What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (11 page)

“Feelin’ good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues …”

We pulled over a couple of times a day to make love, sometimes in front of geysers in Yellowstone or against a tree under Mount Rushmore, while Burgess Meredith narrated a Mount Rushmore movie in the background. (
“Dakota. SOUTH Dakota.”
) Sometimes, on particularly deserted stretches of road, we didn’t bother to pull over. At night we sat in front of our tent, and drank wine, and somehow knew enough to know that it was amazing that
we didn’t have any entertainment other than each other, and yet were completely entertained. And I was blissfully, constantly, swoon-inducingly happy.

But I hadn’t had such a long, sustained period of bliss since then. I had certainly never been with anyone about whom I was so unambivalent. But even aside from the men of it all,
nothing
had ever been so simple, so 100 percent, so easy. The peaceful moments would come, beautiful, fragile butterflies that would alight for a brief time on my annoyingly restless, neurotic soul, but sooner rather than later there would be a soul itch that needed scratchin’, and the sudden movement (and tremendous amount of talking) would cause the happy moments to flitter away. That made me
so
sad—in more than
ten years
I hadn’t topped myself. I decided it was because that bliss had been born of a perfect storm of
firsts
, and, at thirty-one, there weren’t many firsts left. I figured childbirth was my next shot at that kind of first-time bliss.

But then I went to Argentina.

I realized that Argentina had topped that drive on my first sunny day in Bariloche. Diego was working in the Spanish-school office, and so I was alone as I walked down from his apartment into the sun, and saw that the mountains that had been covered by rain clouds for the last week were suddenly in front of me, and covered in snow. The snow line was just a couple of hundred feet above town, which was still filled with autumn color.

I took a bus out of town to a gondola that went up one of the mountains. There was apparently a rotating restaurant at the top, where one could eat and take in a glorious
view of the lake and the snow-covered Andes. I rode up alone, and the view was amazing … for about two minutes. Then the lake and the mountains disappeared as my gondola entered a
sopa
of thick white fog. I laughed as I realized that the restaurant at the top of the gondola was sitting in a cloud, and I would be dining to a rotating view of whiteness.

The waiter snapped my photo in front of all that white, as I sat alone in the empty restaurant, eating yet another steak, looking out at the white, well,
void.
I paid the bill and was on my way back to the gondola to ride down, when, suddenly, the clouds parted.

Now I was alone on top of this mountain, with blue sky, the crazy-clear Patagonian sunlight, the sparkling lake, the untrampled fresh snow. I made a snow angel, thinking about the parents and grandparents on both sides who had taught me how to make one long, long ago, back when I was so small that they could hold me out in front of them like a plank and then let go and
poof!
I’d drop into the snow and make a perfect angel imprint. I took a picture of the snow and the lake and the angelic version of me, and then started walking.

I walked for about five hours, in a vaguely downward direction. The snowy trails were covered in a canopy of red and orange and yellow leaves. I walked and walked and walked, no real idea where I was going, just in love with the fact that I was alone on the top of a mountain at the bottom of the world, that I had just gotten on a plane and made this happen. I’d had two months’ worth of firsts. I had two dozen new friends from a dozen new countries,
and two Argentine lovers. I had learned Spanish, and the tango, and how to buy vegetables in Argentine supermarkets (which is more confusing than you would think). I had learned I was brave. But, most important, I felt just as free and alive and sure of where I was and what I was doing as I had on that car trip, lost in the middle of the country with my first boyfriend. And I was feeling that way
all by myself.
And that made me feel as unambivalent about myself as I had been about my first love.

I had no idea where I was going, but, eventually, I ended up back at the road, and found a bus back to town, and spent a couple more days in Diego’s bed that were sexy and warm but weren’t nearly as fulfilling or romantic as that unlonely walk alone.

T
wo weeks into my time in Bariloche, my cousin Emma came down to visit. Simultaneously, I came down with a terrible flu. We decided to treat ourselves to one night in the glorious Llao Llao Hotel. It’s a grand old lodge-style place right on the lake, the place where presidents stay when they come to Argentina, and I went straight to bed in the crisp white sheets, while the rain outside finally turned to perfectly white snow. Emma got her own room for safety, and I called Diego, who took an hour-long bus ride from town to take care of me.

Before Diego arrived, I called down and asked for a doctor. They sent a lovely woman who spoke no English, so we struggled through my examination with my broken
Spanish. She wrote me a prescription for antibiotics, and since antibiotics tend, grossly, to lead to yeast infections, I tried to explain that I also wanted the pill that keeps that from happening. She couldn’t understand what I was concerned about, but finally understood, and said triumphantly, “
Ahhhh! Infección vaginal ocasionada por hongos!
”

Vagina mushrooms. Actually, literally, vexatious vagina mushrooms. That’s what they call it.

Horrified, I nodded as she handed me a pill.

Vagina mushrooms averted, Diego showed up and brought me a stuffed donkey, because my stubborn streak had led to him nicknaming me
“Burra.”
(I called him
“Perro Contento”
—Happy Dog—because when he would get particularly excited in bed he had a tic where he would quickly pat me with his hand over and over, like a dog shaking his leg when you scratch his belly.) He spent our last night together nursing me, telling me that he knew I liked him the moment we met, and asking if I believed in love at first sight.

W
hen it was time to leave Patagonia, Diego borrowed a car and took me and Emma to the airport, and after he drove away, texted me:

“Creo que te amo.”
I think that I love you.

And, because I was about to get on a plane, I shrugged, and texted back:

“Te amo tambien.”
I love you, too.

