The Blonde Theory Page 2

  It was becoming increasingly obvious that as long as I kept climbing the corporate ladder, I was destined to be alone.

  Chapter Two

  It’s not you, it’s them,” said Meg at brunch the next morning—my Happy-Anniversary-of-Being-Undesirable Brunch, if you want to get specific—looking at me with thinly masked concern.

  “You sound like a bad breakup line,” I mumbled, still wondering why we’d had to move our usual brunch time from 11 am up to 9. Who did brunch at 9 am on a Sunday? This so wasn’t brunch. This was breakfast. I felt like we were cheating.

  Of course, my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that, due to lingering depression over celebrating the three-year marker of my apparently endless singledom, I had been at home alone, awake until 3 am, during which time I had polished off six Bacardi Limón and Sprites (okay, to be fair, six Bacardi Limóns on the rocks—with splashes of Sprite), had plunged headfirst into the tray of brownies my overly helpful secretary, Molly, had brought me at work on Friday, and had then proceeded to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. And I didn’t even smoke. Well, not that often, anyhow. I smoked when I was drinking too much and wanted to feel sorry for myself. I was a Sulky Smoker.

  And yes, I knew it was a disgusting, terribly unattractive habit and that I was slowly killing myself. I was well aware. But I had the situation under control. I’d made a deal with Fate. Whenever Fate wanted to send me a guy who wasn’t scared of me, I’d quit smoking—cold turkey. In the meantime, I didn’t see the harm in lopping years off my life. And besides, what goes better with Bacardi than a Marlboro Light?

  Admittedly, I was grasping at straws.

  “Were you up late drinking and smoking again?” Meg asked, as if reading my mind. Her wide, gentle brown eyes bored into mine. I shot her a guilty look.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But in my defense, I also polished off half a tray of brownies.”

  The three of them—Meg, Jill, and Emmie—just looked at me. Okay, for a lawyer, I wasn’t doing the best job of putting on a good defense.

  “Fine, fine, so I ate the whole tray,” I said, throwing up my hands in mock surrender. “So shoot me.”

  I had never been good at anniversaries. Even happy ones. I hated the pressure they put on me. With Peter, I had freaked out over what to get him for our first anniversary and had ended up lamely presenting him with season one of Seinfeld on DVD while he had bought me a beautiful leather-bound day planner, inscribed with harper roberts, esq. With Chris, the guy I’d dated before Peter, I had baked him a giant heart-shaped cookie that said i love you, chris in chocolate chips, but the edges had burned, the chocolate had melted and smeared, and I basically wound up giving him what looked like a charred Frisbee with unintelligible chocolate smears.

  See, I was a disaster at anniversaries. But the bad anniversaries—like today—were especially dreadful. Thus, the overeating, overdrinking, and resumption of the gross habit of smoking.

  “You’re never going to find a guy sitting on your terrace and drowning your sorrows, Harper,” Jill proclaimed a bit smugly, tossing her sleek blonde hair (touched up on a biweekly basis at Louis Licari’s salon on Fifth Avenue, in case you were wondering) over her shoulder. I didn’t even try to mask the fact that I was glaring at her. Since she had gotten married six months earlier, she had suddenly become very comfortable—too comfortable—dispensing advice, as if her status as a Married had made her a sudden expert in all things love-related. I had thus far restrained myself from reminding her of all the dating fumbles she’d had before stumbling upon the diminutive Dr. Alec Katz, who had proposed to her in less than six months with a diamond roughly the size of a disco ball.

  “Honey, you’re just in a slump,” Meg said to me gently while shooting Jill a dangerous look. “And this isn’t the day for us to pick you apart.” She could always be counted on to dispense motherly nuggets of irrefutable wisdom. Sometimes I forgot she was only thirty-five and not sixty-five, an observation I had thus far refrained from sharing with her. She even looked like a concerned grandma sometimes, with her dark hair cut short for practicality’s sake, and her affinity for collared shirts with khakis. And she wore aprons at home when she cooked, for God’s sake. Aprons!

