Add to these nerve-racking existential stakes the fact that I was on a book tour for my memoir, Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor. The book had just come out in Australia. I was writing the screenplay for Miramax. If we were going to be there anyway, I figured, why not do a little publicity? Cheesy, yes. But an author will stop at nothing to move the merch.
So here we were, flip-flopping around the most lethal continent on the planet. My wife, the thrill-seeker. Me, the safety-seeker. I remember it all like the fever dream it seemed at the time.
‘How’re you going?’
This was the concierge at The Establishment, a boutique hotel in Sydney. Our first stop in the land of Oz. She was about six-foot-five – your standard Australian supermodel/triathlete/surf goddess.
‘Great!’ I replied. ‘How am I going where?’
It took me a week to get used to this stock Ozzie salutation. If you mean, ‘How are you doing?’ why don’t you bloody well say it?
But I wasn’t here to argue linguistics. I was here to pass the first test. The Room Test.
Ours was small and dark, with no view. Ilene said it was ‘fine,’ in a way that suggested I better fucking upgrade us before she got back from the salon. Yeah, that was just a little pressure as I stood there in the Establishment lobby looking up, way up, at this Aussie Glamazon. I’m not a room-changer, okay. I’m Canadian. We say thank you to ATMs. But I knew I couldn’t face my bride in the same cramped cell she’d left me in.
I informed Elle Macpherson’s hotter sister that my wife and I were on our honeymoon and braced myself for the standard boutique-hotel stonewall. Instead, she handed over a key to … the Penthouse. The – wink – ‘Robbie Williams Suite.’ He’d just stayed there, she said, with a coy smile. ‘Enjoy it.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, a little stunned by the pair I’d just grown. ‘We will.’
When Ilene got back, I welcomed her to our loft-like aerie, where we partied like overblown British pop stars for the rest of our stay in Sydney.
I passed the first test. But we had yet to embark on the ‘extreme’ portion of our antipodal adventure.
Lizard Island is an exclusive, no-kids getaway whose claims to fame are: 1) Captain Cook scaled the island’s peak to survey the treacherous shoals that were foundering his ships; and 2) it’s forty-five minutes by boat from the Great Barrier Reef.
I tried to climb ‘Cook’s Look’ to impress Ilene, and it damn near killed me. We were halfway up – me huffing, puffing, ready to turn back – when this 60-year-old from Adelaide who’d killed me on the tennis court the day before ran past on his way down. This is what you’re dealing with down here. Perfect, retirement-age specimens of manhood who play soccer three times a week and complain about ‘slowing down.’
The next day we were on the boat out to the Great Barrier Reef for a little snorkeling. No scuba. I don’t enjoy ‘sports’ where there’s a chance you might have an embolism and die. I might have skipped the boat ride altogether, but I sensed this was another test.
So I hunkered down in the cabin, where any sane person would be given the size of the waves, the speed of the boat and the fact that the captain looked like a human pint of Foster’s. Oh, and I had forgotten my inhaler. What if I had an asthma attack in the middle of a school of barracuda? Ilene had disappeared. I looked around and saw her at the front of the boat – the prow? the bow? whatever the fuck it’s called – having a Titanic-style tête-à-tête with Stefano, the Italian dive instructor.
Nice. On our honeymoon. I had no choice. I put on a life jacket – the boat going bump, splash, bump, bump – and inched along the guardrail, white-knuckled, to confront my beloved bride.
‘What, you didn’t get enough swarthy, effortlessly stylish Euro-guidos defiling you with their eyes at the wedding?’
She looked at me, salt air whipping my face, touched by my jealousy. ‘I was just telling Stefano to keep an eye on you in the water. You seemed worried about your inhaler.’
The strapping Italian grinned. He clearly hadn’t understood a word.
The engines cut out and our boat sat bobbing like a bathtub toy on the edge of the fathomless depths of the Pacific Ocean. I put on my mask and fins and splashed over the side with the other tourists. Stefano stayed close as we gazed down into the wonders of the reef. Totally nice guy. Incredible abs. Just as I was getting lost in the bromance of it all came the terrified, flailing cry:
‘Shark!’
