What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  And so Mike slept with her instead.

  I put my foot down after a week of the dark side, and dragged everyone out of bed at the crack of three p.m. for some sight-seeing. We went to Anne Frank’s house, and then for pancakes (sweet). We went to the Van Gogh museum, and then for pancakes (savory). And, one day, I forced everybody onto the train, and out to see the tulip fields.

  We chugged instant train coffee and stared out the windows at the Dutch farmland, which looked like it had been colored by a giant kindergartener. Miles of red next to miles of pink next to miles of purple next to miles of yellow. Mike’s blue hair framed by all of those colors made him look like a character in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The goodwill from the drugs that had opened my mind and heart to all of humanity was still lingering, and it made me tolerant and peaceful when Mike asked stupid questions. Hope’s head was on her boyfriend’s shoulder, all forgiven there, too. In two years they would be married, and in five they would be divorced … because he still hadn’t grown out of raves and drugs.

  I would go home feeling like I had had a real adventure, on my own, without a boyfriend. I’d learned that getting on a plane could make me feel better, and that, regardless of how it had gone, I was the kind of girl who sometimes hung out alone in Paris. The kind of girl who took Ecstasy and knew a guy named Peter the Dutch Drug Dealer and could have made out with a crippled British girl. And that was the first thing that made me feel better about the death of the life I thought I was going to live with Vito. There was a new life coming, and it was going to be as colorful as Dutch tulip fields.

  In two months I would start dating my friend Trevor, who would help me get over my first heartbreak, and whose heart I would break two years later when I realized at twenty-nine that I desperately needed to be single for the first time in my life. But, in that moment, the sun was shining, and we were four friends traveling by train through Holland in the spring. I hadn’t had my international sex sorbet, and I hadn’t kissed a girl, but I had gotten out of my heartbroken fetal position and taken a trip across an ocean. And I liked it.

  2

  “If I Don’t Sleep with This Russian Bartender, the Terrorists Win”

  Los Angeles International → Moscow Sheremetyevo

  Departing: May 7, 2002

  I used 9/11 to rationalize cheating. I’m not proud of it, but it’s important that you know. And I’d like you to read the following story through a nine-months-after-9/11 lens. Remember that time? We were all a little more grateful for life, a little less sure of the future? Right? Remember?

  Yeah, I know, it just sucked. But unfortunately my first actual success at a vacation romance was also my first (and only) time cheating.

  It was on a trip to Russia two years into my relationship with Trevor, to whom I now offer a heartfelt apology. Trevor and I had been friends for years while I was dating Vito, and then, six months after Vito and I broke up, Trevor asked me on a date. He was a cheerful curmudgeon who hated most people, so I took it as a great compliment that he liked me. After two years, we were living together, and he really wanted to get married. As usual, I did not.

  I was about to turn twenty-nine, Sex and the City was at its peak, and I didn’t really understand a word of it. I’d never been single as an adult. I couldn’t speak with Carrie-like authority about the difference between twenty- and thirtysomething men, I couldn’t entertain a dinner party with stories of ridiculous things I’d done to find love. I’d never had bad dates, or good dates. Really, I’d never had any dates, because my last decade had been spent in two almost back-to-back relationships with guys who had first been close friends of mine. In both cases, we’d gotten drunk one night, kissed, said “I love you,” and then been together for several years.

  So I was starting to wonder if I’d just never have crazy single-girl stories. Which felt like I was choosing to skip a vital life experience, like seeing Paris or having a child, the memory of which would comfort and entertain me as I lay in my old-lady bed, knowing that I had really done it.

  Trevor was handsome and hilarious and weird in a way I loved. But he was also an aspiring comedy writer who, like all aspiring comedy writers, was regularly unemployed. The same month we started dating, I had finally stopped aspiring and started doing, getting my first writing job on That ’70s Show, and so his unemployment was also accompanied by depression since, every morning, I went off to his dream job. This was a big bummer for both of us. I loved him, and he moved in with me when his lease was up during a period of unemployment, but I didn’t plan on marrying him. I didn’t think being in a relationship with someone I didn’t want to marry was a problem, mostly because, as I’ve said, I had never really wanted to get married, period.

  So why was that? Most everyone says your feelings about marriage come from your parents’ marriage. I don’t know if that’s the whole explanation, but here is my parents’ story, which definitely had at least some influence:

  My parents met when they were young, tan, blond Southern California lifeguards at the same pool in 1967. Picture everyone in Gidget, and you get the idea. They got married very fast and very young, at barely twenty and twenty-four, and I grew up experiencing them as very much in love—with me, and with each other. They showered together, they danced in the kitchen, they locked the bedroom door on Saturday mornings.

  But after eighteen years, they had grown dramatically apart. The nineteen-year-old lifeguard whom my father had married had turned into a workaholic international corporate lawyer, whose world was getting bigger with every year. The young, beautiful sailor and naval officer who whisked my mother off as a new bride to live in Newport, Rhode Island, and Naples, Italy, had turned into a juvenile probation officer who worked nine to five (which was considered part-time in our house) and who was a cheerful homebody, happiest on the couch with me, my mom, and a box of wine.

