My mother was delighted. She wept and laughed and clapped her hands like I’d told her I was pregnant. It was just such a relief to her that I at least was planning on the baby thing, finally, like a regular person. (My stepfather, a doctor, had often received calls from me over the years requesting that he phone in a renewal of my birth-control prescription. Often I would hear my mother shout, “Don’t give them to her!” sassily in the background. The woman wanted me knocked up, bad.) So, she cheered me on as I started my little science experiment on myself, injecting things into my body, growing breasts that looked like they could feed the metropolitan area. My mom dropped me off after egg-retrieval day with a list of fifteen baby names, one for every egg I retrieved. (Jazzy Newman was one option, short for Jasmine. So, a stripper.)
Of course, just like in a J-Lo movie, as soon as I started the fertility injections, I met a guy. He was a moody, sensitive TV editor with great eyelashes who kept me on my toes rationalizing several pieces of information, dispensed over a few months:
1. He had made a documentary about a sex commune in San Francisco, as part of his “exploration of whether or not monogamy makes sense.”
2. He had cheated on his ex-wife, who, it turned out, I had met before.
3. He announced he was ready to stop seeing other people months after I assumed we had both stopped seeing other people.
But I pushed past all of these data points, and kept going, my head down. I was the Little Engine Who Could Ignore Massive Red Flags.
And I quietly went forward with freezing my eggs. Which led to mystifying days where I injected fertility drugs into my stomach in the morning, and then had sex with my boyfriend with a condom later that night. Might there be an easier way? a modern girl might ask herself. Eventually, when I had to call off sexy time for a couple of weeks because of the procedure, I told him what I was doing. He reacted calmly.
“That’s cool. It’s like the opposite of the talk I usually get from women your age. It means you aren’t in a hurry.”
The news also, mysteriously, made this guy who was absolutely not in a hurry suddenly really anxious to stick things in me without a condom, even though that could have turned into dozen-tuplets. I think my fertility pheremones were intoxicating.
I ended up with a couple of handfuls of little potential babies in the freezer. (The doctor said I had “gorgeous lining” and that if I were younger I would have “donor ovaries.” The doctor’s voice had a very smooth-jazz kind of purr to it, so this sounded sexier when he said it.) Anyway, I thought my life was going just great, until one night a couple of months later, when the editor and I were taking a bath.
We sat in the two-person tub I had purchased in an optimistic “if you build it they will come” sort of mood. I had then sat in it alone for a year, until my bath-loving boyfriend came along. On the bathing night in question, there were bubbles and candles and rose petals and wine. (On a Wednesday! Sometimes I’m awesome.) We climbed in, and chatted about our day, and I rubbed his feet, and then he told me he had been obsessively listening to a song that made him think about me. Awwwwww, I said, super naked. But he continued.
The song was called “The Curse.” Awwwwww? It was about a zombie who comes to life when he falls in love with a beautiful girl. For a while they walk the earth together, alive and in love, but eventually it becomes clear that his liveliness has only occurred as a result of his zombie nature—he went ahead and sucked out the beautiful girl’s life force. So she starts to wither and gray and ultimately must go to bed a shell of her former self. He then leaves her and dates other live women.
So I stood up and climbed out of the tub, more naked than I’ve ever been, picked the rose petals off my bubbly body, and we broke up. In the morning, I woke up with that “Shit, I’m single again” feeling, walked into the bathroom, and found a tub with dead rose petals stuck to the bottom of it. They reminded me of confetti and cigarette-filled cups on the floor after the party is all over.
And so I e-mailed Father Juan.
Juan and I had stayed in touch after his visit the previous year. He had even invited me to come skiing in Patagonia with his family (!!!!) a couple of months before the bathtub breakup, but I had a life-force-sucking boyfriend, and a job. I had been really grateful that I had the job, which kept me from looking too closely at what my answer to Juan would have been if it was just the moody nonmonogamous bather standing in between me and a trip to Juan’s beautiful family’s beautiful ski cabin in freaking Patagonia.
