Unwifeable(59)

“I told him I was shooting for Gawker,” Garth explains via text, “and he said he had a friend who had an ongoing battle with them who writes for the Post. To extrapolate, he mentioned your name, and I said we met once.”

God, how I love the coded message of man speak. “A friend.” “We met once.” So good.

But I have to be honest, I do kind of love that Blaine can’t help but bring me up at parties. I know him well enough to remember how he was always bragging about famous or interesting people he knew when he got a little bit of a buzz on.

That means I won, right? I’m now the girl he can’t help bring up when he’s tipsy. I rule.

But the next day, Garth sends me one final update. It turns out one of the pictures Garth snapped of Blaine at this benefit for the preservation of money or whatever the hell it was is now going to be published—on fucking Gawker. The gossip site that used to write about my column all the time and that Blaine lived in terror of being outed on.

“So I emailed Blaine to tell him he was in one of the shots,” Garth texts me, “and he asked me not to mention you. Nice guy, yeah.”

You know that feeling when you think you have finally achieved amazing washboard abs but then it turns out someone has actually sucker punched you in the stomach? That’s how I feel. So. Much. Ouch.

Of all the symbolic interactions I’ve had with Blaine, this one beats them all. Fucking Blaine brings me up. Fucking Blaine mentions me. Then fucking Blaine begs the fucking photographer he mentioned me to in the first place to “please please please don’t say I dated Mandy Stadtmiller.” Good God, man, stop being so afraid of life.

And me? Maybe I should start being a little more afraid of it.

Because I’m freaked out I woke up with this photog rando who wasn’t using a condom, I make the necessary Plan B purchase, but I also decide I need to make some kind of change. I know what I need to do, obviously. Stop drinking. So that’s what I resolve to do. It’s not like I have to go to some depressing AA meeting or anything. I’m not some weirdo alcoholic. I’ll just . . . stop. On my own. I’ve done it before.

Not too long after Gawker runs their beautiful non-Mandy-associated photo of Blaine, I get an email from him out of the blue. I’ve just written a groundbreaking feature on the “hot new trend” of threesomes, and what do you know, Blaine read the piece.

“Was reading the Post at the gym today, nice article on 3sums,” he writes. “How are things going, what are you wearing for Halloween?”

What am I wearing? I want to punch my fist into the computer screen. That’s what the fuck I’m wearing. Instead, I write a terse passive-aggressive reply: “I’m wearing a costume that says, ‘Garth, please don’t mention that I dated Mandy Stadtmiller if you post that picture of me on Gawker.’ Things have never been better. Take care.”

I think it’s fairly clear in that email that I’m pissed, right?

Instead of offering any kind of acknowledgment as to how this was yet another insult in a long line of them, Blaine replies: “Garth seems like a nice guy though I guess discretion is not his middle name! Funny picture and saw no need to advertise it, hope all is going swimmingly with you. Can you help us out with an event in December we are doing?”

So fucking tacky.

I’ve never felt so glad to be single. No matter how much I am spiraling out, I feel a weird sense of freedom in knowing I refuse to ever sink as low as that relationship brought me again.



* * *




BUT . . . LET’S BE real. I am so, so spiraling out.

The newest wrinkle in my sex life is that I have now recruited my friend Bianca (who I met while on retreat with Amma, the so-called hugging saint of India) to be my partner in crime. It’s so perfect somehow that I met her at this super-hippie patchouli-scented spiritual convention, and that instead of praying or whatever, we end up having a bunch of creepy sex romps. We have one, then two, then five three-ways. We’re definitely not average on the Kinsey scale to be sure, but neither of us is really all that into pussy. No, I would say these three-ways are our sad aging-party-girl versions of slumber parties where we get to dish on the man afterward—and not feel dumb when he doesn’t call. I suppose, in some ways, they are also my meager attempt at having love and consistency in my life.

But that isn’t even the spiral-out part. Where it gets really dark is when I begin an affair with a married man—something I said I would never do.

The night we meet, I don’t go home with him, nor does it even come up—but he does roast me in a way that is slightly thrilling. He is an award-winning comedy writer whom I’ve met in the course of covering the scene. I go to see him perform at his suggestion, and afterward we grab a drink at the bar . . . talking. Because you know, that’s beyond reproach, right? Nothing wrong with that. Men and women do that all the time.

When the bartender comes to get my drink order, I proudly stick to the no-alcohol rule I’ve kept up for a few months now since the Gawker photographer no-condom debacle.

“I’ll get a water,” I say, and then apologetically offer by way of explanation, “I stopped drinking a few months ago. I’m just so over the top as it is, you know.”

He looks at my six-foot-two frame.

“You’re a pretty big girl.”

“Whoa.” I laugh. “Don’t ever tell a girl she’s ‘big.’ I’m tall. And I fucking hate it when people give me shit about my height.”