Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  Marilyn had no idea what to do. Then she lost a client who moved back to LA. And her dog needed a three-thousand-dollar operation.

  It was the middle of winter and Marilyn couldn’t stop talking about how it was so cold that if you went to the end of a pier and took your clothes off, you could freeze to death within twenty minutes. She said she’d looked it up on the internet.

  This was alarming. Marilyn, who’d been taking Prozac for fifteen years, was one of the happiest people I knew. She talked to everyone and was one of those rare souls to whom you could safely confess your biggest fears without fear of being judged. And so at 8:00 a.m. on a cold morning in April, Marilyn went to see a shrink.

  The shrink sent her home with some prescriptions that Marilyn filled at the drugstore. Then she went up to her apartment and promptly consumed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. I know, because I called her at 9:15 to see how the appointment had gone seconds after she’d consumed the last pill. She was barely awake but managed to answer the phone.

  I called 911.

  Thankfully she recovered, and it seemed like a good time for Marilyn to take a break from the city and regroup.

  * * *

  And so Marilyn headed out east to stay in a friend’s cottage overlooking the bay in the Village. At first, she thought she’d stay a week or two. That turned into a month. Then two. It wasn’t long before she became friends with a real estate agent who had the inside scoop on anything that might be affordable for a middle-aged single gal. Meaning properties with ancient appliances and peeling paint, the kinds of places developers wouldn’t touch because there wasn’t enough profit to be made.

  Three months turned into a season and then a year, and it was winter again. And one morning, after Sassy had slipped on ice on her way back from Pilates and torn a muscle, she started complaining about how the city wasn’t the same anymore and how great it would be if we all lived close by again. This gave Marilyn an idea. She was going to find us cheap houses and we were all going to live in the Village.

  Years and years ago, Sassy, Marilyn, and I had lived on the same block and were always in and out of each other’s apartments. And probably because we were fifteen years younger those times seemed exciting and happy, as successes built upon successes and one was quite sure that the future would take care of itself. Things changed, of course, but we always stayed close, and probably because we never had children or pressing familial obligations—Sassy’s parents were dead and Marilyn’s family was back in Australia—we still had holidays together.

  Things don’t usually work out as planned, but in this case, they did. With the help of the real estate agent Marilyn had befriended, both she and Sassy found houses and had taken up residence a few months before. Now, with my windfall, I would join them.

  * * *

  That spring I moved into a quaint run-down farmhouse about half a mile from Sassy and a mile and a half from Marilyn. At first it was just the three of us, but it wasn’t long before Sassy ran into Queenie, whom we’d both known from our single days, and discovered she was living in the Village as well.

  Back when we knew her in the city, she was a society it girl. But one weekend she came out to the Village to visit her mother, who was a famous artist and an even more famous grand doyenne. Eager to get out of the house, Queenie went to a bar, met a local guy, fell in love, got pregnant, and then after a brief, two-year attempt at staying married, got sectionorced. She’d lived in the Village since then and knew everyone.

  Still, her boyfriend of the past ten years lived in another state and her daughter, now seventeen, had her own life, so soon Queenie joined in on our girls’ evenings. This concept of being one of the girls was newish to her. She always said “the girls” as if with quotes, as if hanging out with other single women in your fifties was something that needed to be separated from her own life—with punctuation at least.

  And then came Kitty.

  Kitty was another mutual friend who, having landed her Mr. Big fifteen years ago, had happily disappeared into married bliss. Or so we thought. Now, as would turn out to be the case with so many of our friends, Kitty was all of a sudden getting sectionorced.

  This was a shock. Kitty was my only friend who unreservedly believed in true love. All through her twenties and thirties she’d rejected men right and left because they weren’t soul mate material. And then one day she walked into a neighborhood restaurant and sat down next to an older guy. They started talking. She went home with him that night, moved in with him the next day, and married him six months later.

  Kitty and I lost touch for a while, but we reconnected while she was still married. I remember being struck by how in love she and her husband were. He told everyone that he couldn’t live without Kitty and he’d rather spend time with Kitty than with anyone else.

  I remember wishing that I, too, could have had a love like Kitty’s, but knew it probably wasn’t my fate. And I certainly didn’t expect Kitty’s marriage to end—or to end so abruptly—the way it did one Saturday afternoon when Kitty’s husband came home unexpectedly early. He’d been playing golf and he was drunk, as was his golf buddy. Stumbling up to Kitty, he said, “You’re a cunt” (he was English) and handed Kitty sectionorce papers.

  Or tried to, anyway.

  “Are you insane?” Kitty screamed at him. This wasn’t the first time she’d seen him in this condition in the past few months; like most of the people in this story, he had issues. But the sectionorce papers were a new development.

  Despite the fact that Kitty ripped them up, the papers were real. As was the airtight prenup. Which meant that Kitty had to move out and fast.

  She rented a house in the Village so she, too, could be near her friends.

  Kitty made it five.

  “So what do you do out here?” Kitty asked one afternoon.

