A Total Waste of Makeup (31 page)

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” Jordan says, falling into a chair. “Drew didn’t want to get out of the limo with sleazy photographer guy there, so instead he called the bouncer over to our window, slipped him a hundred, and asked him if he could take John to the VIP room solo. Then he gave John a thousand dollars in cash, and told him to call his buddies to hang out.”

I sigh, and glare at Drew. “So you just left him there? By himself? With no way to get home?”

Drew finishes off the mini Jack. “No way to get home?” he says, sounding like he’s talking down to me. “I left the guy with a thousand dollars in a VIP room with a bunch of strippers who think he’s friends with Drew Stanton. Getting home is the last thing he wants to do.” Drew stands up, puts his arm around my shoulder, and kisses me on the cheek. “I love you, sweetie. But, honestly, you sound like such a girl sometimes.”

“Bring him back!” Andy angrily yells from the bathroom. Then she throws up again.

Drew walks into the bathroom doorway. “I can’t be seen in a place like that,” he says haughtily. “I’m an upstanding citizen in my community.”

I give Jordan a weak smile. “Will you excuse me?”

I push past Drew in the doorway as Andy flushes the toilet again. “Do you need anything?”

“I need you to bring John back,” Andy says, forcing herself to sit up.

Drew sits next to Andy. His voice becomes calm and soothing, like he’s playing a therapist in a film. “So, what’s the deal? Are you having issues about settling down, or is this some grudge fuck kind of thing?”

I yank Drew up by his arm. “I can handle this. Why don’t you go see Dawn?”

“Aw, she’s asleep. Besides,” he says cheerfully, “this is real-life drama. I live for drama. I’m an actor.”

I put out my arm and point to the doorway. “Out!” I say sternly.

Drew looks at Andy, slumped over the toilet, then back at me. Andy, me.

He slowly stands up to walk out.

But then he grabs my hand and leans into me. “I’ll give you another thousand-dollar chip if I can stay,” he whispers.

“No,” I say quietly, hoping Andy can’t hear us.

“Two thousand.”

“Drew…”

“Two thousand dollars, and you can have next week off to help your sister with her wedding.”

I yank Drew out of the bathroom. I’m drunk, I’m worried about my sister, and I’m getting angry. “Now, listen: you are a great boss, and I know you’d like to help, but you cannot put a price on something as private as—”

“Give her three thousand dollars and the week off, and not only can you stay, but I’ll tell you why I want to cheat on my fiancé,” Andy yells from the bathroom.

“Sold!” Drew says, leaving me to go back to Andy.

I walk in after him and watch as he sits down next to Andy, who falls into his arms.

Jordan walks over to me, hands me a small bottle of Evian water for Andy, and mouths, “I’m gonna go.”

I nod as I take the water.

So much for my wild night.

I sit down by the sink, on the cold tile floor, across from Andy and Drew. We’re all silent for a while. I listen to Jordan’s footsteps as he leaves. When the door clicks shut behind him, I say to Andy, “So, what’s up?”

She looks up at me. “You can’t tell Mom.”

“Schyeah. Like that would ever happen.”

Andy puts out her left hand and stares at her one-and-a-half-carat diamond. She smiles the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Hunter slept with his ex-girlfriend.”

Drew and I exchange worried glances.

“After you got engaged?” Drew asks.

“No. Before. Right before,” Andy says. “Like, the night before. He told me about it the next morning.”

Neither Drew nor I say anything for the longest time. I can’t stand the silence—it seems to go on forever. I open my mouth to speak, but Drew shakes his head and puts his index finger over his mouth as if to say
Sssshhhh
.

When someone finally does speak, it’s Andy. “He came to my apartment at five in the morning, all teary eyed. He told me what happened, and I broke up with him—right then and there. He begged me to take him back, said he’d do anything to make it up to me, blah, blah, blah, and I said marry me, because I won’t put up with this bullshit from a boyfriend, and now, here we are, the happy couple.”

Whoa. I didn’t say that, but whoa! “So, we’ll call off the wedding,” I say calmly to Andy, like it’s no big deal. “No one has to know why. You’ll just say things didn’t work out.”

Andy nods her head slightly, like of course that’s the thing to do.

