He replies immediately, profusely, and sincerely—explaining that it was teasing payback from the night before, when I’d told him he had “man boobs.”
Oh shit. I forgot I call everyone fat when I’m drunk. We talk on the phone and some of the night comes back to me. I also said, “You don’t have herpes, do you?” and “You should send me flowers!”
Later that day, I get a call from the messenger’s office. Flower delivery. From Blaine.
In the column, I call him Super Preppy. I send all of these About Last Night columns along to Alex Balk at Gawker, who links it, making fun of it as expected. The comments are, of course, savage. I summarize them and send a note out to my mailing list, “I’ve started a new man-hands, horse-faced Renée Zellweger with Down syndrome dating column!”
But I know the game. Gawker brutalizes you. Your site gets the traffic. Everyone is happy.
ONCE ALL IS copacetic again with Blaine, he surprises me by wanting to see me—a lot. When he is traveling for work down South, buried in paperwork, he writes, “A bold suggestion, why don’t you come down to East Hampton? Weather is supposed to be nice, and it would be a good change of scenery for a summer weekend.”
I take the jitney up, catching up on email, one of which is introducing Hannibal Buress to a few comedy folks I know. I’ve by now told Hannibal all about this new guy in my life, even showing him a ridiculously preppy picture of Blaine wearing blinding yellow trousers.
“Thanks, Mandy,” Hannibal writes after I’ve made the introductions. “This almost makes up for you consistently going out with this weird-pants-wearing dude.”
Kyle Kinane describes him another way. “He sounds like a villain from a bad eighties movie.”
Blaine picks me up in his Jeep at the station, and we drive to his family’s converted farmhouse in Amagansett, which has a long winding road to the main house. It is daunting. I’ve never been to East Hampton before, let alone to someone’s regal country estate. The view from the living room window looks like a Monet painting, with a tiny bridge leading out to the water, trees and tall waving grass.
“This will be interesting,” I say, trying to just be myself instead of someone who is totally out of her element. “I wonder if we’ll like each other for a whole weekend.”
“Maybe we’ll kill each other,” he says.
“Maybe!” I say brightly.
We sit on the window seats, looking out into the marshlands, drinking chardonnay. When Blaine goes off to run some errands, I am given the edict “Mi casa es su casa,” and I’m left alone to play woman of the manor. An hour later we are having cantaloupe and vanilla ice cream and zinfandel with his mother and her friends, which is surreal, to say the least. I’m meeting his mother?
“You’re from San Diego,” his mom says with an upper-crust lockjaw even more pronounced than Blaine’s. “And what do your parents do?”
There are a lot of double-cheek kisses on the way out, and then we’re off to another party in Bridgehampton. More zinfandel, more double-cheek kisses, and while I’m having fun, it’s also a little bit like the episode of The Sopranos where Tony is invited to the exclusive golf club only to realize he is there as the circus oddity.
“What’s the Post like?” everyone wants to know. “It’s my favorite rag.”
Soon enough, the frequency of dating Blaine has an impact on my life—personal and professional. I am all Blaine, all the time. When I get asked to do Red Eye on Fox, not only do I not know that you should always prepare a bunch of funny lines to say in advance, but I’m more concerned about getting my fake tan just right because I’m seeing Blaine later that night. I suck on the show and never get invited back.
But it certainly pays off with Blaine. He invites me to spend the weekend with him at, as he describes it, “the ridiculously, pretentiously named” William K. Vanderbilt Jr. Concours d’Elegance weekend in Newport, Rhode Island. I’m told to wear something dressy, preferably black or white, but he knows I’ll be “stunning” in whatever I wear. The man knows how to lay on the charm.
I rent an insanely gorgeous long swishy black Christian Lacroix dress from a friend of a friend for $250. It’s worth several thousand, but I don’t ask any more about it for fear of psyching myself out completely.
When we go to the party, we arrive at a Gilded Age mansion, complete with a temple-front portico resembling the White House. Where have I seen this place before? Oh, that’s right. In the movie The Great Gatsby. There’s Tommy Hilfiger charming and captivating a circle of admirers. On the dance floor there’s Byrdie Bell. It’s also the first time I notice that Blaine definitely does not want to be photographed with me on his arm for the society pages. He conspicuously whisks me past the cameraman there to document the six hundred celebrants in attendance. That’s okay, I think. We’re very new to dating, and high-society people only want to be written about three times (birth, marriage, and death), so I don’t think much of the snub. It smarts, I’ll be honest, but who cares? What a fun escape into fantasyland for a little while.
“I like your confidence,” Blaine says, and I see what he means when I look at a selfie I’ve taken of the two of us together at a table, with his lips planted against my cheek. I’m nearly unrecognizable from the miserable woman I was just a few years ago.
We spin around the dance floor, and I spend most of the night trying not to put my foot in my mouth (aside from asking one particularly buxom society girl if her breasts are real), smiling and nodding as much as possible. But unfortunately, the night
