25 Challenge Accepted
TWENTY-FIVE
Challenge Accepted
Three days later I drove toward the house where Wlad was staying for a few weeks. Wlad had texted me while I was behind the wheel, and after I parked in the driveway, I checked my phone.
Running late. I left the key on top of the rock wall for you.
I got out and looked left, then right. There were two walls, and both were at least six feet tall. Remember, I’m five foot two.
“All right, here we go,” I said as I approached one, grabbed on to whatever handholds I could find, and started to climb. When I was able to peek over the top, I hoisted myself up, rested my belly on the edge, and scanned every inch of the wall.
There was no key in sight.
I jumped down, dusted myself off, and walked toward the other wall, shaking my head and wondering what Wlad could have possibly been thinking. Then I remembered I had an extra wiper blade in the back of my car, and surely it was long enough to reach the top of the wall.
“Here goes nothing,” I muttered as I reached up and scraped the wiper blade across the top of the wall. No key. I moved down the length of the wall, scraping as I went, and just as I was sure I’d hit something, I heard the front door open.
“Hi, can I help you?” a man’s voice said.
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “I am so sorry. I’m Hayden. Wlad told me he’d left a key on top of one of these walls for me.”
“I’m Roger,” he answered more kindly than I expected, given that it looked like I was trying to break into his house. “It looks like our friend thinks everyone’s as tall as he is,” he added. “So instead of killing yourself out here, come on in. Wlad’s not back yet, but you can wait for him inside.”
I smiled at Roger and thanked him. Then I put the wiper blade back in my car and followed him into the house.
A good half hour later, Wlad showed up. After some lighthearted joking about how he’d probably be late for his own funeral—then make sure the programs were on top of six-foot walls that no one could reach—we sat down on his friend’s couch and began talking.
Almost immediately, we fell into an easy conversation, and before I knew it, I was holding Wlad’s hand, then kissing him.
He wrapped me in his strong arms, and I swear I could have stayed there for the rest of my life.
For the next few days, Wlad and I were inseparable.
I didn’t feel any rush to leave or to be anywhere except by his side.
The more we talked, the more our habits and routines ebbed and flowed, and the more we learned about where we came from, as well as all the things we dreamed of doing in our lives.
Wlad told me that he’d grown up working class, living with his brother, parents, and grandmother in a house the size of a one-bedroom apartment.
His dad was in the Soviet air force, and they lived in Pripyat, Ukraine—the site of Chernobyl—when the disaster happened in 1986.
While most of the family fled, his father stayed to help clean up, just like my dad did at Ground Zero right after 9/11.
During the Soviet era, boxing—and sports in general—were viewed as a way to move up in life, so he and Vitali had trained in gyms every moment they could.
I wasn’t a fighter like him, but I understood this daily struggle to prove yourself to others.
Wlad was a kindred spirit. We had come from very different places, but our lives felt deeply entwined.
During one of my stints in treatment, I read The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman, and it caused me to reexamine every relationship in my life.
Chapman introduces the five ways—or “love languages”—through which people express and experience love, including physical touch, quality time spent, words of affirmation (such as compliments), and gift giving.
I realized immediately that my love languages are quality time spent and physical touch; I’m a hugger and a talker, and I need people around me because solitude depresses me.
My dad is the same; he needs his friends and his golf buddies, and when he didn’t experience satisfying intimacy with my mom, he escaped into the arms of another woman.
Both my mom and Wlad find love in words of affirmation.
Mom thrives on the positive reinforcement of coaching, callbacks, and casting; if she’s judged well, she feels loved.
Wlad, like Mom, is a workaholic. Work yields results, and a job well done affirms the effort put into it.
Wlad’s love language got a little deeper with me, though.
If he made me happy, it affirmed what he was doing.
If success in friendship, the boxing ring, intimacy, or anything else he poured his heart and soul into yielded positive emotional results for someone else, Wlad was on top of the world.
His superpower was making me happy because it made him happy.
“You know, I’ve only been in love once,” Wlad said to me one night.
“Oh yeah, who?”
“My ex-girlfriend, Diane. It was a long, long time ago.”
I didn’t respond because I could tell he was about to say something important.
Wlad sighed. “I don’t think I’ll ever fall in love again. I definitely don’t want to get married.”
If there’s anything I love, it’s a challenge.
I’m the girl who rode a zebra, sang “… Baby One More Time” on the Rosie O’Donnell Show when she was eleven, and ran directly into a fiery train derailment—without putting her long hair up.
When I heard Wlad’s declaration, I didn’t feel sad or worried about our future.
Instead, I decided to take the bull by the horns.
You’re not going to fall in love again? I thought. Challenge accepted. Wladimir Klitschko, you are about to lose your heart.
At the end of our three days together, Wlad told me he had to discuss something with me.
“I’m not going to see you after today… for a while at least,” he said.
“You’re leaving town?” I asked. My heart suddenly felt like it might break in two.
