I Know What I'm Doing (30 page)

Then Dr. Doogie Howser proceeded to tell me a story about his cousin. He said, “She was a career woman. She was a power lawyer. She kept telling everyone that she didn’t need a man, that she was happy. She said she was married to her work. Well, once she turned forty and saw all of her sisters having kids she felt really left out and lonely. She lives in a beautiful high-rise in Chicago but she gave up being a lawyer and now she’s totally lost. She can’t find any man who wants to date someone her age.”

I said, “Well, that’s certainly a beautiful story and I’m sure your cousin would appreciate you telling your patients the excruciatingly disappointing parts of her life. But first of all, I’m not your cousin. We may handle things differently. Secondly, something tells me that she probably never wanted to be a lawyer in the first place. She just became one because it’s probably the type of thing that we think we’re ‘supposed’ to do. I’m sorry that nobody in the family sat her down ten years ago and said, ‘It’s okay if you don’t want to get married yet and you also don’t have to be a power lawyer either. Women have more choices now than just Super Mom and Super Bitch.’ ”

My young orthodontist sat on his wheely stool and his shoulders slumped. He quietly stammered, “What’s so great about travel anyway? Isn’t it nice to build a home and stay grounded?” I was the only other person in the room so it was obvious he was asking me this question, but it also seemed like he was talking to a deeper part of himself.

How could I answer his question? I personally don’t mind even what are seen by most people as the hassles of travel. I go into a Zen mode taking my shoes off at airport security and like to give a knowing smile to the TSA agent who has to answer some dumb-dumb when they ask, “So, I can’t bring my water through the X-ray machine?” I find it a moral challenge to see how little I can pack in a suitcase, proving to myself that we don’t really need too many things in life—just the important stuff like my shampoo and conditioner laced with caviar. (Sorry, PETA.)

I don’t make fun of my orthodontist’s life. I never asked him, “Hey, don’t you get sick of going to Costco every weekend to buy ingredients for your spinach dip that you’ll serve on a tray on your leather living room ottoman during the Big Game on Sunday?”

Dr. Teeth prodded, “So, you don’t think you’ll get sick of it and want to rest?”

“Sure. I get sick of it all the time. I come home from trips with a tweaked back from having to pull my fifty-pound suitcase off of the baggage claim at an odd angle because some woman is standing in my way texting, leaving me no room to properly bend from the knee. I get dehydrated from flying. Sometimes I’m so jet-lagged, I won’t even care that I’m somewhere exotic like Australia and I’ll stay in bed for a day and just tell people that I went to the zoo. It really produces the same effect on them and everyone’s happy. I don’t have to hear, ‘What do you mean you didn’t see any kangaroos?’ Just tell someone that you saw a kangaroo once and it will make his or her fucking day.”

“Well, I just hope that you’re up-front with any man you meet about the fact that you don’t know when this travel schedule is going to slow down.”

This is when I said, “We’re not actually talking about me, are we?”

He paced the office and finally confessed, “My girlfriend just dumped me last night after a year and a half. I thought things were going fine. She says she doesn’t think she wants to have kids and that she thinks she wants to travel the world instead of settle down right now. What does she mean she
thinks
? I mean, why didn’t she tell me that at the beginning?”

“It sounds like she didn’t know. She’s in her twenties. She’ll probably think she wants a lot of different things and will try them out before deciding on one path.”

“But I was ready to marry her. I don’t even know if she knows how to buy a plane ticket!”

“You wanted to spend the rest of your life with someone who doesn’t know how to buy a plane ticket?”

“I don’t care where she wants to go. I don’t believe it. I think it’s a phase.”

“People aren’t teeth. You can’t put a clamp on them and correct them.”

“Should I call her?”

“No! The answer is always no to the question ‘Should I call him/her?’ Nobody should call anybody.”

He said, “I just don’t believe she’ll actually travel.”

“Well, maybe you can drive by her house sometimes and see if her lights are on.”

