The Longest Way Home

by Andrew McCarthy

  The signal during the call is patchy and strains my conversation with D further. Eventually the call drops.

  I was scheduled to get back on the boat ten minutes ago. People are waiting. The call won’t go through anymore. I climb to a different spot on the hill and try again, and again. Eventually, it connects.

  Luckily, a photo I took of some coconuts and had sent to our daughter several days earlier has finally downloaded during the time I was trying to call again. Our daughter is delighted with the photo and D has relaxed. Soon we’re chatting and she begins to laugh. I ask if the orchid I (somehow) remembered to send before I left home arrived. “It did. It’s lovely, thank you,” D says. “You knew you better call today, huh?” she laughs.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “I thought, ‘He better call.’ I don’t care how far off the grid you are, sometimes you’ve got to call.”

  We talk some more as I begin to head down the hill to the boat. D recounts the frustrations of trying to get a delivery made. She has recently gone back to her yoga practice on a more committed basis, which has revitalized her outlook. “The best thing about doing yoga every day is that it really grounds you in yourself. It lets you slice through a lot of crap. You just don’t put up with a lot of people’s nonsense,” she explains, and then she laughs. “It’s good you’re making the cut.”

  “I’m not sure I am,” I say. “I’m just away a lot.”

  “Good point.”

  My boat ride back to the other side of the peninsula didn’t wait, and I find myself a room at a rustic lodge on top of a hill looking out over the bay. Unexpected and improvised plans are the luxury of the solo traveler. When I lie down, I hear thunderous stomping on my metal roof. Monkeys are scampering around above me and sleep is a long time coming. Later, I’m woken by a ferocious rain pounding on the roof. I get up and look out my window into the dark and can make out palm fronds and banana leaves bent under the relentless assault. The heavy drops smack the leaves with machine-gun determination. Yet dawn arrives to blue skies and I hop on a supply boat headed around to Puerto Jiménez. The captain drops me near Carate to retrieve my car and I’m on my way back toward town.

  At the Río Oro I see a road paralleling the river and heading up into the rain forest. I saw it on my way out—it’s the only turnoff from the main road—so for no other reason, I take it.

  The dirt track is worse than the washboard main road. There are deep ravines down the center, carved by runoff cascading down during the heavy rains. A few die-hard gold miners are living and working beside the river. Green plastic sheeting is stretched taut between propped-up sticks. Beneath the plastic roofing, cots are visible, as are piles of clothing. A cooking fire smolders nearby the giant Hefty-bag homes. Two rope-thin and ragged men bend low, thigh-deep, working the river. The road climbs steeply and then turns back on itself and climbs again. The rain forest is thick, the air heavy. Mist hangs in the treetops. My car struggles hard against the steep grade; at one point the incline is so severe it feels as if the car will tumble back on itself. Then there’s a hand-painted wooden sign nailed to a tree: ALMOST THERE, it says. It’s written in English and the first indication of any life up this road.

  Suddenly the track levels and a well-manicured circular driveway welcomes me to an elegant and rustic eco-lodge. Hardwoods have been used as pillars and palm fronds thatch the roof of the expansive open-air lobby and dining area.

  “How did this get here?” I say aloud.

  Then a blond woman, about my age, perhaps a few years older, with ample breasts and piercing blue eyes walks toward me. She’s wearing a light blue form-fitting cotton dress that’s hugging just right. Her teeth are a brilliant white when she smiles at me, and her skin is lushly tanned.

  “Wow,” I say inadvertently.

  Holly Evans came to the Osa from Boulder, Colorado, for the first time in the early eighties, then bought this chunk of rain forest in 1994 and opened her eight-bungalow lodge in 2000. “This has been my dream,” she tells me, staring deep into my eyes.

  “Mine too,” I’m thinking.

  Over a cup of tea on the deck overlooking the rain forest Holly tells me, “I broke my leg in four places and my nose twice building this place, but it had to be. Can you understand?” She is still staring deep into my eyes, and now she reaches out and touches my upper arm.

