First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaria Read online

  “Well, Eve, I kind of have a rule about sex. I only make love with someone I love.”

  Like it or not, you've got to respect that. So John tucked me under his African blanket, kissed me good night, and left the room.

  Five minutes later, he was back.

  “But I have the feeling I'm gonna love you soon,” he said, crawling in next to me and covering us both with the African blanket.

  When John went out the next morning to get breakfast, I looked through some of the photos on his dresser. There was John, looking exactly as he did now, amid a tuxedo-clad group of men at a wedding. They looked enough alike for me to assume this was John and his four brothers. They were all tall, handsome, and clean-shaven. Except for the slightly scruffy brother with the red beard. I panicked and wondered if I had slept with the wrong brother! But when John came back with coffee, bagels, and the New York Times, I forgot all about the red-bearded brother. After all, food—not SEX—was the surest way to my heart. Well, that and the fact that after breakfast he suggested we take a long ride on his motorcycle.

  “Hey, let's go out to Staten Island. We can stop in at my mom's house,” I suggested. In retrospect I can see that it would have been saner to suggest walking barefoot through downtown Brooklyn. But clearly, my better judgment was clouded, and besides, the round trip to my mom's meant nearly two whole hours snuggled behind John on his motorcycle. And I couldn't think of anyone else to visit on Staten Island.

  “So,” my mom said within five minutes of meeting my newly beloved, “are you shtupping my daughter?” I, of course, hadn't met John's Irish Catholic parents, but I sincerely doubted that they would ask me—in any language—if I was screwing their son. It is the type of thing my mother would, and did, do. But I had to give her some credit for at least being tactful enough to say it in Yiddish. John, who no doubt did not speak Yiddish, just smiled politely and nodded.

  “Excuse us for a moment.” I grabbed my mother and dragged her into the bedroom. “Be nice,” I hissed. “I'm crazy about this guy.”

  “He's nice,” she said. “Too nice. I don't trust him.”

  It belatedly dawned on me that it was way too early for John to meet my mom (especially if I had any hopes of marrying him). We declined my mom's invitation to stay for dinner. Back in Brooklyn, we held hands and strolled around Park Slope. We had dinner in a Mexican restaurant and spent the rest of the night—together—under John's African blanket.

  I didn't hesitate the next day when John offered to take me on his motorcycle to get my car, which I'd left at my dad's house. My dad had always been as restrained as my mom was expressive, possibly explaining their divorce ten years earlier. So I didn't think he'd ask any embarrassing questions. Besides, how could I possibly turn down another chance to snuggle behind John on his motorcycle?

  On the Long Island Expressway, a car slowed down beside us, the passenger pointing frantically behind us. I looked back and saw stuff—my stuff—strewn like confetti on the highway. My bag, which had been bungeed onto the rack at the back of the bike, had come undone.

  John pulled off onto the side of the road and we walked back, picking up the bits of my life. We found everything—wallet, license, credit card, keys—everything except the picture I carried of The Oneonta Sweetheart. I thought this might be tremendously significant, as I was already thinking about whether or not to hyphenate my name when John and I got married.

  We got back to the motorcycle and saw that our helmets were missing and that a car was pulling away. It had never occurred to John, still fresh from Africa, or me, living in sleepy Oneonta, that someone might actually pull over on the Long Island Expressway and steal the helmets off of our motorcycle. It is illegal, not to mention suicidal, to ride a motorcycle without a helmet in New York. While we might have been high on pheromones, we weren't scofflaws, so we found a pay phone, called the police, and then waited for them to come and lend us riot helmets for the ride home.

  “You know,” John said, “one day we'll tell our grandchildren about this.”

  My mind reviewed all the extraordinary signposts of our budding relationship: the intense connection at our interview, the glorious weekend, the lost picture, and now the mention of our grandchildren. Did John, too, sense that we were meant to be? Or did he simply mean that this story was so unbelievable that one day he'd tell his grandchildren about it and I'd tell mine?

