What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

That was about how the night went. I circled Ferris, he circled away. Another friend gave me a quick awkward peck at midnight, at the top of the bell tower, while we all huddled together on the freezing, tiny balcony and watched the fireworks I had imagined going off over my midnight kiss instead going off over all of Paris.

  But the party raged on. Thomas, Ferris’s right-hand man and fellow magic-maker, did a late-night striptease from his tuxedo down to a gold Speedo that I have now seen on New Year’s Eves all over the world. This first striptease happened on the spiral staircase just as the church deacon entered the room. A couple of guys chased me around unsuccessfully as I unsuccessfully chased Ferris. (I call this phenomenon a Pirates of the Caribbean night, after the part in the ride where a fat woman chases a man who chases a pretty woman, all in a circle, no one ever catching anyone.)

  The night finally ended at six in the morning, because Ferris’s brother had to give a sermon at nine. I stumbled out of the cathedral with my sixty new friends, happy and disappointed in equal measure. I hugged Ferris good-bye and clip-clopped home.

  The next “morning,” I woke up at about one p.m., left Emma and Sally behind to sleep, and took myself out to breakfast for my first moment alone. I found a perfect little warm café, and the sun came out for the first time on the trip, and it reflected off the rain-soaked Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine across the way and straight onto my face, almost blinding in its intensity and warmth. La Madeleine is a neoclassical cathedral completed in 1842 that looks like an ancient Greek temple. It’s beautiful, but, in my opinion, it’s trying to be something it isn’t. I teared up—at the bigness of my hopes that had been dashed, and the incredible group of open, warm, hilarious, attractive, happy weirdos I had managed to find, at my luck that I was eating madeleines while I stared at the Madeleine in Paris on the first day of the year, at the sun that shone on my healing pimple. After breakfast, I walked into the cathedral, and got down on my knees, and gave thanks. I hadn’t found true love, but I had stumbled onto the people who were going to make my life without it happier. My life was starting to become what it was supposed to be.

  I would eventually realize that I didn’t want to be with Ferris any more than he wanted to be with me—we were way too much alike. Remember that in the movie, Ferris doesn’t date a female Ferris. He dates Sloane—the one on the ground looking up at him adoringly as he goes by on the float, wondering, How does he do it? I wasn’t that girl. I wanted to be up on the float.

  When Ferris came home from Paris, he invited a big group of friends over for food and reminiscing. And I was one of the people he invited. I walked into the house that I had walked by so many times when I was stalking Ferris the stranger, and a dozen people threw their arms around me. By not making out with any of the men in the group, I was embraced by the girls, who distanced themselves from the many fluttering women this posse of attractive, successful, single guys always attracted. Being part of this world of people who were happily single in their thirties, who knew how to live life in a brave, big way, felt better than humping the leg of a gay barrister.

  Ben tried to get back together again, and as tempted as I would be by the completeness of his love in the face of a new world of men who seemed to see me as some sort of little brother, something deep within me was screaming that I wasn’t ready to be half of a whole. I was about to be having too much fun.

  4

  “Love the Juan You’re With” (Argentina, Part 1)

  Los Angeles International → Buenos Aires Ezeiza

  Departing: March 15, 2005

  In really important ways, Argentina was my first love. It was the first place I went all by myself, and I fell in love with it hard. A little because of how Argentina made me feel about me, in the way you fall in love with that crush at summer camp because he’s the first person who’s ever looked at you like that. Argentina made me feel backlit, like the girl who makes the music swell when the camera hits her, like the girl who first broke your heart.

  I ended up in Argentina because my friends seemed to think that having imaginary boyfriends who didn’t like me back was a sign I needed something … different. And so they secretly signed me up for Internet dating, “winking” and messaging men as me before finally showing me their top choices. I had never Internet dated, mostly because I wanted a better, more star-crossed how-we-met story than that. Sasha and Hope decided that was stupid, and that I needed someone like them to take charge of my romantic life. They found me a supposedly straight guy who drove a Volkswagen Bug. Not a cool vintage one, a new one. With a bud vase.