Not from me. It was Ilene. She’d just noticed the three-foot sand sharks brushing the floor of the reef. I’d seen them, too, but figured they were too small to worry about. As Stefano reassured Ilene, I dived down for a closer look. My wife was already back on the boat, shivering.
I wasn’t keeping score, but I won that one.
Australia boasts seven of the world’s ten deadliest snakes. When my half-sister moved here she reported scorpions in her backyard. We drove past miles and miles of pristine beaches that were completely empty because of the presence of ‘stingers’ – jellyfish the size of your thumbnail capable of inflicting excruciating pain. You don’t die, but you wish you would.
I guess living every day with the possibility that something could kill you is what built up the bravado and cavalier machismo Australians are known for. And it’s not just the men.
We’d just come out of a toad-racing event in Port Douglas – what, you haven’t been to one of those? – and were dodging the massive swooping brown bats known as flying foxes when Ilene got into an altercation with some drunk townie tarts. Parts of Queensland are Australia’s equivalent of the Ozarks. The men sit in bars on whose every wall hangs a television set broadcasting some form of gambling, or Australian Rules Football. (Punch line: there are no rules!) The women have a hard, ropey look – with their tight black jeans and accents that could cut glass. So here we were, minding our own business, when the words ‘American cunt’ were uttered. I’m not sure they realized who they were dealing with: a Jewish girl from Long Island. But I sensed it wasn’t going to end well. I really should have stepped in, but those chicks looked strong and I felt a Deliverance moment coming on. So I pulled us into the cab that the ropey tarts accused us of stealing from them and averted an international crisis. Or YouTube sensation.
I will say this for the Australian ladies. In America, Canada, and the UK, I’d been pilloried by many a female reviewer for the ‘toxic bachelor’ behavior recounted in my memoir. But here, the reaction of the women who interviewed me for the local papers, radio or TV was: ‘He’s not so bad!’ Compared to the knuckle-draggers they were used to, I was a softie. Barely a cad at all. After all, the whole reason I was here was to honeymoon with the book’s happy ending. How bad could I be?
Our last ‘extreme’ act before flying back to reality as husband and wife was to go ‘abseiling’ in the Blue Mountains, an hour or so outside Sydney. You get into a harness and rappel down the mountainside. Again, Ilene’s idea. As soon as she looked over the edge, she wanted to go home. But the guys who took us had a company motto: ‘Feel the Fear, But do it Anyway.’ It’s on their T-shirts.
I went first, to show her it was no biggie. The ninety-eight-foot drop was easy, like a climbing wall. She made it down, too. Shaken, but too proud not to go to the next level. The 197-foot. I went first again. It was awesome. Ilene followed. Afterward, she looked a little green. ‘You don’t have to go,’ I said.
‘No, I want to.’
I zipped down. Totally ninja. Now it was Ilene’s turn. She was taking so long the wind had kicked up. My newlywed bride was buffeted across the cliff like a rag doll. The instructors steadied her rope, told her to keep going. They were yelling. I was yelling. It took a while, but she made it down, flushed, trembling and fell into my arms. After two weeks of feeling like Quentin Crisp in this land of He-Men, and He-Women, it felt good to look macho in her eyes. To be the guy she could lean on.
So this was the template we forged on our honeymoon. One of us pushes the other to do something extreme or ris
ky that the other would never have done on his or her own and we’re both the better for it.
It’s been that way ever since. Australia’s fatal shores, booby-trapped jungles and brazen locals gave us a motto to face marriage, and life, by.
Feel the fear, but do it anyway.
Seven years later, I still have the T-shirt.
Island Love
DANI KLEIN MODISETT
Dani Klein Modisett is a writer and actress who created the live show Afterbirth … Stories You Won’t Read in a Parenting Magazine. An anthology of stories from the show was published by St Martin’s Press. Dani spent the previous ten years working as an actress on Broadway, in movies and television and as a comic before settling down in Los Angeles with her husband. She is a frequent contributor to Parents magazine and recently created a new show, Not What I Signed Up For, which tackles the subject of marriage with the same candor and wit that Afterbirth uses to shed light on the truth about being parents. Dani has two young sons and is a graduate of Dartmouth College.
