What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (28 page)

Argentina was the first place that reenergized my life. It would always be my special place because it had been the first, but Israel reminded me that there were thousands of places out there still. And discovering them would always be my way out of the blues. While slow careerwise, the previous year and a half was the best travel period of my life: six weeks in New Zealand, three in Australia, one in Iceland, one in Chamonix, three in Israel. Comedy was
dead, but my travel schedule was hopping. Israel rebooted my brain, and made me interested in my life again.

Now, on that first Israeli trip, did I change my flight, like always, and stay an extra week after Astrid left? I did. And was it less than twenty-four hours after her plane lifted off the tarmac before I was sleeping with a Yemeni-Israeli soldier/bartender named Inon? Yes. Did he introduce himself over his kosher bar with raised eyebrows and a pointed, “
My
name is IN. ON.
”? Yes again. Did he ultimately end up, in fact,
in
me while I was
on
his kitchen counter? Also yes. Listen, if I haven’t made it clear by now, you meet people quickly when you’re alone. But, on this trip, the boys were just an endnote.

“Juan More Time, with Feeling” (Argentina, Part 3)

There is an actual medical condition called Jerusalem Syndrome. Each year, it afflicts hundreds of people when they go to Israel and are so religiously moved that they become convinced God is speaking to them, and that they are the Messiah. There is a dedicated wing in the psychiatric ward at a hospital in Jerusalem that deals with these people. I met a psychiatrist who works there, and asked her what the treatment is.

“It is easiest if there is more than one patient in the
clinic at a time,” she told me. “The best way to snap them out of it is usually to introduce them to each other.”

I love that image—the guy who is sure he’s the Messiah meeting
another
guy who is sure
he’s
the Messiah, and immediately going, “Oh. Well, that guy sounds crazy. Never mind.”

I experienced that at an apartment party one night in Los Angeles. Hope and I were holding red plastic cups filled with keg beer, and getting the dancing started while scanning the living room for cute boys. I looked over at my thirty
-cough
-year-old dancing friend whom I had watched doing this precise set of activities for so many decades, and was hit by a not-particularly-insightful insight.

“We have been doing this for a
really
long time.”

That set us off on a fit of hysterical laughter, but it was not exclusively funny. My friends and I were getting old for all of this.

I was also starting to notice that, just like Astrid, a lot of my beautiful, smart, well-traveled girlfriends, who claimed that they ultimately wanted to get married and have kids, were still exclusively picking very handsome younger men who told them at the outset of their relationships that they were not interested in a commitment. My friends would ignore these facts, and their relationships would eventually implode. They also turned down dates with reasonable, not-quite-so-adorable available men.

Being face-to-face with the mirror that all of this added up to kind of snapped me out of it.
Oh, well, that sounds crazy. Never mind.

I also spent New Year’s 2011 in Chamonix, in a
gorgeous chalet filled with comedians. It was a lovely, enchanted, European white wonderland, and they were
loud.
So loud. You can’t imagine how badly they all needed to tell
so
many jokes
so
many hours per day. It was the dick-joke Olympics. While the sheer amount of laughter was a delight, there was a tonnage issue, and I finally decided that
funny
was not only no longer a priority for me in the Potential Guy Department, it was maybe something to be avoided.
Interesting
and
witty
and, mostly,
calm
were now at the top of the have-to-have list.

I was also not ready to follow the advice of a book Sasha was currently recommending to me,
Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.
That, I hope we can all agree, is the most depressing advice any woman has ever uttered. I once heard the author of this book speak, and this was her story: she had been an attractive woman who had tons of choices in men. No one was “good enough.” She turned forty, and her choices were gone, and she made a sperm-bank baby. She wished she had settled earlier, since she felt her age meant she wasn’t even marketable enough to settle for anything reasonable anymore. She claims women who are thirty and say they aren’t worried about getting married are lying. Her main message:
Settle while you’re young enough to settle for pretty good.

Kill me. And, please, someone help this woman have some fun.

So I was looking for a third option.

That third option was taking a while to find, so I decided to freeze my eggs. A little on that decision: It had
occurred to me many years earlier that I grab, smooch, and adore every small child that comes within a ten-foot radius of me. (Aside from the shitty ones.) I had been in the delivery room for the birth of Sasha’s daughter that year, and had spent the following week wandering around in a daze, daydreaming about that little girl like I would daydream about a new boyfriend. The intense infatuation I had with that baby taught me that I did not have to be genetically connected to a tiny person to be madly in love with it. I needed to bond and shape more than I needed to grow and push. So I relaxed about the biology thing, happy to adopt if I didn’t end up settling down until after my ovaries had decided to retire to Florida. (I just had an image of my retired ovaries, driving around Boca in a huge eighties Cadillac, shaking their little ovarian fists at crazy young motorcyclists. And … scene.)

Anyway, I then remembered that not all men might be as happy to adopt. And that putting some future babies in the fridge might not only be a way around a possible deal breaker, but it could be something great to do for the man with whom I someday settled down. I certainly was not going to wait this long to find the perfect person and then rush into making a baby just because of biology. I had watched many formerly picky and thoughtful friends lose their minds and do exactly this as they hit their late thirties, rushing into the creation of a new, possibly relationship-ruining life. So, feeling exactly like when I set up my first 401(k), I set up my egg-freezing, a lady in the new millennium taking care of herself.

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:

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.

J
uan 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:

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.