What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (20 page)

“It just seemed like the thing people do,” Olivia said.

A few months later, they were married by a club-kid friend of theirs who had gotten ordained online, and who shakily read the ceremony off the back of one of those plastic-windowed envelopes. Josh wore a tux that was a little too big, and Olivia wore a high-necked, thrift-store, old-timey lace wedding dress, and so the tiny blond bride and groom looked like kids playing dress-up. Someone’s
dog cut its paw and jumped on Olivia, so there was a bit of dog blood on the front of her gown. For her footwear, the bride chose a black rubber river sandal.

Now happily ensconced in a little house in sheep-covered countryside, Olivia and Josh were all smiles and good vibes. Their equally happy dog loped through snout-high wildflowers toward me when I arrived at their green, blooming place, and my mood immediately lifted. We went hiking that first day, and brainstormed fun things for me to do in New Zealand. Olivia suggested a silent meditation retreat near the black sand beach where they shot
The Piano.
Her friend had recently spent ten days there, not reading, not writing, not exercising …

“So, what do you do for ten days?” I asked Olivia.

“You just sit and be
silent.
”

Now, you may remember some of my issues with silence. So this idea resonated like a gong.
Silence.
Might that be
exactly
what I needed? The argument could certainly be made that at least 25 percent of what had gone down with my show could be blamed on my mouth. What I had said to whom, and the varying degrees of politicking I had managed and mismanaged, had certainly been part of the show’s downfall. I had been an open book to untrustworthy people, and that had been my undoing. And it was not the first time my prolific lip-flapping had gotten me into trouble in my life, professionally or personally.

I had even had medical problems as a result of my mouth. For years I’d been losing my voice. On a good day people said I had a sexy, Demi Moore sort of timbre, but after a night out it was absolutely more post-op Kathleen
Turner. I ignored it for years, but finally was losing my voice entirely so often that I went to a doctor to find out it was basically the result of every kind of nodule and nighttime acid reflux and allergy you could think of that would attack one’s vocal cords.

But the doctor emphasized that my hoarseness was also caused by a more pressing problem—
my personality.
His main advice was just to
talk less.
Which had only been my unaccomplished New Year’s resolution for thirty or so years. Oh, and there was also this nugget from him, given to me while he fed a camera up my nose and down my throat, with regard to sleeping with my cat, which was adding to the problem:

“Try to get something with two legs into your bed instead of four.”

“
I TYING!
” I had protested, while choking on the camera.

In addition to finding love, getting rid of my pet, and changing my personality, I was supposed to stop eating and drinking basically everything that gives life meaning. So … I was hoarse. And walking through the hills of New Zealand wondering if all signs in my life were pointing to me shutting up for a little while.

What would ten days of not speaking even feel like? Almost immediately, my fantasy about the silent meditation retreat started to include a handsome, silent stranger sitting across the meditation yurt. We would spend ten days communicating with
only our eyes
, falling deeper and deeper in love without speaking a word. Even without speaking, I would
just know
that he loved children and dancing. He
would
just know
that I was neither a morning nor a night person, and would think being at one’s best only between ten a.m. and seven p.m. was normal and charming. And at the end of the ten days, a bell would ring signaling the completion of our vow of silence, and he would walk up to me, and say:

“
Hello
.”

“
Hello
,” I’d reply, taking his hand.

And we would be in love.

I was so enamored with that ending that I immediately started writing a play with that “Hello” as the last line. (
In
my head
I wrote it. Let’s not get excited and think I actually put pen to paper.) That final “Hello” before the stage lights went out would leave the audience wondering—would they really be in love once they found out that the other person was nothing like they imagined, like the audience had known all along?
What if this play was a huge hit?! I could marry my meditation boyfriend and become a playwright and move to New York and be done with Hollywood forever!!! And, by the way, FUCK that network president who didn’t even give me a chance to prove him wrong!!! I should have just picked up the phone months ago, and told him that—

So that was a no on the silent meditation retreat. I would have adventures and find international love instead, I decided. Which, really, is the only way I’ve ever found to quiet my mind, if not my mouth.

