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Good morning Upper East Siders. Rumor has it that two of our own are ready to go the way of Brad and Jen, Kim and Kris, Britney and Kevin, Katy and Russell. C and B haven’t even been married 2 years, but my sources tell me that there’s a divorce brewing on the Upper East Side. How many is this for our fallen queen? Two divorces by twenty-four? Someone’s been taking lessons from her mother-in-law.
-
She stops to sign the divorce papers on her way to the airport, but she’d prefer not to think of this as running away. Paris is about moving on, growing up, and yes she’s doing things out of order (two divorces in and she’s only just getting around to the college degree, just figuring out that she doesn’t have to be her mother, just telling herself that it’s okay to be just Blair on her own. Blair, 25 and sparkling and starting over), but she’s still doing them.
It was surprisingly easy, arranging things at the Sorbonne, applying for her student visa, renting the small apartment (well, not that small, but not a penthouse, either, not even in an elevator building), packing and shipping her life across the ocean. She’s not keeping it a secret, but she doesn’t go out of her way to tell everyone she’s leaving, doesn’t even mention it to Chuck as they exit the lawyer’s office, him for a business meeting, her for her flight. She kisses him on the cheek, swipes at a lock of hair the wind has curled against his forehead, and says: “Okay. I guess that’s it.” He reaches for her wrist, but she’s already in the car.
And two hours later the plane is taxiing. She can see Manhattan glittering away on the other side of Queens and she’s really not that sad. Blair Waldorf is growing up, moving on. The world is waiting for her.
-
Dan is barely in touch with his high school classmates anymore—not since he first left for Italy. He’s got a handful of Facebook friends with familiar faces, their lives continuing miles and miles away and of little relevance to the one he’s living these days. He gets semi-regular emails from Nate, checks Gossip Girl maybe once every six months, but it’s all just the past now.
If he’s telling the truth, he’s not sure he was built for Los Angeles. He came here after his summer in Rome to write the screenplay for Inside, stayed to adapt a Nick Hornby novel, and then never got around to leaving. His follow-ups to Inside, a book of short stories the New York Times called “fair, if not astonishing” and a novella that got a tiny run from McSweeney’s, have kept his name out there, but he hasn’t had anywhere near the success he used to think he could taste. Most days he’s pretty sure that doesn’t bother him, that he’d rather live comfortably and happily than in some approximation of the lifestyle he’d seen up close. He’d still be lying if he said he didn’t miss it a bit.
-
She’s in Paris a week before she gets an eye infection. The Doctor, a small man speaking rapid, clipped French, informs her that she can’t wear contacts, not for awhile anyway, maybe never again, and though Blair has kept her less-than-perfect vision a secret since the seventh grade (not even Gossip Girl knew, or Serena, so carefully did she guard the saline solution, the contact case, the annual visit to the ophthalmologist), it’s kind of a relief. She wakes up in the morning and fumbles for the chic designer frames on her bedside table. In the mirror she thinks she looks like the person she wants to be. Older and maybe a bit wiser.
She’s started wearing pants more, too. Nothing denim, she’s still Blair, but in carefully tailored black pants, hemmed at the ankle and paired with brightly colored flats, she feels more like Audrey Hepburn than ever. She even cuts her hair a bit, not pixie-cut short, but to the shoulder, where it slips and swings across cashmere pullovers and tidy fitted blazers.
A few weeks into classes she’s stopped by a girl she sits next to in 19th Century French Novels. Elodie is tiny and blonde and unabashedly friendly as she invites Blair to join her study group. They spend more time drinking wine and gossiping about their impossibly young and handsome professor than they do discussing the works of Victor Hugo, but Blair has four new friends (friends, not minions), none of whom seem to recognize her as the one-time Princess of Monaco, or if they do they have the manners not to mention it. Her French is better than ever.
By the end of the fall semester she feels at home, at ease. She invites her mother and Cyrus to Paris for the holidays, doesn’t even think about booking a flight back to New York. They arrive on a Thursday with plenty of luggage in tow, and she’s happy, so thrilled to see them, and so uninterested in everything they have to tell her about the city, Manhattan, the Upper East Side.
