Speaking of Yolanda, she is recovering in Ohio and she is so very grateful that David is helping to take care of her. “This is not what you signed up for, my baby,” she coos to him and he’s being so kind and solicitous to her that I considered going for a quick ride on the David-Foster-is-not-a-total-d*ck bandwagon – until he says to Lisa Vanderpump over the phone, “Let’s just say this: Ken has better t*ts than her.” The guy sucks bloody crusty implants.
Back in the Hamptons, Lisa Rinna, Erika, and Eileen are heading over soon to Bethenny’s. Both Erika and Eileen are Bethenny virgins but Lisa has met her before and she really likes her. And speaking of Kyle’s dear friend, Bethenny’s house is white and there are pops of Skinny Girl red everywhere you look. These two women go way back, y’all. Not only did Bethenny used to shop at Forever 21 with Paris and Nicky, but she actually used to date Kyle’s ex-boyfriend and the two met when Bethenny went clomping over to her at a restaurant to ask if the crazy expensive makeup remover she found in the guy’s medicine cabinet once belonged to Kyle. It’s such an adorable story, right? Not only do we get a bit of clarity that Bethenny was always abrasive, but we also get confirmation that Kyle was always able to afford really expensive stuff. This is going to be the story I tell to my children and my children’s children every year on their birthdays.
Despite all the sh*t I (or anyone with eyes and ears) could talk about Bethenny, I do love her house and it’s impressive what she has done for herself as a businessperson. And I can rhapsodize until I’m blue in the face about her astonishing levels of ambition, but I’d so much rather hear her ask Kyle about what’s really going on with the most errant member of the Richards clan. Kyle tells Bethenny that it’s been really bad lately and she resents how everyone is asking her things about what’s going on. Then she begins to cry. See, it’s okay for Bethenny to ask Kyle questions in the way it’s not okay when Lisa Rinna does. After all, Bethenny has known Kyle and Kim for decades – and Bethenny is a bigger star. Kyle’s got standards when it comes to releasing secrets, people.
(Fun fact: Kyle’s mother used to keep a mayonnaise jar filled to the brim with diamonds. It’s really remarkable her daughters ended up as f*cked up as they did, right?)
After Bethenny asks about Erika, Kyle shows her pictures of Erika on her private plane. Bethenny thinks she’s beautiful and it seems all the women are kind of enchanted by Erika. Lisa Rinna and Eileen are all but sitting on the woman’s lap and braiding her hair in the limo when Ken, Lisa, and Giggy get in to join them. Lisa Vanderpump tells Erika that the video she saw was erotic and beautifully shot, though maybe she wasn’t looking at the same piece of film Bethenny was when Erika Jayne had a few of her own fingers buried in her ass crack. When the women arrive at Bethenny’s, their host is pretty friendly and she ushers them outside. Lisa Vanderpump considers Bethenny a woman to be reckoned with and I guess that’s pretty clear when she says “rim job” in the first five seconds of her dinner party. Ken eventually leaves to go meet up with a friend for dinner and Erika takes a moment to run to the bathroom (maybe one of those rings shoved up her ass caused some tenderness). While she’s gone, the rest of them talk about how they like Erika, especially Eileen. In fact, I think Eileen might have a tiny nonsexual crush on her new friend – or her new friend’s alter ego – and she definitely likes Erika way more than she likes Bethenny who spouts out judgmental comments that are then followed by a quick sarcastic laugh designed to mask the truth of what she just said.
You know who doesn’t care about other peoples’ judgment? Erika – and Erika Jayne. Go ahead! Call her a hooker! Hookers are fabulous! She will happily represent all the hookers in the world because, really, she’s just like they are. All hookers live in a home the size of a continent and have their own pilots! After all, it’s 2016! Let’s declare it the Year of the Prostitute!
It turns out that Bethenny and Erika have some things in common. Both were cocktail waitresses in Beverly Hills and both sold their souls to Bravo and both have Andy Cohen on speed dial and well, that’s kind of it. As scallops and couscous are served and Erika’s music video is brought up again, the artist known as Erika Jayne looks none too pleased when Bethenny says that she’s already looked at it and noticed that Erika had a hand shoved up her vagina halfway through the song. She then gives Erika some lessons on branding – which means that Bethenny has been carefully studying her good friend Ramona Singer to properly gage the very worst time to shove unwanted opinions someone’s way the very day you meet her. Bethenny’s sage advice to the woman who does not appear to be hurting for money or minor adoration or career advice is that she should rebrand herself as the walking embodiment of female empowerment. “That’s what I do,” replies Erika – and now f*ck, I really need to get myself a whip and a bed with some posts because that’s gotta be the reason I don’t feel powerful all the time! The conversation continues as Lisa Rinna begins to get sick to her stomach at the table – which means it was either the scallops or all the talk about fingers plunging into ass cracks that did her in – and she begins to visibly sweat and immediately gets up from the table to go back to the Hamptons house and I commend her for not puking and sh*tting all over Bethenny’s lovely table setting.
