I Didn't Come Here to Make Friends (3 page)

I tried to focus on our romantic destination, which was so exclusive Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie had recently stayed there. We’d have our own chef, sauna, Jacuzzi, masseuse, and most important, we could call our parents and share the news. I was so excited. I couldn’t wait to be alone with Ben. The next two days would be the most uninterrupted time we’d ever spent together. On our overnight date, in between our sex sessions, we stayed up all night talking because we wanted as much time together as possible. In the Fantasy Suite we’d lain in bed facing each other, listening to Bon Iver, with a fire crackling. Around 5:00
A.M.
, my eyes started closing. I fought so hard not to fall asleep, and apologized that I couldn’t stay awake any longer. About an hour later, I opened my eyes and Ben was still awake watching me sleep. It was one of the most intimate, special nights of my life.

When we arrived at the ski chalet, I saw it was three stories high, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows. We walked into the master suite and the first thing I saw was an incredible view of, yes, the Matterhorn. Our room already had a hundred lit candles (of course), and a romantic fire going. I felt a huge sense of freedom, and the weight started to lift off my shoulders. I saw my bags, and was happy to have all of my things with me, including random snacks I’d collected along the way—apples, teas, granola bars. It’s weird but my personal belongings brought me comfort.

I looked around the suite. This is where Ben had been staying this whole time. I saw his clothes hanging up, and all of his things very organized in his closet. It made me feel closer to him to be staying in his room. We lay on the bed facing each other and stared into each other’s eyes. I ran my hands through his hair. I told him, “I love you.” His eyes filled with tears. I couldn’t tell if these were happy tears or sad tears, but it pained me to see him cry. I realized in that moment that I had so much to learn about him, and it made
me
a little sad. I thought to myself,
It’s okay. I will learn all of his faces, looks, moods, and what makes him happy. I will make him happy every day for the rest of his life. I have so much love to give and I will give it all to him.
I rolled on top of him, wiped his tears away, and kissed him. I wondered if he was thinking about his father, who’d died five years ago. I started to well up, too.

We should have been celebrating our engagement, not bummed out. So I said, “Let’s get out of these clothes.” We closed and locked the door and took our first shower together. It was really “lovely,” as Ben would say. We made love in the shower, then in the bed.

After our steamy shower, I would have loved to have a romantic dinner à deux in our fabulous chalet in just our bathrobes. Instead, at Ben’s request, we got dressed to have dinner with a couple who had worked on the show. After twelve weeks of no privacy, I was desperate to ditch all these people. But Ben had already made this executive decision without even talking to me about it first. He also ordered a $2,500 bottle of wine and later got in trouble for it from the producers.

For the next three days we ended up having every breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the couple. Every. Single. Meal. The second night we all watched
Finding Nemo
together. I was horrified to learn that Ben knew every line, which he recited during the movie. The boyfriend and I kept looking at each other across the room and rolling our eyes, but Ben and the girlfriend seemed to be having a grand ol’ time. Sensitive Ben admitted to crying while watching movies on the road together. I did not like the fact that he was watching movies with her at all.

So, while I was trying to get to know my fiancé in the first few days after our engagement, he flirted with this woman and shared inside jokes. Later, when I gingerly told Ben that I was uncomfortable with their friendship, he shrugged it off and said that she was like a sister to him. Then he said that he thought it was healthy to be able to flirt in a relationship. And that she had a great body and “the best” boobs.

I worried I may have gotten engaged to the biggest boob of all. Had I just made the biggest mistake of my life?

On the final morning at the chalet, I woke up at 5:00
A.M.
to take the train back to Zurich, so I could finally fly home. It was only a few days into our engagement and I was back to traveling without my fiancé. Of course, my flight home had been booked separately from Ben. I wasn’t allowed to be seen in public with him for the next four months, until after the finale aired. So while I flew home, Ben went skiing across the border in Italy with that other couple.