  “Um, yes,” I say, “I understand.”

  Her lover is off in San José for a few days. “He’s much younger, he needs the city sometimes.” She smiles at me. “Would you like a tour?”

  I nod stupidly.

  She shows me her favorite suite, with a large bed overlooking the jungle canopy. “Nice, isn’t it?”

  “Mmmm.”

  Back outside Holly walks in front of me up a long flight of stairs carved into the mountain; the backside of her blue cotton dress dances before my eyes as she goes. We stand on the edge of her yoga platform, gazing out over the jungle down to the sea.

  “Whenever I’m confused about something, I come up here and stand on my head, and everything is all right.”

  It begins to rain, loudly and with force. We stand and look out in silence. Listening. Clouds and mist race before us. The air around us is charged.

  In the past, several of the scenarios I encountered on this trip might have given me pause, and my failure to react to them this time left me wondering if perhaps I was past that temptation. But suddenly my senses are alert and have me reengaged in a way I haven’t been recently. I’m wondering why. Then, as the rain falls down, I realize it’s not Holly’s beauty that attracts me to her—although it does—it is her complete inhabitation of her life. She has the confidence of a person who knows what she wants, has the courage to make the choices to reach for it, and has the satisfaction of her achievement. When she turns to me and smiles, I can only smile back.

  After the rain lets up, we slowly descend the slick steps and wander in the direction of my car. I fish my keys from my pocket and we stand for a moment; Holly’s blue eyes burn again into mine. The leaves of the nearby banana trees drip heavily, the birds have begun to squawk again, and the lingering mist is burning off quickly. The air is already steamy. Holly nods and then thrusts out her hand. We shake. I smile at the gesture, and then she does, and then I’m in the car, riding the brake hard, easing my way back down off this slippery slope.

  I can imagine lingering images from my brief time here, images that might fester and go deep, images that have nothing to do with reality but can nonetheless assert themselves and influence and alter the reality that does exist, back home, with D.

  Yet as I bounce back the way I came, I find myself thinking not of sensuous headstands over the rain forest or of large soft beds overlooking a misty sunrise, but of images of hazy light over cobblestone streets and smoky coffeehouses, images of a swarming square outside a cathedral—images of Vienna, of an earlier trip with D and her family. What happened in Vienna that is supplanting the type of fantasy I used to latch on to and cultivate and cling to and employ when my life got bumpy?

  Vienna. It was soon after that trip that D and I decided to get married. What was it, what happened, what signs had I missed while I was traipsing around on the trail of the Hapsburgs?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  VIENNA

  “Leave the Man Some Privacy”

  In life there are dividing lines. These moments become a way to chart our time; they are the signposts for our lives. There was my life before acting—and then there was my life after I discovered it. There was drinking—and then life after I stopped. And more and more, it seems that there was a time before we decided to finally get married—and now there is after.

  Before all of this, before Patagonia, before the Amazon and Costa Rica, before we decided to take the final step—there was Vienna. At the time it just seemed like a fraught, unwieldy family outing, nothing life-altering—at least I didn’t think so at the time.

  Moe showed me around the apartment—the master bedroom and bat
h, the large office that had been converted to a second bedroom for our purposes. The ground-floor loft with the wide plank floors was to be not only D’s and my temporary home but our daughter’s and D’s parents’ as well. It was a frigid February morning in Vienna, yet Moe took pains to point out the garden, which he considered a major asset of the apartment in the converted silk factory. He showed me how to slip the key into the lock. He handed me a folder with pertinent information, maps and phone numbers. He was gracious and solicitous.

  “And this is how you work the stove,” Moe explained. He picked up a single detachable magnetic knob, placed it on the appropriate circle corresponding to the selected ring on the sleek, black electric stove, and then turned to the desired temperature. It made no sense to me.

  “Everything is in the folder?” I asked. I knew I wouldn’t remember anything he had said to me in the fifteen minutes that he had been showing me around the apartment. I had just flown ten hours, overnight, not slept at all on the plane (what if the pilot needed my help?), it was my first time in Vienna, I was completely jet-lagged and disoriented. I just wanted to be left alone.

