Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  She awoke from the operation to what she was told was more good news: “Doctor was able to make you just a bit larger. You’re now officially an E cup!” the nurse squealed, so that “E cup” came out like the sound a mouse might make. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

  Ess tried to take a deep breath and nearly panicked. There was an unfamiliar weight on her chest. The weight of breasts. Of sexiness. Of desire and of being desired. For a moment, she wondered what she’d done. Was she ready for this? She could tell the breasts were big from the weight. She wondered how she was going to maneuver these saline receptacles through the world—literally. Her breasts would be unavoidable, and everyone would look at them. The thought of men looking at her, of desiring her, turned her on again.

  “You’re going to have so much fun in your new body. Shopping, buying bras,” the nurse waxed on. “And now you have the perfect excuse to buy yourself a whole new wardrobe. You’ll see. Your entire life is going to change.”

  She looked wistful and why not? All women are familiar with the story of the makeover journey. Indeed, we relish it as a success story. If a woman can make herself over into a more pleasing, commercial, universally acceptable version of a stereotypical female, she can live an entirely different life.

  Indeed, Ess discovered that having this new body was almost like having a baby. Everyone was celebrating. But this time around she wasn’t tired and she looked amazing and she could drink. It wasn’t long before she’d made some new girlfriends. She met them at happy hour at a bar on the pier near the train station. Some of them were married, some weren’t, but they were all tanned and groomed and wore expensive clothes and, like her, had breast implants.

  Suffocating under the tacit disapproval of her parents, Ess took to leaving the house to cut loose with her new friends, who were sympathetic to her tale of woe. How she’d married the love of her life and he’d destroyed her and now she was going to do what she should have done in the beginning. She was going to marry a man for money.

  Outwardly, her friends applauded her. In the world of women, using a man for his money is payback for men using women for, well, just about everything.

  Nevertheless, while the idea of marrying a man for his money seems like a good one, the actual execution of it often proves vexing. Finding a man at all, even if he has an equal amount of money, is hard enough. In other words, when a woman says, “I’m going to find a rich man to marry,” most women are secretly thinking, “Yeah, right.”

  But Ess said it and did it. And that’s what makes her story a bit different.

  She also admitted that she wasn’t in love with the man, right up until her wedding day. This was also unusual. In the story of marrying a man for his money, the woman isn’t supposed to admit it. She’s supposed to at least pretend to love the guy. But Ess didn’t do that. As she got dressed in the ornate bridal suite in the thousand-dollar-a-night destination hotel, surrounded by her bridesmaids, Ess reminded everyone that she was only marrying Eddie for his dough.

  “Then don’t do it, sweetie,” begged a couple of her friends.

  “I have to. For my sons. Well, ladies,” she said as they lifted the bridal dress over her raised arms, “here goes nothing.”

  For the next five years, even though her husband, Eddie, was mean-spirited and selfish, never seeming to tire of telling her and other people how stupid she was, Ess didn’t complain. Her boys had a fine roof over their heads, and they had the best schooling, and that was what mattered. And when her husband began to drink more and occasionally became violent, she brushed it off. She’d made her bed and would lie in it and make the best of it even if she had to do it for the rest of her life.

  And then her husband went to the doctor and the doctor told him if he didn’t stop smoking cigars and drinking, he would die.

  Some men would have brushed this off—after all, everyone is going to die “someday”—but not Eddie. He was one of those middle-aged men who suddenly see the light and run right into it.

  Eddie returned from his doctor’s visit white and shaken. Ess was in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of white fruit sangria. When Ess saw Eddie’s pale, sweaty face, for a moment she thought he was having a heart attack, and for a moment her initial reaction was not one of fear or terror but of joy that perhaps her husband was going to die and solve all their problems. But life was not that kind.

  “I’m scared,” Eddie said.

  He immediately went on what was once known as a health kick.

  This happens when a person who always had very little interest in their body suddenly becomes obsessed. They take up exercise and everything that goes with it, like gadgets to measure their progress and count calories. And one by one, they begin giving things up: carbs, sugar, gluten, wheat, meat, and dairy. And, of course, alcohol.

  Back in the day, when this happened, everyone would kind of shake their heads and keep right on drinking that cocktail. Excessive interest in one’s health was considered self-­indulgent. You weren’t supposed to try to cheat god of his moment to decide when your time was up by trying to lengthen your life through exercise. Indeed, a sudden interest in one’s health was usually a sign that death wasn’t far behind. You could run as fast as you could, but death still caught up with you, as illustrated by the fact that it was common for middle-aged men to suddenly drop dead of a heart attack while running.

  That night, while Ess drank white sangria, she and Eddie got into a nasty fight. Eddie insisted that since he had to stop drinking, she had to stop drinking as well. She also needed to give up meat and carbs. When she objected, he told her she’d become fat and didn’t take care of herself and didn’t turn him on anymore. The next morning, Eddie stormed off to Miami where he checked himself into a seventy-thousand-dollar-a-month rehab facility.

  It worked. Sort of. Eddie returned sober, ten pounds lighter, obsessed with yoga and krav maga and kale. He also wanted a sectionorce.

