I Know What I'm Doing (24 page)

My husband, Matt, and I were walking down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice after a huge dinner in one of those restaurants that has outdoor seating on a cobblestone side street—right underneath the woman who lives on the third floor who looks out disapprovingly as she smokes a cigarette and checks on her drying laundry. It’s a scene that if it were a movie, the director would say to the set designer, “Look, you’ve got the Italian waiters speaking French and flirting with both the husband
and
wife. You’ve got the moon lighting up the checkered tablecloths and the bottle of house red tucked snug into a wicker holder. You’ve got the elderly man with the accordion wandering up and down the street playing for no one and everyone. You’ve got the woman who lives in the building with the pink shutters pursing her cigarette between her lips as she hangs a white sheet on her clothesline. It’s too much. Pick ONE European cliché, please, for this dinner scene.”

I realized we weren’t holding hands as we walked, and three thoughts piled up in my head at once, like cars in a freeway collision. After the Jaws of Life removed my thoughts from the wreck and untangled them—they went like this:
We aren’t holding hands. I’m not sure if I want to hold hands. He doesn’t seem like he wants to hold hands. People who have been married for almost a year and together for six don’t have to hold hands anymore walking down the street. We’re not horny teenagers. We’re best friends. I sort of want to want to hold hands with someone, though. Jen, grow up. Those days are over. You’re a grown woman. No need to display your affection for the world. I wonder if we’ll have sex tonight. I’d be okay if we just laid in bed together and listened to the cars drag down the road and the ocean in between them. I’m kind of enjoying this book I am reading. I guess I could enjoy this book after the sex but I might be too tired.

I turned to Matt and coyly suggested, “Hey. Want to go down to the beach?”

“The beach? For what? It’s dark and it’s all rocky. We could fall.”

“I’m not talking about walking. Let’s have sex on the beach.”

“Sex on the beach? No way. I don’t want anyone seeing me naked.”

“Dear God, no. I don’t even want YOU to see me naked. I think I saw some cellulite on my knee today. We don’t have to get naked. I mean we’ll sneak off under the boardwalk and to anyone passing by who happens to see us they’ll think we’re just snuggling.”

“No, Jen. Come on.”

“You come on! This is the South of France. I think the people who
aren’t
having sex on the beach are the ones that people are staring at.”

“What are you even asking me for sex for? To fulfill some kind of exhibitionist fantasy?”

Matt wasn’t a cruel, nonspontaneous person but that night I thought he was a dream-killing celibate monster. With perspective I realize that given the thoughts leading up to my request for sex on the beach I’m surprised I didn’t just ask, “Can we walk over there and just see if we’re still attracted to each other?”

As it turns out, I am the type of woman who wants sex on the beach. I’d just never really shared that with Matt. I don’t know why. I’d had sex on the beach once, with my boyfriend Blake back in July of 1996 at Duxbury Beach in Massachusetts at about midnight—not that it left a beautiful memory and made a searing impact or anything. I just remember the way the towel felt, cool on my back on the damp sand; the sight of the moonlight on the water; the steady sound of the waves slapping a few feet away. It was stimulating not because of the danger that at any second we could get caught and arrested by some angry cop who wasn’t getting any himself—but because it was so romantic. The climax went beyond a physical orgasm. My heart almost burst as I smelled my boyfriend’s patchouli scent and gazed at the unstoppable stars in the sky. That’s right. I loved my patchouli-smelling boyfriend. I was young and in love and I take it as a win when a twenty-year-old guy doesn’t smell like stale beer.

I thought that maybe if Matt and I had a location cure for what had become sort of a return to a bread-and-butter sex life that perhaps I could really feel in my heart my love for my husband. I knew intellectually that I loved my partner but my heart always remained safely in my rib cage—with no threat of bursting through. We didn’t have sex in the South of France but instead watched other people score when we turned on the TV to watch the World Cup.

