Chapter 2 Humiliation Is a State of Mind #3
The second time Reggie stopped by, Blair began to understand that this was going to be a thing.
She couldn’t really complain. They’d fallen out of love years ago.
Had remained friendly co-CEOs of the family as they’d done the staying-together-for-the-kids thing, waiting until Esme left for college to file the papers.
So, she reasoned, if they could skip the acrimony and move straight to conscious uncoupling—was that still a thing? —all the better.
And there was a sort of solidarity between them. Reggie was the only one who understood what Blair meant when she said, “I’m worried that Cal isn’t having any fun.” And Blair was the only one who understood when Reggie responded by saying, “I’m worried Esme is having too much fun.”
Sometimes she thought she missed Reggie, but when he started showing up unannounced, she realized that what she missed was the understanding that flowed between them. The shorthand.
It was hard to have that stuff when you lived alone.
But, she reminded herself, there was relief in her solitude.
Relief in knowing there would be no little comments about what she was wearing to whatever gala Reggie had signed them up for.
That she didn’t have to try to talk him out of another car purchase.
That she didn’t have to listen to him recount a meeting that had gone spectacularly well for him despite his lack of preparation.
But two things could be true at the same time. There was relief in solitude, yes, but also, she hated eating alone.
When Reggie buzzed at her gate one week in late September, Blair was, surprisingly, not in the mood for solidarity.
TMZ had caught her on the way out of the office the day before and had run the resultant picture next to a piece about Reggie’s “beach date with a bleach blonde.” “Sources” reported that Reggie was bouncing back from the divorce more quickly than Blair was.
Of course he was. He had a newly acquired postdivorce gym body and a ten-bedroom house, and he was making movies in which men shot at other men for three hours.
Blair had lines in her forehead since she’d stopped getting Botox and a three-bedroom house, and she made movies about the complexities of human relationships.
And she’d started having to fold all the quilts she used multiple times after she was done with them.
She was beginning to understand that Reggie wasn’t going to be the cure for her loneliness.
He hadn’t been when they were living in the same house—Reggie never noticed the cyclones, even though the previous run of them had coincided with COVID lockdowns.
When Blair had disappeared for hours at a time to batten down the hatches, he’d thought she was working.
The buzzer rang through the house a second time. Morticia, who was stretched out on the spot on the sofa she seemed to have claimed, gave a terse meow. She hated the buzzer. Blair didn’t blame her.
Blair had been bummed when she had to install a security system. Back when she and Reggie had first lived here, there had been no need for security, nor had there been for all the years she’d rented it out. But as she’d reoccupied it, she’d understood that she had to face facts.
Facing facts sucked.
A third buzz. Another annoyed meow.
“Sorry, Morticia.” She pressed the button to talk. “Hi, Reggie.”
“Finally. I can see your car, so I knew you were home.”
“I’m on my way out,” she lied, “so I can’t invite you in.”
“OK, no prob. I was in the area,” Reggie said breezily, his forehead huge as he leaned toward the camera.
“Everything good?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah. I want to talk to you about some potential post-Christmas travel plans I wanted to invite the kids to participate in, if you don’t mind sparing them for New Year’s.”
She could see it now: Reggie and Esme and Cal skiing while Blair drank too much as the pity invitee at Tiffany’s first New Year’s with her new boyfriend.
Or, let’s be real, while Blair begged off said party and watched the ball drop in Times Square by herself and went to bed at midnight Eastern time.
Maybe by Christmas she would actually be able to go to a party. Mingle in public with people she didn’t know without fear of embarrassing herself.
Maybe that should be her goal: attend a party before the year was out.
“I’m thinking of Saint Lucia instead of Aspen this year,” Reggie said. “But we can talk about it later.”
“OK. Put the dates in the app.” In theory, they used a co-parenting app to talk about kid stuff. In practice, Reggie just called or came over. Just as she was about to disconnect, she said, “Wait. Reggie?”
“Yeah?” The forehead grew larger on the display that suddenly brought to mind a baby monitor. With the wrought iron bars of the front fence behind him, Reggie looked like a giant baby in a crib. She told herself to hold on to that image.
“Will you stop talking to the press about me?”
“I think Jack Branksome has that covered.”
“You read that?” Reggie was not the New Yorker type.
“Not initially. I heard about it from a few people, so I had Nancy get me a copy.”
Nancy was Reggie’s brisk, ultracompetent assistant. In some ways, in the practical sense, Blair missed Nancy more than she missed Reggie. If Blair were in a state to go out, she would ask Nancy to lunch.
She would ask Nancy to lunch, she vowed. Once she was settled in. There was another goal: a meal out at a restaurant.
“Well, if you know anyone who’s talking to the press about me, tell them to stop. It’s trashy.” She’d chosen her words carefully. Reggie would hate being called trashy. “I gotta go.” She lifted her finger from the button so he couldn’t talk back.
She should actually go somewhere. But she wouldn’t. Still, she had goals now: a party and a meal out before the end of the year. Those should be doable.
Right?