Why not? So much easier to say in Spanish.

Emma and I went from Bariloche up to Iguazu Falls, a two-mile-wide expanse of about three hundred waterfalls in the jungle where Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina meet. It’s one of the natural wonders of the world, and the constant roar of the water has the effect of about ten Valium. Local legend has it that the falls were created when a god wanted to marry his human lover, Naipi. But she wanted a life with one of her own kind, and so fled with her mortal lover in a canoe. The god then used lightning to slice the river in front of them, creating the falls and condemning the lovers to an eternity of literally
falling
in love.

We spent a couple of days in the thunder of falling water (and love?), walking over and under and around the falls. We finally took a little open-air train up the river that turned into these awe-inspiring monsters. There is a wooden walkway that goes over the river, and the water is wide, and quiet, and appears to be slow moving … until it suddenly hits the cliffs that transform it into the huge, mind-blowing phenomenon that it is. We sat over the river, and talked about how the river had become something unique and amazing just by cruising along on its path. How even if your life seemed quiet and typical, you never knew if around the next bend you were about to become something spectacular. Or fall spectacularly in love. We talked about how that was probably how I wanted to feel when I
fell in love, like I was going over a waterfall for all eternity, and how that might just possibly not be sustainable, or, if you really thought about it, enjoyable. Then we made fun of ourselves for getting so
deep, man.
Kristin-Adjacent can get pretty cheesy.

Later that day, we sat in the hotel bar and started chatting with two guys who turned out to be fast-talking New York Wall Street types. They asked me what I did, and I told them I was a comedy writer.

“Huh. No offense, but you don’t really seem like a comedy writer,” one of the guys said. “You seem too mellow. The comedy writers I know are all super loud and fast and frantic.” Emma laughed really hard.

E
mma and I went back to Buenos Aires for a couple more weeks, and I saw Father Juan a few more times. He took us to a birthday party for two outrageously beautiful twin brothers, and we met his friends, each more gorgeous and well-spoken and well-traveled than the last. But Juan still stood out, for his peacefulness and his quiet sweetness. The partygoers all loved him ferociously and a little protectively, but he was a little on the outside of the boisterous bar scene. He and I sat outside, looking at the boats in the tony waters of Puerto Madero, and he told me about why he had joined the seminary, mostly because of his father’s and sister’s deaths. Then he took me home, for
mimitos
, and in the morning I sat on my hands to keep from grabbing my camera when he pulled his crisp white shirt over his perfect skin.

Diego would text me constantly from Bariloche, things like, “
Tengo una grande problema con vos.
”

I have a big problem with you.

T
he day before Emma and I finally flew home, Father Juan came over. We walked to the park near my apartment and took pictures of ourselves lying in the grass, Juan smiling as I nibbled on his neck. I cried, talking about what Argentina had meant to me, and he promised that I would be back.

Juan brought me a photo he’d taken of a horse, and a copy of a story about a man who rode a horse from Buenos Aires to Los Angeles at the turn of the century. He was inspired by the story … the journey could be made, with the right horse and enough determination. The cities weren’t so far apart.

My landlady came to pick up my apartment key, took one look at Juan, and raised her eyebrows.

“You had a
really good trip
,” she said, looking steamy.

On the plane, I found a note from Juan on the back of the photo:
“When we are old we will smile about these times we have together when we where young.”

I
had changed my return ticket to Los Angeles three times, pushing it back until the very last day before I had to be back at work in the
That ’70s Show
writers’ room. I thought all of the English at LAX might break my heart, and when
I walked into my house for the first time in months, I burst into tears.

But back in the writers’ room, the speed and quality of the conversation were like fireworks. I was still in slow, Kristin-Adjacent mode, and couldn’t keep up that first day, so basically just watched the words fly across the room. And … it was really fun. It turned out I had missed the linguistic acrobatics of my American life, even if the new “room bit” upon my return from South America was that I was constantly, at any given moment, either in the process of getting impregnated or getting an abortion. (For the record: I’ve never done either.) The proximity of the two events meant that in the routine I was also getting knocked up by the abortionist a fair number of times. Welcome to comedy-room corporate-speak.

As I came back up to my normal speed, I also fell in love again—with my job, with my coworkers (to comedians, making abortion jokes at your expense is really just a way of expressing love), and with my friends. As much as I loved Argentina, it made me appreciate home in a way that I hadn’t before, too. And when I would start to get blue about being in Los Angeles instead of somewhere exotic, I developed some tricks to snap me out of it. I started writing in hotel lobbies, because even though I’m working a few blocks from my house I can pretend I’m on vacation somewhere sexy. I started a routine where I would walk around the city imagining that I was just visiting, trying to see the familiar streets of my hometown through the eyes of a girl on vacation by herself in the exotic city of
Los Angeles, California, U.S.A. It’s like when an old married couple imagines their spouse is someone else in bed, spicing things up by pretending they don’t belong to each other. The trick almost always gives me that new-love zing for my life, and my city.

I started to dream of a perfect life—not exclusively away from Los Angeles, which I realized my people really made “home”—but one that involved leaving it for a few months a year, so I could have the break that seemed to be required to love it. I also wondered if Juan had been my final fling before I would meet my husband. If the trip to Argentina to prove that I could take on a continent alone was the thing I needed to get to the place where I could merge with someone else again, be half of a whole, and feel good about it.
Maybe that was my last crazy single-girl fun
, I thought as I unpacked my bags.

But that was only the first of my three trips to Argentina.