  Depressing, right?

  I had one season left of my seven-year run on That ’70s Show, which meant it was my last spring hiatus to spend traveling—the next year I would have to stick around more to find a new job. But everyone with whom I normally traveled was either overemployed or underemployed or too married or too pregnant to travel. And so there was … a VOID.

  “Kristin, a void is a good thing,” my mother said. “You’re always rushing to fill up your life with fun fun fun. But nothing new or good can come in without a void to fill. Voids are necessary and wonderful.”

  So I spent about a week after my work year ended just being in all of that voidy space, just feeling all of that sweet nothing … and then I bought a one-way ticket to Argentina.

  My mother really shouldn’t have been surprised, about either my ambivalence regarding settling down, or my desire to travel south. I was at least third generation in both departments. My mother loved Latin America, and as I mentioned before, part of the reason she and my father divorced after eighteen years was because she wanted to live a bigger, sexier, more international life. So they split up, and when I was fifteen and she was thirty-eight, she and I both started dating for the first time.

  “Who the hell is going to go out with her?” Sasha and I wondered about my petite, pretty, charismatic, and successful mother, who when she wasn’t working hundred-hour weeks was skiing, scuba diving, and preparing gourmet meals. “I hope she’s not jealous when I start having lots of dates and she doesn’t,” I added, dipping another Oreo into peanut butter and shoving it into my pudgy, acne-covered face. “Kill me if I’m trying to find a guy in my thirties.”

  She did okay. Like Sex and the City okay. She even had cute, objectifying nicknames for the men she met: there was Donut Man (he introduced himself by buying her a donut), Cape Man (he came to their first and only date unironically wearing a cape), Nervous Breakdown in the Caracas Airport Man (self-explanatory). The man she finally fell in love with was a dashing European-born, American-educated businessman who lived in Mexico City … and who broke her heart. His name was Laszlo, but Sasha gave him a cute nickname: “Promiser of Everything and Deliverer of Nothing.”

  Laszlo wouldn’t move to the States, and my mom wouldn’t leave me and my grandma to move to Mexico, and so she lost him to a twentysomething aerobics instructor who lived down his street. But her love of Latin America preceded and survived the breakup, and that came from her mother.

  My mother’s mother left the family farm in Iowa for California when she was seventeen, and never saw her own mother again. She met my grandfather at work at an aerospace company, but he would only marry her if she quit working and stayed home with the kids. Because my grandmother was born when she was (and because she also happened to be pregnant with my mother), she quit, had my mother and her two siblings, and reported waking up in the morning to their little voices, thinking, Oh, God, I have to get through another day. My mom would describe cleaning days in her house as a child, when my grandmother would go into “rages” about being a housewife. She wrote haikus in her head as she ironed to keep herself from “losing her mind.”

  The minute my grandmother’s three kids were out of the house, my old white grandma went back to school at Compton Junior College (as in Straight Outta Compton), and signed up for a foreign exchange program in Mexico. She left my grandfather behind for a couple of months, and some Mexican family who signed up for
an American college student got my grandmother. I still feel sorry for that seventeen-year-old Mexican boy who must have had so many fantasies about showing around his wide-eyed, nubile American “sister.”

  So the women on one side of my family were travelers. But my paternal line was just the opposite. Just as my mother loved to roam and my father loved to watch the sun set over his own backyard, their parents were similarly split. My dad’s father had only been out of the country for his military tour in World War II, which he always called “a wonderful adventure,” but never repeated. (He would show me pictures that he had taken from the deck of his naval ship of bombs blowing up gorgeous South Pacific beaches, and simply comment, “Look at that beautiful beach.”)

  My dad’s mother traveled even less. She had French ancestors, and so embraced France in all of the ways one can embrace France if one is limiting one’s embrace of France to hanging paintings of France around one’s house. She exclusively decorated with what she called “my Frenchie colors,” and collectible plates of French street scenes that she bought in the gift section of the Cracker Barrel. Finally, when they were grown, her kids started a “Send Mom to Paris” fund, which they would all add to on Christmas and her birthday. But she cut it off after only a couple of contributions. She didn’t want to go to Paris.

