Travel Writing

by Peter Ferry

“You just walked him. You can smoke in here,” she said. “Just sit by the window.”

  I opened the window and sat by it and blew smoke out of it. She busied herself in the kitchen, and there was the comforting clink and clatter of teacups and teakettle.

  “By the way,” she called to me, “did you take three hundred dollars out of our joint savings a couple of weeks ago?”

  I rode my bike up the lakeshore into Highland Park against a north wind. It was cold and hard going, and I got a good workout, but coming back I sailed. Everyone was already crowded around a table in the oyster bar at Davis Street making funny, profane toasts to sloth, idleness, debauchery, dissipation, and two or three other vices.

  “Chilly out there,” someone commented.

  “I should say. When’s this damn weather going to break? I hate spring in Chicago.” I got a pint of Guinness and raised it to Carolyn and Wendy, who were still in their work clothes but who were now wearing oversized T-shirts over their tailored suits. They were bright yellow and said EUROTRASH GIRLS across the fronts.

  “So this is it?” I said. “Last day of work?”

  “Last day until sometime in September,” Carolyn said, clinking my glass.

  “Last day forever,” said Wendy, who claimed to have a plan that would allow her to never work another day in her life.

  “What’s your plan?” I asked.

  She winked. Wendy and Carolyn are about as different as two friends can be, except that they are both smart. Wendy grew up a working-class kid in Berwyn, Illinois, and was the first member of her family to go to college; she had a brief, early marriage and is tough, brash, and aggressive in a way that has made her an outstanding, highly paid corporate attorney, who loves to drink beer, shoot pool, close bars, and who doesn’t always go home alone. Carolyn is single, shy, subtle, thoughtful, discreet, stable. Each is what the other might secretly want to be, just a little bit.

  “Where’d you get the shirts?” I asked.

  “Officer Lotts.”

  Someone sang out, “Eurotrash girls,” and we toasted.

  Lydia knocked on the window from the sidewalk, then hurried in. Having come from the train, she, too, wore work clothes. She hugged me from behind with one arm and kissed me on the cheek as if Tuesday night had not happened. She got a glass of white wine and crowded into the table. She seemed confident and natural in ways I did not feel. I watched her with our friends as they talked and drank and laughed. She looked so happy. They looked so happy.

  Someone else said, “So tell us about this trip.”

  “Oh, jeez,” said Wendy. There was a villa in Aix-en-Provence that a couple she knew from law school was renting for the month of June. They’d start out there. There was a week of hiking in the Swiss Alps with some other friends. “You met the Thumas, didn’t you?” Wendy asked me.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Then they were going to Prague, then “into Hungary to look for Wendy’s lost identity,” said Carolyn. After that they planned a week of R and R on the Amalfi coast in a small hotel they’d read about somewhere, then on to the Greek islands.

  “God, I’d love to be going with you,” said Lydia, and I knew that she meant it.

  “Why don’t you, then?” asked Wendy. “Why don’t you guys come join us in Switzerland for a week. You ever been to Lauterbrunnen?” Wendy described a narrow mountain valley with a flat, lush floor and sheer two thousand-foot walls over which one stream after another stepped into space, creating a dozen little waterfalls and rainbows everywhere you looked.

  Lydia turned to me.

  Wendy talked about taking cogwheel trains and cable cars up into the mountains in the mornings, hiking all day in pastures filled with wildflowers and cows wearing cowbells, surrounded all the time by snowcapped peaks, then taking your shoes off and sitting in beer gardens afterward.

  “Write a couple of your pieces about it. Cover some of your expenses,” urged Carolyn.

  “This isn’t just the wine speaking?” Lydia wanted to know.

  “Of course not,” said Wendy. She told us to book into the Hotel Oberland and get a front room, so our windows, complete with window boxes full of red geraniums, would swing open right on the Jungfrau and the Eiger. “Big, soft quilt to sleep under. Downstairs in the restaurant they have a fish tank full of trout. You point out the one you want, and ten minutes later they bring it to you grilled.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” I said. “When are you going to be there?”