Anyway, after the breakup, there were a few more months filled with e-mail flirting with Juan, and writing a show about a nerdy spy with a supercomputer in his brain, and my annual-yet-now-age-inappropriate Christmas road trip in the backseat of my mommy’s husband’s car with my pillow and blankie. And then, after all of that, because I really, really deserved it, the mother lode was delivered unto me:
RE: COLOMBIA????
Hola, Pulpa!!!!! I go alone for three week trip to Colombia in Avril for to take pictures ……… maybe you can come???????? Will be days to know us better …
Beso muy grande,
Dulce de leche!!!!!
It can be argued that Romancing the Stone messed me up pretty good. Sexy Michael Douglas, with that hat, and that smile, chopping off Kathleen Turner’s high heels, fighting off jungle guerillas, wrestling crocodiles, and then dancing her around a courtyard in white linen before showing up on her doorstep in a boat and sailing her off through the streets of New York happily ever after? That’s intoxicating stuff … and nonexistent.
But that is exactly what I expected out of my Colombian adventure with Father Juan.
I stopped eating. I lasered/waxed/dermabrased everything. I dragged the Chuck writing staff to the gym at Warner Bros. every day at lunch. I listened to Spanish lessons in the car. I bought a lot of white linen, and turquoise jewelry that I hoped would “pop” on the golden skin I got for forty-five dollars in Beverly Hills. I dyed my eyelashes for model-like emergences from the ocean. I procured sexy jammies that lifted my girls up a little higher than they were naturally perching these days. No Colombian guerilla has ever brought out bigger guns. Or higher ones.
Because I was not merely meeting Juan in Colombia. He also invited me to come back with him to Argentina, where I would be staying in his apartment for three more weeks. We were going to go to his friend’s wedding, and to Argentine wine country in Mendoza, and to his family’s Arabian-horse ranch out in the pampas for Semana Santa (Easter Week). I was not going to be in Buenos Aires in an apartment checking my phone to see if Juan had called. I was going to be moving in.
Now, I was 87 percent sure that this was just going to be another great vacation with a great guy. But … six years. We had been finding each other for six years. Sure, I was a godless TV writer and he was an almost-priest who lived a continent away. Absolutely, my friends and family were looking at me skeptically and asking questions like, “Are you sure you want to do this?” But that made the fact that we kept coming back to each other after all these years even more amazing, right? And there was something different in his voice and his eyes now when we Skyped. He was starting to wonder if this was something, too.
“Ah, que linda sos,” he would coo over the computer. How pretty you are.
“Will be days to know us better …”
Because of work I could only meet him for the final week of his three weeks in Colombia. I left the earliest minute I could. My last day at Chuck was spent in the Hollywood Hills, under the Hollywood sign, filming a scene from an episode I wrote that was meant to take place in a mining town deep in the mountains of—you guessed it—Colombia. That’s how you write off a trip, ladies and gentlemen! So on the day I left to meet Father Juan, I woke up at dawn to get my hair blown out, then spent the day on my set shooting a fake Colombia that hundreds of people built because I told them to, then left at midnight to go meet my Argentine lover in the real Colombia, groomed to within an inch of my life. It was the most glamorous I’ve
ever been.
On the plane, I sat between two solo travelers in their midtwenties. She was on her way to her friend’s wedding in Cartagena, he was on his way to have his first solo backpacking adventure. We all ordered drinks, and then they chatted over me as I tried to breathe and control my fantasies of living happily-ever-after with Juan on the pampas. By the end of the flight they had exchanged numbers, and were going to share a cab into town. I felt like the postgrads at the end of St. Elmo’s Fire, when they see the college kids in their bar and decide to go home early and meet up for brunch instead.
