Unwifeable(39)

“This will be interesting,” I say, trying to just be myself instead of someone who is totally out of her element. “I wonder if we’ll like each other for a whole weekend.”

“Maybe we’ll kill each other,” he says.

“Maybe!” I say brightly.

We sit on the window seats, looking out into the marshlands, drinking chardonnay. When Blaine goes off to run some errands, I am given the edict “Mi casa es su casa,” and I’m left alone to play woman of the manor. An hour later we are having cantaloupe and vanilla ice cream and zinfandel with his mother and her friends, which is surreal, to say the least. I’m meeting his mother?

“You’re from San Diego,” his mom says with an upper-crust lockjaw even more pronounced than Blaine’s. “And what do your parents do?”

There are a lot of double-cheek kisses on the way out, and then we’re off to another party in Bridgehampton. More zinfandel, more double-cheek kisses, and while I’m having fun, it’s also a little bit like the episode of The Sopranos where Tony is invited to the exclusive golf club only to realize he is there as the circus oddity.

“What’s the Post like?” everyone wants to know. “It’s my favorite rag.”

Soon enough, the frequency of dating Blaine has an impact on my life—personal and professional. I am all Blaine, all the time. When I get asked to do Red Eye on Fox, not only do I not know that you should always prepare a bunch of funny lines to say in advance, but I’m more concerned about getting my fake tan just right because I’m seeing Blaine later that night. I suck on the show and never get invited back.

But it certainly pays off with Blaine. He invites me to spend the weekend with him at, as he describes it, “the ridiculously, pretentiously named” William K. Vanderbilt Jr. Concours d’Elegance weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. I’m told to wear something dressy, preferably black or white, but he knows I’ll be “stunning” in whatever I wear. The man knows how to lay on the charm.

I rent an insanely gorgeous long swishy black Christian Lacroix dress from a friend of a friend for $250. It’s worth several thousand, but I don’t ask any more about it for fear of psyching myself out completely.

When we go to the party, we arrive at a Gilded Age mansion, complete with a temple-front portico resembling the White House. Where have I seen this place before? Oh, that’s right. In the movie The Great Gatsby. There’s Tommy Hilfiger charming and captivating a circle of admirers. On the dance floor there’s Byrdie Bell. It’s also the first time I notice that Blaine definitely does not want to be photographed with me on his arm for the society pages. He conspicuously whisks me past the cameraman there to document the six hundred celebrants in attendance. That’s okay, I think. We’re very new to dating, and high-society people only want to be written about three times (birth, marriage, and death), so I don’t think much of the snub. It smarts, I’ll be honest, but who cares? What a fun escape into fantasyland for a little while.

“I like your confidence,” Blaine says, and I see what he means when I look at a selfie I’ve taken of the two of us together at a table, with his lips planted against my cheek. I’m nearly unrecognizable from the miserable woman I was just a few years ago.

We spin around the dance floor, and I spend most of the night trying not to put my foot in my mouth (aside from asking one particularly buxom society girl if her breasts are real), smiling and nodding as much as possible. But unfortunately, the night doesn’t end there. Back at the gorgeous waterfront house he’s renting with some friends of his, we keep partying on the deck, which sits on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. We even have our own sixty-three-year-old tuxedoed bartender named Bobby, who has been hired for the night to keep those drinks a’comin’.

“That’s straight vodka,” one of Blaine’s friends says, taking my glass and pouring its contents out into the bushes. “Let me get you a real drink, darling.”

He brings me a Smirnoff martini and makes the wry observation, “You’re wearing a twenty-thousand-dollar dress, but you’re with a ten-thousand-dollar man.”

Zing. It’s only a little while later I find out that this same friend warns Blaine that I am going to get him kicked out of all of his private clubs. And that he and his wife want nothing to do with me. In their defense, it is not just my plebeian status. I apparently say a bunch of insulting things when I am drunk—which I have no memory of doing.

Besides, maybe they are on to something. Because even later that night, when Blaine and I can’t keep our hands off each other, as we are making out on the patio steps, a bleached-blond forty-something woman suddenly cries out, “I want my pussy licked!”

We are all about five drinks past smashed. Blaine looks not very interested at all. I shrug and say, “I’ll do it,” and proceed to go down on her as he watches the X-rated scene unfold.

Then I stand up, triumphant—and proceed to fall into a bush. My neck now looks like that of a slashing victim, and Blaine and I pass out on our bed soon after. I wake up, cringingly remembering the night before, and say, “Oh my God.” I proceed to give what can only be described as an apology blow job and say how sorry I am.

“I thought it was cute,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Then he takes me to an exclusive beach club, where the first thing he does is show me a sign posted on the wall directed at anyone in the press that they are not to write about the club—ever. Yeah. Got it. Later in the day we go to brunch in town, and we run into the same bleached-blond woman from the night before. I give her my best dude “sup nod.” Remember . . . from before?