Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  “Wow,” I say. “You fucked your AA chip out. That’s pretty good.”

  After he leaves, I follow up on something I’d mentioned I would do, and I email Lazlow from Grand Theft Auto, introducing him to Marc about podcast tech stuff.

  Marc replies, “Thanks, stud. Nice of u. Nauseous in cab now. Great bein with u.”

  I don’t feel like a stud at all. Well, maybe when I don’t know it.

  * * *

  ONE THING I am certain of: Nothing is off the table anymore.

  Who knows—maybe I’m a lesbian?

  After meeting a charismatic psychic named Adi, I spend a long, stoney weekend with her. If anything, she makes me appreciate just how hard it is to make a woman come.

  But the next morning when I sober up, I tell Adi the bad news: As much as I enjoyed all the nonbinary fluidity, I just don’t think I’m gay.

  This inspires Adi to freestyle a song about me: “You wake up in the morning, and you tell me you’re not gay / But you’re touching and you’re teasing like you really want to play / Experience Girl / Experience Girl / In it for the experience / Experience Girl.”

  She has me dead to rights.

  Not too long after, I run into an S&M couple, Edward and Elizabeth, I once interviewed for research on a story about kink. They make me an offer I can’t refuse.

  “We’re going to pick up some coke,” Edward says. “Wanna join?”

  Cocaine is something I’ve never done before, and I know exactly where it leads. But I just don’t care anymore.

  Back at my place, Edward unloads a bag filled with $2,000 worth of S&M gear—giant dildos, collars, and sundry sex toys—for a porn shoot they are doing the next day. Then he rolls up a twenty-dollar bill, metes out several lines on my Green Day Dookie CD, and says, “Welcome to hell.”

  The first three lines I snort hit me immediately. I want it all. I can’t get enough. It’s like every doubt I’ve ever had about myself is gone. I can do no wrong. I am unstoppable. I fucking love cocaine.

  “I should totally write about this night for this HBO show I’m going to do,” I say, talking a mile a minute, grabbing my computer and pulling up my Spinster “concept” document.

  Elizabeth reads over my shoulder a little bit and then lashes out at me in disgust.

  “What the fuck?” she yells. “What is this Sex and the City bullshit you’re writing? You wouldn’t say this! You would never say this! This needs to be trashy, sexy, in your face! What is this right here . . . a semicolon? You would never use a fucking semicolon!”

  My eyes glaze over as I watch this dominatrix really take my punctuation to task.

  “Hey . . . so, uh, do you guys want to, like, actually dominate me?” I ask.

  I look at my reflection in the mirror, and I see my pupils are the size of Alaska.

  “Showtime,” Edward says, standing above me.

  To prepare to dominate me, Edward looks around the room and ignores the $2,000 of assorted porn props they have brought, and instead grabs my Sporty Spice neon yellow bike jacket, which I bought during a brief healthy-living phase. He ties it around my eyes. Then Elizabeth pulls off my pink Victoria’s Secret lace panties and stuffs them in my mouth. It’s a nice touch, I must admit.

  “Do you think you’re a little starlet?” Elizabeth hisses as she spanks me. “You think you’re a little star, don’t you?”

  I find this entire dynamic hilarious. This is pretty much the opposite way to dominate me.

  “Yes!” I agree enthusiastically. “Totally!”

  But now Edward is trying to get in on the action.

  “I’m going to fuck the shit out of you with my huge cock,” he snarls, and then leans into my ear to whisper so only I can hear, “I’ve wanted this for so long.”

  That sobers me up—a little. I strip off the blindfold to see him standing there, revealing his sad, flaccid coke-dick. For once, I am so grateful to the gods of impotence. Thank you, Jesus.

  “Edward, we have to go,” Elizabeth says, disgusted. “We have the shoot tomorrow.”

  It is now 4:30 a.m., and in their rush to leave, some of their porn props are still scattered around my apartment, which is also littered with empty beer cans and cigarettes. When they’re gone, I am pacing the room, ready to jump out my window. I log onto Craigslist and post an ad on Casual Encounters. “Need to get fucked now,” it reads.

