The Long Way Home (Part Two)
Back on the train! This morning was our third trip to Penn Station, The Man’s and mine, in less than two weeks. There was Boston and then a day trip to Trenton, New Jersey and now we are aboard the Adirondack 69 to Montreal. For various personal reasons, we are taking a rather zigzag route back to The No Place, going from New York to Montreal and then on to Vancouver and then to our part of interior British Columbia.
It may seem a little strange to you, the phrase, “personal reasons,” popping up in this space…because often it feels, to me, that there are no taboos here—nothing that is off limits for discussion. While that is true about myself, there is now The Man to consider and I think it only fair to say that he is on the fence about being discussed here.
A friend of mine who writes profiles for The New Yorker, even though he is married and perhaps especially because he is often in the business of tattle tailing on the more peculiar weaknesses of the human condition, says he would never date anyone who wrote a blog. While I see his point, I feel I take care to protect my most intimate relations…even and perhaps especially the guilty ones. I never name The Man, nor have I named my parents when I discuss them. Furthermore, I do not snipe; no spats show up word for word the next day for anyone to comment on or judge. I don’t dish on the sex life. Few gory details are to be had at all, in fact. I haven’t even told you about our first date, which is a lovely story by the way, because it hasn’t been relevant to anything I’ve felt like analyzing about my life or the world I see around me. To my mind, what’s worth mentioning here are the interactions and relationships that have and are currently rearranging my perspective on the world in general and changing the specific circumstances of my life. Right now, and for these last months, The Man falls into that category on a daily basis. While I’ve tried to explain this to him (and for now he accepts it), he still grunts occasionally at the mention of the blog.
So, for now, various episodes of our travels and my life will remain under wraps. These are innocent personal matters that, were we to be dining with you, The Man would speak of freely. But they are his personal matters as well as mine, and he is on the fence, and I must remain respectful.
But let me take you back to Spain. It was a big decision, whether or not to make the trip to Madrid for The Man’s opening there in April. We’d just gotten back to New York ten days before we would have to leave and were living together there for the first time, with the kid staying in the picture…and my roommate too, in my small two bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. But after much deliberation and last minute arrangements, we were on our way!
Not only was it my first time to Spain, I’d never accompanied The Man to one of his openings. While I was not looking forward to the trans-Atlantic flight, as I am deathly afraid of flying where an emergency landing is next to impossible, the excitement of the excursion and the comfort of intimate company overwhelmed my fears.
Madrid is a beautifully kept, one might even say manicured, smaller European city. Almost everyone speaks a little English and they are kind and understanding when visitors stumble with phrasebook Spanish, as we did. It took us forty-five minutes to accomplish the purchase of said phrasebook at the department store, but that was our fault for not thinking ahead. Try it sometime, asking for Spanish-English conversational book of translation when you can say nothing more than “gracias…” Go ahead, I dare you.
The gallery arranged a lovely hotel for us, but with two twin beds put together for a king…and on wheels. Mind the gap, indeed. I knew enough to expect very little ice in cocktails, shops closing in the middle of the day, unfamiliar cuisine—travel to a foreign country is always an experience of a different way of life…but not being able to snuggle your lovely through the night? That was one thing I didn’t expect and for which I was unable to account.
Even so, one makes do. Once we were settled in at the hotel, we went to the gallery to meet and greet and make sure the paintings were arranged appropriately for the opening the next evening. On arriving were graciously informed that the paintings…had not arrived. We’d been slightly concerned about this possibility, due to extenuating circumstances photographing and shipping the work from the middle of nowhere. But in twenty years of exhibiting The Man has never had his paintings not make it in time and he was optimistic that everything would come together at the last minute. He was even in good spirits once given the bad news. I was not so cool. I managed to keep it together while at the gallery, if glumly, but when we got back to the hotel I cried. We’d come thousands of miles not to have an opening. It was such a to do to get there when we had just gotten home to New York, I couldn’t believe it was all for naught.
The Man managed to cheer me up, if you can believe the irony, and we did make a lovely holiday out of our trip. We went to the No Show, as I’ve come to call it, as there was another artist exhibiting in the gallery’s adjacent space who was also opening his show that night. We dressed up and chatted up anyone who chanced to stray into the room with blank walls and then joined the other artist and gallery associates for dinner. On our other few days we went to the Prado, walked around the beautiful city, and even ate dinner at a gorgeous restaurant Philip Stark had fashioned from an old theater. Although highly unexpected, it was a trip I’ll never forget.
I’m afraid the part The Man will remember most was our disastrous journey home. Remember my terrible fear of flying? Since our trip was so last minute I was unable to book us seats together on the return flight. He was sure we’d be able to work it out at the airport, but I had nightmares about it as our trip came to an end. Finally finding the one you love and then plummeting to your deaths three rows apart was not a fate I could accept. As melodramatic as my worst-case scenario thinking tends to run, I needed to be seated next to him if I was putting my life in the hands of Continental. Continental, it turns out, couldn’t be bothered. No one at the ticket desk would help us and after days of unclear communication and a major worst-case scenario come true, I lost it. I had a full blown personality meltdown in the middle of the airport and was on the verge of another on the plane—at the hands of already frustrated flight attendants who probably had no real power to help me, but who were all too ready to wield their authority to have us escorted off the plane—when a few kind people offered to rearrange their seating to accommodate us. Obviously, we landed in tact…or in my case relatively in tact. But that’s usually the state of my case, isn’t it?
It felt good to be back in New York for a solid couple of months. We had so much to do and so many people to see. And we had a life together that we would have to translate into a new dialect.
