Unwifeable(47)

When I’m tasked with writing an investigative story about what the Sex and the City movie has in store for viewers, I get to do some old-school tabloid reporting.

Using my paparazzi contacts from the Waverly Inn piece, I track down a photographer who tells me he can get me pages from the script that I can use. He puts me through the wringer, though, and when we finally meet up, it’s past midnight in a burger joint, where he continues to tease me about whether he’ll give me the goods. We make some deals about his pictures being used in the newspaper at some point, and finally I leave the diner with the pages from the shooting script.

Now I have to consult with the Post’s legal team about whether or not we’ll be sued depending on how I report the material. It comes down to this: While I can’t say that we have the pages, I can give insight into what happens based on someone who is familiar with the script. This provides the Post with that very special legal protection of not appearing to have received stolen intellectual property but rather of having access to a person who is familiar with the stolen intellectual property in question.

Playing private investigator is my favorite part of Post reporting. It’s fun to be given the challenge of getting information that is locked down. I also learn just how little I know about Hollywood. When a friend hooks me up with an interview with one of the actors in the movie (I label the actor an “insider” in the piece), I straight-faced ask this person, “Now, I’ve heard that some of these scenes are being shot to misdirect people as to what is going to happen . . .”

The actor interrupts my question—to laugh at me.

“Do you know how much it costs to shoot for five minutes?” the actor says. “It’s like ten thousand people on the crew, and it costs a ridiculous amount of money to shoot. Anyone saying that full scenes are being shot just to throw off the audience, that’s an absolute lie.”

We’re able to bill my spoiler-filled (and spoiler-warned, don’t worry) Sex and the City preview as an exclusive, and in the final minutes before signing off on the piece, I go into my editor Isaac Guzmán’s office, where he has a specially prepared cosmopolitan waiting for me that he made from his in-office bar. He knows I’ve worked my ass off, and it’s an incredibly thoughtful gesture from an incredibly thoughtful guy.

Isaac also knows, as the guy who edits my dating column every week, just how unlike any kind of rom-com fairy tale my life is. Unlike Carrie Bradshaw, I’m essentially a joke, eviscerated on Gawker and an embarrassment to the guy I’m dating exclusively. It’s not like in the movies where the guys are beating down your door. The guys want sex, and then they want you to disappear forever—or at least to keep your trap shut.

There’s nothing so loathsome as being associated with female desire expressed and documented. That’s how you don’t get a husband, don’t you know? The reality for most women who write any kind of dating or sex column is that there is no Aidan who tries to thrust the engagement ring upon you, but you in your freewheeling lifestyle of carefree fun and abandon can only bring yourself to wear the giant rock swinging around your neck fancy-free. Because dammit, you’ve just got to do you.

There’s no Aidan, and I’m as far from that doesn’t-want-to-be-caged story line as you can get. I can’t wait to be wifed again, to be claimed. And in constantly vocalizing how no-pressure our relationship is to Blaine, I’m absolutely trying to appropriate a cool girl character like that—because I sure as fuck don’t know who I actually am. I just know how good it feels when I receive approval—especially male approval—and my laser target of choice is poor Blaine.

So, most of the time my mental energy at the paper is consumed with About Last Night. Not even the column itself, but the stress around it that it creates for Blaine.

Whenever Blaine meets more of my friends, I try to ease his fears, but my passive-aggressive anger leaks out.

Me: “I do feel a little pathetic at a certain point saying, ‘Please don’t let it get out that this guy is my boyfriend.’ Like that you’re ashamed to be that person.”

Blaine: “Listen, you know that I take our relationship highly seriously and am totally excited to be dating you. I am also excited for most of your friends to know my identity and really like meeting and hanging out with your friends. Just not sure if I’m quite ready to have the whole Gawker media circus thing.”

But I do enjoy the status that dating (and writing about dating) a high-society guy affords.

Shallow actions bring shallow rewards. The slightly buzzed thrill of being swept in VIP to Skybar and the Reading Room in Newport along with the rest of the blue-blazer set, with Blaine at my side makes me feel like I’ve come so far. I am no longer the too-tall high school dork who screamed along to the lyrics of “I Don’t Like Mondays” and tolerated the popular girls who would ask for homework help, then later pretend not to know me at parties.

When the sad reality is it is the exact same dynamic.

I am still the embarrassing secret. I am still gobbling up those little crumbs of love and attention anywhere I can get them, and then apologizing for the burden I am.

As the relationship intensifies, I realize it is time for me to finally unburden myself of my physical past. So I return to Chicago for one final trip to rid myself of stuff I’ve kept in storage. Going through boxes, I unearth an old CD that has a song that my ex-husband, James, wrote for me right after we separated. It was inspired by a story I told him about how a friend once told me, “Before I got divorced, I was getting a major operation. And to get through it, my therapist told me to say, ‘I can do this.’ So, I did, and I didn’t cry—not even once.”