The Blonde Theory

by Kristin Harmel

Genres: Women's Fiction; Contemporary Romance; Romantic Comedy

Synopsis

"Hilarious...deliciously entertaining." - Sarah Mlynowsi, author of Monkey Business "Kristin Harmel dishes with disarming honesty and delivers a sparkling, delightful story." -- Laura Caldwell, author of The Year of Living Famously Harper Roberts is a corporate attorney in Manhattan. She's smart, attractive, and funny. So why can't she find a date? Men flock to her at parties when they think she's a dumb blonde. But, as soon as they realize she's a Harvard-educated lawyer, they flee. Harper's best friend is a magazine editor who suggests Harper go on assignment for a month as a 'dumb blonde' and see if it changes her dating perspective. So, for two weeks, Harper goes undercover. She changes her wardrobe, her conversation, her body language. The result is a series of comical encounters. Soon, Harper must take a good look in the mirror and realize that it's not just men who judge people on their looks.

Release date: February 22, 2007

Publisher: 5 Spot

Print pages: 304

Sample

Acknowledgments


Thanks to Mom, the biggest inspiration in my life and the best person I know, to my wonderful brother and sister, David and Karen, and to Dad, who I love very much. I’m also fortunate to have the best set of grandparents in the world—even if Grandpa insists on always telling the embarrassing story of the first time he saw me! And thanks to the rest of my great family, too—-especially Aunt Donna, who helped instill in me a love of reading (and always beats me at Trivial Pursuit!). I love you all!

Thanks to all the great folks at Warner Books, especially my wonderful editor Emily Griffin (I’m so thrilled to be working with you!), Elly Weisenberg (You’re not just a great publicist, but a great friend, too), Jim Schiff (I’m so glad we’ve stayed friends!), Rebecca Oliver, Penina Sacks, Caryn Karmatz Rudy, Laura Jorstad, Brigid Pearson, Candace Waller, Tom Haushalter, and, of course, the incomparable Amy Einhorn.

Thanks to Elizabeth Pomada, for helping give me my start in the publishing industry. I will always be grateful to you. Thanks also to superstar agent Jenny Bent, with whom I am looking forward to many adventures, and to her assistant, Victoria Horn. Thanks to my film agent extraordinaire, Andy Cohen, who has become a great, valued friend. And thanks to Linda Kuczma, the patent attorney who let me pick her brain to make Harper more authentic. I’m so glad to have met you!

One of the best things about being a writer, I’ve discovered, is the wonderful friendships I’ve developed with other writers. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some of the most generous, kind women in the business. Thanks to Alison Pace, Lynda Curnyn, Melissa Senate, Laura Caldwell, Julie Dam, Mari Mancusi, Lani Diane Rich, Jane Porter, and Liza Palmer. And a special thank-you to Sarah Mlynowski, who has not only become an amazing friend, but who has also gone above and beyond to help and advise me.

Thanks to the ladies of Olive & Bettes, Shou’ture, Blue Genes, and Shopgirl for the fabulous launch parties; to Laura Baddish and Bacardi for the partnership and the super-cool “Movie Star-tini” and “Tangerine-tini”; and to Amy Tan(gerine), for your business partnership, but especially for your friendship. You’re the best!

Thanks to my many friends, who have supported me, listened to me, read my drafts, and made my life happier. I am the luckiest girl in the world to know you all. Thanks especially to Gillian Zucker (it’s your book!), Lauren Elkin, Kristen Milan, Kara Brown, Megan Combs, Wendy Jo Moyer, Amber Draus, Ashley Tedder, Lorelyn Koch, Kendra Williams, Don Clemence, Lisa Wilkes, Anne Rach, Andrea Jackson, Megan McDermott, Kelly McDermott, Trish Stefonek, Michael Ghegan, Michelle Tauber, Courtney Jaye, Samantha Phillips, Josh Henchey, Ryan Dean, Brendan Bergen, Eric Colley, Troy McGuire, Ben Bledsoe, Jeeves, Clayton Morris, Kia Malone, Mitch English, Lana Cabrera, Melissa Rawley Payne, Pat Cash, Courtney Harmel, Janine Harmel, Jay Cash, Tom Rottcher, Lindsay Soll, Mindy Marques, Steve Helling, Michael Kovac, the Vito crowd, Candace Craig, Jean-Marc Denis, Dave Ahern, Steve Orlando, John Kaplan, and Cap’n —and to my very favorite dogs and cats: Duke, Dr. Spots, Kitty, Tiger, Bailey, Buster, Bamboo, Jeffi, and Chloe.

