What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (21 page)

One thing was for sure: I was not yet ready to go back to Hollywood.

I needed to walk. So I joined a five-day hut-to-hut hiking tour of the Milford Track, one of the iconic Great Walks of New Zealand. We walked eight to ten hours a day, through green, wet valleys, sometimes in the rain, always surrounded by dozens of waterfalls streaming down the black mountains on either side. At night we slept under down comforters in secluded lodges that were only for the walkers, and ate three-course meals with wine we didn’t have to carry on our exhausted backs. I spent the walking days alternating between peaceful and angry. Sometimes just breathing in the green, sometimes playing out various drafts of perfectly written “so there!”s against those who did me wrong in Hollywood as I marched.

My walking mates, mostly other solo travelers, were, for the most part, no less tortured. Among the group, we had:

One punk-rock-haired Australian girl who was going through her first divorce at twenty-six.

One twentysomething Swedish student whose mother
had kidnapped her and her siblings as children. Her mother then brainwashed them with lies about their Canadian father, who died before my friend finally found out the truth and tracked him down.

One sixty-year-old Australian owner of an online gambling site who had just lost his mother.

One fortysomething American couple and their single female friend, who struggled valiantly not to be sad about being a third wheel.

One thirty-year-old, muscled Texan who had just cashed out of a successful sex toy business and was trying to figure out what to do next.

And finally there were two fiftysomething Kiwi businessmen, old, jolly friends who took hiking and fishing trips together a few times a year, and whose wives and grown children were friends back home. One night, in one of the cozy little lodges, I watched the two buddies rubbing each other’s sore backs and feet … and heads and legs and chests. Further conversation made it clear that these quarterly fishing and hiking vacations were also vacations from their marriages, and heterosexuality.

“Do your wives know?” I asked them.

“Probably,” they said cheerily. “Who knows. But we don’t talk about it.”

“Have you ever thought of leaving them, and being together?” I asked.

“Nah, the girls are lovely. And the four of us have a nice time together. We just like a little
Brokeback
variety!” one explained. They had been taking these trips for almost thirty years.

We all walked, and talked, and sometimes separated and spent the whole day walking alone. The scenery looked like that of
The Lord of the Rings
, and we felt like explorers on a quest. I started replaying the last year of my life less, and started to think about the future more. At night in the lodge, my new friends reported the same phenomenon. Divorces were becoming less important, deaths less tragic and more a part of life, ideas for “what’s next” springing up with each step. My “tragedy” felt much less like a tragedy in the face of these real tragedies, and more like what it was: a really lucky experience that just didn’t last forever.

Our five-day walk ended in Milford Sound, a spectacular bay surrounded by dramatic fjords, on a dark, stormy day. We celebrated the journey, dancing in the outpost’s one pub, and playing pool, and taking pictures of one another in big group hugs. I held off an inappropriately young kayaking guide or two so I could just chat and laugh with my new friends. I had finally taken the universe’s hint: this trip was not for kissing boys.

(To this day, many years after my New Zealand adventure, I have one sad, lone condom in my toiletry bag. It made that trip to New Zealand with me … and came home with me. Six years later, it’s become sort of a good-luck totem, that hopeful condom that never got used, but is extraordinarily well-traveled.)

J
ana the kidnapped Swedish girl had been traveling around New Zealand on a bicycle. She had ridden alone, with all of her belongings, across the South Island, over a mountain
range, staying with sheep farmers along the way who would call their friends who were a day’s ride down the road to make sure she had another bed for the next night. She and I decided to travel together for a few days after Milford, and so got a little car, and headed east to Kaikoura.

Kaikoura is a tiny town on the water, famous for its marine life. I had grown up on the ocean, had traveled to dozens of beach towns around the world, and yet had never seen a whale. It was weird, and I was determined to see one here. Jana decided she’d rather see wine country, and so we separated for the afternoon.

You could go whale watching two ways: on a boat, or in a helicopter. Since in New Zealand only two vessels of any sort are allowed to be near a whale at any one time, once a whale surfaces it’s a race by all of the tour companies to be one of those two. So the helicopter is the way to go, because you get to the whale first. I learned in the hostel that my ability to take the more expensive helicopter option made me a “flash-packer” in this part of the world, which basically means you are a backpacker who can afford private rooms in the hostel and helicopter rides. I liked that—it sounded age-appropriate, but still fun.

I went up in the helicopter after a day of swimming in the ocean with hundreds of wild dolphins. We were instructed that if we sang to them it would get their attention, so a dozen of us floated in the frigid Antarctic water singing “Hot Cross Buns” and “Paradise City” into our snorkels. The dolphins swam by with their babies, who nosed me in the tummy and jumped over and under us
as they passed. After the dolphin swim, I headed for the helicopter, where my tour partners were a gorgeous honeymooning couple from, of course, Argentina. The man could have been Father Juan’s brother, all shiny hair and
dulce de leche
skin. We went up together, and I got to see my first whale in the wild.

I ended the day alone on a black-sand beach under a glacier-covered mountain, and as I watched the sun set, I noticed something: I wasn’t mentally fighting with anyone in Hollywood anymore. I was just alone on a beach, and at peace. The year started to coalesce for me: I had basically gone to grad school for showrunning. I knew how to do it now. I had been given an amazing experience, and a four-million-dollar short film about my family. I had learned I
was
a real writer, that if I had to write a new script in one day every day for months for forty-five bosses with conflicting directives, I could. What had been the worst part of the show experience was how out of control I was. But getting on a plane and getting away from it all gave me my life back so I could see what was ultimately a work failure as just a small part of a big picture of goodness. My life as it had lain out so far felt very full, and rich.

