They Only Eat Their Husbands Read online

  He said he’d put me in touch with someone from his paragliding club. Then he changed the subject. “I’ve been meaning to call you, but I never got your number. I thought about calling the TV station, but I didn’t want you to think I was a stalker.”

  “You could’ve just asked Kaitlin.”

  “I thought about that, too, but I was kind of embarrassed. Anyway, I was wondering, would you like to go with me to see Phantom of the Opera? I’ve been wanting to see it and you’re the only person I could think of that I’d want to take.”

  When I told Kaitlin, she said, “You see? He has class,” as if she were already taking credit for her matchmaking success.

  “And he has this sexy voice,” I said. “Not deep, but warm and soothing. He gives you this feeling like he’s hanging onto your every word.”

  Phantom didn’t open for a few weeks, and now that it came down to it, I didn’t want to wait that long. So, that weekend I invited him to—what else?—go for a bike ride along the Coastal Trail. I later found out that he borrowed a bike for the occasion, because he didn’t want to admit he didn’t own one. He picked me up, showing up at my doorstep with a platter of fresh fruit, which we dug into before we started. Kaitlin’s right, he has class, I thought.

  During the bike ride, I was nervous as a schoolgirl. I chattered incessantly, pulling out every exciting reporter anecdote I could think of: flying with a bush pilot to cover the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, driving through forest fires, getting stuck in a blizzard in Bethel. I went on and on, until I thought he was convinced I was either a superhero or the most pretentious woman he’d ever met. Instead, my stories seemed to excite him, and gave him openings to talk about his adventures as a paramedic. We were both addicted to the adrenaline-rush of our jobs.

  “Your job sounds amazing,” he said.

  “But I don’t save lives.”

  “I don’t do that as often as you think.”

  It never occurred to me that Chance might have a hero complex, or that a strong woman might not offer enough opportunities for a hero to strut his stuff. I was lonely, and, for the moment, that was something from which he could rescue me.

  We spotted a Ptarmigan, and he stopped his bike. “Shhh! Watch this. These birds are so dumb. It’s the only bird you can hunt with a broom.” Without looking at the bird, he began sidling up to it, mimicking the walk of a Ptarmigan, bobbing his head and craning his neck. The downy brown bird sat very still, trying to blend in with the dirt. “He thinks if he sits still we can’t see him,” Chance whispered. Then he very slowly reached out and touched the bird. In a sudden flutter, it flew away. In that moment I knew: I was in the same danger as that dopey Ptarmigan. This goofy guy had me mesmerized. I’d never met anyone who could be so unabashedly weird and still retain such deadly sex appeal.

  After the Ptarmigan flew away, Chance smiled at me and said, “I haven’t felt this good in a long time. I’m having so much fun my smile muscles hurt.” He stopped smiling when his pager started beeping. He looked at the phone number and sighed with irritation. He explained, “It’s this guy from work who I asked to trade shifts. The thing is, I don’t know if I want to switch with him after all, because he called it a ‘favor.’ I just don’t want him to think I owe him. I don’t like to be in someone’s debt.”

  My smile faltered, too, as a tiny doubt tugged at a corner of my mind. I projected to some moment in the future when I’d give too much to this man and he’d resent me for making him feel indebted. But I shook it off. You’re always borrowing trouble from the future, I told myself. He’s the most exciting guy you’ve met in a long time. Relax.

  On our second date we went to a movie, and afterward he said, “I’ve been reading the new dating manual, and it says that on the second date you’re supposed to kiss me.”

  So I did.

  On our third date we went for a walk, and I said, “I bought a copy of that dating manual, too, and it says on the third date you’re supposed to hold my hand.”

  So he did.

  The first time I saw Chance truly fly was on our fourth date. We were at Hatcher Pass with maybe a dozen other paraglider pilots, their girlfriends, boyfriends, families, and dogs. The sky was a rainbow of paraglider canopies drifting back and forth along the cliffs.

