What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (25 page)

About a woman who used to be hot, and is now forty.

Or
The Panic Years.

About women “on the wrong side of
twenty-five
without a ring.”

This book was pitched to me by a good friend, a producer who also happens to be a forty-five-year-old, happily single man.

“What about my life choices would ever make you think I would want to put a message like this out in the world?
Twenty-five? Wrong side?
” I demanded.

“Oh, right,” he said, thinking I was insane.

It made me more determined than ever to break the stereotype: I would
not
be a sad, bitter Bridget Jones, waiting for her prince/barrister. I would not panic about my age. I would enjoy my life if it killed me.

A couple of weeks after I came home from Iceland, Ben and I broke up. He wasn’t as in it as he needed to be, and we both knew it. His “I love you”s this time were reticent, usually sandwiched between a “sure” and a “but”—
Sure, I love you, but …
There was a deep sadness about walking away, but also a bit of relief—I had gone back, and tried to fix my mess, but it was unfixable. At least it wasn’t hanging out there, a question that needed to be answered, a big love that I had passed by. We would say later that the first time around it was my turn to be the narcissist, and the second time around it was his. So we were even, which hurt, but felt correct.

The night we broke up, I had a dream. I was in Antarctica, and I felt I had never seen something so wonderful. In the dream, I had mistakenly gone to Antarctica in the winter, and so it was unexpectedly dark. But it was much, much more beautiful than I had pictured it would look in the sun. There were very kind people there, and magical lights, and cathedral-like, glowing cliffs of translucent, turquoise ice, and I was shocked that this place that was so dark and cold and unexpected could be the most spectacular place I had ever been. I took the dream as a good sign that I was heading to something really transcendent and surprising by making the hard choice to leave Ben. Walking away from the compromise that being with him represented was going to lead to me finding something really spectacular.

And wouldn’t you know, about three months after Ben and I broke up, Father Juan came to America.

J
uan and I had stayed sporadically in touch, and I had noticed on Facebook that he was planning a trip to New York. I immediately pointed out that Los Angeles was on the very same continent, and he quickly agreed it seemed silly to come so far and not see California.

He would be in town for Thanksgiving, and so he would also be meeting my family. My family on Thanksgiving also includes Sasha’s family, since there have been many Thanksgivings when Sasha, whom my mother calls her “soul daughter,” would host my family while I was off gallivanting. Sasha is a much better daughter to my mother in a couple of departments, holiday-throwing and grandchild-bearing being the big ones. Sasha’s first child got a gift from my mother of a baby-size leather jacket my mother had bought several years earlier for her “grandma hope chest.” I took too long, though, so the jacket went to Sasha.

I had no idea what was going to happen when Juan came to visit. I didn’t even know if he was visiting as a friend or as something more. Let’s remember that he had never slept with me, and the last time I’d seen him in Argentina it had been platonic. Five years had passed since our first romantic time in Buenos Aires. To cover all my bases, I waxed everything I had and put clean sheets on the guest bed.

I picked Juan up from the airport, and, not at all shockingly, he looked glorious after that fifteen-hour flight. I
nervously took the exhausted man sight-seeing: we went out for a walk on the Venice boardwalk. We got cheap Thai massages, and went for his first tacos with some friends. I was keeping him moving. We were shy with each other, small-talking and keeping our distance. I started to worry: maybe this
was
just a platonic visit to see L.A. But after dinner, we went back to my house, where we had put his bag in the guest room.

“You know, there is one problem with that room,” I said as we lingered awkwardly in the kitchen, getting glasses of water. “There aren’t curtains on the window, so the sun comes in
really
bright in the morning. Might be
too
bright for you up there.”

He smiled at me, and took my face in his hands, and I took him to my room. And that almost-priest had brought a condom all the way from South America this time.

The rest of that week was a rush of giddy joy. Thanksgiving with my family was sweet and delightful. Sasha’s timid, soft-spoken stepmother pulled me aside to gush:

“Kristin, he’s
so handsome.
It’s like there’s some kind of
light
coming out of him.”

My mother was worried. She had been worried since I first came home from Argentina five years earlier enamored with Juan, and she was more worried now as she watched me fluttering around. She thought Juan was as lovely as everyone did, but I think she saw in my eyes exactly what had been in her eyes twenty years earlier, when her Latin lover, Laszlo, went back to Latin America, her heart in his hand, the rest of her left behind in the fetal position in California.

As a result of her heartbreak, she had tried hard to keep me from following my genetically predisposed need for international adventure down the same road hers had led her. When I was sixteen, not long after Laszlo left, my mother and I sat through our twenty-third viewing of
Dirty Dancing.
At the end of what was, and maybe still is, my all-time-favorite losing-it scene in American cinema, when a still-large-nosed Jennifer Grey asks a shirtless Patrick Swayze to “dance with her,” which boy oh boy does he ever do and how, I turned to my wildly depressed, afghan-wrapped mother and said, “Well, it doesn’t get any better than that.” She then gave me advice that I’m sure she hoped would save me years of heartache looking for what she had just lost:

“Kristin, it doesn’t get that good.”

A
fter Thanksgiving, I took Juan up to Santa Barbara wine country, where we rented a house for the weekend with three other couples. A newly pregnant Parker and her husband were there, as were Hope and her new boyfriend (finally!) and another constantly single comedy writer friend, Erin, and her boyfriend (finally!). It was a weekend of wine and friendship and love, and I was
one of the couples for once
(finally!). Juan and I made up for our five sex-free years, and we all cooked and drank and visited miniature horses and danced in empty saloons. It was a golden weekend, and I was deliriously, deliriously happy.

