What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding (5 page)

Earlier that year, at a meditation workshop with a stressed-out friend, the meditation guide was walking us through an exercise, and asked us a question that we were to think about as we sat.

“With no thoughts, with no words, what am I?”

Dead.
Immediately, with medium-size panic and a shortness of breath, that was my answer. Without thoughts, words,
speech
 … death. My career and my identity were filled with millions of words daily, and without them I
would be a black hole. My friend and I talked about the question after the class, and I was surprised to hear that her reaction had been absolutely opposite from mine. For her, the idea of no words, and no thoughts, made her deeply calm and peaceful.

For me it meant I was gone.

But on that trip to Russia, I eventually got used to being without words. I could still smile at people, and pass the bread, and look friendly. I was not just the words that came out of my mouth. I was still there without them. And that’s when I just ate my cheese salad and
relaxed.
I relaxed to such a degree that I realized I had never been relaxed at any dinner party in my entire life. This was my favorite part about my trip to Russia.

Aside from Aleg.

M
y Russian lover was a bartender. You will find that bartenders will become a recurring theme. Eventually, in my early thirties, I made a decision: no more dating people who serve food or drink in the United States (excluding Hawaii and Alaska). Now, foodservers of these United States, don’t get offended. If I lived anywhere else, I would love to take you out for a drink. But I live in Los Angeles, and so dating a waiter or bartender here means you are
actually
dating an actor or model or musician, which is an unreasonable, self-destructive thing to do.

But a no-bartenders rule is just as unreasonable when traveling abroad. Especially when you’re traveling alone, since there’s often no one to talk to but the people who are
serving you. Which brings us back to Aleg, and his sharp, exquisite Russian features, his floppy, shiny, dark hair, his deep, tortured Russian eyes. I met him one night when Sasha and I went to his bar for a drink, where I looked into those eyes and cooed, “
Vodka tonica
,” which is Russian for “vodka tonic.” I said it with a great accent. Then we took our drinks and found a table. But Aleg and I couldn’t stop staring at each other.

“I love him,” was all I could say to Sasha.
Love
is a way easier word to use out of the country.

“Do you want me to go talk to him for you?” she asked.

No, I was embarrassed. Also, I had a boyfriend. Sasha looked irritated. Since I had told her that I would by no means be marrying Trevor, she was ready for me to be done with it already. So I looked back at Aleg, who was still simmering.

Well …
maybe he had a good idea for where we should go next? Maybe there was a wonderful local cultural event that he would know about. She could ask him about that, at the very least.

We got up and marched over to the beautiful bartender. Sasha started speaking to him in Russian, and they chatted for a couple of minutes while I did my Ulla routine, smiling and nodding whenever Aleg would look my way with those freakin’
eyes.

After a couple of minutes, Sasha turned to me. “This is Aleg. I told him you like him. He likes you, too. You have a date with him tomorrow night. Don’t say no, because you’re not going to marry Trevor anyway, which means you’re going to be single someday soon, which means it
would be stupid to not go out with a Russian in Russia, which is the thing you’re supposed to do in the place you’re supposed to do it.”

Sasha could make a great point.

I blushed, and Aleg reached out his hand. I put my hand in his, and he squeezed it.

“Priviet, Kristinichka.”
Hello, my little Kristin.

“How many years, how many winters.”

Sweet Jesus.

S
asha called Aleg the next day, as promised, and chatted with him about where we would all meet. He asked to speak with me, and she handed me the phone.

“
Priviet?
” I tried.

“Hello,
Kristinichka
,” Aleg purred sweetly.

I giggled. “Hello, Aleg!”

A long beat, then he spoke again, sweetly, with so much hope: “Tonight?”

Aleg had learned an English word! I loved him. He was so smart.

“
Dah!
Tonight!” I trilled.

Another long beat, then:

“Kristinichka.”

Another giggle, then, “Aleg.”

Sweet Jesus.

S
asha and I hitched a ride to the bar where we would meet. As wildly dangerous as that sounds (and felt), that’s how
you got around Russia. There weren’t enough taxis by a long shot, and so you just raised your hand, and then someone would pull over, ask you where you wanted to go, and tell you how much they would charge to take you there. Lots of people needed rides, and everyone who wasn’t in the mob or the government (same people) needed extra money.

What this meant in practice was that two American girls would raise their hands. A beat-up car, usually containing one or two enormous, terrifying, glowering, mobster-looking men in black leather jackets, would pull over and ask, “Where to?” while swigging from a bottle of vodka. The American girls would decide whether the men were actually dangerous, or just dangerous-looking, like most Russians. (The Russian-born American girl was the first to note that, so it’s more about self-loathing than xenophobia.)

We made a rule that we would only get in a car that contained fewer than two terrifying-looking giants, reasoning that we could overpower one three-hundred-pound Russian kidnapper, but two could get rapey. This all got less scary the more we did it, though, because inevitably the conversation with these gray-faced behemoths went something like this (in Russian):

Looks thus kept being deceiving, which made me very grateful to be with a Russian speaker. Because before Sasha would open her mouth, every single person in Russia looked at us as though they were going to kill us like they’d just killed their favorite dog when they realized they couldn’t feed it through the winter.

“That’s just what their faces look like,” Sasha said to her mom one night.

Then she squeezed her mother’s hand again.

O
n the night of my big date, we hitched a ride to the loud, dark club that Aleg had chosen for a meeting place. I had spent the day telling myself that meeting up with a guy did not mean I had to hook up with him—we were just making local friends!

