What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding

by Kristin Newman

  Before I launch into what was wrong with Sally, I think I should share a few thoughts on what makes one a good traveler. I probably should say that this is what makes you a good traveler in my opinion, but deep down I really think this is just universal, incontrovertible truth. There is the right way to travel, and the wrong way. And if there is one philanthropic deed that can come from this book, maybe it will be that I teach a few more people how to do it right. So, in short, my list of what makes a good traveler, which I recommend you use when interviewing your next potential trip partner:

  1. You are open. You say yes to whatever comes your way, whether it’s shots of a putrid-smelling yak-butter tea or an offer for an Albanian toe-licking. (How else are you going to get the volcano dust off?) You say yes because it is the only way to really experience another place, and let it change you. Which, in my opinion, is the mark of a great trip.

  2. You venture to the places where the tourists aren’t, in addition to hitting the “must-sees.” If you are exclusively visiting places where busloads of Chinese are following a woman with a flag and a bullhorn, you’re not doing it.

  3. You are easygoing about sleeping/eating/comfort issues. You don’t change rooms three times, you’ll take an overnight bus if you must, you can go without meat in India and without vegan soy gluten-free tempeh butter in Bolivia, and you can shut the hell up about it.

  4. You are aware of your travel companions, and of not being contrary to their desires/​needs/​schedules more often than necessary. If you find that you want to do things differently than your companions, you happily tell them to go on without you in a way that does not sound like you’re saying, “This is a test.”

  5. You can figure it out. How to read a map, how to order when you can’t read the menu, how to find a bathroom, or a train, or a castle.

  6. You know what the trip is going to cost, and can afford it. If you can’t afford the trip, you don’t go. Conversely, if your travel companions can’t afford what you can afford, you are willing to slum it in the name of camaraderie. P.S.: Attractive single people almost exclusively stay at dumps. If you’re looking for them, don’t go posh.

  7. You are aware of cultural differences, and go out of your way to blend. You don’t wear booty shorts to the Western Wall on Shabbat. You do hike your bathing suit up your booty on the beach in Brazil. Basically, just be aware to show the culturally correct amount of booty.

  8. You behave yourself when dealing with local hotel clerks/​train operators/​tour guides etc. Whether it’s for selfish gain, helping the reputation of Americans traveling abroad, or simply the spreading of good vibes, you will make nice even when faced with cultural frustrations and repeated smug “not possible”s. This was an especially important trait for an American traveling during the George W. years, when the world collectively thought we were all either mentally disabled or bent on world destruction. (One anecdote from that dark time: in Greece, I came back to my table at a café to find that Emma had let a nearby [handsome] Greek stranger pick my camera up off our table. He had then stuck it down the front of his pants for a photo. After he snapped it, he handed the camera back to me and said, “Show that to George Bush.” Which was obviously extra funny because of the word bush.)

  9. This last rule is the most important to me: you are able to go with the flow in a spontaneous, non-uptight way if you stumble into something amazing that will bump some plan off the day’s schedule. So you missed the freakin’ waterfall—you got invited to a Bahamian family’s post-Christening barbecue where you danced with three generations of locals in a backyard under flower-strewn balconies. You won. Shut the hell up about the waterfall.

  Sally did not adhere to any rule from the above list. She never ate or slept or moved when Emma and I did. She was not constitutionally capable of noticing what anyone around her wanted or needed. She fought with every person with whom she came in contact, in hotels and train stations, in cabs and museums. We spent the entire two-week trip apologizing for her.

  But we had high hopes when we landed in London, where we would pass a few days warming up for New Year’s Eve in Paris. We spent those days primarily just trying to get Sally out of bed. She had awful jetlag, but insisted on going without the sleeping aids Emma and I popped until she had tossed and turned for several hours … which meant that she was taking an eight-hour sleeping pill just before Emma and I were waking up. After giving her a couple of hours while we got dressed and ate breakfast, we would try to quietly leave her to sleep. But she would wake up and insist on coming with us just as we were ready to slip out the door. So we would take off our coats and get comfortable while Sally ran a nice long bath, and our days would get started in the early afternoon.

