pathological empathy for underdogs, often leaves me defending Felipe’s victims, which only adds to the tension. While he expresses zero tolerance toward idiots and incompetents, I think that behind every incompetent idiot there lies a really sweet person having a bad day. All this can lead to contention between Felipe and me, and on the rare occasions that we argue, it is generally over such questions. He has never let me forget how I once forced him to walk back into a shoe store in Indonesia and apologize to a young salesclerk whom I felt he had treated rudely. And he did it! He marched back into that little rip-?off of a shoe store and offered the bewildered girl a courtly expression of regret for having lost his temper. But he did so only because he found my defense of the salesclerk charming. I did not, however, find anything about the situation charming. I never find it charming.
Blessedly, Felipe’s outbursts are fairly uncommon in our normal life. But what we were living through right then was not normal life. Six months of rough travel and small hotel rooms and frustrating bureaucratic holdups were taking their toll on his emotional state, to the point that I felt Felipe’s impatience rising to almost epidemic levels (though readers should probably take the word “epidemic” with a large grain of salt, given that my hypersensitivity to even the faintest human conflict makes me a thin-?skinned judge of emotional friction). Still, the evidence seemed incontrovertible: He was not merely raising his voice at complete strangers these days, he was also snapping out at me. This really was unprecedented, because somehow Felipe had always seemed immune to me in the past-as though I, alone among everyone else on earth, was somehow preternaturally incapable of irritating him. Now, though, that sweet period of immunity seemed to have ended. He was annoyed at me for taking too long on the rented computers, annoyed at me for dragging us to see “the fucking elephants” at an expensive tourist trap, annoyed at me for planting us on yet another miserable overnight train, annoyed when I either spent money or saved money, annoyed that I always wanted to walk everywhere, annoyed that I kept trying to find healthy food when it was clearly impossible…
Felipe seemed increasingly stuck in that awful breed of mood where any glitch or hassle whatsoever becomes almost physically intolerable. This was unfortunate, because traveling-particularly the cheap and dirty traveling we were undertaking-is pretty much nothing but one glitch and hassle after another, interrupted by the occasional stunning sunset, which my companion had evidently lost the ability to enjoy. As I hauled the ever more reluctant Felipe from one Southeast Asian activity to the next (exotic markets! temples! waterfalls!), he became only less relaxed, less accommodating, less comforted. I, in turn, reacted to his befouled humor the way I’d been taught by my mother to react to a man’s befouled humor: by becoming only more cheerful, more upbeat, more obnoxiously chipper. I buried my own frustrations and homesickness under a guise of indefatigable optimism, barreling forth with an aggressively sunny demeanor, as though I could somehow force Felipe into a state of lighthearted gladness by the sheer power of my magnetic, tireless merrymaking.
Astonishingly, this did not work.
Over time, I became irritated with him-exasperated by his impatience, grumpiness, lethargy. Moreover, I became irritated with myself, annoyed by the false notes in my voice as I tried to engage Felipe in whatever curiosity I’d dragged him to this time. (Oh, darling-look! They’re selling rats for food! Oh, darling-look! The mommy elephant is washing her baby! Oh, darling-look! This hotel room has such an interesting view of the slaughterhouse!) Meanwhile, Felipe would head off to the bathroom and come back fuming about the filth and stink of the place-whatever place we happened to be in-while simultaneously complaining that the air pollution was making his throat sting and the traffic was giving him a headache.
His tension made me tense, which caused me to become physically careless, which caused me to stub my toe in Hanoi, to cut my finger on his razor in Chiang Mai as I dug through the toiletries bag for toothpaste, and-one really awful night-to put insect repellent in my eyes instead of eyedrops because I hadn’t looked carefully at the travel-?sized bottle. What I remember most about that last incident is howling in pain and self-?recrimination while Felipe held my head over the sink and rinsed out my eyes with one lukewarm bottle of water after another, fixing me up as best he could while raging in a steady, furious tirade about the stupidity of the fact that we were even in this godforsaken country to begin with. It is a testament to how bad those weeks had become that I do not now specifically remember which godforsaken country we were in.