Aleg showed up a few minutes after we ordered our
vodka tonica
s, and kissed me three times on the cheeks, right left right, the Russian way. What is important to understand about this custom is that you get one cheek kissed, then your noses and lips and eyes brush past each other’s on your way to the other cheek, and then you do the
whole pass and brush routine
yet another time
on your way back to the first cheek, breathing each other in the whole while. The slower the pass from one cheek to the next, the more serious the greeting. It’s a pretty great way to spice up those hard, gray, vodka-and-snow-filled lives.

Aleg’s passes were crazy slow.

Aleg immediately recognized a friend at the bar—Misha, a sexily dangerous-looking tattoo artist in his midthirties. Sasha immediately recognized that she needed to get a closer look at Misha’s tattoo sleeves. So my translator left Aleg and me alone to get to know each other.

Aleg leaned over and screamed at me (it was very loud), “I speak small of English!”

“Fantastic!” I screamed back. “I’m kind of a talker, and the thought of what we were going to do if we couldn’t communicate was sort of terrifying! So, are you from Moscow? How do you know Misha?”

Aleg looked at me, panicked for one beat, two, three … and then just kissed me.

He kissed the SHIT out of me. One thing that a tortured, dramatic worldview does for someone is it makes him a HELL of a kisser. At least, Sasha and I came to this understanding based on our sample size of two. Later in life I’d also find the same can be said about Israelis, who obviously share the Russian tortured, dramatic thing, combined with the whole “We may not even be here tomorrow and should try to make more Jews for the good of our people” Jewish thing. That particularly amps up the passion quotient. The tortured worldview kissing theory can even
be true about regular Americans, if they’re sensitive and unhappy enough.

So maybe my sample size is large enough. I’m sure my mother thinks so.

But back to the date. While Sasha could actually communicate with her new friend, it wasn’t long before she, too, was gathering her own kissing data on the other end of the bar. The evening quickly turned into a veritable crazy-Russian-night-out stereotype: there was a lot of vodka, a lot of champagne, dirty dancing on a dance floor flooded with lots of flashing lights and fur-clad women shimmying to a combo of bad techno and bizarre American one-hit wonders that had apparently been huge in Russia. “Mambo No. 5” got a huge reaction, for example.

(A side note about Russian women: good God are they hot when they are eighteen. The girls in this club were all legs and cheekbones, pouty lips and exquisite big eyes. But, quite tragically,
every woman over forty
in Russia looks like a tiny, shriveled, ancient little gnome. That cold, pessimistic, vodka-and-cigarette-filled, fresh-vegetable-free life is
hard
—it drives over women’s faces like a Soviet tank. Now that Sasha is a fantastic-looking forty, I can tell you it is not the genes, it is the life.)

Anyway, after some time dry humping to the Spin Doctors, Misha suggested we move the party back to his place, since Sasha was drunk enough to think that Misha was not too drunk to give her her very first tattoo.

We stumbled into a taxi with our bottles of vodka and champagne, and drove for a very, very long time. It turned
out that Misha lived with his parents in a housing project on the outskirts of Moscow. Aleg did, too. Almost no one in Russia lives with fewer than two or three generations of family, and yet everyone has a dacha—a summer house. We were confused about how such impoverished people, who often had PhDs yet lived life ten to a room, could all afford summer homes, until we started noticing the small wooden shacks along the side of the highway. These were dachas. Apparently, when you’ve spent a Russian winter with ten relatives in one room, a week alone in a shack next to a highway equals an attractive option for your summer vacation.

We finally pulled up to Misha’s towering tenement, and went up to the two-bedroom apartment, giggling and whispering as we snuck past his sleeping parents to Misha’s room. But Misha’s room was pretty small for four people trying to do terrible things to each other, and so Misha took Sasha for a twenty-minute tour of the bathroom, leaving me and Aleg to his futon.

Now, all day, when I wasn’t thinking about how I absolutely was not going to cheat on my boyfriend, I had been harboring a very specific Aleg-related fantasy. It basically involved him teaching me how to say all of the parts of the body in Russian, by kissing each part and then telling me the word for it, which I would then repeat and try to remember as he moved to kiss the next spot. Then I would do the same for him, in English. It was really a very adorable fantasy.

So, after a day of this, I found myself on a futon with my Russian. And let’s remember that I was twenty-eight,
and had been with two people in the previous eight years. It had been a
very
long time since I had been with someone for the first time, and it hadn’t happened very often. And Aleg and I could only communicate with our
eyes
, and our
bodies.
And we communicated
really effectively
that way. So everything was already fairly amazing when Aleg stopped doing something disgustingly wonderful, kissed the tip of my nose, and said:

“
Nos
.”

Nose. In Russian. HE WAS DOING IT! Delighted, I said “
nos
,” then kissed the tip of his nose and said “nose.” Aleg repeated, a great student: “nose.” Next was an ear. Fingers. Elbows. Terrible places.

Crazy, right?

Except it wasn’t. I would eventually, via many other vacation romances, learn something:
This always happens when you make love to someone who speaks another language. Always.
It’s crazy, but my fantasy apparently sprang from the fact that this is just a natural instinct for two people who cannot communicate and yet find themselves in the same room naked.

Sasha and Misha eventually returned, rumpled but smiling, for the second reckless portion of their evening together: the tattoo. My beautiful friend—fresh out of the Ivy League, the ultimate manifestation of the American Dream who had been saved from a life as just another angry-looking, prematurely aging Russian whose only way out of the country might have been as a mail-order bride—this young promising woman pulled down her pants, bent over a chair, and slurred at her new companion:

“Do whatever you want!”

Now, you might think that this should have been the moment where Sasha’s good friend would intervene. But I was still topless, reasoning that as long as Aleg stayed on top of me, my modesty could remain intact. And so instead of intervening, I took another ladylike swig out of a bottle of champagne and slurred, “I love that you’re doing this!”