liberation. It felt as though we had found the Northwest Passage of Perfect Intimacy-something that, as Garcia Marquez wrote, “resembled love, but without the problems of love.”
So that’s what we’d been doing up until the spring of 2006: minding our own business, building a delicately divided life together in unfettered contentment. And that is very well how we might have gone on living happily ever after, except for one terribly inconvenient interference.
The United States Department of Homeland Security got involved.
The trouble was that Felipe and I-while we shared many similarities and blessings-did not happen to share a nationality. He was a Brazilian-?born man with Australian citizenship who, when we met, had been living mostly in Indonesia. I was an American woman who, my travels aside, had been living mostly on the East Coast of the United States. We didn’t initially foresee any problems with our countryless love story, although in retrospect perhaps we should have anticipated complications. As the old adage goes: A fish and a bird may indeed fall in love, but where shall they live? The solution to this dilemma, we believed, was that we were both nimble travelers (I was a bird who could dive and Felipe was a fish who could fly), so for our first year together, at least, we basically lived in midair-diving and flying across oceans and continents in order to be together.
Our work lives, fortunately enough, facilitated such footloose arrangements. As a writer, I could carry my job with me anyplace. As a jewelry and gemstone importer who sold his goods in the United States, Felipe always needed to be traveling anyhow. All we had to do was coordinate our locomotion. So I would fly to Bali; he would come to America; we would both go to Brazil; we would meet up again in Sydney. I took a temporary job teaching writing at the University of Tennessee, and for a few curious months we lived together in a decaying old hotel room in Knoxville. (I can recommend that living arrangement, by the way, to anyone who wants to test out the actual compatibility levels of a new relationship.)
We lived at a staccato rhythm, on the hoof, mostly together but ever on the move, like witnesses in some odd international protection program. Our relationship-though steadying and calm at the personal level-was a constant logistical challenge, and what with all that international air travel, it was bloody expensive. It was also psychologically jarring. With each reunion, Felipe and I had to learn each other all over again. There was always that nervous moment at the airport when I would stand there waiting for him to arrive, wondering, Will I still know him? Will he still know me? After the first year, then, we both began to long for something more stable, and Felipe was the one who made the big move. Giving up his modest but lovely cottage in Bali, he moved with me to a tiny house I had recently rented on the outskirts of Philadelphia.
While trading Bali for the suburbs of Philly may seem a peculiar choice, Felipe swore that he had long ago grown tired of life in the tropics. Living in Bali was too easy, he complained, with each day a pleasant, boring replica of the day before. He had been longing to leave for some time already, he insisted, even before he’d met me. Now, growing bored with paradise might be impossible to understand for someone who has never actually lived in paradise (I certainly found the notion a bit crazy), yet Bali’s dreamland setting honestly had come to feel oppressively dull to Felipe over the years. I will never forget one of the last enchanting evenings that he and I spent together at his cottage there-sitting outside, barefoot and dewy-?skinned from the warm November air, drinking wine and watching a sea of constellations flicker above the rice fields. As the perfumed winds rustled the palm trees and as faint music from a distant temple ceremony floated on the breeze, Felipe looked at me, sighed, and said flatly, “I’m so sick of this shit. I can’t wait to go back to Philly.”
So-to Philadelphia (city of brotherly potholes) we duly decamped! The fact is we both liked the area a lot. Our little rental was near my sister and her family, whose proximity had become vital to my happiness over the years, so that brought familiarity. Moreover, after all our collective years of travel to far-?flung places, it felt good and even revitalizing to be living in America, a country which, for all its flaws, was still interesting to both of us: a fast-?moving, multicultural, ever-?evolving, maddeningly contradictory, creatively challenging, and fundamentally alive sort of place.
There in Philadelphia, then, Felipe and I set up headquarters and practiced, with encouraging success, our first real sessions of shared domesticity. He sold his jewelry; I worked on writing projects that required me to stay in one place and conduct research. He cooked; I took care of the lawn; every once in a while one of us would fire up the vacuum cleaner. We worked well together in a home, dividing our daily chores without strife. We felt ambitious and productive and optimistic. Life was nice.
