Jessica laughs—probably at the fact that a thirty-three-year-old has the emotional maturity of a thirteen-year-old—and we proceed to carry out my plan of attack. The second and then the third martini hit me hard, and I begin babbling on to Jessica about how I’m trying to spend less time with Blaine in order to increase my value—and that includes withholding sex.
“But I’m so horny,” I whine to Jessica. “Maybe we could just go back to my place and fool around? You’re a girl, so it wouldn’t really be cheating.”
Of course, that’s totally cheating, but never mind that.
“That sounds really fun,” Jessica says politely, while also slickly employing every man’s favorite word. “But I can’t because I have a boyfriend.”
“Oh, I totally get it, no worries,” I say. “I should just go over to Blaine’s place, but I’m really trying to do better about making myself less available.”
Still cruising on the elation of the show and now the solid intoxication of a three-martini punch, I walk out of the bar to head home. I see two men on the street smoking, and I realize I should definitely bum a cigarette. I haven’t smoked in years, but tonight feels like the night.
“Hey, got a smoke?” I ask. Looking a little closer, I realize, Holy shit, these guys are hot.
“We are pilots,” they tell me in heavy accents, as they dispense to me many cigarettes and look me over, “visiting from Italy.”
I have zero filter at this point, and I am 100 percent pure unadulterated id.
“Man, if I wasn’t in a relationship I would totally go for you,” I crow. “You guys are super sexy. Here, come with me, I’m going to introduce you around and get you laid.”
They are charmed. I lead them up into Sixty Hotel in SoHo, a celebrity hideaway where I once spent the day staking out Paris Hilton with a tattoo-covered paparazzo I was profiling.
“You’ll love this place,” I say. “Let’s get a drink, and I’ll introduce you around.”
As I nurse my fourth martini, I begin my totally-not-weird-at-all quest of hawking these Italian pilots’ sexual wares to confused single women. The pilots finally put an end to the performance I am putting on and corner me in the middle of the bar.
“But,” Pilot #1 says, brushing up against my arm, “we like you.”
“I know, right?” I say cockily. “I wish I was single.”
I wish I was single.
My heart is thumping. I sip my drink, nibble on my olive, and think about that statement, wishing I was single. Suddenly, I have the justification-for-cheating epiphany to end all epiphanies.
Aren’t I, though—pretty much? I’m in a relationship with a fantasy lover kept in secret who is perpetually disappointed with my ability to be good enough for him. These last several months especially, I’ve been making a fool out of myself trying to change for someone whom I should have let go the instant he didn’t want to have his picture taken in public with me.
You know what? I wish that lawyer family friend had written up something threatening me not to ever write about him again.
Fuck Blaine. And fuck me for having tolerated this for so long.
I look at these hot Italian pilots in front of me, with their black curly hair, olive complexions, and hedonistic smiles. I kiss one of them. Then I kiss the other. This shit is on.
We sneak to the back of the bar, and Pilot #1 (I find names so formal, don’t you?) drapes his coat over my legs and begins to finger me while Pilot #2 kisses me in exactly the way I like. Kissing that says This Is Exactly What I’m Going to Do to You.
“Do you want to see my place?” I ask, and we walk to my apartment, where, all full of bluster, I show them a picture of Blaine, then turn it over, and we all proceed to: Tone. It. Down.
* * *
FLUSHED, SWEATY, AND still very drunk, when my new pilot friends leave, I wake up to reality. Like, reality reality. Oh shit. That just happened. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.
My entire “If you liked it then you should have put a ring on it” drunken epiphany I had earlier has transmuted into a dark pit in my stomach filled with fear, personal loathing, and regret.
I stand up and immediately fall over my plastic tower of CDs, bruising my leg badly and sending the jewel cases shattering everywhere. I find my cell phone and dial Blaine’s number.
It is two thirty in the morning. “Hello?” he answers.
“I just had sex with two Italian pilots,” I say.
“What?” he asks groggily. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I’m coming over,” I say, and I grab a cab to head to his place.
I wave hello to the doorman—he’s the third one I’ve gotten to know in our nearly two years of dating now—and head up to Blaine’s apartment.
“So, do you want to break up?” I ask.
“I need to think,” he says.
A small smile shows on his face.
“Maybe we could all get together and talk about it,” he says with a wry chuckle. “Just you, me, and the pilots.”
“Totally,” I say, laughing. “Oh my God.”
And then—as I sober up—I return to my ABC (Always Be Closing) Stepford Wife party line. So much for the “Fuck Blaine” independent-woman internal monologue I gave myself last night. Now I’m back to used-car salesman. Hey, I can still save this thing. We talked. We laughed. We bonded. No one said they wanted to break up. Maybe it’s time to register him another domain name?
“You could propose to me,” I say.
He looks at me quietly.
“Yeah,” he says, “that’ll be quite a story for our grandchildren.”
Blaine and I have an already planned dinner with his friends that night—the ones I apologized to after saying mean things to them when I was drunk a few years ago. And the entire thing is bizarre. We are now fully playacting. Pretending that I haven’t just sent a nuclear missile into our relationship.