  “Well, I write,” I said.

  “But what do you do at night?”

  “I’m on a schedule. I exercise and take the poodles to the beach and then I have dinner early. Sometimes at four.”

  “At four?”

  “I mean six,” I said.

  “By yourself?”

  “Sometimes with Sassy and Marilyn. And Queenie.”

  “Dinner at six?” Kitty snorted. “That’s no life.”

  She was right, of course.

  And finally, Tilda Tia, who had been one of Kitty’s married friends, magically appeared from the South of France. She’d just ended a twelve-year relationship with a Frenchman and was trying to start her life over again in the States.

  And so we did what we’d done years ago, before there were husbands and children, demanding careers and all kinds of heartbreak: We gathered together to figure it out.

  Specifically in the kitchen at Kitty’s house.

  And almost immediately, the way it had years ago when we were all single, the topic turned once again to sex.

  “Where’s the fun? Where’s the excitement?” Kitty demanded.

  “Where are the men?” Tilda Tia said.

  And as I looked around at their eager little faces, I realized now might be a good time to find out.

  And so, four years after I’d left, I returned to my old stomping grounds. As I crossed the bridge into Manhattan, now a middle-aged, single white woman driving a sensible SUV with two large standard poodles in the back, I had to ask the obvious question. Is there still sex in the city?

  chapter two

  The Mona Lisa Treatment

  If there were any sex, I wouldn’t be having it. Not according to my gynecologist anyway.

  She was my first appointment upon my return to the city. This yearly visit is always terrifying, but it’s something women like me have been trained to do: show your vagina to at least one person a year. Or else.

  After the standard exam, she slid back on her stool and shook her head mournfully.

 
“Did you get that info I sent you about the Mona Lisa?” she asked.

  “The Mona Lisa?” I felt the familiar trickle of fear. Had I missed something? Had I done something wrong? Was I now doomed?

  I got dressed and headed into her office, bracing for the worst.

  “Listen, sweetie,” she said kindly. “The hormone ring isn’t working. Your vagina is not flexible enough.”

  I made a garbled noise.

  “When was the last time you had sex?” she asked.

  Another garbled reply.

  She rolled her eyes. I’d been seeing her for the last four years and every time she brought up sex I’d have to explain that I was “about to get around to it, very, very soon.” Much like cleaning out the gutters.

  But this time she wasn’t buying it.

  “That’s why I brought up the Mona Lisa,” she said, sounding like a woman in an advert. “It’s a new laser treatment that restores thickness and elasticity to the vagina.”

  She slid a purple pamphlet toward me. “Think about it. You’ll find it makes a huge difference when it comes to sex.”

  I coughed. “How much?”

  “It’s three treatments for three thousand dollars.”

  Three thousand dollars? No thanks.

  Afterward, I went to lunch with a Hollywood producer. He wanted to discuss the possibility of some vague TV show that would vaguely be about sex and I was happy to be vague about it in exchange for an opportunity to put on proper clothing, go out to lunch, and eat with a cloth napkin.

  “Have you ever heard of the Mona Lisa treatment?” I asked.

  He went white.

  He knew all about it. His wife—actually, his soon-to-be ex-wife—had undergone the treatment two years earlier, at fifty-two. At first, all had been fine, but then she told him he wasn’t enough anymore and began an affair with the horse trainer he’d hired to teach his teenage girls. They were now getting married. This despite the fact that the horse trainer was over twenty years younger than the wife.

  I had to feel sorry for the guy. He was nearly crying. He seemed shocked by the possibility that a younger man might prefer an older woman. I pointed out that if the roles were reversed—if it had been an older male who had run off with a younger female—he would have considered the age difference­, and the behavior, normal.

  Now, thanks to the Mona Lisa treatment, it seemed the shoe truly was on the other foot. If older women could have relationships like older men—meaning with partners decades younger than themselves—would they? Would more women give up their so-called age-appropriate men for younger, hotter guys?

  Yes, they would, according to my friend Ess. Especially if, like Ess, they live in the 1 percent.

  These are women who’ve spent years looking good for their husbands she explained. “After dieting, doing yoga, and spending thousands of dollars on Botox and filler, what’s another laser treatment?” Indeed, it’s not unusual for a husband to give his wife the Mona Lisa treatment for her fiftieth birthday.

  Like most of these laser treatments, the Mona Lisa doesn’t work for everyone. But when it does, watch out. Ess could name three women who had done it and had recently left their husbands.

  The Viagra Effect

  “It’s like what happened when older men first got Viagra,” she explained. “They suddenly had hard-ons and wanted to have sex with their wives and the wives didn’t want to anymore and so the older guys left their wives for younger women. This is the reverse.”

  Sort of. The biggest problem with the analogy is that most women, unlike men, will not have the opportunity to experience this new dating phenomenon. As usual, there’s a big difference in the price men pay for youth versus what it costs women.

  How much will that “little blue pill” set you back? Not a lot, I’d wager. Like so many things male, it’s probably covered by insurance. In any case, it doesn’t cost anywhere near three thousand dollars.