  Chance giggled like a school kid on the first day of summer as he rolled out his blue nylon canopy. “I hope you don’t mind if I rush off. The conditions are incredible!” He strapped on his harness and started running. His bright blue wing rose behind him, and he jumped off the cliff. Air filled the canopy and lifted him into the sky, where he continued to rise, higher and higher, and farther and farther away, until he disappeared around the hill. He sailed back and forth above the ridge again and again, along with the other pilots. Everyone was laughing and hollering. I could almost smell the adrenaline in their wake.

  “Three hundred feet above launch! Can you believe it!” he shouted at his friends as he returned to earth. Then he turned to me, “I’m sorry, I know you don’t understand, but going three hundred feet above launch, that’s amazing! It’s like being a bird, just soaring on the updrafts.”

  Once my image of him took to the sky, there was no bringing it down. Soon after that, Chance invited me into his apartment. I didn’t want to make the mistake of moving too fast, like I did with Scott, but I thought it would be okay if we stayed in the living room. I didn’t know that his living room doubled as his bedroom. We rented old episodes of The Outer Limits and flopped on his futon to watch. Afterward, we barely stayed within the limits of the dating handbook.

  When I felt my self-control slipping I pulled away and said, “I just want you to know, there’s this guy I was seeing up until a few weeks ago, and we never really split up. He just stopped calling . . . ”

  “You mean, you have a boyfriend and you’re here in my bed?” Chance slipped me a sly grin and kissed my neck.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call him my boyfriend anymore. But it was sort of serious, and then it suddenly stopped. And this is all happening a little quickly for me.”

  “Look, I’m not planning to have sex with you, if that’s what you’re worried about—not that I don’t want to . . . I mean, you’re very attractive. It’s just that I’ve kind of got a new dating rule: no intercourse. At least, not for a long time. Really. I can draw a line if you can.”

  True to his word, he didn’t try to insert tab-A into slot-B, although we certainly went farther than I planned. His kiss was as simultaneously calming and exciting as his voice, driving smelly Scott from my mind. I hadn’t felt this way since I was eighteen. I’d only settled cynically for its recurring counterfeit, because I was someone who always wanted to be in love.

  When I stood in his doorway to say goodnight, he said, “I like you a lot, so I just want to warn you: I’m not very good at commitment. I wouldn’t call off that old boyfriend just yet.”

  My face burned with humiliation. That was stupid, I thought. Did I ever ask him about his feelings? I gave him a cursory hug and left, feeling like an accessory to my own violation.

  ***

  After we got only half-naked and stopped short of spending the night together, Chance stopped calling. Two weeks went by. I decided it was a no-fault breakup, like being let go during the probationary period at a new job. That’s when Scott called.

  Out of a warped sense of loyalty, and a perverse desire to blot Chance’s rejection from my mind, I decided to give Bachelor Number One another chance. When Scott invited himself to my place for the weekend, I accepted. Hadn’t Chance said, “I wouldn’t call off that old boyfriend just yet”? Hadn’t I once come to the covert conclusion that I could marry Scott? Surely he’d stop talking about his old girlfriend sooner or later. Surely as soon as I explained to him that his pheromones made me a little nauseous he’d rush out and buy deodorant.

  When Scott arrived at my doorstep on Friday night, I dragged
him into my apartment and we made up with a vengeance. I noticed that making love with this ultra-athletic guy was kind of like competing in an Olympic sport for which I’d never trained; I just couldn’t keep up with his high-speed performance. And I couldn’t push Chance out of my mind.

  Afterward, we went to a country-western bar with a couple of my friends, where I stared at Scott’s innocent eyes and tried to figure out why the feeling that had seemed so real a few weeks ago had vanished. Mistaking my stare, Scott sealed our fate by saying, “Don’t go getting all mushy and start falling for me, now.”

  Indignant, I decided he needed to be taken down a peg. Maybe he was an outdoorsy Alaskan man who’d built a house in the woods and seen some interesting places, but once the exciting image wore off he was just another presumptuous, smelly guy with issues. In spite of the compulsion I felt to hang onto yet another placeholder until Mr. Right arrived, I chose to forego another qualifying run in the sack. Whatever flimsy thing had been between us was now gone. That night I told him our relationship wasn’t going anywhere. In the morning he left and didn’t return.