After dinner, Blaine tells me he’s going to go to Vermont for the weekend to go skiing.
I text Mackenzie, encapsulating everything down to one sentence: “I had sex with two Italian pilots last night.”
“HOLY CRAP,” she texts back.
Staring at myself in the harsh glare of daylight, I see what I don’t want to about myself.
I am in fact even more chickenshit than Blaine in this entire scenario. I’m the one who didn’t have the courage or dignity to end things earlier because I was in such a disgusting diamond-ring horse race mode. And when it doesn’t seem like I’m getting what I want, I turn into a feral maniac.
When Blaine and I finally meet up when he returns from Vermont, within the first few minutes of talking at the Smith in Union Square, he says, “You know, you did hurt me. I think we need to take a break.”
“Fine with me,” I say, and I stand up instantly. I leave the merlot I’ve just ordered on the bar. I walk away, crying as I march through the East Village, logging onto Facebook on my phone, and changing my status to no longer in a relationship.
My self-awareness is sorely lacking. My entire problem with Blaine is that he’s so afraid of what people might think about us dating, but what’s the reality here? I’m the one hung up on perception. Status. Associative redemption. And I so care how I’m seen.
The very next day after we break up—I kid you not—my first assignment is to cover a wedding expo. A goddamned motherfucking wedding expo. I’m doing a video, and ducking into the bathroom frequently to fix the eye makeup I keep fucking up with unexpected tears every time I see some happy couple reminding me of what a complete failure of a human being I am.
A few weeks later, when I am gone at work, Blaine drops off a stash of my assorted belongings with a note that reads, “You are a fabulous, joyful person whose life is filled with nothing but happiness.”
I feel empty reading it. So I have a long conversation with my old friend Hollywood manager Jonathan Brandstein about what I have done. He emails me a little bit later on.
“Mandy, you are a Kashmir
Sapphire,” he writes. “The famous sapphires of Kashmir are mined from a remote region high in the Great Himalayan mountains of northwestern India. Lying at an elevation of approximately 150,000 feet. These sapphires are so beautiful and rare. Today with the exception of estate sales, fine Kashmir sapphires are virtually unobtainable, mute testimony of the degree to which they are coveted. They are often categorized as a conundrum gem. They form an exclusive class of its own. And once they are cut, they make a beautiful jewel.”
His note makes me weep. I don’t cry because Blaine fails to see me this way. I’m crying because I can’t see it either.
chapter seven
* * *
The Unhinged
2009–10
You seem lighter,” Mackenzie says after the first week or so.
I definitely am—but there is an inner darkness that she doesn’t know about.
My mission to de-Blaine myself results in a kind of twisted logic where I become determined to do the opposite of what I once did with him in my life. No one tells me what to do. Did he think I was embarrassing? Did he think I was unwifeable? Well, he doesn’t know the half of it.
I’ll show you fucking unwifeable.
It’s not just Blaine either. One day I receive an email from a wealthy tech entrepreneur I had reached out to asking if he could set me up with any “nice guys.” No, he can’t do that, he explains and proceeds to shame me for everything I’ve ever written online.
“Given your proclivities,” he tells me, “I’d predict you’ll either never get married, or have N husbands.”
It turns my stomach a little to read. So I tell him that I already have been married once before and indeed am a very loving and devoted partner.
Instantly, he replies: “I’d suggest you stay away from marriage going forward? :)”
Reading his words, I am livid.
I hate him. I hate Blaine. I hate anyone who has ever looked down on me ever. I despise the hypocrisy inherent in shame. If I don’t fit into a polite world, then I will live as unpolite a life as possible, I think. I will ravage myself. I will dive headfirst into one seedy encounter after another. And that’s exactly what I do.
* * *
MY LIFE BECOMES a cocktail of excess. And my coworkers start to notice.
One night after a rollicking evening on the town with a bunch of Post-ies, I lose all track of time around 2 a.m. I come to early the next morning. I wake up in a hotel room with a strange man I quickly remember I met the previous evening when I swerved into a Village diner, approached a booth of strangers, and swung my legs up onto the lap of the closest guy—and proceeded to eat all his onion rings.
Everything after that goes to black. At this very moment, though, I recognize that Mr. Onion Ring Man is now on top of me, looking positively gleeful, his shaggy brown hair flapping about as he thrusts inside me.
“You took a little nap,” he informs me. “I had to wake you up.”
Yeah . . . that’s one way to put it.
On the way into work, I refuse to feel sadness or regret. No, this is just a crazy story. That’s what it is. So I write it up and email it to all the coworkers I partied with the night before, telling them all about the “hilarity” of what happened after I left.
All jacked up on no sleep and a severe hangover, I’m greedy for even more reaction and jokes to be made, though. So while Katherine didn’t go out with us, I forward on my witty little summary to show her what a hysterical maniac I am.
I just know she’ll get a kick out of this.
Later in the day, Katherine walks over to my desk with a tentative smile on her face. She is kind as always, but there is a difference in her demeanor. It’s like she’s looking through me.