  A million replies flood my in-box, and I click on one that catches my eye. Ken, an engineer, includes a link to his professional website. I watch a reel that attests to his professionalism and work ethic. Yeah, this is the guy.

  Before Ken arrives, I light a red-and-gold glitter Wiccan love-potion candle I’ve purchased to help me find my soul mate and fix my love life. Seems to be working so far!

  I change into some black sheer Wolford thigh-highs and dance around to Weezer until the doorbell rings. When Ken arrives, I answer the door wearing only the stockings.

  “Oh, hey, let me do, like, a fashion show for you,” I tell my new suitor, pulling Ken into my living room before digging through my closet to try on various Halloween costumes. I change into my slutty nurse outfit. Then my slutty pilot one. Then my slutty Sacagawea.

  Before I can find slutty nuclear physicist or whatever comes next, Ken lifts me up to carry me to my bed. But my feet stretch out and knock over the Wiccan candle, splattering red and gold wax all over my cream carpet.

  “Fuck!” I say. “That’s my love-potion thingy. I need that.”

  Ken shrugs and sets me down on my bed, but as he does, something catches his eye. Ken looks a little freaked out. I look over and see what he is seeing.

  “What the hell?” he says.

  One of the porn props Edward and Elizabeth left behind that fell out of their bag is the most enormous dildo you’ve ever seen in your life.

  Ken picks it up off the ground with a sly smile.

  “Oh, that’s not mine,” I say by way of explanation. “It belongs to this S&M couple who were over here earlier. We had a failed three-way, and I did coke for the first time.”

  “Sure,” Ken says, shaking his head in disbelief. “That makes sense.”

  As debauched and ridiculous as the evening is, I love the debauchery and ridiculousness of it all. I tell myself I am a sort of modern Hunter S. Thompson with a vagina. I tell myself these stories are gold. I tell myself that I’m in control because I’m the one doing this. But there is no control. I’m just lost.

  Not long after, I have a few more Casual Encounters with men who are seeking “snow bunnies” (women to do coke with) or “girls to show off.” I even answer an ad where the guy offers “100 roses,” which means dollars. But I can’t bring myself to take the cash at the end of it. So instead we watch Apollo 13, and I lecture him on “repetition compulsion theory” and how I totally know what I’m doing with all of these seedy sexual encounters before I leave.

  Another night, I go to a high-rolling Post party where I arrive stoned, and a lawyer plucks me right off the vine, kisses me, and takes me back to his place. He orders coke, and I do it off a plate while he watches patiently before carrying me into his bedroom. When I leave, I don’t want the night to end, so I answer an ad on Craigslist from a guy who posts only a JPEG of his dick.

  It’s like “Choose Your Own Adventure: Sex Death Wish Edition.” He lives at a Central Park West address, and when I arrive I think we are each somewhat relieved that we are both fairly normal. He’s an investment banker (of course he is). Only when I tell him what I do, he starts to get nervous about how high I am already and how much of his coke I want to do.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t want a Post reporter to die on me, man.”

  I wish I could say the same.

  * * *

  NOTHING REALLY FILLS me up anymore, so I decide I might as well just say yes to everything.

  As I’m on my way home to my apartment one evening, carrying some groceries I’ve just picked up at the store, a good-looking man approaches me.
<
br />   “Excuse me,” he says.

  “What?” I ask, looking into his eyes, which approach a color close to blackness.

  “I wanted to ask you,” he says, looking at me and my bag of groceries. “Would you want to get a drink sometime? I find you very attractive. My name is Carlos.”

  “How does now suit you?” I ask.

  With me still carrying my bag of now-spoiling groceries, we walk together to Spring Lounge.

  “I should tell you something,” Carlos says when we sit down. “About three years ago, I hit on you when you lived in Park Slope.”

  He then repeats line for line everything he said and how I reacted. I have to admit, I’m a little weirded out.

  “Wait, you didn’t, like, follow me and find out where I live to hit on me again, did you?”

  “No,” he says. “Nothing like that.”

