Wanderlust Read Online Free Page A

I’d been neither to a certain beach bar nor to a particular discoteca . “Why don’t you come out later tonight?”
    Maria José and Toni accepted the idea right away. Pepe was a known quantity, son of their longtime restaurateurs, and would deliver me home. And so my tour of Costa Blanca nightlife began later that evening, on the back of Pepe’s motorcycle.

    When I realized that Maria José Sr. and Toni didn’t mind at all if I went out after the children were in bed, I started abusing the privilege. Regarding the night as the only time that was my own, I maximized it by staying out late, often until three or four in the morning. The consequence, since I had to get up when the children did, was that soon my days were passing in a sleepy haze. But that never stopped me from going out again. At 11:00 PM, all I could think about were the two or maybe five hours of freedom stretching ahead. After the children went to bed, I primped and brushed my teeth and climbed to my tower. From there I could see the road in the distance, winding over the ridge from the village center and around the beach at El Portet. One headlight meant a motorcycle: hopefully Pepe’s.

    He seemed to know someone everywhere: old friends from school, friends from the mili, foreigners he’d come to know in the restaurant over the years, and, all along the coast, bartenders and waiters who didn’t charge him for drinks. I wrapped my arms around his torso and we rode on two-lane highways to towns like Dénia, where we walked on a crowded boardwalk and he explained how to mix a favorite cocktail. He told me that his friends called him “el más moro,” which as near as I could figure out meant either the most macho, the most sexist, or the most Moorish. The Moors had left half a millennium earlier, but up and down the coast you could see, in the words on maps, evidence of their culture. Every place that began with “Al ” or “Ben” came from an Arab word: Alicante, Alcázar, Almoines; Benissa, Benigánim, Benidorm.
    One day Maria José came to pick us up at the beach, and got into a yelling match with an older man about a parking space. I watched from a short distance, and realized that I had no idea what they were saying. Other than a few exclamations— “¡huevos!” —it wasn’t Spanish. In the car, after she’d regained her calm, I asked what language she’d been speaking. “Valenciano,” she said. It was a local dialect similar to Catalan. The old man had accused her of not being from around here, of having the parking skills of a tourist. In her fury she’d broken into Valencian, indicating the deepest possible roots in the land. I was impressed with how deeply she was from here, in a way I could never imagine being from anywhere, not even my hometown. My family tree was made up entirely of people who’d moved from one place to another. The irony was that the Morairans assumed that I, though alien here, had a connection to home like their own. I was the representative of something that didn’t exist, and so felt fraudulent. I also envied them.

    The first time I let Pepe kiss me we were parked—he had borrowed his family car—on a quiet hillside road in El Portet, somewhere up from the beach but below my house. We had gotten out of the car to gaze down at the bay, and Sinead O’Connor, singing “Nothing Compares to You,” was playing on the stereo. The pining romance of the song made me think of Graham. I was annoyed at Pepe’s insistence; I had thought I would probably kiss him at some point, but later. After we kissed I was still annoyed and he was mollified. He dropped me off at home.
    We went one night to the summer house of a Belgian friend of his, who had a heart-shaped swimming pool in a terraced yard. It was after midnight, the air was warm, and the turquoise pool was lit up from within. I stripped down