  One night, a couple of hours after Sally woke up, we went out to dinner in Soho to a Thai restaurant that sat parties at communal tables. We were seated with a group of six people from Mauritius, which, it turns out, is an island nation in the Indian Ocean, about twelve hundred miles east of Africa. The country is a mix of Indian, African, and French descendants, and if this little table of gorgeously colored people was any indication, the mix is a good one. They were all twenty- and thirtysomething, and most of them were “barristers” in London. Isn’t it funny how when people tell you they’re a “lawyer” it’s super boring, but when they tell you they’re a “barrister” it feels like you’re meeting Colin Firth? As John Travolta said, “It’s the little differences.”

  One of the female barristers was there with her younger brother, a pretty, twenty-year-old, effete fashion-industry type who was living in New York City. We all made friends over dinner, and I made eyes with one particularly handsome, dark-eyed twenty-four-year-old named Nicolas, who said he wanted his picture taken kissing my cheek. I thought that was a great idea. After dinner, he invited us to come dancing with them.

  Nicolas suggested a club nearby that he said had a fantastic DJ, and which he said was mixed—both gay and straight. That sounded perfect since we were so clearly a mixed group—or, at least, a group of straight people with the one obviously gay young brother from New York. So our new posse of nine spilled down the wet streets arm in arm and piled into the club, which was filled with rainbow disco lights; mirrored floors, ceilings, and walls; and exclusively tan, waxed, shirtless men whose thongs were showing above their white jeans. This club was as “mixed” as the Village People. But the DJ was indeed fantastic, and so I grabbed my barrister and hit the dance floor.

  The nice thing about a gay club is there is no possible way to be the sluttiest person in the room. Nicolas was a hell of a dancer, and our bodies were moving really well, and really close. It didn’t take long for some kissing and groping to spring out of this fertile soil. He tasted like orange-vanilla lollipop, and it was all pretty sexy. If there is one thing that is my favorite thing in the world, it’s making out on a dance floor. Of course, it’s not always the most ladylike thing to be caught doing. I have more pictures from college than I’d like of me, twenty pounds heavier, in some nice Midwestern boy’s arms, looking caught and squinty-eyed, lipstick smeared across my round, stuffed-pizza-stuffed cheeks, maybe a nipple or two accidentally poking out over the strapless dress I’d borrowed from my thinner roommate … So, not the classiest. But here in this gay club in London, squeezed in between about a thousand men with their hands on each other’s Disneylands (happiest places on earth), I could quietly hump this stranger’s leg and still come across like one of the daughters from Downton Abbey.

  I found more evidence of my relative sense of decorum when I went to the bathroom, and had to squirm my way through the sea of humping men. It reminded me of when I was a kid and we would go play in the waves at night when the grunion were running. We’d scream as we ran across the sand covered with millions of slimy, squirming, mating fish, slithering all over each other and our toes … Crossing this dance floor was like that, but with more boners and bronzer.

  Anyway, I made it to the women’s bathroom to find that the door had two
signs on it: one that read WOMEN, and a second that clarified WOMEN ONLY ALLOWED IN WOMEN’S RESTROOM!!! NO MEN!!! Once I pushed that door open, which was difficult due to the fact that the room was filled wall to wall with men, I found two stalls with signs of their own on the doors: ONE PERSON AT A TIME IN STALL!!! Each stall had two to four sets of male feet inside.

  I managed to beg my way to a moment with a toilet, and peed amongst the smell of cocaine and sounds of coupling/throupling, then made my way back to Emma and Sally, who sat with our Mauritian friends. Nicolas and Raj, the young gay New Yorker, talked to two older white-haired-and-jeaned gentlemen nearby, while Raj’s older sister, Leoni, watched in amusement.

  “Poor Raj,” she said. “These guys won’t leave him alone. And that one could be his father.”