  Moe showed no sign of wrapping it up so I interrupted him and thanked him and hurried him to the door. On the way there I began to worry that my rush might make him think I was engaged in some kind of shadowy activity in the apartment he had just rented me, and so, to appear casual, since he had a Middle Eastern accent, I asked where he was from.

  “Oh, you noticed,” he said with pride. “I am from Iran, but I have been in Vienna for ten years.”

  “Do you like it?” was all I could think to ask.

  “I love it,” he told me. I nodded, and he told me he had a friend with a video camera and if I wanted a personal tour I could get myself taped as I experienced the city.

  “Let me think about that one and get back to you,” I said. “Thanks, Moe.”

  “And where is the rest of your family?” he asked as he stepped into the doorway.

  My instinct was to correct him—D’s parents were not technically my family, nor, at that time, was there an imminent probability of their becoming my family—but rather than burden Moe with my personal doubts and insecurities, I felt the tightness in my throat as I said, “Oh, they’ll be getting in tonight,” and closed the door on him.

  I had most of the day to myself before everyone arrived. I didn’t know what I wanted to do or how I might accomplish it if I did. I showered and drifted out onto the street. A red and white tram was stopping on the corner, heading in the direction of what I assumed to be the center of town. I got on. Ten minutes later, the tram crossed over the Ringstrasse, I saw some imperial-looking buildings I later discovered were the Hofburg Palace, and I made my way on foot toward a tall spire, the highest point I could see in what was clearly the center of the old town. The air was biting, but the streets were full of people. The closer I got to the spire the busier and narrower the streets became. My confused mental state, coupled with no knowledge of where I was—I had neglected to take the tourist map Moe had left me—allowed me a freedom from expectation that I usually lack. Perhaps some of D’s laissez-faire attitude toward organization was rubbing off on me.

  The streets became pedestrian-only and funneled toward a large square surrounding the Romanesque and Gothic Stephansdom Cathedral. Solemnly dedicated in 1147, the cathedral was rebuilt and expanded over the span of centuries, and Viennese life still radiated out from its 445-foot tower, which was visible for miles. But it was the cathedral’s steep roof, covered in ornate tiles that formed a mosaic of the double-headed eagle, symbol of the Hapsburg dynasty, that was its most telling feature.

  The air inside was cold, but in a different way than outside. It was an old cold, the way cold feels when it has been trapped inside stone over centuries. I watched a Buddhist monk in an orange robe take photos of the high altar. I stared up at the symbols of my Catholic upbringing, uncertain, as I always am, what exactly I felt about them. These were figures that had strongly affected my family, dictated a great many of our actions, and with whom I was forced to spend a considerable amount of time in my youth, yet I didn’t know them at all. I had changed a great deal since my last real contact with them but they had remained exactly as they had always been. They were strangers with whom I was deeply familiar. I lit a candle and thought of my children.

  Back outside the cathedral, I saw a small sign that read MOZART’S HOUSE. The gray town house was through an archway and down a narrow cobbled street. I bought a ticket and climbed a flight of stairs, wandered through the apartment where the genius apparently lived happily for a short time and wrote The Marriage of Figaro. Nothing was evocative of what the place might have been like at the time he lived there. Only the view out the window, down Blutgasse, the cobblestone street below, a gas lamp attached to the wall of a nearby building, gave my imagination a start. Images of foggy nights and horse-drawn carriages and men hovering in the shadows wearing long cloaks suddenly materialized in my sleep-deprived mind.

  I sought out the neo-Renaissance opera house, where much of Mozart’s music premiered. Final preparations were under way for the famous Opera Ball in a few days’ time—I was denied entry. I looked across the street and up at the other apartment I had considered renting and wished I had taken it, here in the bustling heart of the city, instead of the one I had rented from Moe, in a far-flung neighborhood.