She’s stopped having to remind herself that she’s not running away.
-
He’s been kind of seeing a girl, Colleen, a writer on a cable late night show. She’s the closest thing he’s ever met to a “pistol” of a girl--bright, beautiful, disarmingly funny. She’s also cold, occasionally cruel. He doesn’t much like himself for the way he holds her at a distance, but things aren’t serious, not for either of them.
If he’s being honest it’s been awhile since he hasn’t held people at a distance. The thing he’s found with dating anyone seriously is that they want to know everything about you, not just who you are, but everyone you’ve ever been. He aired most of his dirty laundry quite publicly when he was 20 years old, and anything he left out of Inside is easy to find with a quick Google search. Dan’s got little interest in the person he used to be, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t.
His second full-blown novel is published a week after his 27th birthday. It’s the first thing he’s written that’s not remotely auto-biographical, a painstakingly researched bildungsroman set on a dairy farm in Nebraska at the turn of the century, but you’d never know it from the press he gets. Some low-level researcher must have dug up the old Gossip Girl post from high school graduation, the one that called him “the ultimate insider,” because the phrase pops up all over his Google Alert. “New York’s Ultimate Insider is at it Again,” claims EW.com, and “Ultimate Insider Publishes Second Novel,” says Time. The underfed broad that hosts Colleen’s late-night show cracks three jokes about him in three nights and he ends the relationship. Decides it’s finally time to leave LA.
-
Blair graduates from the Sorbonne on a sunny Saturday in May, two years since she’s been home. Her mother, her father, Cyrus, Roman and even Serena all cheer from somewhere in the depths of the assembled crowd. This is the most powerful she’s ever felt, she thinks, with her diploma clutched her hands. She’s not sure how she ever forgot that this was what she always wanted.
After the ceremony she has everyone up to her apartment: her parents, her friends…she even invites a couple of professors, though they don’t show. She watches as Elodie and Amélie, the closest friends she’s made here, chatter with Serena by the small brick fireplace, eagerly practicing their English. Her father comes up behind her to put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m so proud of you, kiddo,” he says. “You’ve really turned things around.” She’s not sure he could have given her a better graduation gift.
Her mother and Cyrus offer to fly her home in the fall for her ten-year reunion and she promises to think about it. Two years ago the thought would have made her ill, but now…well maybe it wouldn’t be all bad.
In the mean time she’s starting her new job, an entry-level position at Vogue Paris. She’ll be a glorified gofer, she knows, fetching coffee and filing, mostly what she did last summer when she interned there, but she’ll have a title now, and a salary—a small one—and if she goes to the reunion, if she decides it’s worth her time, well she’ll have something to say for herself. She won’t be Blair Waldorf, the twice divorced and terribly alone ex-princess. She’ll be Blair Waldorf: poised to take over the world.
-
His father is pretty much living on tour now, and Jenny took over the loft upon her unheralded return to New York in the spring, so he finds his own apartment, a small studio in a doorman building in Kips Bay. It’s the first time he’s ever lived in Manhattan, and he thinks it’ll be different, but it’s not really. All that time he spent in high school worrying about the differences between Brooklyn and Manhattan, between who he was and who his classmates were, it seems mostly wasted now.
He doesn’t make much of an attempt to reconnect. He runs into Serena on Madison one afternoon and it isn’t the most awkward moment of his life, but it’s easy enough to let it slide by, just an encounter with someone he used to know on his way to meet someone he knows now. Nate seeks him out and they make more of an effort, but Nate’s got a two-year-old now, and a very young wife, and therefore not much in the way of time. He spends Sunday mornings with his sister, making waffles in the loft, but mostly he passes time with new people, friends he’s met through his writing, or people he knew at NYU.
When the reviews for Morning Prayers, the second novel, finally arrive, they help to solidify his status as an up-and-comer. It doesn’t sell like Inside did, not at first, but it builds a little and goes into a second printing. Entertainment Weekly calls him “not just a one-hit wonder.” People wants to put him on their “Most Beautiful People” list, which is flattering if a bit embarrassing. (He agrees because his publisher doesn’t give him much of a choice. Nate laughs at him for a week until he gets the same call.)
