Two years ago I’d just gotten out of a relationship with a guy named Tommy. Well, I guess “relationship” is not exactly the most accurate term. I wished it was a relationship, but it was more of a fuck-buddies setup and it was leaving me increasingly unsatisfied.
Tommy was a motorcycle riding, commitment-phobic, checkered-past-having walking cliché, but I was hooked on him despite that – or perhaps because of it. I’d been seeing him off and on since I was a barely-experienced teenager and by the time I was twenty-four, I realized that what I’d thought was cool non-conformity was really just laziness.
I’d had some difficulties to overcome in my life too, but I had goals. I worked hard, got my own place, and took college classes at night. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that college kids take a trip to Europe, so I saved up, bought a backpack and spent three months traveling around. When I got back, Tommy was delivering pizza and thinking about maybe becoming a musician.
Tommy didn’t strive for more than what was easy to get. He liked the freedom to stay up late and do what he pleased, and he took sketchy temporary jobs that allowed him to do just that. He liked sex, but he liked it with a lot of different women and didn’t want to put any work into other aspects of a relationship. F
inally, after one more morning slinking home alone in a disheveled, skimpy outfit, I realized that the thrill had begun to wear off and I was forced to admit to myself that Tommy and I would never be a real couple. I think now that he only liked me because I was his type physically, with my slender body, light brown skin, full lips, and long dark hair.
Even after I decided to stop seeing him, I couldn’t stop thinking about Tommy. I knew I could call him at any time and have a couple of hours of physical intimacy, if not the emotional variety. I was constantly tempted. Whatever Tommy may have lacked in motivation or goals, he made up for it in sexual imagination. But I knew that for my own sake, I had to get my mind off him.
I went for a walk alone one evening and it was not helping me stop thinking about Tommy at all. But then it occurred to me that, since I love to travel so much, a trip would help me forget him, or at the very least, keep me from calling him and making a mistake. I couldn’t go somewhere romantic, I reasoned, or I’d just feel lonelier, but maybe someplace less suggestive of lovers – and far, far away from New York City. As I was pondering this question, I passed a bookstore and decided to step in and check out their travel section for some ideas.
Three hours later, I left the bookstore with a biography of Mother Theresa and a copy of Lonely Planet’s India guidebook. Ever impulsive, I had decided to go to Calcutta and volunteer for the Sisters of Charity for a few months. I figured Mother Theresa was a great role model – she probably had no problems resisting booty-calls from exes. Not to mention that the poor of Calcutta probably had a lot more important things to think about as well.
My friends and family were alarmed at the thought of me going to India alone, as but they’d been alarmed at each of the solo trips I’d taken over the past few years, I’d learned to smile and ignore it. And any secret hopes I had that Tommy would realize he had made a mistake were dashed when his reaction to my announcement was simply, “Hey, that’s a cool idea. Have a good time.”
By the end of the month, I’d sublet my apartment, quit my job and was on a plane to Calcutta with a backpack full of clothes I hoped were modest enough not to offend Indian sensibilities.
Calcutta was an excellent distraction. I got a dorm bed in a hostel on Sudder Street, where the tourists and volunteers stay, and started to get to know the city. The first thing I learned was that it was hot. Painfully hot. I copied the locals and began to carry around a handkerchief to periodically wipe the sweat from my face as I went about my business. With all the new sights, sounds, smells and tastes to experience, not to mention the constant sweating, I had little time to pine for Tommy.
I met Kurt my first night at the hostel, and even went to dinner with him in the company of a dozen other hostellers. In such a big group I didn’t get the chance to speak with him and, although he had classic good looks, he didn’t stand out in any remarkable way, so I didn’t even notice him in particular.
On my third day in Calcutta I went to the large, high ceilinged, and relatively cool common room to read. Kurt was there, lying on one of the couches, reading a thick volume of Goethe in German and smoking cheap Indian cigarettes called Captains. His dark brown hair was hanging over his eyes, so in order to read and smoke, he had to tip his head back a bit and squint through it. This gave him a contemplative look that made me develop the first tingles of a crush.
I smiled at him as I sat down and opened my own book, a paperback copy of City of Joy, purchased at one of the many bookstalls along Mirza Ghalib Street.
“That’s a good book,” he said.
“Yeah… I’m learning a lot.”
“Have you yet read Freedom at Midnight? LaPierre wrote that one too, with someone else.”
“No, not yet, but I plan to.”
“Where are you from?” he asked me.
“New York. You?”
“Just near Vienna.”
Kurt’s English was excellent and he spoke with the charming and half-familiar but somehow elusive accent of a European who has learned British English; I found out he had spent a year studying in England during high school. I also found out that he’d finished his compulsory military service about six months ago, and hadn’t cut his hair since—wouldn’t, in fact, be cutting it again until he started at Oxford next year. This meant that he was a lot younger than I’d realized.
“How old are you?” I asked curiously.
“I am twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one? You’re only twenty-one?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Um, I don’t know. I just thought you seemed older, that’s all.”
Looking closer, I could see the youth in his face, but when Kurt expounded on philosophy, he seemed as mature as I’d originally thought him to be. But as much as I normally enjoy a good intellectual discussion, when Kurt talked passionately about something, I occasionally found myself listening more to the sound of his warm voice with its sexy accent than to his words themselves. But mostly I listened to his words. His idealism made me realize how cynical I’d become. And he’d been volunteering for months; he was so very different from Tommy.
It took a couple of weeks for anything to happen between Kurt and me. In the meantime, I started my volunteer work at a school. I started to feel somewhat at home weaving through the crowds of people in exotic (to my eyes) saris and lunghis, and the beggars, some of whom were distressingly disfigured, and some of whom were tiny children. I learned to politely rebuff the persistent touts offering everything from hotel accommodations “Very cheap, very cheap,” to fortune telling, to guide services, the rickshaw-wallahs constantly calling out to me. I chose a favorite of the chai-wallahs set up on every corner, selling tiny cups of sweet, milky tea. I began to act blasé when my path was cut off by a dozen goats being herded through the streets to be sacrificed at Kali temple.
Kurt and I talked every day – but then I talked to a lot of the other volunteers every day. I wasn’t sure if he returned my interest, so I was shy with him. I was beginning to think nothing was going to come of my little crush.
The hostel turned the common room lights out at eleven p.m., but people often stayed there anyway, talking by candlelight. One night Kurt and I were the last ones left – I had been determined to say as long as he did, hoping for just such an occurrence; perhaps he was too. I don’t even remember what we talked about. Indian politics, our respective countries, travel stories, something like that, probably, but we sat up long after the cheap little candles had guttered out. Kurt was full of idealism and ideas and he was interesting to talk to, but that night I barely listened. I just kept telling myself that surely he was interested in me or he wouldn’t still be out here and when is he going to kiss me?
I don’t remember how it happened, but he ended up giving me a massage. After lusting after him for two weeks, feeling his hands rubbing my back made me weak. Perhaps it was the long anticipation, or the exotic location, but I had never had a more sensual massage. Normally I hate it when someone turns a massage into something sexual, but this wasn’t a sleazy guy thinking he was tricking me, it was a boy too shy to make a bolder move, and it charmed me. It didn’t hurt that he was actually good at what he was doing.
