I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends (24 page)

My heart sank. My sister’s opinion meant the most to me. It really hurt my feelings that she wasn’t blown away by Ben.

“I just don’t see it,” she added sadly.

I made excuses for him—he was tired and nervous—and I tried to put the conversation out of my mind. It might take some time, but they’d all eventually see what I loved so much about him.

The next time I saw Ben again, during an officially sanctioned Happy Couple Weekend right before Christmas, he was swamped and stressed. Not only was he running his winery, but he was also now doing tons of press for
The Bachelor,
which was scheduled to premiere on January 2.

The cast had just been announced so now I had to be extra careful when I met up with him. I took the train from L.A.’s Union Station up to Montecito, California, near Santa Barbara, and a producer picked me up and drove me to meet Ben. Our rented house, located behind a big gate and covered in ivy and Mexican saltillo tile, was just down the road from Oprah’s gargantuan estate. Of course, it had a hot tub. Why would you even ask?

We were told that we couldn’t leave the property at all, so I was hoping for a romantic shut-in weekend filled with sex and snuggling. The first night we cooked a big meal together, but I quickly realized Ben’s almost as bossy as Gordon Ramsay in the kitchen and likes his knife cuts as precise as Morimoto. He made a San Fran classic, cioppino, a spicy fish stew filled with clams, scallops, crab, and shrimp, but I wasn’t allowed to help him. I was relegated to salad duty.

While we were cooking, his mom called and I talked to her for the first time since Switzerland. She was really nice and chatty. I’d gotten holiday gifts for Julia and her and she sent me a thank-you card right after Christmas. “I love the scarf you bought for me,” she wrote. “Beige is my color. Joe used to call me, ‘Queen of Beige.’ Isn’t that funny? Also, I have one of Ben’s new ‘Epilogue’ bottles of wine in the bicycle you gave me in Switzerland. You are very thoughtful and have an eye for the perfect gifts.”

I’d also bought Ben several Christmas gifts—his favorite snack, See’s Candies, a charcoal beanie and cashmere socks from Marc Jacobs, and a pickling kit. I also commissioned an artist to draw a picture of his dog, Scotch. He got me the best gift I’ve ever gotten from any boyfriend—a sparkling diamond band to wear on my right hand until the show could give my engagement ring back to me. I wore it on my left hand, just for me, when I was inside.

While Ben and I ate dinner, listening to our favorite songs by Drake and Bon Iver, there was that comfortable silence between us but something was definitely missing. I felt like we could have connected more and been more intimate. Not that we didn’t have a great time. We definitely made love in Montecito and spent most of the days in our PJs, watching movies or
Parks and Recreation
on an iPad in bed. One night, we forced ourselves to get dressed up for dinner like it was a real date. Only we actually ate the food this time and there were fifteen fewer cameramen watching.

It was fun to lounge around, but it was also a lot of alone time, too, and we both went a little stir-crazy cooped up indoors. Ben, again, spent a buttload of time working on his laptop, while I puttered around aimlessly. We weren’t allowed to go for a walk or run. My job entailed going to castings, which I couldn’t do during these long weekends. Ben also invited his handler over for lunch one afternoon. It wasn’t the first time I noticed that Ben needed to be surrounded by “his people,” and definitely not the last.

Ben wasn’t overly attentive to me when I was right in front of his face, and he was even less so when we were apart. On New Year’s Eve, two nights before our big
Bachelor
season premiere, he cohosted the ball drop in Times Square with Jenny McCarthy and Ryan Seacrest, while I stayed home by myself and drank a bottle of wine. I stayed up all night to watch him and he texted me one picture.

We didn’t even watch our first episode together. My roommate, Ally, had a viewing party, but it was really awkward watching the show with so many people. They kept talking loudly during it and I just couldn’t stand watching myself. Halfway through that first episode, I went into my room and didn’t watch another second of my season until more than a year later.