  Later, I realized that Scott wasn’t a bad guy. His biggest problem was that I wanted someone else.

  ***

  The day after Scott left, Chance called. My heart started beating with the same silly eagerness as a puppy’s tail thumping the floor. He invited me for a hike up Flattop, a popular mountain just half an hour outside town. Without asking why he hadn’t called in two weeks, without stopping to think about his last words to me, I leapt at the chance to see him again.

  Flattop was always the handiest place to remind myself that, although I lived in a city, I still lived in Alaska. It only took forty-five minutes to hike to the top of the 3500-foot mountain, and it was a relatively easy trail for anyone in decent shape. Yet it was also an easy place to achieve a sense of accomplishment, with steep rises and a hand-over-foot scrabble up craggy rock, leading to an incredible view. The top looked as if someone had chopped the peak off with a cleaver, giving Flattop its name. The flat surface seemed to confuse the ever-shifting, swirling air, leaving the top invariably cold and windy.

  Just in case the winds might be in his favor, Chance packed his paraglider on his back. But as we rose above the twisted hemlock of the lower slopes, the wind was already whipping us. So he hid his paraglider in some bushes on Blueberry Hill, to retrieve on our way down. Now that he was empty-handed, he offered to carry my daypack. “I’m okay for now,” I said. “But I may take you up on that later.”

  A short way up the trail, he said his throat was sore. “I put some cough drops in the top of your pack, can I grab them?” I waited as he stepped behind me and unzipped my pack to rummage around for a lozenge. Later, when we reached the steepest section of the hike, I said, “Okay, I’ll take you up on that offer—you can take my pack now.” His face twitched in a mischievous grin as he took my pack, put it on the ground, and unzipped it. “Okay. But first . . . I won’t be needing this anymore.” He reached into the pack, pulled out a huge rock, and tossed it to the ground, where it landed with a thud. It weighed at least five pounds. Then he innocently tossed the pack onto his shoulders. Chance had never needed that cough drop. I stared at the rock, slack-jawed, then pummeled him. As we stood there giggling, I realized I was in love with him. That damned rock seemed to seal it.

  A short time later, we pulled ourselves over the final crag and onto the abbreviated peak. The wind nearly knocked us over.

  “Isn’t this great!” Chance shouted over the shrieking air. “I love extreme weather.”

  “Yeah, it’s great, but my ears are freezing!”

  We ran for cover behind a cairn, where Chance huddled behind me, cupped his hands over my ears and blew on them. His breath felt hot, in exciting contrast to the cold. When we felt warm enough to stand, we took in the 360-degree view: graceful saddles led in several directions to the severe alpine beauty of the Chugach Mountains, while below us Alaska’s largest city looked like a toy model and Cook Inlet gleamed in the sun. No one else was on the mountain and we ran around like children, giddy with the freedom of having this windswept view to ourselves.

  When we were too cold to stand it anymore, we scurried down the mountain and back to his place. We curled up together on his futon while Chance talked, his soothing voice buzzing in my ear. I relaxed into a feeling of warm contentment and, in characteristic fashion, spoke my thoughts aloud without stopping to consider them: “Chance, from now on I don’t want to be with anyone but you.”

  The comment came from my desire to completely attach myself to Chance. Yet that comment severed me from him in a way I didn’t expect, because this guy who’d told me he was lousy at commitment had assumed I’d already made one. His body stiffened with anger.

  “What do you mean? Have you been with someone else? Did you see your old boyfriend again?”

  “Well, yes. You stopped calling and I thought I wasn’t going to hear from you again. So I thought I’d give him another chance. But that’s my point: when I saw him, I realized I didn’t want to be with him, I wanted to be with you. So I told him it was over.”

  He sat up and pushed me away. “When exactly did you tell him this?”

  There was no getting out of this situation. I have a profound aversion to lying, based less on merit than on ingrained defensiveness over being wrongly and regularly accused of lying as a child. I could refrain from speaking, but he would know the answer by my silence.

