What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  I was ready to stop doing all of this alone.

  I said good-bye to Jana, spent another couple of weeks driving around alone (on the wrong side of the car, and the wrong side of the road, feeling like Superwoman), taking kayak trips (with an all-female group, natch), and going to Peter Jackson’s Christmas party with a hundred nerdy American visual-effects guys (my life at home). I slept in haunted, empty hotels at the end of long, rainy roads, lonely and spooked; I slept on a houseboat hostel in the captain’s (captainless) quarters; I slept in the homes of new, lovely Kiwi friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends. I had so many adventures with so many kind, hospitable souls that my faith in upright primates was restored.

  And since that was the real goal, just in time for Christmas, I packed up my unused, well-traveled condom, and I went home.

  9

  “Thirty-Five Is Too Old to Be Sleeping in a Bathroom”

  Los Angeles International → Brisbane Airport

  Departing: April 3, 2009

  There are moments in one’s life that make one realize one could be making better choices. That moment for me was when I found myself, at age thirty-five, sleeping on a bathroom floor in Australia. For a week.

  When I came home from New Zealand, I was a new woman. I felt wise and washed clean by the highs and lows of the previous year. I was ready to create and be loved and grow up. I went straight to my agent the day after I got home and told him I was taking the year off from TV to write my first movie. I had Christmas with my family, and then drove up to Mammoth with Hope and some other friends to snowboard for a few days on our way up to a twenties masquerade New Year’s Eve ball that Ferris and Thomas were throwing in an art deco mansion in San Francisco. I felt great.

  And then, an hour after we drove into Mammoth, I walked out of a restaurant, slipped on black ice, and broke my leg. The same one that had been run over 360 days before.

  Once again, my husband, Hope, took me to the hospital. The next day. After she went snowboarding. There were ten feet of fresh powder and blue skies that day, and I would have done the same thing.

  As I lay on the couch waiting for my friends to get off the mountain, I got even more philosophical. God really, really wanted me to sit still in the void. The small hints were not reaching me, so he was resorting to physical violence. But … the void is so lonely! So I put off the void-sitting until right after I flew home from Mammoth, saw a doctor to make sure I didn’t need surgery, hitched a ride up to San Francisco for the masquerade ball, and Lindy-Hopped all night in my air cast.

  But then, after that, I definitely sat still in the void for a full couple of weeks. I couldn’t drive so I found myself back at my mom’s, who couldn’t believe her luck. Her daughter hobbled and in her home two years in a row! Her dreams were coming true.

  But … voids. Right? So right in the middle of this big one, I went out to dinner with Ben.

  Remember Ben? The guy I was dating when I crushed on imaginary Ferris five years earlier, the heart I broke when I was not yet ready to settle down? Well, he was finally over me. That had been a process since the Ambien e-mail debacle two years earlier, but he had done it.

  And then there I was, literally tenderized like pounded meat by my year of work, failure, and physical and emotional battering. My New Zealand beach realization that I was ready for all of the things I had feared I was too broken to ever want felt both good because it meant that I was normal, but also terrifying. I was normal. Years later, Lena Dunham’s character on Girls would have a similar moment when she broke down and wept to a nice, handsome doctor with a beautiful house, “Please don’t tell anyone this, but I want to be happy … I want all the things everyone wants.” I was embarrassed to be a thirty-five-year-old woman who was looking for true love, and a family. It was so freaking typical. But I was also deeply relieved that I’d finally gotten there.

  And so, in this place, I reached out to Ben, and asked him out to dinner, as friends. He was not all that into the idea, since he rightly felt I had not acted in a particularly friendly way over the last few years. I guess that had been hanging over me—Ben was the person my internal mishegas had hurt the most. I wanted to fix the relationship, build something from this new place of peace.

