The Blonde Theory (16 page)

Between my busy day at work and unwelcome thoughts of Matt and his infuriatingly adorable smile, I had almost forgotten about the fact that I was more than halfway through The Blonde Theory. I didn’t feel like I had learned much except the inevitable truth that I already suspected: Most men liked dumb blondes a whole lot better than they liked me.

T
HAT EVENING, FREE
from The Blonde Theory for one night, at least, I had just changed into sweats and settled back onto the couch with a lap full of paperwork from the office when there was a knock at the door. I looked at the clock on the wall and frowned. Nine forty-five. What, was today National Drop In Unannounced On Harper Roberts Day or something? First Matt James and now a random evening visitor at my apartment?

I sighed and shifted my paperwork to the couch. Then I padded to the door, opened it, and blinked into the hallway. It took me a moment to recognize the man standing there. He was dressed in dark jeans and a button-down collared shirt, and his sandy hair was combed back.

“What are you doing here?” I blurted out, sounding much ruder than I’d intended to. I immediately flushed.

“Now what kind of a greetin’ is that for the man who came to your rescue with a load of towels the other day?” asked Sean O’Sullivan, the handyman who had responded to my overflowing toilet crisis call on Saturday.

“Oh no,” I groaned, slapping myself on the forehead. “I’m such an idiot! Your towels! I told you I’d be here Sunday for you to pick them up, didn’t I? I am so sorry.”

“?’Tis no big deal,” he said, grinning at me. “You shoulda heard me inventin’ stories for the benefit of my flatmate, though, about where the towels had gone to.”

“I’m so sorry,” I repeated again, feeling horrified with my own rudeness. I had, in fact, washed the towels. But then I had vanished to go on my series of blonde dates, with no thought to the generous handyman at all. “You should have called. I would have brought them over.”

“Didn’t have your number,” he said with a shrug. “Just your address. Besides, I was on my way home from having drinks with a friend anyhow. You were right on my way.”

“A date?” I asked before I could stop myself. Embarrassed, I clapped my hand over my mouth. Why did I keep blurting out the rudest questions around this poor guy? My foot seemed permanently poised to be inserted into my mouth in his presence. There was just something about his cleaned-up appearance and the faint whiff of cologne I could smell in the air that had made me assume he had been meeting a girl. But it was none of my business.

Instead of looking insulted, though, Sean just laughed. “As a matter of fact, yes.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “Turns out it didn’t go very well.”

“No?” I asked, despite myself.

“No,” Sean echoed. “A bit of a daft bird, she was.”

“Daft bird?” I asked with a small smile, halfway between confused and amused at his choice of words.

Sean nodded solemnly. “She wasn’t that bright, if you get what I mean,” he said. He leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms.

“I thought guys liked girls like that,” I grumbled darkly, the sting from the first four Blonde Theory dates still fresh in my mind.

“No,” he said, knitting his brow. He looked concerned. “What, is that what some bloke told you?”

I shook my head and sighed. “Just what I’ve learned over eleven years of dating in this city.”

“Maybe you’re dating the wrong guys, then,” Sean said with his easy smile, his blue eyes twinkling at me.

I frowned and thought about it for a second. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked finally, not sure if I should take offense or not.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that as an insult, ma’am,” he said, leaning away from the door frame, taking a step back, and looking a bit abashed. “I just meant, well, a nice woman like you should be able to meet a nice guy who appreciates you, is all.”

“Yeah, one would think,” I grumbled. I felt inexplicably annoyed at him, although there was really no reason to be. I looked at him for a moment, then shook my head. “Listen, I’ll get those towels. I really am sorry. Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

“You could invite me in for a second so we’re not conversin’ here at your doorstep,” Sean said with a smile.

I hesitated, then smiled back. “Yes, yes, of course, come in while I go get the towels.” Sean nodded and followed me inside, where he waited in my front entryway while I went back to my bedroom to get the stack of towels I had folded after taking them out of the wash. My mind was on his comment about me dating the wrong guys, so much so that I felt almost lost in a fog of thought as I walked back to the entryway with the perilously high stack of towels. I placed them on the counter in the front hall. “Here they are, good as new,” I said. “Thanks again, so much, for letting me borrow them.”

“Of course,” Sean said, winking at me. “It’s not as if I was goin’ to let ye live in a swamp, now.”

I laughed.

“You definitely saved me,” I agreed. Sean smiled then reached over to the counter to pick up the stack of towels.

