What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (9 page)

But somehow I didn’t learn all of this at that first dinner … 
despite it being under my nose, right next to my pimple.

We did ultimately have a great night. We went out dancing, and I met all of these amazing, hilarious women who were also part of the trip, and danced with the charming men. Where most of my friends at home had fallen into the “married” or “bitter to be single” categories, here was a group of thirtysomething single people who were
delighted
to be single in their thirties. Their careers were starting to take off, and the combination of the newfound money no one had had in their twenties and the freedom they all protected like mama bears with their cubs was a heady brew. I would learn that this group entering a bar is a thing of beauty: within moments, everyone will split up and immediately make new friends in every corner, and they will all, ultimately, be dancing in one another’s collective arms by the end of the night. We owned every room we entered. I was pining for Ferris, but I was also having the best time of my life.

N
ew Year’s Eve arrived. Now, while I was not exactly “connecting” with Ferris, and was starting to wonder if perhaps he and I were perhaps a little
too
alike, he had not yet hooked up with any of the models or Bond girls he had collected. And so I was still holding out hope for a midnight kiss moment, involving fireworks and chilly Parisian night air, that would deliver on everything the trip (and the rest of my life) was supposed to be.

Emma, Sally, and I made our way through wintery
Paris to Ferris’s party at the American Cathedral. Ferris’s brother’s stone-and-stained-glass priest’s apartment in the church was filled with food and music and people in gorgeous dresses and tuxedos, velvet smoking jackets and feather boas, Givenchy gowns and seventies ruffled thrift-store shirts. There were what turned out to be members of the Parisian Algerian mafia, who had given their number to Ferris “in case shit went down.” (Shit never went down, but that number got a lot of cool tables at impossible-to-get-into Parisian clubs.) There were guys who managed the finances of sovereign nations and
New Yorker
cartoonists and a Brit in “public relations” who would spend the next eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan as one of General Petraeus’s closest advisors. Ferris had met dozens of Parisians during his month in town, and they mixed with his other guests, who had flown in from all over the U.S. and Europe. It had only taken Ferris a couple of weeks to become a hub in Paris, just like he was at home.

A wrought-iron spiral staircase stood in the middle of the living room, and it disappeared into what turned out to be the cathedral’s bell tower, which looked out over the Eiffel Tower, and all of Paris. Over the course of the evening, people would bundle up and carefully climb the stairs in stilettos, up up up through three stories of the windy, pigeon-filled stone tower, trying not to fall through the grates or spill their champagne.

Ferris was wearing a blue velvet tux that he has worn every New Year’s since. (I just texted him to confirm that he never washes the tux. He responded: “The yearly Halloween cow costume never gets washed, but should. The
blue velvet tux doesn’t really need cleaning.” So … no. He never washes it.) Anyway, back on that first magical night when the tux was still clean, Ferris came over to welcome us with two bottles: one a three-foot-tall double magnum of red wine, and the other a bottle of absinthe he had smuggled in from Berlin. He poured us glasses of both, happily spilling red wine that could not possibly be successfully poured from so large a bottle. He looked ecstatic that I was there, and kissed me on both cheeks, European-style, and gushed about how beautiful I looked … and then did the same to everyone else.

That was about how the night went. I circled Ferris, he circled away. Another friend gave me a quick awkward peck at midnight, at the top of the bell tower, while we all huddled together on the freezing, tiny balcony and watched the fireworks I had imagined going off over my midnight kiss instead going off over all of Paris.

But the party raged on. Thomas, Ferris’s right-hand man and fellow magic-maker, did a late-night striptease from his tuxedo down to a gold Speedo that I have now seen on New Year’s Eves all over the world. This first striptease happened on the spiral staircase just as the church deacon entered the room. A couple of guys chased me around unsuccessfully as I unsuccessfully chased Ferris. (I call this phenomenon a
Pirates of the Caribbean
night, after the part in the ride where a fat woman chases a man who chases a pretty woman, all in a circle, no one ever catching anyone.)

The night finally ended at six in the morning, because Ferris’s brother had to give a sermon at nine. I stumbled out of the cathedral with my sixty new friends, happy and
disappointed in equal measure. I hugged Ferris good-bye and clip-clopped home.

The next “morning,” I woke up at about one p.m., left Emma and Sally behind to sleep, and took myself out to breakfast for my first moment alone. I found a perfect little warm café, and the sun came out for the first time on the trip, and it reflected off the rain-soaked Église Sainte-Marie-Madeleine across the way and straight onto my face, almost blinding in its intensity and warmth. La Madeleine is a neoclassical cathedral completed in 1842 that looks like an ancient Greek temple. It’s beautiful, but, in my opinion, it’s trying to be something it isn’t. I teared up—at the bigness of my hopes that had been dashed, and the incredible group of open, warm, hilarious, attractive, happy weirdos I had managed to find, at my luck that I was eating madeleines while I stared at the Madeleine in Paris on the first day of the year, at the sun that shone on my healing pimple. After breakfast, I walked into the cathedral, and got down on my knees, and gave thanks. I hadn’t found true love, but I had stumbled onto the people who were going to make my life without it happier. My life was starting to become what it was supposed to be.

