What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  Sasha could make a great point.

  I blushed, and Aleg reached out his hand. I put my hand in his, and he squeezed it.

  “Priviet, Kristinichka.” Hello, my little Kristin.

  “How many years, how many winters.”

  Sweet Jesus.

  Sasha called Aleg the next day, as promised, and chatted with him about where we would all meet. He asked to speak with me, and she handed me the phone.

  “Priviet?” I tried.

  “Hello, Kristinichka,” Aleg purred sweetly.

  I giggled. “Hello, Aleg!”

  A long beat, then he spoke again, sweetly, with so much hope: “Tonight?”

  Aleg had learned an English word! I loved him. He was so smart.

  “Dah! Tonight!” I trilled.

  Another long beat, then:

  “Kristinichka.”

  Another giggle, then, “Aleg.”

  Sweet Jesus.

  Sasha and I hitched a ride to the bar where we would meet. As wildly dangerous as that sounds (and felt), that’s how you got around Russia. There weren’t enough taxis by a long shot, and so you just raised your hand, and then someone would pull over, ask you where you wanted to go, and tell you how much they would charge to take you there. Lots of people needed rides, and everyone who wasn’t in the mob or the government (same people) needed extra money.

  What this meant in practice was that two American girls would raise their hands. A beat-up car, usually containing one or two enormous, terrifying, glowering, mobster-looking men in black leather jackets, would pull over and ask, “Where to?” while swigging from a bottle of vodka. The American girls would decide whether the men were actually dangerous, or just dangerous-looking, like most Russians. (The Russian-born American girl was the first to note that, so it’s more about self-loathing than xenophobia.)

  We made a rule that we would only get in a car that contained fewer than two terrifying-looking giants, reasoning that we could overpower one three-hundred-pound Russian kidnapper, but two could get rapey. This all got less scary the more we did it, though, because inevitably the conversation with these gray-faced behemoths went something like this (in Russian):

  SASHA: “Thanks for the ride. What’s your name?”

  GRAY-FACED BEHEMOTH: “Vlad. Where are you from?”

  SASHA: “Los Angeles.”

  GRAY-FACED BEHEMOTH: “Hollywood! And you’re going to the Bolshoi tonight? Is [insert famous dancer’s name] performing? He’s remarkable. I saw him in Swan Lake and it made me weep. Also, you’re going to love [insert famous conductor’s name]. He squeezes emotion out of the orchestra like no one I’ve ever seen.” [Passing bottle of vodka over seat] “Would you like a sip?”

  Looks thus kept being deceiving, which made me very grateful to be with a Russian speaker. Because before Sasha would open her mouth, every single person in Russia looked at us as though they were going to kill us like they’d just killed their favorite dog when they realized they couldn’t feed it through the winter.

  “That’s just what their faces look like,” Sasha said to her mom one night.

  Then she squeezed her mother’s hand again.

  On the night of my big date, we hitched a ride to the loud, dark club that Aleg had chosen for a meeting place. I had spent the day telling myself that meeting up with a guy did not mean I had to hook up with him—we were just making local friends!

  Aleg showed up a few minutes after we ordered our vodka tonicas, and kissed me three times on the cheeks, right left right, the Russian way. What is important to understand about this custom is that you get one cheek kissed, then your noses and lips and eyes brush past each other’s on your way to the other cheek, and then you do the whole pass and brush routine yet another time on your way back to the first cheek, breathing each other in the whole while. The slower the pass from one cheek to the next, the more serious the greeting. It’s a pretty great way to spice up those hard, gray, vodka-and-snow-filled lives.

  Aleg’s passes were crazy slow.

  Aleg immediately recognized a friend at the bar—Misha, a sexily dangerous-looking tattoo artist in his midthirties. Sasha immediately recognized that she needed to get a closer look at Misha’s tattoo sleeves. So my translator left Aleg and me alone to get to know each other.

  Aleg leaned over and screamed at me (it was very loud), “I speak small of English!”

  “Fantastic!” I screamed back. “I’m kind of a talker, and the thought of what we were going to do if we couldn’t communicate was sort of terrifying! So, are you from Moscow? How do you know Misha?”