  I asked her about that once, not long before she died. Why wouldn’t she want to go to the place that was her “favorite place”?

  “I was afraid it wouldn’t live up to my dreams,” she said.

  So it was my maternal line’s wandering, ambivalent soul that made its way to me. And at thirty-one, I had one regret in my life: I had never lived in another country. I decided to dodge depression and the dates my friends were finding me on the Internet by spending this last job-hunt-free hiatus pretending that I lived in another country for a few months.

  I knew no one in Buenos Aires, and I was a little terrified. I would say the terror was evenly split between fear for my safety and fear of disappointment. But I didn’t want to be my grandmother, never going to Paris in case it was a letdown, so I took a deep breath and went.

  I had the numbers of a few friends of friends who lived in town. I got an apartment in Palermo, a lovely neighborhood near the Central Park of Buenos Aires, and an Argentine cell phone, and signed up for daily Spanish and tango classes. I called every friend of a friend within twenty-four hours of landing in Argentina, and had dinner plans my second night there.

  Fuck you, Void!

  Within a week I had met a group of expats from the U.S. and England and Malaysia, and had my first date with a porteño (resident of Buenos Aires). It was with a man I met at La Viruta, a milonga, or tango club, which was located in the basement of an Armenian community center. Victor was either a construction worker, or an architect. (I’d had only a week of Spanish classes at that point.) Before our first date, I asked Kate, a quiet, awkward American girl who had lived in Argentina for five years, what it was like to date Argentinos.

  “Well, they expect you to sleep with them on the first date, because that’s what Argentine women do,” she told me.

  “Huh. And what do they do when you don’t?” I asked.

  Kate shrugged shyly, legitimately stumped. “I don’t know.”

  I met my Argentine lover at a party on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in a country club that was promoting the opening of its new golf course. The local girls who brought me said that the event was very “fashion,” their highest compliment. The crowd was a mix of models, actors, and porteño elite, who all mixed in the warm night.

  Mechi, the fashion party girl who brought me, told me she wanted me to meet someone. That someone would become the most important vacation romance of my life. Father Juan.

  Father Juan is not a priest, sadly, but he had just recently left a Catholic seminary where he had spent four years studying to become one, so that’s what I secretly called him. To his face I eventually started calling him “Dulce,” short for dulce de leche, because his skin is the color and smoothness and sweetness of a baby covered in Argentine caramel.

  Father Juan has the combination of ethereal and sexy beauty that melts hearts of single American girls and praying congregations alike. Juan as an actual priest would have turned very Thornbirds very fast. Evidence: his nickname for me was “Pulpa”—a feminized form of the Spanish word for octopus. Because when he tried to get out of bed, I would wrap my tentacles around him, not letting him go.

  I learned later that it was very rare for someone from Juan’s socioeconomic class to become a priest. He grew up in English schools, in the fanciest neighborhood in Buenos Aires, with country weekend houses and an apartment in New York and a beach house in Punta del Este and a family Arabian-horse ranch in the pampas. But at twenty-six, he decided to become a Catholic priest, and spent four years eating, basically, gruel, in the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

  And away from women.

  That night, though, he was just a guy at a party. Mechi introduced us, and Juan said hello, quietly and respectfully. And, despite the fact that I am not convinced that Jesus was anything other than a world-changing ethicist, I thanked Jesus.

  Juan has a sort of internal light that just radiates out of him, the kind of light you would think a man of the cloth should have, because it makes you believe in God. Yes, he’s six feet tall, with broad shoulders, flawless golden-brown skin, silky black hair, and this big, white, leading-man smile. But the first thing you really notice about Father Juan is just this beaming sweetness. It’s fairly devastating.

