Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  But when the car pulled into the entrance, Ess’s mood plummeted. It was so barren and concrete. Not at all what she’d been expecting.

  The people at the ranch were smiling, though, and nice, like the people at the hospital. Here they all wore light-blue uniforms accented with a darker hue. This should have worked, but there was something off about the shades of blue. Instead of going together, they clashed.

  The fact that she’d noticed reminded Ess of how out of place she felt.

  But then the guy who took their luggage began joking and perhaps even flirting with her, and Ess remembered why she was here: to have fun.

  She made a point of saying it out loud to the head therapists who asked them what their goals were for their stay. “I’m here to have fun!” Ess declared. This made the therapists smile and nod at each other in approval.

  “I’m here to have fun, too,” Jennifer said.

  As you can imagine, the two women’s ideas of fun were vastly different.

  For the first two hours, Ess tried her best. There weren’t treatments in the afternoon, so she and Jen sat out by the pool centered in an expanse of cement painted in swirly colors. Nearby was a vending machine selling healthy snacks.

  Jennifer pulled out a few small bills from her designer wallet and fed them into the machine. “Here.” She handed Ess a package of rice and dried tofu creations.

  They lay down on chaises on either side of an umbrella.

  “So,” Jen said. She pulled at the fluted cellophane containing raw pumpkin seeds. The seam gave way and a few seeds exploded onto Jen’s oiled belly. She carefully picked them up and placed them in a napkin. “So,” she repeated. “Tell me everything.”

  Ess began. But maybe because there was no alcohol, Jen didn’t seem as interested as she would have in the past. In the past, she’d have been excited about Ess’s relationship trauma. In the past, nothing was more interesting and important than relationship trauma.

  “Oh, Ess. I’m sorry,” Jen said.

  “I know. It’s boring,” Ess said. “I mean, what did I expect? I never loved him.”

  Jen nodded. She picked up the napkin with the seeds in it and got up to deposit it in a trash container stained with spilled iced tea.

  “You know,” she began when she returned. “It might be that it wasn’t all Eddie’s fault.”

  “What do you mean?” Ess was immediately on high alert.

  Jen considered. What did she mean? What she wanted to say was that if Ess could admit to her duplicity in the situation—­she did drink a bit too much, and she shouldn’t have married Eddie in the first place, and she needed to stop living her life relying on men—then perhaps she could learn from it. And become a better person.

  But Jen realized that now was not the time. Instead, she became soothing. “I didn’t mean anything. Only that when I got sectionorced, I really had to take a look at myself and how I was to blame for some of it.”

  Ess’s eyes narrowed. “Yes,” she said. “But that was over twenty years ago. And you cheated on your husband. And he caught you.”

  “I just meant—” Jen broke off.

  “I know, I know,” Ess said. “I’m tense. Maybe I need to lie down.”

  They agreed to part ways for a nap.

  Ess went into her room. She lay down on the bed, but it was hard and after five minutes she was bored with her own company. She checked her phone. Two of the guys from the plane had texted.

  One was staying in a hotel. The other one was at his house, which wasn’t far away.

  Ess texted him back and told him to pick her up at the gates of the spa and they’d go get a drink.

  They went to a TGI Friday’s.

  Ess had forgotten how good that food was, nachos with cheese and those fat canned jalapeños on top. She drank a few margaritas. She became drunk. It wasn’t necessarily a pleasant feeling.

  She asked if the guy could drive her back to the spa.

  He could. In fact, he seemed relieved to be rid of her. He dropped her by a side door.

  Ess went up the outside stairs. She thought she was on the second floor, but it turned out she was on the third floor. She didn’t know that though until she tried to open what she thought was her door and a woman in a bathrobe with goop on her face answered and said, “Honey, you’re lost.” And then Ess, like a goat that has no idea where to go, went down an elevator and over a glassed-in bridge that bisected the lobby. The woman at the front desk saw her and waved frantically, but Ess found another set of stairs and began climbing. She went down a long hallway, turning left three times. The fourth time she ran right into Jen, who was standing in the hall. She was in her robe and hotel slippers with a security guard by her side. “I’ll take things from here,” she said, pushing open the door to Ess’s room after the security guard unlocked it.

  “Oh sweetie,” Jen said. She pulled back the covers on the bed and shook her head. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ess called out gaily and waved her hand. Flapped it rather, like a bird with a broken wing.

  * * *

  “How are you feeling?” asked the head therapist the next morning. She put her moisturized hand on top of Ess’s shoulder and leaned in. “If you need to talk about your problem, I’m here.”

  “I’m fine,” Ess insisted.

  She was fine. She was hungover. Big deal.

  Except somehow, it was.

  It was the spa itself that was to blame Ess decided. Who could feel better in this bleak temple of health?

  No one. And so Ess came up with a plan.

  All afternoon she went about recruiting other women, from the line in the cafeteria to the steam room to the yoga mats, where women like her, who hadn’t exercised in a million years, struggled to hold the positions. Like Ess, it turned out that they, too, wanted to have fun. Like Ess, they, too, wanted to relive those youthful days when friendship meant going out to eat, drink, and be merry.

