The Turk Who Loved Apples: And Other Tales of Losing My Way Around the World

by Matt Gross

  Over the years, though, I learned to cope, partly through the promise of writing. If I could write, and write well enough to produce something lasting—a book, say—then my words, my ideas, my self would survive my unavoidable end. My work would probably not outlast me by much, a century if I got lucky, but while I’d never know for certain what kind of legacy I’d leave, this was my best chance to avoid being forgotten completely.

  I can’t say this was a particularly sophisticated approach to life (or death), but it came from deep within me, this visceral fear of death that I could tamp down only through denial and disciplined misdirection. But seen through this lens, it also explains my craving for companionship. By making new friends, I could leave trace memories of myself all over the world. (Had I been more attractive and less ethically bound, I might have left children in many lands.) Luckily, making friends was a virtual job requirement. I needed people for my stories—locals, preferably, to show me around, provide color, and transform my dispatches from the Fabulously Frugal Adventures of Matt into something broader and less personal.

  And so I drove into eastern Kentucky with high hopes. This was bourbon country, and a half-dozen distilleries were scattered around among the horse farms and raw limestone hills. Wild Turkey, Jim Beam, Maker’s Mark—all had their production facilities and tasting rooms here, and the windowless towers where they aged their liquor in new, charred-oak barrels stood out starkly amid the deep green of the countryside. Bardstown, whose Federal-style brick houses and central square gave it the look of an old town in eastern Pennsylvania, was where I planned to focus my energies, both for its proximity to the distilleries and for the Old Talbott Tavern, a nineteenth-century inn that had supposedly once lodged Abraham Lincoln and, more importantly, was reputed to have the best whiskey selection around.

  The dark, wood-paneled bar, however, was nearly deserted when I arrived that Friday afternoon. The handful of patrons were drinking gin-and-tonics and bad bottled beer. The bourbon list was indeed lengthy, with lots of single-barrel selections and rarities from independent producers, and I desperately wanted to discuss it with someone. I loved bourbon, the burn of the alcohol, the illusion of sweetness, the mouth-filling texture. But the bartender didn’t seem interested in talking shop. I ordered an old-fashioned and moped.

  Perhaps, I thought when I’d finished the drink, I’d have better luck in the tavern’s restaurant. I walked through the building, past the gift shop, and into the dining room. But the stone-walled, wood-beamed space was equally desolate. A mother and her daughter were eating cheeseburgers. A trio of older guys sipped sweet tea.

  In one corner, however, I spied a single woman. Blonde, mid-thirties, I guessed, and not from around here. When she spoke to the waitress, she didn’t have the accent. Maybe, I hoped, she was in Bardstown for the same reason I was—a love of bourbon. But how could I approach her? She was all the way across the room, and I had no pretext for introducing myself. I didn’t want to seem like a weirdo, and I didn’t want to appear to be hitting on her. (I was married, after all.) I just wanted someone to talk to, to share my discoveries with.

  It would be easier, I knew, if I already had a companion—if this woman were already at my side. That’s how it had worked in the past. A few years earlier, I’d traveled around northern India with my friend Sandra, a petite, dark-haired graphic designer. We were both involved with other people at the time, but we were friends, and adventurous, and on trains, in restaurants, and on the streets we gave off an aura of approachability. We were not dangerous. We were interesting. You could talk to us—you wouldn’t be popping a lovers’ bubble. We were together, but we were independent. We could look after each other, but weren’t responsible for each other’s happiness. We could flirt with whomever we wanted.

  This could be confusing in India. On the third-class train from Sawai Madhopur to Agra, a fantastically crowded compartment in which we were the only, and therefore fascinating, foreigners, a conductor pushed his way down the aisle and sat beside me.

  After asking my name and where we were from, the conductor looked at Sandra, then at me, and said, “Are you married?”

  Yes, I told him.

  “Ah,” he said. “So this is your wife?”

  No, I said without elaborating.

  He looked confused, then his eyes brightened. “So,” he asked tentatively but eagerly, “she is your girlfriend?”

  “No,” I said, and smiled.

