The Turk Who Loved Apples (15 page)

“It's not for you to know,” Neko Case sang on the car stereo, “but for you to weep and wonder.”

Weep and wonder I did. I almost felt I could not go on. The music, the landscape, the unfightable forward motion—they contrived to amplify my isolation. To sweeten it, too. I was a month into a summer-long cross-country Frugal Traveler road trip for the
Times
, zigzagging from New York to Alabama to South Dakota to Texas to Colorado to Wyoming to Seattle, avoiding all interstates, and for most of the twelve-thousand-mile journey, I knew, I would
be alone in my car, a creaky silver 1989 station wagon, prone to overheating, that I'd purchased for $1,600 and named Vivian.

Though not exactly alone. Music kept me company. Neko Case sang me across Wisconsin and Iowa, the Flaming Lips through New Mexico and Colorado. Bob Dylan got me past Kansas, Leonard Cohen past Nebraska, Cat Stevens into South Dakota. From my iPod to the tape deck to Vivian's one working speaker, French rapper MC Solaar chanted out his combative prose.

The miles would go by—one hundred, two hundred—and the music kept going. I gunned Vivian around the muddy Mexican borderlands (where her rear bumper fell off) and up Rocky Mountain dirt roads (where her transmission died) and through the persistent rurality of Indiana, and I listened to sad, simple songs all the way, the kind of minor-key music you'd never put on with a real, live friend at your side. But this trip was different, and my solitude needed a soundtrack.

At times, though, the beauty of the landscape and the sound scape would overwhelm me, and I'd be tempted to let go of the wheel and drift off down cliffs and ravines to certain death. The slick Black Hills of South Dakota, those winding pine-lined highways intercut with washboarded logging roads, were a Siren's song. The Texas desert west of Mentone—no gas stations, no population, just empty rock and arid riverbeds—could have been my own personal wastelands. The death wish enveloped me, but not because I wanted this to end. On the contrary, I wanted to go on forever, to preserve this feeling of absolute perfection. As I hurtled across the land in my silver steel station wagon, the world was revealing itself to me, and to me alone, as the musical gods I adored sang to me, of me, for me. I was beholden to no one, in charge of my direction and my destiny, as urgent but unhurried as the loping rhythms of Portishead. And the only way to keep this moment from ending, I kept thinking, was to end it all—to stop any other moment from ever intruding. Sorry, Vivian!

“Do you realize,” the Flaming Lips asked me, “that happiness makes you cry? Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?”

Everyone? Well, yeah. But everyone's death was not what concerned me—I was obsessed with my own fate, and still am. Early on, probably before I was ten years old, I lost whatever faith in a supernatural God I'd once had, and mortality became a pressing concern. At night, I feared sleep, because temporary unconsciousness seemed a mere prelude to an eternity of unbeing. Once in a while, the panic would rise in my chest and spread over my face, drilling into my skull the fact that one day I would be no more—and would not even know it, and would not even for a second be able to feel relief at having come to an end. The universe would, as far as I was concerned, cease to exist. Everyone I know someday will die? Yeah, sure, of course, I cared, but the day
I
died I would no longer be capable of caring.

Over the years, though, I learned to cope, partly through the promise of writing. If I could write, and write well enough to produce something lasting—a book, say—then my words, my ideas, my self would survive my unavoidable end. My work would probably not outlast me by much, a century if I got lucky, but while I'd never know for certain what kind of legacy I'd leave, this was my best chance to avoid being forgotten completely.

I can't say this was a particularly sophisticated approach to life (or death), but it came from deep within me, this visceral fear of death that I could tamp down only through denial and disciplined misdirection. But seen through this lens, it also explains my craving for companionship. By making new friends, I could leave trace memories of myself all over the world. (Had I been more attractive and less ethically bound, I might have left children in many lands.) Luckily, making friends was a virtual job requirement. I needed people for my stories—locals, preferably, to show me around, provide color, and transform my dispatches from the Fabulously Frugal Adventures of Matt into something broader and less personal.