  Across the street from the opera house was the Hotel Sacher, Vienna’s most famous lodging. D’s parents, particularly her father, Colm, were avid dessert lovers, and he had recently told me about the famous Sacher torte.

  “You’re going to love it, Andrew,” he shouted over the phone as I packed my bag in New York. “It’s worth a trip to Vienna for that alone.”

  The chocolate cake, filled with a layer of apricot jam, was apparently so legendary, its recipe had to be defended in court. I went in to see if I could perhaps get a slice to take away, so that it would be waiting for him on his arrival.

  Conservatively dressed men held whispered conversations on red damask couches under ornate chandeliers in the small lobby. Gilt-framed mirrors hung from the walls. Ladies with stiff hair, wearing fur coats, strode regally past. Given the elegant, old-world, and buttoned-up feeling it exuded, I very much doubted the Hotel Sacher would indulge in such crass American behavior as “takeout.” I was wrong.

  Three hundred sixty thousand little chocolate cakes are sold every year at the designated takeaway café, each ranging in price from twenty to thirty-five euros apiece.

  “Small, medium, or large,” the stout woman behind the counter said to me in English before I had a chance to speak. She swiped my credit card and pressed a wooden box into my hands. I hadn’t even laid eyes on one of the famous tortes and she was looking past me—“Small, medium, or large.”

  When I stepped out of the metro at Westbahnhof—at what I hoped was a few blocks from my new apartment—the day was nearly gone, the sky had taken on a pink and purple patina, and there was a smoky, foggy haze that struck me as what I had always thought the light in Vienna must be like. I didn’t know I held this preconception until I looked up and saw the bell tower of a small local church, shrouded in a gauzy glow. This moment, this image, lodged in my mind. What is it about the brain that chooses images, seemingly at random, to hold on to and empowers them with significance? I saw more beautiful churches and prettier winter sunsets while in Vienna, but this fleeting image asserted itself as the mental postcard for my time there.

  I needed to find some groceries so that everyone would have something to eat when they arrived. The Bio-Market Organics around the corner was closed, as was the Eurospar, as well as the Merkur. Apparently, on a Sunday afternoon in Vienna, everything outside the tourist-choked center is locked up tight. I was in trouble. I cursed myself again for not taking the apartment in the center. I cursed myself for not taking care of this chore earlier in the day. It was late now. Everyone would be arriving in just over an hour and I would have nothing. I could
easily imagine D, with our daughter, who was battling a cold, tired in her arms, and her parents dragging far too many suitcases.

  I panicked. I marched in circles around blocks I knew I had been down before. The unpronounceable German names on every closed and shuttered shop began to enrage me. I considered returning to the center of town to get something, but I could remember only clothing boutiques and Mostly Mozart souvenir shops and cafés. The burden of having to provide for these people began to swell up inside me and I wished I were there alone. I grew angry with D and her parents for needing me to take care of them. It wasn’t the first time I’d decided that the burden of family was too much for me, something I didn’t know how to handle or even want. I wished I had no contacts or ties. I loved my children, but the rest of them—the hell with it! I was on the verge of a full-blown tantrum.

  Whereas D would find the idea of fetching groceries for the nourishment of her loved ones in a strange city a pleasurable way to express her affections, I resented it. I felt trapped, taken advantage of, and (preemptively) unappreciated.

  At Europaplatz I saw the bright lights of the Westbahnhof train station—across from the metro stop I had exited an hour earlier when my hunt began. Misreading the pedestrian traffic signal, I raced across the four lanes of Neubaugürtel and was almost hit. The station was swarming with people on the fringes of life who typically haunt such transit hubs in large cities.

  Down a level, in a far corner, I found a small convenience store that was open. It was packed with some of Vienna’s less desirable denizens, all picking over shelves that were close to bare. I found some eggs and a loaf of white bread and some butter. I bought some yogurt for our daughter. Hardly a feast, but everyone would be able to eat something, and they would understand my difficulties in an archaic city that still shuts down on a Sunday—they would hail my ingenuity and my generosity.