Those left behind watch Erika’s video again and Kyle is a little nervous about Bethenny spewing out some unsolicited advice in a way that anyone with a pulse might view as rude. “Want some advice?” asks Bethenny. “I don’t love the production value. It looks cheap. It’s trying to look a little avant-garde but it’s not quite getting it.” Eileen jumps in to disagree and to temper the sting of the comments from a virtual stranger before Bethenny also busts in to say she didn’t like the music or the cheesy silver bed or, for that matter, the song itself. In fact, the only thing Bethenny might actually like about Erika’s video is the phone it played on. “Is that bad?” wonders this odd adult woman about how she all but just pulled out a typed list of complaints at the table. But the second Erika simply responds calmly to all of Bethenny’s rapid-fire insults, Bethenny appears flummoxed. “Who is this blonde woman not telling me to go f*ck myself after I tried so hard to insult her?” she wonders. “Aren’t all blondes related to Sonja Morgan?” Perplexed and recognizing that nobody is all that charmed by her even in her own home, Bethenny changes her tune and even gets up and does some moves with Erika until she pulls her groin by squatting suggestively near the table and there was even a chrghhhhhh sound effect that went along with it and I guess that makes everything just a little bit better.
In the morning, Lisa Rinna has recovered from whatever alien invaded her insides at Bethenny’s table and she celebrates her reemerging health by doing some pretty impressive yoga. Her Zen vanishes slightly when she goes inside and Eileen tells her that she felt blindsided by Lisa Vanderpump the other day when she was asked about her marriage and it was phrased as “the affair.” She felt grilled and she is sure that she came off as clearly uncomfortable and Lisa Vanderpump is a lot of things, but stupid is not one of them so she had to know that Eileen didn’t enjoy any second of their conversation. She’s annoyed by it all and kind of hurt too. At the same time that Lisa and Eileen are having their pow-wow in the kitchen, Ken, Lisa, and Erika travel to the house. In the limo, Lisa asks Erika all kinds of questions, but none of them ruffle Erika all that much. She knows what’s going on right here. She realizes that Lisa likes to be in control and that she enjoys her role as the leader of the group and Erika doesn’t so much as perspire under her questioning. She didn’t glisten when Bethenny came at her either. Erika just gazed evenly at both of them and she smiled serenely and then she looked directly at the camera during an interview and wondered aloud about Bethenny: “Is she being a bitch or is she just being…” and the she took a f*cking glorious ten-second beat before finishing her question with the word “jealous” and it was stated in a tone made entirely out of the purest form of organic honey and I don’t know when this woman’s birthday is, but I’m about to start celebrating it.
Eileen, however, is sweating her ass off. She has taken Lisa’s questioning personally and she sees it as an indication that Lisa does not respect her so she asks the violator to sit down with her. She prefaces the conversation by saying that maybe she’s just being a little oversensitive, but she wants Lisa to know that she was genuinely uncomfortable about it all. Lisa is immediately conciliatory about hurting Eileen’s feelings and she tells Eileen to just come out and tell her if she’s ever being too intrusive and that Eileen should never feel like she has to answer anything she doesn’t want to tell. Eileen nods and throws out a few “uh huhs” but she doesn’t think anything was resolved. Now, I usually find Eileen to be pretty logical, but I’m not quite sure what she was looking for as a resolution here. Lisa apologized. She indicated how Eileen could communicate with her in the future to make Lisa stop from tossing out unwanted questions. What else does Eileen want? I’m not even sure that she knows.
Next time, Bethenny apologizes for insulting Erika, Eileen bursts into tears about something, Yolanda flies home, and the new Housewife who used to date OJ Simpson shows up. If the producers went after this woman simply because of her one-time proximity to the murderer who went free (until he was arrested eventually for something else entirely), I’d like to take a moment to thank them for their restraint in not promoting Faye Resnick into being a full Housewife. Then again, her schedule was probably crammed too full with playdates so she could build sand castles with Yolanda’s implant on the ocean floor.
Nell Kalter teaches Film and Media at a school in New York. She is the author of the books THAT YEAR and STUDENT, both available on amazon. Check out her website at nellkalter.com. Her twitter is @nell_kalter.