And so I drove into eastern Kentucky with high hopes. This was bourbon country, and a half-dozen distilleries were scattered around among the horse farms and raw limestone hills. Wild Turkey, Jim Beam, Maker's Mark—all had their production facilities and tasting rooms here, and the windowless towers where they aged their liquor in new, charred-oak barrels stood out starkly amid the deep green of the countryside. Bardstown, whose Federal-style brick houses and central square gave it the look of an old town in eastern Pennsylvania, was where I planned to focus my energies, both for its proximity to the distilleries and for the Old Talbott Tavern, a nineteenth-century inn that had supposedly once lodged Abraham Lincoln and, more importantly, was reputed to have the best whiskey selection around.

The dark, wood-paneled bar, however, was nearly deserted when I arrived that Friday afternoon. The handful of patrons were drinking gin-and-tonics and bad bottled beer. The bourbon list was indeed lengthy, with lots of single-barrel selections and rarities from independent producers, and I desperately wanted to discuss it with someone. I loved bourbon, the burn of the alcohol, the illusion of sweetness, the mouth-filling texture. But the bartender didn't seem interested in talking shop. I ordered an old-fashioned and moped.

Perhaps, I thought when I'd finished the drink, I'd have better luck in the tavern's restaurant. I walked through the building, past the gift shop, and into the dining room. But the stone-walled, wood-beamed space was equally desolate. A mother and her daughter were eating cheeseburgers. A trio of older guys sipped sweet tea.

In one corner, however, I spied a single woman. Blonde, mid-thirties, I guessed, and not from around here. When she spoke to the waitress, she didn't have the accent. Maybe, I hoped, she was in Bardstown for the same reason I was—a love of bourbon. But how could I approach her? She was all the way across the room, and I had no pretext for introducing myself. I didn't want to seem like a weirdo, and I didn't want to appear to be hitting on her. (I was
married, after all.) I just wanted someone to talk to, to share my discoveries with.

It would be easier, I knew, if I already had a companion—if this woman were already at my side. That's how it had worked in the past. A few years earlier, I'd traveled around northern India with my friend Sandra, a petite, dark-haired graphic designer. We were both involved with other people at the time, but we were friends, and adventurous, and on trains, in restaurants, and on the streets we gave off an aura of approachability. We were not dangerous. We were interesting. You could talk to us—you wouldn't be popping a lovers' bubble. We were together, but we were independent. We could look after each other, but weren't responsible for each other's happiness. We could flirt with whomever we wanted.

This could be confusing in India. On the third-class train from Sawai Madhopur to Agra, a fantastically crowded compartment in which we were the only, and therefore fascinating, foreigners, a conductor pushed his way down the aisle and sat beside me.

After asking my name and where we were from, the conductor looked at Sandra, then at me, and said, “Are you married?”

Yes, I told him.

“Ah,” he said. “So this is your wife?”

No, I said without elaborating.

He looked confused, then his eyes brightened. “So,” he asked tentatively but eagerly, “she is your girlfriend?”

“No,” I said, and smiled.

The conductor frowned. This did not make sense, and he seemed to be wondering whether he'd made a mistake in his English or had misunderstood mine. After a silent minute, he said good-bye and moved on.

Later, I felt guilty for this deception—he hadn't deserved my smart-aleckiness—but at the time I relished our bizarre situation too much to let the opportunity to confound him pass. Sandra and I may not have been an item, but we intrigued, and I loved it.

It wasn't this way when I traveled with Jean. When she and I went to Mexico or Maine or Paris or Taiwan, it wasn't to meet new people but to be with each other. Jean's comfort was my concern; if she wasn't enjoying herself, I couldn't. This is not to say I didn't like traveling with Jean, but it was different. We were a closed circuit.

But with Sandra, it was an open relationship, so to speak, as it was with other friends I'd traveled with: Christine, Sita, Sara, Mary Ellen. If only this mystery woman was at my side already, I wished in the Old Talbott Tavern, I could talk to her, no problem. It was a chicken-and-egg situation, and I was clearly the chicken.