  Jen was a different story. It took a bit of work to convince her, but she finally relented, acknowledging that once upon a time she, too, had been one of those eat, drink, and be merry women.

  And so a group of six women went to a local place where there was old-fashioned line dancing. In the center was a dance floor ringed with picnic tables. There were guys in authentic cowboy gear. It had the feel of a tourist spot except it was real.

  They settled at an empty table. A harried server nodded her head at them as she spun away. “I’m going to order drinks at the bar,” Ess said, getting up.

  “I’ll come with you.” Jennifer took Ess’s arm. She glanced back at the women they’d left at the table.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “What do you mean? It’s fun.”

  “Well,” Jen said.

  “Look at those guys,” Ess said, indicating two men straight ahead. They were large, good old boy types. “Hot,” Ess declared.

  “Who?” Jen looked around then frowned in disbelief. “Them? Those guys? They are not hot.”

  Ess went over and started talking to them.

  In Jen’s telling, it just got worse from there. Ess started dancing. She got some woman to trade shoes with her. And then she might have found someone to give her some kind of drug.

  And that’s when it happened. The incident.

  Ess was propping herself up at the bar. While the muscles in her face were moving they had bypassed what could be considered normal expressions.

  Jen was triggered. By all kinds of things. Memories of the two of them twenty-five years ago. But mostly what set her off was that Ess was stumbling and incoherent and once again Jen was going to have to take care of her and mother her. Get her to put down her drink and come outside and maybe she wouldn’t have to stop in the bathroom first.

  And hopefully she wouldn’t puke.

  Ano
ther mess to clean up.

  “Ess!” Jen said. She said it more forcefully and maybe more disgustedly than she should have, but she was pissed. Nevertheless, her tone was what got Ess’s attention.

  Ess immediately went on the defensive, demanding to know what was wrong with Jen.

  Jen sighed. She knew she shouldn’t have spoken harshly. The more ramped up Ess got, the harder it would be to get her out of there. Which Jen, in her near sobriety, saw clearly was now her only mission, whether she liked it or not.

  She dropped her tone. “Come on, sweetie,” she said.

  Ess dropped the façade as well and became overly jolly. “Come over here and meet K,” she said, indicating the guy.

  Jen gave him her side head and said formally, “Nice to meet you. If you don’t mind, we’ve got to go.”

  “Maybe you’ve got to go,” the guy said.

  Jen looked at him dumbfounded. The men she knew didn’t speak to women like that. He couldn’t be serious.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Take a ride. Cash it outside. Me and your friend are having fun getting to know each other so why don’t you take off.”

  “Why don’t you take off,” Jen snapped. The rush of anger felt good.

  She turned back to Ess. “Let’s go.”

  “No,” Ess said.

  Jen looked around in frustration. She put her hands on her hips. “Ess. Please.”

  Jen was sure she saw Ess’s eyes flash just before she shouted, “Shut the fuck up!” And then her arm shot forward and a Frisbee-shaped puddle of beer struck Jen on the side of the face.

  The force of it knocked her head like a bobblehead doll. When her head snapped back, she realized her hair was wet along with half of her face. Panicked, she put her hands on her hair and when they came away, she almost expected to see blood.

  Instead it was only thin, foamy, piss-colored beer.

  “Oh my god,” Ess said and folded her hands over her mouth.

  Jen suspected she was laughing.

  She grabbed a handful of napkins, patted herself down as best she could, and took a taxi back to the spa.

  Showered and back in her bathrobe, Jen thought about sending Ess a long email telling her what she really thought of her. But she was too charged up. Then she called her husband and told him the story and cried. He told her to forget about it. That made her angry and so she unloaded on him about what a terrible person Ess was and her nice husband, who’d always liked Ess, was forced to concede that yes, he’d known there was something deeply wrong with Ess all along.

  “Et tu, Ess,” he whispered.

  Ess stayed at the cowboy place for another hour. The women from the spa had all disappeared, and so had the guy who’d caused the ruckus.

  She went out to the parking lot. She went behind a lamppost and cried for a little bit, but then she saw a cop and he called a taxi for her.

  The next morning, Ess took the first flight out. She didn’t talk to Jen. She didn’t talk to anyone.

  She had a drink at the bar before her flight and passed out nearly as soon as they closed the doors.

  It was early evening by the time Ess got home. Coming upon her house after a turn in the road, Ess was thrilled to see the familiar driveway and the pink-blooming magnolia tree where her dogs loved to lie on a summer afternoon. And there was the house itself. Somehow she’d forgotten how grand it was. And how when she’d first moved in with her boys, she’d thought she was the luckiest woman in the world.

  Back then, when she thought about her future, she vaguely envisioned Eddie dying before her and leaving her everything, including the house, where she would live out her latter days in peace.

  She knew now that wouldn’t be true.