  “We meet Dick and Martha on the veranda of the Oberland for lunch on June 17.”

  “I can’t do it,” I said. “Maybe Lydia can—”

  “Why can’t you?” asked Wendy.

  “Oh, I’m chaperoning a wilderness canoe thing up in Canada with a group from school; I’ll be gone.”

  “Get someone to take your place,” said Steve.

  “Too late. Besides, I told the Trib I’d do a piece on it.”

  “On a bunch of teenagers on a canoe trip?” asked someone. “Who’d want to read about that?”

  “Well,” I said, “I was going to leave the kids out. Just write a kind of me-and-nature thing.”

  “He thinks,” said Lydia, “that high school boys wearing Ray-Bans and lighting farts around the campfire might detract from the Thoreauvian quality of the piece.”

  “Can you do that?” asked Wendy.

  There followed a fairly heated debate on the decay of journalistic standards and whether or not travel and other soft-feature writers have the same moral obligation to truth and accuracy as those writing on the front and op-ed pages.

  “God, I need a cigarette,” I said finally. “Ask that guy with the mustache if I can bum a cigarette.”

  “Change the subject!” said Lydia. “He hasn’t had a cigarette in two days.”

  “Okay,” said Carolyn, “I need a dog sitter or a house sitter, or both. Anyone know of a reliable friend or relative who wants a place to stay for the summer?”

  She needed someone to take care of her old Australian shepherd, Cooper, while she was gone, but her ads had been answered almost exclusively by college-age boys who were way too interested in being just two blocks from Wrigley Field and who she imagined holding Cooper over the back porch railing to pee and using her splintered Mission style furniture to build late-night bonfires on the roof deck.

  Wendy was now trying to convince Lydia that we should join them in France.

  “I really can’t,” I interrupted.

  “Why not?”

  “He’s got to solve the crime of the century,” said Lydia.

  There was a pause. Then Officer Lotts said, “This doesn’t have to do with that Korean chick, does it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Oh Jesus Christ,” said Steve.

  “But kind of?” asked someone.

  “Kind of, I guess.”

  “Oh Christ. Pete, you know what?” said Steve. “You’re going a little nutty on us here. I think you need to talk to someone. That’s what I’d do if I went a little nutty; I’d get right in there and talk to someone.” He left the table suddenly. There was an awkward pause in the conversation.

  “It’s even part of my plan,” Wendy said into the vacuum. “How do you think I got the moxie to quit my job? I went to a counselor.” Together they’d decided Wendy was unhappy because she needed some time off. So that was Wendy’s plan: quit her job, go to Europe, spend all her money, sue her counselor for malpractice, settle out of court, then open a chain of McDonald’s in Uruguay or Chile and get involved in local politics.

  “Bravo!” someone said. We toasted justice and the American way, self-interest, Machiavelli, and abject amorality. Later I got into a conversation with Carolyn at the end of the table and asked her directly if she’d ever gone to a shrink.

  She hesitated. “Yes, when my father died.”

  “Did it help?”

  “It did.”

  Much later I pushed my bike home and Lydia walked beside me. We were both quiet much of the
way. Finally Lydia said, “I’m sorry I said that about the crime of the century.”

  “Okay.”

  We were quiet again until she said, “I want you to do me a favor. When you get back from Canada, I don’t want you to go up to the cottage. If you need to do this thing, if you need some time, stay in Carolyn’s place and take care of Cooper for her.”

  “What difference does it make where I stay?”

  It somehow did. “Carolyn’s is neutral ground. Stay there and help her out. Please. Will you do that for me?”

  I told her that I’d already intended to go to the cottage for the weekend to grade papers. I did not much like Lydia telling me what to do with my freedom before I even had it, but I didn’t like hurting her, either. I didn’t like that at all. I told her I’d think about staying at Carolyn’s, and, in an effort to change the subject, I said, “You know, you can go to Europe by yourself if you want to.”