And to anyone who has ever thought she has to change who she is: Believe me, if people don’t like you for who you are, they’re not worth your time in the first place. Be proud to be you—and strive only to be a better version of yourself. It’s the best thing you could ever be.

Chapter One

I didn’t know when it happened that it would be my last chance at finding love. I mean, who thinks like that? Sure, we agonize over breakups, cry with our girlfriends, drown our sorrows in too many pints of mint chocolate chip or too many martinis. But in the back of our minds, even as our hearts are breaking, we know there will be someone else. Maybe not right away, but eventually. There’s always someone else just around the corner.

At least that’s what I thought then. Sure, I was devastated when Peter left. It broke my heart when I came home one evening after a long deposition three years ago and found him in the final stages of packing his old suitcases. Another half an hour and I think I would have missed him entirely. I think he would have left without saying good-bye.

“Harper, I can’t do this anymore,” he said while I stared at him blankly, trying my best to formulate some sort of rebuttal. But I didn’t know what to say. My brain was too busy trying to wrap itself around the fact that he was leaving.

I hadn’t had even the slightest clue that anything was wrong. After all, we had just celebrated our two-year anniversary two weeks before with champagne, strawberries, a night of cuddling up, and drunken mumblings about spending forever together. He had introduced me to his parents less than six months earlier. We had been talking about moving into a bigger apartment when our lease was up in the spring.

“What...what...why?” I finally stammered, hoping that it was something along the lines of an appropriate response. I stared at his broad back, which was turned to me as he bent over the battered brown leather suitcase he had placed on the bed we’d shared for the last two years. I tried not to think about the last time we’d made love there, but that was awfully difficult, since it had been just four days ago, the day before my law firm announced I’d made partner—the youngest partner the old-school Booth, Fitzpatrick & McMahon had ever had. Thirty-two-year-old women weren’t supposed to make partner. Not at one of the most prestigious firms in the Northeast. But in the last two years, I had quadrupled their patent business and brought in more than two million dollars’ worth on my own. I’d finally had the courage to approach the partners and threaten to leave the firm if I wasn’t made a junior partner by year’s end. They had conferenced about it and agreed, a move that had made news all over New York’s legal community. I should have been the happiest I’d ever been in my life. Peter should have been happy for me.

Instead, he was packing. To leave. To leave me.

“Why?” I repeated, this time my voice a mere whisper. He turned to me finally and sighed in what sounded like exasperation, as if I was simply supposed to know exactly why he was leaving. As if me asking him was simply some tedious formality that he had to be subjected to on his way out the door. His dark brown hair, I noticed as I stared at him, was still wet, as if he’d just emerged from the shower, and its little ends, which sorely needed a trip to the barber, were starting to curl up, the way they always did when they dried. He was fresh-shaven, so his square jaw was missing that day-old-stubble look I always found so sexy. His hazel eyes looked bright, brighter than they would have been had he any regrets about leaving. Apparently, he didn’t. His posture was just as relaxed and comfortable as usual, which, in my opinion, wasn’t how one should look if he was walking out on the woman to whom he’d been proclaiming his undying love less than a week earlier.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” he repeated, shrugging as if the situation were beyond his control, as if forces greater than he were making him decide to leave, making him pack his suitcase, making him coldly turn his back to me. “I just can’t.”

