Sex and the City

by Candace Bushnell

  PERI: SIZE (EIGHT) MATTERS

  “It’s like this,” said Maeve. “As long as you’re neurotic and crazy, he’s great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem.”

  “He gets incredibly mean,” said one woman. The others nodded.

  “Once,” said Jackie, “when I said I was a size eight, Peri said, ‘There’s no way you’re a size eight. You’re a size ten, at least. I know what a size eight looks like, and believe me, you’re no size eight.’”

  “He was always telling me to lose fifteen pounds,” said Sarah, “and when I went out with him, that was the thinnest I’d been in years.”

  “I think when men tell women to lose weight, it’s a diversion from their own lack of size in certain areas,” one of the women added dryly.

  Maeve remembered a ski trip to Sun Valley. “Peri did everything right. He bought the tickets, he booked the condo. It was going to be great.” But they started fighting in the limo to the airport—they wanted to sit on the same side. By the time they got on the plane, the stewardess had to separate them. (“By that time, we were arguing about who got to breathe more air,” Maeve said.) They fought on the slopes. On the second day, Maeve began packing her bags. “He said, ‘Ha ha ha, there’s a blizzard outside, you can’t leave,’” Maeve recalled. “I said, ‘Ha ha ha, I’m going to take a bus.’”

  A month later, Maeve went back to her husband. Her situation was not unusual—many of the women ended up dumping Peri, only to go back to the men they had broken up with.

  But that didn’t mean that Peri went away. “There were faxes, letters, and hundreds of phone calls,” said Sapphire. “It was sort of awful. He does have a huge heart, and he’s going to be a great guy someday.”

  “I kept all his letters,” Sarah said. “They were so touching. You could practically see the streaks of his tears on the pages.” She left the room and returned seconds later holding a letter. She read aloud: “‘You don’t owe me your love, but I hope you’ll have the courage to step forward and embrace mine. I don’t send you flowers because I don’t want to share or demean your love with objects not of my creation.’” Sarah smiled.

  “WE’RE GETTING MARRIED”

  Post-Peri, the women claimed they had uniformly done well. Jackie said she was dating her personal trainer; Magda had published her first novel; Ramona was married and pregnant; Maeve had opened a cafe; Sapphire had rediscovered an old love; Sarah said she was happy to be pursuing a twenty-seven-year-old boy-toy.

  As for Peri, he recently moved abroad, in search of fresh marriage prospects. One of the women had heard he got dumped by an English woman who had really wanted to marry a duke. “He always dates the wrong women,” Sapphire said.

  Six months ago, Peri came back for a visit and took Sarah out to dinner. “He took my hand in his,” she said, “and he was saying to his friend, ‘She’s the only woman I ever loved.’ For old time’s sake, I went back to his apartment for a drink, and he asked me to marry him so seriously, I couldn’t believe it. I thought he was lying. So I decided to torture him.

  “He told me, ‘I don’t want you to see any other men, and I won’t see any other women.’

  “I said, ‘Okay,’ thinking, How’s that going to work? He lives in Europe and I live in New York. But the next morning, he called me up and said, ‘You realize you’re my girlfriend now.’

  “I said, ‘Okay, Peri, that’s cool.’”

  He went back to Europe, and, Sarah said, she forgot about the whole thing. One morning, she was in bed with her new boyfriend when the phone rang. It was Peri. While Sarah was talking to him, her boyfriend said, “Do you want some coffee?” Peri went nuts.

  “Who’s there?” he said.

  “A friend,” Sarah said.

  “At ten in the morning? You’re sleeping with another guy? We’re getting married and you’re sleeping with another guy?” He hung up, but a week later he called back.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  “For what?” Sarah said.

  “We’re getting married, aren’t we? You’re not still seeing someone, are you?”

  “Listen, Peri, I don’t see a ring on my finger,” Sarah said. “Why don’t you send a messenger over to Harry Winston’s to pick something up, and then we’ll talk.”

