Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me - Chelsea's Family, Friends [40]
Having made the change, I felt better but understood that this was not the ideal way to end a honeymoon. From champagne to shit. I was still not sure how to tell Shannon that we needed to go pack up immediately. So I didn’t. When I returned to the pool, I pussyfooted around the issue, telling her that I’d “looked into changing the tickets, but didn’t actually make the change.” Even “looking into” got me in trouble.
She was pissed off and started crying. She couldn’t believe that I would even consider going back early. I began to realize I would be in deep shit when it came time to tell her that I hadn’t just “considered” it; we were going home early. At that moment, I fully accepted that I might have to resort to drugging her and dragging her ass to the airport.
“They’re just fucking with you and you’re stupid enough to fall for it!” she yelled before storming off.
I yelled after her, “But what if they’re not?! I have to be in Time magazine, Shannon!” I decided to hang back a bit and let her cool off. At least I hoped she was going to cool off.
Needless to say, the pool boys hadn’t been by to rotate my umbrella recently—they wanted no part of our marital problems. I got up and glared at the nearest pool boy as I struggled to rotate the umbrella myself. Then I slinked back down into the deck chair and checked my e-mail again. There was a message from Johnny.
Too timid to defy Chelsea outright, he responded to my last pleading e-mail as best he could without actually revealing anything. But like death row inmates sending coded messages, I understood the subtext of his e-mail.
BRAD, THERE IS NO REASON TO LET THIS RUIN YOUR HONEYMOON.
Oh shit. Just then I realized that the whole thing had been a lie—an awful, tumultuous Chelsea Handler lie that had sought to drive me crazy and disrupt my blissful, once-in-a-lifetime (I think) honeymoon. I was now out $1,800, my wife was pissed at me, and worst of all, there would be no Time magazine shoot.
How would I reveal this to Shannon? She’d been right and I’d been wrong. Not only would I pay the immediate consequences, but for the rest of our marriage I knew that she would lord this over me, never missing the chance to remind me who was right and who was dead wrong.
It was going to be bad enough when I told her that it was all a lie. I couldn’t top it off with “Oh, and we are actually going home a day early… and we’re in economy… and it cost us eighteen hundred dollars.” It would have been too traumatic for her. And she would have wasted no time insisting that, as punishment, I buy her an eighteen-hundred-dollar Chloe purse. Somehow my losing money means I always have to spend the equivalent on her. I’ve never been certain of her logic there.
I returned to the business center to change our flights back to the original itinerary. Good news: we could switch back for a very slight fee. Bad news: there was only one seat left in first class. Relieved just to be back on the initial flight, I accepted and decided to worry later about explaining to Shannon why she was flying economy and I was still in first.
With the matter resolved and our love restored, Shannon and I wrapped up the honeymoon as intended.
Checking in at the airport on the day of our departure, we received our boarding passes and Shannon wondered why we weren’t sitting together. Still attempting to cover my tracks, I stupidly decided to sternly ask the ticket agent, “Sir, why are we both not sitting in first class as our itinerary states? There has to be an error.”
Not appreciating my tone, the all-business ticket agent wasted no time in looking at the monitor and explaining ever so bluntly, “Because our records show that you changed your flight, and when you changed it back there was only one first-class seat