Marie-Claire, from France, pictured left, and Elaine Comerford, from the US, pictured right, crossed paths traveling in 1991. Elaine Comerford/Marie-Claire Martineau
Marie-Claire Martineau couldn’t stop thinking about Elaine Comerford.
It was late summer 1991. Marie-Claire was back in her home country of France after a couple of years working in Japan and a stint traveling across Europe by rail.
Now Marie-Claire was 29 and felt listless – uncertain what the future held, uncertain where she might live, uncertain what she might do with her life.
She played back her time with Elaine like a movie in her head. Those first moments together on the Trans-Siberian railway, speeding through Eastern Europe. Finding one another in Budapest. Sharing dreams and growing closer in Vienna.
Now, Elaine was just a disembodied voice on the other end of a landline, a signature on a scrawled postcard with a Boston, Massachusetts, postmark.
A couple of months passed. One day, Marie-Claire received a letter from Elaine explaining she was leaving her parents’ home in Boston and moving to New York City.
“What are we?” Elaine’s letter read. “What are we going to do? Are we going to continue this?”
All through their travels together Marie-Claire and Elaine lived in the moment, too busy enjoying the now to contemplate the future – especially when translating their vacation romance into the real world felt near impossible.
Marie-Claire read and reread Elaine’s words. It still felt impossible.
On one of their grainy transatlantic phone calls, Elaine broached the topic directly – maybe Marie-Claire could come to the US? Maybe they could make a proper go of what they’d started?
Marie-Claire paused. Then she said no. Hanging up, she told herself once again that what she’d shared with Elaine was “just a vacation romance.”
But that night, Marie-Claire couldn’t sleep.
“I thought about it, and I missed her so much,” Marie-Claire tells CNN Travel today. “The next day I bought my flight and I flew to New York to see her.”
First meeting
Marie-Claire and Elaine’s story first started on a bus in Beijing, China. The bus was ferrying travelers to the train station to board the Trans-Siberian railway.
The Trans-Siberian railway spans 5,000 miles of track, comprising several routes including the Trans-Mongolian line, which winds from Beijing to Moscow via Mongolia.
Marie-Claire and Elaine were among two dozen or so travelers who’d signed up to the same organized tour “stopping in Mongolia for a week and then taking the Trans-Siberian train all the way to Russia,” as Marie-Claire recalls it.
Elaine happened to board the bus first, with a gang of friends in tow. Like Marie-Claire, Elaine had been working in Japan for a while, teaching English. Then she’d entered what she calls an “in-between phase” – traveling with friends from east Asia through Europe.
“You know, young 20s, seeing a little bit of the world and enjoying some time with friends. That’s where I was,” Elaine tells CNN Travel today.
Elaine and her friends were excitedly chatting on the bus when Elaine spotted Marie-Claire for the first time. She was instantly struck by this blonde stranger.
“Marie-Claire got on the bus and was walking down the middle, towards the back,” Elaine recalls. “I thought, ‘Hmm, okay. This is somebody I might want to speak to.”
Marie-Claire was also traveling with a friend – kind of.
“She was an ex-girlfriend, actually, although at that point it was platonic,” Marie-Claire explains.
Flirting in Mongolia
As the travelers decamped the bus and boarded the train, introductions were made. Elaine and Marie-Claire spoke to one another for the first time.
“I don’t remember exactly what the first conversations were,” says Elaine. “Just probably ‘getting to know you’ comments – ‘Where are you coming from?’ – And I’m sure we talked about Japan at some point, because we’d both lived in Japan.”
On board the train, the entire tour party stuck together “getting to know each other, hanging out, playing some cards,” as Elaine recalls.
Once the group arrived in Mongolia, they were split in two. Elaine maneuvered herself to make sure she ended up in Marie-Claire’s half.
Then over that week exploring Mongolia, Marie-Claire and Elaine grew closer. The polite pleasantries on the train somehow seamlessly switched to in-jokes, laughter and constantly gravitating to one another’s side.
“We started flirting,” says Marie-Claire.
Back on the train, over the several days traveling from Mongolia to Russia, the spark between Marie-Claire and Elaine became impossible to ignore.
“We were on the train, going through Siberia when we first kissed,” says Elaine.
Elaine was sharing a train car with two of her friends. They were in the bottom bunk, asleep, while Elaine was in the top, restless.
“Then Marie came to my bunk,” Elaine recalls.
“We kissed,” says Marie-Claire.
They both knew “it was heading that way,” as Elaine puts it. And from there, Marie-Claire and Elaine were pretty inseparable. They stole moments together whenever they could – although it wasn’t always easy to do so.
“You’re on a train with a lot of people,” Marie-Claire recalls. “So to find a moment alone was very hard – it was literally six days on a train.”
Still, falling for each other as the train sped through the Siberian countryside was exciting.
“The train was fun,” says Elaine.
Each time the train pulled up at a station, the travelers would lean out the windows and purchase food and drink from local sellers.
At one station, Elaine and one of her friends got off to buy something. Then the train unexpectedly started to leave the station.
“So the train started pulling away,” recalls Elaine. “And me and my friend Steve were running for the train and jumped on, we made it.”
When the train arrived in Moscow, locals met the travelers at the station, offering rooms for accommodation. It was an “old-school version of Airbnb,” says Marie-Claire.
Elaine, Marie-Claire and their friends all opted for the same accommodation – a tiny apartment where the host squeezed in eight mattresses on the floor.
Marie-Claire and Elaine took mattresses next to each other.
“We lay next to each other,” says Marie-Claire. “But you’ve got a room full of mattresses, you can’t do much.”
But in the night, Marie-Claire and Elaine reached out across the dusty floor to hold hands.
By then, the two knew “we had this romance that was budding,” says Elaine.