  “Easy for you to say,” I grumbled. After all, she was married, too. Darned Marrieds. Going on like they knew what they were talking about.

  Hmph. Well, maybe they did.

  It was just too early in the morning to deal with that possibility.

  Then again, Meg had always seemed to know everything. Maybe it was time I started listening to her. After all, she had been right about pretty much everything in the twenty-nine years I had known her.

  In what was a particularly unusual feat for four Manhattanites in their mid-thirties, Meg Myers, Jill Peters-Katz, Emmie Walters, and I had been friends since grade school in Ohio and were still as close as sisters—even if we didn’t always see eye-to-eye on everything.

  Meg and I had been best friends since the first day of first grade, when she sat down beside me and announced that she had Band-Aids, Children’s Tylenol, and Neosporin in her backpack, should I ever fall on the playground and scrape my knee. Twenty-nine years later, she still carried Band-Aids and Neosporin, although the Tylenol had been replaced by Advil. She has always been the one I turned to when I had a problem—whether it be the time that Bobby Johnston stole my lunch in the second grade (Meg gave him a very threatening speech about respecting other people’s property) or the day my parents told me they were getting a divorce, when I was eleven (“They’re not divorcing you, Harper,” she had explained patiently while I punched her pillow and bawled my eyes out. “And neither of them loves you any less.”), or the time my first boyfriend, Jack, broke my heart by dumping me over the phone when I was eighteen. (“He didn’t deserve you anyhow,” Meg had sniffed while handing me a tissue.)

  Emmie had come along two years after Meg and I met, a perky blonde whirlwind of energy whose parents had just moved east from LA. She arrived at James Franklin Cash III Elementary School midway through November with a dark tan and a necklace made of seashells, and all the third-grade boys fell immediately in love with her. Meg stood up for her one day when big Katie Kleegal tried to steal Emmie’s lunch, and the three of us had been close ever since.

  Jill Peters had been the last addition to our little group. She had moved in down the street from Emmie the summer before junior high, and despite being a year younger, she was the only one of us who knew how to put on foundation, wear a bra, and French-kiss boys, which of course made her immediately indispensable to our little group.

  “Girls in Connecticut, where I come from, are so far ahead of girls in Ohio,” she had said with a withering expression of boredom that made us all feel just a bit embarrassed about our affiliation with the Buckeye State. From the day we met her, she had been talking about finding Mr. Right, which baffled Meg and me. We had both been late bloomers, and the summer before junior high we still thought boys were kind of icky.

  (Come to think of it, though, maybe we’d been right all along, before the teenage hormones took over our brains. Guys were kind of icky, weren’t they? Why was it that I was just now coming to this realization at the age of thirty-five? Clearly, I wasn’t as smart as I’d thought.)

  The other three girls had moved to Manhattan when they were twenty-two, after we had all graduated from Ohio State. Meg had moved into a tiny, dingy one-bedroom in Brooklyn to pursue a career in magazine journalism. Emmie had moved in with Meg for a year, her old Rainbow Brite sleeping bag stretched out on Meg’s living room floor, to try out for every Broadway show possible. Jill had studied interior design and had somehow moved directly into a management position at Lila McElroy, a hip, prestigious downtown firm, her first year out of school.

  I had visited on weekends but hadn’t made the permanent move to Manhattan until I was twenty-four, after I had graduated from Harvard Law, making our little foursome complete once again.

  Now we were all living our dream
s—or at least an adjusted version of them. I had a thriving career that I loved. Meg, who had originally wanted to be a writer for The New Yorker, was instead a senior editor at Mod, a trendy women’s magazine, which seemed to fit her better anyhow, since it allowed her the opportunity to give young women advice every month—and there was nothing Meg liked better than dispensing advice. She had married her high school sweetheart, Paul Amato, an electrician, who had come to New York with her. She kept her maiden name.

  Emmie, a tiny, adorable blonde with pixie-cut curls, had struck out on Broadway, had a string of roles in off-Broadway productions, and finally landed a role on the soap opera The Rich and the Damned two years ago. Once a month or so, she was approached by a starstruck housewife from Boise or Minneapolis or Salt Lake City who recognized her and asked for her autograph, which thrilled her to no end. She also had an endless string of adoring men who were enchanted with her status as a C-list celebrity. She had collected no less than a dozen marriage proposals during the thirteen years she had lived in New York.

