“Twenty-four.”
“Perfect age,” he said.
“Perfect? For what?” Cici asked.
“Me,” he said.
“How old are you?” Cici asked.
“Thirty-six,” he said. Lying.
The party was crowded. Beer in a keg, vodka and gin in plastic glasses. Cici had just turned away from the bar and was about to take a sip of beer when she saw an apparition barreling toward her from the other side of the loft. A large girl with long dark hair, wearing red lipstick and, rather inexplicably, a long “dress” (If you can call it that, Cici thought) that appeared to be made of flowered chiffon scarves. Arabian Nights.
The guy turned just as she was about to run into them. “Carolyne!” he said. “Love your dress.”
“Thanks, Sam,” Carolyne said.
“Is that that new designer you were telling me about?” Sam asked. “The one who was going to make you a bunch of dresses for free if you wrote about him?” He smirked.
“Would you shut up?” Carolyne screamed. She turned to Cici. “Who are you, and what are you doing at my birthday party?”
“He invited me,” Cici said.
“So you just accept invitations from other girls’ boyfriends, huh?”
“Carolyne. I am not your boyfriend,” Sam said.
“Oh yeah. You’ve just slept with me about twenty times. What about last time. That hand job at System?”
“You gave someone a hand job at a club?” Cici asked.
“Carolyne. I have a girlfriend,” Sam said.
“She got deported. And now you can’t keep your greedy little hands off me.”
“She’s back,” Sam said. “She’s living in my apartment.”
“You have a girlfriend?” Cici asked.
“You mortify me,” Carolyne said to Sam. “Get out and take your cheap little slut with you.”
“You have a girlfriend?” Cici asked again. She kept repeating it, all the way down the stairs until they were out on the street.
Two weeks later, Carolyne ran into Cici in the bathroom at a club.
“I just wanted to tell you that I saw Sam,” Carolyne said, applying red lipstick. “He got down on his hands and knees and begged me to go back to him. He said I was beyond.”
“Beyond what?” Cici said, pretending to check her mascara in the mirror.
“Did you fool around with him?” Carolyne asked. She snapped the top back on her lipstick.
“No,” Cici said. “I don’t fool around with anybody.”
Sure enough, Carolyne and Cici became best friends.
“I HATE MIAMI”
Carrie met Cici around this time last year at Bowery Bar. Carrie was sitting at one of the booths, it was kind of late and she was kind of fucked up, and this girl bounced over and said stuff like, “You’re my idol” and “You’re so beautiful” and “Where did you get your shoes I love them.” Carrie was flattered. “I want to be your best friend,” Cici said, in a voice that rubbed up against her like a cat. “Can I be your best friend? Please?”
“Now listen, er . . .”
“Cici.”
“Cici,” Carrie said, a little sternly. “It just doesn’t work that way.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve been in New York for fifteen years. Fifteen years and . . .”
“Oh,” Cici said, slumping. “But can I call you? I’m going to call you.” And then she bounced over to another table, sat down, turned around, and waved.
A couple of weeks later, Cici called Carrie. “You’ve got to come to Miami with us.”
“I hate Miami. I will never step foot in Miami,” Carrie said. “If you ever call me again and mention Miami, I will hang up.”
“You are just so funny,” Cici said.
In Miami, Cici and Carolyne stayed with some rich-guy friends of Carolyne’s from the University of Texas. On Friday night, they all went out and got drunk, and Cici made out with one of the Texas guys, Dexter. But she got annoyed at him the following night when he followed her around, putting his arm around her, trying to kiss her—like they were a couple or something. “Let’s go upstairs and fool around,” he kept whispering in her ear. Cici didn’t want to, so she sort of started ignoring him, and Dexter stormed out of the house. He came back a couple of hours later with a girl. “Hi y’all,” he said, giving Cici a wave as he passed by the living room on his way upstairs with the girl. The girl gave him a blow job. Then they came downstairs, and Dexter made a great show of writing down her phone number.