New York now is not like New York was then, he finds. He breathes easier now, smiles easier. He doesn’t keep his guard up, doesn’t flinch at camera phones. It’s harder to forget his past now that he’s walking these streets again, but Dan now is not like Dan then. Dan now is what you might call a grown-up.
-
Constance Billard and St. Jude’s send out the invitations late in October. The class of 2009’s reunion is scheduled for the Saturday after Thanksgiving, on campus. Blair tosses the invitation (embossed blue letters on thick, creamy stationery) onto the spindly table by her front door and doesn’t look at it for a week. Not until the evening she stumbles onto a stash of Dan’s books in an English language bookstore: half a dozen copies of Inside, just rereleased in paperback with a new cover, a battered copy of his novella, and stacks of the new novel, the one she saw reviewed in New York a couple of months ago. She hadn’t read the review, had told herself she wasn’t interested.
She picks up Morning Prayers three times before she decides to buy it, takes it home along with the novella. Twelve hours later she’s mailing her RSVP. Someone needs to tell Humphrey that there’s a typo on page 352.
-
Nate talks him into RSVP-ing for the reunion. “You’re a success, man. Don’t you want to make sure they all know?”
And okay, he’s moved on from that petty high school stuff, from the kid that wanted so desperately to prove himself to his wealthy classmates, but he thinks maybe it would be nice to look back for once, to stop in on some of his fonder memories. Those years weren’t all bad, there are things worth revisiting.
So he marks the date on his calendar, puts the reply card in the mail. He lets Jenny bully him into a haircut, lets her pick out a suit for him to wear. He even lets himself look forward to it a little. Ten years. It seems like it flew right by.
-
She reads the novella on the plane. Reads it twice, actually, once for content and then again to savor it, the way Dan has curled himself into his sentences, so each one feels familiar, warm. She supposes it must be autobiographical, at least a bit, but it’s not a part of his biography she knows. This is Dan post-Blair, post-New York. Dan in LA, moving on, growing up.
It’s still dark when she lands at JFK, the sky just starting to purple around the edges. By the time she’s through baggage claim and customs and climbing into the back of a Town Car, everything has gone white and cold. The weather alert on her phone is threatening snow.
The drive into the city is quiet. It’s Thanksgiving morning and the roads are mostly empty. The car drops her outside her mother’s building just as the first few flakes begin to fall.
Cyrus is clattering around in the kitchen, still in his robe, and he tells her her mother hasn’t gotten out of bed yet. He pours her a large cup of coffee and asks about work, her friends, her love life. By the time her mother stumbles in, still rubbing the sleep from the corners of her eyes, Blair has forgotten her trepidation. She kisses her mother on the cheek and begins gathering the ingredients for a pumpkin pie. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving otherwise.
-
His father is in town for the holiday, and he thinks it’ll be just the three of them, Rufus, Jenny and Dan, in the loft, like it used to be, but Lily invites them over for the big van der Woodsen dinner and, because apparently Rufus doesn’t think that’s going to be awkward, they go.
The penthouse looks the same as it always did: crisply white and a little too clean. It’s a crowd of familiar faces. Serena, a very sparkly ring on her finger, is on the sofa with Carter Baizen and her mother, and Chuck has cornered a young, pretty caterer by the fireplace. Dan gravitates toward Nate and his kid, Annie, playing with a small pile of blocks in the corner by the stairs.
“Hey man,” Nate greets him, barely looking up from the tower Annie is building. “Didn’t think we’d see you here.”
Dan crouches down and offers the toddler a block. “Apparently it’s not awkward. So says my father, anyway.”
Jenny is hovering around the edges of the party, looking skittish and uncomfortable, until Eric approaches her with a plate of food and a smile. Whatever tension Dan was holding onto about the potentially volatile assemblage of people eases.
They make it through dinner without any incidents, Dan and Jenny staying far away from Chuck, everyone keeping as much attention on the toddler as possible, and off of the past. It feels a bit like a test run for the reunion, and Dan’s thinking things might actually go alright on Saturday, that he might not regret letting this particular crowd of people back into his life, when something bubbles over between Chuck and Carter during dessert and most of the guests decide to make a swift exit.