Quiet country life with Josh and Olivia was not leading to either adventure or love, but I had one other contact in New Zealand. A friend who worked in extreme sports connected
me with her “hot Maori friend” who sold surf and snowboard gear, and he invited me to come stay in Mount Maunganui, a little beach town on the North Island. Josh offered to drive me there, and when we arrived we found that the hot Maori wouldn’t be around until the next day, since he had gone away for the weekend … with his girlfriend. So Josh and I got hotel rooms and went out to dinner.

We ended up meeting a posse of fun Kiwis who invited us back to a house party right on the beach. The party was very cool, with a bonfire on the sand, a DJ, and lovely, friendly surf people dancing everywhere.
Oh, hello, international sexy love story.
But
everyone
was coupled up. And very into gardening. The biggest, hottest Maori surfers would amble up, lean in close, and shout over the pumping electronica in those adorable accents:

“My sweet peas are going
off
right now! The boys came over and we put up a new deck and trellis, and the vines are loving it! They’re doing so well my partner and I are thinking of expanding the veggies this year if we can move the compost heap,” one might offer, except in a twenty-minute version, with his girlfriend suddenly appearing on his lap.

And then another huge dude would start to talk about his tomatoes. For an hour. They
love
their gardens in New Zealand.

T
here is something about New Zealand that attracts runaways. Over and over and over again, other travelers told
me their stories. And almost no one was just there to see the scenery. Everyone was going through something, running away from something, processing something, putting off something. I learned that night in Mount Maunganui that my sweet, cheerful friend Josh had moved to the country in New Zealand after ten years in San Francisco because of a nasty little speed habit he had acquired as a result of the fifteen-hour workdays of a chef. He couldn’t quite figure out how to stop, but thought removing himself to a green, quiet place at the bottom of the world might do it. He was right.

The hot Maori and his lovely blond girlfriend invited me to stay for as long as I liked. This is what all Kiwis do, inexplicably. When I was ready to move on after a few days, they took the day off work to drive me to Rotorua, an actively volcanic national park like Yellowstone with crazy stinky weird stuff coming out of the earth. With the funky smells of Rotorua returned the emotional funk of my work heartbreak in Hollywood, my first-week running-away high fading as my new friends drove off. So I kept moving.

My Mount Maunganui friends insisted that I go to Queenstown, a mountain town on a lake on the South Island, where bungee jumping and canyoneering and just about every other extreme sport were invented. They e-mailed their “gorgeous” friend Alex, who lived in town, and promised I’d be shown a great time. Why I expected Alex to be a hot, single, interested, male extreme-sports guide, after so much evidence that this was not going to happen on this trip, is beyond me, but I did. As you would expect, because you are brighter than I, Alex was a beautiful,
thirtysomething woman. And instead of meeting me for a beer, like I suggested, she met me at the airport, with my name on a sign, then took me back to her lovely two-bedroom cottage on a flowery hill overlooking the town and the lake.

“I hope this is okay,” Alex said, as she showed me to her extra bedroom, where she had put lavender on the pillow. “Stay as long as you like.”

This is just what happens in New Zealand. In the six weeks I ended up spending in that country, originally knowing only one local, I paid for a place to stay for exactly seven nights. Kiwis just kept passing me to other Kiwis, who inexplicably would invite me to stay for months if I wanted, and then call another Kiwi down the road to take me in if I was moving on. Maybe being in the middle of the ocean at the bottom of the world makes them happy for a visitor and a story, or maybe they’re just the most hospitable people on earth. As someone who comes from a group of friends who no longer give each other rides to the airport or help each other move, I found it remarkable.

Gorgeous Alex turned out to know every extreme-sports guide in town. That first day, she and I went down to the lakefront and lay in the sun, watching paragliders float down from a mountain above us. I said I’d love to paraglide while I was in town.

“Easy! That’s Casey flying down right now. I’ll text him,” Alex said, and pulled out her phone. Moments later, smiley, adorable Casey dropped out of the sky and landed lightly on the sand in front of us.