Cici ran out of the house screaming and crying just as Carolyne was spinning up the driveway in a rental car. She was also screaming and crying. She’d run into Sam, who just happened to be in Miami as well, and he had wanted her to have a ménage à trois with some blond, stripper bimbo, and when Carolyne said, “Fuck off,” he pushed her down on the sand at South Beach and said, “The only reason I ever went anyplace with you was because we always get our pictures taken at parties.”
PAGE SIX!
Two weeks later, Carolyne ended up in the Post’s “Page Six” gossip column. She went to some party at the Tunnel, and when the doorman wouldn’t let her in, she started screaming at him; he tried to escort her to a cab, she punched him, he wrestled her to the ground, and the next day she made the publisher of the downtown publication she worked for call up the Tunnel and try to get the guy fired, and then she called up “Page Six.” When the item came out, she bought twenty copies of the paper.
Then Cici got kicked out of the apartment she was sharing with a lawyer from Philadelphia—the older sister of one of her high school friends. The woman said, “Cici, you’ve changed. I’m really worried about you. You’re not a nice person anymore and I don’t know what to do.” Cici yelled at her that she was just jealous, then she moved to Carolyne’s couch.
Around that time, an unfortunate item came out about Carrie in one of the gossip columns. She was trying to ignore it when Cici called up all excited.
“Omigod, you’re famous,” she said. “You’re in the papers. Have you read it?” Then she began reading it, and it was awful, so Carrie started screaming at her. “Let me explain something. If you want to survive in this town, never, ever call anybody up and read something terrible about them from the papers. You pretend you never saw it, okay? And if they ask you if you did, you lie and say, ‘No, I don’t read trash like that.’ Even though you do. Get it? Jesus, Cici,” she said, “whose side are you on here?” Cici started crying, and Carrie hung up the phone and felt guilty afterward.
MR. RESIDUE
“I’m going to introduce you to a guy, and I know you’re going to fall in love with him, but don’t,” Carolyne said to Cici. So she did.
Ben was forty, a sometime restaurateur and party promoter who’d already been married twice (in fact, he was still married, but his wife had gone back to Florida) and been in and out of rehab a dozen times. Everyone in New York knew about him, and when his name came up, people would roll their eyes and change the subject. After all his drinking and coke snorting, he still possessed a residue of what he was before—charming, amusing, handsome—and Cici fell in love with the residue. They spent two great weekends together, even though they never actually had sex. Then they went to a party, he disappeared, and Cici found him rubbing up against a sixteen-year-old model who had just come to town. “You’re disgusting!” she screamed.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You’ve got to let me live out my fantasies. I have a fantasy of being with a sixteen year old.” He grinned, and you could see that his teeth needed to be rebonded.
The next morning, Cici turned up uninvited at his apartment. His three-year-old daughter was visiting. “I brought you a present,” she said, acting like nothing had happened. The present was a baby bunny. She put it on the couch, and it peed several times.
Meanwhile, Carolyne sort of moved in with Sam. She kept her apartment but spent every night at his and always left something—shoes, perfume, earrings, dry-cleaned b
louses, six or seven different kinds of face cream—behind. This went on for three months. The night before Valentine’s Day, he exploded. “I want you out,” he said. “Out!” He was screaming and breathing heavily.
“I don’t get it,” Carolyne said.
“There’s nothing to get,” Sam said. “I just want you, and your stuff, out of here now!” Sam cranked open a window and began throwing her things out.
Carolyne said, “I’ll fix your wagon, buster,” and she smacked him hard across the back of his head.
He turned around. “You hit me,” he said.
“Sam . . .,” she said.
“I can’t believe . . . you hit me.” He began backing across the floor. “Don’t come near me,” he said. He cautiously reached down and picked up his cat.
“Sam,” Carolyne said, walking toward him.
