What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  More often than not, the person at the party hearing this routine would then take a beat, really look at me over their adult beverage, and say something like, “You seem really good these days.” And I was.

  This new, vaguely irritating persona was unfortunate for an incredibly lovely man named Matt, whom I started to date right after I got back. And who probably never had a shot when I had just discovered what it was like to travel alone. But I thought I had gotten something out of my system. That I could somehow redefine myself with an experience that I wouldn’t need to repeat. I did, after all, want to find love. And so when I got back from Argentina, I decided to go online, and found Matt.

  I fell for Matt right from our six-hour-long first date, where we talked and talked and time flew. But several months into the relationship, after he took in a cat that had adopted me despite the fact that it wouldn’t stop peeing in his house, and I met his big, perfect family and took him on his first snowboarding trip, where he broke his wrist on the first run, two things happened. First, my ambivalence reared its ugly head again. Is he the one, am I irritated a normal amount or more than normal, will I ever love completely, why does he tell me trivia about the director while I’m trying to watch the movie, better make a pro/con list, will I ever meet someone and not feel the need to make a pro/con list blah blah blah.

  But while the ambivalence was familiar, something else also happened this time: spring approached. The time when my work was over, and I could get on a plane and go back to Argentina.

  Everything in me rebelled against bringing a boyfriend with me. Argentina was my place. Being half of a couple in the place that made me feel so much myself sounded like the saddest thing in the world. Not because I wanted to hook up with handsome strangers, although Father Juan wasn’t not on my mind. It was because going alone was what had made it special. I had even declined to go on Ferris’s international New Year’s adventure that year, because it was to Argentina. The idea of how much he and his posse would take ownership of the place made me crazy. It was mine. The only child in me had never been more terrible at sharing anything than it was at sharing Argentina.

  And so, as tortured as I always was when breaking up with a great guy I loved, I broke up with Matt.

  “Just not happy, it’s not you, there’s something wrong with me, I’m just looking for a perfect feeling I’m not feeling, there’s nothing to work on …”

  “You know, Kristin, if ‘happy’ is your goal, you’re probably never going to be happy,” my dad often contributed from the couch, over a box of wine. “I shoot for ‘content,’ which is doable, and then I’m happy.”

  “Do you maybe think the problem isn’t with the guys?” my mother asked, twenty or thirty times. “I really liked that last one.”

  Anyway, I was single again, and bought my ticket to Buenos Aires. I had stayed in touch with Father Juan, whose e-mails earlier in the year were fantastic, always using the words we had taught each other in bedtime language exchange: “nibbles,” “smooches,” and “mimitos”:

  FROM: JUAN

  TO: KRISTIN

  RE: Te extraño!

  You will be remembered as the lovely American that conquered ‘los suaves mimitos’ of an Argentine ….… good things must end but can also be continued ….….… there were five hundred mimitos left ……… for the next time we meet again!!! We’ll keep on touch ….…. not the touches of mimitos, nibbles, smooches for the moment, but by this way … jajajaja … I’ll miss that ones more! Beso grande!!!!!!

  Right?! I had learned in previous correspondence with men in foreign lands that they tend to use exclamation points and ellipses like tween American girls, so I didn’t judge him for that. (Kristin-Adjacent is so much less judgy!) Also, what’s more fantastic than a “jajajaja”? “Jajajaja” is perhaps the best argument I can think of for taking a Spanish-speaking lover. These adorable e-mails from Juan continued for many months. But when I announced my return trip, there seemed to be a tonal shift.

  RE: Loud American Girl Returns

  Well, you know that anything you want and I can get for you just make me notice!!!!!!

  Hm. Are you noticing the lack of mimitos references? The conspicuously absent “beso grande”? I was. But he did use all of those exclamation points, he must be excited to see me again, I told myself. Tone is so hard to convey over e-mail. Of course, I had also stayed in touch with my Patagonian boyfriend, Diego, whose feelings were always much clearer:

  RE: BURRA

  I miss you so much and every day I think of you …… The truth is that you will always be in my heart. I hope you are well and that you think of me like I think of you. I hope you can come back and do many beautiful things with me. Write me, Burra! I love you!!!!! Write me!!!!!!!!!!

