Unwifeable(40)
On a casual sailboat ride later that day with some of his friends, a woman points out the largest house in sight and says, “You know that’s Blaine’s family house.” Good Lord. It’s the first time I really make the connection. Yeah, I am way out of my league here. On a positive note, I do not fall into any more bushes—female or leaf-bearing.
As the year progresses, so does our romance. Weekends in the Hamptons and Newport become the norm. And so does my observation of his patterns. Blaine keeps pictures of his ex-girlfriends up. “They gave them to me,” he says. He doesn’t throw anything away. He is a multimillionaire but is always stressed, and I frequently provide comfort and solace. He is incredibly paranoid about people finding out he is the one I am writing about in his column—that it could “hurt his career prospects . . .”
He didn’t need to say the rest of the sentence. I knew how it would go: . . . because he was dating such an embarrassing slut.
Before he meets some of my colleagues he asks, “They know to keep my identity quiet? God, I feel like Deep Throat.” If he feels like Deep Throat, I feel like Nora Ephron wanting to burn her ex-husband Carl Bernstein to the ground in her famous roman à clef Lovesick about what a bastard he was during their marriage.
The worst part is that Blaine isn’t even a bastard. He just is terrified about me somehow sullying his rich-dude super-exclusive status or reputation. And I put up with it.
A few months into dating, we travel to Phippsburg, Maine, and spend a weekend at the Small Point Club, roaming the beach and getting to know his mother and her sisters. I wear a skintight white dress, and, ever the lady, not wanting to show any panty lines, I go commando.
The picture his mom snaps of us sitting on a wicker chair is so adorable, I proudly send it on to everyone I know. After I’ve sent it on to a good three hundred people in my address book, Mackenzie pulls me aside and says, “Hey, this is awkward but . . .”
“What?” I demand.
“You can see up your dress in that photo.”
Fuck. Of course you can.
Among the many mishaps that befall me as the non-prostitute version of Julia Roberts dating Richard Gere in Pretty Woman are those that could only occur in the alternative universe of dating a guy like Blaine.
One day I’m heading down in the elevator and a member of the Strokes is in there with me. “Going . . . down?” he asks with a sly grin. Another morning Katie Holmes is breastfeeding Suri in the lobby. The most over-the-top experience, though, is when I walk out front and there is a sea of paparazzi, all waiting for the new power “friend couple” of Tom Cruise, Katie Holmes, and their besties, Victoria and David Beckham. One of the paps who I’m friends with even snaps a shot of me as I walk out of the building, and he emails it to me later. I’m wearing shades, a baseball cap, and a Burberry trench coat the lovely fashion editor Serena French has kindly gifted me from the fashion closet, which features our designer overstock. I look very on the DL, and it provides me another perspective on how the world might see me.
I look . . . powerful. Like I have my shit completely together. It’s amazing what a photograph can show.
But there are also many evenings out with the Post crew, along with Blaine, where some of my true drunken colors start to come out. One night I fall off a stool at Langan’s after “playfully” biting photo editor Dave Boyle’s finger out of the blue, accusing one of the editors that his girlfriend is flirting with Blaine, and then on the way home demanding that Blaine have sex with me in the cab. Another night at the Soho House, I break a chandelier after a raucous evening spent screaming “vagina” and singing “Rock Me Ahmadinejad.” What a nightmare person I am when I drink too much—which is most of the time.
The day after Soho House, Blaine says, “If someone didn’t know you, they might think you’re a little unstable. Surly . . . and unstable.”
Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. It’s so annoying that other people don’t seem to have the same problems that I do when I drink. But normal people drink. I know that. So I drink, just like everyone else. It’s fun, except when it’s not. I just have to remember to keep it to two or three glasses of wine a night. I don’t know why I keep losing track.
I see some “doctor” during this time who bills himself as a healer, and I show him all my bruises from falling down. He tells me that I just need to “clean my blood” by detoxifying and not drinking for three months. I can do that, I think. Blaine is a little concerned, though. Am I done drinking forever? No, no, don’t worry, I tell him. It’s totally temporary. It’s not like I’m going to retire from ever having fun again.
When we travel to Miami for Art Basel, Blaine gets recognized by a Vanity Fair reporter who asks, “Wait, are you Super Preppy?” He looks a little mortified, then shrugs and says, “I guess I’ll have to get used to it.” Later in the year, we travel for the holidays to a fancy party with his relatives, and even though I am on my best behavior, I receive two edicts passed down to me via Blaine: “Kindly do not write about the family.” And, regarding my fitting in, “She’s not even trying.” Not long after this, I also hear back that his mother thinks I’m “a little strange.”
My strangeness is only compounded by small chat with her. When I do a story about a bad-boy New Yorker for my column, revealing this guy’s strange experiences with women, I quote to Blaine’s mom one of the lines he told me, that he once spent the evening “somewhere with an industrial-size tub of Vaseline, a dead horse, and an underage Thai hooker.” Blaine’s mom laughs along with me, but later Blaine scolds, “That wasn’t appropriate.”