“I don’t understand,” I said, finally able to control my voice again. He turned his back again, returning to his packing as if I weren’t there. I crossed the room and stood beside him, trying my best to refrain from throwing myself at his feet and hanging on to his ankles so that he’d have to take me with him wherever he was going. Because that would just be pathetic, wouldn’t it? Instead, I just stood beside him, breathing hard, waiting for him to look at me. Finally he did. “Why?” I repeated.

He didn’t meet my eyes. He wouldn’t. But he stopped packing long enough to mumble the answer that has been ringing in my ears ever since.

“I just can’t be with a woman who puts her career before our relationship,” he had said, gazing straight down at his toes. All the air went out of me in a whoosh, and suddenly I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t understand. When had I put my career before our relationship? He worked just as hard as I did. And if he really felt that way, why hadn’t he said so before? In fact, I had tried in every way I could to let him know that he was at the center of my universe. I probably could have made partner even sooner if I hadn’t been so worried about making Peter feel wanted. But I had wanted to be a good girlfriend as much as I’d wanted to be a successful attorney. Until that moment, I thought I had juggled both roles just fine.

Evidently, I was mistaken.

“What do you mean?” I asked weakly, feeling more bewildered than I ever had before. Peter paused before going back to his packing. “I don’t do that,” I whispered. Surely I didn’t, did I?

“Yes, you do,” Peter said slowly, folding the last of his crisp button-up shirts, which he wore to work at Sullivan & Foley—a law firm that had once been nearly as prestigious as mine but had filed for bankruptcy last year and fired half its staff. Peter had stayed on, but he’d been forced to take a pay cut. “Besides,” he added with a quick glance in my direction, snapping his suitcase shut with a resounding bang that sounded ominous and final, “we agreed when we started dating that we would never compete with each other. And now you seem determined to beat me at whatever you do. I’m just tired of it.”

There were no words left. After all, I knew I had never purposely tried to compete with him or beat him. It wasn’t my fault that I’d had an easier time climbing the ladder at my firm. It wasn’t my fault that his firm had screwed up a few major cases, come under investigation by the SEC, and been forced into its drastic measures. Peter’s career had once looked even more promising than mine, but things had changed. I just stared at him, bewildered, while tears rolled down my cheeks. So that was it. I had made partner, and it had come with a sizable raise. It apparently also came with a surprise breakup. No one at Booth, Fitzpatrick & McMahon had warned me about this.

Finally, Peter turned to look at me. Not out of respect for me, but because I was standing between him and the doorway. And he was on his way out.

“Listen, Harper,” he said, the overstuffed suitcase he held in his right hand weighing down the right side of his body almost comically. “I care about you. But I’m a man. And men like to be providers. I should be the one who makes partner first. Besides,” he added archly, “I thought we had agreed that you’d quit after a while and stay home so we could have kids.”

“I...I never agreed to that,” I said shakily, staring at him in shock. Besides, I was only thirty-two. What, I was supposed to have quit by thirty-two so I could bear his children? Was he delusional? I had another good ten years or so of childbearing ability left, and I couldn’t exactly impress the other partners with my legal aplomb with a nursing newborn hanging from my breast, now, could I? It wasn’t that I didn’t want kids someday. It was just that I wasn’t ready for them yet. And Peter sure as hell had never indicated that he was.

“I just thought we were on the same page, Harper,” Peter said sadly, shaking his head at me as if I were a child and he was disappointed in my behavior. “But you just had to be better than me at everything, didn’t you?”

I was aghast. I couldn’t think of another thing to say as he walked past me toward the door. I followed him mutely out of the apartment and watched him as he made his way down the stairway to the ground floor.

He didn’t look back.

AFTER EVERY BREAKUP, there’s a period of mourning. Sometimes it comes in the form of a rebound fling or two. Sometimes it comes in form of a lingering semi-depression. Sometimes it comes in the form of a Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey carton. Or two. Or thirty-seven.