  His friends danced and drank and chased models while Juan and I chatted about horses. He loved horses the way a child loves horses. He loved a lot of things like a child. Years later, I found a CD of children’s music in his collection … that he bought for himself. There was just a simplicity and sincerity and utter lack of edge to him that probably would have gotten boring … eventually. I imagine. It’s hard to say, because he was just so ridiculously beautiful and sweet that everything he said and did was fascinating.

  He was shy, and I wasn’t sure if he liked me. But soon we were slow-dancing, and at the end of the night he asked me if I wanted a ride home.

  In the front seat of his little red car, Juan kissed me. The kiss was just like him, sweet and sexy at the same time. And then he drove me home, and asked if he could come up, and I of course said he could, and then he did something that no Latin lover has ever done in the history of Latin lovers …

  He didn’t have sex with me.

  We did naked stuff, don’t get me wrong. There was no chance I wasn’t going to put my lips on as much of that beautiful skin as was humanly possible. But The Deed was never on the table. After a few hours, Juan got up to go, and I felt in the darkness for my camera. When you reach the top of Everest, you want evidence. I couldn’t see him dressing in the dark, so I just pointed the camera in his general direction, and started shooting.

  FLASH. Juan’s smooth perfect back, as he gets out of bed.

  FLASH. Juan, pulling a shirt over his head, his perfect flat brown belly exposed.

  FLASH. Juan, laughing, covering his face with his hand.

  FLASH. Juan back on the pillow, smiling as I kiss his ear.

  Juan and I spent the next two months dating casually. By which I mean that I obsessed about him constantly, and he casually dated me. I met a couple of his friends, I saw him a couple of times a week. The Deed continued to be a nonstarter, but Juan taught me words like mimitos, which are little snuggles and caresses. And mimitos with Father Juan felt like they could knock a girl up.

  But he kept me at arm’s length. I think I was a lot for him, this sweet, slow-moving guy who had just left the seminary, and was now back in college. (He was getting his degree in marketing. I met another guy once who had left the Episcopalian monkhood, and he went back for his degree in marketing, too. I guess spreading the Good News is essentially a sales job.)

  To keep myself from staring at my four photos of Father Juan all day, I wen
t to my Spanish class with the other foreigners, and I studied tango with my tiny dance teacher who wouldn’t let me do anything but walk in a circle for a week, à la The Karate Kid. I went out to dinner at midnight and went dancing at two in the morning, and, like a real porteña, never ever slept.

  And I met a lot of other Juans.

  So many Juans that it led to cheap Juan wordplay. There was Father Juan. Then there was The Other Juan. One night at a lonely dinner at a pizzeria I brazenly dropped a note with my number on it into the lap of a curly-haired Frenchman named Jean, The French Juan (aka Jean-Juan). There was The Boring Juan and The New Juan. As the Juans came and went, my new expat friends and I would wax philosophic:

  “Another Juan bites the dust,” Joe the bitter Brit would say.

  “He just wasn’t the Juan for me,” I’d conclude.

  Buenos Aires Ezeiza → San Carlos di Bariloche Teniente Luis Candelaria

  Departing: May 14, 2005

  I left Father Juan behind in Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks so I could study Spanish in San Carlos di Bariloche, a resort town on a lake in the mountains of northern Patagonia. I bought the plane ticket reasoning that I really shouldn’t miss out on the rest of the country because I was waiting for a phone call from a hot priest who was busy studying for his marketing final.

  (Full disclosure: I did invite Juan to come with me. He said he couldn’t. I also then paid two hundred dollars to delay my trip for a day, because Juan had said he might possibly take me on a day trip to Tigre, a little delta town up the river with a floating flower and fruit market. He flaked. But then I totally left.)

  So, alone and disappointed, I went to the mountains of northern Patagonia. I went to Patagonia in very late fall, when, it turns out, no one goes to Patagonia. The sun rose at nine in the morning and set at three in the afternoon. It rained nonstop, too warm by about one degree to snow, and the constant, building-rattling Patagonian winds turned umbrellas (that only dumb American girls attempt to use) immediately inside out.