  Which made me realize that if I wanted to continue to explore this sex question, I was going to have to use what I already had: my bicycle.

  Meet the New Bicycle Boys

  Twenty-five years ago, when I’d first written about “bicycle boys,” they were a rarified group. A little boyish, a little juvenile, they tended to be bookish and a touch nerdy and also annoying with their bikes, especially when they tried to bring them up to your apartment like they were some kind of pet. Their bike riding was considered a little silly and a little dangerous. It also signaled a lack of funds.

  Today, the opposite is true. The bicycle boys are not only everywhere but like a virus that can’t be stopped, they’ve mutated into dozens of different types.

  Following are but a few:

  The Family-Man Billionaire–Tech Guy

  He has a passel of kids with different wives and somewhere on one of his thirty-million-dollar properties is a jungle gym. He likes to impress his other billionaire–tech guy friends with his prowess, so one of the things he does is road bike from New York City to Montauk—back and forth—in a day.

  The good: He is rich, fit, and fertile.

  The bad: He changes marriages the way other guys change bicycle tires.

  The Pack-Rat

  The pack-rat is a parallel-play type of man. He likes to ride in a pack with other men. He is usually not rich, but he is rich enough to spend two thousand dollars on a bicycle. He is also rich enough to devote several hours a week to his “hobby,” while his partner toils at home.

  The good: He is trying to take care of himself, which means he will probably want to take care of other people, too—at least when he isn’t riding.

  The bad: He’s the type who really pisses off his wife. She wasn’t pissed at him at first, but now she is because they’re both getting older and their kids are teenagers and he’s out riding his fucking bike!

  The Actual Bicycle Boy

  This is a verifiable young person as opposed to a man who just acts like one. The actual bicycle boy may be shorter or smaller than you are, but he’s a lot tougher and a much better rider.

  The good: He can do wheelies.

  The bad: You might end up trying a wheelie yourself and land in the hospital with a broken coccyx.

  The Bachelor Boy

  This is the guy on a weekend date with someone he met on a matchmaking app. The bachelor boy has only ridden a bike maybe three times in his life. On the other hand, since this is a guy who has seen The Bachelor, The Bachelorette, and probably Bachelor in Paradise, he knows that in the dating world of today, good guys must do things like ride bikes around quaintish summer towns. It’s supposed to be fun but from the expression on his face, it clearly isn’t.

  The good: A part of him really is looking for “the one.”

  The bad: If you fall off your bike, he’ll quickly replace you.

  * * *

  So is it worth getting on a bike to try to meet a guy? I went to Central Park to find out.

  It was filled with people on bikes. The problem was that they all rode like they were in the Tour de France. Forget stopping one much less hooking up with one. And while there were plenty of Citi Bike people to explore, I didn’t have the guts, the reflexes, or the stupidity to attempt to ride a two-wheeled vehicle in New York City traffic.

  I decided to take the question out to the Village—and specifically to Tilda Tia.

  Suddenly Samantha

  Unlike me, Tilda Tia was open to any kind of dating experience. She’d been “good” for twelve years with her ex and was ready to be “bad” with her freedom.

  Tilda Tia was Suddenly Samantha. She was also a maniac bike rider.

  For the past week, she’d been texting about how she’d ridden fifteen, eighteen, and then twenty-one miles in under three hours and how we should aim to ride twenty-four miles in the same time or less. For some reason, I agreed. Even if we didn’t meet anyone, at least we’d get exercise.

/>   When I picked her up, Tilda Tia was wearing a peasant-style flowered dress and silver sandals like we were going to a beach party instead of on a twenty-mile bike ride. She had just had her hair done and refused to wear a helmet. Instead she stuck earbuds in her ears, as if these were going to save her.

  I, on the other hand, was dressed for safety. I was wearing padded bike shorts and the neon-green safety vest Sassy had given me, along with a large helmet painted to resemble half a watermelon. My ride was an orange mountain bike that at one time had elicited admiring glances on the dirt tracks Angie and I used to ride in Connecticut.

  It was exactly the wrong kind of bicycle to ride anywhere else. It was great for going over curbs and cutting across grass but too heavy to go very fast. At least not as fast as Tilda Tia.

  I was fine until we reached the edge of the Village and hit the bike path. The first obstacle was a bridge. I’d crossed this bridge plenty of times in my car, never having realized how steep it was. Or how narrow the lane between the cars and the bikes was.

  I made it halfway up before I wobbled and sensibly got off. I walked my bike over the crest to find Tilda Tia waiting impatiently on the other side. “You got off your bike?” she said. “We haven’t even gone up one real hill.”

  “I’m afraid of heights,” I said. I got back on the bike. At first, I pedaled furiously behind her, trying to keep up. When I realized I couldn’t, I slowed down and decided to do some research by taking note of my fellow riders.

  You’d think biking would be a young person’s hobby, but it’s not. I quickly realized this as we passed one middle-aged person after another.