The only way to massage a floating person is to kind of wrap your arms around them, and pull them close, using all of your body to hold them still as you rub them. So for the next hour and a half, Parker and I were embraced and rubbed by these near-naked descendants of the first Thor, with sun and cool wind on our faces, and warm water and big hands everywhere else. The experience was like having the best sex ever while in the womb. When it was over, my masseur/favorite person in my life whispered, “Now just relax,” and gave me a little push. I drifted away, into a quiet alcove, and after a few minutes of floating in the breeze, I felt Parker bob up next to me.
Finally opening my eyes, I looked over at my equally blissed-out friend.
“I kinda feel like you just cheated on your husband,” I said.
“I was thinking the exact same thing,” she replied.
By the way, my little Peruvian friend’s masseur insisted he could only massage her properly if she let him untie her bikini top. The white girl’s masseur seemed to be able to rub her just fine with her top on.
“Are you Indian?” Parker’s masseur asked her as we emerged from the water. “Your skin is so beautiful.”
Iceland is possibly the most stunning country in the world. We rode tiny, fuzzy Icelandic horses across emerald green, spongy tundra, we snowmobiled across glaciers under blue skies, we strolled around gardens filled with tiny painted houses (for the fairies who live in gardens), we drank rum-on-the-two-thousand-year-old-rocks with a boat driver who chipped us off a piece of ancient glacial ice as we cruised by. We rented a car to get around, and so spent a lot of the time on nearly empty roads just driving.
As we drove, Parker and I talked a lot about timing. We had both been girls and women who were very good at setting goals, going after them, and making them happen. Her inability to get pregnant when she wanted was flying in the face of that. Her husband had come along sooner than she hoped, so she hadn’t gotten to choose how long she got to be single, either. I had tried to push pause on my relationship with Ben (and settling down in general), and then restart it when the time was right for me. But Ben’s life hadn’t paused. He had moved on, and the love I went back for was no longer there in the same way. The connection was, but the time had passed for his heart to be really available. Maybe he was too different, or maybe the effects of time and history had made me less attractive to him. But things had kept moving.
Furthermore, the world hadn’t paused. The good ones had been snatched up, just like people always said they would be. I had always scoffed at this, because I knew so many fantastic guys who were single into their thirties and forties. But chasing some of those fantastic guys unsuccessfully for years had shown me what everyone was talking about when they said “the good ones.” They meant the ones who want to commit, who are excited to build a family and life with a grown-up. Those do disappear. I didn’t regret my path of fun and freedom for a moment, and really didn’t wish I had settled down earlier, but there was going to be a cost.
My friends who met their spouses young have often told me they live vicariously through my adventures. That they sometimes think about the oats they never got a chance to sow. There is a trade-off for both their choice and mine. I used to beat my head over Vito, when he was struggling for years over how he wanted to be with me, but also wanted a life that wasn’t compatible with my life. He couldn’t believe that he couldn’t have everything, and so just wouldn’t choose. And I would tell him, so full of twentysomething wisdom, that life is almost never about choosing between one thing you really want and another thing you don’t want at all. If you’re lucky, and healthy, and live in a country where you have enough to eat and no fear that you’re going to get shot when you walk out your door, life is an endless series of choosing between two things you want almost equally. And you have to evaluate and determine which awesome thing you want infinitesimally more, and then give up that other awesome thing you want almost exactly as much. You have to trade awesome for awesome.
Everyone I knew, no matter what they chose, was at least a little in mourning for that other thing.
Parker and I were standing in line at the airport at the end of our Icelandic adventure when Parker gasped, got a huge smile on her face, and pointed. I followed her finger, and there was a brunette woman in a short, polka-dotted baby-doll dress and striped knee socks. She was holding the hand of a little girl who was wearing only a shirt and panties, and was absolutely too old to be going without pants. But this was a little girl who never really had a shot at dressing appropriately, because this little girl’s mommy was Björk. We had gone to Iceland and seen Björk.
Some things are inevitable. There are repercussions to your actions, logical cause-and-effects, like if you go to Iceland you will see Björk. Like if you are Björk’s child, you will go pantsless in public far longer than is appropriate. Like if you break someone’s heart, and leave them to go find yourself on years of solo adventures, they will be different and unavailable when you come back.
Parker got pregnant with her first daughter a few weeks after we got home. She swears it’s because she got the flu, and had to just give in and lie down for a week instead of working twelve-hour days. She got pregnant with her second daughter two years later, and Iceland was our last “single-girl” trip together. Yet another travel partner had bitten the dust, and I was still on the road.
11
“The Land of Milk and Funny”
Los Angeles International → Tel Aviv Ben Gurion
Departing: April 5, 2010
By this point in my life, I was very used to getting the following call from my agent when springtime, and hence TV staffing season for writers, rolled around:
“Got you a meeting on this show about single people. Go in there and tell your terminally-single-whorey stories.”
Sometimes, if the job interviewer was a more reserved type, he might also add the following:
“Don’t Kristin Newman all over the place.”
