Boston, 2014, was the first time, though I thought about how easy I could get away with it at a hotel bar in Atlanta, considered it with a yoga instructor in L.A., and nearly called the number my black car driver slipped me after he picked me up from the airport in Tulsa. Looking back, I realize that after traveling all over the country for the second book tour, Boston felt familiar, and therefore like the last in my series of attempts to prove that I was too good to fit in anyway. I finally felt prepared for this particular challenge: The blooms hadn’t fallen off the show yet and the book was selling so well I had just gone on an antique Persian rug spending spree with money to spare for an Alhambra earring and necklace set from Van Cleef. I was thirty but I looked twenty-six. I was on TV. If I failed, there were plenty of affirmatives to cushion the blow to my self-esteem.
The men in Boston did not feel like the hipster men of New York—rather, they felt like the WASPy guys who told me I was hot in high school and college but were too afraid to actually sleep with me. What were they afraid of? That they might like it? That they might like me? That they might have to take me home and explain me to their mothers? I could relate to that, at least—not knowing how to explain a black partner to a white mother. I dated a few black guys in college, and while I met some of their families, I never introduced them to mine. I had grown up reassuring my adoptive mother that although I was one of a handful of black members of our community, I didn’t feel like an outlier. I dressed like the popular girls and I played the sports the popular girls played and I spoke like the popular girls and I ultimately became a popular girl to prove to her that I felt welcomed and included, to soothe her lingering concerns over my adoption. People warned her that despite the privilege she could afford me, she could inadvertently make my life worse by raising me in a place where I would always feel out of place. On some level, I worried that if I brought home a black guy, she would interpret this to mean that she had failed at creating a home where I felt like I belonged. Like what she had to offer me in terms of connection and love and empathy had never been enough. Like I might have been better off without her—always her greatest fear.
I knew Boston guys, the ones whose families had summer places on the Cape and degrees from small liberal arts colleges. But I had only ever known them through the lens of wingwoman or platonic friend. When I was younger, I had been quick to take my sexuality off the table before they could do it for me. It’s true that I didn’t neuter myself for Vince, but Vince had no pedigree. He may have been better-looking than the guys who rejected me growing up but as a struggling actor from a second-generation Italian family on Long Island, he was always a cut below. His degree didn’t say Colgate or Hamilton, and he didn’t have a long line of blond ex-girlfriends with pearls the size of jawbreakers in their ears. Who was I beating, really? Gia from Holbrook, studying for her nursing degree? It’s not an accomplishment to take men from the Gias, it’s an accomplishment to take them from the Lauren Bunns of the world, who would have slept with a guy like Vince, but married him? Not even blacked out in Vegas, something she did once, with a guy she met at the craps table.
Jamie was the name of the first. Sort of fat. Really tall. He was funny, bearded, and jobless, drinking a Bud Light at the bar at Mistral. Vince hadn’t had sex with me in two months. That is a different thing than saying Vince and I hadn’t had sex in two months. Do you understand that? My husband couldn’t get hard for me but he could for everyone else, and I was still so young. Thirty. A baby. This couldn’t be it for me. Yes, both Vince and I have had sex with other people in our marriage, but I am not a cheater. I am an outsourcer.
Jamie and I ended up back in my hotel because I was staying at the Taj and I wanted him to understand that he knew me too. A guy who occasionally serves Bloody Marys at his parents’ country club probably thinks he doesn’t have much in common with a woman who looks like the sassy sidekick to the hot girl on his favorite TV show, but money catches that trust fall. The sex was sloppy, neither of us finished, and when I woke up in the morning all that was left of Jamie was a few congealed specks of his urine on the toilet seat. But I had succeeded—or so I thought at the time. Because looking back, I’m now able to ask—but at what? Fucking an unambitious slob with decent breeding? He was my prize, and one I only felt worthy of collecting once I had amassed the advantages of fame? What happens when that goes away? And it would go away. That, or turn on me and last forever. I knew this from the start, but only in the most abstract of terms. The way anti-tobacco campaigns that attempt to deter kids from smoking with lung cancer horror stories don’t really work. It’s too far in the future to worry about having to talk through a hole in your neck now. That’s what I thought when I signed on to The Show. Yes, this will end, and maybe even badly, but not for many, many years. I always thought I had more time before someone punched a hole in my neck.
I pay for the half hour of in-flight Internet on the way to L.A., but after the first thirty minutes I still haven’t heard back from Gwen, and still nothing after an hour. I film a few clips of myself on the GoPro camera production gave me to use on the plane.
“On my way to meet the Oscar-Nominated Female Director,” I whisper, so as not to disrupt the other Mint passengers, and the line works like an affirmation. I’m on my way to meet the Oscar-Nominated Female Director. Gwen isn’t avoiding me. It means nothing that she has requested my AQ.
It’s not until I’ve shelled out $7.95 for the fourth time that Gwen gets back to me.
The director dinner!!! You must tell me how it goes!! Don’t worry about the AQ—just wanted to check on something! Did you see your piece in the Times?! That picture—you look like you’re twelve! I think Gwen has hit her yearly exclamation-point quota in a single email to me.
Of course I’ve seen the Times piece. I’ve seen the Times piece and the People piece and the HuffPo piece and the piece on The Cut and in a few months there will be the Vogue piece and an interview with Vanity Fair. There are so many pieces coming out that when I land and listen to the voicemail from a reporter fact-checking a story, I don’t even pay attention to what publication he says he is from. I call him back and when he tells me he’s with The Smoking Gun, I apologize, telling him I didn’t put this interview date into my calendar.
“We didn’t have one,” he says, as I pass under a sign that reads “Yoga Room This Way.” Definitely in L.A. “I was hoping to confirm that your birth date is 10/17/82 and that the date you graduated high school was May 2000.”
I stop walking. “Why?”
“Are those the correct dates?”
“They are correct, yes,” I say, and they are, so why do I immediately regret my answer?
“Thank you,” he says, and hangs up.
I dial Gwen, who is in a meeting. “Can you please tell her it’s urgent, Stephanie?”
“I will,” Stephanie promises, dutifully.
“Stephanie, do you know why The Smoking Gun would be calling me?”
“They called you?”
The alarm in her voice turns my stomach. I am right there with her, but I can’t bear to hear it echoed in my own. I make it sound like it wasn’t a big deal. “They just wanted to confirm my birthday and the year I graduated high school.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I confirmed it.” Silence. “They had their dates right.”
“I’ll let Gwen know they’re calling you now,” Stephanie says.
“Calling me now? What . . . have they been calling you? Does this have something to do with Gwen asking for my AQ?”
“I really don’t know all the details, Stephanie,” Stephanie says, softly. But of course she does. She’s the receptionist at the oncology unit, telling you not to worry while looking at your lab results that say stage four. “I’ll have Gwen call as soon as she’s back at her desk, okay?”
I’m in my tiny corner room at the Sunset Tower Hotel, House Hunters failing to attenuate my anxiety, when my phone seizures on the nightstand. It’s my motion picture agent, not Gwen.