  He resented the housekeeper my mother hired so she didn’t have to spend her few free hours cleaning the house. She resented that she was working constantly to bring home a big check that she wanted to use to see the world, and yet he insisted on going to the same condo in Maui year after year, where we would make sandwiches and break into the beachfront pool down the road. She would buy him flying lessons for his birthday, because as a young man he had dreamed of being a pilot, and he would feel criticized for not being enough for her. She wanted him to have a life about more than us, he wanted her to have a life that was more about us.

  It broke.

  Following are the lessons I internalized about marriage as a result of my parents’ marriage:

  1. Getting married young is gambling on a game you don’t know how to play. You don’t know who either of you is going to become. If you get married before you are fully cooked, you have no idea if you are marrying someone who will ultimately be compatible with you.

  2. Marriage is a limiter. It limits your freedom, and it limits your capacity to follow your dreams. If you do make the mistake of growing while married, your marriage will end.

  3. No matter how in love you start out, no matter how much you dance in the kitchen and lock the bedroom door on Saturday mornings, love will die.

  And so when people like Vito and Trevor asked me to marry them, I said no.

  My best friend, Sasha, was mystified about why I would be spending what she called my “high-worth years” with someone I wasn’t going to marry. The world was my oyster, now, she would say, but it wouldn’t be that way forever. I found this ridiculous. I wanted to have kids eventually, so I knew I’d get married someday. But not yet, not by a long shot. When I was a kid, I told my mom I wanted to have babies when I was as old as possible. Men got married and had babies late into their thirties and forties; I certainly could do the same.

  But this was a decade before I noticed something important: Those older men were usually not marrying women who were also in their thirties and forties. Ten years later, I would watch the men my age dating women much younger than they were because those women sti
ll had time to slowly date and enjoy before they had to have babies. Somehow, despite everyone telling me this was how it was going to work, I was sure it wouldn’t for me. When I was in my twenties and older guys would ask me out, I thought they were creepy, and unattractive, and way too old. It never occurred to me that I was the only twentysomething woman who found thirtysomething successful men creepy.

  “Why do you think you hate men with jobs?” Sasha would ask.

  Anyway, there I was, living with a depressed, unemployed man whom I loved but was not going to marry, when Sasha invited me on a trip to Russia. Sasha was living on the East Coast, and so for years we had been taking annual girl trips to see each other. The Russia trip happened because Sasha was born in Moscow, and immigrated to the U.S. when she was three. When I met her on the first day of fifth grade, I took one look at the little girl with the uneven bowl haircut given to her by her frugal Russian father and thought, That is the cutest boy in school.

  But Sasha was now a beautiful twenty-nine-year-old woman with an expensive haircut, and had spent the last two years mixing and sleeping with princes of industry and children of world leaders at Yale Law School. Nothing made Sasha calmer than going to Neiman Marcus, because it felt like the farthest place from the smell of stewed cabbage in her childhood home. She taught me about expensive shoes before either of us could afford expensive shoes, and we chipped in together on one pair of “time-share” Manolos that we shipped back and forth between Los Angeles and New Haven for special occasions, or planned run-ins with exes.

  Sasha’s mother suggested they take a trip back to Russia, their first time back since they fled to give Sasha a better life twenty-six years earlier. I jumped on the chance to travel to Russia with Russians (the thing to do in the place, etc.) and off we went.

  On the plane, Sasha sat next to a barrel-bellied, middle-aged man from Phoenix named Tommy. He was heading to Russia to pick up his pregnant mail-order bride. Tommy pulled out photos. She was eighteen, and spectacularly beautiful. He had met her a few months prior, when, after e-mailing with several women, he traveled to Russia to see which one he liked. The way it worked was this: the girls were put up in different rooms in the same hotel. He visited each girl with a translator, sort of taking her out for a test drive. He picked the one he liked, and spent a couple of weeks with her. She got pregnant, and so now he was going to bring her to her new life in America, where she would be a new mommy to Tommy’s two fat children from his first marriage, and would receive a tract home and a new red Buick convertible. He had pictures of the car and the fat kids and the tract home with him, too.

  “Have you learned any Russian?” Sasha asked him.

  “Oh, no, she’d rather learn English, I’m sure,” Tommy replied. “All she wants is to be American.”

  Sasha squeezed her mother’s hand.

  For a few weeks we had been practicing “speaking Russian.” This did not mean actually speaking Russian, it just meant speaking English with a Russian attitude; i.e., dramatic and full of impending doom. My guidebook told me that the national anthem for Ukraine translated roughly to “We have not yet died!” That was the most victorious and optimistic version they could come up with. When Russians meet, their “Nice to meet you” literally translates to “How many years, how many winters?” Why couldn’t it at least be summers? It’s all very dramatic and dark in Russia.

  So when we were “practicing Russian,” Sasha and I would translate “Enjoy your meal” into “I hope you don’t choke and leave your family devastated.” “Have a nice day” became “Today, try to forget this world is gray and bleak.”

  Et cetera.

