Unwifeable(67)

“So, uh, could I get your . . . info?”

He glared at me.

“Why,” Mayer asked, “are you still talking to me?”

And that was that.

But with Wayne by my side, the humiliation never felt quite as intolerable as it might have alone.

As soon as I got sober, Wayne noticed the change in my outlook overall. One night at Carolines, I told him how I was sick of acting like this groveling low-status person all the time, and that I was going to quit doing it.

“Actually,” Wayne said, “that sounds like an excellent idea.”

Cut to the first few months of sobriety.

During this time, I am assigned multiple stories on the film The Social Network. When I interview the movie’s famously mercurial producer, Scott Rudin, I keep the pledge I made to Wayne, and at the end of the call, instead of gushing all over Rudin as I might have in the past, I end the call by saying, in a monotone, “Well, good luck.”

I get a concerned call a few days later from Rudin’s assistant asking if there is anything else I “needed for the story.” Amazing what just a little bit of projection of worth does for your status. After the piece publishes, I call Rudin and ask if I can get on the list, plus one, to New York Film Festival’s opening-night party. Impressed by my moves, Wayne says I am like a “master-level chess player.” I bring him to the party (and Wayne repays the favor by inviting me to take in the Yankees in Lorne Michaels’s box seats when neither he nor Jimmy Fallon can use the tickets).

“Oh my God, there’s Sorkin—I’m going to try to talk to him,” I tell Wayne as we mingle after I nab a photo with Justin Timberlake, who says, “You’re with the Post? You guys write shit about me like every day.”

I literally dodge and weave Sorkin’s assistant, and reach out to shake his hand.

“Oh, I kind of screwed that up,” I say, laughing.

“Should we do it again?” Sorkin asks.

“Well, we could do the Bill Clinton double handshake,” I say, imitating that. “Or the really creepy handshake.”

Then I wiggle my finger into his palm. And hand him my card.

I get an email about an hour later—from Sorkin. I’m still at the party, and I show it to Wayne, my mouth open.

“Mandy, I’m really sorry I couldn’t answer your questions tonight,” he writes. “I hope you had a good time at the movie and the party and I hope I get to see you soon.”

I also meet Lloyd Grove, who had been for a long time the Daily News’s answer to Richard Johnson. I ask him if he’s interested in seeing the script for The Social Network, which one of the Winklevoss twins sent me. “Definitely,” he says.

A few days after that, Wayne is again my plus-one at a party for the release of a Bill Hicks documentary. We are sitting in the audience still, watching folks head out of the Paley Center, when he says, “I think that’s Keith Olbermann.”

“Hey, Keith!” I yell, and Olbermann turns around.

The three of us spend the next hour geeking out over Bill Hicks’s legacy and old Bob and Ray audio recordings. After a while, Keith offers to walk me to the subway, where he kisses me goodbye. I get a complimentary email from him with photos we took together and a friendly warning that he followed me on Twitter.

In the meantime, Lloyd asks me out, and he tells me all about interviewing Sorkin, which led to raised voices and tensions. I email Sorkin, feeling like I’m the cleverest person on the planet, saying, “I hear there was yelling? Sounds exciting . . .”

Sorkin replies, “Ah Mandy, Mandy, Mandy—if we were on a date and off the record, I would tell you all about it, but since we’re neither, all I can say . . . ‘What yelling?’?”

“But I’m like the queen of off the record,” I write back.

“And I’m the king of getting my ass kicked by Page Six,” he replies.

With all this potential for self-created drama, I have found my new addiction.

So instead of figuring out how I can, you know, be a better person, I instead take to reading Robert Greene books like The 48 Laws of Power and The Art of Seduction, which recommend greasy soul-dead tactics like creating an aura of desirability through love triangles, instilling a “shared feeling of guilt and complicity,” and trying to stir up regression by dabbing milk on your breasts—just in case a guy has a mommy complex.

I never get around to the milk part.

Essentially, I may be sober, but I’m still rotten on the inside: completely disingenuous in my interactions with men whom I want to please, trying to play some heartless seductress—because it feels like a role that is safe and powerful and can’t ever be broken.

Instead, it’s perhaps the most fragmented and phony I’ve ever been.

While Lloyd tells me why he doesn’t like Olbermann, I also start to really fall for him. He’s so able to laugh at himself and the moment he does the most searing imitation of Howard Stern mocking him in a very put-on affected voice, I think: This is the guy. When I tell Olbermann that I can’t see him anymore because I’m going to be dating Lloyd exclusively, Olbermann replies, “Good grief, my mortal enemy.”

Lloyd and I eventually do break up, but he treats me better than anyone up to this point in my life. There are so many hilarious moments during the relationship (I mean, the guy was good friends with that most scathing wit of all, Christopher Hitchens), and there are several inadvertently hilarious moments, too. Like when he takes me to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and at the MSNBC after-party we run into disgraced governor Eliot Spitzer. After listening to me prattle on for a few minutes, Spitzer turns to Lloyd and says, “She must be a handful.”