  The conductor frowned. This did not make sense, and he seemed to be wondering whether he’d made a mistake in his English or had misunderstood mine. After a silent minute, he said good-bye and moved on.

  Later, I felt guilty for this deception—he hadn’t deserved my smart-aleckiness—but at the time I relished our bizarre situation too much to let the opportunity to confound him pass. Sandra and I may not have been an item, but we intrigued, and I loved it.

  It wasn’t this way when I traveled with Jean. When she and I went to Mexico or Maine or Paris or Taiwan, it wasn’t to meet new people but to be with each other. Jean’s comfort was my concern; if she wasn’t enjoying herself, I couldn’t. This is not to say I didn’t like traveling with Jean, but it was different. We were a closed circuit.

  But with Sandra, it was an open relationship, so to speak, as it was with other friends I’d traveled with: Christine, Sita, Sara, Mary Ellen. If only this mystery woman was at my side already, I wished in the Old Talbott Tavern, I could talk to her, no problem. It was a chicken-and-egg situation, and I was clearly the chicken.

  Elsewhere, this would work differently. In Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, I’d discovered a hip milliner, Nini K., whose boutique sold modern versions of traditional Caucasian fur hats. And when I learned Nini spent half the year in New York, our talk turned to our favorite Lower East Side bars, and then to the party she was planning at her country house that weekend—to which she invited me, without knowing I was a travel writer. I remember walking out into the street, blinded by the summer sun and the hospitality. But apparently, that was just how it works in Georgia: A few nights later, I was walking alone through an area of open-air bars, taking pictures, when a group of teenagers spotted me and called me over, first to ask questions, then to drink beers and accompany them to a disco and hang out all night long.

  Here in America (and much of the West), we’re afraid. Afraid of being misunderstood or, worse, flat-out rejected. To say hello is to put our souls on the line by confessing our loneliness. Much easier to remain monadic and to suffer than to risk failure. Even for me, after a thousand successes and far fewer failures, I couldn’t summon the courage to connect.

  And, not for the first or last time, I wished I didn’t need to. Why couldn’t I just be alone? Why this desperate, flailing craving for human connection? The uncomfortable fact was, I was good at being alone. I knew how to eat alone (at the bar), and I could happily go days without a real conversation as long as I had plenty of reading material. Traveling solo was often easier than with a companion—I could wake up when I wanted, go where I wanted, and leave when I got bored. Solitude inspired in me a cheerful indifference, a nothing-left-to-lose sense of independence. I’d survived solitude before; those horrible lonely nights in the Lucy Hotel had transformed into sweet memories of youth. I could survive it again, right?

  But then the isolation and longing would overwhelm me, to the point where I would do anything—anything!—to make real contact with a stranger like the mystery woman. Anything but go talk to her, of course.

  And as some of my readers would later suggest, the mystery woman might have been the wrong target. Maybe the sweet-tea trio or the cheeseburger family were ready for a chat? They looked like locals; they probably knew this town inside and out. But no—I couldn’t talk to them. They had other things going on. There were dynamics I couldn’t disturb. They had come together, to eat and talk, and I didn’t feel like it was my place to interrupt. They did not remind me of myself and Sandra in India, open and inviting.

&nbs
p; Instead, I ate my pork chops, alone with my brooding thoughts and creeping dread. But afterward, as I lingered in the tavern’s gift shop thumbing through tourist brochures, the mystery woman walked out of the restaurant and up to me.

  “Are you from New York?” she asked.

  Patricia, I learned over bourbon flights, was from Westchester County and, intriguingly, was a veteran road tripper. Whenever she had a break from her secretarial job, she’d fly off to the Shenandoah Valley or Sioux Falls, rent a car, and roam the region for a week or more, indulging in her passion for American history.

  As we talked and drank, I was, in a strictly platonic way, falling in love with Patricia. Here I was, traveling the world as a professional observer and evaluator of the experience, yet this was what she did for fun, and what happened to her on the road did not have to follow a theme and would not be simplified and condensed for public consumption. What happened there mattered to her, and to her alone.