On the sidewalk Dan and Nate say goodbye while Rufus hails a cab. “Wouldn’t have been Thanksgiving without someone getting into a fight,” Nate says. “At least the Waldorfs decided not to come. Who knows what would have happened with Blair and Chuck in the same room again.”
“Blair’s in town?” he asks before he can stop himself. “I thought…I mean I figured she wasn’t coming to the reunion.”
“I didn’t think she would, but Serena says she RSVP’d. I don’t think she’s been back in New York since they finalized the divorce.”
He nods.
“So I’ll see you Saturday, then?” Nate asks. “Should be fun. I’m leaving this one at home,” he gestures to Annie, who is passed out in her stroller. “Can’t bring a toddler to a reenactment of my wilder days.”
And Dan laughs and says, “yeah, can’t have that.” He’s mostly thinking about Blair, though. Thinking about seeing her again, the best friend he tried so hard to let go.
-
She’s at Constance before things are really in full swing. She’s not early, but she’s not fashionably late, either.
Penelope is manning the booth at the door, dozens of nametags laid out in front of her, all neatly lettered with familiar names. She doesn’t recognize Blair at first, has to ask her her name, and then, “Oh my God, Blair. Since when do you wear glasses?”
Blair adjusts her frames, gives Penelope a small smile, her lips pursed, her eyes narrowed a bit. She’s out of practice, but it’s one of the more withering glares in her arsenal and she can see Penelope shrinking a bit. “Since when do you wear polyester, Penelope?” she asks, and she doesn’t like herself much for it. These are old habits, bad habits, habits she thought she’d broken. “Sorry,” she says, and she means it, she does. She reaches for her name and takes a deep breath. She’s Blair Waldorf, 27 and sparkling. Blair Waldorf, poised to take over the world.
She hands her coat to a pimply-faced teenage boy at the coat check, a current St. Jude’s student, she’s sure, but he looks so young. She’s attaching the nametag to her dress, a purple knee-length Ellie Saab she bought for the occasion, perfectly fitted to all her curves, when she hears Dan’s voice. Around the corner he’s collecting his own name tag, exchanging pleasantries with what sounds like Nelly Yuki, and she realizes that she forgot about this moment, the one where she has to see them all for the first time again.
She didn’t run away, she knows this. But do they?
But Dan’s coming around the corner now and it’s too late, so she smooths her dress and smiles, smiles a real smile, and she says, “Dan!” because he’s standing in front of her in a suit that fits him perfectly, his hair longer than she’d like, but tamed, and it doesn’t feel too bright or too fake or like something she doesn’t mean. She’s just so happy to see him. And he’s smiling at her, too.
-
They stand in the back of the room, drinking unmarked red wine from over-filled clear plastic cups and talking. It’s a while before anyone else they know shows up, anyone they know particularly well anyway, and it’s nice to just be with each other for a bit. She tells him about the Sorbonne and Elodie and her unbearable boss at Vogue Paris, a man with a lisp and too much of an appreciation for cravats. He tells her about the difference between LA and New York hipsters and how frustrating it is to make a movie and that he’s a Manhattanite now (she laughs. “You’ll always be Brooklyn to me, Humphrey,” she says, but it’s friendly and warm and maybe it’s her second glass of wine, but it’s hard to make herself break eye contact, look away from him).
And then, “Oh my God, is that Nate’s wife?” she asks him in a loud whisper, swatting at his arm. “How old is she?"
“Twenty-one.”
“And they have a kid, right? How old?”
“Annie? She’s two.”
Blair laughs. “I guess this shouldn’t be a surprise.” And they’re both laughing a little, but Nate’s on his way over, leading Hildy by the hand, and they pull it together.
“Blair!” he greets them, affable as ever. “I can’t believe you’re here. I want to hear all about Paris.” And before long they’re joined by Serena and Carter. Everyone is hugging and smiling and it feels mostly genuine, mostly like they really are all happy to see each other.