I was hoping that because I had listened to his relationship struggles I wouldn’t have to dish out twenty bucks for my co-pay. I should be charging him. I ended up no longer being annoyed with my seemingly judgmental orthodontist and instead felt sympathy for him. I told him that I was sure there was a woman out there who wants a guy who wants to stay home together on weekends. I promised him that he’ll find this woman and eventually he’ll even not be able to remember why he wanted a woman around the house all the time. “Enjoy being able to leave your dirty socks on the kitchen table for now.”

I also reminded him that since he thinks there are a bunch of fortysomething women out there who have fulfilling jobs but empty, regretful wombs and hearts, they may want a nice thirty-year-old doctor to date. I suggested that if he wants to find love maybe he could start hanging out in front of a Botox clinic or a strip mall Zumba class.

24

THE BRIDGE OF BRISBANE COUNTY

“Things change. They always do, it’s one of the things of nature. Most people are afraid of change, but if you look at it as something you can always count on, then it can be a comfort.”

—ROBERT KINCAID (PLAYED BY CLINT EASTWOOD) IN
THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY

W
hile I was touring this past year, I went back to Australia—this time with a lot less nerves and no enmeshed relationship with my seatmate. But I did meet a man on tour in Australia and we fell for each other. We had an impetuous one-week affair and he ended up coming to America for three months to be with me. Monogamy. Meeting my friends. Traveling America together on planes, trains, and automobiles. We dove head first into a quasi-relationship. (We’re in the beginning of his last month here before his visa expires or as I call it, “Month Number . . . Fuuuuck, We Didn’t Think This Through.”)

But don’t worry, you distressed single people who were almost at the end of this book hoping to find solace in the fact that my life, like yours, remains a shit show—by the time this book is in your hands, I’m sure my romance will be over. It’s going to end. We don’t live in the same hemisphere. He’s a performer. He can’t just leave the career he’s building there and I can’t leave the one I’m building here. Sure, we
could
do a long-distance thing rather than a double suicide, that’s one ridiculous option on the table. But Melbourne, Australia, is
so
stupidly distant it makes my friend’s New York-to-Los Angeles romance seem almost convenient. “My God. You guys are just a six-hour flight away at any given moment? You’re practically on top of each other! How do you get any space? What if you have to poop?” I’m in Los Angeles and my guy lives . . . in
tomorrow.

But back to my decidedly fated breakup that looms. I’m just being realistic.
All
my romantic relationships have ended. Were those relationships not successes? Is success in a relationship only determined by it
never
ending? That’s like saying that someone’s life was a failure because . . . well, death. Think about it this way. Who are the most successful guests at a party? The ones who are committed to seeing the whole night through, raiding the fridge, and drinking the host’s secret stash? Or the guest who arrives on time, charms the pants off strangers, washes the mozzarella-encrusted nacho dish that she brought, and leaves before anyone can slowly grow to resent her?

My relationships ended for the right reasons and exactly when they were supposed to. (Even if at the time during a few breakups I thought that God, Jesus, Buddha, and former president Bill Clinton were very cruel people who
weren’t helping me at all
by not forcing some of my ex-boyfriends to change their minds
.
) But on the bright side, if all my relationships hadn’t ended a bunch of men would be reading this right now thinking,
What do you mean you
met someone
?
Well, Jen, after reading this book I have to say that this information is seriously going to impact our future together!

I guess I should tell you his name. It’s David. He hasn’t pissed me off yet for him to earn a derogatory nickname in this book, like Stupid Dickhead Who Had a Crazy Idea to Have an Intercontinental Affair. Lots of people just call him “Dave.” I’m one of those assholes who calls a man by his full name. I’m not trying to sound like I own him and I’m sure I just sound like I’m his uptight kindergarten teacher. I just like the sound of his name and it’s the closest I’ll get to being with David Bowie.

We were sitting on my deck in Los Angeles (okay, the Valley) one night when David asked, “Am I in your book?”

“No. It’s already written and it’s really just about how no matter what I try to plan, or who I intend to be, it feels like I so rarely get life ‘right.’ ”

Then I realized.
Shit. I
absolutely
have to write about David in this book. It’s messy and magnificent and exactly what life looks like
.