  Answering machine, beep:

  Hi, Mom. You said that John was either gay or too good to be true. Well, he is definitely not gay. Now all I've got to do to convince him that I'm the woman of his dreams is to go off and live in a Third-World jungle for two years without him! That shouldn't be too hard, right?

  I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Leave

  I may have been headstrong and starry-eyed, but I wasn't a two-timer, so I broke up with The Oneonta Sweetheart as soon as I got home.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “But I think I've met the man I'm going to marry.”

  “Oh?” he said, his huge blue eyes opened wide.

  “It's my Peace Corps recruiter,” I explained. We had both known a breakup was inevitable; it was just a matter of when.

  “Well, what about you going into the Peace Corps?” he asked. “You've been talking about this for a long time.”

  “Oh, yeah. I'm still going into the Peace Corps,” I said, hoping to sound more convinced than I actually was. “Of course, I'm still going.”

  Yeah, there was no doubt about it. I was going into the Peace Corps. Until John called.

  “Hey, the weather is supposed to be beautiful this weekend. Why don't I ride my motorcycle up to Oneonta?”

  With John in town, I avoided the hangouts where The Oneonta Sweetheart and I had been regulars. We had broken up but remained friends, and I didn't want to flaunt my new boyfriend in front of him. Also, half the people in Oneonta were mad at me for breaking up with the sweetest guy in town.

  So John and I took long motorcycle rides out of town, and I cooked him my favorite hearty vegetarian recipes, which he ate with abandon. While it was clear that we had moved into a romantic relationship, I still felt a bit like I was applying for something. Perfect Peace Corps material or perfect mate; I was determined to prove to John that I could be either. It seemed to be working.

  “This is Eve,” John said, introducing me to his entire family when he took me to Massachusetts for his grandparents' anniversary party that June. “She'll be leaving for the Peace Corps soon.”

  As kind and welcoming as they were, they must have been as quietly confused as I was. Only John seemed to think nothing of the fact that this woman he was now introducing to his entire family was supposed to be leaving soon for two years. We spent the weekend in the house where John and his brothers had grown up. The walls of the comfortable three-story house were covered with pictures of growing boys and family events.

  “This is Stephen, the oldest,” John said, pointing to a picture of a brother who looked amazingly like John. “And here's Tommy and Joey and Jimmy,” he said, pointing out more photos. All of them had boyish good looks—not a murderer in the bunch, as my grandmother would say. But they looked enough alike that I really couldn't tell one brother from the other. And there it was again, even bigger—that wedding picture with the mysterious, red-bearded brother.

  There would be no premarital shtupping in John's parents' house, and just to be sure, his mother escorted me to a guest room on the third floor, while John got settled in his old bedroom on the second. On the bureau were several framed photos, and my jaw dropped when I looked at one of them.

  “What a nice picture,” I stammered. I knew I was looking at the ruddy-bearded face of my future husband. “Which son is this?” I was almost afraid to ask.

  “Why, that's John when he was in Burkina Faso,” she said.

  “Oh, then in the wedding picture downstairs. The one with all the boys in tuxedos? The one with the beard, is that John too?”

  “Yeah, he looks just like Stephen now that he's c
lean-shaven, doesn't he? But that was John when he'd just gotten back from Africa. I think he looks much better without the beard, don't you?” Far be it from me to argue with my future mother-in-law, so I just smiled. In fact, I smiled through the rest of the weekend and returned to Oneonta on Monday ready to give up everything to be with John.

  “I'll be going into the Peace Corps,” I told my boss when the school year and my teaching job ended a few weeks later. Then I moved down to New York City.

  I hadn't received my invitation yet. But the medical office had cleared me—my wisdom teeth and appendix intact—and my application was now in the placement office. This meant that as soon as there was an opening for someone with my skills, the Peace Corps would send me an invitation. It could take a few months for the invitation to come through, and once I got it I'd have two months to prepare. And until I left, I wanted to spend every minute I could with John.