  Raj was whispering into the older man’s ear, and smiling. Whatever he was saying was making the old man smile, too.

  One of the Mauritians leaned over to Raj’s sister: “Leoni, I don’t think he minds.”

  Leoni looked confused, and turned back to watch her brother, an idea slowly dawning. And that’s when we understood that not only did she not know her brother was gay, which was sort of like not noticing he had two arms and two legs, but the entire reason we were here tonight was so that her friends could help him come out via the fascinating approach of making out with old men in front of his sister. We had stumbled into a Mauritian coming-out party.

  Leoni started rocking back and forth, trying to self-soothe by saying things like, “I’m in the ocean surrounded by dolphins, I’m in the ocean surrounded by dolphins,” as she threw back her margarita and watched her brother grind on the hot, tan grandpa.

  We whispered among ourselves how incredible it was that she hadn’t seen that this obviously gay boy was gay as he and my date got pawed by the silver-haired men. I got up to grab Nicolas, who had been ignoring me completely while he was wing-manning for his friend … really well. Like, he didn’t seem to mind it at all, actually. And then I realized that I, too, was not noticing that someone had two arms and two legs.

  I slept next to Emma that night.

  Sally, though, brought home a barrister. They got a second room for the two hours we had before we needed to wake up to catch our train to Paris, and Sally stumbled into our room to pack one hour and fifty minutes later. Realizing she had lost an earring in the other, now vacated, room, she called the front desk demanding to be let back in. But the room was under the barrister’s name, who had already left.

  “You guys, what was that guy’s name?” she called to us irritably, still on the phone with the front desk.

  We, too, did not know the name of the man with whom she had just had sex, so she yelled at the front desk for a few more minutes. “So I don’t know his name! You saw me come in two hours ago with that guy, you know I was with him in his room, just let me in!” She was clearly much more attached to this earring than she was to her dignity.

  Now, let’s not get distracted by my sexy night with the gay Mauritian. I was in Europe because I invited myself on a trip across oceans so that I could have a wildly romantic New Year’s with the man of my dreams. The man who, even if we hadn’t fallen in love yet, after months of knowing each other, was still ensconced in my little head as my best hope for finding someone who would make me want what everyone else in the world seemed to want. This is a lot of pressure. And that pressure built up mostly about two inches below my left eye, on my cheekbone, in the form of an enormous, painful, tumorlike pimple. The kind of pimple that even Emma and Sally had to admit was the kind that makes you skip prom, the kind that stars in a Stridex commercial.

  Our first night out in Paris, I carefully put spackle on my face, trying my best to look less like an awkward teenager, and we went to our first Ferris-organized dinner.

  I’ve now shared a hundred group dinners with Ferris, and they always go the same way. He introduces everyone, making every member of the party sound like the most incredible person in the world. He does all of the ordering while everyone gabs. He’s a perfect orderer. The tables are boisterous, people feed one another from communal plates, there are often performances of the singing or trick-performing or toast-making variety, attractive strangers at adjacent tables are usually brought over to join the party, and the waiters or chefs or restaurant owners often end up sitting with us, sharing a bottle of wine and handing over their phone number to Ferris so he’ll invite them to his next party. It’s magical. And as the person who normally takes responsibility for the success of any given dinner party, I am always both impressed and vaguely displaced.

  Ferris is better at what I’m great at.

  So we walked into the private room that held this first dinner, excited to see what Ferris had cooked up. It turned out that Ferris had flown to Paris from Berlin, where he had seen a beautiful blond stranger in the terminal. She was in talks to be the next Bond girl, and had a part in the next Batman movie. She was that kind of blond girl. On the plane, he was in business class and she was in coach, and so he ran champagne and warm nuts back to her during the flight and discovered she would be staying with some model friends just a couple of blocks from his brother’s cathedral! So lucky! So she and some Latvian models were now part of our party. And were the center of attention. I didn’t need to worry about my pimple being noticed … or any of the rest of me.

