What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (10 page)

So the women on one side of my family were travelers. But my paternal line was just the opposite. Just as my
mother loved to roam and my father loved to watch the sun set over his own backyard, their parents were similarly split. My dad’s father had only been out of the country for his military tour in World War II, which he always called “a wonderful adventure,” but never repeated. (He would show me pictures that he had taken from the deck of his naval ship of bombs blowing up gorgeous South Pacific beaches, and simply comment, “Look at that beautiful beach.”)

My dad’s mother traveled even less. She had French ancestors, and so embraced France in all of the ways one can embrace France if one is limiting one’s embrace of France to hanging paintings of France around one’s house. She exclusively decorated with what she called “my Frenchie colors,” and collectible plates of French street scenes that she bought in the gift section of the Cracker Barrel. Finally, when they were grown, her kids started a “Send Mom to Paris” fund, which they would all add to on Christmas and her birthday. But she cut it off after only a couple of contributions. She didn’t want to go to Paris.

I asked her about that once, not long before she died. Why wouldn’t she want to go to the place that was her “favorite place”?

“I was afraid it wouldn’t live up to my dreams,” she said.

S
o it was my maternal line’s wandering, ambivalent soul that made its way to me. And at thirty-one, I had one regret in my life: I had never lived in another country. I decided to dodge depression and the dates my friends were finding me
on the Internet by spending this last job-hunt-free hiatus
pretending
that I lived in another country for a few months.

I knew no one in Buenos Aires, and I was a little terrified. I would say the terror was evenly split between fear for my safety and fear of disappointment. But I didn’t want to be my grandmother, never going to Paris in case it was a letdown, so I took a deep breath and went.

I had the numbers of a few friends of friends who lived in town. I got an apartment in Palermo, a lovely neighborhood near the Central Park of Buenos Aires, and an Argentine cell phone, and signed up for daily Spanish and tango classes. I called every friend of a friend within twenty-four hours of landing in Argentina, and had dinner plans my second night there.

Fuck you, Void!

Within a week I had met a group of expats from the U.S. and England and Malaysia, and had my first date with a
porteño
(resident of Buenos Aires). It was with a man I met at La Viruta, a
milonga
, or tango club, which was located in the basement of an Armenian community center. Victor was either a construction worker, or an architect. (I’d had only a week of Spanish classes at that point.) Before our first date, I asked Kate, a quiet, awkward American girl who had lived in Argentina for five years, what it was like to date Argentinos.

“Well, they expect you to sleep with them on the first date, because that’s what Argentine women do,” she told me.

“Huh. And what do they do when you don’t?” I asked.

Kate shrugged shyly, legitimately stumped. “I don’t know.”

I
met my Argentine lover at a party on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, in a country club that was promoting the opening of its new golf course. The local girls who brought me said that the event was very “
fashion
,” their highest compliment. The crowd was a mix of models, actors, and
porteño
elite, who all mixed in the warm night.

Mechi, the
fashion
party girl who brought me, told me she wanted me to meet someone. That someone would become the most important vacation romance of my life. Father Juan.

Father Juan is not a priest, sadly, but he had just recently left a Catholic seminary where he had spent four years studying to become one, so that’s what I secretly called him. To his face I eventually started calling him “
Dulce
,” short for
dulce de leche
, because his skin is the color and smoothness and sweetness of a baby covered in Argentine caramel.

Father Juan has the combination of ethereal and sexy beauty that melts hearts of single American girls and praying congregations alike. Juan as an actual priest would have turned very
Thornbirds
very fast. Evidence: his nickname for me was
“Pulpa”
—a feminized form of the Spanish word for
octopus.
Because when he tried to get out of bed, I would wrap my tentacles around him, not letting him go.

I learned later that it was very rare for someone from Juan’s socioeconomic class to become a priest. He grew up
in English schools, in the fanciest neighborhood in Buenos Aires, with country weekend houses and an apartment in New York and a beach house in Punta del Este and a family Arabian-horse ranch in the pampas. But at twenty-six, he decided to become a Catholic priest, and spent four years eating, basically, gruel, in the service of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

And away from women.