  He left the house and went to stay at a fancy hotel.

  Ess began innocently nosing through his things. It wasn’t long before she found something: Yes, Eddie had gone to rehab for a month. But immediately afterward he’d gone to a hotel and paid thousands of dollars for transactional sex with a variety of women.

  Ess reached out to her girlfriends, who rushed to her side.

  More sordid details came out. How Eddie had once been so drunk he’d passed out on a plane and peed himself. How he had thrown a friend’s skis off the gondola because she asked him to put out his cigar. How he’d called Ess fat.

  Clearly, Eddie was the villain.

  Like many men, however, the ability to look at one’s sexist and abusive behavior and see anything wrong with it eluded Eddie. And yet, being a man, there had to be a winner and a loser. Since he could not be the loser, he had to try to be the winner. Which meant Ess must be demonized. Ess must be shown that it was all her fault.

  Eddie hired an attack-dog superlawyer and put him on to Ess. The superlawyer claimed that he’d heard Ess was telling people that Eddie was a bully, an abuser, and alcoholic, and now Eddie was going to sue her for slander on top of sectionorcing her.

  This new and unpleasant chest-thumping male in Ess’s life caused her very high levels of stress and anxiety. Each communication put her into a red-level fight-or-flight mode. She was practically bursting with cortisol.

  In fact, all that stress might have caused what happened next: one of Ess’s breast implants exploded.

  Tilda Tia pointed out that this wasn’t actually surprising. She said that breast implants often went wrong, and they didn’t last forever, although they usually didn’t tell you that before they put them in.

  And so, in the middle of this terrible sectionorce, Ess went into the hospital for the first of a two-part operation to remove the implant. When she awoke her chest was covered with slightly bloody crisscrossed bandages.

  She didn’t feel terrible t
hough. Not terrible enough to resist tempting fate by laughing at her situation and asking, “What else can go wrong, right?”

  If Ess were in any other time phase, this would have been a rhetorical question. But because Ess was in a MAM cycle, the answer to “what else can go wrong?” was “just you wait.”

  * * *

  On the third day of her recovery, Ess got a phone call from her brother informing her that her eighty-seven-year-old father had been out driving and hit a tree. He’d been taken to the hospital and pronounced dead fifteen minutes before.

  And as far as her brothers and her mother were concerned, it was all Ess’s fault.

  Ess had taken on the responsibility of her parents, checking in on them regularly and driving her father to the store or wherever else he wanted to go—often to the local diner—where they’d order bad-for-you sandwiches piled with processed meats and cheeses. But that ended when Ess became embroiled in her sectionorce and her medical emergency. Which was also her fault. She’d finally found a rich man, someone who could take care of her. And now she’d blown it. Couldn’t she do anything right?

  Ess began having bad MAM thoughts.

  Bad MAM Moments

  There are psychic moments in MAM that will make you want to scream. When you’ll stare in the mirror and see no reason for going on, when you’ll have a day that’s just like a black hole.

  Thoughts are like little feet. They start making a path that then becomes a trough of self-doubt and despair. What did I do to deserve this? Where did I go wrong? And: Is this really my life?

  That began to happen to Ess. Now, when she woke up, she started to think that maybe it would be better—for herself and everyone else—if she didn’t.

  But then she’d realize she was being silly and self-indulgent. She had her sons to think about. And the second operation to look forward to.

  And here, lady luck had finally tapped her magic wand. Because the implant had exploded, insurance would also cover the reconstruction, requiring liposuction and a small tummy tuck. In short, Ess’s body would be surgically reshaped.

  Ess took care in packing for the operation. She knew what to expect from her last visit. The constant beeping. The hazy, twilight sleep. The polyester hospital linens. The nice people on staff who were, when she thought about it, the only people who had been nice to her in the last six weeks. Who at least bothered to pretend to care and therefore perhaps did?

  Was such a thing possible?

  As Ess drove herself to the hospital, she realized she was looking forward to her stay.

  * * *

  The next morning, wrapped like a mummy in a tight girdle, support bra, and a gel sports wrap that was the latest technology in bandages, Ess returned home.

  She went through the heavy front door, through the double-­height foyer—a requirement in the homes of the affluent, as if there is no greater sign of money than needless headspace­—and went up one of the double staircases and into the master suite with its walk-in closet and hall of mirrors. She held out her cell phone. She took a picture.

  She sent it to five of her friends. Then she got into bed and slept for sixteen hours.

  One of those friends was Tilda Tia. She reported that the operation was a huge success and you couldn’t believe how amazing Ess looked.

  She showed us the most recent photos. Wearing black athletic wear over the support garments, Ess appeared to have shed half her body weight.

  “I can’t believe they can do that,” I said.

  “It’s incredible what they can do these days,” Tilda Tia said. “And thank god. Now at least maybe she can find another man. Because let’s face it. She doesn’t have a lot of options. It’s not like she can get a job.”

  I blanched.

  “It’s a reality,” Tilda Tia said scoldingly. “Not every woman has a big career. Look at Jerry Hall. She married an eighty-seven-year-old man. That’s what’s out there if you’re a woman like Ess.”

