Later, relaxing in the hot tub of the hotel, Blaine expresses a sentiment that, depending on how you interpret it, could go either way.
“I’m really glad I met your parents,” he says.
Except, I don’t think he did.
I made sure of that.
chapter six
* * *
The Homemaker
2008
Everything changes with the New Year.
Even my roommates, Lola and Juanita, aren’t who they were when I first moved in.
Lola is now pregnant—thanks to an international sperm donor flown in to make his deposit—but Juanita is moving out. Now, it’s just me, Lola, and the twins she is carrying.
I don’t mind, though. I love Lola. She’s funny, kind, generous, and one of the most authentic people I’ve ever met. She rolls with the punches, and she can’t wait to be a mother—even though the relationship with Juanita is not going where she expected.
Lola is an inspiration to me—not least because of how she manages to keep things friendly with Juanita. The two of them have a love for each other that makes me realize that the end of a relationship does not need to be terrible. You don’t have to curl up and cry in defeat. It can sure feel like that at times, but if you’ve built yourself up strong enough, you can and will go on. You will thrive. You’re stronger than your circumstances.
And I’m still not drinking. During this time, Blaine and I plan a trip to Brazil—led by photo editor Luiz Ribeiro—on which we are going to be joined by other Post friends, the most exciting of which is Mackenzie.
Another giant change is that Steve is promoted to editor of the Sunday paper and now Katherine is my new boss. One of the stories she assigns soon changes my life in a way I never could have imagined.
It’s about radical honesty.
The piece is ostensibly about a new TV show centered around the concept, and will include an interview with the founder of the movement, Brad Blanton, and then a first-person documentation of my attempts to be “radically honest.”
But it is Brad Blanton who blows my mind.
I talk to him on the phone, and he is unlike anyone I’ve ever interviewed. He will literally tell you anything that you want to know—including if he wants to have sex with your sister, the fact that he’s let a dog lick peanut butter off his balls, even how much money he makes. This is the theory of radical honesty. He calls “withholding” the most pernicious form of lying. That is when you try to abide by the mores of polite society by not saying things like that you want to fuck someone’s sister.
“Whenever something occurs in the world, there’s always what occurred and then there is the story about what occurred, and then there is the meaning made out of the story about what occurred,” he tells me in explaining why most communication—filled with all of its half-truths, twisted perceptions, and withholdings—is so problematic. “Most people stay lost in the meaning made out of the story.”
It’s true.
I don’t think about reality: “I got divorced.” I think about the story I tell about it: “My ex-husband betrayed me.” And the meaning I attach to that: “I am unlovable. I am unwifeable. I am a failure. I am not worth it.”
Brad also forces me to look at some painful truths about my own anger and discomfort. He tells me that you should just say what you are thinking about someone. I tell him that I hate when strangers start talking to me about my height.
“So, if someone says, ‘God, you look tall,’ do you get offended by it still?” he asks me.
“I don’t get annoyed,” I say. “It’s just boring.”
“Well, boredom is anger and you haven’t expressed your anger sufficiently to all those people who ask you about being tall,” he says. “You still have a lot of resentment about people—and probably some resentment about being tall. So when someone says, ‘What’s it like being so tall?’ just say, ‘Fuck you! Eat shit and die! And I resent you for saying I’m so tall.’ ”
I crack up. “Then I would appear like this easily hurt social leper,” I say.
Then he reveals the real key, the real magic of what he is preaching.
“You’re worried about how you would appear, see?” he says. “That’s what you think your identity is. It doesn’t matter how you appear. You’ll appear differently in another half a minute anyway because people’s registry of how you appear changes very dynamically. For a while, you appear to be a leper of some sort, and a little while later you’ll appear to be someone who’s very brave and willing to talk about things honestly. Later on, you’ll appear as a kind of person to be trusted because you’re not going to be withholding.”
When I am assigned the piece, I assume it will be the usual “shtick lit” where you stunt it up and write the reactions. Instead, I find myself unnerved. Emotions are bubbling up.
Earlier that day, I bought a fancy $350 red coat from Ann Taylor to wear because the photos are to be in color, and one of the photo editors told me I need something to make me “pop” in pictures instead of my black overcoat. After I file my piece, I am exhausted, and Katherine joins me to return the coat to the store right before closing. We are walking in the rain, when I realize I left the receipt at my desk. But all the tags are on, and I bought it that day. I explain all this to the clerk at the counter, but she cops an attitude like a Soviet bureaucrat.
“No receipt, no return,” she says.
“I really don’t appreciate your shitty attitude,” I tell the clerk, and now I am both livid and ashamed of my behavior. I hate myself. I hate everything.
“Are you okay?” Katherine asks, and I am embarrassed and confused. I can’t see straight, I am so angry over nothing.
“Are you a manager?” I ask the clerk. I am now just gone completely, riding a wave of fury.
“No,” she says.
“That’s what I thought!” I snap, and I leave the store with Katherine.
“You’re not crazy; she was a total bitch,” Katherine consoles me, and I start crying at the stupidity of it all. I give her a hug good night, and walk away.
I trudge back to the office, now soaked in rain, seething with irrational rage and even more anger directed at the anger itself. It’s like a cycle of shit.
I haven’t let myself feel this way in a while. Only when I am drunk does it come out.
I sit at my desk. I text Katherine and tell her I feel sick, “like congealed lamb fat left over from lunch now in the fridge.”