‘Your parents never took you to Hawaii?’ a man with graying temples asked me with the same gravity you might inquire about a person’s childhood spent bouncing from foster home to foster home. It was June and my husband Tod and I were at his prep school reunion. I was in no mood for being pitied for never having been taken to a tropical island. I had pity covered, self-pity to be exact, having spent a fruitless year trying to have a second child. Since Tod and I had depleted not only our spirits, but our family nest egg trying to get pregnant again, hearing how underprivileged my life had been for not taking a vacation that I would not be taking any time soon was enough to make me stick my tongue under the chocolate fountain on the dessert table.
‘That guy’s always been an ass,’ Tod said on the drive home, as I drifted in and out of a sugar coma.
‘I’ll take you to Hawaii, honey,’ he added, pushing aside a piece of hair matted to my cheek by brown dots.
The next day while Gabriel, our nineteen-month-old, slept, I googled ‘Hawaii hotels.’ Through a series of finger taps I landed on the Mandarin Oriental on O’ahu. I couldn’t take my eyes off the synchronized dolphins swimming in and out of gleaming blue water to the sounds of Hawaiian folk music. I so wished I could blink and be there. Too bad I wasn’t Bewitched, and we were flat broke.
‘We should go,’ Tod said, looking at my screen as he headed into the bedroom to see if Gabriel had woken up from his nap.
‘Yeah, right,’ I said, leaning back in my chair still mesmerized by the islands. Sure, I thought, let’s make some money out of air and take a Hawaiian vacation. Then when we come home all rested and refreshed I can take Gabriel to work with me at Starbucks so at least we’ll have free coffee to drink.
Tod came back in, Gabriel in his arms still drunk with sleep until he heard my voice and reached for me.
‘Momma! Momma! I want Momma!’
I guess pleasuring oneself into a cup for almost a year and feeling helpless to make your wife happy can move a man to irrational actions because Tod made good on his promise. He took whatever money we had left, and some of what we didn’t, and decided to take his adorable son and very tired wife away for some much-needed renewal and rebuilding of the family. Especially now that it was clear that it was just going to be the three of us. So there we were at the gate of an airplane headed over the Pacific, tagging Gabriel’s stroller to be safely stored below.
‘This is fucking crazy, Tod,’ I said, struggling to fold up the stroller and get it on the plane.
‘I know. They really should make those easier to collapse.’
‘I don’t mean the stroller,’ I said, snapping it locked with my finger inside.
‘I know what you meant,’ Tod said, smiling. ‘But you deserve it,’ he added, disengaging my throbbing pinkie. ‘We deserve it. Honestly, we need it. And it’s a done deal so you might as well try to enjoy it. ‘
‘Mommy, booby,’ Gabriel said, tugging on the front of my shirt.
‘Okay, honey, on the plane,’ I said, leaning over, trying not to flash my fellow travelers.
‘Aloha, ladies and gentlemen. All passengers with small children are now invited to board flight 357 to Honolulu.’
Since Gabriel decided to party down with an in-flight five-hour nursing fest, by the time the plane’s wheels touched the tarmac I was pretty sore, and if possible, even more exhausted. He had fallen asleep for about ten minutes, but then managed to wake up just in time for the landing. All he could do was point to his ears and scream while Tod hustled to get our items together and relieve the people around us from his wailing.
‘I know you said something about trying to enjoy myself, but really … ’ I said, holding Gabriel on my hip while trying to slam the stroller open this time. As I stood up from fastening him in to his seat, an unfamiliar tan hand came around my neck and lightly brushed my sensitive breast, dropping a ring of fresh-cut orchids around my neck. It smelled like hibiscus flowers and coconut.
‘Aloha, madame, welcome to Hawaii. Let me help you.’
Just then Tod returned from the bathroom.
‘I just got lei-ed, honey.’
‘That’s great. And you’re blushing.’