  “Except it’s a much lesser version,” Kitty pointed out. “Which is even more depressing.”

  Nevertheless, we all agreed the surgery was a triumph. Every friend’s triumph, no matter how they get there, is a triumph for all. It shows that maybe we can do what we’re all afraid we can’t: beat the odds.

  But MAM doesn’t work that way.

  MAM is like Medusa—cut off one head and two grow back.

  Two weeks later, while Ess was still at home recuperating, she got a call from her old friend Jennifer. She and Jennifer hadn’t seen each other for years, but Jen had heard about Ess’s situation and wanted to see how she was. Ess was grateful. She filled Jennifer in on her latest batch of troubles. She’d had to put the house on the market and Eddie had told the real estate agent she was an alcoholic. She missed her father terribly and her mother was still not speaking to her and wouldn’t let her have any of her father’s things. And her boys were away at camp and she was all alone.

  Jennifer suggested if not actually a solution, at least a break from her problems—a trip to a spa in Arizona. Jennifer had won the trip for two in a raffle. All Ess would need to pay for was her flight.

  Ess said yes. And it might have been just what she needed if MAM wasn’t about to light up the sky with stink bombs.

  Because in MAM, two women who once thought they had everything in common can suddenly discover their lives couldn’t be more different.

  Like Ess, Jennifer also had two children and had been married twice. At the beginning of her career as a real estate agent, Jen had met a perfectly fine man. They’d married and had two daughters, while Jennifer continued to work.

  By the time they were in their early thirties, they both cheated and the marriage fell apart. But unlike Ess’s situation, when her first husband left, Jennifer didn’t have to sell the house. In fact, she didn’t have to move or change her life at all. In a sense, she had it easy. Her life went on pretty much the same as before, with her working and taking care of her girls and the house, except that her husband was no longer in the picture.

  Eventually Jennifer met a wonderful man who was her age and also a real estate agent and they married and started their own firm together.

  Now, fifteen years later, they’re still together. They live in a very nice house and they have savings and lots of friends. Jen is close to her daughters, who live nearby. And soon, Jen knows, like her, her daughters will meet someone nice in their circle. They’ll marry, have children, and also work. Jennifer is her daughters’ role model.

  At one time, Ess thought her life—although perhaps not quite as happy—would end up resembling Jennifer’s.

  Now it wouldn’t. A fact neither one would realize until they clashed in Arizona.

  Jennifer, who was traveling from a different airport, got up early to do a yoga class before her flight. Ess, meanwhile, woke up late and flustered. She’d been drinking too much and doing some of it alone. In the past, drinking would have eased the pain, and usually when she woke up, everything was generally okay. Now that was no longer true. She drank, she woke up, and something else was wrong again. Like her passport was about to expire.

  But she noticed something different as she walked through the airport. People weren’t casting their eyes away at the sight of her the way they had before the surgery. It had to be her new body. She smiled at one or two, and when they smiled back, she began to think that this trip was going to be the perfect tonic for the lousy last few months.

  Ess made her way to the bar. She and the bartender immediately got into a conversation and she found out everything about his life and how he lived an hour from the airport and had to get up every morning at 5:00 a.m. He ended up giving her two free drinks and she gave him a forty-dollar tip she couldn’t afford.

  On the plane, Ess made more new friends. A woman and three men. They had a jolly time and the people around them didn’t mind when they got a bit too loud. The p
assengers were either going on vacation or going home, heading to people and places they looked forward to seeing.

  Ess landed in Arizona with the sickening thud that happens when all the alcohol you’ve consumed on the flight coagulates into a roaring hangover in regular atmosphere. There was only one way to combat it: with a small sip of something.

  She went to a bar, ordered a glass of red wine, and picked up her phone. She had four texts from Jennifer.

  Where are you? Are you okay?

  The texts annoyed her. She wanted to write back: What are you, my mother?

  Just landed, she wrote. She chugged down the glass of wine, partly in defiance.

  * * *

  * * *

  Outside the revolving door, the heat was dry and heavy.

  “Hiiiiii,” Jennifer said. She was waiting just outside, glancing from her phone to the exit. “Oh my god,” she exclaimed. “You look amazing.”

  “Thank you,” Ess said. “I feel amazing.”

  “Well, wow,” Jen said.

  “You look great,” Ess said.

  Jen gave a modest head drop to the side. It was her trademark gesture when people told her how good she looked. Jen was beautiful and she’d never gained a pound and she hadn’t had plastic surgery and yet she looked at least fifteen years younger, thanks to her careful years of clean living. She was also an incredibly nice person, as if she knew she’d been blessed with these great looks but it wasn’t important to her. She was annoying, Ess remembered. That might have been one of the reasons they didn’t end up being the bestest of friends. Jen’s very control of her physical self was a sort of rebuke to others. If she could do it, why couldn’t you?

  During the ride, the driver extolled the beauty of the Arizona landscape. They passed small, crumbling ranch houses with pokey horses in pens, then orange stucco developments, acres and acres of them reaching to the bottom of the mountains and then strip mall after strip mall until they came to an area where there were trees and green grass and sprinklers and upscale chain restaurants.