But also, I realized … 
done.
Not like I was ready to die, or change careers, or leave L.A. forever, but I realized at the end of this day of spectacular experiences by myself that I had
a lot
of days full of spectacular experiences by myself. The whole Lone Woman at the Bottom of the World thing was pretty checked off. Perhaps, finally, even played out. Just as I had proved to myself that I was a real writer, I had proved to myself that I could be happy and
brave and tackle the planet by myself. So … I didn’t need to prove anything anymore. I could stop.

I was ready to stop doing all of this alone.

I
said good-bye to Jana, spent another couple of weeks driving around alone (on the wrong side of the car, and the wrong side of the road, feeling like Superwoman), taking kayak trips (with an all-female group, natch), and going to Peter Jackson’s Christmas party with a hundred nerdy American visual-effects guys (my life at home). I slept in haunted, empty hotels at the end of long, rainy roads, lonely and spooked; I slept on a houseboat hostel in the captain’s (captainless) quarters; I slept in the homes of new, lovely Kiwi friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends. I had so many adventures with so many kind, hospitable souls that my faith in upright primates was restored.

And since that was the real goal, just in time for Christmas, I packed up my unused, well-traveled condom, and I went home.

“Thirty-Five Is Too Old to Be Sleeping in a Bathroom”

There are moments in one’s life that make one realize one could be making better choices. That moment for me was when I found myself, at age thirty-five, sleeping on a bathroom floor in Australia. For a week.

When I came home from New Zealand, I was a new woman. I felt wise and washed clean by the highs and lows of the previous year. I was ready to create and be loved and grow up. I went straight to my agent the day after I got home and told him I was taking the year off from TV to write my first movie. I had Christmas with my family, and then drove up to Mammoth with Hope and some other friends to snowboard for a few days on our way up
to a twenties masquerade New Year’s Eve ball that Ferris and Thomas were throwing in an art deco mansion in San Francisco. I felt great.

And then, an hour after we drove into Mammoth, I walked out of a restaurant, slipped on black ice, and broke my leg. The same one that had been run over 360 days before.

Once again, my husband, Hope, took me to the hospital. The next day. After she went snowboarding. There were ten feet of fresh powder and blue skies that day, and I would have done the same thing.

As I lay on the couch waiting for my friends to get off the mountain, I got even more philosophical. God really,
really
wanted me to sit still in the void. The small hints were not reaching me, so he was resorting to physical violence. But … the void is so
lonely
! So I put off the void-sitting until right after I flew home from Mammoth, saw a doctor to make sure I didn’t need surgery, hitched a ride up to San Francisco for the masquerade ball, and Lindy-Hopped all night in my air cast.

But then,
after that
, I definitely sat still in the void for a full couple of weeks. I couldn’t drive so I found myself back at my mom’s, who couldn’t believe her luck. Her daughter hobbled and in her home two years in a row! Her dreams were coming true.

But … 
voids.
Right? So right in the middle of this big one, I went out to dinner with Ben.

Remember Ben? The guy I was dating when I crushed on imaginary Ferris five years earlier, the heart I broke
when I was not yet ready to settle down? Well, he was finally over me. That had been a process since the Ambien e-mail debacle two years earlier, but he had done it.

And then there I was, literally tenderized like pounded meat by my year of work, failure, and physical and emotional battering. My New Zealand beach realization that I was ready for all of the things I had feared I was too broken to ever want felt both good because it meant that I was normal, but also terrifying.
I was normal.
Years later, Lena Dunham’s character on
Girls
would have a similar moment when she broke down and wept to a nice, handsome doctor with a beautiful house, “Please don’t tell anyone this, but I want to be happy … I want all the things everyone wants.” I was embarrassed to be a thirty-five-year-old woman who was looking for true love, and a family. It was so freaking
typical.
But I was also deeply relieved that I’d finally gotten there.

And so, in this place, I reached out to Ben, and asked him out to dinner, as friends. He was not all that into the idea, since he rightly felt I had not acted in a particularly friendly way over the last few years. I guess that had been hanging over me—Ben was the person my internal
mishegas
had hurt the most. I wanted to fix the relationship, build something from this new place of peace.

At dinner he had a new swagger from a new job and a new band and, apparently, a new plethora of women. He also just had a new
certain something.
Probably that
certain something
was that he was over me. And so I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

In retrospect, going back to Ben was probably an attempt to prove to myself that
I had been fixed.
In a scientific experiment, you keep one thing constant when you’re trying to figure out which combination of elements is the right one. Ben was the constant. There had been love there, but I had ruined it. If I could go back to the original source and build love there again, the only logical conclusion was that
I
was now working.

After a couple of months of soul-searching and obsessing, and talking to friends who insisted that Ben and I were not a match and that I had broken up with him for a reason, I finally decided that I was obsessing about Ben because of Ben and not because of me. So I went up to his little house in the hills and told him how connected to him I still felt after all of these years. I admitted that the Ambien-fueled e-mail from Madrid didn’t come from nowhere. And I asked for another chance.

“Is this because you’re thirty-five and lonely?” Ben asked, a valid question that his friends would continue to insist was the answer.