Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  The ordeal is far from over, however. If you do “find something” you want to take home, you will have to purchase it. Everywhere else in the world this is done with a touch of a button. Not in Madison World.

  For some strange reason, it will take at least fifteen minutes to ring up your purchase and run your credit card. During this time, exhausted, you may collapse on one of the many sectionans—or fainting couches—located near the opening in the wall where the salespeople disappear to make this mysterious, time-consuming transaction.

  And then you have to pay the bill. It’s always more than you feared. Walking into a store in Madison World is like walking into a casino. You have no idea how much money you might lose.

  But behind the glittering cases of jewels and fine leathers and backgammon sets with mother-of-pearl inlay was an ugly secret: the stores in Madison World were going broke.

  It was a refrain I’d overhear again and again, made by everyone from the salespeople taking a break out on the street to the bartender at Bar Italia.

  Still, maybe the news wasn’t all bad. If the stores were going broke, then certainly the stores should be having sales. Wasn’t that the first rule of business? If something isn’t selling, maybe it’s too expensive.

  I decided to make my first stop Ralph Lauren. There was usually some kind of good sale at Ralph. A year ago, I’d bought the one nice thing I now owned—a leather biker jacket—at 80 percent off. I wore it everywhere, and I happened to be wearing it when I walked in.

  It may have been a twenty-four-hour news cycle of disaster out in the real world, but entering the store was like stepping into another time when nothing particularly bad was happening. The air smelled slightly of candy. Some kind of groovy music was playing—a boppy tune familiar enough to make me feel younger and like I had my whole future ahead of me. It was rather like being inside an egg.

  The feeling didn’t last long.

  I was immediately surrounded by a flotilla of salespeople who recognized the leather jacket.

  “I remember that jacket from last season. I always loved it.”

  “Have you seen this season’s version?”

  “Um, no. But how many does one woman need?” I said, as politesse forced me to examine the studded leather jacket that had been procured from the racks and was now being held out like a newly born child. I caught a glimpse of the price tag. Five thousand dollars. No wonder they were after me. How were they to know that there was no way I could afford a five-thousand-dollar jacket and that the one I had on had been 80 percent off?

  I looked toward the entrance, hoping to make an escape, but the salespeople were blocking my way. What everyone said about the stores going broke must be true. Which meant the salespeople must be desperate.

  The question was how desperate? And what would they do to me when they discovered I was a “fake” shopper? I imagined a scene like something out of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

  I tried to slip upstairs, but two salespeople followed me.

  “Is there something you’d like to see?”

  My eye was immediately drawn to the shiniest, most glittery piece in the room—an enormous ball gown constructed of tulle. I hurried toward it, hoping I might hide behind the vast skirts.

  No dice.

  “Can I help you?” the saleswoman asked.

  “Just wondering about the price,” I murmured.

  “What would you like to know?”

  “How much is it?”

  The salesperson went to the dress and turned over the tag.

  I held my breath while I did a few quick calculations. Twenty years ago, that dress would have been thirty-five hundred dollars. Allowing for “inflation” it would be about five thousand today. But then there’s the rich tax.

  “Rich tax” is the price you pay for being rich in the first place. If there’s one thing that most people don’t understand about the rich it’s that there’s nothing they like more than fleecing other rich people. It’s why the richer the rich get, the more expensive everything they need to buy to prove they’re part of the richy-rich club—the yachts, the Hamptons homes, the clothes—goes up in price as well.

  And so, given the rich tax, I guessed the dress would be eight thousand dollars.

  Wrong. “Twenty thousand dollars,” said the saleswoman.

  I gasped. That made the rich tax about twelve thousand dollars. It also made the dress out of reach for all but the richest of the rich. The point zero, zero 1 percent.

  “Twenty thousand dollars,” I exhaled. “That’s the price of a small car. Who on earth can afford that?”

  The salesperson looked around to make sure we weren’t being overheard. “You’d be surprised who can afford it.”

  “Who?”

  “I can’t say,” she whispered. “Hey, do you want to try it on?”

  I shook my head.

  “No. Because I’d never be able to afford it. Plus, I don’t have anything to wear it to.”

  “You never know,” the salesperson said.

  And there it was. The mantra of the eternally hopeful. Buy this dress, take it home. Maybe this time the charm will work. Maybe this time it really will transform your life.

  How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?

  For weeks, I’d been limping along in an old pair of patent leather pumps that, while painful, weren’t quite as painful as any of my other old shoes. I could last about two hours before I felt like my eyes were rolling into the back of my head from the agony.

  “I can’t,” I finally said. “I can’t walk.”

  It was time to buy a new pair of shoes. And since I didn’t have a lot of money to throw around, I’d have to view the shoes as an investment.

  Which meant the shoe would have to be a staple. A shoe that could go from day to night. From pants to a cocktail dress. It would be a shoe that fit. A shoe that I could walk in.

  I thought I knew the very shoes.