I mourned Peter. As angry as I should have been with him for leaving me just like that, with no warning, no real explanation, I was filled instead entirely with sadness and hurt. I didn’t get out of bed for the next three days. My three best friends, Meg, Emmie, and Jill, sat with me in shifts. My secretary dropped by all the patent paperwork I had to do that week and canceled all my appointments and court appearances. I told her I was sick, but I think the Reese’s wrappers, Pringles canisters, Bacardi Limón bottles, cigarette butts, and empty ice cream cartons scattered all over my room gave me away. As did the fact that I had Courtney Jaye’s girl-power “Can’t Behave” playing on repeat and was angrily singing along with the words time after time after time, inserting Peter’s name in unflattering locations throughout the song.

On the fourth day, I sucked it up and went back to work, telling myself that I was better off without him. I was, obviously. Who needed a guy who walked away the moment he felt overshadowed? Certainly not me. Who wanted a guy who felt so emasculated if his girlfriend made a little more money than he did? I sure didn’t.

But knowing those things didn’t help much. Logic is no match for heartbreak.

It took me awhile to want to date again. I’m not the rebound type. And I just knew that Peter would change his mind and come back. But four months later, I hadn’t heard one word from him. He had sent his friends Carlos and David to pick up the rest of his belongings—including the beautiful Italian leather sofa we’d bought two months before he left that he’d insisted on putting on his credit card—and then he had seemingly disappeared off the face of the planet while I moped around in a living room with no furniture.

But when I was finally ready to get out there again, to dive back into the dating pool, I found I was swimming alone.

Sure, I had dates here and there. I wasn’t unattractive; at five foot six with shoulder-length light blonde hair, green eyes, a tiny nose, girlishly freckled pink cheeks, and a body that would be considered average for a woman in the vicinity of thirty, I still turned my share of heads.

But the problem wasn’t in attracting the guys. The problem was that the moment they found out I was an attorney—and even worse, a partner in one of Manhattan’s most prestigious firms—they ran. Far and fast. They couldn’t get away from me quickly enough. A few of the braver ones hung in until date three or four, but they always jumped ship eventually.

And it wasn’t that I didn’t get asked on dates. I did. Men were intrigued by me. They knew they were supposed to like the trifecta of beauty, charm, and brains (okay, in my case, moderately average attractiveness, a sarcastic sense of humor, and brains). But apparently, in reality the total package—so to speak—was totally horrifying. Who knew?

I’d been so sure I’d find someone. It wasn’t because I needed a man by my side; I wasn’t that kind of girl. I was perfectly content being by myself. It was just that I had known that after Peter, I’d eventually find someone else, someone who would love me and whom I would love, someone who was a stronger man than Peter and who appreciated what I did for a living without feeling threatened by me, someone who understood that my job didn’t define who I was.

I was thirty-two then, when Peter left. Young enough to be hopefully optimistic. Foolish enough to believe in love.

Now I was thirty-five. I hadn’t had more than four dates with the same man—other than Peter—since my twenties. And my twenties were a long time ago.

Tomorrow was the third anniversary of Peter leaving me, the third anniversary of me being alone, the third anniversary of the day that I began to realize that being successful and being desirable are evidently mutually exclusive.

It was becoming increasingly obvious that as long as I kept climbing the corporate ladder, I was destined to be alone.

Chapter Two

It’s not you, it’s them,” said Meg at brunch the next morning—my Happy-Anniversary-of-Being-Undesirable Brunch, if you want to get specific—looking at me with thinly masked concern.

“You sound like a bad breakup line,” I mumbled, still wondering why we’d had to move our usual brunch time from 11 am up to 9. Who did brunch at 9 am on a Sunday? This so wasn’t brunch. This was breakfast. I felt like we were cheating.

