And that is how I ended up in Newfoundland, three weeks after Laura told me she was leaving, and a week after Laura packed her bags and moved a thousand miles south to try to build a life again with the world’s least reliable rock guitarist. Laura may have expected me to drop everything and follow her, but I was placing my bets on a different outcome: that Nick was going to prove as unreliable as ever, and Laura would be back in New York by September.
In the meantime, I was going to see the world, my chin held high and suitcases swinging at my side, like a slutty, urban version of Maria fromThe Sound of Music.
The improv? That came later.
2
“YOU REALLY NEED TO HEAR ABOUT HIS MOTHER”
At the endof improv practice that night—the early August night that I’ll call the ‘kiss night’—Paul stood at his doorway like a good host to see us off. Paul speaks with a slight Newfoundland accent, which always sounds to me like friendly Midwestern with a dash of Swedish. I wasn’t sure whether I should stay behind to talk to him in case there was any remaining awkwardness or hurry out with Mark and Lisette so that he wouldn’t think that the kiss meant anything to me.
When I approached, he glanced down to avoid eye contact, like a man about to deliver bad news. I could feel myself tensing up: oh dear God, was he going to preemptively reject me? Or even worse, did he feel sorry for me? Then he glanced up and met my eyes with a half-hearted grin, and I had the same feeling I’d had since the first time I met him: this mix of complete familiarity, like I could understand every thought he had, every flicker of irony or self-doubt—and then seconds later, the certainty that I was getting him all wrong.
I let Lisette leave first. She leapt up to give Paul her usual giant hug—she’s unreserved in a way that I could never be—and then skipped out the brightly-painted doorway. I figured I would leave before Mark, who was still shaking out his coat andexamining the buttons. Mark is usually the last person to leave anywhere, even though he apparently lives the farthest away. Lisette thinks this is because his house is really dumpy, though she’s never actually seen it.
“I’m betting it’s a trailer,” she said to me once. “He seems like the type to live alone in the woods.”
“He works in advertising, so I kind of doubt it,” I told her. Mark is divorced, like Paul, but he is close to fifty and has kids who are already out of the house, so he definitely seemed like he should have the money to live well. However, I could see Lisette’s point: most of his energy was spent being pessimistic and asking people pointed questions, so I wouldn’t put it past him to be living in a trailer out of spite.
As Lisette headed down the steps, her pale blonde hair bobbing in all directions under a handknit cap, I approached the front door and put out a hand to Paul awkwardly. It seemed like the safe choice. I could feel myself blushing a little and I wanted to project a carefully neutral attitude, like we were two colleagues at a business conference.
“Well,” I said brightly.
“We’re shaking hands, now?”
“You only get one kiss a night, buddy.”
He opened his mouth and then seemed to change his mind about what he was planning to say. “Fair enough,” he said, and shook my hand.
I almost apologized again but I knew I couldn’t get through it without acting like a teenager, so I turned to go.
“Hey, I may call you,” he said as I stepped away. I stopped, my heart lurching. Then he went on, “I have another improv book to recommend.”
“I was that bad tonight, huh?” I was impressed with my own ability to sound jovial instead of desperately nervous.
“Or that good,” he replied. “Good night.”
Mark followed only a few steps behind me and caught up with me halfway down the block.
“Hey, you want to grab a drink around the corner?” Mark has one of those low, rumbling voices that suggests a one-sided love affair with cigarettes.
“Oh, umm…” It was a windy evening in St. John’s, and I was calculating how late I wanted to get back to my sublet apartment. I had a meeting with my boss in the morning, even if I was planning on taking it on a laptop wearing fuzzy, mint-green slippers.
“I just want to chat. I’m not asking you out,” Mark said testily.
“Um, sure, I can grab a drink,” I said. “Where do you have in mind?”
“How about right there?” He pointed down the hill to a little pub in the basement of one of the old stone buildings from the late 1800s. It looked like the kind of place that had once advertised dry goods to women in wide brimmed hats. “They have some good beers on tap.”
As we tramped down the hill together, I glanced back. I knew it was silly, but I wanted to see whether Paul was still at his door, watching us go. I could see his silhouette frozen in the doorway, but when he saw me looking, he turned and disappeared inside. When I turned back to Mark, he was watching me with a dry smile.
“There’s something you really ought to know about Paul,” he said.
So why Newfoundland?That will probably seem even more unlikely than my decision to pine after an improv comedy enthusiast who shows no apparent interest in dating me. The windy, foggy weather here was certainly a factor. I’m a hoodedsweatshirt person at heart; I’m happiest when the weather is 62.5 degrees, with a light breeze, so I can enjoy a proper cup of hot coffee in the morning. Janeane Garofalo was my style icon growing up: casual, dryly funny, wearing shoes that could kick a door open.
Still, ending up on an island in the North Atlantic was more than just a pleasant way to avoid the smell of Brooklyn during July and August, when the city is most redolent with trash bags of stale pizza and spoiled milk. I was also thinking about leaving the U.S. for good.
Ever since I hit my thirties, I have had days when I start to feel like I’ve had it with the U.S.—that there are too many important things that we haven’t gotten right. Still, until Covid and the ‘work from home’ policy that came with it, I never really thought seriously about the possibility of just picking up and going. For one thing, I don’t have a particular claim to citizenship in a foreign country. I always envied friends who could skip around the world on multiple passports, whereas I was born in the exotic city of Troy, New York—a gritty, industrial back porch to our state capital of Albany. People didn’t usually get out of Troy to see the world; they made a circular tour of the city’s factories, pubs and pizza restaurants before winding up a block from where they were born, looking much the worse for wear. I had no ‘in’ that would allow me to duck away to Ireland or Portugal as a second-generation citizen.