  They were black suede platforms with hand-stitched lacing. There was a rosette on top. Despite the rosette, there was something very solid, almost militaresque about the shoes.

  This being Madison World, however, I couldn’t just walk in, try them on, and buy them. As per the Ralph Lauren incident there was a protocol involved. Shoe salespeople are much nicer if you’re already wearing an expensive pair of shoes, the idea being that if you already own a pair of expensive shoes, you can probably afford many, many others. And so I dug out a pair of flat-heeled designer booties I’d purchased just before I left the city. The boots weren’t really my type of shoe, but I remembered that I was feeling confused about my life when I bought them. I’d just gotten sectionorced and wasn’t sure how to proceed. The salesperson, a young man with pretty curling hair and excited puppy dog eyes, mentioned that Nicole Kidman had worn the same boots in an ad. He pointed to a poster on the wall as proof.

  In the photograph, Nicole Kidman looked like a woman who knew where she was going and what she was doing. She was not a woman who was sad. She was not a woman who was alone, depressed, and felt like a failure. She was in control of her mind and her destiny.

  I bought the shoes and tried to walk in them. But the proportions were all wrong. The boots made my legs look shorter and my feet bigger. They were long, narrow, nasty things that pinched terribly. I wore them twice and retired them.

  Until now.

  Sure enough, those suckers still hurt.

  I winced into the store with a rictus grin. The shoe section was all the way in the back. A fifty-foot walk past the clothes I couldn’t afford, past the fortysomething newly rich couple from Silicon Valley who could, and past the saleswomen who were trying to decide whether to help me or not. I said, “Erm, I’d like to see those shoes in the window?”

  As usual, the salesperson asked which shoes, as if by forcing me back to the window and therefore the entrance, I might
wander out of the store on my own—which I sometimes did.

  But the shoes weren’t there.

  In fact, those shoes were so popular, another woman was trying on the only pair of eight and a halves left.

  That was my size.

  I don’t know what kind of expression I had on my face, but the salesperson immediately took pity on me.

  “They run small,” she said. She was sure she had a size nine. They’d probably fit perfectly.

  The woman who was trying on the eight and a halves was a classic Madison World lady. She appeared to be in her early forties but could have been older.

  Her hair was Madison World blonde, a color not too platinum or too gold, in a tone that is cheerful without being showy. The texture is bouncy, of a length that can’t be described as long or short. In other words, Madison World blonde is a pleasantly interchangeable hairstyle that looks good on many women and often causes them to look exactly alike, to the point where these women are often mistaken for other Madison World blondes, even by their own husbands.

  No matter. Madison World blonde is an aspirational, achievable, and sisterly color. It allows women who have never met to instantly bond and become friends, secure in the knowledge that they probably have some other Madison World lady in common.

  If I was going to fit in in Madison World, it was going to have to be some version of this. Which meant if the blonde was getting the shoes, I needed to have them as well.

  The salesperson came back out. She only had a nine and a half left.

  They would definitely be too large she said.

  “I’m going to try them anyway,” I said, countering with the universal line of female persuasion: “You never know.”

  She handed them over doubtfully.

  I unwrapped the shoes and placed them on the carpet. I slipped my feet in. I rose up from my seat. Up and up and up. The shoes, which had somehow looked much lighter and more delicate in the window, were actually huge clomping affairs that would require Pilates-style leg muscles to maneuver across the landscape of uneven pavement, steps, grating, and other obstacles that had to be negotiated when walking in heels.

  I took a step forward. Then another one. The shoes looked great and, at that moment, everyone in the store knew it.

  “But they’re too big,” the saleslady said.

  This was a little bit true. There was an eighth of an inch gap between my heel and the back of the shoe.

  “I can call our other stores. See if anyone has a size nine.”

  “No,” I said. “They’re fine. I can walk in them.”

  * * *

  The triumph of having secured the right shoe triggered something in my brain, and then I couldn’t stop shopping. When the fancy overpriced drugstore on the corner was going out of business with everything 50 percent off, I went on a mini spending spree. All of a sudden, I needed a whole bunch of things I hadn’t thought about for ages. Like leather gloves. Makeup brushes. Six bottles of normally forty-dollar shampoo.

  The penultimate splurge was a pair of hot-pink neoprene booties. I convinced myself it was okay to buy the booties because they were made of the same material as those swimming shoes, which also meant they were comfortable and a lot cheaper than leather.

  They weren’t entirely practical though. The color screamed: “Look at me.” Out in the real world, when your clothes scream “look at me” you’re supposed to be a six-foot model or at least an attractive young person. But I didn’t live in the real world. I lived in Madison World, home to a variety of fashionistas. In addition to the Madison World lady and actual models was another type: an older woman in garb that would be considered bizarre and inappropriate anywhere else.