Three days after the show aired, Ben and I had another Happy Couple Weekend at a mansion in Bel Air. We picked the location so he could easily do appearances in Hollywood. I actually felt bad for him. He had so much press to do he was being run ragged.

He had one very early morning interview on Ryan Seacrest’s radio show. According to a friend/spy who worked there, the
American Idol
host had a mildly inappropriate conversation with my hubby-to-be after their interview.

“Dude, she’s so hot,” Ryan allegedly told Ben.

“Yeah, I never thought I could get a girl like that.”

Well, he got me but wasn’t doing much to keep me. During our Happy Couple Weekend, Ben was gone one entire day and spent much of our other time together on his computer, wearing a Lululemon workout outfit, which was kind of a turnoff. I did have a handler drive me out to one casting, but other than that I found myself sitting by the pool alone most of the weekend. He’d come out to kiss me a few times and thank me for being so understanding.

“Of course, no problem!” I said, trying to be supportive.

Ben did countless phone interviews and watched future episodes of
The Bachelor
with his headphones on, laughing loudly when I said drunkenly in Sonoma, “It’s a war out there.” He also was tippity-tapping away on his blog for People.com. He didn’t tell me what he was writing and never asked for my opinion. I had to read it myself online with everyone else after it was published each week. I was none too pleased when Ben confessed that Jennifer was the best kisser in the cast.

Ben also invited a bunch of crew members over for lunch, where I learned that Vienna Girardi and Jake Pavelka also stayed in this house and almost had their cover blown after they accidentally tripped the alarm and the fire department showed up. Later, one of the producers pulled me aside and warned me that it was going to get progressively worse for me. I had no idea what she was talking about.

It was the first time someone from the show hinted that there might be something larger going on, something that I had no control over.

BY THE TIME
we got to our third Happy Couple Weekend in Inverness, on a misty oceanside peninsula an hour from San Francisco, the third episode had run. I had officially become the villain of season 16 after I asked Kacie B, “How’d that taste coming out of your mouth?” among other explosive comments and general cockiness.

I wasn’t watching the show, but my sister was, and she was getting bombarded with e-mails and tweets from strangers, friends, and distant relatives who crawled out of the woodwork. Rachel, who is a lawyer, was even accosted in the copy room by a coworker demanding to know the scoop about Ben and me. Rachel was already exhausted trying to defend me—and the show had barely started airing.

KEEPING IT REAL

Life After
The Bachelor

by Graham Bunn

The show is a privilege to be a part of but comes with a cost that many people aren’t ready for, myself included. In that you are exactly who the show portrays you to be, just magnified beyond measure. Whether you like it or not, you are forced to see yourself in a blinding light of self-evaluation. You find out a lot about who you are and who you want to be after its airing. Now, granted, you get the experience of insane dates, incredibly beautiful women of past, present, and future cast, this author included, of course. The lessons learned come with the experience of doing the show but what you do with those lessons are sold separately.

Ben was aware that I’d become a lightning rod, but so far he hadn’t said a word to me about it. On the way to Inverness, he asked me to stop at Whole Foods, where I blew $1,000 on food for our weekend and groceries for Ben’s apartment, including paper towels and “good” olive oil, as he requested. As I shopped, he drank at a bar down the street from our cottage.

The first night Ben invited his sister, Julia, and her boyfriend, Garrett, over for dinner. Julia and I were instant best friends and I loved Garrett. He was warm and captivating, and a really good boyfriend. He treated Julia like a queen.

You know how couples try to out-lovey-dovey each other? Ben was very affectionate that night as we played board games and Uno. He even talked for the first time since filming the show about me moving up to San Francisco. He’d been looking at properties online and showed me a few he liked. “Is it crazy to think about buying a house?” he asked. I was so excited and told him I could go to castings in the city.

All was wonderful, until Ben decided to make steaks for dinner. He was bossy boots in the kitchen again and criticized the way I chopped tomatoes for the salad I was allowed to prepare under heightened supervision. “Are you really going to cut those like that?” he asked. “You eat with your eyes.”