“Stay back,” he said. He grabbed the cat under its armpits so its legs were sticking straight out at Carolyne; he held it up like a weapon. “I said, get back.”
“Sam. Sam.” Carolyne shook her head. “This is so pity-ful.”
“Not to me,” Sam said. He hurried into the bedroom, cradling the cat in his arms. “She’s a witch, isn’t she, Puffy?” he asked the cat. “A real witch.”
Carolyne took a few steps toward the bed. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“You hit me,” Sam said in a weird, little-boy voice. “Don’t ever hit me. Don’t hit Sam no more.”
“Okay . . .,” Carolyne said cautiously.
The cat struggled out of Sam’s arms. It ran across the floor. “Here kitty kitty,” Carolyne said. “C’mere kitty. Want some milk?” She heard the TV click on.
“HE WAS SO MORTIFIED”
Carrie was always promising Cici and Carolyne that she’d have dinner with them, so one day, she finally did. On a Sunday night. Her only free night. Carolyne and Cici were sitting back on the banquette, their legs crossed, stirring their drinks, and looking very smart. Carolyne was talking on a cellular phone. “I have to go out every night for my job,” Cici said, sounding bored. “I’m just so tired all the time.”
Carolyne flipped her cellular phone closed and looked at Carrie. “We’ve got to go to this party tonight. Downtown. Lots of models. You should come,” she said, in a tone that suggested she definitely should not.
“Well, how is everything?” Carrie said. “You know, like Sam and . . .”
“Everything is fine,” Carolyne said.
Cici lit a cigarette and looked off in another direction. “Sam went around telling everyone that he and Carolyne had never slept together, even though tons of people had seen them making out, so we mortified him.”
“We found out he started seeing this girl who has diseases, so I called him up and I said, ‘Sam, please, as a friend, promise me you won’t sleep with her,’” Carolyne said.
“Then we saw the two of them at this brunch place.”
“We were dressed to the nines. They were wearing sweatpants. We went up to them and they asked us for a cigarette and we said, ‘A cigarette? Oh please. Get one from the waiter.’”
“We sat right next to them. Intentionally. They kept trying to talk to us, and Carolyne kept making calls on her cellular phone. Then I said, ‘Sam, how’s that girl I saw you with last week?’”
“He was so mortified. We sent him notes saying, ‘Herpes simplex 19.’”
“Is there a herpes simplex 19?” Carrie asked.
“No,” Cici said. “Don’t you get it?”
“Right,” Carrie said. She didn’t say anything for a minute while she took a long time to light a cigarette, then she said, “What is wrong with you?”
“Nothing,” Cici said. “The only thing I care about is my career. Like you. You’re my idol.”
Then the two girls looked at their watches and each other.
“Do you mind,” Cici said. “We have to go to this party.”
17
City in Heat! Sexual
Panic Seizes Mr. Big
Manhattan’s Own Brand of Summertime Steaminess Gives Way to Sidewalk Fantasies, Drunken Jigs, Bedroom Crackups, and Air-Conditioned Nightmares
New York is a completely different city in August. Like living in some South American country with a corrupt and drunk dictator, skyrocketing inflation, drug cartels, dust-covered roads, clogged plumbing—where nothing will ever get better, the rains will never come.
The psyche of most New Yorkers cracks under the heat. Bad thoughts and bad feelings bubble to the surface. They lead to bad behavior, the kind New Yorkers specialize in. It’s secretive. It’s nasty. Relationships break up. People who shouldn’t be together get together.
The city’s in heat. Days of ninety-five-plus-degree weather are strung together one after the other. Everyone is cranky.
In the heat, you can’t trust anyone, especially yourself.
Carrie is lying in Mr. Big’s bed at eight A.M. She believes she is not going to be okay. In fact, she is pretty damn sure that she is not going to be okay. She’s crying hysterically into the pillow.
“Carrie. Calm down. Calm down,” Mr. Big orders. She rolls over, and her face is a grotesque, blotchy mask.