  “Of course I can.” As she bristled, I was reminded of two things: just how fiercely independent Lydia had once been, and just how much she had changed without my really noticing. It should be said, however, that neither her fierceness nor her independence had come naturally. Rather, they had been foisted upon her by careless parents who spent almost all their time fighting, complaining about each other, feeling sorry for themselves, and ignoring her. As a result she had become very tough and oddly territorial. Most of us are capable of being possessive about small spaces, duties, achievements, lovers, and sometimes friends. Lydia had been possessive about everything. She had divided the world quite clearly between hers and yours. Jack Purcell tennis shoes had been hers; I hadn’t been allowed to own a pair. Glenn’s Diner had been her restaurant. No matter how many times I ate there, I had always been an interloper. She had owned it. She had owned asparagus, Wedgwood blue, Virginia Woolf, the coast of Maine, all Woody Allen movies, the word “ennui,” Auguste Renoir, and autumn, and she hadn’t been very interested in sharing any of them. She hadn’t been interested in sharing music at all, except Django Reinhardt. She had loved Jerry Jeff Walker until I had borrowed a CD, and she’d found it in my car one day. “What’s this doing here?” she had asked.

  “I’ve been listening to it,” I’d said. “I like it.”

  She handed it to me. “Here. It’s yours.” As far as I know, she never listened to it again. Now it seemed that she cared much less about “her things.” Either that or I had become one of them.

  Why had I answered so quickly that I couldn’t go to Europe? I had the time; I had the money. I guess I didn’t want to go; I wanted to stay home and get to the bottom of this Lisa Kim thing. Or maybe I didn’t want to go with Lydia, not just when I had won some breathing space. Or maybe it was some of all of that. And if I really wanted to find out about Lisa Kim, why had I signed on for the canoe trip? But I knew the answer to that one. I’d done so at a time when I was spending half my days running after Lisa Kim, and half running away from her, thinking that if I ran fast and far enough, my life might get back to normal. It happened on a day when I was running away from her. I said yes, and just to seal it before I changed my mind, I pitched my idea for an article to the Trib travel people, and they said yes, and so I was committed. Good. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  I called Carolyn the next day and told her I’d take care of Cooper if she couldn’t find anyone else to, but I didn’t mention staying in her condo. I also asked more about the counselor she had seen, and finally, if she would mind giving me his name. “No,” she said, although I wasn’t so sure. Was she territorial, too? “Gene Brooke; he’s in the book.”

  Gene and I sat in a narrow, tall, bright room on living-room furniture. Gene was a slender, balding man with a goatee, an earring, and an easy manner. Before he could ask me a question, I asked him one. I wanted to know if people can ever really change, if they can make fundamental changes in themselves. I was thinking of Lydia, but I suppose I knew I was also thinking about myself. Gene looked at me thoughtfully, and I wasn’t sure he was going to answer, but then he did. I would find in the weeks ahead that he often did the unexpected, that just when I was positive I knew what he would do, or he as psychologist would do, he’d surprise me. “I believe that they can and sometimes have to. Not often—once, twice in a lifetime at most. Never easily, because real change is wrenching. But sometimes people have to find a new path, go a different way. I couldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t believe that. Now, can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you uncomfortable being here?”

  “Sort of.”

  “Can you tell me why?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I guess I feel that coming here is kind of an admission of failure,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “Well,” I stalled. I looked at him trying to decide if I was ready to confide in him. It was the fact that he had answered my question that allowed me to take the chance. I told him that growing up I’d been a worrier, that I’d worried about everything, but that I’d learned to quit worrying. It had happened that year when Lydia and I had lived in Mexico. I could almost say it happened one Sunday afternoon when I was out exploring the farms and villages in my car and the oil-pressure light on my dashboard came on. At first I panicked. I was fifty miles from anywhere and thought I was screwed. The car was the only thing of value I had. Then, as I sat there by the side of the road looking at the little red light, I began to have a conversation with myself. I said, “What’s the worst that can happen? Your car’s shot. Suppose it is. Suppose you leave it here and never see it again. You walk away. You walk to a paved highway. You sit down in the shade and wait for a bus; Mexico is full of buses. It takes you to another bus or to a town. Tomorrow you’re in Mexico City. The next day Chicago, if you want to be. In ten years you won’t remember how much the car was worth. You’ll laugh about it. It won’t even make a very good story. It’s okay. You can handle this. In fact, there isn’t anything you can’t handle.” I told Gene that that became my mantra. In a tight spot I’d just step back and say, “There isn’t anything I can’t handle.” I told him that it had worked quite well until recently.