  John hadn't exactly invited me to move in with him in Brooklyn. So I moved into my mother's guest room on Staten Island. I got a job running a YMCA day camp in downtown Manhattan and split my nights between my mom's apartment and John's. I loved being back in the city and loved the challenge and bustle of my new job. And every day I fell more in love with John. I wondered if somehow we could forget about the whole Peace Corps thing and just go on this way forever. Maybe if I just don't bring it up, I thought.

  For a few blissful months it was easy to ignore the topic because my paperwork was stuck in the Peace Corps placement office and it seemed like it might stay there forever. I still hadn't heard anything from them by the time summer ended, so I took a job coordinating volunteers in Central Park. It was late in the fall by the time I got my big, fat manila envelope from the Peace Corps inviting me to Ecuador. By then, John and I had been together for seven months and I wasn't nearly as interested in spending two years sleeping alone under a mosquito net as I was in spending the rest of my life sleeping with John under his African blanket.

  But I was too far in to back out now. John had proclaimed me perfect Peace Corps material and given me a coveted “outstanding” rating, which he'd only ever given to one other recruit. And while it was obvious that he loved me, I wasn't sure how much of that was because I was such outstanding Peace Corps volunteer material. A big part of what he loved, I was convinced, was the bold, adventurous woman—boobs and head held high in safari chic—that he had met at our interview.

  “I will not be the person who stands in the way of your dream,” he told me anytime I tried to hint that maybe I shouldn't go. Of course, I didn't have the nerve to tell him that my dream now was that he'd actually beg me to stay. More than anything, I wanted to stay with him. But if I didn't go, I wasn't sure that he'd even want me around.

  “Eve, if we were meant to be together, then it will all work out,” he'd say when I asked how, exactly, our relationship was going to work once I left.

  “Well, does that mean you are going to wait for me? Not see anyone else while I'm away?” I knew I was breaking a cardinal rule of dating: Never push a guy into a commitment. But I just couldn't help myself.

  “I can't promise you anything other than if it was meant to be, it will work out.” I didn't have John's damn optimistic faith. I didn't believe it was going to work out if I left for two years. But I couldn't see how it was going to work out if I didn't go. I was caught between the proverbial rock and hard place.

  So I made all my final preparations in a quiet state of dread. I tried to appear excited as I went shopping for my appropriately rugged sleeping bag, my Peace Corps–recommended duffel bag, and my sensible shoes. But all the while I was feeling like a virgin about to be sacrificed to the volcano gods. I tried to be perky and upbeat whenever I talked about my impending departure, but it was difficult to speak on account of the boulder-sized lump in my throat. It was hard work hiding how I really felt. Only when I was alone at my mom's apartment would I allow myself to cry out loud. But there were a few nights, after we'd made love and John was fast asleep, when I'd lie curled against him and cry ever so quietly, swallowing the enormous, pent-up sobs that rattled my entire body.

  “Hiccups,” I told him one night when I accidentally woke him.

  There really seemed to be no way out. It wasn't just John I was afraid of disappointing. My mother had been crowing to anyone within earshot about how proud she was of her daughter who was going off to “save the world.” Then she threw me a going-away party. A going-away party in a rented hall, packed with people and balloons and food and drink. A going-away party with a cake that had my face superimposed on the Peace Corps logo, and balloons that read “The toughest job you'll ever love, meet the best recruit you'll ever have.” It was the kind of going-away party that makes one obligated to, well, go away.

  Friends and family came to the party and brought me gifts. Thoughtful, appropriate gifts, like a black Swiss Army knife, because every other volunteer was going to have a red one, and a travel alarm clock that showed the time in two time zones. There were bandanas, inflatable water bottles, and Imodium pills. Clearly, I had no choice but to leave the country.