Then he would hang up, and I would go into the meeting, trying to be not-too-Kristin-but-just-Kristin-enough, and tell my crazy stories, all in the hopes that the interviewer would see an endless vessel of episode ideas in the wealth of neuroses and life experiences before them, since that’s how a sitcom writer gets a job.
During the staffing season that accompanied my thirty-seventh year, that meeting turned especially meta, since one of the executives for whom I was to trot out my terminally single stories was a woman who was one week away from marrying my ex-boyfriend Matt. I decided to just own it, and chirped to the nice woman as I left, “My latest funny terminally single story is now having to tell my funny terminally single stories to my ex-boyfriend’s fiancée!” She laughed, kindly, and hugged me good-bye. Like you can do when you’re healthy and have won.
Another upsetting trend was suddenly happening in my work life: people kept pitching me books to turn into shows with deeply upsetting messages. Worse, the pitches for these grim titles would always start with a speech like, “Kristin, I have this book that’s perfect for you. It’s called My Formerly Hot Life.”
About a woman who used to be hot, and is now forty.
Or The Panic Years.
About women “on the wrong side of twenty-five without a ring.”
This book was pitched to me by a good friend, a producer who also happens to be a forty-five-year-old, happily single man.
“What about my life choices would ever make you think I would want to put a message like this out in the world? Twenty-five? Wrong side?” I demanded.
“Oh, right,” he said, thinking I was insane.
It made me more determined than ever to break the stereotype: I would not be a sad, bitter Bridget Jones, waiting for her prince/barrister. I would not panic about my age. I would enjoy my life if it killed me.
A couple of weeks after I came home from Iceland, Ben and I broke up. He wasn’t as in it as he needed to be, and we both knew it. His “I love you”s this time were reticent, usually sand
wiched between a “sure” and a “but”—Sure, I love you, but … There was a deep sadness about walking away, but also a bit of relief—I had gone back, and tried to fix my mess, but it was unfixable. At least it wasn’t hanging out there, a question that needed to be answered, a big love that I had passed by. We would say later that the first time around it was my turn to be the narcissist, and the second time around it was his. So we were even, which hurt, but felt correct.
The night we broke up, I had a dream. I was in Antarctica, and I felt I had never seen something so wonderful. In the dream, I had mistakenly gone to Antarctica in the winter, and so it was unexpectedly dark. But it was much, much more beautiful than I had pictured it would look in the sun. There were very kind people there, and magical lights, and cathedral-like, glowing cliffs of translucent, turquoise ice, and I was shocked that this place that was so dark and cold and unexpected could be the most spectacular place I had ever been. I took the dream as a good sign that I was heading to something really transcendent and surprising by making the hard choice to leave Ben. Walking away from the compromise that being with him represented was going to lead to me finding something really spectacular.
And wouldn’t you know, about three months after Ben and I broke up, Father Juan came to America.
Juan and I had stayed sporadically in touch, and I had noticed on Facebook that he was planning a trip to New York. I immediately pointed out that Los Angeles was on the very same continent, and he quickly agreed it seemed silly to come so far and not see California.
He would be in town for Thanksgiving, and so he would also be meeting my family. My family on Thanksgiving also includes Sasha’s family, since there have been many Thanksgivings when Sasha, whom my mother calls her “soul daughter,” would host my family while I was off gallivanting. Sasha is a much better daughter to my mother in a couple of departments, holiday-throwing and grandchild-bearing being the big ones. Sasha’s first child got a gift from my mother of a baby-size leather jacket my mother had bought several years earlier for her “grandma hope chest.” I took too long, though, so the jacket went to Sasha.
I had no idea what was going to happen when Juan came to visit. I didn’t even know if he was visiting as a friend or as something more. Let’s remember that he had never slept with me, and the last time I’d seen him in Argentina it had been platonic. Five years had passed since our first romantic time in Buenos Aires. To cover all my bases, I waxed everything I had and put clean sheets on the guest bed.
I picked Juan up from the airport, and, not at all shockingly, he looked glorious after that fifteen-hour flight. I nervously took the exhausted man sight-seeing: we went out for a walk on the Venice boardwalk. We got cheap Thai massages, and went for his first tacos with some friends. I was keeping him moving. We were shy with each other, small-talking and keeping our distance. I started to worry: maybe this was just a platonic visit to see L.A. But after dinner, we went back to my house, where we had put his bag in the guest room.
“You know, there is one problem with that room,” I said as we lingered awkwardly in the kitchen, getting glasses of water. “There aren’t curtains on the window, so the sun comes in really bright in the morning. Might be too bright for you up there.”
He smiled at me, and took my face in his hands, and I took him to my room. And that almost-priest had brought a condom all the way from South America this time.
The rest of that week was a rush of giddy joy. Thanksgiving with my family was sweet and delightful. Sasha’s timid, soft-spoken stepmother pulled me aside to gush:
“Kristin, he’s so handsome. It’s like there’s some kind of light coming out of him.”