  At dinner he had a new swagger from a new job and a new band and, apparently, a new plethora of women. He also just had a new certain something. Probably that certain something was that he was over me. And so I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  In retrospect, going back to Ben was probably an attempt to prove to myself that I had been fixed. In a scientific experiment, you keep one thing constant when you’re trying to figure out which combination of elements is the right one. Ben was the constant. There had been love there, but I had ruined it. If I could go back to the original source and build love there again, the only logical conclusion was that I was now working.

  After a couple of months of soul-searching and obsessing, and talking to friends who insisted that Ben and I were not a match and that I had broken up with him for a reason, I finally decided that I was obsessing about Ben because of Ben and not because of me. So I went up to his little house in the hills and told him how connected to him I still felt after all of these years. I admitted that the Ambien-fueled e-mail from Madrid didn’t come from nowhere. And I asked for another chance.

  “Is this because you’re thirty-five and lonely?” Ben asked, a valid question that his friends would continue to insist was the answer.

  I gave him a long speech about all of the experiences I had had in the last five years, about my moment on the beach in New Zealand where I realized I was ready to take someone along on my adventures. I was different. I had grown this year. I was ready now.

  “You know I don’t trust you, right?” Ben said.

  “I know!”

  “I’m dating people. I’m not just going to stop doing that,” he continued.

  “I get that.”

  “Last week my band played the Roxy and there were these Russian teenagers throwing glitter at me. I woke up in the morning with glitter in my beard. That was awesome.”

  “I know, I don’t want you to stop having glitter in your beard,” I promised.

  He grilled me some more, and said he was really too busy with work for a relationship, and that my tits looked great in the Van Halen T-shirt I wore for precisely that reason. (Single girls: just go buy one. It’s weird boy-bait. Don’t know why, don’t even like Van Halen, but trust me. If it helps mine is gray and V-necked.) I told him he didn’t have to decide right then, to just think about it. But I had been running away from the truth for a long time—the simple fact that he moved me. That no matter what, he never left my heart. That I loved the way he looked at the world. He reached out, and pulled me to him.

  We decided we shouldn’t sleep together for a while, as a slow-it-down mechanism. So we started dating again, nervously, cautiously, and always stopping at third, and I tried to rebuild his trust while he held me at arm’s length, and dated any extraordinarily young girl he wanted. We had said that we could each keep dating other people, but had to let the other know if things ever went past three or four dates with anyone. With so much ambivalence and distance, it was easy as pie for me to be absolutely sure this time … at least sure that I loved him. And so I wooed the shit out of him. Looking back on the e-mails now, you can practically hear me sweat. You can also imagine his quizzical look when you read his responses to my manic “lovemetrustme” tap dance. In one, he said that this new, unambivalent me seemed like a space alien to him, so different was she from who I had been for so many years.

  “We’re on the same page, we’re just going at different speeds,” Ben would say, after refusing to sleep with me, or go to my friends’ gatherings, or tell any of his friends that we were dating again, or invite me to his gigs, or stop seeing other people. All of his behavior was totally fair given my sudden reappearance after so many years of rejection … but it was also incredibly unsettling. Ben was also a little dif
ferent, and focused on work, and being in a band, and just sort of generally enjoying both kinds of booty that come with being a well-employed thirtysomething man in Los Angeles who has the ability to get actresses work. But he was also different, I knew, because of me. Because I had sort of broken him. Which only made me want to fix him all the more. I wanted to clean up my mess.

  A couple of months into this awkward and upsetting romantic situation, I got an invitation from Alex, the pretty Kiwi who had taken me into her house in Queenstown that previous autumn. She was going to Australia for the famous Byron Bay Bluesfest, and thought I should come along. I looked at my slow-moving, nonmonogamous heavy-petting relationship and wide-open employment schedule, and bought a plane ticket. Ben enthusiastically told me to have a great time on what he called my “passive-aggressive trip to Australia.”

  I firmly denied that it was passive-aggressive. It was just a great opportunity, and there was no reason not to go. That being said, things were feeling very odd. I was ready to dive in, and Ben just wasn’t.

