Thursday, Aug 28, 2008
On the road, the rest of the world can begin and end in a stuffy phone booth.
Jun 18, 1999 | I travel a lot and mostly I travel alone. When I enter a public phone booth to check in with friends back home, sometimes I feel like I'm opening a mystery novel. I never know what news awaits me, and more than once, love has rung its way into my life -- or disconnected from it -- in these places.
"I hate to tell you this way, but your visit to stay with me in Hawaii just won't work out now," his voice said on my answering machine. It was at least 100 degrees. Familiar symptoms followed: crazy heart rate, a wash of sweat over my body. I did a quick survey of my life, past, present and future, and found it sadly wanting.
I was high in the Corsican mountains exploring the 1400 B.C. Bronze Age archaeological site of Pianu di Levie and had decided to stop in the sole phone booth to access my messages back in California. After two months in France and Corsica, I was to be heading home in five days, and then on to a remote area in Hawaii to spend a few weeks with my lover of the last six months, a man I had known for the past three years. I'd been looking forward to this visit, to the love and coziness, to being cared for, after what had been a rigorous and lonely two months. I stood in the phone booth with my tickets, reservations and dreams and wondered what to do.
My booth was in the sun, surrounded by the village's barren and dusty tiny plaza. In order not to suffocate, I held the folding door of the booth open with one hip. I called my 88-year-old writer friend, Dorothy Carrington. These days, I seem to be collecting a certain kind of role model: older women writers all over the world, living well and creatively on their own. Dorothy tops my list.
During the next few days, I had been planning to visit her at her home in Ajaccio, Corsica's largest town and Napoleon's birthplace. Without pausing for a breath after hearing my romantic woes, she said: "That's not at all surprising. Men are hunters. Only one in four is at all capable of making any kind of emotional commitment. And in any case, you wouldn't want a man around all the time anyway."
"What about sex?"
"Ah, well, yes. That is a problem. When I turned 70, my desire for sex just walked out the door, and I've been much more at peace ever since. So, are we going to get together?"
"What about lunch?"
"That's too much. What I really want is a banana split." This stated with an English aristocratic "baanahna." I was already beginning to cheer up.
The next day I found myself on the white sand beach near the fishing village of Campomoro, looking out at southwest Corsica's translucent turquoise sea. The blank sentinel eyes of a 14th century Genoese watch tower oversee this area of the Gulf of Valinco. A voice interrupted my solitude: "You seem to be quite triste; perhaps I can cheer you up." I looked up. The voice was attached to a tall, olive-skinned, hazel-eyed young Corsican. "My name is Christian. May I bring my towel over here?"
As I explained my situation to him, he came to a rapid conclusion. "You must stay on here for two more weeks. There's a phone booth just above by the cafe. I'll help you call the airlines and we'll change your flights. In fact, I'm not even using my apartment these weeks; please feel free to stay there."
I awoke the next day to birds' songs. Below me the sea was blue and calm. The nightmare had passed. The wrenching of flesh from flesh. On another isle 10,000 miles to the west, 12 hours earlier in time, the volcanoes still bubbled and smoked and exploded. He slept, perhaps dreaming guilty dreams of me. Here the volcanoes were calm, mature, covered with green maquis, smoothed by the centuries. But still the form of the volcano remained. The potential was there, of passion, eruption. The bells of Propriano sounded in the distance, below in the town. My new lover arrived, bearing fresh warm croissants.
"How many lovers have you had?" he asked me.
"I don't know."
"More than me, I'll bet."
Little does he know, I thought.
"Maybe finally you are meeting the right one." He was charming and convincing and a wonderful antidote. My injection theory of recovering from a broken heart worked once again: Make love with another man, and like swallowing an antihistamine pill, you begin to recover. Replacement juices and hormones do their job.
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