“Do you need some help?” I asked, feeling guilty. “I can help you home with those if you want. It’s the least I can do.”

“No, no, that’s not necessary.” Sean laughed. He picked up the stack of towels, which didn’t look nearly as large and teetering in his arms as it had in mine. “I think I can take it from here. But thanks for washin’ and dryin’ them.”

“No problem,” I said. “I’m just sorry you had to stop by to get them.”

“My pleasure.” He walked to the door and waited while I opened it for him. “Just remember what I said,” he said as he stepped out into the hallway.

I stood in the door frame and cocked my head to the side. “What?” I asked.

“About guys,” he said. “If they’re not appreciatin’ your intelligence, they’re clearly not the right guys.”

“Thanks,” I murmured. Sean tipped his chin at me and said good night, then turned to walk away. I watched him go, feeling a bit insulted that he had felt it necessary to comment on my taste in men.

But for the rest of the evening, I couldn’t shake his words from my head.

Chapter Twelve

T
he next night, at eight, I was waiting in the entryway to Ralph’s, a fancy Upper East Side bistro with a trendy bar that attracted a lot of movers and shakers from the neighborhood. This time, I was scheduled to meet George Edwards, an electrical engineer who had responded to my dumb-blonde NYSoulmate.com profile. And despite myself, I was a little excited; he had a background in engineering, like me. We’d have a lot in common. Too bad I’d have to hide it to correspond with my profile. Thanks to my talk with Alec, and to my discomfort over Matt’s random drop-in, I was filled with a renewed sense of resolve about acting like a ditz. Maybe Alec was right, although I hated to admit it.

Thanks to Emmie’s indispensable assistance, I was decked out once again as a dumb blonde—this time in a strange, off-the--shoulder lime-green wrap shirt and a white denim miniskirt, paired with staggeringly high white heels, all from the wardrobe closet of Emmie’s show. Once again, I had protested, saying that I felt naked and exposed in the outfit; once again, Emmie had oohed and ahhed in sympathy while teasing my hair and heaping too much lipstick onto my mouth and too much blush onto my cheeks. Once again, I felt like a bit of a clown as I waited alone at Ralph’s for my Internet date.

At five minutes past eight, a man I recognized immediately from his NYSoulmate.com profile photo came hurrying through the door. My first thought was that he definitely wasn’t the six foot one he had claimed on his profile; he’d be lucky to measure up to five foot ten. But I didn’t care about height; it was just the odd realization that he’d fibbed about something so basic. Beyond that, though, he looked nice: dark-haired, square-jawed, clean-shaven, and dressed in navy pants with a pale blue oxford and a yellow tie. I vowed not to hold the height thing against him and to consider him with an open mind.

“Harper?” he said, approaching me with a smile.

I nodded and giggled, turning on the dumb-blonde charm. “Yeah,” I bubbled. “And you, like, must be George?”

“That’s me,” he said with an easy smile that immediately relaxed me a bit. “Sorry I’m a few minutes late. Want to get a table?”

Ten minutes later, we were seated and talking easily. I was finding it easier and easier to act vacant and ditzy. The more dumb-blonde dates I went on, the easier the act seemed to become.

Better yet, George didn’t seem half bad. Unlike the first four guys, who were pretty self-absorbed, George actually seemed to be relatively modest and, despite my feigned stupidity, wasn’t treating me as if I were a second-class citizen. In fact, twenty minutes into the date, I was wondering why I couldn’t have met him when I was actually acting like my real self; he really did seem to be just my type.

Then again, I had to consider the fact that he had responded to BlondeBartenderHotti’s ad and not UptownAttorneyGirl’s. And he seemed to genuinely
like
the dumb-blonde version of me, which didn’t speak too highly of his judgment in women, I supposed.

He told me about his upbringing in Montana and his decision to move to New York after he had graduated from college. He told me about getting his first job in the city and how much time and effort it had taken to rise to his current position, as one of the top engineers at Con Ed. And he listened with rapt interest as I invented a fictitious background as a waitress in Ohio who had always wanted to move to the big city.

“And now I’m living the dream,” I sighed, forcing a far-off, dreamy expression. I tossed my hair and batted my eyelashes for good measure. “I’m a bartender at one of the hottest bars in town.”

“So, Harper,” George began.

I enthusiastically bobbed my head, then tilted it to the side, widening my eyes. “Yes?” I chirped.

“I have to ask,” he said. “Why would a beautiful, talented girl like you need to meet guys online? It seems like you could have your pick of guys at your bar any night of the week.”