Of course, my mood wasn’t helped by the fact that, due to lingering depression over celebrating the three-year marker of my apparently endless singledom, I had been at home alone, awake until 3 am, during which time I had polished off six Bacardi Limón and Sprites (okay, to be fair, six Bacardi Limóns on the rocks—with splashes of Sprite), had plunged headfirst into the tray of brownies my overly helpful secretary, Molly, had brought me at work on Friday, and had then proceeded to smoke an entire pack of cigarettes. And I didn’t even smoke. Well, not that often, anyhow. I smoked when I was drinking too much and wanted to feel sorry for myself. I was a Sulky Smoker.

And yes, I knew it was a disgusting, terribly unattractive habit and that I was slowly killing myself. I was well aware. But I had the situation under control. I’d made a deal with Fate. Whenever Fate wanted to send me a guy who wasn’t scared of me, I’d quit smoking—cold turkey. In the meantime, I didn’t see the harm in lopping years off my life. And besides, what goes better with Bacardi than a Marlboro Light?

Admittedly, I was grasping at straws.

“Were you up late drinking and smoking again?” Meg asked, as if reading my mind. Her wide, gentle brown eyes bored into mine. I shot her a guilty look.

“Maybe,” I said. “But in my defense, I also polished off half a tray of brownies.”

The three of them—Meg, Jill, and Emmie—just looked at me. Okay, for a lawyer, I wasn’t doing the best job of putting on a good defense.

“Fine, fine, so I ate the whole tray,” I said, throwing up my hands in mock surrender. “So shoot me.”

I had never been good at anniversaries. Even happy ones. I hated the pressure they put on me. With Peter, I had freaked out over what to get him for our first anniversary and had ended up lamely presenting him with season one of Seinfeld on DVD while he had bought me a beautiful leather-bound day planner, inscribed with harper roberts, esq. With Chris, the guy I’d dated before Peter, I had baked him a giant heart-shaped cookie that said i love you, chris in chocolate chips, but the edges had burned, the chocolate had melted and smeared, and I basically wound up giving him what looked like a charred Frisbee with unintelligible chocolate smears.

See, I was a disaster at anniversaries. But the bad anniversaries—like today—were especially dreadful. Thus, the overeating, overdrinking, and resumption of the gross habit of smoking.

“You’re never going to find a guy sitting on your terrace and drowning your sorrows, Harper,” Jill proclaimed a bit smugly, tossing her sleek blonde hair (touched up on a biweekly basis at Louis Licari’s salon on Fifth Avenue, in case you were wondering) over her shoulder. I didn’t even try to mask the fact that I was glaring at her. Since she had gotten married six months earlier, she had suddenly become very comfortable—too comfortable—dispensing advice, as if her status as a Married had made her a sudden expert in all things love-related. I had thus far restrained myself from reminding her of all the dating fumbles she’d had before stumbling upon the diminutive Dr. Alec Katz, who had proposed to her in less than six months with a diamond roughly the size of a disco ball.

“Honey, you’re just in a slump,” Meg said to me gently while shooting Jill a dangerous look. “And this isn’t the day for us to pick you apart.” She could always be counted on to dispense motherly nuggets of irrefutable wisdom. Sometimes I forgot she was only thirty-five and not sixty-five, an observation I had thus far refrained from sharing with her. She even looked like a concerned grandma sometimes, with her dark hair cut short for practicality’s sake, and her affinity for collared shirts with khakis. And she wore aprons at home when she cooked, for God’s sake. Aprons!

“Easy for you to say,” I grumbled. After all, she was married, too. Darned Marrieds. Going on like they knew what they were talking about.

Hmph. Well, maybe they did.

It was just too early in the morning to deal with that possibility.

Then again, Meg had always seemed to know everything. Maybe it was time I started listening to her. After all, she had been right about pretty much everything in the twenty-nine years I had known her.