•  •  •

In stark contrast to that trip with my ex-husband, Allison and I took in every museum, had mimosas with breakfast and sparkling wine with dinner. Allison didn’t judge me when I insisted on bumming a cigarette off of someone in a café because she didn’t have to kiss my ashtray breath after. (Travel tip: Bumming cigarettes in Paris is a big no-no. The French wish that you would buy your own Gauloises.) Allison and I shopped during the day and even browsed inside Dior. (Of
course
it’s not gauche to go in there and not buy anything. Who can afford Dior?) At night over dinner we talked intimately about our fears, our frustrations with our careers, she lamented her single state, I lamented that I was in love with a friend who I couldn’t bring myself to be with because I didn’t want to have to take care of a man who I felt didn’t have his life in order. I cried in my meringue. We stayed in separate rooms. I never understood why traveling is something reserved for lovers only. Who wants to stay with their lover in a small European hotel where the toilet is next to the bed? It’s way too exhausting to be on vacation and keep having to say, “I’m going to run to the corner and get us some coffee,” just so that you can secretly take a number two in the hotel lobby bathroom. Besides, have you ever watched the sun set over the Eiffel Tower and thought,
What I really want right now is to finish this night off pretending that I don’t hear my partner’s derriere having diarrhea in our tiny hotel bathroom
?

19

FLYING BY THE SEAT OF MY SWEATPANTS (LOS ANGELES TO MELBOURNE)

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

—AMELIA EARHART

We
don’t have any shrinks at Walkabout Creek. No. Back there if you got a problem you tell Wally. And he tells everyone in town, brings it out in the open, no more problem.

—CROCODILE DUNDEE

I
’m so familiar with in-flight instructions I could train future flight attendants. The most accidentally philosophical instruction being the one regarding using the oxygen mask that falls from the ceiling. Affix the strap to yourself before putting it on your kid’s face. People in the midst of a freak-out and full of “I’m a good parent” hormones want to do it the other way around, but if you run out of breath then you and your kid are both screwed. The lesson? You can only help others once you’ve helped yourself and you’ve got your oxygen together. As a solo traveler who doesn’t have to worry about her kid, or her husband who acts like a kid sometimes, I’m available to help in case of an emergency. (I mean, not like a real emergency like terrorism or anything. Even though I sit in exit rows a lot, I’m lying. I don’t think I can push open that fifty-pound door.) Anyway, my point is that instead of pitying me for traveling alone on a sixteen-hour flight from Los Angeles to Melbourne, you should be congratulating me for being there to help someone even worse off than me—a
man
traveling alone, and by alone I mean without Klonopin.

A flight to Australia used to be something I thought I could never do because of my panic disorder. Even with my trusty prescription for Klonopin, my fear was overwhelming in the face of such a long flight. The biggest question that I asked myself over and over and over was,
What if the pill stops working? Then how will I feel?
That’s anxiety. Anxiety is a brat. Imagine if your brain was a big boardroom filled with men and women who make decisions every single day. Some committees handle things really smoothly, so well that you don’t even realize it—like the committee that handles telling your heart to beat. Every day the board of directors has meetings to decide how our brains are going to behave. Now imagine that the good-for-nothing son of the CEO shows up drunk, unshowered, with puke stains on his shirt from the night before, crusty blood under his nose from a brawl he doesn’t remember starting. He sits down full of bravado and arrogance and absolutely no experience and no sense of reality. But he thinks that he belongs.
He
is anxiety. And what makes his presence so awful? For some reason the CEO of the brain—ME—lets him stay at the table while the other committee members must be thinking,
Wait a minute. We have college degrees and years of experience running her brain and this frat boy do-nothing gets the same power to vote, veto, and advise as we do? Why? Why can’t the boss see that this guy has
no idea
what he’s talking about? He only causes trouble with his big ideas like
‘Let’s obsess over a proven medication not working.’ Or ‘Let’s tell Jen’s brain she’s in danger when she’s not.’

Anxiety is such a strong voice in my head that sometimes it tells me not even to bother with certain experiences.
“Oh, you’ll freak out if you do that. Don’t do that. That’s not for you.”
And I used to believe Anxiety! No more. Anxiety is a liar and a lazy little shit. Don’t let Anxiety have a seat at the table.