Right before I got on the train I had to take off my engagement ring and hand it over. To make sure the show’s finale remained top secret, I couldn’t be spotted wearing it. “I’ll just wear it because it’ll be safer that way,” the production assistant said.

As the train pulled out of the station, I glanced over at the production assistant’s hand, and I seriously couldn’t believe
my
ring was on her finger. Then I stared out the window pensively at the Matterhorn. But this time, I didn’t have to try to look concerned. It was effortless.

1

BIRDS, BEES & BIRTHDAY SUITS

M
y mom warned me that men would cause me nothing but trouble and heartache. From the minute I was able to comprehend words she began lecturing my older sister Rachel and me about the evils of the opposite sex. The monologues began every night at six o’clock on the dot as we sat around the dinner table in our house in Scottsdale, Arizona.

“Men are pigs,” she first declared to me in third grade, while sipping a glass of wine on spaghetti Sunday. “It’s all about sex or getting some.” A few years later, on taco night, I remember her philosophizing over a margarita: “Girls, always remember men are scum.” My father, in my humble opinion, was not a pig or scum. He was always home for dinner on time at Casa de Ninas, as he called it. He’d usually stay quiet during these diatribes, though occasionally he might throw in “it’s pretty much true” or “there is some truth to that.”

My mom had pretty good reasons not to trust men. Her own father disappeared before she was born, so she never met him. Her high school sweetheart not only was abusive, but he also got her pregnant at nineteen (introducing my older half sister, Amy). They got married, but divorced three years later. And while my dad is the sweetest guy, a total softy, it’s no secret that he was quite the ladies’ man in his younger days. In addition to being extremely handsome, outgoing, and charismatic, he lived in L.A. in the swingin’ seventies and had the good fortune of being roommates with Kurt Russell when he was starring in Disney movies like
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes
. They called their dilapidated house the Goat’s Nest. Yes, Kate Hudson’s stepdad was my dad’s best friend. “We were happily single,” my dad fondly recalls. “We hosted many great parties at the Goat’s Nest. Kurt was a very fun person to hang out with.” Because my dad was kind of a chick magnet, for my entire childhood my mom was constantly worried he would have an affair. My sister and I would often overhear them fighting about it. If he came home one minute late, Mom would grill him about where he’d been and who he’d been with. My mom always said my dad’s motto was “deny, deny, deny.”

As passionately as my mom hated men, they passionately loved her. A 5'2" beauty with big boobs, she was courted by the richest, most successful guys in town—including a famous musician and a 6'7" basketball star on the Phoenix Suns—even though she came from nothing. After her disastrous first marriage, she grew a thick skin and became notoriously intimidating. She was not easily impressed by potential suitors. My dad, who moved to Arizona and enrolled in ASU’s business school, ultimately won my mom over by making her laugh and pretending like he didn’t care too much. On their first date, he picked her up in his burgundy Buick Regal, smoked with the windows up, and took her out for drinks instead of the expensive surf ’n turf dinners she’d been getting from other men. He may not have rolled out the red carpet, but his sense of humor and hardworking ways won her over. She felt like he had a promising future and would take care of her. So after dating for three years and avoiding his marriage proposal, my mom finally caved and said, “I do.” Today, thirty-four years later, they’re still together.

For my mom the bottom line with men was simple: with the exception of my father, men were disgusting and to be avoided at all costs. As Rachel and I got older she became paranoid. She was convinced that “perverts” were going to snatch us right off the street, or that a male family friend would kidnap us from school. If a family friend tried to pick us up, they’d have to know the secret Robertson family code word, which was “douchebag.” As for strangers on the street, we practiced a drill over and over again so I was prepared to escape their filthy clutches. After I identified the pervert, I’d drop my backpack and run like hell. I actually had to implement the plan when a scary guy got out of a truck and followed me home from the bus stop one afternoon. Practice made perfect. I immediately ditched my bag and left the pervert in my dust.

