Unwifeable(45)

This is my first really big trip with Blaine, and I’m skinnier than I’ve ever been, thanks to that sketchy healer guy I’ve been seeing, who tells me to cut out not only alcohol but also sugar, flour, coffee—basically anything that gives you joy.

At the entrance to the main room of the gorgeous resort, I dance around with my arms outstretched, twirling underneath the Bahia sky, and it feels like I’m truly in nirvana. But my body tells a different story. My legs are covered in welts from bug bites, my face is overwhelmed with cystic chin acne, and my stomach is twisted up in knots.

One afternoon, Blaine and I go seek out a mud bath that supposedly has medicinal properties. We get lost. We walk seventeen kilometers. We ask a stranger, “Onde mud?” which we realize is the equivalent of a tourist coming up to us in New York asking, “Where mud?”

The man smirks at us like we’re the stupid Americans we are. “I speak English,” he says. “You want to see mud? There’s a river a kilometer up from here.”

We give up on the magical mud bath and now are simply determined to find civilization. We ask the man for help. “Ah, you want the next town,” he says. “Trancoso. You’ve very near there. Don’t worry. It is civilized. They will not attack you.”

Sure enough, Blaine has something akin to Hamptons-dar. The next town is utterly posh.

After a forty-five-minute cab ride to take us back to our resort and a night of hanging out with our friends, finally, at 2:30 a.m., I start to feel internally what my outsides are showing. I’m lonely. I want to be radically honest. I want to connect.

“Do you think we’re good together?” I ask Blaine out of nowhere.

“I sometimes feel like you’re testing me to provoke some kind of reaction,” Blaine says. “Listen, I’m used to dating the uptight Upper East Side kind of girls and you’re used to dating angst-filled emotive artists. But maybe we can accept that dating one another is a good thing.”

“Why do you think that?” I ask.

“You’ve got to be one of the more complex, deeper people I’ve known,” he says.

I am quiet. “Thank you,” I say.

Then I am quiet even longer.

“Where do you think this is going?” I finally blurt out.

“Mandy,” he says, “I really don’t have the mental capacity for this right now.”

“Cool,” I say, radically dishonest. “That’s fair. Night.”

The next morning, I wake up nauseated. I am violently ill, unsure why, but remembering how all my repressed emotions from childhood usually led to trips to the gastroenterologist.

“Just go ahead with the others,” I tell Blaine. And he does.

I’m better by nighttime, and Blaine is sweet when he returns.

“I missed you today,” he says.

I am tight. I don’t want a repeat of the night before.

“I really missed you today,” he says.

“Onde mud?” I ask him, and he laughs.

This is as close as we get.

The next morning, we lie in the hammock, and Blaine looks down at my expanding bug bites.

“It’s kind of grotesque,” Blaine says, touching one. He sees the sadness this elicits in my face.

“I mean,” he says, “I wish you had those insect bites all the time, it would make me so hard.”

He imitates a mosquito. “Zzzzzp. Who could resist this beautiful blond goddess?”

I laugh meekly, and then I try to go deeper.

“Do you feel a sense of possibility?” I ask.

“I do,” he says. He kisses my neck and says, “Mmm. Tastes like bug spray.”

I smile weakly and Blaine says, “I don’t think people really know you. You put out this brash image, but underneath you’re very different.”

The next day, late at night, after having done the required three months of no alcohol that the healer dude recommended, I head with Mackenzie and Blaine to the small wooden hot tub overlooking the ocean.

I jealously eye the caipirinhas that Mackenzie and Blaine are drinking.

“Do you want one?” Blaine asks. “Or are you still off alcohol?”

“Yeah,” I say, and Blaine calls the waiter over to bring me a drink.

We look out at the clouds shifting over the ocean like magic, changing the color of the water from dark blue to purple, and the plants look like the roots of ginger reaching up to strain against the sky.

“Beautiful,” Blaine says.

“I can’t believe we’re really here,” Mackenzie says.

“Neither can I,” I say, and suddenly my first drink in three months is upon me.

It hits me like a wave of fluid relaxation. Everything is softer, fuzzier, easier. The water in the hot tub is bubbling, steaming, and the sky matches the swirly rising intoxication in my brain.

“Crazy to think this all came from an online date,” I say.

And that leads us to talking about the hilarity of online dating profile headlines and how much they reveal about someone’s psyche. We suggest how people might game their profile so as to appear to be catnip to the opposite sex. Mackenzie suggests that a man couldn’t resist a woman’s profile with the headline “Don’t Want to Talk About the Relationship.” And I suggest that for a woman, a man’s headline would be “Can’t Wait to Make a Woman in Her Thirties Feel Safe and Secure.”