I don’t know about you, but if I’m invited to stay in a guy’s hotel room for more than three days and he’s footing the bill, I infer that sex will probably be in the mix, unless he’s a relative or religious figure. (As I said before, if you don’t want to be in a situation like this, leave.) But after three or four days of total confusion, my friend called to tell me it wasn’t happening with the French deejay. I immediately told her she needed to throw down and be honest. “Tell him, ‘If we are not going to have a sexual relationship, or at least an emotional relationship that’s going to lead to a sexual relationship, then you need to leave, because your Frenchness is bumming me out.’ ”
When I returned to my office the next morning, my friend was there, hanging out with one of my publicists, still shocked and devastated by this guy’s behavior. “I want you to go in my office,” I said. “Find those photos of me when I was your age, the ones that no longer look like me. I want you to know that even when I looked like that, I thought I was defective—that I was the problem! You have to accept the fact that if this were meant to be, he would have jumped on top of you long ago.”
The point is, we can put these situations on Freud, or we can put them on cultural differences, but we should not put them on our hotel bill.
9. If you’re sleeping with a married man, you’re helping him stay married. A married man will never leave his wife for you. If you had asked me twenty years ago whether men or women end most relationships, I definitely would have said, “Men.” And in my two marriages I spent a lot of time wondering whether I was keeping my husband happy enough. But I now have enough life experience to know that when a man finally commits to a chick, he may eventually cheat on her with her best friend or drive her crazy eating Doritos on the couch all day like a sack of potatoes, but he is never leaving, regardless of how much he can’t stand her. He will always make her lower the boom. And even then she probably won’t be able to get rid of him! I mean, Spencer Tracy wouldn’t leave his wife for the great Katherine Hepburn, despite the fact that they spent thirty years together and costarred in nine films!
Years ago, after my first husband, Ronnie, made me kick him out,* I met a really beautiful German rock star, who was in the INXS of Germany. I could hardly believe my good luck. He was blonde, funny, great in bed and had the hottest south German accent I’d ever heard. To top it all off, he lived at the Chelsea Hotel. I mean, can you say Traum, baby? Within two weeks, we’d embarked on a massive love affair. We traveled together and hung out with each other’s friends, and every night after working in the studio, where he was recording an album with my musician friend, he appeared at my apartment on Hudson Street in the West Village.
One day about a month into our relationship, I ran into a friend of mine named Nico, who always knew everyone’s business. Nico mentioned that he’d heard I was dating this German rock star and wondered if I knew he had a three-month-old baby at home in Germany, with his live-in girlfriend. I felt as though I’d been hit in the head with a ton of bricks while being kangaroo-kicked in the heart. There was just no way. Nobody could fuck me so hard and so pure and be so corrupt at the same time.
“It can’t be the same guy,” I said, shaking my head. I was about to learn that men have an amazing ability to compartmentalize. (FYI, so do women, but we’re not talking about us right now.)
“Why don’t you ask him?” Nico suggested gently, almost daring me.
That night, when the rock star knocked on the door, I opened it only halfway.
“Hey, babe,” he said.
“Before you come in, I have a question for you,” I said accusingly. “Do you have a girlfriend? Better yet, do you have a baby?”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he replied, with a slight tinge of annoyance that said, How inconvenient you’re finding out about this in the middle of our wild love affair.
That’s when I swung my fist and punched him harder than I’ve ever hit anyone in my life. Then I slammed the door in his face.
Outside, he banged and pleaded in vain. “Come on, we need to talk about this,” he said.
I just sank to the floor and cried and cried, vowing never to speak to him again.
The truth of the matter is, you just never know what’s going on with people. I believe that even if a guy tells you he’s separated, divorced, or about to get a divorce, it doesn’t hurt to do a little digging around on the Internet or even pay a few bucks for a background check. I mean, there are just so many different family systems out there today. It’s not enough to just ask if he’s married; you may need to come up with five or six ways to find out whether he’s in a relationship! Does he live with another human being besides his child? Is he in any sort of ongoing sexual relationship with someone to whom he is not related?
I’ve actually been forced to learn this lesson more than once. Five years ago, I’d become an eco-dater, meaning I was only sleeping with people I’d already slept with in the past. It was around then that I reconnected with my