‘Right this way please, my friends,’ my savior said, his hand near the small of my back guiding us in the right direction.
As soon as we get outside, the moisture in the air makes my skin tingle. There’s a clammy, squishy, wet quality to the atmosphere that feels nurturing in a way that the southern California desert never will. A minibus is waiting to take us to the hotel. Before boarding, another strand of orchids is draped around my neck. ‘Aloha, madame,’ the bus driver says.
‘Aloha to you,’ I say, not sure how to respond to his kind face. Tod stands behind me smiling.
‘Momma, come on! Bus! Bus!’ Gabriel says, grabbing my hand and pulling me up the few steps to our seats. We pick up about six other people on our way to the hotel. Each passenger joining us is more attractive than the last. All are dressed in flowing, colorful resortwear that looks like it can come off with the release of one hook or the unfastening of a single button. I’ve been using my body (and Tod’s) as a tool of science for so long now that I’ve forgotten how beautiful, graceful, fluid and hot the human form can be. And it turns out that people who vacation in Hawaii are very attractive specimens indeed. They smell good, too, like fresh-cut flowers and almond oil and success.
Walking into the lobby of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on O’ahu, I feel like I should be a queen or at least have had my hair blown out. It’s a huge open space, with lovely oriental detailing, flooded with light and anchored by a massive chandelier at its center. And bars serving fruity drinks on either end. We decide to sit and have a few before going up to the room. Gabriel runs around us in circles, stopping every once in a while to pick a nut out of the bamboo bowl on the table between Tod and me. A man in white pants stands before us to take our order. I don’t usually like men in white, but since we are sitting and he is standing within reach, if you will, it is hard not to notice how nicely he wears them.
‘Honey, you’re staring,’ Tod says.
‘What? At his ivory cuff links. Please. They’re clearly a hand job. I mean handmade. They’re handmade!’ I say, giggling.
What is happening to me, I think. I am supposed to be depressed.
‘Handmade!’ Gabriel yells, imitating me, grabbing a macadamia nut. We sign for the check and head to our room.
‘If you need anything at all, my name is Kai,’ the porter says a few minutes later at the room, wheeling in our bags.
‘Okay, Kai, thank you,’ I say, handing him a tip, thinking he must be related to our waiter and wondering what strange universe this is where everyone is so gracious and handsome. I wonder if it’s hard to get a job here and if they have any openings for women who used to be funny.
Our spacious room is lushly appointed with shiny, soft fabrics, glossy Hawaiian magazines and lightly scented candles. It has a huge window o
verlooking the ocean. The king-size bed is piled high with pillows, and covered in 400-count Pima cotton sheets. The bathroom is stocked with thick, soft towels, and has a deep bathtub with a jar of almond salt on a slate ledge for you to pour in the water with the help of a small seashell. There’s even a welcome basket just for kids with baby shampoo, a few small ceramic turtles, and three size-three diapers. These are too small for Gabriel, but in a pinch, a diaper is a diaper. A crib sits by the window as requested.
I am standing in the lap of luxury – but for one small detail. Even though I am certain Tod and I will never engage in sex again that isn’t premeditated, scheduled, and then analyzed for effectiveness, if perchance we do want to break free for a little wild island action here, clearly we’ll be doing it with Gabriel as our audience. Despite the hotel’s royal hospitality, it appears no-one has considered where, when or how we are to express our reawakened passion with a toddler right by our side.
I check the closets to see if the crib will fit in any of them, which is probably against the law, but it’s not like we’d make him sleep there overnight. None is big enough. All right, I think, this isn’t meant to be a sex trip anyway, this will be an at-least-I-don’t-feel-hopeless-anymore-because-I-can-always-move-to-Hawaii-and-be-a-chambermaid vacation. As for the hotel, no matter how posh, it clearly is not their job to anticipate guests’ nooky needs.
We unpack, take a quick tour of the pools, including the one where dolphins live, enjoy a few glasses of wine and some chicken nuggets with pineapple sauce, watching the sunset, and decide to retire early. Nothing sounds more delicious than the sounds of the ocean lulling me to sleep in that big, soft bed.
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