In April, just past the halfway point, a port call, the Holy Grail of deployments, popped up and glittered on the horizon. Singapore. Could we afford it? Ross and I weighed the financial hit against the ever-present possibility that the carrier would reschedule at the last minute, scrapping some or all of our brief reunion, but we decided to go for it. Stella and Jake did too. The next couple of weeks passed in a giddy blur of trip planning, Stella and I poring over guidebooks together and seeking out food recommendations from an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. She had her mom come stay with the kids and I arranged for time off work and boarded my pets. We flew out of San Francisco and over the Pacific with vodka tonics in hand and surgical masks over our faces given the bird flu epidemic. “To us, Roxy,” Stella toasted, using what she had termed my “bad girl” name. “To all the limes that gave their lives for our caipirinhas,” I added, “and to your garbage disposal, may it rest in peace.” It was easy and fun, joking about our overenthusiastic drinking and all the nights we’d spent bullshitting on her back porch after her kids were asleep. It was also a far less painful way to cross international borders than being dragged along as a miserable teenager, but as Ross and I drew nearer to each other on the globe, I felt my heart drawing back and an unexpected anger rising up.
By the time the guys met us in the lobby of our towering glass hotel in downtown Singapore, Stella was nervously sneaking a cigarette and I was a precariously balanced sculpture of crazy, all porcelain and knives and nitroglycerin. For the first forty-eight hours, Ross was a startlingly lifelike cardboard rendition of himself. For years I’d been hearing tales from other wives of steamy reunions in exotic locales, that it was the best part of a cruise and great for keeping the spark alive. The dissonance between their stories and my current reality I took as evidence of what I already suspected: something was wrong with me, or with us, and I wasn’t doing any of this right.
I tried to find solace in the subway on our first night together. I loved the announcement wording on the MRT, Singapore’s public transport, recorded by a woman with a kind British accent and then played on a digital screen in English, Chinese, and what I later learned were Malay and Tamil: “Next station, Dhoby Ghaut. Passengers continuing their journey on the North East Line, please alight.” Their journey. Please alight. Like birds on migration. And it was that orderly. Everyone stood around texting, not shouting into their phones. Indian mamas drowsed next to their big-eyed children in the gentle shaking of the tunnels. We could go anywhere with our little green transit card, tapping our way in and out of electronic turnstiles and flowing along in the air-conditioned veins underneath the city with orange-robed Buddhist monks shuffling along next to us with iPod headphones plugged into their ears. I felt like part of the big humming blood of something, and that wherever I got on or off, it would be the right place. It was all new, in other words, novel, strange, miraculous, not the Central Valley of California and the overdue oil change, chaotic checkbook register, and flat Highway 41 whose sixty-five-mile stretch of dairy farms and raisin fields I’d been traversing alone for months on end. Singapore was fascinating and a deep relief to the feeling of being stuck. But being back together with Ross, the part I’d expected to feel like quenching a long-held thirst, instead felt scary—awkward and delicate, like at any moment he could just disappear again without warning.