My mother was worried. She had been worried since I first came home from Argentina five years earlier enamored with Juan, and she was more worried now as she watched me fluttering around. She thought Juan was as lovely as everyone did, but I think she saw in my eyes exactly what had been in her eyes twenty years earlier, when her Latin lover, Laszlo, went back to Latin America, her heart in his hand, the rest of her left behind in the fetal position in California.
As a result of her heartbreak, she had tried hard to keep me from following my genetically predisposed need for international adventure down the same road hers had led her. When I was sixteen, not long after Laszlo left, my mother and I sat through our twenty-third viewing of Dirty Dancing. At the end of what was, and maybe still is, my all-time-favorite losing-it scene in American cinema, when a still-large-nosed Jennifer Grey asks a shirtless Patrick Swayze to “dance with her,” which boy oh boy does he ever do and how, I turned to my wildly depressed, afghan-wrapped mother and said, “Well, it doesn’t get any better than that.” She then gave me advice that I’m sure she hoped would save me years of heartache looking for what she had just lost:
“Kristin, it doesn’t get that good.”
After Thanksgiving, I took Juan up to Santa Barbara wine country, where we rented a house for the weekend with three other couples. A newly pregnant Parker and her husband were there, as were Hope and her new boyfriend (finally!) and another constantly single comedy writer friend, Erin, and her boyfriend (finally!). It was a weekend of wine and friendship and love, and I was one of the couples for once (finally!). Juan and I made up for our five sex-free years, and we all cooked and drank and visited miniature horses and danced in empty saloons. It was a golden weekend, and I was deliriously, deliriously happy.
The week came to an end, and Juan didn’t try to change his flight to stay longer, and he didn’t ask me when we were going to see each other again. He just kissed me sweetly, said the week had been amazing … and left.
And man I was blue. Feeling singler than single, and lying around the house too much. I still wasn’t working since I hadn’t gotten staffed on a show, and the pilot I wrote that year was not getting shot. (The networks buy hundreds of scripts every year, make a dozen or two, and put a handful on the air. It’s incredibly upsetting to be a writer of one of these hundreds of unmade scripts unless you set out knowing you’re getting paid to write a script that will never get made, and then you can just crank out one a year in peace, grateful that you’ve covered your mortgage. It’s a nonsensical process, and business, and life.)
So I was lying around my house too much. My mom called me one day, and I braced myself for some sentiment that would make me feel worse. But instead, the woman who normally cautioned me against running away so much suggested something amazing:
“Pistol, it sounds like you need a trip.”
It made me cry, how known and accepted this advice from this particular person made me feel.
I decided to go to Israel. I had an idea for a script that would be set there, so research was in order. The idea was to write a drama, something edgy for cable, about expats living in Jerusalem, living regular lives in the middle of the conflict. The comedy television scene had slowed down almost to a crawl, and it was time to broaden my writing horizons.
Of course, I wasn’t Jewish and knew next to nothing about the Israeli political situation. I bought really embarrassing books, like Teach Yourself: The Middle East Peace Crisis! and The Israeli/Palestinian Conflict for Dummies! I read them quickly, absolutely unwilling to take any of these books on a plane with actual Middle Easterners. As I started to fall in love with a new country, and spend my day thinking about something new, my mood lifted.
I got my intrepid single-girl traveler buddy, Astrid, who’s traveled alone even more extensively than I have, and we went to the Holy Land. Getting there was not simple, however. First two single girls had to get through security.
When you fly to Israel with El Al, there is a multi-tiered, one-on-one interview process where you are given a security rating, from one to seven. A one is for a Jewish Israeli, and gets the fewest security delays. A seven is for a probable terrorist.
It turns out that single Western women “of a certain age” are much closer to a seven than a one. Apparently there have been incidents where sad, middle-aged single girls
get involved in online relationships with “handsome Israelis” who then invite these lonely hearts to come visit them in Israel. “Just pick up a package and bring it for me, and then our hearts will be forever joined Old Testament–style,” these men promise. Then the sad, lonely girl picks up the package, having no idea that her “boyfriend” is actually an Arab terrorist, and unknowingly tries to bring her lover’s bomb on a plane.
Basically, single women in their thirties are a national security threat to the state of Israel.
Combine our dangerous marital status with the fact that my tiny blond friend Astrid liked to do things like travel alone to Tunisia, and you have two hours of security checks. They stripped us of everything but our passports, and we were handed the rest of our things on the plane.
Except we didn’t get everything back. In the search process, they apparently forgot to replace an entire bag of my clothes. So I got to Israel without anything to cover the top half of my body. Since Astrid had forgotten her contact lenses, we said we were the blind leading the topless.
Before we left the States, I wrote the following six words on my Facebook page:
“Anyone know anyone interesting in Israel?”
Two things happened: every Jewish man I knew responded with the words “I love Israel! I got my first hand job on the beach in Israel!” Apparently, those Birthright teen trips to Israel have been both wildly successful in bringing young Jews together and wildly unsuccessful in that hundreds of millions of wasted little Jews have been spilled upon those chosen sands. The second thing that resulted from my Facebook post was that I got introduced to about a hundred incredible people. Let me tell you, a couple of people in Hollywood know a couple of people in Israel.
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Page 18