Perverts weren’t only limited to men in creepy vehicles. I also wasn’t allowed to go to the local Big Surf water park because my mom didn’t want dirty old men to ogle me in a bathing suit. Not being able to go to a water park in Arizona? In the scorching heat of summer? Not fun.

For all of my mom’s lectures against the male species, I was organically a guy’s girl. I couldn’t help it. I was a tomboy and played soccer and war with all of the neighborhood boys in our front yards. I was a hopeless romantic and dreamed of having one true love like I saw in my favorite movies
My Girl, Beauty and the Beast,
and
Aladdin
. But in my house, I couldn’t just announce on meatloaf night that I had a crush on my adorable neighbor, Dallas. My mom was too scary, plus then I’d have to sit through a mind-numbing sermon about being an independent strong woman, which at nine years old, was also not fun.

Because I was terrified of my mother’s wrath and didn’t want to disappoint her, I got really good at crushing on boys behind her back. I was so good I actually had a secret boyfriend named Ryan for three months in sixth grade. He was the cutest guy in our class and I set my sights on him fearlessly. One afternoon a bunch of kids were hanging out on a hill. All the girls were just sitting there being lame, so I started rolling down the hill, even though it’d make me sweaty and grass stained. But Ryan noticed me. He came over and said, “I want to roll down the hill, too!” My mom may have been a ballbuster, but she’d also drilled it into me to be a leader, not a follower.

My very first kiss was with Ryan during a strategic game of spin the bottle at my friend Bri’s house. Never one to play games, I just cut to the chase and pointed the bottle right at him. After a shot of Binaca we ran off to the bathroom for some tonsil hockey. As one might expect, the kissing was totally amateur, an alien tongue slobbery mess. I decided to give him a chance to hone his skills, so Ryan and I got serious after that. Well, as serious as you can in sixth grade. He’d walk me to class and hug me. He even bought me a silver ring to make our love official. But our steamy love affair was blown to shit at Track and Field Day at school, when Ryan’s mom innocently went up to my mom and beamed about how cute it was that we were “going” together. “Where the hell are they going?” my mom screamed at her. “Courtney doesn’t have a boyfriend!” She made such an embarrassing scene that Ryan dumped me.

After that debacle, my mom instituted a new rule: I wouldn’t be allowed to date until I was sixteen. As I raged through puberty, she refused to let me shave my legs and armpits, or pluck my eyebrows, which resulted in the lovely nickname Unibrow. Already taller than most of the boys, I was gangly, awkward, and really hairy (thanks Italian heritage!). I was as flat as a pancake chest-wise and wore baggy T-shirts from Target every day. Though I had inherited a lot of my mom’s fierce personality, I had not been blessed with her ample bosom. So, in addition to Unibrow, I was also dubbed Brick Wall by the meanest boys on my bus. I didn’t really care. I loved boys, even the mean ones.

I always got along so much better with boys than girls. I did have a best girlfriend I’d known since kindergarten, Sara. Looking back, the circumstances of how we met would foreshadow my relationship with her—and women in general—for the rest of my life. Sara came from one of the richest families in the area. Her dad was a famous doctor in Arizona. My family was pretty poor when I was young. We couldn’t always keep up with our super rich neighbors. There were a couple times I had to drop out of dance or gymnastics classes because we couldn’t afford the dues. Instead of bringing a cool lunch box filled with delicious sandwiches and Capri Suns, I ate the $2 lunch provided at school (in grade school my sister Amy even worked in the cafeteria like Marley’s mom on
Glee
). Oh, how I longed for an individual bag of potato chips, a luxury in my eyes! From an early age, I always tried to make extra money doing whatever I could: my dad would pay us a penny for each grapefruit we picked up in the yard, we ran lemonade stands, we pawned knickknacks, and once I even tried to sell leaves off of our mulberry tree. I was distraught that nobody would buy one, until my neighbor pointed out that she had plenty in her own yard.