  Peri never called Harry Winston’s, and he didn’t call Sarah again for months. She said she sort of missed him. “I adore him,” she said. “I feel compassion for him because he’s totally fucked up.”

  It was getting dark outside, but nobody wanted to leave. They all wanted to stay, transfixed by the idea of a man like Tom Peri, but not Tom Peri.

  4

  Manhattan Wedlock:

  Never-Married Women, Toxic Bachelors

  Lunch the other day. Vicious gossip with a man I’d just met. We were discussing mutual friends, a couple. He knew the husband, I knew the wife. I’d never met the husband, and I hadn’t seen the wife in years (except to run into her occasionally on the street), but as usual, I knew everything about the situation.

  “It’s going to end badly,” I said. “He was naive. A country mouse. He came in from Boston and he didn’t know anything about her and she jumped at the opportunity. She’d already gone through so many guys in New York and she had a reputation. No guy in New York would have married her.”

  I attacked my fried chicken, warming up to the subject. “Women in New York know. They know when they have to get married, and that’s when they do it. Maybe they’ve slept with too many guys, or they know nothing’s ever going to really happen with their career, or maybe they really do want kids. Until then, they put it off for as long as they can. Then they have that moment, and if they don’t take it. . . .” I shrugged. “That’s it. Chances are, they’ll never get married.”

  The other guy at the table, a corporate, doting-dad type who lives in Westchester, was looking at us in horror. “But what about love?” he asked.

  I looked at him pityingly. “I don’t think so.”

  When it comes to finding a marriage partner, New York has its own particularly cruel mating rituals, as complicated and sophisticated as those in an Edith Wharton novel. Everyone knows the rules—but no one wants to talk about them. The result is that New York has bred a particular type of single woman—smart, attractive, successful, and . . . never married. She is in her late thirties or early forties, and, if empirical knowledge is good for anything, she probably never will get married.

  This is not about statistics. Or exceptions. We all know about the successful playwright who married the beautiful fashion designer a couple of years older than he is. But when you’re beautiful and successful and rich and “know everyone,” the normal rules don’t apply.

  What if, on the other hand, you’re forty and pretty and you’re a television producer or have your own PR company, but you still live in a studio and sleep on a foldout couch—the nineties equivalent of Mary Tyler Moore? Except, unlike Mary Tyler Moore, you’ve actually gone to bed with all those guys instead of demurely kicking them out at 12:02 A.M.? What happens to those women?

  There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of women like this in the city. We all know lots of them, and we all agree they’re great. They travel, they pay taxes, they’ll spend four hundred dollars on a pair of Manolo Blahnik strappy sandals.

  “There is nothing wrong with these women,” said Jerry, thirty-nine, a corporate lawyer who happened to marry one of these smart women, three years older than he is. “They’re not crazy or neurotic. They’re not Fatal Attraction.” Jerry paused. “Why do I know so many great women who aren’t married, and no great guys? Let’s face it, the unmarried guys in New York suck.”

  THE M&MS

  “Here’s the deal,” Jerry said. “There’s a window of opportunity for women to get married in New York. Somewhere between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five. Or maybe thirty-six.” We agreed that if a woman’s been married once, she can always get married again; there’s something about knowing
how to close the deal.

  “But all of a sudden, when women get to be thirty-seven or thirty-eight, there’s all this . . . stuff,” he said. “Baggage. They’ve been around too long. Their history works against them. If I were single and I found out that a woman had gone out with Mort Zuckerman or ‘Marvin’ (a publisher)—the M&Ms—forget it. Who wants to be twentieth on that line? And then if they pull any of those other stunts, like children out of wedlock or rehab stays—that’s a problem.”

  Jerry told a story: Last summer, he was at a small dinner in the Hamptons. The guests were in TV and movies. He and his wife were trying to fix up a forty-year-old former model with a guy who had just gotten divorced. The two were talking, and suddenly something came up about Mort Zuckerman, and then Marvin, and suddenly Jerry and his wife were watching the guy turn off.

  “There’s a list of toxic bachelors in New York,” said Jerry, “and they’re deadly.”

