[Ed. note: originally published on June 26, 1995]
Bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their newly-married-with-children friends in the suburbs. First, on the train back, one feels a yearning for those green yards, waxed Acuras and adorable children. Then, revulsion sets in, pure disgust at the lack of interesting people, artists, musicians. Instead, you get all those Stepford Wives, and their sniveling brats and fake wood paneling. Gimme shelter—in Bowery Bar.
But then you snap back to center: Maybe I do want that life, silver picture frames, tennis out back, iced tea. Then again, maybe I don’t. Damn. I’m 32, you think. Which means absolute confusion. Which can be dangerous.
On a recent morning after four of my 30-ish friends—Carrie, Miranda, Belle and Sarah—returned from a bridal shower in Greenwich, I got phone calls.
Sarah told me she had broken her ankle rollerblading at 4 in the morning. Miranda had sex with some guy in a closet at a party and they didn’t use condoms. Carrie had done something so ridiculous she was sure her short relationship with Mr. Big was over. And no one could find Belle.
The Bold Fellow
Miranda told me she hadn’t meant to go nuts at the party, to go into what she calls “my Glenn Close imitation.”
“I was just going to go home and get a good night’s sleep and wake up and work on Sunday.” That was the great thing about not being married, not having kids, being alone. You could work on Sunday.
But Sarah made her go to the party. “There could be good contacts there,” Sarah had said. Sarah, who had her own P.R. company, was constantly on the lookout for “contacts,” which could also translate to “dates.” The party was on East 64th Street. Some rich old guy’s town house. Women in their 30’s wearing black dresses and all with practically the same color blonde hair. That type of woman always went to parties at rich old guys’ houses and they always brought their girlfriends, so there were squadrons of these women looking for men and pretending not to.
Sarah disappeared into the throng. Miranda was left standing by the bar. She had dark, wavy hair and she wore leggings with the boot part sewn in, so she stuck out.
Two girls walked by her, and Miranda, maybe she is a little paranoid, swore that one of them said, “That’s that girl, Miranda Hobes. She’s a total bitch.”
So Miranda said, out loud, but so no one could hear, “That’s right, I am a real bitch, honey, but thank God I’m not like you.” Then she remembered how at the end of the long afternoon in the suburbs, the low-fat carrot cake with low-fat cream cheese frosting had been served with tiny sterling forks with prongs so sharp they could break the skin.
A man came up to her. Expensively tailored suit. O.K., he wasn’t exactly a man because he was only about 35. But he was trying. She was making the bartender give her a double vodka tonic, and the man said, “Thirsty, eh?”
“No. What I really want is a steak. O.K.?”
“I will get you one,” the man said, and it turned out he had a French accent.
“I’ll let you know,” she said, and tried to walk away. She didn’t want to have anything to do with the party. She was tired of feeling like she didn’t fit in, but she didn’t want to go home, either, because she was tired of being lonely and she was a little drunk.
“My name is Gilles,” he said. “I own a gallery on 79th Street.”
She sighed and said, “Of course you do.”
“Perhaps you have heard of it.”
“Listen Gilles…” she said.
Gilles smiled slyly. His dark eyes crunched up under his bushy black eyebrows. “Yes….”
“I suggest you go fuck yourself.”
“A come-on!” Gilles said, and Miranda wondered if he was really that stupid, or if he just seemed stupid because he was French. He grabbed her hand and began pulling her up the stairs; she went along because she figured that any guy who could keep his cool after being insulted couldn’t be that bad. They ended up in the rich old guy’s bedroom, which had a red silk cover on the bed, and then, somehow, they ended up kissing. People kept coming in and out of the bedroom.
For some reason, they went into the walk-in closet. Old pine paneling, racks for jackets and trousers, shelves for cashmere sweaters and shoes. Miranda checked the labels: Savile Row—boring. Then she turned around and Gilles was standing right there. Then there was the groping. The leggings came down. Out popped the bold fellow.
“How big?” I asked her on the phone.
“Big. And French,” Miranda said. (How could she?)
And then, afterward, he said, “Hey, darling, you’d better not tell my girlfriend.” As he stuck his tongue in her mouth one final time.
It all came spilling out: the girlfriend whom he’d lived with for two years and they were engaged, sort of, but he really didn’t know if he wanted to get married, but she was living with him, so what could he do?
The next day, Gilles tracked down Miranda’s number and called her, wanting to see her again. “And this is what we have to choose from,” Miranda said.
Newbert Gets Worried
At noon, Belle’s husband, Newbert, called to see if I’d seen Belle.
“If she were dead, I’d know about it,” I said.
A Rollerblade Ingenue
Then there was Sarah, who, according to Miranda, went rollerblading in her basement at 4 A.M. Drunk. Thirty-eight years old. A grown woman clinging to the role of ingenue. Is there anything less attractive? I don’t think so.
But what is Sarah supposed to do? She is 38, and she’s not married, and she’d like to be with someone. And men, as we know from this column, are attracted to youth. Even the women at the bridal shower, older than Sarah now, were younger than she is when they got married. It may not be an option for her anymore. So she rollerblades with a 25-year-old in her basement. Instead of having sex with him. He wants to; she is afraid he’ll think her body’s too old.
