The Blonde Theory Read online

  “Harper, you’ve got to learn to look beneath the surface, ya know,” he said. “I’ve been taking law classes at NYU starting six weeks ago. It’s what I came over to the States for. It’s what I decided I wanted to do with my life. Tax law, actually, considering my background is in accounting. Did you know that? That I was an accountant in Ireland?”

  “No,” I said weakly.

  “Ay, I musta forgotten to mention it. Anyhow, it was time for a change, time to get out of Cork, like I told ya. So here I am, attendin’ NYU. It’s no easy feat makin’ the loan payments, which is why I’m crashin’ on my friend’s couch and workin’ part-time to put myself through school. It’ll be a long few years, but I’m hopin’ I can save enough this summer to start going to school full-time this fall.”

  I stared at him for another moment, until a thought occurred to me.

  “So this was all your idea, then, was it?” I demanded. “What, was this supposed to teach me some kind of lesson about life or something?” That figured. Although I’d been dreading it for the most part, there was a small part of me that had been looking forward to the date. Instead, it was Sean, and he had apparently taken me on as some sort of project. No thanks. I didn’t need to be anyone’s project.

  Sean looked surprised, then he smiled again.

  “No, actually,” he said, “I had no idea Molly worked for you. I don’t exactly go to study group talkin’ about overflowing toilets and such, ya know. But I had given Molly some advice about a problem she was havin’ with her girlfriend a few weeks ago, so we got into a conversation about datin’ and such. I suppose that’s why she felt comfortable asking me to go on a date with her boss.”

  “She asked you?” I said skeptically. “With no idea that we knew each other?”

  “Absolutely.” Sean nodded. “I swear it on the grave of me mother. She didn’t tell me your name until after I’d agreed to the blind date.”

  “And when she said my name?” I asked carefully. “How did you react? You probably wanted to change your mind, right? But you’re here out of some sort of obligation? Some sense that you need to teach me a lesson?”

  “No,” Sean said, looking surprised. “I’m here because I really want to be. I told Molly that I already knew you. And then I told her that I already liked you.”

  “You what?” I replied. “That’s impossible. I’ve been nothing but rude to you.”

  “Ay, because I’ve been stickin’ my nose where it doesn’t belong, I suspect,” Sean said. “I can’t really blame you, now, can I?”

  “I haven’t exactly been overly friendly either,” I muttered reluctantly. I studied him for a moment, not sure what to think. I hadn’t even considered going out on a date with someone like Sean—not even that first morning when he showed up at my apartment and I noticed abstractly how cute he was. He was right: I hadn’t bothered to look beneath the surface and see him as anything more than a handyman. It hadn’t occurred to me that there was more to him than met the eye. I’d been so closed-minded that I’d only seen him as the guy who had the power to fix my toilets, not as someone who could be intelligent, kind, and, well, datable. I’d been so caught up in my own insecurities about how men felt about me and whether or not they felt threatened by my job that I had unconsciously dismissed anyone whom I assumed didn’t fit. It wasn’t that I thought I was too good for someone who had a lower-level job than me—far from it. I was deathly afraid of falling in love with someone and then seeing him walk away, like Peter had, as soon as the financial and status differences between our jobs became too much to bear.

  I thought about Jill and the disaster she had stepped into by marrying someone who fit into her preconceived mold of the “perfect guy” without taking the time to really get to know him. I thought about Emmie, who was the same age as I was but didn’t seem all that worried about her romantic future, although I always seemed to be fretting about winding up old and alone. I thought about Meg, who loved her job but loved her husband—a jovial, down-to-earth electrician—more. And I thought about Molly and the many challenges she faced.