  Up and down the avenue were women in neon colors and shiny gold accents. They wore head-to-toe black leather, lime-green tracksuits paired with platform sneakers, sequins and satin-striped pants that reminded me of the circus. And the hair. Dyed blonde mixed with sharp hues of bright pink and green and blue like peacock plumage. In true Madison World style, these birds of a feather stuck together. I’d see them congregating by a lamppost, smoking cigarettes. Or sitting outside Ladurée, in the green-and-white striped chairs eating pastel-colored macarons.

  I was pretty sure these women weren’t from Madison World, however. Proper Madison World ladies didn’t laugh loudly with their girlfriends on the corner or scream into their cell phones. They didn’t express excessive emotion in public. And mostly, they didn’t smoke cigarettes, much less smoke on the street.

  One day my curiosity got the better of me. When I saw a cluster of them standing in front of a store, I bummed a cigarette and stood close enough to overhear what they were saying.

  They were Russians. Or Russian-speaking people. This was interesting. A well-placed source in Madison World had told me that the Russians were mostly responsible for the huge spike in the rich tax. They could afford to pay full price on dresses in the shops, which had driven up the cost.

  Meanwhile, the Park Avenue princesses who were married to American billionaires were up in arms. Even they thought twenty thousand dollars was too much to pay for a party dress.

  And now the Russians were all over Madison World. And they weren’t just buying clothes.

  The Russians Get Me

  Meanwhile, with no other identity to choose from, I’d become that tired old urban cliché: the schlepper.

  It had been years since I’d been a schlepper, but I remembered it well and not fondly. You carried it all with you—your work, your shoes, your life—in handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department-store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks. You became slightly stooped from the weight as you sherpa’d your way around dirty slush, toxic-looking deposits, strollers, bike messengers, up and down escalators and subway stairs worn dangerously smooth. You lugged your stuff from work to bars to clubs and to the bathroom in those clubs and eventually back to your tiny bedsit. Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn’t have to schlep no more.

  My schlepping route often took me straight through Madison World, past what appeared to be a group of Russian youths who hung out on the stoop in front of a store. They were attractive and had that careless air of kids who know they’re cooler than you are. Sometimes they played music, but mostly they laughed and harassed passersby. I’d once seen them chase an unsuspecting woman to the corner, telling her they could help with her “sad eyes.”

  Every now and again a sinewy older guy who appeared to be in charge would come out and yell at them and tell them to get back to their real job: handing out free samples of face cream.

  No thanks.

  I hate taking samples. Hate having to make conversation with strangers. I managed to avoid the clutches of the Russians until one day one of the girls called out: “Hey, I like your style.”

  That stopped me in my tracks.

  After all, who knew style better than these kids? All day long they stood outside, watching the fashionable people walk up and down the giant runway of Madison World.

  Eventually, I struck up a passing acquaintance with these Russians. If I was in a good mood, I’d pass by and take a packet of face cream and talk about my dogs. If I was in a bad mood, I’d cross to the other side. While I’d see them ask other women to come inside the shop, I noted that they never asked me. I got the distinct sense they didn’t think I was quite good enough for their face cream.

  A day came when I was feeling particularly blue—too blue to cross to the other side. That middle-aged drumbeat of terror—it’s all downhill from here!—was pulsing in my head. I was convinced that nothing good would ever happen again, that age was about to take away all of life’s excitements and pleasures, leaving me with nothing but my own useless existence.

  On that day, the day when they got me, I was also par­ticularly laden with b
ags.

  “You’re so busy,” called out the girl who’d said I had good style. We usually exchanged a few bon mots as I passed; she was the friendliest and not actually Russian but Greek.

  I paused. For some reason, I wanted to explain. Yes, I was busy, but not doing anything particularly important.

  “You’ve got to relax,” said another.

  They were right. I did need to relax. “You smoke?” asked the slim guy who was the most disdainful, perhaps because he looked like a male model. He held out a pack of foreign cigarettes.

  They’d never offered me a cigarette before. I thought it would be rude to refuse, so I took it, while it crossed my mind that maybe they wanted to be friends with me.

  “Hey!” said the Greek girl. “You’re working so hard I’ll give you a special treat.”

  “Really?”

  “You want to get rid of the bags under your eyes?”

  Hell yes.

  She glanced over at the modelly guy, as if she needed his approval to “let me in.” As though he were the de facto bouncer at this secret face cream club.

  He looked me up and down, raised his eyebrows as if I were probably a lost cause, and nodded.

  I was in!

  * * *

  The interior didn’t disappoint. It was white and shiny, like one of those sleek stage sets on Broadway. Marble steps accented with gold led up to what could have been an actual small stage but instead contained the cash register.

  I knew I’d made a mistake. This place was expensive—far too expensive for my budget. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “Come on. It will only take five minutes.”

  I balked. “Five minutes” in Madison World was fifteen or twenty anyplace else.

  “You don’t have five minutes?” she asked, as if this couldn’t possibly be true. “Five minutes to look good for your boyfriend?”

  I laughed. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “Maybe after you have this treatment you will.”