The minute I got the email from Steve, I obsessively checked my blog’s StatCounter and there I saw it: again and again, a News Corp IP address that showed someone who worked there had been checking what I was writing almost daily. I knew it had to be Steve.
From that point forward, as I sat in my gray-fabric-lined little box at the medical school writing about science grants while I watched Comedy Central in the background, I would make it a priority to religiously update my blog.
I treated it like a tryout session, an audition for him and anyone else who might be reading. At night, as I came home to my Gothic converted servants’ quarters turned guesthouse in Humboldt Park where my husband and I were still living, my arms were filled to overflowing with stacks of celebrity magazines to stay current.
Daily, I searched to find a comedic angle on every fresh new pop culture obsession.
When TomKat was huge, I stationed myself on top of our orange velour couch, which we’d found outside a Dumpster, and basically read every article on Scientology ever written. Then I wrote a satirical “day in the life” story about the couple. Emboldened by the emerging linking economy, I forwarded the post on to Mark Lisanti at Defamer, whom I had never communicated with before, with the subject line “For your consideration”—and a day later, he linked it. Soon after that, I made up a fake Martha Stewart catchphrase for her new Apprentice-style reality show. Linked again! I watched as hits on my blog climbed into the thousands. And still, StatCounter showed that News Corp IP.
But then, just as quickly as my great career hope had arrived, Steve fell off the radar. Didn’t write back to my pitches. Didn’t run a sample thing I wrote for him. Nothing.
When last minute my dear high school friend Siobhan Foley changed her wedding destination from Ireland to New York, I took a chance and emailed Steve again in early August.
“Hey, Steve,” I wrote, “if you’re still alive, perhaps we can get together for a drink when I’m in New York Sept. 23–25 for a wedding.”
Again . . . silence. By that point, I knew I needed to make dramatic changes in my personal life as my happiness and sanity continued to plummet. I made a resolution that I would:
1. End my marriage to James.
2. Move home to live with my mom, who said she was excited to have me back home in San Diego.
Unfortunately, that plan quickly unraveled, too, when . . .
1. My parents called to tell me they were getting back together after their five-year-long divorce.
2. Hopefully I could figure something else out?
A day before I was set to fly out to New York for my friend’s wedding, I checked my email one last time. There it was. Steve.
“Am I too late for this?” he wrote. “I’ve been on jury duty and am seriously sorry and would like to see you.”
While I had no hope that anything would come out of it, we made a plan to text while I was in the city. Emboldened by finally hearing back from Steve, I decided to test my cold-call-emailing luck and wrote a short note to the author Jonathan Ames, too. I had met him once after he spoke in Chicago as part of my friend Davonna’s thesis showcase.
He was the closest thing to a real-life New York celebrity I had in my Rolodex, and I somehow thought meeting him might impress Steve and show him how connected I was.
“Hey, I’m in NY this weekend for a wedding,” I emailed Jonathan. “Any chance of getting coffee or tea, or are you performing somewhere famous? That tall blond girl from Davonna’s thing. Yep.”
I made sure to send him a link to my blog—which featured all my romantic dalliances—to show him that I was single, skinny, separated from my husband after five years of marriage, and very much dating. On the blog, I wrote stories and showed pictures of nights out with suitors who ranged from guys who at first seemed un-googlable (savvy friends quickly informed me this meant they were just using fake names and, oh yeah, married) to headache-inducing frat bros driving Hummers to an older lawyer named Scott who took me out on his yacht.
Jonathan and I exchanged various emails, with him keeping me up-to-date on why he probably couldn’t meet up. Meanwhile, my short trip to New York already felt like a small personal victory in some minuscule way. I had arrived—at JFK International, almost divorced. I turned on my phone and saw that Scott with the Yacht had already called to say he missed me.
I settled into my college roommate’s art deco apartment in Park Slope, where I was staying, introduced myself to her two cats, which I would be minding while she was away, and began frantically reaching out to all manner of old friends and acquaintances. “I’m in New York!” “What are you doing?” “I’m getting divorced!”
The next morning, the day of Siobhan’s nuptials, I got Jonathan’s hypnotically lowercased invite: “going to a late party tonight in manhattan, but if you can’t sleep, maybe when i’m coming back from the party i’ll call you and we could meet for a late drink or something.”
I blasted the Strokes from my iPod, put on my cleavage-baring black thrift-store slip dress, and blissfully attended Siobhan’s vows at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Little Italy, snapping pictures of everything. The centuries-old weathered red bricks, stretched ten feet high and permanently leaning, seemed to offer stark comfort to my own teetering state of late. It wasn’t long before I was partying into the night at the Prince George Ballroom, twirling around the dance floor, drunk on sauvignon blanc. I checked my messages. One new voicemail from Scott with the Yacht. “Hope you’re having fun in New York!” I sure was. Now I just needed a date to prove to myself I