  I knew then, with a sudden clarity I’d been lacking, that I had to change my perspective. I’d been thinking of things all wrong, basing every dating decision on my experience with Peter, assuming that every man who came after him would think just like he had. And by selecting guys who were, for all intents and purposes, a lot like Peter, I had spent the last three years morosely confirming my own theory and slipping deeper and deeper into self-doubt. But maybe Sean had been right when he had suggested, last week, that at least part of the problem was within me. Troubling as that was to consider, maybe this whole dating conundrum that I’d been experiencing the last three years was, at its root, of my own making.

  Finally, I focused on Sean, who was smiling as he waited for me to speak again. His eyes were big and blue; his sandy hair was tousled, and he had a small cluster of freckles across the bridge of his nose that I’d never noticed before. He had deep dimples, broad shoulders, and, as Molly had pointed out, one hell of a gorgeous smile. I flushed a little as I noticed how attractive he really was for the first time. It would take awhile to adjust the way I’d been thinking for the past three years, and indeed to really, truly learn to open up again without throwing up my defenses. But as far as I was concerned, there was no better place to start.

  “So are you going to just sit there?” I finally asked Sean, smiling at him. “Or are you going to take me out on a date?”

  Sean’s grin grew wider and his blue eyes twinkled enticingly at me.

  “Well, Miss Harper Roberts,” he said, nudging me playfully. “I thought you’d never ask.”

  It’s nice to be included in people’s fantasies, but you also like to be accepted for your own sake.

  —Marilyn Monroe, world’s most famous blonde, in 1955

  EPILOGUE

  Two and a half months later...

  Sometimes in life, everything seems to fall into place all at once. The clouds clear, the heavens shine down on you, and everything is perfect. The things you didn’t understand before are suddenly in focus; all the little problems you were facing are gone, and you know that there are only good times ahead.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case with me. Never had been. But at least I had two new pairs of amazing shoes that I could wear while skipping from catastrophe to calamity, purchased with my fee for writing the article about The Blonde Theory for Meg. I was wearing one of the pairs tonight: gorgeous zebra-striped Manolo sling backs with a two-and-three-quarter-inch heel and a little black bow tied neatly over the tiny keyhole opening on the top of my foot. They had set me back $565 but were well worth it. My other pair of new Manolos—black crepe mules with a crystal ring at the top of each shoe and a two-inch heel—had set me back $656, leaving me roughly $200 to treat the girls to a meal, which is exactly what I was doing tonight.

  It was a night to celebrate, for sure. Meg had gotten a small raise at work a week earlier, a gigantic triumph, as her company was notoriously cheap. Emmie had finally, at long last, scored a role in a real movie. She had only two lines, and it would take her only two days to actually shoot the scene, but she was playing actor Cole Brannon’s ex-girlfriend in a movie that co-starred George Clooney and Matthew McConaughey and was already being talked about as the breakout hit of the following summer. She hadn’t stopped talking about it since she’d gotten the call from her agent. Molly, whom I had invited along to celebrate with us, had just finished her law school semester with A’s in both her classes and had decided, at my urging, to enroll in three classes next semester instead of two. I had promised her that she could lighten her workload with me if she needed to.

  But the real reason to celebrate tonight was that Jill’s divorce from Alec had become final that day. I had sat by her side in a room full of lawyers as she signed the divorce papers once and for all. I hadn’t known what to expect from her. Tears, perhaps? Regret? Sadness? Fear at being alone again? But instead, she had turned to me
and smiled once everyone else had left the room.

  “I guess it’s time to throw my mother’s rules out the window and get back out there to start dating again,” she had said ruefully.

  “Do you miss him?” I asked softly. I knew she was doing the right thing but couldn’t for the life of me imagine what she must be feeling.

  Jill tilted her head to the side, as if considering the question. Then she smiled. “No,” she said finally. “I don’t miss him. I miss what I thought he was. But that was never the real Alec anyhow, was it?”