  I did not tell Diego I was coming back to Argentina.

  Are you noticing a pattern?

  After all of the hubbub about going to Argentina alone, I invited Hope and Sasha along. I wanted to show my favorite girls this place that was so special to me, since only children like showing off even more than they hate sharing. But they would join me for only the first part of the trip, so I would still get my romantic solo-traveler fix after they left. I carefully planned this Return to Fantasy Island. Which, Hervé Villechaize and ABC will tell you, is a dangerous idea.

  Here was the plan: Sasha, Hope, and I would rent a lovely apartment in my old neighborhood in Palermo. All of my Buenos Aires friends would thrill to my return. Father Juan would come to the door, take my face in his hands, and kiss the shit out of me. My best friends would get to see what all the fuss was about, and I would show them such an amazing time that they, too, would discover something new and wonderful about themselves, and fall hopelessly in love with Argentina, bringing them joy and us closer. Then they would go home, and I would continue on to Tierra del Fuego by myself, where I would take a four-day boat journey around Cape Horn, through the glaciers and penguin colonies just a couple of hundred miles away from Antarctica, ending up in Punta Arenas, Chile. I would be a lone woman thinking big thoughts at the bottom of the world, staring out at the tranquility of the glacier-strewn ocean, probably an unknowing foreground in some other tourist’s photo, which they might later name Woman and Ice. I would then head into South America’s version of Yosemite, Torres del Paine, for a few days of wilderness adventures in beautiful hotels on which I would normally not splurge (or reserve ahead of time, which would also turn out to be an important difference). Father Juan would miss me, but I would be back in Buenos Aires for another week at the end of this adventure, where we would fall more madly in love than ever for a few blissful days, before a painful good-bye and a dreamy flight home, which I would spend sipping Malbec and crying deliciously over the impossibility of our love.

  That is not what happened.

  The trouble started before we even left Los Angeles. Sasha and I had not gone on a girl trip since she had gotten married, and I couldn’t wait to get some time with my friend again. But then, a week before we left, her kind, stable, responsible husband came out with a whopper: he had been a secret painkiller addict for eight years and needed to go to rehab. Her husband was a hardworking, successful man who rarely had wine with dinner, and he was possibly the last person from whom you would expect this news. Obviously it was a massive crisis, but since Sasha wouldn’t be going to rehab with him, she ultimately decided there was no reason to cancel our trip. So she dropped him off at Betty Ford and we went to Argentina. Needless to say, the mood was off.

  Meanwhile, Hope was deep into the longest dry spell I have ever witnessed an attractive person experience. She had been divorced for a couple of years … and there had been nothing. I mean, there were drunken incidents—an Italian here, a thirty-year-old skateboarder with no car who worked at Sofa U Love there—but they were few and far between, and none ever stuck. This was crazy because Hope had been THE dater of cute boys in high school and college. The ungettable guys all loved her. And she was aging beautifully, her long legs ju
st as coltish as they’d always been. And yet the traffic flow had just stopped. It was mysterious, and heartbreaking.

  The only good part of Hope’s dry spell was what it meant for our friendship: we were always together. Even though we had been friends since eighth grade, we had never been single adults together before the last couple of years, when her divorce nicely coincided with my singlehood. That was when we went from being friends to being de facto spouses. We called each other husband and wife, because we leaned on each other so completely. We were even great salsa partners (she led, so she was the husband) and slept in the same bed two or three nights a week, depending on which side of town we got drunk on. We bemoaned our revulsion at the idea of the other’s vagina, really the only impediment to a lifelong commitment to each other.