“Yes,” he answered. “I have to go back to Germany to train.”
I absorbed what Wlad said, and I burst into tears.
Wlad wrapped his arms around me, and I looked up and noticed the shock that was registering on his face. “What’s going on here? Are you crying? You don’t want me to go? Is that what this is about?”
“No, I don’t,” I answered, my chest heaving as tears streamed down my face. “I’m going to miss you so much.”
Wlad looked at me, and I saw a tiny shift of emotion that signaled he was ruminating on something.
He didn’t say it, but I knew what it was.
By opening the door to honesty and deep emotions, I’d given him permission to fall for me.
He’d been waiting for me—the one whose love language was tactile and tangible—to signal that something made me unhappy.
If I was unhappy, he was, too. For Wlad, it was challenge accepted as well.
His next move would be to lower his defenses and fall in love.
He was ready, and I was too.
Wlad didn’t know how long he’d be in Germany. Every day he was gone, longing ate at me, like Wlad was satisfying a need I hadn’t known existed.
In the late 2000s, Skype was the go-to platform for free international video calls, and it became my lifeline to Wlad while he was away.
I’m not exaggerating when I say that we rarely—if ever—turned it off.
If Wlad went to the gym to train, he left Skype on.
When I got in bed at night, I set my phone or my laptop next to me so Wlad and I could talk before I fell asleep.
We talked about our hopes, dreams, disappointments, families, careers, and mistakes.
We ate meals together. We cried and dreamed and planned.
The one thing we didn’t nail down, however, was when we’d see each other again. Wlad’s training schedule was packed from morning till night.
“So how does it work when you’re in the ring? Like, what do you like to do?” I asked on a call one night. I knew next to nothing about boxing, except that it involved getting hit in the head.
“I am known for defense,” he answered. “I stand back a lot and protect my body while my competitors advance, then punch and fail to connect. When they get exhausted, I punch them out.”
“Whoa,” I said. “That’s impressive.”
Wlad laughed. “Tell that to my critics. They think my fights are boring because I don’t throw many punches. But my strategy has allowed me to fight my entire life without getting any brain damage.”
I paused before responding. “I guess if I were a boxer, I’d be right in there, throwing punches like crazy,” I said.
“I know you would,” he answered. “But in boxing, you have to watch as much as you have to act. I watch the other boxers and find their weaknesses, then attack. People call my fights boring, but I don’t feel that way. The fact that I study my opponents makes me smart.”
Wlad was smart, with a PhD in sports science and four languages (English, German, Russian, and Ukrainian) under his belt. He also owned a few businesses—including a sports management company—and invested in various ventures across Europe.
“I sit in many chairs,” he said one night.
Wlad had come up in a world so different from mine, with political oppression, poverty, and disaster, and yet he hadn’t let that weigh him down.
He’d used the body he was born with to create a better life, and he kept fighting—both in the ring and outside it.
Forget the tough Wlad I’d met at Diana’s book party.
The Wlad I was falling in love with looked intimidating, but he was good as gold.
“I really, really miss you, Wlad,” I said early one morning a few months into our separation. “I’m not sure how much longer I can stand having a relationship on Skype.”
He didn’t answer, and I figured he’d walked away from his phone for a minute. Then, suddenly, a photo popped up in my texts.
“Wlad?” I asked. “Why are you sending me a photo of my front gate?”
“You got my picture?”
“Yes, what is going on?”
“Come outside.”
I jumped up from bed, ran through the house, and swung open the door. There stood Wlad holding a bouquet of flowers.
“Wlad!” I screamed, jumping into his arms. “I can’t believe it!”
“I’m in town for a few days. Can I stay with you?”
“Of course you can,” I replied. “Now, come inside.”
The next few times Wlad returned to LA, he showed up at my house unannounced just like he had the first time. He always brought thoughtful, beautiful gifts, and we’d spend entire days together until he had to leave town.
“Roll over, monkey,” he sometimes said just before we went to sleep. “You’re taking up the whole bed.”
“Monkey” was his nickname for me, along with “kukolka,” which means “little doll” in Russian.
As a person whose life had been scheduled from dawn to dusk for years, I loved the surprise and spontaneity Wlad brought to my life.
The truth was I was getting bored with everything other than him, and I needed an outlet and a distraction.
Heroes was well into its fourth season, and the entire cast felt that the writers were cranking out scripts like they were on autopilot.
The plotlines didn’t feel fresh, the writing seemed forced, and none of us felt the electricity and suspense we had in the beginning.
I still loved my castmates, my character, and all the stunts I got to do—and there was no part of me that wasn’t grateful for the opportunities I’d had on the show—but it was time to move on.
I wanted to run away from the mundane and toward excitement.
I wanted a new life on my own terms, with someone far away from everything I knew.
That was Wlad. I knew, deep in my heart, he’d be one of the biggest influences in my life, breaking open my world and taking me to places I’d never been before. I couldn’t wait.