  Later in the day, I relay the story to Anna, who’s thirty-six, and who has a habit of disagreeing with everything men say. All guys want to sleep with her, and she’s constantly chewing them out for being shallow. She’s dated the M&Ms and she knows Jerry. When I tell her the story, she screams. “Jerry is just jealous. He’d like to be like those guys, except he doesn’t have the money or the power to pull it off. Scratch the surface and every guy in New York wants to be Mort Zuckerman.”

  George, thirty-seven, an investment banker, is another guy who sees the toxic bachelors as a problem. “These guys—the plastic surgeon, that Times editor, the crazy guy who owns those fertility clinics—they all take out the same pool of women and it never goes anywhere,” he said. “Yeah, if I met a woman who had gone out with all those guys, I wouldn’t like it.”

  KIDS—OR LINGERIE?

  “If you’re Diane Sawyer, you’ll always be able to get married,” said George. “But even women who are A’s and A-’s can miss out. The problem is, in New York, people self-select down to smaller and smaller groups. You’re dealing with a crowd of people who are enormously privileged, and their standards are incredibly high.

  “And then there are all your friends. Look at you,” George said. “There’s nothing wrong with any of the guys you’ve gone out with, but we always give you shit about them.”

  That was true. All of my boyfriends have been wonderful in their own way, but my friends have found fault with every one of them, mercilessly chewing me out for putting up with any of their perceived, but in my mind excusable, flaws. Now, I was finally alone, and all my friends were happy.

  Two days later, I ran into George at a party. “It’s all about having children,” he said. “If you want to get married, it’s to have kids, and you don’t want to do it with someone older than thirty-five, because then you have to have kids immediately, and then that’s all it’s about.”

  I decided to check with Peter, forty-two, a writer, with whom I’ve had two dates. He agreed with George. “It’s all about age and biology,” he said. “You just can’t understand how immense the initial attraction is to a woman of child-bearing years. For a woman who’s older, forty maybe, it’s going to be harder because you’re not going to feel that strong, initial attraction. You’ll have to see them a lot before you want to sleep with them, and then it’s about something else.”

  Sexy lingerie, perhaps?

  “I think the issue of unmarried, older women is conceivably the biggest problem in New York City,” Peter snapped, then thoughtfully added, “It provides torment for so many women, and a lot of them are in denial.”

  Peter told a story. He has a woman friend, forty-one. She’d always gone out with extremely sexy guys and just had a good time. Then she went out with a guy who was twenty and was mercilessly mocked. Then she went out with another sexy guy her age, and he left her, and suddenly she couldn’t get any more dates. She had a complete physical breakdown and couldn’t keep her job and had to move back to Iowa to live with her mother. This is beyond every woman’s worst nightmare, and it’s not a story that makes men feel bad.

  ROGER’S VERSION

  Roger was sitting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, feeling good and drinking red wine. He’s thirty-nine, and he runs his own fund and lives on Park Avenue in a classic-six apartment. He was thinking about what I’ll call the mid-thirties power flip.

  “When you’re a young guy in your twenties and early thirties, women are controlling the relationships,” Roger explained. “By the time you get to be an eligible man in your late thirties, you feel like you’re being devoured by women.” In other words, suddenly the guy has all the power. It can happen overnight.

  Roger said he had gone to a cocktail party earlier in the evening, and, when he walked in, there were seven single women in their mid- to late thirties, all Upper East Side blond, wearing black cocktail dresses, and one wittier than the next. “You know that there’s nothing you can say that’s wrong,” Roger said. “For women, it’s desperation combined with reaching their sexual peak. It’s a very volatile combination. You see that look in their eyes—possession at any cost mixed with a healthy respect for cash flow—and you feel like they’re going to Lexis and Nexis you as soon as you leave the room. The worst thing is, most of these women are really interesting because they didn’t just go and get married. But when a man sees that look in their eyes—how can you feel passionate?”