Dan keeps finding himself next to Blair, and he’s not sure which of them is doing it, or if it’s both of them maybe, but it’s like having a shadow or being a shadow, like a magnetic pull. He hasn’t seen her in six years and now he can’t let her go.
When Chuck arrives, not long before things start winding down, he expects to see her respond in some way, to shrink or to puff herself up, but he can barely tell she’s even noticed. She just goes on chatting with Serena, smiling at a story about china patterns. Some last knot inside of him comes loose and he feels a little like he’s falling. But it’s a good fall, the kind where you know something’s waiting to cushion the landing.
-
“When do you go back to Paris?” he asks as they wait for their coats.
“Not until Thursday.” He holds hers out for her to slide into. “Why?”
“There’s a Caulder exhibit at MoMA.” He shrugs. “I thought you might be interested. We could get coffee.”
“I’d like that.”
-
The sculpture garden is nearly empty, just a family of startlingly blonde German tourists wandering around. The wind is cold enough to leave an ellipsis of tears along the side of her face, but they stay outside, sitting on a bench in a corner, coasting off the warmth from their trip through the Caulder exhibit. She’s balancing a cup of coffee between her knees, holding her hands low over the lid to capture the steam.
“Do you ever miss it?” he asks her.
“What? High school?”
“No.” He laughs. “New York. Ruling the Upper East Side with a platinum fist.”
“Platinum is far too malleable. I ruled with an iron fist and I’ll accept no other descriptions.”
“Apologies.”
“I don’t miss it.” She gathers the coffee cup into her hands and turns to face him on the bench. “I outgrew it.”
He meets her eyes, but doesn’t say anything.
“When we were in high school, fifteen, sixteen, Nate used to talk about his terrible fear that he’d grow up to be his father. That it was all just a vicious circle and there was no way any of us would escape it. But I didn’t believe him. I had all of these plans for who I was going to be and what my life was going to look like, plans that mostly involved him at the time, and I figured that maybe Nate wasn’t going to escape the Archibald/Van Der Bilt legacy, but for him that didn’t seem like such a bad thing.” She shrugs, takes a sip of her coffee, adjusts her glasses. “But then I was twenty-four and deeply unhappy and I looked around and I realized that all of my friends had turned into their parents. Nate had already stumbled into financial trouble at the Spectator, Serena was on her third engagement, I was running Waldorf Designs and Chuck was…” She stops. “So I decided to break the cycle.”
“And you’re happy?”
She smiles. “I’ve never been so happy in my life.”
-
He’s already thinking about kissing her when he meets her outisde MoMA. He thinks about kissing her all morning. He remembers something Eric said to him once, the first time around. “You are ass-backwards crushing on Blair Waldorf,” he hears like an echo, but it doesn’t scare him this time, it doesn’t seem worth denying.
He is ass-backwards crushing on Blair Waldorf. Again.
They sit talking in the sculpture garden for a long time, hours maybe. They only leave when their stomachs start to rumble, and then they sit and talk some more over lunch.
He remembers days like this, entire Sundays spent together in college, carrying on a friendship like a dirty secret, pretending like it wasn’t maybe something more.
They slip into the lobby of her parents’ building a little past six, their cheeks blushed with cold. He’s thinking about kissing her again—still—when she reaches out and pulls him to her, her fingers winding into the curls at the nape of his neck (“still too long,” she said that afternoon, flicking the tips of her fingers across his forehead, “but better”), her breath warm across his cheek in the moment before her lips meet his. He was thinking about kissing her. She was deciding to kiss him.
-
It’s like having a pen pal. A pen pal that sends her love letters. The kind of love letters that make her blush.
It’s not easy to make Blair Waldorf blush.
She comes home again for Christmas. He meets her at baggage claim with a cardboard sign that says “Waldorf” and his father’s junky old car. They make out in the backseat for half an hour before she insists that he find a hotel they can check into, because she cannot possibly make it through the half hour drive back to his apartment in the city.
In the elevator, his mouth on her neck, she slides her hand down the front of his pants and wraps her fingers around him. His breath hitches and they’re both stuck in a flashback to another elevator, a different time, and they only notice the dinging for their floor when the doors open behind him and they fall out onto a questionably clean carpet.
