stars. They’d traipsed through Panfilov Park and watched dozens of solemn old Kazakhs play chess in the murky sunshine. They’d scratched Zenkov Cathedral—which claimed to be the tallest wooden building in the world—from their pitiful itinerary. They drank fermented mare’s milk in a fast-food restaurant shaped like a yurt, ate blocky tomato sandwiches and apples as big as softballs at the Zelyony Bazaar, and wandered back to their room, killing time with the BBC as they waited for the Hotel Kazakhstan’s sixty minutes of hot-water service, which commenced at the supremely inconvenient hour of 5 p.m.
They are here for no real reason. Two years ago, Jayne found herself with Douglas ducking her way inside something called Glowworm Cave in Waitomo, New Zealand. Last year she’d had her photograph taken beside Hadrian’s Arch in Jarash, Jordan. Both were what Douglas called Expensive Trips Nowhere, the rubric beneath which this current junket also falls. Douglas first conceived of the Expensive Trip Nowhere after his parents were blind-sided on the New Jersey Turnpike by an Atlantic City– bound tour bus whose driver had suffered a stroke at the wheel. Douglas and Jayne had been married a little shy of a year when it happened. Jayne had stabilized into a teeth-clenched toleration of Douglas’s parents, Park-and-Seventieth gentry who never understood why their son had settled for “some mousy midwestern girl.” This was the phrase Douglas had once quoted—his ill-advised attempt at honesty—in trying to provide Jayne with some understandable frame for his parents’ animosity.
Douglas did not seem surprised that his parents had ceded their estate to a number of New York charitable organizations rather than to him. His parents had, however, arranged for a
dispositive provision
—thus began Jayne’s education in the phraseology of bequeathment— which ensured that a portion of their trust’s income and dividends would be paid out monthly to Douglas, a “sum certain” to the tune of $8,000. Beyond that not a cent belonged to him, except in cases of “extreme need,” and only then in “reasonable amounts,” along with other similar caveats that kept the world in suspended litigation.
The monthly windfall was large enough to encourage carelessness yet modest enough to make frugality seem picayune. Months after the accident, in bed one night, at some namelessly late hour, neither of them sleeping, both of them knowing it, her back discreetly to him, Douglas proposed the Expensive Trip Nowhere, a journey to no place, for no reason, with no plan. Just to go. Just to leave. He spoke with such irreproachable sadness that Jayne rolled over to find his eyes pooled. She’d agreed, instantly. She knew that Douglas’s wealthy Manhattan upbringing had been far too serious a matter to allow for even the suggestion of a childhood; rather like a sexually timid girl turning incandescent atop a boy she finally trusts, the death of his parents now allowed Douglas the consort of some unfamiliar, someday self he’d always been denied.
Three months ago, Douglas had burst into their apartment blabbing about Kazakhstan, from which one of his uniformly affluent students’ parents had just returned. Jayne, whose purse had been stolen in New Zealand and who had been extravagantly ill in Jordan (or, as she called it,
Giardian
), stood there in their kitchen, holding a stack of DoubleStuf Oreos that she had spent a good part of the day stevedoring into her mouth, staring at Douglas with a slipping, ugly expression she hated him for not heeding.
The next day Douglas came home with a muddy fax from something called the Adventure Mountain Company in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. It offered two- or four-day package tours of hiking, rock climbing, rafting, and other communions with the natural world of which Douglas knew nothing. She read over the fax, numb. “Come on,” he’d wheedled. And suddenly he was Douglas again,
They are here for no real reason. Two years ago, Jayne found herself with Douglas ducking her way inside something called Glowworm Cave in Waitomo, New Zealand. Last year she’d had her photograph taken beside Hadrian’s Arch in Jarash, Jordan. Both were what Douglas called Expensive Trips Nowhere, the rubric beneath which this current junket also falls. Douglas first conceived of the Expensive Trip Nowhere after his parents were blind-sided on the New Jersey Turnpike by an Atlantic City– bound tour bus whose driver had suffered a stroke at the wheel. Douglas and Jayne had been married a little shy of a year when it happened. Jayne had stabilized into a teeth-clenched toleration of Douglas’s parents, Park-and-Seventieth gentry who never understood why their son had settled for “some mousy midwestern girl.” This was the phrase Douglas had once quoted—his ill-advised attempt at honesty—in trying to provide Jayne with some understandable frame for his parents’ animosity.
Douglas did not seem surprised that his parents had ceded their estate to a number of New York charitable organizations rather than to him. His parents had, however, arranged for a
dispositive provision
—thus began Jayne’s education in the phraseology of bequeathment— which ensured that a portion of their trust’s income and dividends would be paid out monthly to Douglas, a “sum certain” to the tune of $8,000. Beyond that not a cent belonged to him, except in cases of “extreme need,” and only then in “reasonable amounts,” along with other similar caveats that kept the world in suspended litigation.
The monthly windfall was large enough to encourage carelessness yet modest enough to make frugality seem picayune. Months after the accident, in bed one night, at some namelessly late hour, neither of them sleeping, both of them knowing it, her back discreetly to him, Douglas proposed the Expensive Trip Nowhere, a journey to no place, for no reason, with no plan. Just to go. Just to leave. He spoke with such irreproachable sadness that Jayne rolled over to find his eyes pooled. She’d agreed, instantly. She knew that Douglas’s wealthy Manhattan upbringing had been far too serious a matter to allow for even the suggestion of a childhood; rather like a sexually timid girl turning incandescent atop a boy she finally trusts, the death of his parents now allowed Douglas the consort of some unfamiliar, someday self he’d always been denied.
Three months ago, Douglas had burst into their apartment blabbing about Kazakhstan, from which one of his uniformly affluent students’ parents had just returned. Jayne, whose purse had been stolen in New Zealand and who had been extravagantly ill in Jordan (or, as she called it,
Giardian
), stood there in their kitchen, holding a stack of DoubleStuf Oreos that she had spent a good part of the day stevedoring into her mouth, staring at Douglas with a slipping, ugly expression she hated him for not heeding.
The next day Douglas came home with a muddy fax from something called the Adventure Mountain Company in Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city. It offered two- or four-day package tours of hiking, rock climbing, rafting, and other communions with the natural world of which Douglas knew nothing. She read over the fax, numb. “Come on,” he’d wheedled. And suddenly he was Douglas again,
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