  Back to Peter, who was working himself into a frenzy over Alec Baldwin. “The problem is expectations. Older women don’t want to settle for what’s still available. They can’t find guys who are cool and vital, so they say screw it—I’d rather be alone. No, I don’t feel sorry for anyone who has expectations they can’t meet. I feel sorry for the loser guys who these women won’t look at. What they really want is Alec Baldwin. There isn’t one woman in New York who hasn’t turned down ten wonderful, loving guys because they were too fat or they weren’t powerful enough or they weren’t rich enough or indifferent enough. But those really sexy guys the women are holding out for are interested in girls in their mid-twenties.”

  By now, Peter was practically screaming. “Why don’t those women marry a fat guy? Why don’t they marry a big, fat tub of lard?”

  GOOD FRIENDS, LOUSY HUSBANDS

  I asked that very question to Charlotte, the English journalist. “I’ll tell you why,” she said. “I’ve gone out with some of those guys—the ones who are short, fat, and ugly—and it doesn’t make any difference. They’re just as unappreciative and self-centered as the good-looking ones.

  “By the time you get to your mid-thirties and you’re not married, you think. Why should I settle?” Charlotte said. She said she’d just turned down a date with a beautifully eligible, recently divorced forty-one-year-old banker because his unmentionable was too small. “Index finger,” she sighed.

  Then Sarah beeped in. She’d just gotten money to make her first independent film, and she was ecstatic. “This idea of women not being able to get married? It’s so small-minded, I can’t even deal with it. If you want to get these guys, you have to shut up. You have to sit there and shut up and agree with everything they say.”

  Luckily, my friend Amalita called and explained it all to me. Explained why terrific women are often alone, and not happy about it, but not exactly desperate about it, either. “Oh honey,” she cooed into the phone. She was in a good mood because she’d had sex the night before, with a twenty-four-year-old law student. “Everyone knows that men in New York make great friends and lousy husbands. In South America, where I come from, we have an expression: Better alone than badly accompanied.”

  5

  Meet the Guys

  Who Bed Models!

  There was just the slightest stir as “Gregory Roque,” the conspiracy filmmaker, slipped into the Bowery Bar on a recent Friday night. The auteur of such controversial films as G.R.F. (Gerald Rudolph Ford) and The Monkees, Mr. Roque was wearing a tatty tweed jacket and keeping his head down. Surrounding him was a swarm of six young women, new models with a well-kno
wn modeling agency. All of the girls were under twenty-one (two were as young as sixteen), and most of them had never seen Mr. Roque’s films and, frankly, couldn’t have cared less.

  Functioning like two small tugboats in keeping the swarm moving and intact were the modelizers, Jack and Ben—two self-employed investors in their early thirties—men of nondescript features, save for the buckteeth of one and the stylish spiky haircut of the other.

  At first glance, it looked like a merry group. The girls were smiling. Mr. Roque sat in a banquette, flanked by his beauties, while the two young men sat in the aisle chairs as if to ward off any unwelcome intruders who might try to talk to Mr. Roque or, even worse, steal one of the girls.

  Mr. Roque would lean toward one or another girl, engaging in snippets of conversation. The young men were lively. But it wasn’t quite as charming as it appeared. For one thing, if you looked closely at the girls, you could see the boredom pulling down their features like old age. They had nothing to say to Mr. Roque and even less to say to each other. But everyone at the table had a job to do, and they were doing it. So the group sat and sat, looking glamorous, and after a while, they got in Mr. Roque’s limousine and went to the Tunnel, where Mr. Roque danced dispiritedly with one of the girls and then realized he was bored up to his eyeteeth and went home alone. The girls stayed for a while and took drugs, and then Jack, who had the spiky haircut, grabbed one of the girls and said, “You stupid slut,” and she went home with him. He gave her more drugs and she gave him a blow job.

  That sort of scenario is acted out just about every night in New York, in restaurants and clubs. There, one invariably finds the beautiful young models who flock to New York like birds, and their attendants, men like Jack and Ben, who practically make a profession of wining and dining them and, with varying degrees of success, seducing them. Meet the modelizers.