The week came to an end, and Juan didn’t try to change his flight to stay longer, and he didn’t ask me when we were
going to see each other again. He just kissed me sweetly, said the week had been amazing … and left.

A
nd man I was blue. Feeling singler than single, and lying around the house too much. I still wasn’t working since I hadn’t gotten staffed on a show, and the pilot I wrote that year was not getting shot. (The networks buy hundreds of scripts every year, make a dozen or two, and put a handful on the air. It’s incredibly upsetting to be a writer of one of these hundreds of unmade scripts unless you set out knowing you’re getting paid to write a script that will never get made, and then you can just crank out one a year in peace, grateful that you’ve covered your mortgage. It’s a nonsensical process, and business, and life.)

So I was lying around my house too much. My mom called me one day, and I braced myself for some sentiment that would make me feel worse. But instead, the woman who normally cautioned me against running away so much suggested something amazing:

“Pistol, it sounds like you need a trip.”

It made me cry, how known and accepted this advice from this particular person made me feel.

I decided to go to Israel. I had an idea for a script that would be set there, so research was in order. The idea was to write a drama, something edgy for cable, about expats living in Jerusalem, living regular lives in the middle of the conflict. The comedy television scene had slowed down almost to a crawl, and it was time to broaden my writing horizons.

Of course, I wasn’t Jewish and knew next to nothing about the Israeli political situation. I bought really embarrassing books, like
Teach Yourself: The Middle East Peace Crisis!
and
The Israeli/Palestinian Conflict for Dummies!
I read them quickly, absolutely unwilling to take any of these books on a plane with actual Middle Easterners. As I started to fall in love with a new country, and spend my day thinking about something new, my mood lifted.

I got my intrepid single-girl traveler buddy, Astrid, who’s traveled alone even more extensively than I have, and we went to the Holy Land. Getting there was not simple, however. First two single girls had to get through security.

When you fly to Israel with El Al, there is a multi-tiered, one-on-one interview process where you are given a security rating, from one to seven. A one is for a Jewish Israeli, and gets the fewest security delays. A seven is for a probable terrorist.

It turns out that single Western women “of a certain age” are much closer to a seven than a one. Apparently there have been incidents where sad, middle-aged single girls get involved in online relationships with “handsome Israelis” who then invite these lonely hearts to come visit them in Israel. “Just pick up a package and bring it for me, and then our hearts will be forever joined Old Testament–style,” these men promise. Then the sad, lonely girl picks up the package, having no idea that her “boyfriend” is actually an Arab terrorist, and unknowingly tries to bring her lover’s bomb on a plane.

Basically, single women in their thirties are a national security threat to the state of Israel.

Combine our dangerous marital status with the fact that my tiny blond friend Astrid liked to do things like travel alone to Tunisia, and you have two hours of security checks. They stripped us of everything but our passports, and we were handed the rest of our things on the plane.

Except we didn’t get everything back. In the search process, they apparently forgot to replace an entire bag of my clothes. So I got to Israel without anything to cover the top half of my body. Since Astrid had forgotten her contact lenses, we said we were the blind leading the topless.

B
efore we left the States, I wrote the following six words on my Facebook page:

“Anyone know anyone interesting in Israel?”

Two things happened: every Jewish man I knew responded with the words “I love Israel! I got my first hand job on the beach in Israel!” Apparently, those Birthright teen trips to Israel have been both wildly successful in bringing young Jews together and wildly unsuccessful in that hundreds of millions of wasted little Jews have been spilled upon those chosen sands. The second thing that resulted from my Facebook post was that I got introduced to about a hundred incredible people. Let me tell you, a couple of people in Hollywood know a couple of people in Israel.

It was remarkable who we met. Secular kibbutzniks, converted Hasidic Americans, Israeli comedy writers, gay pro-Palestinian European diplomats (and their new testtube baby freshly grown in a woman in India), American-Israeli Harvard MBA fighter pilot finance guys, Palestinian
shopkeepers, sons of Bedouin chiefs, divorced Christian Arab-Israelis, television network presidents, Nobel Peace Prize laureates. I’m not sure if we met the most interesting people in Israel, or if Israel is just a country exclusively full of the kind of people about whom Spielberg could make a movie. But the array of stories I heard and experiences I had in that country were unlike any trip I’ve ever taken, before or since.

Our first night in Tel Aviv, Astrid and I met up with a group of Israeli comedy writers. They had worked together on
Eretz Nehederet
(A Wonderful Land), which is Israel’s version of
Saturday Night Live.
Over drinks with these five writers, I asked them a million questions about life and culture and the political situation there. And that’s when I started to learn that “Depends who you ask” is always the first part of every answer to every question you ask anyone in Israel.

The writers talked about Judaism and therapy and annoying network script notes, and told Holocaust and dick jokes and complained about their wives. It was exactly like a day at the office in L.A. The group even had the same gender breakdown as a Hollywood writers’ room: it was four schlubby thirtyish men, and one blond woman, who also happened to be the granddaughter of former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres.

“Is this usually how the comedy rooms look? A bunch of guys and you?” I asked her.

She smiled that same smile I see on every female comedy writer’s face in L.A., and she shrugged and nodded just like we do.

A
strid had a boyfriend back in L.A. They had been together about a year and a half, and he was a very handsome, impeccably dressed, self-described “dandy.” He was also an underemployed “producer” who had told her at the outset of the relationship that he was not looking for anything serious. She didn’t believe him, and so was now saying “I love you” to a man who wouldn’t say it back because he was afraid of making women mad at him when he didn’t follow through on promises. “I love you” was a promise he wasn’t willing to make.