Free love certificate

We met at Yallingup, a clear-blue-water haven on the Indian Ocean with pristine beaches and romantic, hidden caves. Ironically, Yallingup is an Aboriginal word meaning "place of love." I was living in Perth, the capital of Western Australia, and working as a visiting professor in cultural studies at Murdoch University. It was a gig I had hoped would give me a fresh perspective on the usual fixed boxes of "culture" and "race" in America. So far my plan seemed to be working. I, the child of an African-American mother from the South Side of Chicago and an Anglo-American father from the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, had searched my whole life for a better understanding of such terms. From the moment I arrived in Australia, it was as though the world had been turned upside down: Australia was forcing me to look at lifelong assumptions about "blackness" from a new angle. Like doing a headstand in yoga, my worldview was being oxygenated, and I loved it.

By October, more than half of my six-month appointment had gone by and I had yet to take a vacation. My favorite colleague invited me to join him, his wife and their daughters at an Aboriginal surfing competition. It was a yearly event--a place for nyungah (the preferred term among Aborigines) from around the country to come together for surfing, barbecue, music and a good time. So we piled into the car one Saturday morning, making our way some 150 miles south to Yallingup.

A few hours later, six or seven of us were drinking cabernet on the porch of our rented cabin, just as the afternoon sky turned orange. A very sisterly woman named Mary made a point of referring to her handsome, well-traveled son who had just gone to the store, by the way, but would be back shortly so I could meet him. I liked her immediately.

Not long afterward, a fantasy man rounded the corner. Matthew. He was six feet two inches tall and perfectly muscular. He had long curly hair and a tattoo on his right biceps with a pattern of ocean waves. My heart raced. So did his, apparently. Months later he was still reciting to me every detail of what I wore and said that first afternoon. We spoke briefly as the sun went down and then agreed to look for each other on the beach the next day.

I tossed and turned all night with images of Matthew. Shortly after sunrise, my friends and I descended the cliffs for the big surfing competition. Glistening and brown after surfing (like an "Aboriginal Adonis," as my friend Lisa used to say), Matthew planted himself so close to me that first morning that our arms touched. I placed an ice-cream cone in his large brown hands. Afterward we posed for sandy-faced pictures inside the caves. At the roasted-kangaroo and fish cookout, I slipped into his sweater and we sneaked off in the darkness. We camped out under a trillion stars that evening just the two of us, beneath a single blanket. I remember being lulled to sleep by the crashing waves, amazed that I could fall into such a deep warmth so quickly.

For Matthew, I discovered, being a surfer was more important than any other aspect of his identity. More than being Australian or even nyungah, surfing was the very core of who he was. Later, from various shorelines, I would watch him in the distance, immersed in the silence and awe of the waves. He seemed to need the ocean in the same way that some people need churches. It was the place where he most felt the presence of God. Without it he was irritable and distracted. With it he was centered, all-knowing infinitely compassionate.

Matthew came to visit me in Perth about a month after Yallingup. Before he arrived, I dreamed that he had given me a birthday card and was hurt that I had treated it too casually. Inside the card was a certificate for $429 that he had won surfing. He was turning it over to me in full. His surfing. His life. The message of the dream was clear. I was being told not to take him lightly when he arrived. He would be someone serious.

For two weeks we frolicked in the sun, riding bikes on Rottnest Island, making love and drinking beer. I wrapped up my semester at Murdoch late one evening, with Matthew helping to fill in my students' grades as I called them out. He slipped out early the next morning, bringing back fresh fruit, croissants and flowers. We couldn't stop touching each other.

Australia is a continent only slightly smaller than the United States but with a population the size of New York State. Because there are so few people, even those who live in big cities have the luxury of space. Australians can walk into the ocean naked (which we did) or make love under a blazing sun (which we also did) and never see another human being for miles and miles. Not even a footprint. No matter where one lives, a deserted beach or mountaintop or forest is never far away.

With so much land available, Matthew could rent a three-story five-bedroom home overlooking the ocean for about $900 a month. He worked as an artist, painting canvases and didgeridoos when the mood struck. Sometimes he took temporary jobs with friends in construction. He traveled. By his mid-twenties, he had already lived in England, Holland, Spain and Germany, where he alternately laid roofs and tended bar. On a whim, he would jet to Indonesia for the weekend to surf. Part of me admired him and shared his sense of adventure. Another part of me was envious: His lifestyle represented a freedom unlike any I had ever known.

About four months after we met, we spent the weekend in an island cabin near Cape du Couedic in South Australia, where we saw seals, wallabies and koalas. We brought no docks with us, and there were none in the cabin or car. One day we went to town and asked a waitress if they were still serving breakfast. She looked stunned. It was three-fifteen in the afternoon. "No matter how much I try to situate him in my life, to rank or place him," I wrote in my journal, "his spirit won't allow it. He simplifies me."

Matthew's ancestors were Narangga people on his maternal grandfather's side and Pitjantjara on his maternal grandmother's. His father was an immigrant fisherman of Italian and German descent, whom Matthew only came to know at age 17, shortly before his father's death. Although Mary, his mother, had hoped her five children would learn something of nyungah languages, Matthew never did. His older brother had returned to "the bush," the center of the country where most Aborigines reside, and endured a painful initiation ceremony involving mutilation of the penis. Knowing that a similar fate awaited him if he went North as an adult man, Matthew refused to visit his elders. His brother had been deeply traumatized by the experience. To Matthew, such rituals of traditional men were pointless and cruel.

Although immensely proud of his lineage, Matthew had been raised in the predominantly White city of Adelaide, where he was the only Aboriginal child in his classrooms. I understood what it meant for him to straddle two cultures: He had to live outside people's boxes, in a space that is both liberating and lonely. In fact, I sometimes felt more kinship with Matthew than I did with African-Americans, especially those who insisted that I wasn't really Black because of my color or education or other such nonsense. We were, both of us, outsiders.

But I was also full of doubts about us. I once asked Matthew if he thought we were compatible. He was silent for a moment. "I don't know," he said finally, "but I think we're good for each other." Though I admired his free-spiritedness, I realized just how much I valued order: clean sheets and towels, appointment books and newspapers. He, in contrast, was adamantly opposed to watches and careers. No amount of encouragement I could give--such as helping him sell his artwork--was going to change that. Nor did I want it to, really. I was attracted to him, after all, because of who he was.

Still, it bothered me that Matthew never saw his art as a vehicle for the future, for us. I remember when the World Council of Churches commissioned some of Matthew's paintings. They were to become part of an exhibit that would tour the world. Ultimately they would be housed with the Pope's personal collection in Rome. Though Matthew was pleased, his art remained just something he did from time to time. "We could have houses anywhere, babe," he once told me when I was in a fretting mood. But I knew that houses required paperwork and steady jobs, things that were as foreign to him as another language. Our days together were like having plenty of money but no checkbook to measure it by. We lived well and loved deeply, but never planned for the future.