  He kept making it clear that I did not have a boyfriend. Within the previous couple of weeks we had discussed how I wasn’t going on dates two or three with anyone, because I really just liked him.

  “Huh,” he replied, looking nervous.

  “Which would be more anxiety-producing news for you right now: that I don’t want to see other people, or that I fell madly in love with someone else?” I asked.

  He laughed. “It’s a tie.”

  So I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do in Australia. Shouldn’t I be so true-blue in love that I shouldn’t even want the freedom to enjoy the joys of an international romantic adventure? We had a long, unclear conversation about our status on his bedroom floor (where for some reason we always had long conversations) and then exchanged these nebulous e-mails:

  FROM: KRISTIN

  TO: BEN

  RE: clarity

  Just to reiterate what we discussed so I’m clear, what I think is happening is that you are not sleeping with other people right now, but like meeting/the possibility of hooking up with other people for the interest/freedom of it all. And this might not change in the next few months. Is that accurate?

  FROM: BEN

  TO: KRISTIN

  RE: RE: clarity

  I will always love the possibility of hooking up with 4,000 Russian teenagers. Right now I’m not sleeping with anyone. I like meeting new people, I’m not interested in random hookups. And, yes, this might not change by June. Time is so weird right now. June feels like a year from now and it feels like tomorrow.

  Still stumped, I forwarded the (much longer) exchange to my girls from the Brisbane airport.

  FWD: RE: RE: clarity

  Do I have a boyfriend or not? When choosing your response, please take into account that I have already seen way more beautiful men in this Australian airport than I saw in all of New Zealand, and I’m going to have a lot of rage if I forgo them all and he is fucking Russian teenagers when I get home.

  Sasha’s response:

  Let’s try not to overanalyze. Have fun in Australia. If you end up on a koala rug with a kangaroo trainer, try not to post it on Facebook. I will be at Passover with your mother and am so so jealous.

  My friend Parker’s response:

  How long is he going to punish and torture you? I say go hook up with an Australian pirate and tell me all about it. This could be your last chance! So jealous.

  Alex had a Kiwi friend with a house in Byron Bay, a gorgeous little surf town where rainforest meets beach. Her friend was twenty-seven, and managed a popular nightclub in town, and Alex said his house was big and he was happy to have us. Those things were both true. What was also true was that he and his two roommates had thirteen other people staying with them for the festival.

  “But don’t worry,” Alex promised cheerfully. “I’ve got a quiet little private space just for us!”

  That space turned out to be one inflatable mattress on the floor of the bathroom, wedged in between the tub and the toilet. You entered the bathroom through the master bedroom, where the host’s mother and stepfather were sleeping, and then through a walk-through closet, where another guy was sleeping. Six people were sleeping in the living room, and there were at least two in each of the two additional bedrooms. Three final people were in sleeping bags on the back porch. All of these people used our bathroom. We were piled in like stoned, juice-making refugees.

  I tried to be as cheerful as Alex was when I suggested getting a hotel, but that’s when she told me that she had a hundred dollars to her name for the entire week, and no credit cards, and wouldn’t feel comfortable with me paying. Remember my travel rule about slumming it when your friends are in different financial situations than you are? Well, this was the trip where I really had to put my money where my mouth was, which happened to be in very close proximity to a toilet. (The town’s hotels were also sold out. I might have checked.)

  God bless Alex. Remember she was my savior in Queenstown, the kind of guardian angel who took me into her home and introduced me to extreme-sports guides. But, unfortunately, it turned out that Alex and I were as incompatible as travel partners as we had been perfect as roommates in her little house on the hill.

