What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (6 page)

“Are you gonna get one, too?” Sasha asked, as a very drunk Misha spilled his needles on the floor.

“Hell no!”

But Sasha still let Misha do whatever he wanted. Which turned out to be tattoing a large, misshapen (he was
so
drunk) infinity symbol made out of barbed wire on Sasha. It stretched across her entire lower back in a horizontal-ish figure eight-ish.

While Sasha got her tattoo, Aleg and I used her to get to know each other.

“Sasha, ask him where he was born.”

“Sasha, how do you say, ‘Your skin makes me cry?’ ”

In college, Sasha had invented a phrase that my friends and I all use to this day to describe that moment that happens when someone says something that you were completely sure only you had ever thought about. And which you then decide is a message from the universe that the two of you are supposed to be together forever. She called this thing a “moo-cow.” The name came from a road trip she took with a college boyfriend. She was getting ready to break up with him, but on the trip driving through the country, the guy pointed at a passing cow and said, “Moo-cow.” Now, that was what Sasha’s family always said when
they drove by cows, and so she took this moment as a sign that she was supposed to stay with the guy.

They broke up two months later.

Sasha always cautioned against the power of the moo-cow. Because a moo-cow feels
great
, but it can lead you down the wrong roads. It can make you stay with the wrong person, but, worse, it can make you break up with the
right
person just because the two of you never have any moo-cows, which, while they feel fantastic, are ultimately meaningless.

I was a
big
chaser of the moo-cow.

On that couch, through Sasha’s translation, Aleg and I realized we had enough moo-cows to fill Red Square. And that, consequently, we were meant to find each other. First, we were born three weeks apart, in the same year. Crazy, right?! Second, we had both grown up during the Cold War, terrified that at any moment The Bomb would be dropped on us … by the other person’s country! Furthermore, Aleg had been raised in a tiny town in far-eastern Russia, an eight-hour flight from Moscow, just across the sea from Japan. The only reason this town existed was that it contained a top-secret Russian military base … built around the nuclear missile launcher that his
father
was in charge of operating, and which was aimed at
Los Angeles … where I lived!
In terror of attack by the Russians! I was practicing my duck-and-cover
because of Aleg’s father
! Who didn’t want to drop a bomb on me any more than I wanted to drop one on his fucking hot son!

Now, again, this was just a few months after 9/11. The world was a scary, war-filled place. So it felt very natural to
turn the sordid naked things I was doing in Russia while my boyfriend slept in our bed in Los Angeles into an act of international peacemaking. I was
literally
making love. Out of nothing at all. Love That Would Save Our Planet.

And that’s how I used 9/11 to rationalize cheating.

But at least I didn’t get a tattoo.

T
he next day, Aleg came with me in the taxi to the airport. We held each other tightly. I sang him “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and didn’t feel embarrassed, like I absolutely should have. He knew some of the words.

“I don’t know when I’ll be back again. Oh, babe, I hate to go.”

He held my face in his hands, and stared into my eyes with those
eyes
, and kissed me.

I flew from Moscow to Paris to meet my mom and stepdad and his kids for a couple of weeks of fighting in the South of France. I lit two candles in Notre Dame, one for Aleg and one for Trevor, feeling enough post-9/11 love swelling in my heart for both of them. While my angry family of five drove around Provence in a French car built for two, I channeled my new ability to sit quietly, and stared, peaceful, out the window at the fields of lavender and poppies as they argued.

Sasha changed her flight and stayed behind with Misha
for a couple of extra days. I would call her from pay phones in France, where she would chatter euphorically:

“I’m in Gorky Park eating hot dogs with Misha! Aleg misses you! We have to help them come to America! We’ll help them get visas, Kristin! We’ll CHANGE THEIR LIVES!”

She was not kidding, and I did not laugh. I just agreed, and cried, and told her to tell Aleg I missed him, too. Then I would call him, and, between a pay phone in France and a tenement on the outskirts of Moscow, we would coo the only words we could:

“Aleg?”

“Kristinichka.”

“Aleg.”

“Kristinichka.”

E
ventually, I paid a hundred and fifty dollars to leave my family in France twenty-four hours early, and Sasha paid the same to stay with Misha and leave Russia a few days late.

Back home, Sasha, somehow, through no fault of her own, turned out to be HIV-negative. As for me, I hid my travel journal and my pictures of Aleg in a box in Sasha’s father’s garage, and, racked with guilt, broke up with Trevor. And then, at twenty-nine, I went on what felt like my first adult date.

Before Russia, I thought I was fully cooked. I thought I was who I was going to be forever. But it turned out there
was a little part of me that was still pink. That part was a little quieter, and less judgmental, and a lot wilder than the rest of me. Not quite Kristin … more like Kristin-Adjacent. I’d spend the next ten years exploring this other part of myself that I found on a couch in a Russian tenement, and around dinner tables in Moscow. Even though it came at a morally inopportune moment, I had my first
Sex and the City
story. And that’s how I became The Girl Who Never Lost Her Groove. The girl who was told by a depressive, hilarious friend, “You have more fun than anyone I know.” The girl who got the most votes in a party game where everyone had to choose who they would switch lives with if they had to.

The Girl Who Was Terrified of Losing Her Groove.

“Two Ferris Buellers Don’t Make a Right”

Have you ever fallen in love with someone you’ve never met? I have! And then I flew to Paris to go get him.

This next adventure requires a bit of context, so stay with me.

