years, despite the fact that I’m a “million mile” flyer.

  In the arrivals hall there’s a sign in Spanish, dividing people into two lanes. I bypass the crowd struggling to read it and pick the shorter queue. The flight was two hours late, and I need to get across town to the domestic airport, to catch a three-hour flight down to the Patagonian town of El Calafate.

  The line snakes slowly forward. When my turn arrives, the immigration officer flips through my passport. She’s looking for something. Then she speaks in rapid and clipped Spanish.
My Spanish is poor in the best of scenarios, and rusty, but in my exhaustion, I panic. I’m back in Mr. Gonzalez’s tenth-grade Spanish class, the one I flunked and had to repeat.

  “Do you speak English?”

  “Little bit,” the immigration official says, holding up her thumb and forefinger very close together. “AC/DC. And the Clash.” Then she begins to sing, “Should I stay or should I go? Na-na-na-NA-na-na-na-NA.” Her singing is loud. Her long, loose black hair flies as she flings her head forward and back. I wouldn’t have taken her for a headbanger. I step back from the window and look around. No one is paying any attention. When she finishes singing, her face is flushed and she’s smiling. “You need to pay entry fee,” she says, and points me toward the back of the long line.

  Heading across town I call D from the back of the taxi. She is walking around the reservoir in Central Park. She’s high from exertion, happy. She sounds close yet far off.

  “Are you going into town for an hour, luv?”

  “No,” I reply. “My flight was late, I need to get across town if I’m going to make my connection. I can get a bite at the airport.”

  “Airport food, yum.”

  I look out the window as we pass a billboard for McDonald’s—DOBLE MCNIFICA.

  “Go into town, luv,” D says. “Get a steak. You’ll make the flight, you always do. God knows when you’ll get a decent meal again down there at the bottom of the world.”

  I ask the driver his name and where I can get one of Argentina’s famous steaks. Paulo’s gaze shifts to the rearview mirror. He lifts his eyebrows. I nod and he swerves across two lanes, exits the highway, and heads toward Puerto Madero. Ten minutes later we pull to a stop outside a red brick converted factory.

  I’m ushered through a cool dark room to a seat at the last free table on the back terrace, beside the restored canal. The tuxedoed headwaiter hurries over. I try to think of what the correct words for “rib-eye steak” might be in Spanish. Just to be sure I’m being understood, I point to my ribs and then my eye as I say them.