  My brother's band played at the party, and for the last set they sang a pair of songs by the Mamas and the Papas. With an angelic voice like Natalie Merchant, but with better diction, the lead singer sang, “Just hold me tight and tell me you'll miss me, While I'm alone and blue as can be …” And the tears began flowing. Just a few drops at first, which is probably exactly how it is when they first start the Chinese water torture. Sure, you think, I can take this. I smiled wanly, and she went on to the next song in her sweet and lethal voice: “While I'm far away from you my baby … Whisper a little prayer for me my baby …” And I lost the last shreds of whatever bravado were holding me together.

  Right then and there, amidst the cake, the balloons, and all my guests, the floodgates opened. John scooped me into his arms and did his best to comfort me, while I prayed fervently that he would end my suffering by admitting that he couldn't live without me. But for a smart guy, he was proving pretty slow on the uptake. Either that or he was dead serious about the Peace Corps recruiters' version of the Hippocratic oath, which I imagine went something like “I vow to reel them in and send them away.” Or maybe there was a prohibition against recruiters falling in love with their recruits and begging them to stay. At least that's what I hoped, because it was either that or I was in this head-over-heels love affair by myself.

  He held me tight. “Ecuador's not that far. Next summer, I'll come visit you” was all he said.

  Two days later, on a dreary February morning in 1988, I got on a plane. “I'm going into the Peace Corps,” I sobbed to my bewildered-looking seatmate. Dizzy, dehydrated, and hyperventilating, I looked more like a dishrag than an eager recruit for the cause of world peace.

  “You don't seem all that happy about it,” my seatmate observed.

  When I finally stopped crying, I was somewhere over Florida. I started thinking about how I could get home. How long would I actually have to stay, I wondered, to convince myself—and most importantly, John—that I had given it a good try? I'd heard you could get out of the army by shooting yourself in the foot. That seemed drastic, and I already had a hard enough time keeping up with John's long-legged strides with two good feet. Besides, I was pretty sure they weren't going to give us guns in the Peace Corps.

  Our first stop on the way to Ecuador was a three-day “staging” in the Little Havana section of Miami. And although we hadn't even left the country yet, it was amazingly like we were already in the Third World. The Peace Corps managed to put us up in a part of Florida where no one spoke a word of English. The purpose of staging is to introduce you to the three-dozen or so other equally stunned folks with whom you will be sharing the next two years of your life. It's also one last chance, I suppose, to turn back before it's too late.

  Possibly to get the really squeamish folks to say “uncle,” staging is also when you have to get vaccinated against anything and everything you might enc
ounter in your country of service. I had worried just a bit about getting sick in Ecuador, but clearly not enough. On day one of our staging, each of us was flanked by a pair of nurses, each one armed with an arsenal of multiheaded inoculating guns and needles. The nurses jabbed us in both arms simultaneously, injecting us with as much protection as they could get against the illnesses, plagues, and parasites that apparently roam the streets of Ecuador in search of foreign touristas and other expatriate hosts. When the nurses finished with us that day, they promised to reload and return the next day.

  The next morning we were lined up and ushered one by one into a little room and told to drop our pants. It was time for the dreaded gamma globulin shots that we would each receive every three months for the rest of our Peace Corps service. If ever someone was teetering about whether or not to quit the Peace Corps, what feels like a burning drill bit burrowing into their butt would push them over the edge—and it did too; three or four recruits dropped out on the spot. I can't imagine that the hepatitis these shots were supposed to protect us from was all that much worse.

  Those of us who survived the shooting gallery were initiated into another facet of Peace Corps life: using our rudimentary Spanish skills to find vast quantities of alcohol. By day two, staging had turned into a giant booze fest. This, as it turned out, was an apt introduction to Peace Corps life. Social butterfly that I am, I dove right in, and things began to look up.

  After three days in Little Havana, the whole group boarded a plane for Ecuador. All my earliest memories of Ecuador are slightly blurry and out of focus. That could be because I had been crying so much. But it also could be because, like much of the group, I arrived in Quito very hungover. But hungover or hyperventilating, it didn't matter. We all stepped out of the airport and stared, slack-jawed, as if we had just stepped into a postcard. There they were, the Andes Mountains looming unbelievably huge and majestic over absolutely everything.