But such intervals of stability could never last long. Because of Felipe’s visa restrictions, three months was the maximum amount of time that he could legally stay in America before he would have to excuse himself to another country for a spell. So off he would fly, and I would be alone with my books and my neighbors while he was gone. Then, after a few weeks, he’d return to the United States on another ninety-?day visa and we’d recommence our domestic life together. It is a testament to how warily we both regarded long-?term commitment that these ninety-? day chunks of togetherness felt just about perfect for us: the exact amount of future planning that two tremulous divorce survivors could manage without feeling too threatened. And sometimes, when my schedule allowed, I would join him on his visa runs out of the country.
This explains why one day we were returning to the States together from a business trip overseas and we landed-due to the peculiarity of our cheap tickets and our connecting flight-at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. I passed through Immigration first, moving easily through the line of my fellow repatriating American citizens. Once on the other side, I waited for Felipe, who was in the middle of a long line of foreigners. I watched as he approached the immigration official, who carefully studied Felipe’s bible-?thick Australian passport, scrutinizing every page, every mark, every hologram. Normally they were not so vigilant, and I grew nervous at how long this was taking. I watched and waited, listening for the all-?important sound of any successful border crossing: that thick, solid, librarian-?like thunk of a welcoming visa-?entry stamp. But it never came.
Instead, the immigration official picked up his phone and made a quiet call. Moments later, an officer wearing the uniform of the United States Department of Homeland Security came and took my baby away.
The uniformed men at the Dallas airport held Felipe in interrogation for six hours. For six hours, forbidden to see him or ask questions, I sat there in a Homeland Security waiting room-a bland, fluorescent-?lit space filled with apprehensive people from all over the world, all of us equally rigid with fear. I had no idea what they were doing to Felipe back there or what they were asking from him. I knew that he had not broken any laws, but this was not as comforting a thought as you might imagine. These were the late years of George W. Bush’s presidential administration: not a relaxing moment in history to have your foreign-?born sweetheart held in government custody. I kept trying to calm myself with the famous prayer of the fourteenth-?century mystic Juliana of Norwich (”All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”), but I didn’t believe a word of it. Nothing was well. Not one single manner of thing whatsoever was well.
Every once in a while I would stand up from my plastic chair and try to elicit more information from the immigration officer behind the bulletproof glass. But he ignored my pleas, each time reciting the same response: “When we have something to tell you about your boyfriend, miss, we’ll let you know.”
In a situation like this, may I just say, there is perhaps no more feeble-?sounding word in the English language than boyfriend. The dismissive manner in which the officer uttered that word indicated how unimpressed he was with my relationship. Why on earth should a government employee ever release information about a mere boyfriend? I longed to explain myself to the immigration officer, to say, “Listen, the man you are detaining back there is far more important to me than you could ever begin to imagine.” But even in my anxious state, I doubted this would do any good. If anything, I feared that pushing things too far might bring unpleasant repercussions on Felipe’s end, so I backed off, helpless. It occurs to me only now that I probably should have made an effort to call a lawyer. But I didn’t have a telephone with me, and I didn’t want to abandon my post in the waiting room, and I didn’t know any lawyers in Dallas, and it was a Sunday afternoon, anyhow, so who could I have reached?
Finally, after six hours, an officer came and led me through some hallways, through a rabbit warren of bureaucratic mysteries, to a small, dimly lit room where Felipe was sitting with the Homeland Security officer who had been interrogating him. Both men looked equally tired, but only one of those men was mine-my beloved, the most familiar face in the world to me. Seeing him in such a state made my chest hurt with longing. I wanted to touch him, but I sensed this was not allowed, so I remained standing.
Felipe smiled at me wearily and said, “Darling, our lives are about to get a lot more interesting.”
Before I could respond, the interrogating officer quickly took charge of the situation and all its explanations.
“Ma’am,” he said, “we’ve brought you back here to explain that we will not be allowing your boyfriend to enter the United States anymore. We’ll be detaining him in jail until we can get him on a flight out of the country, back to