  Over the following years, as we communicated by e-mail, I loved simply hearing about her occasionally messy life: the family conflicts, the sexist bosses who denied her promotions and called her on vacation, the crushes on friends (married and single), the realization, after a bluegrass concert attended by senior citizens, that she seemed to “share the same interests as the average seventy year old” and was therefore “a magnet for mandolin players.”

  In other words, Patricia was a full-fledged human being, neurotic and struggling and occasionally succeeding and, when she had the chance, escaping her life to wander America on a tour of “libraries and cemeteries.” I loved how our encounter pulled me out of my morose solipsism and into the world. I loved that Patricia existed, and that I’d had the luck to meet her and fix her in my shaky memory, as I hoped she’d fixed me in hers.

  On some level, I wanted to be like her—to have a life full of drama that I’d deal with by traveling. But my life was settled, which was something of a surprise to me. Just a few months before this cross-country road trip, Jean and I had bought an apartment in Brooklyn together. I had a regular column in the New York Times and was traveling the world on someone else’s dime. I was not addicted to any drugs, did not have any serious health problems, and got along relatively well with my family and my in-laws. Apart from my maudlin fear of death, and the attendant craving for companionship, I had no angst. I may have had amusing stories to tell, but I was, and am, personally boring.

  I am also not as good a friend as I’d like to be. In the years after we bumped into each other in Kentucky, Patricia and I exchanged dozens of e-mails—or really, she sent them to me, and while I read with great pleasure of Patricia’s peregrinations, her sister’s weirdly budding country-music career, her unrequited loves, I never responded speedily or in enough depth to continue the conversation. In fact, it’s only just now I’ve spotted this line in a message from her in 2011: “It’s a little trying, constantly being alone. It seems like there’s got to be something better than that . . . but my experience tells me sometimes solitude is the best option.”

  What I should have told Patricia—what I need to tell her now—what she probably already knows—is that solitude does not last. When its walls seem thickest, that fortress crumbles. You go on Facebook, or Couchsurfing, and make contact. You buy a plane ticket and fly to Kentucky and meet someone in the gift shop. You walk down the street in Tbilisi and wind up in someone’s country house. You get lucky—you connect.

  And that connection does not have to last. That is, friendship is not diminished by its ephemerality. Patricia and I met, wonderfully, on the road, but what claim do we have on each other? What responsibility can we possibly bear toward everyone we meet? Along with Patricia, I’ve met and befriended the Signorino family of Columbus, Indiana, and Hannity in his trailer outside Columbus, New Mexico, and Mike the curly-haired Australian snowboarder in Bulgaria, and Henry and Bess, the Australians I met somewhere in Turkey, and those Peace Corps volunteers in Bishkek and the kid on the train from Urumqi to Beijing and my dining companions throughout Malaysia and all the architects and designers of Buenos Aires. There are hundreds more, and while I’d be overjoyed to see them again, in whichever city they like, I harbor no expectation that will happen. The best and most responsible thing I can do is to remember them, to honor the brief joys of our relationships as abstract souvenirs, and to cross my fingers our paths will cross once more.

  Because it can happen, and in ways we’d never predict. A few months after Douglas and I became friends—after we’d explored Saigon and taken a trip to Cambodia together and shared many, many Sunday brunches at a grottily cute French restaurant—I began noticing an intriguing crew floating through the Lucy Hotel. There were about eight of them, roughly my age, Americans and Vietnamese-Americans. Fairly well-dressed, as if they had real, important jobs. I could, I was sure, connect with them—they were my people—but I didn’t know how. Or I didn’t know how to do so without being obvious.

  And so I waited. I had Douglas, I had Ted and Jed and the Bodhi Tree gang, I had Tom and Tâm Tâm Café, and I had Portishead and I had my novels. I was in no rush, but I would make it happen.

  As the month of March began, Ho Chi Minh City got hot. The rainy season long since past, the sun roasted the concrete sprawl with ferocity that increased each day. I was at the time deep into my midday routine of pork-chop lunches followed by air-conditioned naps, but that day the heat was too much. I finished my meal, then walked downstairs for an iced coffee with condensed milk in the Lucy Hotel lobby.