I’d dreamed of going to Australia since seeing the movie
Crocodile Dundee
when I was a kid. But Anxiety told me that on my flight Down Under, I could have the world’s biggest panic attack, not yet documented, the first of its kind, where the panic leads to a heart attack. Anxiety told me that I would have that heart attack on the plane somewhere between Hawaii and Fiji during the “just the ocean” part of the flight and the pilot would not be able to land and get me to a hospital. Because of this one-sided conversation with Anxiety, when I had the opportunity to go on a fully paid working trip to Sydney back in 2009 with the TV show
Chelsea Lately
I almost said no. I’m glad I didn’t. I got to fly first-class with a bunch of friends and experience the bliss that is the lie-flat seat. And my medication worked. I did not panic. I loved the flight so much; I went into slight mourning over the fact that we had to get off that fun, intimate laser light tube filled with bars and beds.

The Melbourne International Comedy Festival is a prestigious comedy festival that’s an honor—sorry, Australians,
honour
—to be part of, and I was asked to participate in March 2014. I would have to fly the seven thousand nine hundred thirty-two miles alone. Twice. That’s sixteen hours each way. In that length of time on the ground you could wake up, hit snooze a few times, shower, go get coffee, work an eight-hour day, hit the treadmill after work, go out to dinner, and drive home from dinner just in time to watch two hours of
The Bachelor
. Think about that next time you’re going about your day—that in the length of time it took you to do all that, a bunch of people were thirty thousand feet above you unable to just go open a door for some fresh air. Even on the night flights—designed for us to spend a solid seven hours in a dreamlike state—that still leaves NINE other hours.

And my first thought was,
I can’t do that.
This is why Anxiety is such a stupid C student who should be fired from the boardroom of our brains. I’d already had a successful flight to Australia that helped alleviate my fears, but Anxiety told me that was purely circumstantial. It was the friends and the first-class bed that allowed for everything to be okay. Anxiety—who has never been
anywhere
—told me that those thirty combined hours of flying around the world didn’t count. But being the occasional, shortsighted CEO of my brain that I sometimes am, I listened to Anxiety while the encouraging and rational words from the other board members remained a low whisper in the back of my mind. I liked what the committee told me about the safety of airplanes, how I’ll be asleep for most of it, that the flight attendants are trained to deal with anxiety, that even if God forbid something happened—it, like everything else about flying a plane, and most of life in general—is just plain out of my control.

I managed to stay firm with Anxiety, call the board to a vote (9 to 1 in favor of going to Australia), and say yes to the festival.

(FYI, another trick I use to show Anxiety who’s boss is thinking,
What would Madonna do?
Okay, she would have backup dancers, a chiropractor, and a raw food chef traveling with her on a private jet and she would be perfectly made up even while sleeping—her rock-hard arms flexing during her REM cycle. But besides that, she obviously wouldn’t be afraid to fly to Australia. She would be afraid to NOT fly to Australia and let Iggy Azalea interrupt her world domination.)

Still, at LAX as I boarded the plane to Melbourne, not even being safe and sound in my cozy sweatpants could stop the familiar rush of adrenaline. The old miswiring in my DNA that tells me that I am in danger. Maybe my DNA was responding to the fact that there was currently a missing plane off the coast of Perth and that it’s a vast ocean—there’s plenty of room for one more plane. What would Madonna do? I tried to remember her commands from the song “Vogue” and I discreetly tried to “give good face” as I boarded the plane.

I took my seat in Premium Economy by the window. I continued with my inner dialogue.
I’m a grown woman on a trip. I’m Madonna taking the world by storm.
Thank GOD people around me could not hear these thoughts or read my mind. They would have felt such pity for me. “Yeah. See that girl in seat 14A? She’s pretending she’s Madonna. Madonna wouldn’t have to hoist her own suitcase into the bin, though.”

I thought,
Other people must be anxious
. I looked around but no one else
seemed
anxious. Travelers were excitedly taking books out of their carry-ons, getting out blankets, ready for the long, cozy haul, confident that the plane wouldn’t run out of fuel somewhere off Fiji. And then I spotted someone who had the familiar look of terror: swallowing when there’s no saliva left in his throat, a white face—not just a white person, but extra-white skin. He was my seatmate and I could tell that he was having a full-blown panic attack. He put his suitcase in the aisle—forgetting to put it either under the seat in front of him or in the overhead. He sat down and began explaining himself to me as though I had been up late waiting for him and needed to hear a really good excuse.