“Oh hi-i-i,” Sarah says, when I call her in the afternoon. She’s laid up on the couch in her tiny but perfect one-bedroom apartment in a high rise just west of Second Avenue. “Oh I’m fi-i-i-ne. Can you believe it?” She sounds unnaturally cheerful. “Just a little broken ankle. And the cutest doctors in the emergency room. And Luke with me the whole time.”
Luke?
“Lucas really. The cutest guy. My little friend.” She’s giggling. A horrifying sound.
“Where did you get the rollerblades?”
“Oh he came on them. To the party. Isn’t that cute?”
The cast comes off in six weeks. In the meantime, Sarah will have to hobble around, running her P.R. business as best she can. She has no disability insurance. The business runs on a shoestring.
Is this better or worse than being married and living in the suburbs? Better or worse?
I can’t tell.
Belle at the Carlyle
Belle calls from the Carlyle. Mentions something about a wide receiver from the Miami Dolphins. At Frederick’s. Mentions something about her husband Newbert and some spaghetti sauce. “I make great spaghetti sauce,” she says. “I’m a great wife.” I agree.
Anyway, after she got home from the bridal shower, she and Newbert had a fight. Belle ran away, went to Frederick’s, the nightclub. The wide receiver was at Frederick’s. He kept telling her that her husband didn’t love her enough. “He does. You don’t understand,” she said. “I’d love you more,” he said. She laughed, ran away again, booked herself a suite in the Carlyle. She tells me “Cocktails are being served. Now.”
She says she thinks maybe Newbert is upset because he’s just sent out his novel. She thinks maybe Newbert is upset because she doesn’t want to have kids. Not until he sells his novel. When she gets pregnant, it will all be over. So better to have a good time now.
All Roads Lead to Baby Doll
After the bridal shower, and after checking in on the phone with her new boyfriend, Mr. Big, Carrie went to Bowery Bar. Samantha Jones, the 40-ish movie producer was there. Carrie’s best friend. Sometimes.
Barkley, the 25-year-old up-and-coming artist and model-chaser, had inserted himself at Samantha’s table.
“I’d love it if you’d stop by my loft sometime,” Barkley said.
Samantha was smoking a Cuban cigar. “I’ll bet you would.”
“Well, you don’t have to like my paintings,” Barkley said. “You could just like me.”
“We’re leaving,” Samantha said. “We have to find a new hangout.”
They found one. The Baby Doll Lounge. Strip joint in TriBeCa. They smoked in the cab, and when they got out at the Baby Doll Lounge, Sam grabbed Carrie’s arm (Sam almost never did stuff like that) and said, “I really want to know about Mr. Big. I’m not sure he’s the right man for you.”
Carrie had to think about whether she wanted to answer or not, because it was always like this between her and Sam. Just when she was happy with a man, Sam would come along and insert those doubts, like driving a crowbar between two pieces of wood. She said, “I don’t know. I think I’m crazy about him.”
Sam said, “But does he really know how great you are? How great I think you are?”
Carrie thought, “Someday, Sam and I will sleep with the same man at once, but not tonight.”
The bartender, a woman, came over and said, “It’s so nice to see women in here again.” Two girls were dancing on the stage. They didn’t look so good—small saggy breasts and big bottoms.
Carrie went to the bathroom. You had to walk through a tiny slot in between the two stages, and then downstairs. The bathroom had a gray wooden door that wouldn’t shut properly, and broken tiles. She thought about Greenwich. Marriage. Kids.
“I’m not ready,” she thought.
She went upstairs and she took her clothes off and got up on the stage and started to dance. Samantha was staring at her, laughing. The bartender came over and politely told her to get down.
The next morning, Mr. Big called at 8 A.M. He was going to play golf. He sounded tense. “When did you get home?” he asked. “What did you do?”
“Not much,” she said. “Went to Bowery. And then this other place. The Baby Doll Lounge.”
“Oh yeah? Do anything special there?”
“Had too much to drink.” She laughed.
“Nothing else you want to tell me?”
“No, not really,” Carrie said in the little-girl voice she used when she wanted to soothe him. “What about you?”
“I got a phone call this morning,” he said. “Someone said they saw you dancing topless at the Baby Doll Lounge.”
“Oh. Really?” she said. “How did they know it was me?”
“They knew.”
“Are you mad?”
“I’m mad you didn’t tell me. How can you have a relationship if you can’t be honest?”
“But how do I know I can trust you?” she asked.
“Believe me,” he said. “I’m the one person you can trust.”
And he hung up.
Carrie took all their pictures from Jamaica, (how happy they looked, just discovering each other), and cut out the ones of Mr. Big smoking his cigar. She thought about what it was like sleeping with him, how she would sleep curled around his back.
She wanted to take the pictures and glue them to a piece of construction paper and write “Portrait of Mr. Big With His Cigar,” across the top and then, “I miss you,” with lots of kisses at the bottom.
She stared at the pictures for a long time. And then she did nothing.
Candace Bushnell began Sex and the City as a column in The New York Observer in 1994; it subsequently became a book and a series on HBO. She is also the author of Four Blondes, Trading Up and Lipstick Jungle, which is being filmed as a pilot for NBC starring Brooke Shields. Ms. Bushnell is also the host of Sex, Success and Sensibility, a live weekly talk show on Sirius Satellite Radio. She lives in Manhattan with her husband, New York City Ballet principal dancer Charles Askegard.
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