  Around the time of the Argentina trip, Hope was just emerging from a divorce depression that had, as she put it, “stolen her personality.” My friend who traveled around Mexico alone as a twenty-two-year-old girl with just a surfboard, a sleeping bag, and a bus pass, the girl who had been the most consistently ebullient, outgoing, adventurous person I knew, had, for a couple of years, been the quiet girl in the corner, the person I needed to keep track of at a party to make sure she was okay. She took antidepressants for about a year, trying to restart her usually plentiful serotonin, but that, too, led to more dark moments. Like when she got a call from her ex-husband to ask if he could borrow a couple of her pills. Why? Because he and his new girlfriend were going to a rave, and he had heard that taking antidepressants with your Ecstasy helped the comedown.

  “You want to take the antidepressants I’m on because of our divorce for your night of drug-induced sex and dancing with your new girlfriend in a club full of people ten years younger than either of you?” she asked.

  Reminders like this helped her move on, and, slowly but surely, she had just recently come back to us. I couldn’t wait to take her to Argentina.

  Sasha and I went down to Buenos Aires a few days before Hope could join. On the plane Sasha’s bad luck continued when she came down with a terrible flu, her poor body succumbing to the immense stress it had been under since her husband’s “Surprise, I’m a Drug Addict!” announcement. It’s hard to talk about exactly how disappointed I was about this, because it rightly makes me sound like a selfish monster. But I was. The trip was already not perfect.

  After the long, feverish flight, I got Sasha settled in bed in our apartment in a grand old building around the block from where my apartment had been the year before. It had high, glorious ceilings, and cost next to nothing. I went out into the sunshine to get her medicine and groceries, delighted that I knew where the grocery store was, and that you had to weigh the veggies and get a price sticker in the produce section before you went to check out. The year before, on my first, nervous day in town, I had been an embarrassing, confusing mess with the cashier, who tried to explain to me in Spanish I didn’t understand that I was supposed to have done this whole weighing-the-veggies thing, while dozens of annoyed Argentinos waited, and I panicked.

  But this year I knew to weigh the veggies. And knowing this small thing about this foreign place gave me a profound joy.

  Sasha had a couple of bites to eat and went to bed, telling me that she just needed to sleep, so I should go and have fun. I obeyed. This was a mistake.

  While my friend lay alone in bed, sick and worried about whether or not her home life was going to turn into Requiem for a Dream, I called Father Juan.

  (Now you’re thinking to yourself, Jesus, Kristin, your friend is sick and her husband is in rehab and you’re thinking about Father Juan? Turns out, Sasha was thinking the same thing. And, when I look back, so do I. But at the time, I pushed that thought down deep, somewhere I could pretend it didn’t exist at all. It was not a selfless time. Don’t worry, there will be repercussions.)

  Despite Father Juan’s recent nebulous e-mails, I held out hope for a possible progression in our relations. He was a thirty-one-year-old Latin Man who had been out of the seminary for almost two years after all. Nature is nature. You can keep a sheepherding dog in an apartment in New York, but it’s eventually going to try to herd your dinner guests.

  Juan came over to take me out to lunch, and he looked beautiful, and nervous. I had grown out my hair to try to look more like the effortlessly gorgeous, long-haired Argentine girls, and had stopped eating a month earlier, so I hoped he thought the same about me. We walked to a nearby restaurant, and he chatted about his recent college graduation, and his job at an ad agency, while I tried not to sniff his neck or crawl inside his shirt. And then, over pizza a la parrilla, he told me that he had a girlfriend. And since Father Juan is not like other Latin Men, it did not need to be said that he was not going to cheat on her.

  He gave me this news apologetically, like he was certain I was mostly back in Argentina to see him again, and that this news ruined my trip. I assured him that I was perfectly fine being friends, and that I mostly wanted to see Argentina again, since it was Argentina that had redefined me, given me a new voice, changed my perspective on the world blah blah blah.

  That night I made out with a bartender named Oscar. Behind the bar, on the bar, under the bar, after closing time.

