MODERN LOVE When I finished university, I bet everything on my boyfriend

Al terminar la universidad, aposté todo por mi novio - The New York Times The New York Times En el viaje de siete horas en dos autobuses de vuelta a su lugar de origen, el pequeño Puerto Escondido en la costa del Pacífico, ...

MODERN LOVE

When I finished university, I bet everything on my boyfriend

When my friends were pursuing interesting jobs and law school, I went to Mexico after a boy.

An illustration of a woman and a chicken on sharing a hammock, both leaning back with their hands clasped behind their heads.

Credit...Brian Rea

ByDeborah Way

September 9, 2023

Read in English

Ten months after leaving college, I was sitting in a small cabin in a Mexican coastal town, pausing from my identity crisis long enough to smoke a joint with my boyfriend. Then a knock on the door changed everything.

We had gotten together at the end of my senior year, when I had no plans for what would come next. He was beautiful as a statue of a young Greek, and brilliant as one of the recipients of the United States Presidential Scholarship Program. He was also two years behind me in school, spoke Spanish, and had enough AP credits to take a semester off just for fun, so he was spending half of his junior year in Mexico, on $10 a day, traveling. on diesel buses packed with other people who had to travel paying the minimum and the occasional caged chicken that clucked and flapped its wings.

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I didn't speak Spanish, not even a little, and except for summer trips to Canada, I had never left the United States. In my junior year, in order to earn spending money, I had taken a part-time job at a local advertising agency. After graduation, while my friends were betting everything on ambitious and impressive proposals—graduate studies, law, publishing in New York—I started working at the agency full time.

I had no respect for publicity and had no idea what I was doing with my life.

“I have to go,” I told my boss. “I need to be in Mexico.”

Although I immediately let myself be convinced to stay in exchange for a three-week vacation, in my mind I had undoubtedly bet everything on the boyfriend.

I flew to Acapulco, where he met me at the airport. On the seven-hour two-bus trip back to his hometown, small Puerto Escondido on the Pacific coast, I lost the wallet with 200 of the $250 he had brought. He was 22 years old, it was a lot of money and, although we were together, I felt in my heart that I was alone.

I felt very alone with him. And he was lonely too, and inscrutable too. She knew a lot about him: the names of his childhood cats, the divorces and remarriages of his family, the way many of her memories revolved around the food he had been served. But I didn't have the feeling of knowing him .

I was desperate to know: Who are you? That is: Why are you with me?

In Puerto Escondido, we stayed in a tin-roofed stucco cabin on an overgrown hillside less than 30 meters from the beach. It had a palapa awning, a bed, a table, a bench and a chain light.

I had bought a colorful cotton bedspread, a hammock that I hung outside between the awning posts, a blue pewter pot so we could cook over the brick fire, and two matching blue pewter bowls.

Puerto Escondido was a fishing town and a surfing spot, but I didn't do either. The waves were so disturbing that I didn't even go into the sea. Everything worried me. On the beach, some young people were selling roasted iguanas to eat. In the field next to our cabin, two horses were grazing, often with enormous erections, while I lay in the hammock smoking Mexican cigarettes, trying not to look.

Before I arrived, we had written letters to each other: mine was intended to be literary, provocative and romantic, sent to the general mailing list of the cities through which he would pass; His was a travel diary with the dishes he had eaten, the markets he had visited, the people he had met, sketches of birds and a wooden box he was carving. I would scan his words hurriedly, hoping for something that would make my heart flutter, and he would always disappoint me. In one of his arranged calls from a public telephone, he told me: “I really like your letters, but I can't talk like that.”

I didn't talk like that either; He was just trying to get something out of him, some sign that he had him captivated. I was smart, confident, and I could come up with a joke on the spot, and I could even consider myself attractive in a Virginia Woolf way, but I didn't feel dazzling. I needed him to be dazzled.

Because he…geez, everyone seemed to want him. From the moment he set foot on campus, it seemed like everyone knew who he was. He was studying art, talented enough to get a sculpture studio as a sophomore. He was seen riding his bicycle around the city, sitting upright, with his hands on his thighs or hanging gracefully at his sides. Nobody looked that good on a bike. And how her hair fell over his beautiful face.

I wanted to be with that person, and that's why I came to Mexico, and I felt that in his heart... well, I wasn't sure what was in his heart, but I knew that I was too miserable to be loved. She didn't even dare me to order my own food when we went to a restaurant. Sitting at a table with a beer logo, she nodded at him to order something for me. Whatever she ordered, she barely ate.

I was hungry and at the same time not. She was the queen of constipation, not only of my insides, but of my entire being. Life after college was supposed to get bigger, and I had traveled more than 2,000 miles for mine to shrink to a tough little turd.

And then it happened. One morning we got up and decided to smoke the joint I had been saving for the right occasion. We got high until we were paralyzed and we were sitting in bed laughing, talking about nothing and what we were going to do that day, and I said, “Do you know what we need? “We need to eat chicken.”

Chicken. Chicken would taste so good. Thinking about this craving made us laugh the way being very high makes you laugh, and when, suddenly, someone knocked on the door of our cabin, we laughed even more. A laugh from guilty people and terrorists, trying to silence us, because we were in Mexico, taking drugs, and who could be knocking on our door?

“Don't open it!” I whispered. “She's the police!”

“Of course I'll open it!”

And he did. And it wasn't the police. Not only was it not the police, but she was a little girl offering a plastic bag and saying in Spanish in a timid voice, “Chicken?”

Even drugged, I knew what that Spanish word meant.

I have no idea how much that raw, plucked chicken cost, or what we added to it while it simmered in our blue pewter pot, or what it tasted like after we served it in our blue pewter bowls. In my head there was only room for the miracle that had occurred.

She was disoriented and upset, almost without money and without a voice. Without vision of the future, without concept of my life. She had a job I was ashamed of and a relationship I wasn't at all sure about. But I had ordered a chicken, and a chicken arrived at my door.

I knew enough to take it as the sign from the universe that it clearly was: a sign not only that everything would be okay, but also that I could make things happen.

I had made chicken happen. She had conjured it. And when I was no longer high, but still absorbed by the experience, I began to realize that I too had created the relationship.

He hadn't done it like a puppet. She hadn't even done it in a way that she needed to fully understand. It was enough for me to understand that, somewhere inside me, somehow, there was some kind of power strong enough to make him buy a quilt, a hammock, and some blue pewter china so that I would be well. To travel seven hours each way to pick me up at the airport. To be with me in a way that gave up all others.

She had bet on the groom and a chicken had appeared. Perhaps for a person capable of conjuring a chicken, there would be other opportunities as well.

All this is what the chicken helped me see.

And much later, after 10 years together—years during which he graduated and I managed to leave the advertising agency, and we moved to Boston and I started writing in a way that would lead to a career, and we found and started restore the property that was to be our forever home, but also years during which I came to the painful conclusion that he would always be inscrutable, that after all we were not made for each other—the lesson of the chicken helped me Let's see what I could make the relationship end.

So I did it. We are still friends. We are one of those friends who talk every week. He has the pewter pot. I have the bowls.

Deborah Way is the creator and editor of @TheKeepthings , a memoir project on Instagram and Substack featuring stories of transcended loved ones inspired by the items they left behind after they died.

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