“We are beginning our descent into Cartagena …”
I checked my lip gloss while my internal monologue picked up speed:
What if I split my time between Los Angeles and Buenos Aires, and Juan and I get married and have babies and we all become fluent in Spanish? That wouldn’t be the boring, scary version of settling down that gives me panic attacks. That would be an amazing, fantastic Diane Lane movie. “Hey, did you hear about Kristin Newman? She married some hot Argentine priest, and they had three gorgeous babies who speak like ten languages, and she sells a movie a year and lives on a campo in Argentina! She totally did it!”
My seat partners were peeking at each other over me, exchanging flirty little smiles.
“Welcome to Colombia …”
Juan was waiting for me at the airport. His big white smile was framed by a few days of scruff and a backpacker’s tan that shone beautifully in the oppressive humidity.
“Pulpa,” he said as he pulled me into his chest.
Four weeks later, I found myself hugging Juan in an airport once again.
“Pulpa,” he said, in a totally different tone of voice.
“I’ll always be grateful we did this,” I said, crying onto his neck.
“I will remember you forever,” Juan promised. “You’ll come visit me with your family someday,” he whispered into my ear.
Tears streaming down my face, I walked away from the exquisite Father Juan for the last time, and got on the first of my two seven-hour plane rides home to my cat.
Now, I know that was abrupt, finding out how it was all going to turn out before hearing the whole story. But the thing about this last trip with the man who was my most important vacation romance was that I found out how it was all going to turn out before hearing the whole story, too. I knew that I was not going to be living happily-ever-after on the pampas after only a couple of days in Colombia.
On our first day in Cartagena, Juan and I were giddy, holding hands and giggling with wonder that we had made this all happen. We strolled through the steamy cobbled streets, he continued to glimmer beautifully, and I continued to turn into a splotchy red tomato in a white dress. The northern Europeans just do not handle heat as attractively as the tanner varietals.
We had gone to our hotel room first, and the air-conditioning inside felt remarkable, but the big bed really filled that little room, and we were not quite ready for its implications. Our hotel was also called Casa de la Fey—House of Faith—and there were Catholic icons decorating the place that made us both want to explore outside a bit first.
We caught up on our year apart, and had mojitos and ceviche, and took pictures in front of the dozens of gorgeous old painted doors and flower-strewn balconies of Cartagena. We ran into the girl from the plane, who giggled when she saw Juan, and told me that she had a date to see our third seatmate later that night. The sun set, and we went to a bar set up outside on top of the old fortress walls, and kissed above the pink and orange Caribbean in the warm, salty wind. It was good. The magic was still there.
We went back to our room to change for dinner, and he pulled out a crisp white linen shirt that he had been keeping clean for our first night in Colombia. He was doing his part for my Romancing the Stone fantasy. He also surprised me by pulling out a T-shirt he had brought especially for me. It was the shirt he was wearing the first night we met six years earlier, at that party outside Buenos Aires. I remembered it because of pictures, but I couldn’t believe that he did. For the first time ever, I felt like that night meant as much to him as it had to me.
And, finally, relaxed and a drink in, we fell into bed and made love before dinner. And it was …
… not spectacular. And if you think you heard a little drumroll in your head between those sets of ellipses, imagine the epic drum solo I had been hearing for the previous year and a half. The sex wasn’t bad, it was just all a little awkward. Not like the year before in Los Angeles. The kisses were missing something, and I started to have a little uh-oh feeling. But I told myself it was so loaded, this first sex after a year, after so many flights, with so many expectations. Expectations were always my undoing. So we took a shower (a spectacular thing to do with Father Juan) and went out for dinner in a cobbled square very much like where Michael Douglas danced with Kathleen Turner.
A couple more days of sexy travel greatness ensued, and then we took off for Parque Tayrona, a national park made up of pristine, desolate jungles and beaches on the Caribbean. On the way we stopped at Volcan Totumo, a bizarre mud volcano that you immerse yourself in. It looks like a hundred-foot-high termite hill, and sits on the banks of a river in the middle of nowhere. A staircase has been built up the side of it, and at the top you find a caldera of perfectly smooth, warm, gooey mud. It’s very viscous, so you float easily in any position, like you’re perching in pudding. Also floating with you are Colombian men who give you massages as you hover in the goo together.
