THE AFOREMENTIONED FIANCé WAS out of town for an indefinite period because he was walking across the continental United States. His purported goal was not necessarily the Pacific Ocean, but finding his own path in life. It wasn’t just his mission statement but how he talked, on the road or off, raising consciousness, searching for awesomeness in the everyday.
People often looked perplexed when I tried to explain Stuart’s expedition or what I saw in him. There was a time during the period I call Stuart 1.0 when his Instagrams almost exclusively chronicled our dates and were followed by a festival of hashtags expressing affection and devotion. There was a thoughtfulness that I saw as a predictor of husbandly attentiveness; there was a full-time job with the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance that paid for the tickets and trinkets he hid rather adorably around my apartment.
As for the arena I’ll delicately call “relations”—had I been dealing with amateurs before him?
But he changed—and “overnight” isn’t an exaggeration. He started using words such as potentiality and wholeness after an emergency appendectomy. During his recovery, he quizzed anyone in scrubs until a nurse confirmed, “Yes, it could have ruptured; yes, people can die from that.” He emerged from his hospital stay a different man. It wasn’t organic or neurological, but social, a rebirth inspired by the free soul in the next bed whose worldview sounded good to Stuart, postsurgically, supine, and dangerously close to turning forty.
I gave it some time—accepting the new, softer, vegetarian Stuart 2.0. When friends heard about his walk and asked me if he was a nonconformist or a nut, I told them that this was just a new lifelong goal, to find himself by crossing the country on foot, a sabbatical of sorts after his agency had closed its doors.
I agreed to be one of his sponsors in the form of a jointly held credit card, which he vowed to use sparingly if at all. His quest sounded sincere: his embrace of everything and everybody, whether it was scenery or wildlife, or the people who offered him a couch, an indoor shower, a sandwich. I was skeptical that his lightweight cause would attract the goodwill and hospitality needed. But sure enough, thanks to coverage by local TV stations, big-hearted families stopped their cars to ask what they could do. I knew when he’d failed to find free lodging, because those were the days he blogged about constellations or the howling of coyotes, which meant he’d slept in his pup tent under the stars.
He wore a sign that said IN SEARCH OF STORIES on one side and, when flipped, FREE HUGS in Spanish and English. At last count, he’d slept in three unlocked churches, one synagogue, one mosque, a few shelters, and several fraternity houses. Because he believed it’s dangerous to text while walking, he checked in less frequently than I liked. We talked several times a week unless his battery was dead or he’d had too much to drink, which happened while staying with frat boys, current or emeritus. When challenged about what was looking to me like debauchery, he said what he’d look like to his hosts was judgmental if he didn’t partake. And wasn’t the whole journey about “walking two moons in another man’s moccasins?” I was thirty-two. I wasn’t getting any younger. I said yes, I suppose so.
After four months on the road, he’d gotten only as far as Ohio. Have I mentioned that his mom was now married to her ex-sister-in-law, that his forsaken dad and uncle were remarried to women who founded a weavers’ collective, making Stuart the only child of three hippie families? When he first proposed this cross-country walk, I said, “Why don’t we drive across the U.S.? It can be our honeymoon.”
“Oh, really?” he said. “Maybe we can stop by Niagara Falls and Disney World in our RV.”
I should have recognized by his tone that he was being facetious, that suggesting a road trip by car not only bore little resemblance to the fulfillment he was seeking but also exposed me as a comfort-seeking, conventional vacationer who had the word honeymoon in her vocabulary.
Whereas his various parents put a good face on it, as I tried to do, my mother was openly cynical. She enjoyed asking, “Where’s Peter Pan this week? Meeting some nice potheads he’ll never see again?” I’m sure it would’ve been fine if Stuart had been a doctor or a banker, but since he was merely, of late, a self-styled philosopher who proposed without a little velvet box, she worried that he was using me. At the time, I thought that couldn’t be further from the truth, that Stuart wasn’t interested in material things, only love, moral support, and occasional infusions of cash to complete his journey.
No one, including me, was thrilled that he was twice divorced from the same woman, but I did make the argument that men who get all the way to forty without commitments are the true Lost Boys of this world.
I commented regularly under Stuart’s blog entries, signing every one “Faith.” His gratitude seemed excessive, always thanking me for logging on and going public with my commitment to his cause. It made me wonder if he’d forgotten that Faith was my first name.
3
Stewardship
I HAD MOVED BACK TO Everton, Massachusetts, from Brooklyn to take what appeared to be a stress-free job at my alma mater. My duties continue to be these: if you make a donation to Everton Country Day, especially if it funds a scholarship or endows a chair or names a prize after a loved one, I handwrite the thank-you note that describes all the good your money is doing.