But Marie-Claire and Elaine didn’t tell anyone else about their feelings for one another.
“We’d all have dinner at a restaurant and we would meet in the bathroom to kiss,” recalls Marie-Claire.
“I’m sure it was so obvious,” says Elaine, laughing at the memory.
They kept their connection on the down low in part because Marie-Claire was traveling with her ex-girlfriend.
And it was 1991 – It was “a different time back then,” as Elaine puts it.
“Same sex relationships weren’t as accepted,” she says. “My friends wouldn’t have cared. But at that point, it was still a big thing to come out to people.”
Back home in the US Elaine was only out to “close friends.”
“I don’t know if anybody in my family knew at that point,” she says.
Marie-Claire also wasn’t open about her sexuality at that time.
“Nobody knew I was gay,” she says.
Next travels
After the organized tour concluded in Moscow, the travelers were left to their own devices. Some went home. Meanwhile, Elaine and her friend Diane headed to Germany, and then visited Turkey and Greece.
Marie-Claire briefly returned to France, then reunited with Elaine and Diane in Budapest, Hungary. By then, Elaine had told Diane about her relationship with Marie-Claire.
“Diane knew at this point,” says Elaine. “So we traveled a bit together. And then Diane went back home. And Marie-Claire and I went on to Vienna.”
In Austria, Marie-Claire and Elaine were alone together for the first time. It was thrilling and terrifying.
“It was the first time that we were going to be just the two of us,” says Elaine. “It was exciting to be able to finally have some time to ourselves. But we were also nervous.”
In Vienna, Marie-Claire and Elaine grew even closer. They both felt like they were falling for each other. But there was no long-term plan.
“It was very much in the moment,” says Elaine. “You know, ‘Let’s meet up and have fun and travel around.’”
So Elaine returned to the US, and Marie-Claire to France. That’s when the period of letter-writing and grainy phone calls started.
And then came Marie-Claire’s spontaneous decision to travel to New York and find Elaine. She booked her flight, a piece of paper with Elaine’s Queens address in her pocket.
Elaine told Marie-Claire to meet her in Manhattan, where she was now working.
But when she landed Marie-Claire struggled to figure out how to phone Elaine, unfamiliar with the US area code system. She ended up deciding to travel to the Queens address in the hope she’d find Elaine waiting there. Meanwhile, Elaine wondered what had happened.
“Three hours later, she ended up at the door,” says Elaine. “She had somehow managed to get from the airport to Midtown, and then managed to get on the train and find this address in Queens.”
In a pre-Google-Maps age, this was pretty impressive.
“And so I moved in with Elaine. I just stayed,” says Marie-Claire.
She’d brought next to nothing with her, but Marie-Claire was used to living out of a backpack.
“Just as long as I have enough underwear and bras,” she says.
From there, Marie-Claire and Elaine settled in a New York routine together. They loved living together. And as time went on – as Marie-Claire tried to work out a way to stay in the US permanently – the couple started working together too.
They ended up starting a vacation rental company together. In time, Marie-Claire got a real estate license and a work visa.
When Marie-Claire rang her parents in France and told them she had no plans to return, they didn’t try and convince her otherwise. Marie-Claire’s German mother and French father met abroad, and they’d always encouraged Marie-Claire to travel the world and embrace adventure.
But Marie-Claire still wasn’t comfortable telling her parents that she was staying in New York because she’d fallen in love for a woman, although over time her parents realized the two were together.
As for Elaine, she decided when Marie-Claire moved in that she would tell her parents they were together. She also shared the news with her extended network of New York friends.
“Soon she met a lot of my friends in the city, and at some point met my family,” recalls Elaine.
The friends who’d traveled on the Trans-Siberian railway with Elaine and Marie-Claire were especially delighted for them – and admitted that they’d suspected what was going on the whole time.
A life together
Over the next several years, Marie Claire and Elaine’s real estate business grew, becoming a company called Maison Internationale.
Working together came easily to the couple.
“Even at the end of the day, even if we’d been in the office together, we’d still have something to talk about at the end of the day, because she would do different things than I do,” says Marie-Claire.
Elaine and Marie-Claire were content with their life together. They “never thought about getting married,” says Elaine. It was off the cards. And for similar reasons, Marie-Claire and Elaine didn’t think they’d ever have a child together.
But as time moved on, society started to shift. Adopting a child as a same-sex couple became a possibility.
In the summer of 2006, Elaine and Marie-Claire were on vacation together in Provincetown, Massachusetts, celebrating 15 years since they first met.
“And we got the call on our anniversary that a baby boy was born, and that the mother had chosen us,” says Marie-Claire. “We drove the next morning to meet him.”
Marie-Claire and Elaine welcomed their son, Marcello, that year.
They loved becoming parents and committed to passing on a love of travel to Marcello, taking him to a different destination every year.
“We’ve been to Thailand together. We’ve been to Vietnam, we’ve been to Colombia, Ecuador, down to the Galapagos, to Europe and across the United States,” says Elaine.
In 2015, when gay marriage became legal across all US states Marie-Claire and Elaine decided to get married.
“It wasn’t a priority for us,” says Elaine, of marriage. “And then once it became federal, I think things changed. It was like, ‘Oh, we can get married. So we decided to.’”
The wedding took place on Anna Maria Island, Florida, on a glorious sandy beach, with some 70 guests in attendance.
“It was fun and emotional, but mostly fun,” says Elaine.
Over the course of the wedding celebrations there were several nods to Marie-Claire and Elaine’s origin story. Each table had a little train car as the centerpiece. At the reception, one of the friends who was on the train with Marie-Claire and Elaine when they met wrote a poem about their romance.
“That was special,” says Elaine. “It all kind of tied it back.”
The wedding day poem is framed and hangs on Elaine and Marie-Claire’s wall to this day.