I keep texting. I say I miss being her friend now that she has been promoted.
I am . . . radically honest.
She is kind. Katherine is always so kind.
And I keep sitting there, unable to move. The clock says 7:55 p.m. It is me and my best friend, Angie, the cleaning lady, once again. I look in an email folder I haven’t checked in ages. “Old Mail.” Therein lie emotional land mines. The soul equivalent of photographs taken right before an assassination—or, in this case, a marriage’s end.
In one email to my ex-husband, James, I tell him how some of my new friends, like Michael Malice, a very funny provocateur and author, remind me of him a little bit.
“They don’t remind you of me,” James wrote back. “They remind you of aspects of me. No one reminds me of you.”
I keep wanting to scratch the pain.
Angie, the cleaning lady, maneuvers politely around me to remove my trash as I sit there, weeping openly. We talk all the time, but right now she knows to just let me be. I am having what Blanton calls “an orgasm of grief.” I have several.
I pick up my cell phone, and I have no desire to talk to Blaine. I know he doesn’t want to see or know about any of this weirdness. I know it is “a little strange.”
Impulsively, I call James, and I tell him about what an asshole I’ve been tonight. I tell him about finding these old emails, about being reminded of our old life in our ridiculous run-down house in Chicago with the stripped old cars in the yard and the concord grape mini-vineyard that we lay under
looking at the stars and how it felt like the Grand Canyon. I tell him how badly he hurt me and how I want to forgive him but that everything is so contaminated by anger.
He tells me how I hurt him.
“I know you didn’t think you did, but when you said I was like an ‘alien,’ that hurt me,” he says. “It made me feel terrible.”
“I am sorry,” I say, bawling. “I am so sorry.”
He tells me about his girlfriend. I tell him about Blaine.
“You only call me when you want to talk about things that make you feel bad,” he says.
“Do you . . .” I choke out. “Do you want to hear about things that make me happy?”
“Yes,” he says, and I can feel that gentle connection filling up the space around me.
I tell him about the nice emails I get about my column from women who tell me it helps. I tell him about Comedy Central asking me to pitch a show. I tell him I am traveling to Brazil in two weeks with Blaine and some friends from the Post.
“There’s nothing worse than feeling like you should feel happy about something and feeling totally unable,” I say.
This is how Brazil has been feeling lately. Like a beautiful shiny golden thing completely covered in the rust of my mind, which says, I can ruin this, oh, just you watch me.
“I want to move on,” I say to him.
“We were so young,” James says. “We just saw in each other a sense of possibility.”
As we speak, I see some of that rust disappear. I see some of the beauty of the luster return. There is always a sense of possibility.
* * *
TWO SHORT WEEKS later, Blaine and I—and Mackenzie and several other Post friends—arrive in what is truly a Brazilian sun-soaked paradise. It is like we are walking around in a postcard.
We are staying in Arraial d’Ajuda, a picturesque district in Porto Seguro, Bahia, in a little resort three minutes from the beach by the name of Casarão Alto Mucugê. (You should actually check this place out if you’re ever considering a South American trip. And tell Eloisa, who runs the joint, I said, “Opa!”)
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.”
More caipirinhas are consumed. Everything blurs out after a while, but there is a lot of laughter. I don’t even make any scenes. I do say at one point, “Yo quiero comer penis,” but nothing too insane.
See, I can definitely drink. I just need to be more aware.
* * *
WHEN WE GET back from Brazil, one of the first problems I encounter comes in the form of the dating column itself.
When you write about your life, a big challenge is coming up with material. A lot of times the best stuff—the real stuff—is off-limits. I can’t write about what i
t feels like to have Blaine edit my columns before I turn them in so that I can try to keep the relationship intact. I can’t write about how I’m steadily racking up massive amounts of debt in an effort to appear to be a certain type of higher-society girl than I am. I can’t write about how humiliating it feels when Blaine doesn’t want to be linked to me on Facebook. I mean, I could. But I’m far gone at this point. I am in this, and it’s fun to pretend to be someone else. It’s fun to be the kind of girl who would date Blaine.
So, in attempting to write less about Blaine, I try to work the angles to write around him. I quote a psychiatrist at length as he “counsels” me, suggesting that I should not bring up my anxieties and insecurities but rather work against these baser instincts. It is basically the opposite of the radical honesty that provided me so much relief.
I tell the shrink about the sadness I felt in Brazil and the aftershocks that ensued—physical and mental—and he says, “Say you’re on a vacation in Brazil and nothing has happened. Then do yourself a favor. Act against your feelings.”
In my column, I write the lazy joke that, following this doctor’s advice, if I were a cocktail it would be called “Faking It on the Beach.” Because I’m pretending to be all chill even when I’m stressed. Other than that, the column is pretty tame.
But when the piece comes out in the paper and Blaine returns from the corner store with a newspaper and coffees, he looks pissed and embarrassed.
“That’s quite a headline for today’s column,” he says.
I have no idea what it is, so I look down and see what he sees: “Fakin’ It for Super Preppy on Doc’s Orders.”
“Oh, wow, huh . . .” I react, although, to be honest, I am a little less shocked than he is.
By now, I have a very jaded familiarity with the fact that the writer has no idea, no control, no ownership over what happens once she turns in her final copy.
“I mean, the story itself is just about pretending to be relaxed and easygoing even when you’re freaking out inside,” I say, freaking out inside.