  And Jill, whose mother had repeated the mantra Marry well and before you’re thirty, and you’ll never, ever have to worry in lieu of a lullaby, every night before tucking her into her pale pink canopied bed, had done the only thing she’d ever really aspired to do anyhow: married a wealthy doctor with a penthouse on the Upper East Side. (Although I should add that she hadn’t gotten married until the age of thirty-three, somewhat violating the mantra. She had really been in desperation mode in the two years between the time she hit the big three-zero and the time she met Alec.)

  So maybe the girls did know what they were talking about. After all, I was the only walking romantic disaster among us. I was so used to making faces at them when they tried to give me advice that I never really listened.

  “So I added it up last night, and I’ve figured it out,” I said to no one in particular, trying to look as if I thought the whole concept of my romantic meltdown was hilarious. “I’ve been on thirty-seven unsuccessful first dates in the last three years. I think this is a new record. Would one of you like to call the Guinness Book?”

  “Stop being so negative, Harper,” Meg said gently. “The right guy will come along. Just be yourself.”

  “Easy for you to say,” I grumbled. “You married a guy who’s been in love with you since we were sixteen. And you—” I turned to Jill. “You married a doctor with a penthouse, just like you wanted. Even before you met him, guys were falling for you all the time. And you—” I focused my attention on Emmie, who was squirming uncomfortably. “Well, I don’t even know where to start with you. You’re on a date every night of the week with a different guy.”

  “Not every night,” Emmie said after a moment. At least she had the decency to blush. I sighed and looked at the three of them: Emmie with her perfectly golden Shirley Temple curls, perfectly perky little nose, and perfectly tanned skin; Jill with her sleek dyed golden hair, Hermès scarf, and perfect Upper East Side ivory complexion; Meg with her cocoa-and-cream skin and silky black hair, a perfect product of an African American mother and a Jewish father. And then there was me: blonde, not unattractive, but apparently less appealing to men than a visit to the urologist.

  “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve even so much as kissed a guy?” I asked softly. “I’m pathetic.”

  I wasn’t just whining. I didn’t do that; I hardly ever exaggerated. I think it was the lawyer in me that made me want to tell everything like it was, as if under oath.

  “You’re not pathetic,” Meg said gently. Emmie and Jill nodded, but I just shot them a look. They couldn’t put one past me. I knew pathetic when I saw it. And I saw it every morning when I looked in the mirror.

  The girls were silent for a moment. They exchanged looks and then turned back to me, waiting for me to go on. But I had nothing left to say. I was deflated. I sighed. I didn’t know why I’d even opened my mouth.

  “The right guy will come along,” Meg said finally, breaking the uncomfortable silence that had settled over us. It seemed to be her fallback phrase for me, and I wondered whom she was trying to convince—me or herself. Her forehead was furrowed with concern.

  “Really?” I asked, staring at her in frustration. “When? Where is he? Because the wrong guys aren’t even coming along anymore.”

  As my thirties ticked by with no prospects in sight, I was starting to get just the slightest bit nervous that I had somehow missed the boat.

  “That’s not true,” Jill said, interrupting my self-indulgent self-exploration. “Guys come up to you all the time.”

  “Yeah,” I said softly. “Then they talk to me—or maybe even go out with me a few times—and find out I’ve got a brain in my head, which is apparently horrifying.”

  I swallowed hard and forced a smile, trying to look as if I thought the whole thing was funny. In a way, it was. I mean, weren’t men supposed to be strong and confident and all? So what was it about me that scared them so much? I wasn’t unattractive. I wasn’t unkind. I was actually one of the least demanding women I knew, and I didn’t think I had a diva bone in my body. But apparently men liked to be the breadwinners, the success stories, the financial kings of their relationships. And thanks to my mid-six-figure income, they never would be if they were with me.