  As usual, it was cool down there—all those tiles and high ceilings. Across from the front desk was a round wrought-iron table with a glass top and two cushioned chairs. At one sat Lucy Nhung, a gravelly voiced forty-something with big eyes, a bad temper, and a reputation for aggressive business tactics; rumor had it she’d convinced a Korean ex-boyfriend to buy her the hotel, then wound up in full control of the place. She could be loving, but she could also be dangerous.

  When Lucy saw me approach, she greeted me and vacated her seat, asking if I wanted a coffee. I said yes, and she dispatched one of her employees into the street to fetch it. I sat down where Lucy had been, directly across from a Lucy Hotel denizen whose name, I would soon learn, was Tuyen Nguyen. Tuyen was thin, almost slight, with wrinkle-free clothes and wire-rimmed eyeglasses. He spoke not only with care but with ironic detachment, and when he wasn’t speaking, a small, knowing smile played across his face. He was, I knew, part of the gang I wished to join.

  He lifted his own iced coffee to drink, and the tall glass left a puddle of condensation on the table. “Why,” he asked me, “don’t you tuck your shirt in?”

  To be fair, this may not have been the first thing he said to me, but those were the first of Tuyen’s words I remember, and typical of his approach—it was a challenge, but a challenge from a friend. He was, I learned, from Bethesda, Maryland, and a fairly recent graduate of Yale who’d spent time living under the tutelage of an older artist in Spain. In Ho Chi Minh City, he was an editor at the Vietnam Investment Review, one of several financially minded publications that had launched in the last year or two. To me, this sounded like a very cool job.

  From there, the friendships developed smoothly. It might have been that very night, or a few nights later, but Tuyen invited me to join him and his friends in his room for drinks and cards before everyone went out. And that’s how I met the gang: Steve and Lien, married architects from San Francisco; Mai and Jason, journalists with bylines in the Washington Post; and Hanh and Ayumi, English teachers and friends from Stanford. Other people circulated in and out, but this was the core. We’d begin each evening in Tuyen’s spacious room with gin-and-tonics and several rounds of tin lên, the most popular card game in Vietnam, in which players dramatically throw down long straights in an attempt to empty their hands. (There is complex betting involved.) From there, we’d move on to dinner, often at one of the chic Western-style restaurants then opening around the center of the city, but sometimes at street spots, lik
e the riverside auto garage that, come nightfall, transformed into a seafood grill. Then off to the Czech beer garden (run by Vietnamese engineers who’d studied in Prague) for the only authentic Pilsner Urquell in the city, and maybe a little karaoke in its private rooms, where Hanh would belt out Madonna songs with utter conviction and I would find nasal solace in Dylan. After which more drinks and viciously competitive games of pool and, when we all at last gave in, breezy motorbike rides back to the Lucy.

  It was a routine, and a community, and I was part of it all, as accepted as anyone else. We spoke the same language—the language of very young people with forthright ambitions and undisclosed fears, overeducated twenty-somethings who’d temporarily turned their backs on the United States in favor of this unknown new land. Among these friends, I was an equal, and while I wasn’t sure what my role was supposed to be, I also wasn’t sure it mattered, so long as I was there to participate in the drinking, the gambling, the eating, the chatter.

  This was utterly different from hanging out with Douglas. Here I was not the little brother, even though Tuyen might call me “Matty.” Nor did this circle have the tensions and competitions I found among the Bodhi Tree gang. I didn’t need to prove myself. No one would take advantage of me. These people were the friends I’d wanted for months, and half of them had been living right in my building.

  I developed crushes on all the women. Lien had a rough, sexy voice and laughed at everything with total confidence, and once, after lunch, we napped together, clothes on, in my bed; but she was married to Steve. Mai was short, with thick glasses, and was incredibly tough—she’d grown up a refugee in Oakland, California—and one night she rode pinion on my moped back to the Lucy, hugging me from behind; but she was with Jason. Hanh was cute, her face composed of perfect circles, her emotions raw and naked; but she had a boyfriend back home, and I didn’t know how to approach her anyway. With none of them did anything happen, and I was glad. I was terrified of upsetting the delicate balance of this perfect ecosystem.