In what was a particularly unusual feat for four Manhattanites in their mid-thirties, Meg Myers, Jill Peters-Katz, Emmie Walters, and I had been friends since grade school in Ohio and were still as close as sisters—even if we didn’t always see eye-to-eye on everything.

Meg and I had been best friends since the first day of first grade, when she sat down beside me and announced that she had Band-Aids, Children’s Tylenol, and Neosporin in her backpack, should I ever fall on the playground and scrape my knee. Twenty-nine years later, she still carried Band-Aids and Neosporin, although the Tylenol had been replaced by Advil. She has always been the one I turned to when I had a problem—whether it be the time that Bobby Johnston stole my lunch in the second grade (Meg gave him a very threatening speech about respecting other people’s property) or the day my parents told me they were getting a divorce, when I was eleven (“They’re not divorcing you, Harper,” she had explained patiently while I punched her pillow and bawled my eyes out. “And neither of them loves you any less.”), or the time my first boyfriend, Jack, broke my heart by dumping me over the phone when I was eighteen. (“He didn’t deserve you anyhow,” Meg had sniffed while handing me a tissue.)

Emmie had come along two years after Meg and I met, a perky blonde whirlwind of energy whose parents had just moved east from LA. She arrived at James Franklin Cash III Elementary School midway through November with a dark tan and a necklace made of seashells, and all the third-grade boys fell immediately in love with her. Meg stood up for her one day when big Katie Kleegal tried to steal Emmie’s lunch, and the three of us had been close ever since.

Jill Peters had been the last addition to our little group. She had moved in down the street from Emmie the summer before junior high, and despite being a year younger, she was the only one of us who knew how to put on foundation, wear a bra, and French-kiss boys, which of course made her immediately indispensable to our little group.

“Girls in Connecticut, where I come from, are so far ahead of girls in Ohio,” she had said with a withering expression of boredom that made us all feel just a bit embarrassed about our affiliation with the Buckeye State. From the day we met her, she had been talking about finding Mr. Right, which baffled Meg and me. We had both been late bloomers, and the summer before junior high we still thought boys were kind of icky.

(Come to think of it, though, maybe we’d been right all along, before the teenage hormones took over our brains. Guys were kind of icky, weren’t they? Why was it that I was just now coming to this realization at the age of thirty-five? Clearly, I wasn’t as smart as I’d thought.)

The other three girls had moved to Manhattan when they were twenty-two, after we had all graduated from Ohio State. Meg had moved into a tiny, dingy one-bedroom in Brooklyn to pursue a career in magazine journalism. Emmie had moved in with Meg for a year, her old Rainbow Brite sleeping bag stretched out on Meg’s living room floor, to try out for every Broadway show possible. Jill had studied interior design and had somehow moved directly into a management position at Lila McElroy, a hip, prestigious downtown firm, her first year out of school.

I had visited on weekends but hadn’t made the permanent move to Manhattan until I was twenty-four, after I had graduated from Harvard Law, making our little foursome complete once again.

Now we were all living our dreams—or at least an adjusted version of them. I had a thriving career that I loved. Meg, who had originally wanted to be a writer for The New Yorker, was instead a senior editor at Mod, a trendy women’s magazine, which seemed to fit her better anyhow, since it allowed her the opportunity to give young women advice every month—and there was nothing Meg liked better than dispensing advice. She had married her high school sweetheart, Paul Amato, an electrician, who had come to New York with her. She kept her maiden name.

Emmie, a tiny, adorable blonde with pixie-cut curls, had struck out on Broadway, had a string of roles in off-Broadway productions, and finally landed a role on the soap opera The Rich and the Damned two years ago. Once a month or so, she was approached by a starstruck housewife from Boise or Minneapolis or Salt Lake City who recognized her and asked for her autograph, which thrilled her to no end. She also had an endless string of adoring men who were enchanted with her status as a C-list celebrity. She had collected no less than a dozen marriage proposals during the thirteen years she had lived in New York.

And Jill, whose mother had repeat. . .