  “God bless how many beautiful women Ferris always rounds up,” one male guest said to me, not implying I was one of them.

  Now, despite my focus on Ferris, it was also impossible not to notice how many other attractive, funny, single men were in this group. The seeds of many crushes I would have over the next few years were planted on this trip. But what I didn’t understand yet was that few of these guys were available to me, really.

  They were all Peter Pans, and, as I had yet to accept that I was a Pietra Pan myself, I didn’t see it. Over the years, more than one of them would eventually give me some speech that added up to the notion that I was “not one to be trifled with.” That you didn’t kiss someone like me if you didn’t want to marry her, and that was far, far too scary a proposition. This “compliment” frustrated me many a night, in the face of chemistry with one friend or another who just wouldn’t kiss me.

  But somehow I didn’t learn all of this at that first dinner … despite it being under my nose, right next to my pimple.

  We did ultimately have a great night. We went out dancing, and I met all of these amazing, hilarious women who were also part of the trip, and danced with the charming men. Where most of my friends at home had fallen into the “married” or “bitter to be single” categories, here was a group of thirtysomething single people who were delighted to be single in their thirties. Their careers were starting to take off, and the combination of the newfound money no one had had in their twenties and the freedom they all protected like mama bears with their cubs was a heady brew. I would learn that this group entering a bar is a thing of beauty: within moments, everyone will split up and immediately make new friends in every corner, and they will all, ultimately, be dancing in one another’s collective arms by the end of the night. We owned every room we entered. I was pining for Ferris, but I was also having the best time of my life.

  New Year’s Eve arrived. Now, while I was not exactly “connecting” with Ferris, and was starting to wonder if perhaps he and I were perhaps a little too alike, he had not yet hooked up with any of the models or Bond girls he had collected. And so I was still holding out hope for a midnight kiss moment, involving fireworks and chilly Parisian night air, that would deliver on everything the trip (and the rest of my life) was supposed to be.

  Emma, Sally, and I made our way through wintery Paris to Ferris’s party at the American Cathedral. Ferris’s brother’s stone-and-stained-glass priest’s apartment in the church was filled with food and music and people in gorgeous dresses and tuxedos, velvet smoking jackets and feather boas, Givenchy gowns and seventies ruffled thrift-store shirts. There were what turned out to b
e members of the Parisian Algerian mafia, who had given their number to Ferris “in case shit went down.” (Shit never went down, but that number got a lot of cool tables at impossible-to-get-into Parisian clubs.) There were guys who managed the finances of sovereign nations and New Yorker cartoonists and a Brit in “public relations” who would spend the next eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan as one of General Petraeus’s closest advisors. Ferris had met dozens of Parisians during his month in town, and they mixed with his other guests, who had flown in from all over the U.S. and Europe. It had only taken Ferris a couple of weeks to become a hub in Paris, just like he was at home.

  A wrought-iron spiral staircase stood in the middle of the living room, and it disappeared into what turned out to be the cathedral’s bell tower, which looked out over the Eiffel Tower, and all of Paris. Over the course of the evening, people would bundle up and carefully climb the stairs in stilettos, up up up through three stories of the windy, pigeon-filled stone tower, trying not to fall through the grates or spill their champagne.

  Ferris was wearing a blue velvet tux that he has worn every New Year’s since. (I just texted him to confirm that he never washes the tux. He responded: “The yearly Halloween cow costume never gets washed, but should. The blue velvet tux doesn’t really need cleaning.” So … no. He never washes it.) Anyway, back on that first magical night when the tux was still clean, Ferris came over to welcome us with two bottles: one a three-foot-tall double magnum of red wine, and the other a bottle of absinthe he had smuggled in from Berlin. He poured us glasses of both, happily spilling red wine that could not possibly be successfully poured from so large a bottle. He looked ecstatic that I was there, and kissed me on both cheeks, European-style, and gushed about how beautiful I looked … and then did the same to everyone else.