  As I watched my three best friends and my secretary—who had begun to turn into a good friend—smiling and laughing over enormous pitchers of sangria and an almost shamefully large spread of appetizers around a table at Pipa, a tapas restaurant just north of Union Square, I leaned back and smiled. This was what life was about. My friends were like family to me, and it warmed my heart to see them all doing so well. Never before had we all been so happy at the same time, I thought. One of us was always facing some kind of crisis or disaster. But for this frozen moment in time, we were all content, and our lives were all moving in the right direction. Everything just felt right, and that felt good.

  As for me, I wasn’t dating Sean anymore. I had, for about six weeks, and it had been great. Molly had been right: My career hadn’t intimidated him in the slightest, and he’d been wonderfully supportive of everything I wanted to do. We had a lot of the same interests, and both of us understood the other’s busy schedule, so there was none of that resentment that had crept into my relationship with Peter when I had to work long hours.

  But the chemistry just wasn’t there. We were great as friends, but there were none of those sparks that I knew came along with great love. When we finally slept together, after four weeks because it felt like it was about time, the sex was, at best, lukewarm. I was always happy to see him, but my heart never leapt and danced inside me like I knew it was supposed to with someone whose love would rock the foundations of my world. After six weeks, we’d talked about it, and I discovered that he was feeling the same way. We split amicably and had been close friends ever since. In fact, he’d even gotten me hooked on his precious Murphy’s beer, and at least one night a week, I met him at The Long Hop to play darts and “grab a pint,” as he said.

  I suppose I felt a bit of regret that it hadn’t worked out with Sean. He was one of the nicest guys I’d ever met, and in a lot of ways we fit perfectly together. But if there’s one thing he had taught me, it was that I should never have to settle. And I would have been settling if I had decided to be content with someone I knew in my heart wasn’t the love of my life. It would have been the perfect ending to the whole Blonde Theory mess, though, if my Mr. Right had been there all along, wouldn’t it?

  But there was really no need for a perfect ending. I knew that now. Sure, I was thirty-five, and the older I got, the harder dating got because my standards grew higher while the number of decent, available men grew constantly lower. And it was even harder for me, because I knew that a lot of guys did feel threatened by my job or by my intelligence, which further shrank my dating pool. But even though Sean hadn’t turned out to be the guy for me, he had taught me a very valuable lesson: There were still guys out there who could accept me for me, without being scared of my job or my income or my intellect. If I could learn to open my mind to them and take a chance, and if I could withstand the inevitable bad dates and rejections that would come my way, I’d eventually find someone who loved me for who I was without wanting me to change or quit my job or become a housewife. Not that there would be anything wrong with those decisions, but they wouldn’t be me. That’s just not what I wanted for my own life. And I shouldn’t have to lower my standards just to make someone else happy. I knew that now.

  I would never be an empty, vacuous shell of a person or a giggling, uncomprehending ditz who was ready to fall into bed with the first guy who walked in front of her crosshairs. I knew that’s the kind of girl a lot of guys wanted. And sure, my life might have been easier if that’s who I was. But I wasn’t. I was me. And for the first time in three years, I was really, truly proud of that. For the first time in three years, I was learning how to see myself through my own eyes—not through the eyes of my ex-boyfriend or the men who rejected me without getting to know me.

  “I think it’s time for a toast,” Meg said, breaking into my thought process as she picked up the glass pitcher. “Who needs more sangria?”

  After she had filled all of us up, she raised her glass. The rest of us followed suit.

  “To friendship,” she said. “We’re lucky to have each other, girls.” We all smiled, nodded, and clinked glasses.

  “To Emmie’s movie,” Jill said with a grin, and we all clinked again.

  “To Jill getting rid of that creepy husband of hers,” Emmie said, shooting Jill a look. Jill smiled, and we all touched glasses again.

  “To all of you,” Molly said quietly. “I’ve never had a group of friends like you before. Thanks for inviting me along tonight.” We clinked glasses again, then the girls went silent, all of them looking at me, waiting for my toast.

  I hesitated, then shrugged. “Here’s to The Blonde Theory,” I said with a grin. “It was just about the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. But at least we learned something.”