“Oh, George.” I sighed dramatically. “It’s, like, so hard to meet guys? At the bar? Because they don’t want to get to know the real me?”

“And you’re looking for more,” he said, lowering his voice and leaning forward as if he expected this to be our great romantic moment.

I nodded enthusiastically. “Yes,” I exclaimed, still bobbing my head, keeping my eyes wide. “I mean, there’s more to me than just bartending, you know?”

He nodded thoughtfully, as if my words were completely normal.

“Of course, I can see that,” he said solemnly. “And a pretty lady like you certainly deserves a guy who sees you as more than a bartender.”

“Like, yeah,” I agreed.

We continued to chat for another thirty minutes, through a second round of drinks, with George complimenting me frequently and asking thoughtful questions about my job and my life and giving me genuine responses to the few questions I asked about him while I intermittently took out my compact and studied myself vacantly in its mirror. When I had finished my second martini, I excused myself to go to the bathroom.

“I have to go freshen up,” I bubbled. “In the little girls’ room.”

George nodded and stood up politely as I got up to leave the table. I turned around halfway to the bathroom to see if he was watching me, and indeed he was, with an appreciative expression on his face. I gave him a little pageant wave and wink before continuing on my way, my entire focus on not tripping in the perilously high heels strapped onto my feet.

In the bathroom, I stared at myself in the mirror for a long moment, confused and trying to collect my thoughts. George actually seemed decent. He seemed to be genuinely interested in me, and he didn’t have the massive ego or self-absorption that my previous dates had. But I simply couldn’t figure out why an intelligent man who seemed reasonably kind would be so interested in someone who clearly didn’t have an ounce of intelligence to her name. It didn’t seem fair. If the smart guys were going for the dumb girls and the
dumb
guys were going for the dumb girls, who did that leave for people like me?

Exactly. Nobody.

I used the bathroom, then stood in front of the mirror again, digging in my purse to find the horrid tube of lipstick Emmie had sent along with me. I had just retrieved it from the bottom of my bag when two women, one bleached blonde and the other an artificial redhead, both with melon-size artificial breasts stuffed into low-cut shirts, came tripping drunkenly into the bathroom, giggling at some private joke. They went into adjoining stalls, and I tried to ignore them while I applied my lipstick and fished around in my bag for my compact. The women were speaking so loudly, though, that they were impossible to miss.

“Your date is such a high roller,” bubbled the girl behind door number one, the blonde, to her friend on the other side of the stall wall. “He’s throwing cash around like it grows on trees.”

“I’ve only been fucking him for two weeks,” the redhead slurred back from her stall. “And I’ve already gotten a diamond tennis bracelet and a mink. How fucking fabulous is that?”

“His wife must be an idiot not to know what’s going on,” said the first girl with a haughty sniff. “You’ve been with him nearly every night. Where the hell does she think he is?”

The redhead laughed cruelly.

“He tells her he’s stuck at the office,” she slurred. “Married guys are the shit, man. You get the sex and the presents without the obligation. It’s perfect. I feel like a princess.”

I rolled my eyes at myself in the mirror. If there’s one thing the woman in the stall
wasn’t,
it was royalty of any kind. Hearing her talk so cavalierly about having an affair with a married man made me want to smash her over the head with something the moment she emerged from the stall. Of course that would be inappropriate, though.

I tried to focus on applying a fresh coat of mascara and brushing my hair. I had just turned to leave, trying my hardest to forget about the trampy women, when I heard the redhead say something else to her friend.

“I’m going to take my panties off,” she said drunkenly. “And when we go back to the table, I’m going to whisper in his ear that he can fuck me right there if he wants to.”

“Tiffan
y,
” the blonde said with a giggle. “We’re in a
bar.
He can’t fuck you here.”

“He can do anything,” the redhead slurred. “He bought me a mink. He can do anything he wants.”

Sickened, I quickly hurried out of the bathroom and back to my table. But now I was curious, despite myself, to see what poor sucker Tiffany and her friend were with. After all, maybe this warranted a paragraph in the Blonde Theory article I was writing for Meg. I was just faking vacant stupidity. These girls were the real thing, and they were pulling it off spectacularly. It sounded like the redheaded Tiffany had some jerk eating right out of her hand, buying her thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts after just two weeks together. I pitied the man’s poor wife (she was probably home with the kids) and hated him immediately, even though I hadn’t even laid eyes on him, for cheating on her—especially with some dumb tramp who was clearly just using him. My blood quietly boiled. What was wrong with men?