Drew looks at me, then looks back at Andy, and announces, “I don’t think she wants to call off the wedding.”

“Of course she does!” I insist. “My sister’s not a doormat. She’s not going to put up with some bastard—”

“He’s right,” Andy interrupts. “I don’t want to call off the wedding. I really want to marry Hunter. I just want this to have never happened.”

Well, what the hell am I supposed to say to that?

“Man, I know just how you feel,” Drew says, shaking his head. “You’re feeling like ‘If I’d just been sexier, or prettier, or smarter, this wouldn’t have happened. More clever maybe. More successful. Something. If I had just been good enough for him, he wouldn’t have wanted anyone else.’”

I can tell from the look on Andy’s face, Drew just nailed how she feels
exactly
. She cocks her head at him. “I forgot. Your wife left you for another man, didn’t she?”

“Yeah. But she cheated on me with another guy the year before that,” Drew tells her. “And, man, I felt like I must be the most pathetic person in the world when I found out.”

Andy’s eyes begin to water. She wipes a lone tear from her left cheek. “Yeah. And you want to know the really stupid thing? I actually wanted to know all the details. Like somehow, if I knew the when and the where, I could go back and change what happened.”

Drew nods. “I did that. Like it had anything to do with me. ‘Oh, she did it when I was out of town doing reshoots, if only I had brought her with me…’”

“‘If I hadn’t insisted on going to bed early that night…’” Andy continues.

“If I hadn’t sent her to Maui in a five-star hotel bungalow with my best friend, a man who, by all accounts, was a complete dog. I mean, what the hell was I thinking?!” Drew says.

We both stare at Drew. Um…okay.

I lean over and give Andy the bottle of water. “I’m sorry. Is there anything I can do to make you feel better?”

Andy shrugs. “Say something to make the hurt go away,” she says weakly.

Drew pulls Andy into his arms and gives her a hug. “Aw, sweetie…hasn’t Hunter said anything to make you feel better?”

“No,” Andy says, starting to tear up again. “He tells me how much he loves me, but it doesn’t make me feel better. He tells me I’m beautiful, I still feel ugly…he tells me how great our future is going to be, and how sorry he is, and how he’s going to make it up to me, and I still feel like I’m going to crumple up into a ball and die.”

Andy takes some toilet paper and wipes her eyes. I can tell from the way she’s breathing that she’s doing everything in her power not to cry. “I just wish there was something he could say that would make me feel better. That would make me feel like things are going to be okay.”

Drew blows out a big sigh. He lifts Andy’s chin and puts her face up to his. They lock eyes, and for a second, I’m sure he’s going to kiss her. But, instead, he gives her these words of advice: “If people could unfuck, they’d do it every day.”

Andy looks stunned for a few moments. Eventually, she shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what movie that’s from.”

“It’s not from a movie. It’s something my father once told me. And, believe me, it pertains to more than affairs,” Drew says. “Look, Hunter came to you. Right afterwards. He knew he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life, and he wanted to fix it. He would do anything in the world to make it go away, but he can’t. If he could unfuck, he would.”

Andy takes a moment to process that information. She laughs ever so slightly. “You know, for the first time since the engagement, someone has finally said something that makes me feel like maybe there’s some hope.”

“Good,” Drew says, patting her arm. “Let me tell you something else that’s going to make you feel better. That horrible feeling you have inside right now? The one that’s making you nauseous, that makes you feel so weak you want to crawl into a corner and cry your guts out? It goes away.”

Andy takes a deep breath. “You promise?”

Drew smiles. “I guarantee it. And when you’re celebrating your fiftieth wedding anniversary with all your kids and grandkids, it’ll be nothing more than a speed bump in your relationship. It might not even occur to you to think about it.”

Andy smiles and kisses him on the cheek. “Thanks.” She looks at me. “Both of you. For listening. I really needed to talk to someone, but I couldn’t. And that just made it worse.”

“Hey, what’s a maid of honor for?” I say.

Andy crawls across the floor and lies on my lap. “I’m really sorry I messed up your night. You can go see Jordan now if you want.”

I smile. “Nah, I’ll see him tomorrow night. Make him work for it.”