She pulls her hand out of his pants and the keycard out of his hand, pulls him up off the floor and drags him down the hall towards their room.
It’s not until they’re post-coital, her forehead buried in the crook of his neck, his leg nestled between hers, their hair plastered to their still slick skin, the sheets tangled around their ankles, that either of them realizes this is the same hotel they checked into after her wedding to Louis, the one they hid out in. She laughs and he can feel it flickering through his veins.
-
They don’t make a thing about it, the fact that they’re dating or they’re a couple or whatever this is, but by the time she’s back in Paris a few weeks later they’ve been spotted all over New York, their fingers entwined, and no one missed the fact that she brought him to Serena and Carter’s New Year’s party, or the way they kissed at midnight, locking the rest of the world out.
In late January she tells him that you can’t have a whole relationship over Skype and a week later she’s the one meeting him at the airport. She takes him to Montmartre and Ladurée. He makes her watch Midnight in Paris on his laptop and she accuses him of being a cliché, just another Woody Allen character, romanticizing the past, but she liked Hemingway and the Fitzgeralds and Gertrude Stein.
They make out on the banks of the Seine, and he thinks maybe he is a bit of a cliché, but he’s also pretty sure that doesn’t bother him.
They bicker in Shakespeare and Company.
After dark they sit on her cold balcony with a view of the Eiffel Tower, and on the hour, when it fizzles like champagne, she laughs into his chest.
They have sex all over her flat, on the floor in the living room and against the wall of the bedroom. In the shower. Once in the kitchen while she’s making him crêpes. The crêpes burn and they eat cereal instead, half-dressed and smiling at each other across the table.
During the day she goes off to work and he writes at the butcher block table in her apartment, or he goes for walks to other parts of the city. At night they cook together, or meet friends for drinks. Elodie tries to teach him French, and her fiancé, Christophe, talks his ear off about soccer.
He stays a month and then a month and a half. She makes jokes about charging him rent and then asks him to stay another week, a few more days. He’s done more writing in a short time in Paris than he did in six months in New York.
He stays. Every time she asks, he stays.
-
He starts a blog at his publisher’s request. Well, his publisher has been requesting that he start a blog since Inside was first released, but now he has things to talk about, stories to tell. The ex-pat in Paris thing has been done before, he knows, but it’s as good a place to start as any, and he builds up a readership pretty quickly, actually. People are interested in what he has to say.
He buys disposable cameras on the street, prefers them to his phone, and he takes pictures of what he sees, where he goes. He writes about Paris, but he also writes about his life, the one he’s living now and the ones he’s lived before. (Blair is smiling in half the pictures he posts, or laughing or, one time, glaring at him so fiercely that even looking back at it he feels small—he had suggested they take the metro. He takes pictures of Blair in the spring, Blair in the summer.). He never posts anything about her without asking first, making sure she’s okay with it. They both feel safer when they’re in control of what the internet has to say about them.
(In his writing, he always calls her Blair, never B.)
-
By the fall it’s clear she’s doing pretty well at Vogue Paris. They’ve been publishing her writing online, and she’s even made it into the magazine a couple of times—just blurbs, but it’s a start.
Dan makes her a cake for her birthday, chocolate with chocolate frosting, and two candles, one shaped like a two, one like an eight. He invites over Elodie and Christophe, Amélie and her boyfriend Didier, and a couple of the friends he’s made on his own, fellow ex-pats with whom he shares a publisher. Dave and Jeremy bring Blair a bottle of Veuve Cliquot and a life-size cardboard cutout of Dan that they found online, leftovers from his last book tour. Blair props it up in the corner, bedecked in the bows from her other gifts (Chanel No. 5 from Elodie and Christophe, an Hermès scarf from Amélie and Didier, a biography of Gertrude Stein from Dan).
She blows out her candles and wishes for things to stay like this. Just like this.
-
He asks her on the balcony at three in the morning while the Eiffel Tower pops and fizzes in the distance. He doesn’t plan on asking, but she’s there and warm in his arms and he can’t go another minute without knowing if she’ll say yes.
She says yes.