  First incompatibility: my lack of patience with difficult eaters. Alex was an organic vegetarian who was allergic to onions. That pretty much excludes all vegetarian food. Except, apparently, Hare Krishna food. Did you even know there was such a thing as Hare Krishna food? Me neither! But, apparently, onions and garlic are outlawed in Hare Krishna cooking, since, as a random Hare Krishna website tells me, they “overstimulate the central nervous system, rooting the consciousness more firmly in the body”—i.e., they taste too good. Luckily, the little hippie town of Byron Bay had one such restaurant. So we ate there every day. Sometimes twice. This included when we were across town, doing something fun, in close proximity to delicious food that Alex would not eat. So we’d stop the fun, go across town, and get her food that was so bland it didn’t alert your body to the fact that it was being fed.

  Next travel-buddy problem: Alex’s lack of desire to compromise when it came to schedules. Every day, she slept next to our toilet until three in the afternoon, while I waited to go to the music festival, and watched the rain that never stopped falling. She then woke up, spent half an hour in the kitchen with a box of antioxidizing root vegetables and the juicer, then spent hours primping, straightening her hair and putting on mascara. This was especially incredible because we were also about to put on gumboots and plastic trash bags to keep vaguely dry at a music festival that was muddy in a hippies-are-pissing-everywhere, Woodstock sort of way. Watching someone straighten her hair before spending a night in a giant mud toilet during a rainstorm is a special kind of maddening, and might, perhaps, be a great way to torture me if you are trying to get state secrets out of me someday.

  Because of Alex’s lack of money, and her refusal to let me pay for anything, she needed to smuggle a flask of rotgut vodka into the festival in her bra for her drinking needs, which she would only drink mixed with fresh, organic juices that always seemed to be sold on the opposite end of the enormous collection of stages and other perfectly fine juice stands. She also wouldn’t leave Byron Bay to go to another town where we could, say, sleep farther from where we shat. Because the housing in Byron Bay was free.

  “Why don’t you leave her?” Hope said, from Los Angeles, when I called her to complain, as Alex slept and the rain fell.

  “I feel bad. We were supposed to have an adventure together. I’m so mad you’re not here. Also, I keep not kissing hot Australian surfers and I don’t even know if I have a boyfriend,” I complained.

  “Everyone besides us sucks,” Hope agreed. “Come home. I’ve decided I’m forgetting how to live with others, so I rented a room with these two hot thirtysomething professional dudes who surf. If your nonboyfriend boyfriend won’t ever have sex with you, we’re going to have the best summer ever in my new frat house.
”

  “Promising!” I said, cheered.

  And then I would e-mail Ben, who would reply to my updates about the trip, or the rain, or the koalas, but usually not my “I miss you”s.

  I feel bad complaining about Alex, because she really is a lovely person. We just should never have been on this trip together. I wanted to see Australia, and Alex had lived in Australia and just wanted to see a few hours of music a night. We had different agendas. I tried to stay cheerful, because I thought we’d just be at the music festival a couple of days, and I was certainly living like a local, which I usually enjoyed. But a couple of days passed, and Alex wanted to stay longer. So we spent a full week in our little bathroom on our muddy mattress, and at night our host would do cocaine off our bathroom counter while those of us who had not stayed in bed until three in the afternoon tried to sleep.

  But I didn’t leave. And that was, really, for one reason. Everyone in the house was a good ten years younger than Alex and I were, and I could feel the pressure to be cool with it, to roll with it all the way I would have at twenty-three. One grim night in our host’s club, Alex, who let’s remember had spent the week making me trudge around town for organic, vegan, local food, asked if I wanted to accompany her and a man with stinky waist-long dreadlocks into the bathroom to snort some horse tranquilizers he had acquired from a veterinarian in Africa.

  “They give them to livestock before surgery!” he said enticingly.

  It was a low point for our collective travel mood, and I could see that Alex really wanted to reconnect via this shared equine narcotic experience, but I still declined for obvious reasons. And that made Alex really sad. I looked over at my dejected friend with her perfect hair, perched on a vinyl ottoman in a mirrored club lounge, sighed, and asked if this was going to, at long last, make her happy.