After my breakup with Trevor, I was determined to resist my natural instinct to fall into another long relationship. I went on more single-girl trips with Sasha, to China and Tibet, where the mountains, monks, and clay warriors were amazing and the men were too small and hairless, and to Spain, where I tussled with a Barcelonan who turned
out to be wearing black panties that were identical to my own and who wanted to know if I liked things “a little bit strange.” (He meant butt stuff. I do not.) I almost slipped back into relationshipland when I spent a New Year’s Eve in the mountains of Canada making out with a good friend. For years he had been saying inappropriate drunken things about his hopes for us
if only we were both single.
He said I made him wonder what being with someone like me would feel like—meaning someone he could talk to, as opposed to his usual diet of inappropriately young waitresses. Then we finally were single, and kissed on a dance floor in Canada, but he promptly disappeared when we got back home, later explaining, “We really could have had something if you weren’t so successful.”

(Have I mentioned it can be a real bummer to be a working female writer in Los Angeles when it comes to dating? I don’t want to use the words
boner killer
indiscriminately, but let’s just say Sheryl Sandberg had some points about the likability of successful women. Also, not unrelated: Nell Scovell, the cowriter of
Lean In
, was a successful female sitcom writer.)

Anyway, I tried to be grateful that my friend’s rejection kept me on track. My natural instinct was to search for love, but I was supposed to be enjoying my first taste of singledom, after all. So I continued running around Los Angeles declaring to anyone who asked that I was looking for a “great guy with commitment issues.” And since pretty much all of the other women around me who were turning thirty were either getting married or getting panicked about not getting married, more than one guy in Los
Angeles liked the sound of that. If you are looking for the magic words that will make you into a Pied Piper to men, those are the ones. So I spent about a year leading rats around town with that particular flute, and then I met Ben.

Ben had something that turned out to be my own personal Pied Piper’s trill: an epic, wildly flattering story of how we met. One that was so big and romantic that it
sounded
just like what I
thought
my How I Met Your Father story would sound.

The story went like this: one night, at a friend’s birthday party, about a minute after I wondered if I was getting bored with my whole single-and-dating life, I re-met a girl who had apparently come to a Christmas party I had thrown almost a year earlier, just after my breakup with Trevor. When she put together that I was the girl who threw that party, she got very excited. Coincidentally,
just that week
she had had dinner with her old friend Ben, who was unhappily dating girls he wasn’t liking. He complained that he couldn’t stop comparing them to a girl he had briefly met at her Christmas party almost a year earlier … ME! He had apparently been brought to my party by a mutual friend, and while I did not remember meeting Ben, he had been smitten. He hadn’t had the courage to track me down and ask me out, but for a year he and his coworker at a production company would talk about the women Ben was dating, and he would always declare that they were “no Kristin Newman.”

Who wouldn’t like the sound of that?

Now, it’s important to remember that this all happened in Los Angeles. And I looked like a thirty-year-old writer.
Not like a twenty-year-old model or actress or epically legged songstress, which is a category into which an alarmingly high percentage of Angelenas fall. And, because the city is so lousy with these leggy aliens, regular- to below-average-looking guys with reasonable employment levels
can actually get one
, another maddening aspect of being a woman in this city. So getting to be someone’s standard-bearer in this dating pool was not something I expected.

Anyway, the story sounded like a story I would like to hear told for a lot of decades, especially at high school reunions, or in front of twenty-year-old actresses. So I let this girl set us up, and it turned out that Ben was a funny, smart, crazily intuitive guy with a dreamy voice. He came from a family of East Coast artists and writers who ran around Greenwich Village apartments and the family avocado ranch in California. (
Avocado ranch! With an ocean view!
) He could weave stories about the quirky characters in his family like a great novelist. Our e-mail repartee was like fireworks. He was a great kisser, and guitar player. And so, I thought, maybe a year of being single was enough. I thought this for a few months.

And then it started … 
Why does he annoy me sometimes? Do I love him? Am I really ready for him to be The One? Shouldn’t I feel more sure? I was sure with Vito. I wasn’t sure with Trevor and I broke his heart. I don’t want to break someone else’s heart. He really likes me. Do I like him? Is it that I’m not ready yet? Why does he drive so slowly? Making a left turn should not make him this nervous.

One day, a few months into our relationship, I decided I wasn’t happy enough, and I broke up with Ben. We got
back together a week later, because Ben’s most special talent was an uncanny ability to see deep into my neurotic soul and talk me right off a cliff. During that get-back-together conversation, he also let me have it for being crazy, which I, upsettingly, discovered I found attractive. But during that week in between breaking up and getting back together, I went on a ski trip with two couples, and that’s when I first heard about the man who led to this chapter’s foreign adventure in Paris and London. A man I will call “Ferris Bueller.”

I
t started with a simple postbreakup après-ski conversation in Mammoth over nachos and hot chocolates with one of my friends, a fellow TV writer:

“You know who you should meet, Kristin? This guy I work with—Ferris Bueller.”

Immediately my friends’ wives got big eyes and nodded resolutely
—yeah, do that.
They said the guy was a real-life Ferris Bueller, twenty years later. This was exciting because Ferris Bueller had been my Perfect Man since junior high—charismatic and fun, the guy who lit up the room, was loved by fancy bankers and school secretaries alike, and led great adventures with unfailing enthusiasm. I had crushed on another real-life Ferris throughout high school and college, but he had eventually become a professional lifeguard, which wasn’t as appealing over thirty. So when I heard tell of a fully grown Ferris, with a successful career that didn’t require a swimsuit at the office, I was excited.