  Sasha did teach me a couple of actual Russian phrases that became my party trick for the next three weeks. I could say “I am a bride for sale” with a pretty decent accent. Also “Be my daddy” and “American thighs.” When not chirping those phrases, though, I was just the chesty blond girl smiling and nodding while Sasha chatted up Russians. I reminded myself of Ulla, the agreeable but only Swedish-speaking secretary in Mel Brooks’s The Producers. I’d smile, nod, smile, nod, then Sasha would turn to me and say:

  “Kristin, say your thing!”

  “I am a bride for sale!” Ulla would proudly pipe up.

  And we would have new Russian friends.

  I did ask Sasha’s mother how to say “Have a nice day” in Russian, but she just frowned and said, “We don’t really say that.”

  The trip was a combination Russian history tour and walk down Sasha’s mother’s memory lane. We met the original Sasha after whom my Sasha had been named, and had big dinner parties full of her mother’s old Russian friends and the families they’d formed in the twenty-six years since she’d last seen them. No one spoke English, and Sasha and her mother both spoke Russian, so at these dinners I would have to sit quietly and pick at my egg, cheese, and mayonnaise bowl that Russians call a “salad.”

  Sitting quietly at dinner parties was not my natural strong suit. At home, I worked hard at dinner parties. Not just at being entertaining, which I believe to be a holy duty of dinner party guests, but also at keeping the conversation constantly going, noticing people who were being left out and asking questions to draw them in, filling the awkward silences. Maybe this need to keep everyone happy and getting along is just my nature, or maybe it stems from a childhood as an only child of a disintegrating marriage, trying to be the happy glue that kept the splintering family together. Either way, I’m not complaining, since it’s a skill that’s probably exclusively responsible for my success as a sitcom writer.

  Sitcom writers often group write, sitting around a big table, so we talk all day long. Sometimes, on some shows, you literally never sit alone in front of a computer just writing. And I worked exactly as hard in a writers’ room, around that table, as I did around dinner tables. I never realized how hard I worked around tables day and night until the trip to Russia, when I couldn’t. I just had to sit there. At first this was excruciating. I felt completely not myself, dead weight in a little life raft adrift in a sea of incomprehensible and sometimes stilted conversation.

  Earlier that year, at a meditation workshop with a stressed-out friend, the meditation guide was walking us through an exercise, and asked us a question that we were to think about as we sat.

  “With no thoughts, with no words, what am I?”

  Dead. Immediately, with medium-size panic and a shortness of breath, that was my answer. Without thoughts, words, speech … death. My career and my identity were filled with millions of words daily, and without them I would be a black hole. My friend and I talked about the question after the class, and I was surprised to hear that her reaction had been absolutely opposite from mine. For her, the idea of no words, and no thoughts, made her deeply calm and peaceful.

  For me it meant I was gone.

  But on that trip to Russia, I eventually got used to being without words. I could still smile at people, and pass the bread, and look friendly. I was not just the words that came out of my mouth. I was still there without them. And that’s when I just ate my cheese salad and relaxed. I relaxed to such a degree that I realized I had never been relaxed at any dinner party in my entire life. This was my favorite part about my trip to Russia.

  Aside from Aleg.

  My Russian lover was a bartender. You will find that bartenders will become a recurring theme. Eventually, in my early thirties, I made a decision: no more dating people who serve food or drink in the United States (excluding Hawaii and Alaska). Now, foodservers of these United States, don’t get offended. If I lived anywhere else, I would love to take you out for a drink. But I live in Los Angeles, and so dating a waiter or bartender here means you are actually dating an actor or model or musician, which is an unreasonable, self-destructive thing to do.

  But a no-bartenders rule is just as unreasonable when traveling abroad. Especially when you’re traveling alone, since there’s often no one to talk to but the people who are serving you. Which brings us back to Aleg, and his sh
arp, exquisite Russian features, his floppy, shiny, dark hair, his deep, tortured Russian eyes. I met him one night when Sasha and I went to his bar for a drink, where I looked into those eyes and cooed, “Vodka tonica,” which is Russian for “vodka tonic.” I said it with a great accent. Then we took our drinks and found a table. But Aleg and I couldn’t stop staring at each other.

  “I love him,” was all I could say to Sasha. Love is a way easier word to use out of the country.

  “Do you want me to go talk to him for you?” she asked.

  No, I was embarrassed. Also, I had a boyfriend. Sasha looked irritated. Since I had told her that I would by no means be marrying Trevor, she was ready for me to be done with it already. So I looked back at Aleg, who was still simmering.

  Well … maybe he had a good idea for where we should go next? Maybe there was a wonderful local cultural event that he would know about. She could ask him about that, at the very least.

  We got up and marched over to the beautiful bartender. Sasha started speaking to him in Russian, and they chatted for a couple of minutes while I did my Ulla routine, smiling and nodding whenever Aleg would look my way with those freakin’ eyes.

  After a couple of minutes, Sasha turned to me. “This is Aleg. I told him you like him. He likes you, too. You have a date with him tomorrow night. Don’t say no, because you’re not going to marry Trevor anyway, which means you’re going to be single someday soon, which means it would be stupid to not go out with a Russian in Russia, which is the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it.”