“You’re going to be okay. I have to go to work now. Right now. You’re keeping me from work.”
“Can you help me?” Carrie asks.
“No,” he says, sliding his gold cufflinks through the holes of starched cuffs. “You have to help yourself. Figure it out.”
Carrie puts her head under the covers, still crying. “Call me in a couple of hours,” he says, then walks out of the room. “Goodbye.”
Two minutes later, he comes back. “I forgot my cigar case,” he says, watching her as he crosses the room. She’s quiet now.
“Goodbye,” he says. “Goodbye. Goodbye.”
It’s the tenth day in a row of suffocating heat and humidity.
MR. BIG’S HEAT RITUAL
Carrie has been spending too much time with Mr. Big. He has air conditioning. She does, too, but hers doesn’t work. They develop a little ritual. A heat ritual. Every evening at eleven, if they haven’t been out together, Mr. Big calls.
“How’s your apartment?” he asks.
“Hot,” she says.
“What are you doing then?”
“Sweating.”
“Do you want to come over and sleep here?” he asks, almost a little shyly.
“Sure, why not,” she says. She yawns.
Then she races around her apartment, flies out the door (past the night doorman, who always gives her dirty looks), and jumps into a cab.
“Oh, hiiii,” Mr. Big says when he opens the door, naked. He says it half-sleepy, as if he’s surprised to see her.
They get into bed. Letterman or Leno. Mr. Big has one pair of glasses. They take turns wearing them.
“Have you ever thought about getting a new air conditioner?” Mr. Big asks.
“Yes,” Carrie says.
“You can get a new one for about $150.”
“I know. You told me.”
“Well, it’s just that you can’t always spend the night here.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Carrie says. “The heat doesn’t bother me.”
“I don’t want you to be hot. In your apartment,” says Mr. Big.
“If you’re only asking me over because you feel sorry for me, don’t,” Carrie says. “I only want to come over if you miss me. If you can’t sleep without me.”
“Oh, I’d miss you. Sure. Of course I’d miss you,” Mr. Big says. And then after a few seconds: “Do you have enough money?”
Carrie looks at him. “Plenty,” she says.
LOBSTER NEWBERT
There’s something about this heat wave. It’s loosening. You feel almost drunk, even though you’re not. On the Upper East Side, Newbert’s hormones are up. He wants to have a baby. In the spring, his wife, Belle, had told him she could never be pregnant in the summer, because she wouldn’t want to be seen in a bathing suit. Now she says she could never
get pregnant in the summer, because she doesn’t want to have morning sickness in the heat. Newbert has reminded her that, as an investment banker, she spends her days behind the green glass walls of a coolly air-conditioned office tower. To no avail.
Newbert, meanwhile, spends his days puttering around the apartment in a ripped pair of boxer shorts, waiting for his agent to call with news about his novel. He watches talk shows. Picks at his cuticles with blunt instruments. Calls Belle twenty times a day. She is always sweet. “Hello, Pookie,” she says.
“What do you think about the Revlon stainless-steel tweezers with the tapered ends?” he asks.
“I think they sound wonderful,” she says.
One night during the heat wave, Belle has a business dinner with clients. Japanese. A lot of bowing and shaking hands, and then they all go off, Belle and five dark-suited men, to City Crab. Halfway through dinner, Newbert makes an unexpected appearance. He’s already quite drunk. He’s dressed like he’s going camping. He decides to do his version of the Morris dance. He takes cloth napkins and stuffs them in the pockets of his khaki hiking shorts. Then, swinging napkins in both hands, he takes a few steps forward, kicks up one leg in front, takes a few steps backward, and kicks up the other leg behind. He also adds in a few side kicks, which, technically, are not part of the original Morris dance.
“Oh, that’s just my husband,” Belle says to the clients, as if this sort of thing happens all the time. “He loves to have fun.”
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