  As my mind raced for a reply, he repeated, “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Friday night.”

  “Did you sleep with him?”

  I sat in embarrassed silence.

  “Damn it!” He jumped off the couch as if I’d burned him. “You have no idea what a turn-off that is for me. So you broke up with him, but you sent him away with a big smile on his face, didn’t you? And I was starting to think I’d met someone who was so different. I thought this was special.”

  I’d thought so, too, and I could feel it irretrievably slipping away. I babbled, “Don’t you see? I tried to give my old boyfriend a second chance, but it didn’t work because I realized I was falling for you.”

  “Then how could you do that with him?”

  “I’m sorry. I just want you to know . . . I really did have a wonderful time today. And . . . I’m so sorry. Goodbye.” I started to leave.

  “So now I don’t even get a hug?”

  Puzzled, I turned back and gave him a hug. He held me tightly. I felt confused by his mixed signals. I remembered him telling me he wasn’t good at commitment. What had he expected? Then again, what had I expected? I pulled away and left.

  ***

  The next day, I called to apologize. It took me several tries before he answered the phone.

  “Can I come over and talk with you?” I asked.

  “This just isn’t a good time.”

  “I really am sorry.”

  “No, it’s not that. It really isn’t a good time.”

  “Why? What else is wrong?”

  “I’ve been drinking.”

  “What do you mean? A lot?”

  “I had nine beers.”

  “Oh, I see,” I said softly.

  In spite of what popular wisdom had to say on the subject, I blamed myself for upsetting him. Surely he didn’t drink nine beers on a regular basis? He looked and acted so respectable; he was so well-spoken and polite.

  He called back later, after he sobered up, and invited me over after all. When I arrived he was throwing out his trash. I heard the clanking of bottles, a loud after-the-frat-party noise. God, how I hate that sound. My head began to ache and my heart began to pound. I wanted to run.

  But when he returned from the garbage bin, he didn’t seem drunk, just tired. He sat down, pulled me onto his lap, and pressed his forehead to mine. “Cara, I won’t pretend you didn’t hurt my fee
lings, but I think we can get past this. I think I can understand. All I know is I thought about you all day, and I couldn’t stand the thought of not seeing you again.”

  I spent the next two years trying to get back to that feeling on the mountain. Sometimes I think I’m still looking for it, even as I leave Alaska behind.

  Alaska Escape Plan

  thirty-five years old—the inside passage, alaska

  The ferry made no stops today. On the third day of our journey through the Inside Passage we drifted through an elegy of rain. Low clouds caressed the sea with longing.

  I’m staying in the solarium on the back deck, where it looks as if a hippie subculture has set up a little village. Tents stand lined up like a row of squat soldiers at the rear, while deck chairs draped with sleeping bags sit gathered in small groups under the roof. Backpacks lie scattered everywhere. The solarium is a hive of college kids returning from summer jobs, families finishing vacations, fishing guides, the young, the old, the searching, the lost. I’ve been sitting in my deck chair, opening and closing a Russian nesting doll painted in shades of pink abandon. I bought the wood doll a couple of days ago in Sitka as a gift for Iliana, my two-year-old half-sister in L.A. I know she’ll probably lose the tiniest dolls, but I don’t care. I just want to see her reaction when she opens each doll to see what’s inside, one after another.

  Even on vacation, I’m usually driven by a compulsion to do something, hounded by my grandmother’s voice in my head: “I never saw anyone so lazy!” But today the voice stopped, knowing that, even if I wanted to, there wasn’t much to do. I spent the morning playing Scrabble with an older woman camped next to me in the solarium. Then I spent the afternoon talking with two fellow travelers, Pete and Sam, until lazy began to feel good.

  Pete’s a sightseeing pilot. He’s thirty-five, but has the optimistic smile of a man ten years younger. Sam is a fishing guide. He’s the same age as Pete, but has the saturnine demeanor of a man twenty years older, someone who’s seen it all and found much of it disappointing. When I told them that I’m traveling around the world, the two of them helped me cobble together an incoherent travel philosophy, each offering very different advice.