Elsewhere, this would work differently. In Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, I'd discovered a hip milliner, Nini K., whose boutique sold modern versions of traditional Caucasian fur hats. And when I learned Nini spent half the year in New York, our talk turned to our favorite Lower East Side bars, and then to the party she was planning at her country house that weekend—to which she invited me, without knowing I was a travel writer. I remember walking out into the street, blinded by the summer sun and the hospitality. But apparently, that was just how it works in Georgia: A few nights later, I was walking alone through an area of open-air bars, taking pictures, when a group of teenagers spotted me and called me over, first to ask questions, then to drink beers and accompany them to a disco and hang out all night long.

Here in America (and much of the West), we're afraid. Afraid of being misunderstood or, worse, flat-out rejected. To say hello is to put our souls on the line by confessing our loneliness. Much easier to remain monadic and to suffer than to risk failure. Even for me, after a thousand successes and far fewer failures, I couldn't summon the courage to connect.

And, not for the first or last time, I wished I didn't need to. Why couldn't I just be alone? Why this desperate, flailing craving for human connection? The uncomfortable fact was, I was
good
at being alone. I knew how to eat alone (at the bar), and I could happily go
days without a real conversation as long as I had plenty of reading material. Traveling solo was often easier than with a companion—I could wake up when I wanted, go where I wanted, and leave when I got bored. Solitude inspired in me a cheerful indifference, a nothing-left-to-lose sense of independence. I'd survived solitude before; those horrible lonely nights in the Lucy Hotel had transformed into sweet memories of youth. I could survive it again, right?

But then the isolation and longing would overwhelm me, to the point where I would do anything—
anything!
—to make real contact with a stranger like the mystery woman. Anything but go talk to her, of course.

And as some of my readers would later suggest, the mystery woman might have been the wrong target. Maybe the sweet-tea trio or the cheeseburger family were ready for a chat? They looked like locals; they probably knew this town inside and out. But no—I couldn't talk to them. They had other things going on. There were dynamics I couldn't disturb. They had come together, to eat and talk, and I didn't feel like it was my place to interrupt. They did not remind me of myself and Sandra in India, open and inviting.

Instead, I ate my pork chops, alone with my brooding thoughts and creeping dread. But afterward, as I lingered in the tavern's gift shop thumbing through tourist brochures, the mystery woman walked out of the restaurant and up to me.

“Are you from New York?” she asked.

Patricia, I learned over bourbon flights, was from Westchester County and, intriguingly, was a veteran road tripper. Whenever she had a break from her secretarial job, she'd fly off to the Shenandoah Valley or Sioux Falls, rent a car, and roam the region for a week or more, indulging in her passion for American history.

As we talked and drank, I was, in a strictly platonic way, falling in love with Patricia. Here I was, traveling the world as a professional observer and evaluator of the experience, yet this was what she did for fun, and what happened to her on the road did not have to follow
a theme and would not be simplified and condensed for public consumption. What happened there mattered to her, and to her alone.

Over the following years, as we communicated by e-mail, I loved simply hearing about her occasionally messy life: the family conflicts, the sexist bosses who denied her promotions and called her on vacation, the crushes on friends (married and single), the realization, after a bluegrass concert attended by senior citizens, that she seemed to “share the same interests as the average seventy year old” and was therefore “a magnet for mandolin players.”

In other words, Patricia was a full-fledged human being, neurotic and struggling and occasionally succeeding and, when she had the chance, escaping her life to wander America on a tour of “libraries and cemeteries.” I loved how our encounter pulled me out of my morose solipsism and into the world. I loved that Patricia existed, and that I'd had the luck to meet her and fix her in my shaky memory, as I hoped she'd fixed me in hers.

On some level, I wanted to be like her—to have a life full of drama that I'd deal with by traveling. But my life was settled, which was something of a surprise to me. Just a few months before this cross-country road trip, Jean and I had bought an apartment in Brooklyn together. I had a regular column in the
New York Times
and was traveling the world on someone else's dime. I was not addicted to any drugs, did not have any serious health problems, and got along relatively well with my family and my in-laws. Apart from my maudlin fear of death, and the attendant craving for companionship, I had no angst. I may have had amusing stories to tell, but I was, and am, personally boring.