  Laughing, the girls clinked glasses again then dug back into the appetizers, chattering happily. As I bit into a bacon-wrapped blue-cheese-and-walnut-stuffed date, perched delicately on an endive leaf, I looked around the table once more and realized something else. This was the life I had built for myself. I had a career I loved, a self-confidence that was in the process of returning, and a group of the best friends in the world. And man or no man, I knew I’d be happy. I was me. Despite my generous helping of faults and shortcomings, despite the many things I wanted to change about myself, despite the things I knew I needed to do to become a better person, I was glad about that.

  At the end of the day, there was no one I’d rather be.

  About the Author

  I’ve always been a blonde. I come by it naturally. My mom’s blond. My sister, Karen, is strawberry-blond. My brother, Dave, is dirty blond. It just runs in the family. And while I admit to occasional encounters with stereotypical dumb blondes out and about, the majority of the fair-haired folks I’ve met are pretty darned intelligent. My mom can debate politics better than almost anyone else on the planet. Karen’s currently at an Ivy League university earning her second master’s in public policy. Dave’s brain has been a veritable atlas-slash-sports almanac since he was about two years old, and now he’s majoring in economics at the same university Karen and I graduated from. And lo and behold, somehow I squeaked by as the valedictorian of my high school class (Go Northeast Vikings!) and graduated from the University of Florida summa cum laude, blond hair and all.

  But like many blondes—and many non-blondes—I’ve sometimes wondered how much easier my life might be if I could simply giggle my way through my days, batting my eyelashes, flipping my hair, and checking my brain at the door. After all, sometimes it seems that’s what guys are looking for, right? But, through a bit of trial and error, I’ve learned that most of the time, guts go a lot further than giggles, and brains count more than batted eyelashes—in dating and all other areas of life. I still battle with insecurities, but at the end of the day, I’m pretty sure I’m better off being me.

  And who is “me”? Well, among other things, I’m the author of the novel How to Sleep With a Movie Star, which, incidentally, is a work of fiction and not a how-to book! I swear, I’ve never slept with a movie star! (But Matthew McConaughey, if you’re reading this, um, feel free to give me a call.)

  In addition to being an author, I’m a freelance magazine writer who has been published in People, American Baby, Glamour, Health, YM, and a variety of other magazines. I also appear regularly on The Daily Buzz, a syndicated TV morning show on in over a hundred cities around the country. I have a great group of friends and a
wonderful family, and when I am not out spending too much money on clothes I don’t need, I am probably either a) obsessing about when I can next visit Paris (my favorite city in the world), b) trying to plan a wine and cheese party that never quite comes together because of scheduling conflicts and my own inability to clean my house, c) watching Sex and the City reruns that I’ve already seen a hundred times, d) reading, or e) writing (okay that was an easy one).

  I live in Orlando, and although I profess my undying love to Mickey Mouse annually through the purchase of a Disney World annual pass, there’s also a lot more to do in this city than hitting the theme parks. I love eating out, picnicking by Lake Eola, going to the beach, going to wine bars, going out downtown with friends, listening to live music, and did I mention shopping? So check out my Web site, www.kristinharmel.com, and drop me a line to say hello. I’ll probably be here, waiting by the phone for Matthew to call, resisting the urge to giggle, bat my eyes, and flip my blond hair.

  Words of Wisdom from Five Famous Blondes

  1. “Beauty, to me, is about being comfortable in your own skin. That, or a kick-ass red lipstick.”

  —Gwyneth Paltrow

  2. “It’s never too late—never too late to start over, never too late to be happy.”

  —Jane Fonda

  3. “To be brave is to love someone unconditionally, without expecting anything in return. To just give. That takes courage.”

  —Madonna

  4. “There’s something liberating about not pretending. Dare to embarrass yourself. Risk.”

  —Drew Barrymore

  5. “People think that at the end of the day a man is the only answer. Actually, a fulfilling job is better for me.”