  Aleg looked at me, panicked for one beat, two, three … and then just kissed me.

  He kissed the SHIT out of me. One thing that a tortured, dramatic worldview does for someone is it makes him a HELL of a kisser. At least, Sasha and I came to this understanding based on our sample size of two. Later in life I’d also find the same can be said about Israelis, who obviously share the Russian tortured, dramatic thing, combined with the whole “We may not even be here tomorrow and should try to make more Jews for the good of our people” Jewish thing. That particularly amps up the passion quotient. The tortured worldview kissing theory can even be true about regular Americans, if they’re sensitive and unhappy enough.

  So maybe my sample size is large enough. I’m sure my mother thinks so.

  But back to the date. While Sasha could actually communicate with her new friend, it wasn’t long before she, too, was gathering her own kissing data on the other end of the bar. The evening quickly turned into a veritable crazy-Russian-night-out stereotype: there was a lot of vodka, a lot of champagne, dirty dancing on a dance floor flooded with lots of flashing lights and fur-clad women shimmying to a combo of bad techno and bizarre American one-hit wonders that had apparently been huge in Russia. “Mambo No. 5” got a huge reaction, for example.

  (A side note about Russian women: good God are they hot when they are eighteen. The girls in this club were all legs and cheekbones, pouty lips and exquisite big eyes. But, quite tragically, every woman over forty in Russia looks like a tiny, shriveled, ancient little gnome. That cold, pessimistic, vodka-and-cigarette-filled, fresh-vegetable-free life is hard—it drives over women’s faces like a Soviet tank. Now that Sasha is a fantastic-looking forty, I can tell you it is not the genes, it is the life.)

  Anyway, after some time dry humping to the Spin Doctors, Misha suggested we move the party back to his place, since Sasha was drunk enough to think that Misha was not too drunk to give her her very first tattoo.

  We stumbled into a taxi with our bottles of vodka and champagne, and drove for a very, very long time. It turned out that Misha lived with his parents in a housing project on the outskirts of Moscow. Aleg did, too. Almost no one in Russia lives with fewer than two or three generations of family, and yet everyone has a dacha—a summer house. We were confused about how such impoverished people, who often had PhDs yet lived life ten to a room, could all afford summer homes, until we started noticing the small wooden shacks along the side of the highway. These were dachas. Apparently, when you’ve spent a Russian winter with ten relatives in one room, a week alone in a shack next to a highway equals an attractive option for your summer vacation.

  We finally pulled up to Misha’s towering tenement, and went up to the two-bedroom apartment, giggling and whispering as we snuck past his sleeping parents to Misha’s room. But Misha’s room was pretty small for four people trying to do terrible things to each other, and so Misha took Sasha for a twenty-minute tour of the bathroom, leaving me and Aleg to his futon.

  Now, all day, when I wasn’t thinking about how I absolutely was not going to cheat on my boyfriend, I had been harboring a very specific Aleg-related fantasy. It basically involved him teaching me how to say all of the parts of the body in Russian, by kissing each part and then telling me the word for it, which I would then repeat and try to remember as he moved to kiss the next spot. Then I would do the same for him, in English. It was really a very adorable
fantasy.

  So, after a day of this, I found myself on a futon with my Russian. And let’s remember that I was twenty-eight, and had been with two people in the previous eight years. It had been a very long time since I had been with someone for the first time, and it hadn’t happened very often. And Aleg and I could only communicate with our eyes, and our bodies. And we communicated really effectively that way. So everything was already fairly amazing when Aleg stopped doing something disgustingly wonderful, kissed the tip of my nose, and said:

  “Nos.”

  Nose. In Russian. HE WAS DOING IT! Delighted, I said “nos,” then kissed the tip of his nose and said “nose.” Aleg repeated, a great student: “nose.” Next was an ear. Fingers. Elbows. Terrible places.

  Crazy, right?

  Except it wasn’t. I would eventually, via many other vacation romances, learn something: This always happens when you make love to someone who speaks another language. Always. It’s crazy, but my fantasy apparently sprang from the fact that this is just a natural instinct for two people who cannot communicate and yet find themselves in the same room naked.