Juan and I painted each other’s bodies and faces with mud, and then got massaged, and then walked down to the banks of the river, where women stripped off our swimsuits and scrubbed us clean like we were little babies. After they got the mud out of our hidden spots, they toweled us off while their children played nearby. It was the most unusual spa experience I’ve ever had, and cost two dollars. It would be hard to decide which I enjoyed more: getting my thighs rubbed in warm mud, or painting Juan. My version of Sophie’s choice.
At Parque Tayrona, we stayed in a small collection of gorgeous little cabanas in the national park, where alligators lounged on the beach and fully weaponized polícia checked your papers. It was spectacular, our little place, and the vision of Juan stretched out on the white beach lounge hanging from two palm trees is a sight I will never forget. He carved “PULPA” into a walking stick for me. We spent the days walking down so many beaches that we’d run out of daylight before we got home, and I’d end up rock-climbing at night in the Colombian jungle in a bikini, using my iPhone flashlight app for light as I scrambled away from the breaking waves. But it was while on those beautiful beaches that I knew for sure that this was, indeed, just another vacation romance.
We ran out of things to talk about. While hunting for topics, religion obviously came up, and his time at the seminary, and so we got into that in a real way for the first time. I found it fascinating to hear about the life of a seminarian, and enjoyed being educated on the lives of the saints, but I was also honest about what I believed was historic fact and what I considered to be myth. I told him about how I longed to be a believer, because believers seemed so much calmer than I had ever been about anything, but I just hadn’t seen the evidence that could convince me. Juan wasn’t pushy about his beliefs, but I could tell he saw my lack of faith as a little sad. He asked if I ever wanted to get baptized “just in case.” I asked if he thought Jesus would have been anything more than a world-changing ethicist if he had lived during the era of Internet fact-checking or flash photography.
But the aha-ohno moment for me really came when we were strolling down the empty beach, and Juan, in slooooow sentences, told me the story of the two sets of footsteps in the sand that turned into one when Jesus was carrying the first dude during his times of trouble. You know the one—from the Hallmark Special Moments posters. I nodded as he told the tale, and pretended I had never heard it before, or made fun of it before, and knew this beautiful man was not mine.
I would find out that I wasn
’t his, either. I spin too fast, he moves too slow, I like to tease and joke and criticize and judge, he has an internal light radiating out of him for all of God’s creatures. My Internet password is my cat’s name, his is his favorite saint’s.
But we didn’t talk about any of that on the Colombian beach. Have I mentioned how important it is to me to have a great vacation? And you saw just earlier in this chapter with the bather how adept I can be at putting my head down and ignoring unpleasant facts. So I just felt a brief moment of loss as I listened to the footsteps story, and then I got down to the business of doing what I had spent my adult life mastering—enjoying a relationship that I knew was going to last only as long as my vacation. My internal pep talk sounded about like this:
You are in a beautiful place with a beautiful guy. You have a month to go. You like each other. Amazing experiences are going to happen, here and in Argentina. Be grateful and enjoy him. Have fun.
And you know what? I did.
It was while on the plane from Colombia to Argentina, while Juan and I snuggled on each other’s shoulders, that I came as close as I dared to discussing the reality of what was going on between us.
“I know I’m staying with you a really long time,” I said. “If it’s too much, or you need space, I can spend some of the time with other friends, so just tell me.”
“Okay,” he said simply. Not No way. Not Of course not.
It’s hard to describe what it felt like to see Juan’s apartment for the first time. It grounded this sort of mythical person for me. It made him real. He lives in an apartment. This is where he brushes his teeth. This is what kind of couch he likes. This is where he’s been all this time.
The minute we walked in, he felt different. A little chillier, a little less relaxed. His vacation was over. We were no longer in the bubble of pretend and away. He told me the stories behind his family photos, and we went out to get pizza at the neighborhood joint, but he seemed distracted, and farther away.
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding Page 21