  Meanwhile, Sasha slept. Whenever I stopped home to check on her, she was asleep. So, after a couple of hours, I would go back out. I reconnected with my expat friends, whose lives were exactly as they had been the year before, and met up with my new naughty-eyed, curly-haired bartender, Oscar, who turned out to have a delightful habit of taking me to parks, removing his shirt, and kissing me in the sun. While this was happening, Sasha was apparently waking up to an empty apartment, and getting sicker, both physically and emotionally, as three or four days went by without talking to her husband, who was detoxing in California. Which sounds a lot more rock-and-roll than it felt. And so, one night, she broke down.

  She accused me of abandoning her, and not caring, and being selfish … basically all of the things you have been wanting her to say to me. I felt horrible, and guilty, but I was also shocked, because I had offered to take care of her and she had sent me on my way.

  “WHO THE FUCK WOULD LISTEN TO ME IN THIS SITUATION?!” Sasha screamed from the kitchen floor, where she was weeping.

  That was the moment I learned to ignore people in trouble when they tell you they don’t need anything.

  This all happened late at night, but I tried to fix it. The truth was, I had put my need to re-create my Argentina magic above taking care of my friend, and, deep down, I had known it. I called the expats and got the location of a nearby emergency room, but Sasha walked in, looked around at the filth and poverty and crowds, and turned right back around. We retreated to a cab, where my sick friend had a stroke of genius, and said four magic words to the driver:

  “Four Seasons, por favor.”

  One of my mother’s favorite pieces of advice, based on a week she spent in the Singapore Mandarin Oriental with the flu, was that when you find yourself sick in a foreign country, ignore the cost and check yourself into the nicest hotel in town. High-end hotels have doctors on call, room service, and daily clean sheets, and accept credit cards. Since Sasha had basically grown up in my house, she and I had heard this advice from my mom as many times as we had heard her say, “Look both ways before crossing the street,” “Nordstrom’s has the best shoe sales,” and “Always carry twenty bucks for a cab and I.D. so they can identify the body.” So we took Sasha to the Four Seasons, checked her in, got her settled in white sheets under a tray of soup, and then she sent me back to our apartment, chastened and feeling like shit.

  Meanwhile, Hope was still back in Los Angeles. On the day she was to leave for the trip she discovered that she couldn’t find her passport. By the time she got a new one, and got stuck for two strange days in Detroit due to weather and a weird connection, her trip had been chiseled down to about four days. When she finally got to Buenos Aires, Sasha was recovering, but there was still a chill between us, and w
e needed Hope’s energy. Unfortunately, Hope brought the rain with her, and so my attempts at taking my friends around my favorite city were gray and wet, and not as enchanted as I wanted. I was really sad about it.

  “Kristin, this always happens. You set your expectations too high for a particular version of perfect and then you get so crazily sad when it isn’t,” Hope pointed out, for the twentieth time in our lives.

  Appropriately, during that week in Buenos Aires, an odd thing was happening on television. A national channel had a twenty-four-hour camera trained on the Perito Moreno Glacier, which is a huge ice formation in Argentine Patagonia that comes down from the Andes and calves into a gorgeous turquoise lake. The glacier camera never moved, and there was no newscaster speaking. It was just silent twenty-four-hour coverage of this huge wall of ice. Every so often, an enormous hunk would fall, and cause a huge splash, but other than that … you were just watching a wall of ice.

  I found out that this Glacier Cam broadcast happens every few years. The nature of Perito Moreno is that it advances (one of the world’s last glaciers to be doing so, rather than retreating) in such a way that, over the course of between one and four years, it reaches a finger of land and effectively cleaves the lake in half. The two wings of the lake then fight back, slowly melting the stories-high ice from both sides. This two-pronged attack eventually allows the sides of the lake to meet again in the middle, but in the process the lake slowly creates an ice bridge over itself. That bridge then melts and cracks and thins until suddenly, in one majestic moment, the arch is thinned enough that the entire thing cracks, and falls into the lake, creating a splash that is hundreds of feet high.