Morning (or evening) at sea ©1987 UrbisMedia
It seems paradoxical that the very cultural differences that form much of the attraction in romantic travel can become daunting when one considers actually living with them. There arises a point in the romantic travel encounter when the sober and rational side of one’s mind kicks in with the suggestion that the very impermanence, the fact that the fantasy remains unfulfilled, may be what the romantic traveler is really seeking. Commitment is the emotional equivalent to putting your luggage in the attic.
For the traveler a “destination” is not an end point, it’s a point between trips. Thus the foreign love affair is the equivalent of a trip, contained between arrival and departure but ultimately just a diversion from one’s “real life”. Moreover, it seemed that I had made Gwen into part of the landscape of a city that I loved, a way of getting “closer” to it as much as to her. That she didn’t see it (how could she?) in the same terms as I did was only the beginning of admitting that there were differences that might fester in a longer relationship.
These were all thoughts that were only partially formed at the time and, admittedly, owe something to a couple of subsequent romantic encounters. Experience is often the best teacher, but one has to be a good student.
And so here we were in the early morning at Waterloo Station in an absurd twist to those movie good-byes. That wasn’t me waving from the coach door, torn from my lover’s embrace by the vortex of war. That was me on the empty platform, holding a plastic cup of cold tea, and too embarrassed to return the kiss Gwen blew off her fingertips. I could only smile weakly and stupidly raise the cup of tea in an awkward toast.
I watched her until the train was out of sight, and I headed for the Underground, wondering as we clattered beneath the awakening city what the previous two days might have been like had I not stepped into that phone booth in Trafalgar Square. I only knew for certain that I would henceforth see London in a somewhat different light, and that the city would always carry the anticipation for me that on some future visit I might encounter Gwen coming around a corner, or catch a glimpse of her sitting at that bench near the statue of Winnie The Churchill. I couldn’t promise myself for certain that I might not even one day venture into that phone booth in Trafalgar Square and “ring her up.”
When, a bit bleary-eyed, I pulled myself into the seat on the coach down to Dover one of my students inquired: “And where have you been the past couple of nights, professor? At the movies?”
“Sort of,” I replied, and eluded further questioning by taking a nap.
We’d be in Paris by the late afternoon.
* * *
I cringed at Doug’s good-bye scene. He had about thirty-five people attending his romantic farewell, everyone of whom had a hypothesis about how it might end. As our coach pulled away from the hotel in Frankfort with Doug’s and Lisl’s eyes were locked in an embrace through its tinted glass window. They had been inseparable for days, and maybe some nights, although neither Doug’s roommate nor Lisl’s sister had offered any confirmation. And now they were being torn apart. A few of the women in the group were near tears. It was as though they were in the last pages of some tragic romance novel.
There had been a good deal of speculation since that rosy-fingered-dawn in the Ionian Sea a week earlier. It had come out that Lisl had a husband and a young child back home in Austria. This information had been prized out of brother Gerhardt by some of the pack who took turns “toasting” him in the ship’s bar. As to whether or not she was estranged from her husband, or even divorced, was never made clear, which might just have been Gerhardt’s way of keeping the busy-body packers running up their bar bill on him. And Lisl’s home was, it turned out, a rather small Alpine village, not Vienna. If, and when, Doug learned these little “realities,” they seemed not to have diminished the aura of ardor in which the couple moved about right up to this moment of ‘sweet sorrow’.
I, and no doubt many others, wondered at his thoughts, as Lisl, her parents and sister grew smaller in the rear window of the coach. No one dared look directly at Doug. He could have changed his return ticket, stayed on longer, followed her to Austria. But then what? Was there really a husband there, after all? Did he know that? And if not, an Austrian village was not LA. There would be none of the anonymity, the cultural pluralism, the open-endedness of California; quite the opposite. And there would be no jumping off the ship on a romantic Greek isle, but rather her going off to teach English at the local gymnasium. I was right there with Doug. I could almost feel that cold cup of tea in my hand.
But these were my ruminations, not Doug’s. I never heard from him after we said ‘so long’ at LAX, nor did anyone else in the group to the best of my knowledge. Maybe he did return to Austria later, without all the snooping, speculating fellow travelers around. Maybe he, or she, or both, thought better of trying to make more of it than a “shipboard romance,” and treasure their time together as a souvenir.
Maybe Doug got a leather cover for his notebook, like mine. Maybe Lisl will be the model for the heroine of his first novel, or the subject of a poem. Maybe he’ll abandon the safe and certain again to the enchantments of the romantic travel encounter. That’s how foreign affairs begin, with a “maybe,” and that’s how a lot of them seem to end.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 10.20.2004)