Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  “So they got you,” Queenie said when I returned to the Village that weekend.

  “Yes, they did.”

  “How much?”

  “Eeeee.” I hedged. Could I tell her the truth? No. I couldn’t even tell myself the truth. I couldn’t digest it.

  “Maybe two or three thousand?” I lied.

  I couldn’t explain it to myself. Was it possible that Krystal had somehow hypnotized me into spending all that money? Or was it just that I was too afraid to hurt her feelings or make her angry.

  There was another part I didn’t want to admit, and it was that I really wanted that face cream. But mostly, I really wanted that face cream to work.

  I needed something to make sense. To not be a complete and utter waste of time.

  Using the products wasn’t easy. My routine involved doing drippy masks and having to lie down with slimy pads over my eyes. It meant scheduling time to take care of my skin.

  But damn if that face cream didn’t work and damn if it didn’t happen exactly the way Krystal said it would.

  For the first six weeks, no one noticed. But then I went to my dermatologist and he exclaimed that my rosacea had improved. After three months, my housekeeper insisted that I looked much younger and happier. After four months, I ran into old friends and they said they didn’t recognize me I looked so youthful.

  I knew the effects wouldn’t last forever. The question was, what would I do when the cream ran out?

  It happened sooner than expected. Just when my skin was at the peak of dewiness, three of the products ran out at once. And so I did what any sensible person would do and looked up the ingredients online and found other products that claimed to do the same thing and were much cheaper.

  And then I didn’t think about it, until finally, after the longest winter, the days began to warm up and the residents of Madison World came out, once again, into the sun.

  And once again, the jewels glinted behind their plate glass windows while the mannequins sported outfits you could only wear in your imagination.

  But not everything was the same. There were more dark places. Empty stores boarded up behind brown construction paper.

  And so it was with a strange sort of relief that I discovered the Russians were still there on the stoop, harassing passersby.

  I wondered if they would recognize me.

  “Hey!” called out the Greek girl. “I really like your style.”

  I paused. Was this groundhog day?

  Then I was annoyed. “Are you kidding me? Don’t you remember? I came in here six months ago and got suckered into buying that face cream.”

  “You’re one of our customers?” The girl looked at me as if she couldn’t believe it. Was I not good enough for this store or just too wrinkled to be one of their clients? And then I got it. Maybe she couldn’t believe I would be that stupid.

  Here, she said, and pressed a sample packet of face cream into my hands.

  I took it.

  chapter six

  Middle-Aged Madness

  “You won’t believe what’s happened,” Tilda Tia said.

  “Try me.”

  “You know how Ess and Jennifer went to that wellness retreat?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, apparently they got into a big fight and Ess threw a drink in Jennifer’s face.”

  I should have been surprised, but I wasn’t.

  Ess, fifty-three, and Jennifer, fifty-seven, are generally what are known as “nice” people. They rarely disagree with anyone and will happily sacrifice their feelings in order to prevent anyone else from feeling bad. In fact, they often go further, eager to take on blame for things that are clearly not their fault. These are the kind of women who watch Real Housewives and are sure it’s completely made up.

  But then something happens.

  I call it middle-aged madness, or MAM.

  MAM Strikes A Village

  The weather might have partly been to blame. At eighty degrees, low humidity, and bright sunshine, it was the kind of weather that demanded gatherings and, of course, libations.

  Indeed, it wasn’t long before friends of friends began hearing about this fun time in the Village and began inviting themselves to stay. And that’s when the trouble began.

  First Sassy’s friend Margo who had just decided to separate from her husband in Atlanta and was “trying out” single life went on a boating trip with a cub. Like most cub events, it lasted a lot longer than Margo expected, meaning she had a few too many drinks in the hot sun and got arrested in the parking lot of the marina when she tried to drive.

  Then it spread to Marilyn.

  Two months earlier Sassy and I could barely get Marilyn to leave her house. Now Marilyn wanted to go out. Every day and every night. She was at every party, invited or not. There was a flock of women from Europe staying in the Village with Queenie and soon they were all publicly removing their tops with SanTropez abandon.

  The fights started when men began showing up. Kitty and Margo had words over a friend of Kitty’s who was flirting with both of them. Marilyn and Queenie had words over something Marilyn said to Queenie’s out-of-state boyfriend. Tilda Tia was having words with anyone who was willing to have words back.

  And then Marilyn and I nearly came to blows.

  There’d been a strange tension between me, Sassy, and Marilyn since the beginning of the summer that increased as the days got longer. Maybe because we’d never hung out in a pack of women before and Marilyn was playing to the crowd, but she began doing and saying things that felt curiously out of character. Having always insisted she was a behind-the-scenes kind of person, Marilyn became the center of attention, telling indiscrete stories about people and places that Sassy and I had never heard before. Of course, the women who’d just met Marilyn thought she’d always been like this.