That night, though, he was just a guy at a party. Mechi introduced us, and Juan said hello, quietly and respectfully. And, despite the fact that I am not convinced that Jesus was anything other than a world-changing ethicist, I thanked Jesus.

Juan has a sort of internal light that just radiates out of him, the kind of light you would think a man of the cloth
should
have, because it makes you believe in God. Yes, he’s six feet tall, with broad shoulders, flawless golden-brown skin, silky black hair, and this big, white, leading-man smile. But the first thing you really notice about Father Juan is just this beaming
sweetness.
It’s fairly devastating.

His friends danced and drank and chased models while Juan and I chatted about horses. He loved horses the way a child loves horses. He loved a lot of things like a child. Years later, I found a CD of children’s music in his collection … that he bought for himself. There was just a simplicity and sincerity and utter lack of edge to him that probably would have gotten boring … eventually. I imagine. It’s hard to say, because he was just so ridiculously beautiful and sweet that everything he said and did was fascinating.

He was shy, and I wasn’t sure if he liked me. But soon
we were slow-dancing, and at the end of the night he asked me if I wanted a ride home.

In the front seat of his little red car, Juan kissed me. The kiss was just like him, sweet and sexy at the same time. And then he drove me home, and asked if he could come up, and I of course said he could, and then he did something that no Latin lover has ever done in the history of Latin lovers …

He didn’t have sex with me.

We did naked stuff, don’t get me wrong. There was no chance I wasn’t going to put my lips on as much of that beautiful skin as was humanly possible. But The Deed was never on the table. After a few hours, Juan got up to go, and I felt in the darkness for my camera. When you reach the top of Everest, you want evidence. I couldn’t see him dressing in the dark, so I just pointed the camera in his general direction, and started shooting.

FLASH.
Juan’s smooth perfect back, as he gets out of bed.

FLASH.
Juan, pulling a shirt over his head, his perfect flat brown belly exposed.

FLASH.
Juan, laughing, covering his face with his hand.

FLASH.
Juan back on the pillow, smiling as I kiss his ear.

J
uan and I spent the next two months dating casually. By which I mean that I obsessed about him constantly, and he casually dated me. I met a couple of his friends, I saw him
a couple of times a week. The Deed continued to be a nonstarter, but Juan taught me words like
mimitos
, which are little snuggles and caresses. And
mimitos
with Father Juan felt like they could knock a girl up.

But he kept me at arm’s length. I think I was a lot for him, this sweet, slow-moving guy who had just left the seminary, and was now back in college. (He was getting his degree in marketing. I met another guy once who had left the Episcopalian monkhood, and he went back for his degree in marketing, too. I guess spreading the Good News is essentially a sales job.)

To keep myself from staring at my four photos of Father Juan all day, I went to my Spanish class with the other foreigners, and I studied tango with my tiny dance teacher who wouldn’t let me do anything but walk in a circle for a week, à la
The Karate Kid.
I went out to dinner at midnight and went dancing at two in the morning, and, like a real
porteña
, never ever slept.

And I met a lot of other Juans.

So many Juans that it led to cheap Juan wordplay. There was Father Juan. Then there was The Other Juan. One night at a lonely dinner at a pizzeria I brazenly dropped a note with my number on it into the lap of a curly-haired Frenchman named Jean, The French Juan (aka Jean-Juan). There was The Boring Juan and The New Juan. As the Juans came and went, my new expat friends and I would wax philosophic:

“Another Juan bites the dust,” Joe the bitter Brit would say.

“He just wasn’t the Juan for me,” I’d conclude.

I left Father Juan behind in Buenos Aires for a couple of weeks so I could study Spanish in San Carlos di Bariloche, a resort town on a lake in the mountains of northern Patagonia. I bought the plane ticket reasoning that I really shouldn’t miss out on the rest of the country because I was waiting for a phone call from a hot priest who was busy studying for his marketing final.

(Full disclosure: I did invite Juan to come with me. He said he couldn’t. I also then paid two hundred dollars to delay my trip for a day, because Juan had said he might possibly take me on a day trip to Tigre, a little delta town up the river with a floating flower and fruit market. He flaked. But then I
totally
left.)