All this tension reached a peak (or, rather, hit a nadir) the day I hauled Felipe on a twelve-?hour bus ride through the center of Laos to visit what I insisted would be a fascinating archaeological site in the middle of the country. We shared the bus with no small amount of livestock, and our seats were harder than Quaker meetinghouse pews. There was no air-?conditioning, of course, and the windows were sealed shut. I can’t rightly say that the heat was unbearable, because obviously we bore it, but I will say that it was very, very hot. I couldn’t rouse Felipe’s interest in the upcoming archaeological site, but I also couldn’t get a rise out of him about the conditions of our bus ride-and that really was notable, given that this was probably the most perilous public transportation experience I’d ever endured. The driver operated his ancient vehicle with a manic aggression, several times almost dumping us over some fairly impressive cliffs. But Felipe did not react to any of this, nor did he react to any of our near collisions with oncoming traffic. He just went numb. He shut his eyes in weariness and stopped speaking altogether. He seemed resigned to death. Or perhaps he was merely longing for it.
After several more such life-?threatening hours, our bus suddenly rounded a curve and came upon the site of a big road accident: Two buses not at all unlike ours had just crashed head-?on. There seemed to be no injuries, but the vehicles were a twisted-?up pile of smoking metal. As we slowed to pass, I grabbed Felipe’s arm and said, “Look, darling! There’s been a collision between two buses!”
Without even opening his eyes, he replied sarcastically, “How on earth could that possibly have happened?”
Suddenly I was shot through with anger.
“What is it that you want?” I demanded.
He didn’t answer, which only made me angrier, so I pushed on: “I’m just trying to make the best out of this situation, okay? If you have any better ideas or any better plans-please, by all means, offer some. And I really hope you can think of something that will make you happy, because I honestly can’t take your misery anymore, I really can’t.”
Now his eyes flew open. “I just want a coffeepot,” he said with unexpected passion.
“What do you mean, a coffeepot?”
“I just want to be home, living with you in one place safely together. I want routine. I want a coffeepot of our own. I want to be able to wake up at the same time every morning and make breakfast for us, in our own house, with our own coffeepot.”
In another setting, maybe this confession would have drawn sympathy from me, and perhaps it should have drawn sympathy from me then, but it just made me angrier: Why was he dwelling on the impossible?
“We can’t have any of that stuff right now,” I said.
“My God, Liz-you think I don’t know that?”
“You think I don’t want those things, too?” I shot back.
His voice rose: “You think I’m not aware that you want those things? You think I haven’t seen you reading real estate ads online? You think I can’t tell you’re homesick? Do you have any idea how it makes me feel that I cannot provide you with a home right now, that you’re stuck in all these beat-?up hotel rooms on the other side of the world because of me? Do you have any idea how humiliating that is for me, that I can’t afford to offer you a better life right now? Do you have any idea how fucking helpless that makes me feel? As a man?”
I forget sometimes.
I have to say this, because I think it’s such an important point when it comes to marriage: I do forget sometimes how much it means for certain men-for certain people-to be able to provide their loved ones with material comforts and protection at all times. I forget how dangerously reduced some men can feel when that basic ability has been stripped from them. I forget how much that matters to men, what it represents.
I can still remember the anguished look on an old friend’s face when he told me, several years ago, that his wife was leaving him. Her complaint, apparently, was that she was overwhelmingly lonely, that he “wasn’t there for her”-but he could not begin to understand what this meant. He felt he had been breaking his back to take care of his wife for years. “Okay,” he admitted, “so maybe I wasn’t there for her emotionally, but by God, I provided for that woman! I worked two jobs for her! Doesn’t that show that I loved her? She should have known that I would have done anything to keep providing for her and protecting her! If a nuclear holocaust ever struck, I would’ve picked her up and thrown her over my shoulder and carried her across the burning landscape to safety-and she knew that about me! How could she say I wasn’t there for her?”
I could not bring myself to break the bad news to my devastated friend that most days, unfortunately, there is