  It was impossible to explain that she hadn’t and so, for a while, this before and after Marilyn caused a lot of confusion. One afternoon it came to a head, when Marilyn walked in to find me, Kitty, and Tilda Tia at the kitchen table. I don’t remember the particulars of what set us off, but suddenly we were furious at each other.

  I said, “I don’t know who you are anymore.”

  She said, “This is who I am. This is the new me.”

  Then she grabbed her stuff and made to storm off.

  “Don’t you run away again the way you always do.” I knew I sounded like an idiot because the truth was, Marilyn hadn’t ever “run away” before because Marilyn and I had never had a confrontation.

  And then the words came out like a slap.

  “Fuck you!” Marilyn said.

  I gasped. In twenty years of friendship, we’d never used the “F” word on each other. I couldn’t believe it. What the hell was happening?

  “How dare you!” I shouted, as we squared off in the dining room.

  My heart was pumping in my stomach. This anger was deep and disturbing and atavistic, like I was confronting something evil that wasn’t Marilyn. It seemed impossible that we could be this angry at each other. We raised our hands as if to strike.

  We froze.

  Something washed over us and we came to our senses.

  I turned away and she turned away, or maybe it was the other way around. We separated. She out the front door and into her car and me back to Kitty’s kitchen.

  We each immediately called Sassy.

  Sassy gave us a stern talking-to that we were grown women and we couldn’t behave this way. This, she said, wasn’t us.

  She was right. It was MAM.

  MAM vs. Midlife Crisis

  On the surface, MAM resembles what people used to call a midlife crisis.

  Years ago, this crisis happened mostly to men and mostly when they were around forty. It was considered a rite of passage, a railing against the restraints of society. Tho
se fetters being the familial obligations and “the man” or the corporation where, once upon a time, most men worked. Back in the heyday of the male midlife crisis, a man would do stuff like buy a motorcycle or start reading Playboy or have an affair. Sometimes the midlife crisis led to sectionorce but not necessarily. It was considered a phase. Something that men went through.

  Women, meanwhile, weren’t allowed to have a midlife crisis. What they had instead were nervous breakdowns, which today we would call undiagnosed depression. And so, in the midlife crisis of old, while men ran around, women went to bed and pulled the covers over their heads.

  Today, having a midlife crisis at fortysomething just sounds dumb. First of all, lots of people don’t even find a partner and/or start having children until they’re forty. At forty, people are finally beginning to grow up and behave sort of like adults. They buy places outside of big cities and have typical reproductive lifestyles that revolve around their children and the children-adjacent adults that children inevitably attract and that reproducers are invariably forced to call “friends.”

  Because today’s reproductive lifestyle is so busy and exhausting and fraught, because it eats up so much psychic and emotional energy, it actually acts as a deterrent to a midlife crisis. There is simply no time to query the meaning of life or to ask the great question: Why am I here?

  But just because the reproductive lifestyle pushes off a midlife crisis, it doesn’t mean it goes away. It only means it happens later in life. Usually at a time when a midlife crisis couldn’t be more inconvenient because a whole bunch of other major life-changing events—like sectionorce, death, moving, menopause, children leaving the nest, and the loss of a job—are happening as well.

  It didn’t used to be this way. At one time, fiftysomething meant the beginning of retirement—working less, slowing down, spending more time on hobbies and with your friends, who, like you, were sliding into a more leisurely lifestyle. In short, retirement-age folk weren’t expected to do much of anything except get older and a bit fatter and to need to go to the doctor and the bathroom more. They weren’t expected to exercise, start new business ventures, move to a different state, have casual sex with strangers, get arrested, and start all over again, except with one-tenth of the resources and in many cases going back to the same social and economic situation that they spent all of their thirties and forties trying to crawl out of.

  But this is exactly what the lives of a lot of fifty- and sixty­something women now look like today.

  The Exploding Breast Implant and the Happily Unhappily Ever After Story

  Take Ess. In many ways, her story is typical of a woman in MAM, with the exception that her MAM story takes place in the cushioned world of the 1 percent. Meaning, theoretically, Ess should always be able to afford a roof over her head.

  Ess is not a paragon of female virtue, nor is she meant to be. She’s a representation of a certain kind of woman who does what society tells women they should do, who wants what society tells women they should want, and who’s found it’s best not to think too deeply about it.

  Ess grew up in Southern New England in a large ranch house in a development of new houses. It was one of those places where everyone makes relatively the same income and enjoys a similar lifestyle and dresses in a similar manner, in clothing from the same outlet stores and catalogues.

  Ess had two older brothers and a younger sister. Ess and one brother, Jimmy, got the looks. Her sister, who looked exactly like her mother, was considered the smart one. Ess was Daddy’s little girl. Like a lot of men in those days, Ess’s father was what would now be considered an alcoholic but back then was considered an “everyday drinker.” He returned from the office at five and threw back three G&Ts by the time Ess’s mother tried to make everyone sit down for dinner at six. Sometimes Dad’s drinking was a good thing. Sometimes not so good. When it wasn’t so good, Ess figured out that by amusing and entertaining her father she could jolly him out of his terrible mood and everyone in the family was silently grateful. This she figured out, was her job. Probably for life.