I
would eventually realize that I didn’t want to be with Ferris any more than he wanted to be with me—we were way too much alike. Remember that in the movie, Ferris doesn’t date a female Ferris. He dates Sloane—the one on the ground looking up at him adoringly as he goes by on
the float, wondering,
How does he do it?
I wasn’t that girl. I wanted to be up on the float.

When Ferris came home from Paris, he invited a big group of friends over for food and reminiscing. And I was one of the people he invited. I walked into the house that I had walked by so many times when I was stalking Ferris the stranger, and a dozen people threw their arms around me. By not making out with any of the men in the group, I was embraced by the girls, who distanced themselves from the many fluttering women this posse of attractive, successful, single guys always attracted. Being part of this world of people who were
happily
single in their thirties, who knew how to live life in a brave, big way, felt better than humping the leg of a gay barrister.

Ben tried to get back together again, and as tempted as I would be by the completeness of his love in the face of a new world of men who seemed to see me as some sort of little brother, something deep within me was screaming that I wasn’t ready to be half of a whole. I was about to be having too much fun.

“Love the Juan You’re With” (Argentina, Part 1)

In really important ways, Argentina was my first love. It was the first place I went all by myself, and I fell in love with it hard. A little because of how Argentina made me feel about me, in the way you fall in love with that crush at summer camp because he’s the first person who’s ever looked at you
like that.
Argentina made me feel backlit, like the girl who makes the music swell when the camera hits her, like the girl who first broke your heart.

I
ended up in Argentina because my friends seemed to think that having imaginary boyfriends who didn’t like me back was a sign I needed something … different. And so they secretly signed me up for Internet dating, “winking” and messaging men as me before finally showing me their top choices. I had never Internet dated, mostly because I wanted a better, more star-crossed how-we-met story than that. Sasha and Hope decided that was stupid, and that I needed someone like them to take charge of my romantic life. They found me a supposedly straight guy who drove a Volkswagen Bug. Not a cool vintage one, a new one. With a bud vase.

Depressing, right?

I had one season left of my seven-year run on
That ’70s Show
, which meant it was my last spring hiatus to spend traveling—the next year I would have to stick around more to find a new job. But everyone with whom I normally traveled was either overemployed or underemployed or too married or too pregnant to travel. And so there was … a VOID.

“Kristin, a void is a
good
thing,” my mother said. “You’re always rushing to fill up your life with fun fun fun. But nothing new or good can come in without a void to fill. Voids are
necessary
and
wonderful.
”

So I spent about a week after my work year ended just
being
in all of that voidy space, just feeling all of that sweet
nothing
 … and then I bought a one-way ticket to Argentina.

My mother really shouldn’t have been surprised, about either my ambivalence regarding settling down, or my
desire to travel south. I was at least third generation in both departments. My mother loved Latin America, and as I mentioned before, part of the reason she and my father divorced after eighteen years was because she wanted to live a bigger, sexier, more international life. So they split up, and when I was fifteen and she was thirty-eight, she and I both started dating for the first time.

“Who the hell is going to go out with her?” Sasha and I wondered about my petite, pretty, charismatic, and successful mother, who when she wasn’t working hundred-hour weeks was skiing, scuba diving, and preparing gourmet meals. “I hope she’s not jealous when I start having lots of dates and she doesn’t,” I added, dipping another Oreo into peanut butter and shoving it into my pudgy, acne-covered face. “Kill me if I’m trying to find a guy in my thirties.”

She did okay. Like
Sex and the City
okay. She even had cute, objectifying nicknames for the men she met: there was Donut Man (he introduced himself by buying her a donut), Cape Man (he came to their first and only date unironically wearing a cape), Nervous Breakdown in the Caracas Airport Man (self-explanatory). The man she finally fell in love with was a dashing European-born, American-educated businessman who lived in Mexico City … and who broke her heart. His name was Laszlo, but Sasha gave him a cute nickname: “Promiser of Everything and Deliverer of Nothing.”

Laszlo wouldn’t move to the States, and my mom wouldn’t leave me and my grandma to move to Mexico, and so she lost him to a twentysomething aerobics instructor
who lived down his street. But her love of Latin America preceded and survived the breakup, and that came from
her
mother.

My mother’s mother left the family farm in Iowa for California when she was seventeen, and never saw her own mother again. She met my grandfather at work at an aerospace company, but he would only marry her if she quit working and stayed home with the kids. Because my grandmother was born when she was (and because she also happened to be pregnant with my mother), she quit, had my mother and her two siblings, and reported waking up in the morning to their little voices, thinking,
Oh, God, I have to get through another day.
My mom would describe cleaning days in her house as a child, when my grandmother would go into “rages” about being a housewife. She wrote haikus in her head as she ironed to keep herself from “losing her mind.”

The minute my grandmother’s three kids were out of the house, my old white grandma went back to school at Compton Junior College (as in
Straight Outta Compton
), and signed up for a foreign exchange program in Mexico. She left my grandfather behind for a couple of months, and some Mexican family who signed up for an American college student got my grandmother. I still feel sorry for that seventeen-year-old Mexican boy who must have had so many fantasies about showing around his wide-eyed, nubile American “sister.”