So, alone and disappointed, I went to the mountains of northern Patagonia. I went to Patagonia in very late fall, when, it turns out, no one goes to Patagonia. The sun rose at nine in the morning and set at three in the afternoon. It rained nonstop, too warm by about one degree to snow, and the constant, building-rattling Patagonian winds turned umbrellas (that only dumb American girls attempt to use) immediately inside out.

I was the only student in my Spanish school. The gorgeous Andean mountains that I heard surrounded me were covered in rain clouds. So I spent the first couple of days passing the hours watching the rain fall from one of the
town’s many warm Swiss-chalet-looking chocolate shops. I took myself to the
parrilla
(barbecue joint) for steaks a couple of times, and read in my guidebook about the wonderful skiing and boating one could do in Bariloche the rest of the year.

Well, hello, Void! How’d you find me way down here?!

And so I asked out my Spanish teacher.

Diego might not have caught my eye had the town not been so deserted. He was tall, and kind, and cute enough. But, more important, he was the
only
thing to do in the place you’re supposed to do it. So, after our second day of class, I asked if he wanted to grab a drink.

It was during those two weeks with Diego that I started really speaking Spanish. I can’t recommend sleeping with your Spanish teacher highly enough. I moved out of my hotel and into his little room in a charming wood building above a
queso
shop, right on the shores of Nahuel Huapi Lake. We watched the rain fall on the Andes from his little twin bed, an arm’s reach from his “kitchen”—a hot plate—and his “half bath”—a toilet underneath a shower head. He kissed body parts, then tested me on the Spanish words for them, obviously. He reported that I was even speaking Spanish in my sleep, which felt like an enormous triumph. He taught me how to conjugate important verbs like
arracanzar
—to come.

Arracanzo, aracanzas, arracanzamos …

On our very first date, Diego proved to be a proper Latin lover, not at all too religious for The Deed, which felt great after my departure from the decidedly less infatuated
Father Juan. We took weekend trips around the lake, and walked in Los Arrayanes National Park, a stone’s throw from Chile. Diego and I spent a couple of days doing said deed in a hotel room that looked out across the lake in a different direction, at a different part of the Andes, and watched Chile’s rain and Argentina’s sun make international rainbows. We said they were a metaphor for us, and didn’t find that cheesy, like we absolutely should have. We also had some awkward language moments:

“Que feo
,
”
Diego sighed one night, amorously. Which means “How ugly.”

Most upsettingly, he said this while his face was buried deep in a place that a girl hopes won’t ever be called anything but spectacular. My horror subsided when Diego explained to me that
que feo
is an expression Argentinos sometimes use when they mean that something is very, very beautiful. Like saying something is “ridiculous” when it’s over-the-top fantastic. Phat instead of fat. He meant
feo
with a
ph.

Hopefully this is the truth. My vagina is
pheo.
Please don’t tell me if you happen to know differently.

Diego told me that he’d just lost eighty pounds. (He told me in kilos, so maybe it was forty, or two hundred, I’m not really sure. The metric system is stupid. But a lot.) So getting hit on by visiting American girls was a new phenomenon for him. We communicated very slowly, very basically, often unsuccessfully. He thought I ate an awful lot of salad and chocolate. He looked at me like he couldn’t believe his luck. And he made me feel like I had gotten an A+ in my Patagonian Adventure.

But the most romantic day I had in Bariloche was a day I spent alone.

U
p until that day, the prize for “Kristin’s Happiest Extended Period of Time Ever” was still held by a blissful two weeks that happened more than ten years earlier. It was at the end of my junior year in college, when I drove across the country with my first love, Vito. We were a few months into our six-year relationship, finally together after our two-year-long will-they-won’t-they-Ross-and-Rachel-thing. (That was a timely reference back then.) We were driving my car from Chicago home to Los Angeles, and we took the long way home. It was the first time either of us had driven cross-country, the first time no one in the world knew where we were, the first time we were so completely in love. There were no cell phones and no talking GPS systems, so we could get lost in that great way in which no one will ever get lost again. We read aloud to each other, and dangled our feet out the window, and sang a lot of “Me and Bobby McGee.”