What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (24 page)

“He’s different,” Parker said. “You might have broken him.”

“He knows that as soon as you really get him you’ll come up with a reason for it not to work,” Sasha said.

Ouch.
So I went to Iceland.

I
celand is maybe the weirdest place in all the world. If you’re like most people, what you know about Iceland adds up to one word:
Björk.
There was no one in the U.S. who did not respond to the news that we were going to Iceland with the sentence “Cool, you gonna see Björk?”

Little does the entire world know that there is so much more to see! For starters, there are all of the fairies, gnomes, ghosts, and trolls. Now, that might sound like I am being just as ignorant as the people who think that everyone who goes to Iceland sees Björk, but if you go to a tourism office in Iceland, you will see that on their official tourist map, in addition to the drawings delineating the locations of whales, puffins, and waterfalls, there are
drawings of fairies, gnomes, ghosts, and trolls. If you’re like us, you will wonder, “I wonder what this ghost drawing represents!” and then you will look at the map’s legend, which will tell you that what the ghost drawing represents is a ghost.

Icelanders love to tell you that it’s a stereotype that they all believe in otherworldly creatures. And then you read about the Iceland Road Authority bringing in a medium to ask the elves who reside in a pile of rocks that lie in the path of a proposed road if the
elves
would mind if the rocks were moved. When this happened near a town called Hafnarfjörður (not misspelled), the medium said that the elves unfortunately did not want their home relocated. Since plenty of “suspicious and unexplainable phenomena” had been occurring near the job site, the Road Authority
listened to the elves and rerouted their road.

“Our basic approach is not to deny this phenomenon. There are people who can negotiate with the elves, and we make use of that,” the
state-employed
engineer told Reuters.

One night on the Snæfellsnes Peninsula (Parker and I just called it Snuffleupagus), I noticed on our map that there was a ghost icon in the hills behind our hotel. I went up to the front desk, and asked Björn (real name), the handlebar-mustachioed desk guy, if ghosts really lived in those mountains.

“Oh, no,” he said, scoffing. “Ghosts live everywhere.”

So, they’re weird. But there’s just no reasonable way they couldn’t be. What if you were one of like ten people living on an island in the North Atlantic that is dark half of the year? Ever since a couple of boats of Vikings made their
way to this frigid island carrying the prettiest women they could rape and pillage along the way, Icelanders have been getting weird to get through the winter. And they’ve done well. It’s clear their ancestors raped only the best. (And have you seen
Thor
? Maybe they didn’t so much have to rape. “Oooh, Thor! No! Please don’t take me by force from my toothless Welsh farm husband! No, really, don’t throw me over your big, bare shoulder!”) Those first Icelanders were so good-looking, to this day Iceland proudly claims to have the most beautiful women in the world, a claim supported by this tiny country’s unusual number of Miss World winners.

This flies in the face of my theory that the best-looking people are always in countries with large, diverse, mixed-up genetic pools. (Versus, say, New Zealand, where too many Brits bred with each other for too long on a small island. Big teeth, no chins, real mess.) But in Iceland, the good taste of the Vikings has caused a small gene pool to turn out great! That isn’t to say that Icelanders are backward, and think mixing too closely with your relatives is okay. In fact, to keep that from happening, an enterprising Icelander recently invented the “Accidental Incest” app. In a country of 320,000 people, the odds of accidentally kissing your cousin are far higher than you might like. So with this app, you and the hot Viking at the bar just bump phones, and it tells you if you are related. “Bump the app before you bump in bed” is the catchy slogan. Really.

All of those semi-related, tall, white, blond people went
nuts
for my tiny, gorgeous, Peruvian friend, Parker. We would go to pay for our dinner in restaurants only to
find that the bill had been anonymously paid by a “gentleman admirer” who had enjoyed watching Parker eat cod. We got pulled over for speeding, and the Chippendales-looking Icelandic cop asked Parker where her family was from, complimented her skin, let us out of the ticket, and led us to our destination, a nearby farmer’s hot springs. After years of traveling with her tall, white husband, who was always the exotic person of interest in countries where the people were smaller or darker, Parker had a great time. Her sad little unimpregnated heart grew five sizes that trip.

One of the many Icelanders who fell for Parker was a Viking masseur. It was during one of the top five travel experiences of my life: a floating massage at the Blue Lagoon.

The Blue Lagoon is Iceland’s biggest tourist attraction; annually it attracts more people than live in Iceland. Almost twice as many. It turns out that a glacial-blue, milky hot spring in the middle of an isolated black lava field is Valhalla. Surrounding the huge, steamy, mint-colored pool is creamy, soft white mud that bathers slather all over their faces before wading up to a wooden dock in the middle of the pool for drinks. Even in July, when the days are twenty hours long, it doesn’t get much warmer than fifty degrees, so your beer stays perfectly cold as you swim around in the warm water in your face mask. We had booked “floating massages,” not really knowing what they were, but we were told to head over to a semiprivate corner of the lagoon to get them.

Two Vikings in swimsuits met us, and waved us onto thin, floating mattresses. Thor (actual name) and Dante
(same) then took fleece blankets, soaked them in the womb-temperature water, and covered our bodies with them, so we wouldn’t be even the least bit chilly on our exposed side.

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.”

I
celand 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.

P
arker 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.

“The Land of Milk and Funny”

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.
”