  I’m not entirely convinced, but he can’t be any more dangerous than all the assorted strangers I’ve kept company with of late in my little apartment-cum-sadness brothel. Fuck it. Who cares.

  But when the two of us finally go over to his apartment, I see laid out on his desk a bunch of clippings from the Post scattered around, Homeland theory corkboard style.

  “What the hell,” I say. “You are stalking me, aren’t you?”

  “You think too much of yourself,” he says.

  We go into his bedroom, which is painted completely black, and lie down on his air mattress.

  “Can you grab me a beer?” I ask. “I think I need to drink in order to hang out with you.”

  We drink and talk and drink and talk, fool around a little, get naked, come close to having sex, and eventually we are talking again. He asks me why I got divorced.

  So I tell him how my ex cheated on me and then maybe I veer off into sadness, talking about being sad and trying to have the courage to be an authentic human being.

  “I want some attention,” he says. Then he gets on top of me and thrusts his uncircumcised cock into my dry vagina. He groans and it’s over fairly quickly.

  “What the fuck,” I say. “I wasn’t ready for sex.”

  “That was not sex,” he says. “That was rape.”

  I turn to him, aghast.

  “It was a joke,” he says. “You do not get my sense of humor.”

  No, I get it all right.

  Then because he had not gotten his fill of debasement, perhaps, he grabs one of our empty beer bottles and penetrates me. I don’t say no. I am not forced. But it is bleak, man. I would say the whole experience feels like a “consensually abusive” romp.

  “I don’t want to date you,” I tell him eventually. “This is over.”

  “Well,” says Carlos, always the master troll, “if I shoot myself in the head two months from now, it is not because of you.”

  I shake my head and leave. He follows me for a little bit, but eventually, I lose him.

  * * *

  I WISH I could say that all these twisted and depraved sexual misadventures were wake-up calls for me. But no, all they do is make me wax nostalgic for my days as the secret girlfriend to a rich dude whose biggest relationship skill was in wasting a few years of my thirties. How the hell is Blaine anyway? On a whim, when Fashion Week rolls around, I invite him to a big supermodel party at Rose Bar. I don’t want to date him again. But I think that looking in his eyes will remind me of a simpler, depressing-for-totally-different-reasons time not so long ago.

  When I spot Blaine across the room, I make my usual nightmare-grade inappropriate small talk (“Hey, guess what, I tried cocaine for the first time!”), and all the while proceed to slam down martini after martini. I find him boring, and I want to make sure he knows that. So as Blaine watches, I begin to flirt with everyone in the immediate vicinity—his friends, the caterers, my coworkers, gay men just trying to get out of my way—until eventually the night kind of blurs out. But I do have the photographic evidence to document what happens next. Because I go home with an actual photographer.

  We apparently go to several more bars that night in which I pose and smile with empty dead eyes and duck face. The next morning, I come to consciousness again. I didn’t fall asleep this time. I was just—not there at all—even though I seemed like I was.

  When I realize that this photographer is fucking me without a condom, my stomach turns.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” I say, and race to the bathroom and begin vomiting.

  As I’m puking my guts out, Garth the photographer compliments me all the while.

  “I don’t think you realize how hot you are,” he says, which just makes me puke even more. “I’m never going to wash my fingers again.”

  When I finally lift my head off the toilet, I tell him why I got so drunk, how stupid I am, how I invited Blaine to the party, and apparently all of this makes a very memorable impression. Because, I kid you not, a few days later, Garth texts me a picture—of Blaine. Garth runs into him at some socialite party he’s covering, and somehow, Garth puts two and two together that Blaine is the ex I told him about in between vomit takes.

  “I told him I was shooting for Gawker,” Garth explains via text, “and he said he had a friend who had an ongoing battle with them who writes for the Post. To extrapolate, he mentioned your name, and I said we met once.”

  God, how I love the coded message of man speak. “A friend.” “We met once.” So good.

  But I have to be honest, I do kind of love that Blaine can’t help but bring me up at parties. I know him well enough to remember how he was always bragging about famous or interesting people he knew when he got a little bit of a buzz on.