If you’ll recall, in Chapter 17 of this very book, well before I met David, I wrote:

I don’t mean to act like being single and wandering the planet by myself is some fabulous parade all the goddamn time or that I’m constantly in “You go, girrrl” mode. I think—and again this is just a thought; I said, “I think” not “I know for a fact”—but I
think
that having a man to travel the world with would be marvelous. I further think that if that man also had a similar type of life and career and our relationship had elements of creative collaboration—that would be miraculously marvelous.

First of all, I don’t know if anyone has ever had the audacity to quote themselves from earlier in their own book. Second of all, I am not trying to just pull a cheater move toward fulfilling my contractual word count. And third (of all?), sometimes when we dream about what we’d like, when we order right off the menu and find out it is possible to get what we think we want, life acts like a half-witted waiter who brings us a slightly not right version of what we requested. “Oh, you wanted the dressing on the side? We’re out of ramekins so I took the liberty of drenching your lettuce in oil.” And we have to adjust. “That’s fine. I’ll just have to deal with the fact that the situation on my plate is wilted.”

So, a year and a half after my orthodontist lay into me for traveling too much to find a man, and ten months after a psychic said a feminist yet Clint Eastwood–type dude was coming into my life I met David in the lobby of a hotel in Brisbane. We were on a tour together. I saw his name on the advance itinerary and googled him. “He’s cute. He’s so my type,” I caught myself saying. “
But
I’m not doing one-night stands anymore.” Besides, I already had a new comedian tour friend, Gay Nath. He became a surrogate little brother and even came along with me to the Great Barrier Reef despite his contentious relationship with the sun. He couldn’t stand seeing me take all these “Single Woman Sees Australia Alone” day trips. It was pathetic enough I had gone on a crocodile tour and gleefully shrieked in a boat by myself while the families in other boats bonded over seeing these great reptiles lunge out of the water to snatch a chicken in their jaws. On my own, I hopped alongside wallabies at an animal sanctuary—much to their dismay that a loud American human was up in their business. I’d jumped aboard a scenic railway and took a subsequent Skyrail cable car down the side of the Kuranda rain forest by myself. Had any one of the many poisonous spiders that exist in those tropics bitten me, no one would have known, including me. I’d be dead as fuck.

I’d had a really
single
year. It seemed like once I decided I was ready for a relationship, all the available men disappeared. Were they Raptured? I would go to Target and notice that only female employees were working. “Yes, ma’am. All the men called in sick today. It seems they all got a sense that there’s a woman out there who wants more than a fling.” I started slinging bullshit like, “I’m just going to take some time for me.” (Yeah, because no one wants to spend time with you.) “You can’t love someone until you love yourself.” (What? It’s so fun to love someone when you don’t love yourself. What a quick way—without doughnuts—to fill the ol’ heart hole!)

I’d been tangled up with so many emotionally unavailable men. Men who will freely take your call but would be totally fine to never call you in the first place. They weren’t bad guys. They weren’t cheating or lying. They were just Ambivalent Guys. Unfortunately, Ambivalent Guys are oftentimes drawn to Aggressive Women. AWs are magnetizing at first but eventually their forthrightness becomes misinterpreted by the AG as needy. Then the AW has to aggressively set the record straight. “Look, mister. I’m not
obsessed
with
you.
I’m hung up on finding distraction and I don’t have the balls to try heroin.”

Back to Brisbane.

I remember asking myself as I ran a curling iron through my hair, “Why am I getting dolled up to go down to the lobby before a show? I usually just bring my gear backstage.” The aforementioned Google confirmed that cute David would be on this leg of the tour with us, therefore in the lobby to get in the van to the theater. I had spent so many months alone in Oz; I really got to know myself.

“Jen, you’re doing your hair for a guy. A guy you haven’t met. You have no idea if he’s single or even interested. Also, he could be a Nazi.”

“So?”

“So, Jen, you leave Australia in five days. What could possibly happen? And you don’t want to do one-night stands so who cares if your hair has a fun bend?”