What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (30 page)

“I’m living with a man who priests hope will date their sisters,” I e-mailed my mom. I didn’t even discuss the other element—the priest had met me, and hadn’t for even a moment thought Juan and I were together. And Juan hadn’t turned the setup down because of anything having to do with me, either.

I also met Juan’s mother and grandmother, gracious, lovely women who lived together with their maid in a beautiful apartment down the street from Juan. And then, a few days into my time in Argentina, Juan’s grandmother was hospitalized. It looked bad, like she wouldn’t make it, and so family started to fly in from all over the world to say good-bye.

Now … how does one handle a dying grandmother when one is trying to be in a short-term vacationship that one’s partner may or may not want to be in? Did Juan want me to disappear? Or hold his hand at the bedside vigil?

“Cook,” my mother commanded over e-mail. “Cook
for everyone. Bring it to the hospital. That’s what Latin women expect.”

I asked Juan if he wanted me to leave, or stay, or help, or cook. He didn’t really give me any feedback, as usual. “Do what you like,” was about all I ever got.

So I cooked. I dropped by with food. I met lots of relatives, from all over the world, who looked very interested in the fact that Juan had an American girl by his side at his grandmother’s deathbed. And then I cleared out, meeting up with my other friends in the city, taking tango classes, giving Juan space in case I wasn’t welcome. It was awkward.

Juan’s grandmother eventually recovered, and lived for almost another year, it turned out. She was a very gentle, smiley woman, who gave great hugs, and had cool cheeks that smelled like lavender, and held my hand when we chatted. I’m glad I brought food to her hospital room.

A
t the end of my month in South America, the first of my two seven-hour flights home to Los Angeles got me to Panama, where I made a beeline for a bookstore. The AV system had been broken on the first flight, and I had finished reading my only book, and was terrified of another seven-hour flight without distraction. Panicking when I couldn’t find an English-language book in the entire airport, I headed for the ticket counter, where I confirmed that there were indeed movies on the next flight to Los Angeles.

“I really, really need them,” I said to the flight attendant.

“Okay,” she said. “Next?”

I was sick to my stomach. I was no longer the girl with an Argentine lover. Now I was just alone, and thirty-seven, and going home to get back on
Match.com
. It was only in that moment that I realized what a life raft Juan had been for me all of those years alone on my couch, even when we weren’t in contact. He was out there. He made me different. He was a possibility, a
maybe, just maybe.
And that was now over.

I bought a calling card, found a phone, and then, heart racing, I reached out across the continents and spilled my story to the girl who could always make me feel better.

“I really need you,” I said to Hope.

“Tell me,” she said, like always.

Hope had spent a couple of years in South America in high school and college, and loved it long before I did, so she knew exactly what I was describing as I told her about my month in Argentina with Juan’s friends and family. The delicious feeling of being
part of it
, of really living a normal life in a totally exotic place.

J
uan’s family had a campo, or a ranch, about five hours outside Buenos Aires. It had been in the family for generations, and his aunt and uncle raised soybeans and Arabian horses there. His uncle, a doctor in Buenos Aires, raced the horses on eight-hour endurance races even in his seventies, and riders from all over the world would come to his campo to buy his horses.

Juan had described this place to me many times over
the years, in ways that made me ache for my fantasy bicontinental life:

My last week in Argentina, Juan took me out to the campo for
Semana Santa.
We drove out with his welcoming, interesting aunt and uncle, and his cousin’s twelve-year-old daughter. She was chatty and adorable, and we traded Spanish and English lessons while she braided my hair, and Juan quietly stared out at the passing yellow
pampas
and blue sky.

I would learn from his little
prima
that Juan had never brought a girl out to the campo before. So when we arrived and joined twenty family members in three houses on the idyllic property, Juan and I were the subject of a lot of questions, and curious looks, and raised eyebrows. All in the friendliest, most welcoming of ways … which, it turns out, made Juan even tenser.

“
Lo amas?
” groups of little girls would ask me, in whispers, with secret smiles.

Do you love him?

His family did not do their part to turn me off my fantasy life as a
señora del campo.
There were walks during golden sunsets over the fields, picnics and maté and great conversation in the grass by the stream. There was a cook
who spent the day rolling hundreds of gnocchi for our lunch, while her husband, the oldest of three generations of Hugos who all worked the land (Hugo, Hugito, and eight-year-old Hugitito), killed and cooked a lamb over an open fire for our dinner. There were dozens of charming kids kissing me
Buenos días
on my cheek, and sitting in my lap as I read my portion of the Stations of the Cross aloud, in Spanish, around the fire on Good Friday. Juan and the boys all played
bici polo
on the lawn while Australian shepherd dogs chased the mallet-wielding, gorgeous Argentine men in their gaucho caps. We rode horses with cushy sheepskins instead of saddles, and met Saudis who had flown in to shop for Arabian horses.

Maybe I’m not totally sure we’re not supposed to end up together … I certainly could at least watch him ride a bike around with a polo mallet for the rest of my days.

On Easter Sunday, all twenty of us piled into cars and went into town for church. It was a tiny country
iglesia
, and held maybe a hundred people. We were all handed candles for the Light of Christ portion of the mass as we entered. Juan’s older cousin, a happy, funny woman who had gone to fancy English schools in Buenos Aires and now lived on the campo with her husband and five children, handed me a candle with a special whisper:

“I know the light of Christ is not yet in your heart, but I see it in your eyes.”