Drew left about twenty minutes later. As I walk him to the elevator, I ask him, “That last speech you made, about the speed bump in fifty years, that’s from the script you’re reading now, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Drew says brightly, stepping into the elevator. “It’s great dialogue, isn’t it? I’m playing a therapist. I’m telling you, this one has Academy nod written all over it.”

I shake my head as the elevator door closes.

A few hours after that, a very hungover Andy called Hunter and asked him to come to Vegas with his boys, including my brother Jamie, and make it a joint bachelor/bachelorette party.

He did. He just got into a group of cars with his buddies in the middle of the night, and drove out to see her.

And when he got to our suite, he looked so happy to see her, I’m pretty sure he had been hoping she’d call all along.

As I watched from my bed, pretending to be asleep, Andy opened the door, and the second she saw him, she burst into tears again.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she said over and over again, as she sunk into his chest and continued to sob.

“What happened?” Hunter asked softly, rubbing her back.

“I just…I just really love you,” Andy said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her breath and stop crying.

“Well, I love you, too,” Hunter said, hugging her more tightly. “That’s why we’re getting married.”

“No,” Andy said softly, breaking apart from him and swallowing her tears. “I mean, I really, really love you. And I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I don’t think I realized how much until last night.”

Oh shit—now he’s going to think she slept with someone.

“I love you, too,” Hunter said, smiling and gently wiping the tears from her face. “Why don’t you go clean up, and I’ll buy you breakfast?”

Andy nodded her head up and down several times, then walked into the bathroom, closed the door, and turned on the shower, as Hunter threw his luggage on her bed.

“She didn’t sleep with anyone,” I told Hunter, once I knew Andy was out of hearing range.

Hunter turned to me and smiled. “I know.”

I sat up, trying to clarify. “I mean, she didn’t sleep with anyone, she didn’t kiss anyone, she didn’t do anything other than get sick in our bathroom all night.”

“I know,” Hunter said in a completely self-assured, but very sweet tone. “I know my future bride pretty well.”

It was at that moment I realized this marriage was going to be just fine.

And I had a new bit of advice for my book:

If people could unfuck, they’d do it every day. This also applies to undating.

Twenty-Six

Comparisons are odious.—Sir John Fortescue

Romantically speaking, everyone was having a better Saturday than me. Hunter and Andy were spending the day by the pool, hugging and nuzzling each other like they were the only two people on earth.

Drew and Dawn left the group to take a helicopter ride around the Grand Canyon, presumably where they were hugging and nuzzling each other, and acting like they were the only two people on earth.

The bachelors and bachelorettes from Hunter and Andy’s respective groups were hooking up like bunnies. My brother Jamie was probably hooking up with Kate, which I thought was an accident waiting to happen, but I couldn’t say anything to dissuade either of them from flirting this morning, so I gave up.

Me? I was spending the day trying to figure out what went wrong with Jordan.

The day started out so promising. At eleven o’clock in the morning, I went to Drew’s suite to ask Jordan to breakfast. I glued on my happiest smile and knocked on the door—ready to embark on a romantic adventure!

I had the whole day planned out in my head. I would ask Jordan to breakfast, thereby separating him from the herd, so to speak, and whisk him off to someplace fun—just the two of us. Someplace like the Palatium Buffet at Caesar’s Palace, with its all-you-can-eat omelet bar, or maybe the Buffet at the Bellagio.

I would order a glass of champagne and encourage him to do the same (you know, to loosen him up), and we would talk openly and freely, with no reservations, just like we did online.

We would spend hours looking into each other’s eyes, and saying such witty bon mots as “Oh my God! I love Italian food, too!” and “You’re right! Bruce Willis has been overlooked by the Academy!” as we perused all the attractions that Las Vegas has to offer: the dolphin pool at the Mirage, the tiger cubs at the MGM Grand, maybe ride the roller coaster at New York, New York.

We would talk and laugh all afternoon, and I would occasionally rub his arm, maybe take his hand while we walked through the casino, then ask him to dance while we listened to a middle-aged diva with a Princess Diana haircut sing “Having My Baby.”

Oh, it would be silly and fun and perfect, and by the end of the night we would be inseparable.

God has a sense of humor. Don’t believe me? Just look at a zebra, and tell me what was going on in his mind that day.