  “And what happened recently?” Gene asked.

  “It stopped working. I’ve run into something I don’t seem to be able to handle.”

  “And it has shaken you.”

  “It’s shaken me badly.” I told him about my anxiety and irritability. I told him I felt alone, isolated, panicky, unable to concentrate, unable to work, sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes afraid that I would lose control. “I’ve depended on this thing, and now it’s gone.”

  “Do you think it’s gone completely?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “I kind of doubt it,” he said. “My guess is that you’ve just found out that you have limits. We all have them, and maybe you’ve discovered yours.” He told me that finding and then accepting personal limits was one of the last stages in the maturation process. Another was knowing how and when to seek help because most of the time most of us can handle most things, but not quite always. He asked me if I could modify my mantra.

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, can you add a word or two? Can you live with ‘There’s almost nothing I can’t handle’?”

  “Maybe.”

  “‘And then I know where to get some help.’”

  “Here?” I asked.

  He said yes. He said he would help me sort through things if I wanted him to. I thought I did.

  “Why don’t you begin by telling me about what you’re having a hard time handling.” I told him about Lydia and me; then I told him about Lisa Kim. I told him everything, even about the wet dream. When I finished, I felt self-conscious. Later I would think that he did not. Later I would come to feel that Gene Brooke was the least self-conscious person I knew. “So anyway,” I said, “so anyway.” I chuckled. “My friends are concerned about me. They think I’m going crazy. They think I’m obsessed. I don’t know; maybe I am.”

/>   He looked at me thoughtfully. Again he spoke when I didn’t expect him to. “I don’t think you’re crazy, and ‘obsessed’ is probably too strong a word. I think you’re preoccupied. I think there’s something deep inside you that’s eating at you.” He said he could help me look for that thing, and we made an appointment for the following week. At the door, he asked me what happened with my car.

  “The car? Oh. Nothing. It turned out to be nothing. I drove the car another couple years and sold it.”

  I was relieved. Gene Brooke had treated me as if I were normal, and it reminded me of how many people were not doing that just then. I got Art, bought a Trib and an Evanston Review, and sat on the sidewalk at Café Express. The sunshine on my face felt very good. I read the seven-day forecast and made some short-term plans for the first time in a while: haircut, ball game, library for some audiotapes to listen to in the car. I read all the sports stuff including the Cubs minor-league statistics. I checked out the Ravinia schedule and read a movie review. I looked at the police blotter and obituaries. Then there they were: the Doctors Kim. Looking out at me from some hospital benefit side by side smiling in black tie and pearls. Jesus. I mean, true, the North Shore is not that large a place, but really. I turned the page and read a review of a new Japanese restaurant, then turned back. Was there something of Lisa’s smile on her mother’s face? Was there any hint of their tragedy in their eyes, the slope of their shoulders? They were not alone in the photograph. A woman at the table behind them was laughing, pretending not to see the camera. A slim, handsome man who actually did not see the camera was rising from the table, turning. A waiter was leaning to place something on the table; you couldn’t see what.

  I turned on but then turned back again. There was something about that photograph. I carefully tore it from the paper, folded it, and put it in my breast pocket. I licked the suds and drained my latte and tried to think of something else to do so I wouldn’t have to go home.

  John Thompson came into my classroom after school, and sprawled in the chair across the table, his hands clasped behind his head as if neither of us had any finals to grade. He was as straight as his name, a big, crew-cut, poetry-spouting, Shakespeare-quoting, Marine of a man with whom I had started at Lake Forest, and against whom I had competed for a couple years when our enrollment was shrinking and there were fewer and fewer positions. We both managed to survive and made a connection in the process that grew into a friendship when he got divorced and I listened to him about that for a couple of years, and continued undamaged when he recently became department chair and my boss.