  When she graduated from high school, Ess assessed her cards. She was tall and slim, with a figure that was labeled “athletic,” a euphemism for flat chested. Ess was a solid A cup.

  This was a major bummer. Being flat chested was on the very top of the list of egregious female imperfections, above “fat,” “hairy,” and “fat and hairy.” Being flat chested was considered an abnormality, an insult to the male gender, the facts of which her brothers never tired of reminding her. They weren’t the only ones. All through tenth grade she’d been bullied by one particular boy about her lack of plentitude. He used to drive by her house on his motorcycle and shoot at her with his BB gun.

  “Someday I’m gonna kill you,” he’d shout.

  “It’s because he likes you and he doesn’t know how to express it,” her mother said, although Ess knew this was a lie. He really did hate her.

  And as she looked at herself in the mirror, Ess realized there was a way to get revenge on that boy and all the others like him: become a model.

  She succeeded. She worked a lot, enough to support herself in the world of money, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll where models could spend their time when they weren’t in front of the camera. Unlike a lot of other girls, though, Ess never expected that lifestyle was going to be her life. She wanted the kind of loving, rough-and-tumble family she’d had as a kid.

  At twenty-five, Ess married the love of her life, a handsome, former professional soccer player from Ireland who’d transitioned into working in commercial real estate. It was considered an auspicious pairing. Ess was a social dynamo—the kind of person who knew how to oil the water between strangers, who could draw out an intimate confession from the most powerful man in the room. She was a woman who was a fixer, a woman who wasn’t dangerous. A woman who liked to help you solve your problems. Her husband, meanwhile, with his sports background, impressed all her relatives at their Fourth of July barbeques.

  The marriage was good for about five years and then real life rushed in.

  Ess had two boys. They moved out of New York and her husband lost his contacts and made less money and she tried to work but the only thing she’d ever made money at was modeling and there was no way she was ever going to have the body to do it again. The situation continued for another few years, and then her husband, now in his early forties, had his midlife crisis and ran away.

  It turned out her husband had no money. It was an easy sectionorce because there was nothing to split up.

  With nowhere else to go, Ess moved back home, back to the ranch house where she’d grown up. Except this time, it was her sons in her brothers’ bedrooms and herself in her frilly pink childhood bed.

  Her parents loved their grandchildren. But they were in their seventies, smack in the middle of what was once a typical retirement that included several hours of golf each day and weekend getaways to Mohegan Sun where they went to see Celine Dion. A sectionorced forty-two-year-old daughter and her two sons living at home was not their idea of what their life should look like.

  If this were a made-up story, this is the part where Ess would determine to change. She would stop letting life happen to her and take actions that would enable her to write her own narrative. She would find a place to live for her and her two nearly teenage boys that was small but clean and fix-up-able and she would paint the walls herself and would magically get her boys to help her. When they threw paint at each other and laughed, we’d know that Ess was going to turn this boat around. That she was going to find a job at a bakery where she would discover a secret talent for cake decoration­—and all would be fine. In the stories women tell each other, the woman always has some special skill or unfound “gift” that allows her to make money, take care of herself and her children, and keep her dignity.

  Real life, however, doesn’t always work that way.

  In the mirror of h
er childhood bedroom, Ess once again summed up her assets: Her face still looked good. Her legs still looked good. But her breasts—her goddamned breasts again—they looked bad. Two flesh sacks in the shape of torpedoes. Against her mother’s warnings—“small breasts don’t recover from breastfeeding” she’d hissed every time Ess had unbuttoned her shirt—Ess had breastfed. She’d wanted to protect her boys from damage, only to discover there were no defenses against life’s random bad luck.

  In the old world, the world where people stayed together, sagging breasts and outward signs of aging didn’t matter. But back in this world they did.

  Hence Ess’s visit to the breast surgeon.

  Ess got his name from one of her friends and when she went in, she was surprised to find that he was a stumpy, ordinary-­looking fellow who reminded her of someone’s father. He wore an optical mask over his face that obscured his eyes and made him resemble a robot.

  The nurse, who was in the room the whole time, gently pulled the paper gown below Ess’s shoulders to reveal the lifeless flesh. Looking away, the surgeon carefully handled her breasts as if he were weighing counters in his hands.

  He slid back on his stool and sighed. She straightened, quickly pulling up the gown.

  “I think I can make you very, very happy,” he said.

  “You can?”

  “I can make you a D cup. Maybe even a double D. You’ve got lots of extra flesh.”

  “Is that good?” she asked.

  “It’s terrific,” the nurse nodded. “It means they can be bikini-model big.”

  “Like a twenty-one-year-old,” the doctor said proudly.

  Luckily, Ess wanted to look like a twenty-one-year-old. Otherwise the whole thing would have creeped her out.

  She had to pay for the procedure up front: thirty-five hundred dollars put on her credit card.