When it came time for everyone to take Communion, every single person in the church filed up to the front. All of the community, Juan’s tiny cousins, Juan’s seventy-year-old aunt and uncle. Everyone walked up to the priest
holding their candles, except for me and Juan. I didn’t go, obviously, because I’m not Catholic. But while everyone else in the church apparently knew why Juan didn’t go either, I wouldn’t find out why until later.

It was because of me. Because he had sinned since his last confession (a lot, especially in the shower; good Lord, especially in the shower) and was not worthy of receiving Communion.

I had sullied him. And now everybody in town knew.

Later that night, everyone else went to sleep, and Juan and I stayed up reading by the fire. We had been given separate rooms, but were staying alone in the house, so sexy time was certainly possible right there on the couch … I thought. But then I crawled onto Juan’s chest, and tried to kiss him.

He didn’t kiss me back.

And so we finally talked about it.

“I think you are falling in love, and I am not,” Juan began.

“
B
ut you weren’t!” Hope reminded me as I wept on the phone in the Panama airport.

“I know, but why wasn’t he? Is it because I’m too old now? Do you think he was grossed out having sex with me all month? Do you think he wished I hadn’t come? I can’t believe it’s over and I’m just single and alone!” I was snotty.

I learned from Juan, as I cried and we talked, that, unlike me, he had not gone into the month mostly sure it wasn’t going to work out. He wouldn’t have done it at all
if that were how he felt. He brought me into his life for the first time because he thought maybe it
would
work.

“So, you really thought you’d maybe move to L.A., or I’d move to Buenos Aires, and we’d figure it out?” I asked.

“Well … yes.”

I hated that conversation. The greatest thing about vacation romances is you don’t have to break up, or say hard things to each other about what you are or aren’t feeling. You don’t have to talk about what isn’t working, or why. You get to just tell yourselves that it would have lasted forever if not for the geography.
You don’t have to break up.

But Juan needed to break up. I still don’t know when he realized he wasn’t falling in love with me. But when he did, he became racked with guilt about the sex, and about thinking he was leading me on. Unlike me, he hadn’t spent a decade learning how to be madly in love for the length of a vacation, even if he wasn’t in love at all. And he wasn’t on vacation—he was smack-dab in the middle of his life, where I was being warmly embraced by everyone in it, even though he knew I wasn’t going to stay.

Precious little five-year-old cousins were asking him if we were going to get married, and he knew they were never going to see me again. Of course he couldn’t pretend.

“
W
hy
couldn’t he just pretend?!
” I wailed to Hope from my pay phone in Panama.

“Because that’s not how he works,” my friend said. “You got a monthlong vacation from being single. It felt wonderful. Of course you want to be a part of that beautiful
family and live in Argentina. But you and Juan aren’t a match.”

“I know, but now I’m just a single girl. I don’t have a Same-Time-Next-Year Argentine lover anymore. I’m not going to live on a campo or have Spanish-speaking babies. It’s over.”

“Just come home and we’ll do something fun. Maybe it’s good you’re putting a period on this chapter anyway. What does your mom say about voids?”

I
got on my last flight home. And, once again, the plane’s AV system was broken. Never fly Copa. Coming as close to a panic attack as I’ve ever come at the prospect of staring at the back of a seat and thinking for seven hours, I told the flight steward my story of love and loss to help him understand how badly I needed him to fix the movie situation. He seemed to share my sense of drama, and so gasped and squeezed my shoulder and told me he’d try his best, but all he was able to do was get me
The Tourist
with no audio. So I plugged into iTunes, and took a midafternoon Ambien, and drifted off watching Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp, beautiful people in a beautiful place, speaking words that it is probably better I couldn’t hear. The story you imagine is almost always better than the one with the clunky dialogue.

“Love Like You’re About to Get Deported”

A few months before I went to Argentina for the last time, my writer friend Erin called me up:

“Great news. This amazing guy’s wife just left him. We’re going to give him a few months to recover and date a little, and then I’m setting you up. Let’s say May or June.”

I said that sounded great; if I was single and in Los Angeles in May, I was going to be wildly lonely and disappointed about Juan and ready to meet an amazing guy. So our timelines worked nicely.

“Great, so introduce me to my husband in May,” I said glibly.

“It’s on the calendar.”

In May, after I returned from my last trip to Argentina, Erin introduced me to Rob. He was a writer, too, with dreamy curls, a square jaw, broad shoulders, and a big Crest smile. My boss, who writes big movies filled with nice-guy leading men you root for, recently said about him, “He’s the kind of nice-guy leading man you root for in the movies.” When we met, he was newly separated after a fourteen-year marriage, with two tween sons and a wounded spirit that you could barely find underneath his incredibly buoyant, optimistic heart.

I had never dated anyone with kids. Kids had always been a deal breaker, mostly because of how awful my relationship with my own stepmother had been. I knew I wouldn’t be as evil as she had been to me, but I couldn’t guarantee that some guy’s kids wouldn’t be as evil as I had been to her, either. So I avoided the possibility.

But after a few years of dating forty-year-old men who were still acting like twenty-year-olds (which, granted, was not that different from me), I was ready for someone who had done something as huge with his four decades on earth as become a father. Rob was one of those “good ones” who got snatched up, and now he was back on the market. I liked that he was a grown-up, that he knew how to commit and raise a family. And I liked how his face changed when I asked him what his kids were like.

He needed a little help remembering how to date. I taught him that if a girl offers you a ride to your car, especially if your car is less than a block away, it’s an invitation
to kiss her. He learned to remove after-dinner mints from his mouth
before
moving in for a first kiss.