Free What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman Page B

these amazing, hilarious women who were also part of the trip, and danced with the charming men. Where most of my friends at home had fallen into the “married” or “bitter to be single” categories, here was a group of thirtysomething single people who were
delighted
to be single in their thirties. Their careers were starting to take off, and the combination of the newfound money no one had had in their twenties and the freedom they all protected like mama bears with their cubs was a heady brew. I would learn that this group entering a bar is a thing of beauty: within moments, everyone will split up and immediately make new friends in every corner, and they will all, ultimately, be dancing in one another’s collective arms by the end of the night. We owned every room we entered. I was pining for Ferris, but I was also having the best time of my life.
    N ew Year’s Eve arrived. Now, while I was not exactly “connecting” with Ferris, and was starting to wonder if perhaps he and I were perhaps a little
too
alike, he had not yet hooked up with any of the models or Bond girls he had collected. And so I was still holding out hope for a midnight kiss moment, involving fireworks and chilly Parisian night air, that would deliver on everything the trip (and the rest of my life) was supposed to be.
    Emma, Sally, and I made our way through winteryParis to Ferris’s party at the American Cathedral. Ferris’s brother’s stone-and-stained-glass priest’s apartment in the church was filled with food and music and people in gorgeous dresses and tuxedos, velvet smoking jackets and feather boas, Givenchy gowns and seventies ruffled thrift-store shirts. There were what turned out to be members of the Parisian Algerian mafia, who had given their number to Ferris “in case shit went down.” (Shit never went down, but that number got a lot of cool tables at impossible-to-get-into Parisian clubs.) There were guys who managed the finances of sovereign nations and
New Yorker
cartoonists and a Brit in “public relations” who would spend the next eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan as one of General Petraeus’s closest advisors. Ferris had met dozens of Parisians during his month in town, and they mixed with his other guests, who had flown in from all over the U.S. and Europe. It had only taken Ferris a couple of weeks to become a hub in Paris, just like he was at home.
    A wrought-iron spiral staircase stood in the middle of the living room, and it disappeared into what turned out to be the cathedral’s bell tower, which looked out over the Eiffel Tower, and all of Paris. Over the course of the evening, people would bundle up and carefully climb the stairs in stilettos, up up up through three stories of the windy, pigeon-filled stone tower, trying not to fall through the grates or spill their champagne.
    Ferris was wearing a blue velvet tux that he has worn every New Year’s since. (I just texted him to confirm that he never washes the tux. He responded: “The yearly Halloween cow costume never gets washed, but should. Theblue velvet tux doesn’t really need cleaning.” So … no. He never washes it.) Anyway, back on that first magical night when the tux was still clean, Ferris came over to welcome us with two bottles: one a three-foot-tall double magnum of red wine, and the other a bottle of absinthe he had smuggled in from Berlin. He poured us glasses of both, happily spilling red wine that could not possibly be successfully poured from so large a bottle. He looked ecstatic that I was there, and kissed me on both cheeks, European-style, and gushed about how beautiful I looked … and then did the same to everyone else.
    That was about how the night went. I circled Ferris, he circled away. Another friend gave me a quick awkward peck at midnight, at the top of the bell tower, while we all huddled together on the freezing, tiny balcony and watched the fireworks I had imagined going off over my midnight kiss instead going off