  It was really all she knew.

  Moving on from MAM

  Eventually, Ess would figure it out. Most women do. Moving on from MAM means taking a good look at the reality of your life and discovering what you can build from it. A good example of this was Sassy’s friend, Margo.

  Like most women who experience MAM, Margo never expected to find herself in the position she was in: nearly sixty, single, and without a permanent place to live, with no income coming in and no job or career. At some point in the hazy future, she would get some money, when her soon-to-be ex-husband in Atlanta sold their house.

  Margo hadn’t had a regular job in twenty years, but she did have a talent. She could paint, and people were impressed with her paintings. Sassy and I each bought one and so did a few other friends, and this, we thought, could solve Margo’s money problems. We were sure a local gallery would discover her. They would start selling her paintings for ten, twenty, fifty thousand dollars and Margo would be saved. Surely, there were enough rich people in the vicinity for whom fifty thousand dollars was the equivalent of fifty dollars for everyone else?

  Of course, the reality was very different. Margo packed her paintings into the back of her Jeep and drove them around to galleries. She found one that could sell her paintings for twelve hundred dollars. Margo had to pay for the framing, however, which was expensive. After the gallery took their cut, she could expect to clear five hundred dollars. The store guessed that they would sell one or two paintings a month, which would add up to one thousand dollars. Not quite enough to live on in a place where the cheapest rent was at least two thousand a month.

  And so, that winter we worried. Not just about Margo but also about Queenie, who had had a couple of fainting spells. And about Marilyn, who was back to hiding in her house.

  There were no guarantees. While we’d sit around the fire at night, it didn’t escape us that while Margo had done everything that was once considered “right”—she’d worked, married, had children, and then she’d pulled back and out of the income stream in order to stay home, take care of the kids, and perform all the other endless duties of the reproductive lifestyle—it had left her with nothing. Meanwhile, Sassy and I, who had bucked the family tradition, were okay. We had houses and retirement plans and savings in the bank.

  Margo didn’t. She needed a job.

  Three months later she found one: measuring blinds for a decorating firm that did houses for the very rich.

  It paid fifteen dollars an hour for forty hours a week. That was six hundred a week, twenty-four hundred a month, nearly twenty-nine thousand a year, not including taxes, which was nearly the same salary she’d been making thirty-five years ago back in the early 1980s. Back in a different century.

  But it had health insurance. That was the good part.

  It was also a job she knew well. It had been her first job back when she was twenty-two and working for a famous decorator on the Upper East Side. It had been exciting back then. She was just starting out, convinced it was all going to work out for her.

  Now, nearly forty years later, she’d come full circle.

  Or she would have, if MAM hadn’t decided to give her one more chance.

  * * *

  At 8:00 a.m. on the morning that Margo was supposed to start her first day of work, the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Margo?” It was her brother. “Aunt Penny died.”

  Good old Aunt Penny. Margo’s father’s sister. She’d never married and had no children and had left all her money to Margo and her brother.

  And because Aunt Penny had always worked, she had quite a substantial IRA built up.

  And so Margo was saved! At least in the sense that she didn’t have to take the job measuring blinds.

  “A miracle,” Sassy declared.

  We all agreed that this was the result of Margo’s good karma. Of always being nice and being there for other people and look—the universe had finally decided to be there for her.

  Sort of. The money was just enough to afford her a small house in a rural area where it’s a twenty-minute drive to the supermarket.

 
Margo doesn’t mind. She says the solitude is worth it to pursue her dream of painting full time.

  Still, sometimes I worry about Margo. I ask Sassy questions. Is she lonely up there? Who does she see? Who does she hang out with?

  I wonder if she’s disappointed with her life, the way I sometimes am. And if she worries about the price she’ll pay for being a woman in the first place and not doing everything right, the way I often do. And then I calm myself with the mantra that has soothed women for ages when we ask those questions: It’s all about choices. Like we actually have control over our lives.

  chapter seven

  A Boy and His Father: An Adventure in Adjacent Mothering

  The boy and his father arrived in the middle of a heat wave.

  Inside my house, where I barely had air-­conditioning, I took a deep breath and reminded myself not to be annoyed. Not to be angry. Not to be upset that Max promised—­promised—that he and the boy would be here by two.

  It was now six.

  The phone rang and I grabbed it. Sassy. “Are they there yet?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, between gritted teeth. “They only left the city an hour ago.”

  “But I thought they were supposed to leave the city in the morning.”

  “They were. But the tents didn’t arrive.”

  “What?”

  “The tents. I found out this morning that Max ordered them online last night. Who does that? Who orders online at the last minute? He’s known they were coming for weeks.”

  “Honey. It’s called being a man,” Sassy reassured me. “If it gets too difficult, you can take them to Kitty’s. And Queenie’s. We’ll all help.”

  “Thank you.” I exhaled gratefully.

  “What’s the son’s name again?”

  I froze. “Something Icelandic?”

  “You don’t know?” she asked incredulously.