  Sasha and Misha eventually returned, rumpled but smiling, for the second reckless portion of their evening together: the tattoo. My beautiful friend—fresh out of the Ivy League, the ultimate manifestation of the American Dream who had been saved from a life as just another angry-looking, prematurely aging Russian whose only way out of the country might have been as a mail-order bride—this young promising woman pulled down her pants, bent over a chair, and slurred at her new companion:

  “Do whatever you want!”

  Now, you might think that this should have been the moment where Sasha’s good friend would intervene. But I was still topless, reasoning that as long as Aleg stayed on top of me, my modesty could remain intact. And so instead of intervening, I took another ladylike swig out of a bottle of champagne and slurred, “I love that you’re doing this!”

  “Are you gonna get one, too?” Sasha asked, as a very drunk Misha spilled his needles on the floor.

  “Hell no!”

  But Sasha still let Misha do whatever he wanted. Which turned out to be tattoing a large, misshapen (he was so drunk) infinity symbol made out of barbed wire on Sasha. It stretched across her entire lower back in a horizontal-ish figure eight-ish.

  While Sasha got her tattoo, Aleg and I used her to get to know each other.

  “Sasha, ask him where he was born.”

  “Sasha, how do you say, ‘Your skin makes me cry?’ ”

  In college, Sasha had invented a phrase that my friends and I all use to this day to describe that moment that happens when someone says something that you were completely sure only you had ever thought about. And which you then decide is a message from the universe that the two of you are supposed to be together forever. She called this thing a “moo-cow.” The name came from a road trip she took with a college boyfriend. She was getting ready to break up with him, but on the trip driving through the country, the guy pointed at a passing cow and said, “Moo-cow.” Now, that was what Sasha’s family always said when they drove by cows, and so she took this moment as a sign that she was supposed to stay with the guy.

  They broke up two months later.

  Sasha always cautioned against the power of the moo-cow. Because a moo-cow feels great, but it can lead you down the wrong roads. It can make you stay with the wrong person, but, worse, it can make you break up with the right person just because the two of you never have any moo-cows, which, while they feel fantastic, are ultimately meaningless.

  I was a big chaser of the moo-cow.

  On that couch, through Sasha’s translation, Aleg and I realized we had enough moo-cows to fill Red Square. And that, consequently, we were meant to find each other. First, we were born three weeks apart, in the same year. Crazy, right?! Second, we had both grown up during the Cold War, terrified that at any moment The Bomb would be dropped on us … by the other person’s country! Furthermore, Aleg had been raised in a tiny town in far-eastern Russia, an eight-hour flight from Moscow, just across the sea from Japan. The only reason this town existed was that it contained a top-secret Russian military base … built around the nuclear missile launcher that his father was in charge of operating, and which was aimed at Los Angeles … where I lived! In terror of attack by the Russians! I was practicing my duck-and-cover because of Aleg’s father! Who didn’t want to drop a bomb on me any more than I wanted to drop one on his fucking hot son!

  Now, again, this was just a few months after 9/11. The world was a scary, war-filled place. So it felt very natural to turn the sordid naked things I was doing in Russia while my boyfriend slept in our bed in Los Angeles into an act of international peacemaking. I was literally making love. Out of nothing at all. Love That Would Save Our Planet.

  And that’s how I used 9/11 to rationalize cheating.

  But at least I didn’t get a tattoo.

  The next day, Aleg came with me in the taxi to the airport. We held each other tightly. I sang him “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and didn’t feel embarrassed, like I absolutely should have. He knew some of the words.

  “I don’t know when I’ll be back again. Oh, babe, I hate to go.”

  He held my face in his hands, and stared into my eyes with those eyes, and kissed me.

  Moscow Sheremetyevo → Paris Charles de Gaulle

  Departing: May 30, 2002

  I flew from Moscow to Paris to meet my mom and stepdad and his kids for a couple of weeks of fighting in the South of France. I lit two candles in Notre Dame, one for Aleg and one for Trevor, feeling enough post-9/11 love swelling in my heart for both of them. While my angry family of five drove around Provence in a French car built for two, I channeled my new ability to sit quietly, and stared, peaceful, out the window at the fields of lavender and poppies as they argued.