  That means I won, right? I’m now the girl he can’t help bring up when he’s tipsy. I rule.

  But the next day, Garth sends me one final update. It turns out one of the pictures Garth snapped of Blaine at this benefit for the preservation of money or whatever the hell it was is now going to be published—on fucking Gawker. The gossip site that used to write about my column all the time and that Blaine lived in terror of being outed on.

  “So I emailed Blaine to tell him he was in one of the shots,” Garth texts me, “and he asked me not to mention you. Nice guy, yeah.”

  You know that feeling when you think you have finally achieved amazing washboard abs but then it turns out someone has actually sucker punched you in the stomach? That’s how I feel. So. Much. Ouch.

  Of all the symbolic interactions I’ve had with Blaine, this one beats them all. Fucking Blaine brings me up. Fucking Blaine mentions me. Then fucking Blaine begs the fucking photographer he mentioned me to in the first place to “please please please don’t say I dated Mandy Stadtmiller.” Good God, man, stop being so afraid of life.

  And me? Maybe I should start being a little more afraid of it.

  Because I’m freaked out I woke up with this photog rando who wasn’t using a condom, I make the necessary Plan B purchase, but I also decide I need to make some kind of change. I know what I need to do, obviously. Stop drinking. So that’s what I resolve to do. It’s not like I have to go to some depressing AA meeting or anything. I’m not some weirdo alcoholic. I’ll just . . . stop. On my own. I’ve done it before.

  Not too long after Gawker runs their beautiful non-Mandy-associated photo of Blaine, I get an email from him out of the blue. I’ve just written a groundbreaking feature on the “hot new trend” of threesomes, and what do you know, Blaine read the piece.

  “Was reading the Post at the gym today, nice article on 3sums,” he writes. “How are things going, what are you wearing for Halloween?”

  What am I wearing? I want to punch my fist into the computer screen. That’s what the fuck I’m wearing. Instead, I write a terse passive-aggressive reply: “I’m wearing a costume that says, ‘Garth, please don’t mention that I dated Mandy Stadtmiller if you post that picture of me on Gawker.’ Things have never been better. Take care.”

  I think it’s fairly clear in that email that I’m pissed, right?

  Instead of offer
ing any kind of acknowledgment as to how this was yet another insult in a long line of them, Blaine replies: “Garth seems like a nice guy though I guess discretion is not his middle name! Funny picture and saw no need to advertise it, hope all is going swimmingly with you. Can you help us out with an event in December we are doing?”

  So fucking tacky.

  I’ve never felt so glad to be single. No matter how much I am spiraling out, I feel a weird sense of freedom in knowing I refuse to ever sink as low as that relationship brought me again.

  * * *

  BUT . . . LET’S BE real. I am so, so spiraling out.

  The newest wrinkle in my sex life is that I have now recruited my friend Bianca (who I met while on retreat with Amma, the so-called hugging saint of India) to be my partner in crime. It’s so perfect somehow that I met her at this super-hippie patchouli-scented spiritual convention, and that instead of praying or whatever, we end up having a bunch of creepy sex romps. We have one, then two, then five three-ways. We’re definitely not average on the Kinsey scale to be sure, but neither of us is really all that into pussy. No, I would say these three-ways are our sad aging-party-girl versions of slumber parties where we get to dish on the man afterward—and not feel dumb when he doesn’t call. I suppose, in some ways, they are also my meager attempt at having love and consistency in my life.

  But that isn’t even the spiral-out part. Where it gets really dark is when I begin an affair with a married man—something I said I would never do.

  The night we meet, I don’t go home with him, nor does it even come up—but he does roast me in a way that is slightly thrilling. He is an award-winning comedy writer whom I’ve met in the course of covering the scene. I go to see him perform at his suggestion, and afterward we grab a drink at the bar . . . talking. Because you know, that’s beyond reproach, right? Nothing wrong with that. Men and women do that all the time.

  When the bartender comes to get my drink order, I proudly stick to the no-alcohol rule I’ve kept up for a few months now since the Gawker photographer no-condom debacle.