“Wasn’t that crazy?” I laugh, all lazy and cool and smiling.
“Yeah,” she says quietly, sitting on my desk, shifting uncomfortably, seeming more like a big sister than my boss or my friend.
“Hey, I don’t want to be weird,” Katherine begins. “I’m just, you know, a little worried. I don’t want you to end up like Diane Keaton in Looking for Mr. Goodbar or anything.”
The instant I hear the concern in her voice, tears well up in my eyes. Embarrassed at having blown my cover as the wild party girl who is having so much fun, I look down and brush them away. I’m crying because Katherine knows how easily I get crushed. She knows I feel crushed by someone winking at me the wrong way, breathing accidentally in my direction, and yet she’s saying all of this anyway. She is saying this as a friend. She is saying this as a friend who doesn’t want to see me die.
“Well, I mean, I’m . . . I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I mean . . . I certainly don’t want to worry you.”
“No, that’s not it at all,” she says softly. “I’m just a little concerned. Just a little bit.”
That’s all she says, but it’s something I’ve never forgotten.
I wanted so badly for someone to look at me the way that she did that day—to want to protect me, to care if I am alive or dead.
And when it happens, just that tender little scrap of love feels almost too much for me to handle without breaking down crying.
* * *
NOT TOO LONG after my breakup with Blaine, when I realize that I can’t stop looking at his Facebook profile, I decide to do a story on “stalking exes,” where you keep looking at their social media to see who they are dating and what they are doing.
I interview and get to know the comedian Marc Maron for the piece. He shows me very quickly that I am not the only one to do this.
“After my divorce, I decided to do a Google research project, and the title of the project is, ‘Who Is My Ex-Wife Sleeping With?’ ” Maron tells me. “And I googled her name and saw some pictures of my wife with a screenwriter, and within a half hour I found out he was Harvard-educated, comes from a rich family, writes for a TV show, and has a script deal with a major studio. All I didn’t find was footage of them having sex, and stopping in the middle to turn to the camera and laugh at me.”
Maron pauses. “I’m not saying it’s not out there. I just didn’t want to search anymore.”
Not too long after that article runs, I have a killer meeting with an HBO executive and the idea of doing an exaggerated version of my life is tossed around. So I decide to film a reel to illustrate what that might look like, based on the two-pilots story. I call the project Spinster, and I ask Maron if he’ll play my boyfriend in what I’m shooting.
It is an incredibly strange experience to act out a comedic vision of what happened.
“I . . . fucked two Italian pilots last night,” I say to Marc, and by way of reasoning say I was pissed he wouldn’t confirm on Facebook that he was in a relationship with me. “But I was thinking about you.”
“Well, that’s very flattering,” Marc says. “So let me get this straight. When did this happen? Was I sleeping? Was it before I came over? Did you shower?”
“Oh,” I say.
“Well, that’s great,” he says. “That’s really . . . that’s classy. It’s coincidental, because I have to meet an entire Swedish flight crew. And I’m going to now confirm the relationship with you is not only over, I’m going to say, ‘Fuck her.’ That is: Mandy. And then in my status bar, I’m going to say, ‘For fucking two Italian pilots at me.’ Because that’s what you did. You’re basically, you’re like, ‘Look, two cocks. Bye!’ ”
During the course of several hours of filming, we shoot various establishing shots to set the scene of him as my fictional boyfriend, so we pretend to cook in my kitchen, hang out in the living room, and then “pretend” to fool around on my bed.
“That was really hot,” I text him after he leaves.
“It was,” he texts back, and we make plans for me to cab out to Queens.
I’m a little intoxicated when I arrive, but I listen to him tell me all about this new podcast he is trying to get off the ground called WTF.
When we go into Marc’s bedroom, we are able to continue what we st
arted at my apartment earlier. The sex is fun, and at one point, still a little drunk, I say in my best sexy voice, “Slap me.”
He obliges.
Marc and I keep in touch over text (he says I am “adorable for a toughie”) and on Facebook he sends me links to articles like “Love in the Time of Darwinism: A Report from the Chaotic Postfeminist Dating Scene” and “The ‘Menaissance’ and Its Dickscontents.”
He asks if I’d ever want to grab a meal, but I’m more interested in the sex. Depending on what or when I message him, he asks, “Are you drunky?” He’s been sober for years, I know, but I guess he’s used to dealing with train wrecks like me.
When he does come over again, however, I’m stone-cold sober.
During sex, he repeats what I asked him to do last time—he slaps me.
“What the fuck?” I say.
He gives me a look straight out of Curb Your Enthusiasm that says, No good?
Then I remember.
“Oh, right, because I asked you to do that before,” I say. “Sorry, I guess I fuck differently when I’m not wasted.”
We talk about comedy a little bit after, and he says of me, “I think you’re funny when you don’t know it.”
Which makes me feel the opposite of good, but whatever. He’s probably right.
After sex, he peaces out, but I get a knock on the door a few minutes later.
“Yeah?” I ask.
“I think I . . .” he says, and comes into the bedroom and picks something up off the ground.
Unwifeable Page 17