I turned my attention back to George, who actually seemed to be turning out all right. I was dying to tell someone about the conversation I’d overheard in the bathroom, but I realized I couldn’t share it; it wouldn’t exactly jibe with the image I was trying to portray. I settled on babbling about my “career.”

“So, George,” I began, “have you ever been out with a bartender before? Because it’s a very tough profession, and there’s lots to say about it.”

Twenty minutes later, I had told George all about how to mix a rum and Coke (“one shot of rum, and, like, some Coke”), a gin and tonic (“one shot of gin and, like, some tonic water”), and a white Russian (“I forget, but it’s like, Kahlúa and milk or something. The recipe is taped to the bar.”), and he had told me more about his engineering job. But the whole time, I couldn’t shake the voyeuristic desire to figure out who the horrid redhead from the bathroom was with. So after George had finished telling me about how he had graduated sixth in his class from MIT (“Sixth is still top ten,” he had announced somewhat defensively), I excused myself to the bathroom again, claiming that I needed to freshen up my lipstick. George looked a bit confused but nodded, and I smiled and got up from the table.

After I’d touched up my hot pink lips in the bathroom once again, I walked back into the main room of the bar. It would be another moment until George started wondering where I’d gone to. And my curiosity about the slutty redhead’s date was still killing me.

I scanned the main room and didn’t see the woman’s flashy red hair, so I ducked into the smaller lounge, an offshoot of the main bar, which had a more intimate feel—and a bottle-service-only policy: Every table had to order at least one bottle of liquor. It was the restaurant’s way of creating a VIP feel. I should have suspected that the two double-D twins would be in here. I saw Tiffany’s head full of bright red hair immediately. I took a few steps closer to where she was sitting, giggling about something and hanging on her man. I tried to get a good look at her icky, cheating date, who had his back to me. From behind, he looked rather short and nondescript, with close-cropped dark hair and an expensive-looking charcoal suit. I took another step closer and was just about to try out another position when he turned his head to the right to summon the waitress.

I gasped involuntarily. I recognized him immediately and took a horrified step back. I blinked once and looked again, sure that I had seen him wrong. His head was still turned in my direction, though, as he beckoned the waitress impatiently. I stared, unable to look away. I had no doubt.

It was Alec. Jill’s Alec.

For a moment, I stood frozen in place, a thousand thoughts racing through my mind. Surely there was some mistake, I finally decided. Perhaps the slutty panty-removing redhead wasn’t with him after all. Maybe she was with the other guy at the table and Alec was just there...for a work-related reason or something. I knew I was grasping at straws.

But Tiffany the redhead quickly dispelled that thought by leaning over to whisper something in Alec’s ear. He smiled and said something back, and I looked on in horror as she slid her hand under the table and into his lap. He shifted a bit, giving me a sickeningly clear view of what she was doing. And he was enjoying every second of it, a wolfish grin on his face.

I couldn’t watch any longer. It was too horrible. My heart breaking for Jill, I backed quickly away and retreated again to the bathroom, where I stood, fighting the rising nausea inside me as I stared at the mirror, my eyes wide with shock.

I had to tell Meg and Emmie. They’d know what to do. But it wasn’t the kind of conversation I could have on my cell phone from a restaurant bathroom. Much as I was enjoying being a dumb blonde with a guy who wasn’t
entirely
self-absorbed for once (and who didn’t sing ’80s movie songs at the table), I knew I had to cut the date short in order to get home and call the girls. This was an emergency.

Breathless and trying not to cry, I returned to the restaurant’s main dining room. I sat back down at our table and looked at George.

“I’m really sorry, but I have to go,” I said quickly.

George looked crestfallen. “Oh no,” he said, his brow creased with concern. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, no, it’s not that,” I said quickly. “It’s...” I searched my mind for an explanation, but my brain was already on overload, processing the horrific scene I had just witnessed. “It’s just that... I remembered, I have to, uh, deep-condition my hair tonight.” I blurted out the first thing that came to my mind. “I have an appointment at the salon tomorrow for a dye job, and they ask me to deep-condition the night before.”

“Oh.” George twisted his napkin in his lap. “Um, of course. I’m just disappointed. I was having a good time with you.”

“You were?” I asked without thinking. I found the thought inconceivable, as our entire conversation had been devoid of any substance whatsoever. “I mean, um, of course you were,” I bubbled. “I’m sorry I have to go. But thank you so much for the drinks.”