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A journalist tracks a trapeze artist around the country to satisfy an erotic obsession. Now he wants to marry her. Will she make the leap?

Editor's Note:Each Friday Salon Travel's Wanderlust presents a reader's tale of romance on the road. Be it a romance requited or un-, with an old love or a new lust, send your tales of amorous adventure to Wanderlust. We'll share a selection of them here.

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By Diane Weipert

June 25, 1999 | The arrival gate was crowded with people, but I knew Luis hadn't come. I'd missed my scheduled flight to Green Bay, and there had been no way to let him know. I'd left a message with the central office in Hugo, Okla., but was told he might not get it until morning. When at last I arrived, the sun was slipping into a verdant, Midwestern flatland, and the shadows cast by the full, summer trees were already dimming in the last light. I found a taxi outside the airport, but I wasn't sure where to go. It was hard dating a man in the circus.

"Welcome to Wisconsin!" the taxi driver's voice boomed over the din of traffic as he opened my door. His taxi was a boat-size Chevy station wagon with a back seat so wide I felt like a child sliding over the vinyl. "Where're you headed?"

I tried to remember if Luis had mentioned any specifics about where the big top would be set up, but I could think of nothing. Everything had been carefully planned, and I'd ruined it. Luis was to pick me up in a borrowed car, and then we'd rush to a nearby motel until it was time for the first show to begin. Much of our relationship was played out in inexpensive motel rooms: Noelia, his 12-year-old sister, playing diving games with other children in the outdoor pool, Luis and I deliriously engaged in erotic acrobatics inside. He lived with his brother Angel, his uncle Weegi and Noelia in a small motor home that followed the five-ring animal circus from town to town. They were known as the Poema family, a fifth-generation trapeze act from Argentina. And he was the great Luis Poema.

"Did you happen to notice that the circus is in town?" I asked the cab driver, not having directions to give him.

"Sure did. They came this morning and set up in the Brown County Fairgrounds. Posters are all over the place."

"That's where I need to go."

"The circus?"

"Yes, please." The man shrugged his shoulders and started the car.

"Whatever you say!"

I considered Luis an innocuous addiction, like a travel bug. Though our relationship threw everything in my life off balance, I just couldn't stop. The adventure of keeping track of him was like the thrill of exploration. He had been raised as a vagabond, always mobile and unreachable. And in order to be with him, I had to move as well. He sent me plane tickets whenever a two-night gig appeared on the circus itinerary, but sometimes I got impatient and drove across the country just to see him for a night. One time, when I couldn't bring myself to say goodbye, I traveled with the circus through rural Indiana, following the posted black-and-white arrows to New Castle, Connersville, Scottsburg and Salem.

The trouble was that Luis and I had nothing in common. I was working as a small-time, bilingual journalist with plans for graduate school; his entire life was contained within the fantastical world of the circus. I would listen to him talk about his childhood as we lay in bed, damp and languid from playful wrestling and sex, and nothing he described was familiar. While I had been trapped within the somber halls of a Catholic elementary school in Colorado Springs, Luis had been in Mexico or Brazil learning to juggle fire or do a handstand atop a human pyramid. He was like an exotic animal that I dearly loved, but that didn't quite belong in my ordinary life.

Next page | I felt his eyelashes lightly grazing my forehead