“Welcome to town, American friend! Got your text,
done for the day, but I’ll take you flying in the morning,” Casey trilled in his delightful accent, almost as he landed. He then threw his parachute into a backpack and invited us to come across the street to the bar where the flyboys were all gathered for postwork beers, a parachute under every barstool.

That night I extended my trip by three weeks.

But I would not end up kissing any of these men, regardless of how long I stayed. I would go on glorious, wind-whipped rides around the lake on the back of their Ducatis, and blast through canyons on their speedboats, and eat and drink in their homemade houses. I would hear stories of how the idea of bungee jumping came to two of them one night on acid, twenty years before, and of their famous illegal leap off the Eiffel Tower that brought bungee jumping to the world stage. I would go to a couple of memorial parties/flights with them (an alarming percentage of their population had died in extreme-sports accidents, and they always memorialized these victims with more extreme sports). I went to one flirty (taken) flyboy’s fortieth birthday, which was out in the country, at the base of a mountain, at the paragliding headquarters. While a hundred people danced on a deck under the stars, he and a few friends took their parachutes up to the mountain above us at midnight, and flew through the pitch-black night to the dancing throngs way below. Their headlamps glittered faintly in the sky above the makeshift dance floor where we all watched them drift down through the darkness for half an hour, until they finally landed perfectly in the middle of the party.

While there were not a lot of handsome men in New Zealand (too small a genetic pool of Brits breeding with Brits?), the few there were lived in Queenstown. But they all had girlfriends. Perhaps another result of being on a sparsely populated, male-deficient set of islands at the bottom of the world—the cute ones are hunted too aggressively to roam free for long.

Finally, on yet another day that Casey and the other Kiwi flyers said was too windy to go safely, a twenty-year-old Swiss paraglider named Swiss Dave offered to take me flying. And because my fear of missing out on a nice heartbreak-numbing adventure is far greater than my fear of getting blown into a mountain, I went.

Swiss Dave and I drove way down the valley, to a launch spot he said was safer on windy days than the mountain above town, where the pesky buildings and large freezing lake could make a missed landing a bummer. We drove up a mountain, he strapped me to his chest, and we ran off a cliff, floating into the sky over the green, green valley. It made me feel like Supergirl, and Swiss Dave started doing tricks, spiraling to the right, and then to the left. I loved it … until I started to get nauseated.

“I think I don’t feel well!” I shouted into the wind.

“Yeah, it’s rough up here!” Dave shouted back. “Probably was too windy after all. Gonna miss the landing spot!”

“I kinda think I’m gonna be sick!” I finally confessed, as we kept drifting.

“We’re almost there. There’s a sheep field that the farmer lets me land in when I overshoot. Hang on!”

Finally, fifteen seconds before landing, I could hang on
no longer. For some reason I decided that when one needs to vomit while falling from the sky strapped to the chest of a Swiss man, the best move is to cover one’s mouth with one’s hands. Which did a great job of making sure all of the vomit went back onto my own face, as well as around my head and onto the face of Swiss Dave. This all happened about four seconds before we hit the ground, hard, and I fell face-first into a pile of sheep shit, Swiss Dave on top of me.

“Nice!” he exclaimed.

I met up with Swiss Dave five years later, in Interlaken, Switzerland, where he was living. He was still paragliding, and Emma and I were traveling through after a spring snowboarding mission on the Matterhorn. I bought him a beer, and apologized once again for my gastric faux pas all those years earlier. He waved me off—it apparently happens all the time.

“What percentage of the people you take up puke on you?” I asked him that night, in a loud Swiss basement nightclub, as he danced behind my cousin.

“About eighty,” he admitted, grinning. “At least one per day.”

I
finally left Queenstown. The uninterested and/or coupled-up cute boys were getting depressing. I started to wonder if my romantic luck abroad was limited to non-English-speaking countries, where my personality couldn’t get in the way. My gloom began to return, and I
would e-mail my writer friends and my producing partners from my show, and ask what I could have done differently to keep it all from imploding. The answer was always the same:
nothing.
It was doomed politically from the start. But I couldn’t stop replaying notes calls with executives, conversations with actors, moments that I mentally rewrote until I was smarter or more political or more manipulative or less trusting than I had actually been.