At first, his passion for cooking was cute. But now it was starting to annoy me that he thought he was a Michelin star chef and I was his lowly sous chef. As he sliced and diced, he was so in the zone that he ignored everyone. Then when we sat down to eat, he discussed and dissected the meal, bragging how perfectly he charred the steak and criticizing me for putting an entire portobello mushroom on top of my steak without slicing it first. He was mad I ruined his plating.

The next day, Ben’s mom came for a visit. I noticed that they bickered a lot and she was hard on him about not spending enough quality time with her. I’d noticed her demeanor toward me had changed drastically since our friendly phone call before the show started airing. I could tell she no longer liked me and couldn’t fake it. She seemed very uncomfortable when I was affectionate with Ben, staring at us with a baffled look on her face when we held hands.

“Is this real?” she asked point-blank.

“Yes, Mom,” Ben said. “This is real.”

Right before Julia and Garrett left, Babs asked me how work was going. I told her that I had to go to New York soon to model for Stein Mart.

“Oh, I can’t believe you work for them,” she said condescendingly, rolling her eyes.

“Mom!” Ben and Julia scolded.

“Well, they pay me $2,500 a day and I love going to New York.”

Babs’s comment cut me to the bone. It’s really hard to get regular clients in modeling and I was proud to have such a long run and steady income from this bread-and-butter client. I mean would she have preferred Ben brought home a VIP cocktail waitress? Or is being a nanny, like Kacie B, a more suitable career for her son’s future wife?

After Julia and Garret left, Ben had to go back to San Fran so I was left alone with Babs for an hour before I went home to L.A. As we sat drinking tea, we had another awkward and confrontational conversation.

“How is your family doing?” she asked.

“My mom isn’t happy about what’s happening.”

“I didn’t want Ben to do the show either. Couldn’t you find a common bond with the other girls?”

“Those girls were really mean to me.”

“Couldn’t you have tried harder? Couldn’t you have faked it a little bit?”

I wished Ben hadn’t left me alone here. I tried to change the subject again. She hadn’t asked me much about myself, so I started to talk about my past and my career, to show her how hard I’ve worked. I wanted to tell her that I’d lived in New Zealand, because I wanted her to be proud of me.

“I’ve traveled the world …” I started to explain, but Babs cut me off.

“You said that on the show. You should never say that. It makes you look bad.”

If my mom were here, she would have bitch-slapped this woman. But what came next truly knocked the wind out of me: “I guess you should wait it out and sell the ring. You can split the money.”

I WENT BACK
to Santa Monica with an awful taste in my mouth—from both Ben’s steak and his mother. I loved Ben so much but I wondered how I would survive the rest of my life with Babs as my in-law. It was a serious problem.

Another serious problem with our relationship was that when I wasn’t with Ben, I was completely out of sight, out of mind. At the end of January, he left for the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, to film a segment with
Extra
host Mario Lopez. As soon as Ben left, he fell off the map and I couldn’t reach him. He was barely responding to my texts or calls.

“Sorry muffin,” he texted. “Lots of little girlies that want pics.”

I went online to look for clues and saw in paparazzi photos that he was Sundance’s celebutante. He was carousing all over town wearing a white beanie I’d never seen before. One gossip story claimed that while he was partying at the Bing Bar “multiple” ladies were lining up to meet him and that he definitely wasn’t acting like an engaged guy. He’d been attending screenings, going to clubs, picking up mountains of swag, and even hung out with Michael Cera and
Parks and Rec
star Aziz Ansari at a Drake concert. He was having a little too much fun without me and I was furious.

“I’m sorry that you’ve been so busy. I’m trying to be as understanding as possible,” I texted him. “But this is hard. I feel neglected and am unhappy. Call me.”

I finally reached him on his cell and chewed him out. I asked where he’d been and what happened to the charcoal beanie I’d bought him for Christmas. He said he lost it somewhere in Park City.

For the first time in our relationship, I warned him that he needed to start making me a priority. Then I hung up on him.