  I always knew that the trite phrase Money doesn’t buy happiness was true. I just hadn’t realized that money would actually preclude all my chances for happiness. Hmph, they didn’t tell you this at Harvard orientation.

  “You don’t scare men,” said Emmie feebly. I looked at her for a moment, waiting for her to continue, but her voice had trailed off, and she looked troubled.

  It was no use. I knew the girls meant well. They always had. I mean, they were my best friends in the world, and I knew they only wanted the best for me. But they didn’t understand how hard it was. Dating had always come so easily to them, despite the inevitable hiccup here and there in their love lives. I mean, I knew that dating was a roller coaster, filled with ups and downs. But the coaster of my love life had stalled at the bottom of a loop for years. And despite their best intentions, the girls didn’t know how to get me out of it any more than I did.

  I blamed Peter. Okay, so none of this was actually his fault, but I had decided long ago that I would blame him anyhow. He made a good scapegoat. I mean, c’mon, what kind of a guy just walks away one day because his live-in girlfriend gets a promotion and a raise? Why couldn’t he just tell me that with every success I had, he felt just the teensiest bit more emasculated? If I’d known, I wouldn’t have kept talking about the things that made me happy at work. I wouldn’t have invited him to my work parties and let my colleagues talk me up. I mistook his mounting discomfort for happiness somehow, deceived myself into believing that for the first time, I was with someone who was proud of my accomplishments rather than terrified by them. My mistake.

  And so I came home from work each day and, horror of all horrors, told him about my day, which I now recognized as tactical error number one. I told him about all my hopes and dreams—tactical error number two. And then I had the nerve, the gall, the indecency, to go after what I wanted and to make partner at my firm, which came with a lot more prestige and a nice pay hike. Clearly that had been the biggest tactical error of all. Perhaps Peter had been clinging to the hope that I would one day see the light, decide to leave my legal career, and become a stay-at-home mom, like all the good little girls his buddies were dating.

  It would have been nice if he had consulted me about that plan.

  Now I knew better. The more successful I was at work, the less successful I was at dating. It was a simple causal relationship, and somehow I had only recently managed to wrap my mind around its logic. Perhaps I wasn’t as smart as the senior partners at my firm thought I was, or I surely would have figured this all out sooner.

  The irony of it all was that none of the men at work—who were my professional peers—would ever understand how I felt. That’s because they were the victors i
n the world’s most unfair double standard. All of my male co-workers—even Mort Mortenson, with his enormous belly, ubiquitous suspenders, and ridiculous comb-over—had pretty little pixies of wives ten, twenty, or even thirty years their junior. Many of the secretaries at the firm (all female, of course) considered themselves the dating pool for the firm’s young, overworked male attorneys, and more than one conference room secretary-on-associate scandal had inexplicably blossomed into marriage.

  But wonder of all wonders, there were no men in the I-want-to-date-an-attorney secretary pool. Or at the bar in the building next door to our Wall Street high-rise, where women waited to pick up the attorneys and bankers who filtered out of our building each evening. Or in any bar, bookstore, coffee shop, or apartment party I’d ever been to in New York so far.

  I was beginning to run out of options. Or maybe I already had.

  OF COURSE I didn’t realize then, in my hungover, brownie-stuffed state, hunched over a plate of too-runny eggs, soggy hash browns, and a mug of coffee as big as my throbbing head, that this would be the brunch that would change my life. Or at least my dating life. But I guess I had underestimated Meg, fresh out of any Advil or Neosporin to heal the sting of repeated rejection, who of course couldn’t stand for any of the people she loved to be unhappy. I thought, sometimes, that she should run for president. We’d achieve world peace in no time, because Meg wouldn’t sleep until every last person on the planet had a smile on his or her face. She would sit down personally with Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein and Tran Duc Luong, bake them cookies, talk to them in that soothing tone of hers, and get them to see the light. They’d be having tea and biscuits in her living room and signing peace treaties in no time. That’s just the way she was.

  Clearly, in retrospect, I should have been wary of the pleased expression on her face as Emmie and Jill discussed my singledom and I cracked self-effacing jokes at my own expense.