  Sasha changed her flight and stayed behind with Misha for a couple of extra days. I would call her from pay phones in France, where she would chatter euphorically:

  “I’m in Gorky Park eating hot dogs with Misha! Aleg misses you! We have to help them come to America! We’ll help them get visas, Kristin! We’ll CHANGE THEIR LIVES!”

  She was not kidding, and I did not laugh. I just agreed, and cried, and told her to tell Aleg I missed him, too. Then I would call him, and, between a pay phone in France and a tenement on the outskirts of Moscow, we would coo the only words we could:

  “Aleg?”

  “Kristinichka.”

  “Aleg.”

  “Kristinichka.”

  Eventually, I paid a hundred and fifty dollars to leave my family in France twenty-four hours early, and Sasha paid the same to stay with Misha and leave Russia a few days late.

  Back home, Sasha, somehow, through no fault of her own, turned out to be HIV-negative. As for me, I hid my travel journal and my pictures of Aleg in a box in Sasha’s father’s garage, and, racked with guilt, broke up with Trevor. And then, at twenty-nine, I went on what felt like my first adult date.

  Before Russia, I thought I was fully cooked. I thought I was who I was going to be forever. But it turned out there was a little part of me that was still pink. That part was a little quieter, and less judgmental, and a lot wilder than the rest of me. Not quite Kristin … more like Kristin-Adjacent. I’d spend the next ten years exploring this other part of myself that I found on a couch in a Russian tenement, and around dinner tables in Moscow. Even though it came at a morally inopportune moment, I had my first Sex and the City story. And that’s how I became The Girl Who Never Lost Her Groove. The girl who was told by a depressive, hilarious friend, “You have more fun than anyone I know.” The girl who got the most votes in a party game where everyone had to choose who they would switch lives with if they had to.

  The Girl Who Was Terrified of Losing Her Groove.

  3

  “Two Ferris Buellers Don’t Make a Right”

  Los Angeles International → London Heathrow → Paris Charles de Gaulle

  De
parting: December 26, 2004

  Have you ever fallen in love with someone you’ve never met? I have! And then I flew to Paris to go get him.

  This next adventure requires a bit of context, so stay with me.

  After my breakup with Trevor, I was determined to resist my natural instinct to fall into another long relationship. I went on more single-girl trips with Sasha, to China and Tibet, where the mountains, monks, and clay warriors were amazing and the men were too small and hairless, and to Spain, where I tussled with a Barcelonan who turned out to be wearing black panties that were identical to my own and who wanted to know if I liked things “a little bit strange.” (He meant butt stuff. I do not.) I almost slipped back into relationshipland when I spent a New Year’s Eve in the mountains of Canada making out with a good friend. For years he had been saying inappropriate drunken things about his hopes for us if only we were both single. He said I made him wonder what being with someone like me would feel like—meaning someone he could talk to, as opposed to his usual diet of inappropriately young waitresses. Then we finally were single, and kissed on a dance floor in Canada, but he promptly disappeared when we got back home, later explaining, “We really could have had something if you weren’t so successful.”

  (Have I mentioned it can be a real bummer to be a working female writer in Los Angeles when it comes to dating? I don’t want to use the words boner killer indiscriminately, but let’s just say Sheryl Sandberg had some points about the likability of successful women. Also, not unrelated: Nell Scovell, the cowriter of Lean In, was a successful female sitcom writer.)

  Anyway, I tried to be grateful that my friend’s rejection kept me on track. My natural instinct was to search for love, but I was supposed to be enjoying my first taste of singledom, after all. So I continued running around Los Angeles declaring to anyone who asked that I was looking for a “great guy with commitment issues.” And since pretty much all of the other women around me who were turning thirty were either getting married or getting panicked about not getting married, more than one guy in Los Angeles liked the sound of that. If you are looking for the magic words that will make you into a Pied Piper to men, those are the ones. So I spent about a year leading rats around town with that particular flute, and then I met Ben.