Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  And while Brad was merely behaving like a typical man in a typical heterosexual relationship, Rebecca decided this wasn’t okay after all.

  She broke up with him the next morning.

  Brad was devastated. Marilyn saw him at a meeting and he started crying when he talked about Rebecca and how much he’d cared for her. That’s how sensitive and wonderful these new middle-aged men were, and Marilyn said Rebecca was a real fool to break up with him. He was a great guy and he had everything.

  A couple of months later, Rebecca was dating someone else. I wondered if middle-aged dating was not going to end up being some beautiful new experience, as Rebecca had hoped, but instead just another version of the serial dating we did back in our twenties and thirties.

  What would that be like?

  I got some idea when a couple of super middles came to stay at Kitty’s.

  Like many super middles, they were in their sixties. This makes sense, considering that MAM can eat up more years than you think. By the time you get it together, you’ve clocked another decade. But that might be the only thing that’s older about these super middles.

  Kimberly, sixty-one, and Steven, sixty-seven, were a good example. Kimberly was once an actress, but she’d given it up when she had kids. Steven, who used to be an Olympic skier, was now a ski instructor in Aspen. We weren’t sure what their relationship was. Steven was an old friend of Kitty’s, and when he asked if he could come and stay, she said yes. She thought maybe he would turn out to be interested in her, but then he called and asked if he could bring a friend.

  “Is she his girlfriend?” I asked. “Why is he bringing her?”

  “I have no idea,” Kitty said.

  They arrived with several bags, which they put in the same room. Like so many super middles, they were obsessed with their health. After unpacking their bags, they brought down containers of special vitamins and tinctures that needed to be stored in the refrigerator.

  They went back upstairs, put on their bathing suits, and went outside.

  They had typical super middle bodies. Meaning, due to the ten or twelve or so hours they put into exercise every week, they were in far better shape than most people of any age. And they knew it. They were not the least bit afraid to strut around in their sixtysomething bodies clad in just small scraps of fabric.

  They did that for a while and then they spotted the paddleboards. When a super middle sees any kind of board, they’re compelled to get on it. Sure enough, the two dove into the water, swam around the paddleboards, and vaulted on top. When I saw them paddling back thirty minutes later, I made Kitty go outside with me.

  “I hate them,” Kitty said.

  “I do, too. But we have to be friendly. Otherwise we’ll look like the weird ones.”

  When they got back to land, I tried to make conversation by asking Kimberly about how the paddle had gone. “It was beautiful. It was so Zen.” She looked me up and down. “You should try it.”

  I smiled. I have, I wanted to say, and I didn’t find it at all Zen. And neither did Kitty.

  I suddenly realized that it might be difficult to communicate with these super middles. They were all about vitamins, exercises, and Zenness, a language Kitty and I didn’t speak.

  But then I found something Kimberly and I could talk about. She had an invention!

  She wasn’t the first super middle woman I’d met who’d recently invented something. One had invented a filter for a phone screen. Another had come up with a formula for a new kind of fabric. Kimberly had invented a machine that could destroy cellulite. A lot of people were clamoring for it and now she had to figure out how to manufacture the machine. She’d just gotten back from a trip to China.

  On the first night at the hotel, she cried. She was afraid she couldn’t do it. Afraid she was a fraud. She called her son.

  “You can do it, Mom,” he said. “We know you can do it. We believe in you.”

  She hung up and she did it. She was there for ten days. It was her company and she was working all the time, trying to get it right.

  Now she finally had a free weekend and she wanted to relax.

  I brought the topic around to Steven. Were they together?

  The answer was complicated. Steven was still married, but he didn’t live with his wife anymore, who lived in Denver. In any case, he had out of the blue asked her to come on this trip and she said yes. They were old friends from the 1980s. He was a “great guy” and she’d always “loved him as a person.”

  He and Kimberly came into the kitchen to take more vitamins. They talked about the benefits of B12, then suggested we all take a B12 capsule. Kitty and I passed. Kimberly told us this was probably a good idea because we could potentially be in the 5 percent of the population who’re allergic to B12 and will blow up like a balloon upon taking it. Then they reassured us not to worry about them and went back up to their room.

  Some time passed. Enough that Kitty and I became curious. “What kind of houseguests go up to their room in the middle of the afternoon and just stay in there?” she asked.

  “Maybe they’re having sex.”

  I went upstairs to find out.

  As I crept down the hall, I heard music and giggling. Their door was open a crack, probably because it didn’t quite shut unless you closed it hard.

  I peeked inside. I got a split-second glance of them lying on the bed in their bathing suits laughing at some private joke they found hilariously funny before they spotted me.

  “Hello?” Kimberly said.

  “Come in,” Steven said, sitting up.

  “Yes?” Kimberly asked.

  “Um,” I said. It was summer, so I asked the obvious question: “Do you want some corn?”

  “Corn?” Kimberly said. She looked at Steven. “I’m so fucking sick of corn. No, I don’t want any more corn.” And then they both laughed.

  “What are you, the hall monitor?” Steven said, which made them laugh even harder.

  I felt like the teenage geek who’s just stumbled upon the head cheerleader and the quarterback making out. As I took refuge in the kitchen, I wondered if middle-aged dating was going to end up being just like high school.

  Was this cycle of mate selection and rejection going to go on forever?

  Later I asked Queenie: “If you and your boyfriend broke up, would you try to find someone else?”

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “What about if you were sixty?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seventy?”

  “Of course.”

  “Eighty?”

  “Why not?” Queenie brought up a mutual friend who was eighty-three and had recently found a new boyfriend.

  And indeed, why not. In middle-aged dating and beyond, people aren’t partnering up to get a life. They already have a life—children and exes and parents and work—so this time around, a relationship is about enhancing your life. It reminded me of the relationship theory we’d spout to ourselves back in our twenties and thirties: a relationship should be the icing on the cake of your life, not your life.

  And now, apparently, this was possible.

  “What about you?” Queenie asked. “If you and your MNB broke up, would you try to find someone else?”

  I didn’t know the answer to that question. But Marilyn did.

  * * *

  * * *

  Marilyn had decided that she and her MNB were going to get married. He hadn’t asked her yet, but she knew he was going to, very soon. They were going on vacation in Italy and he had a jeweler friend there and said he wanted to buy her a ring.

  And in the time-honored way in the world of women, Marilyn already had the wedding planned out.

  They’d get married on the beach where they loved to walk. Then they’d go to the nearby miniature golf course for the wedding meal. The clubhouse had a small, old-timey
restaurant that served breakfast all day, so the wedding guests could have a feast of pancakes and bacon, waffles, sausages, real maple syrup, French toast, and several types of eggs benedict served with a thick hollandaise sauce.

  We would all be bridesmaids I was sure. Me, Sassy, Kitty, and probably half a dozen other women—Marilyn had a large network of girlfriends—all of whom adored her and would do anything for her. I suggested that we walk from the beach to the miniature golf course. It was only about a mile and a half, and that way we’d get in twenty minutes of exercise to mediate the thousands of calories we would consume at the wedding breakfast.

  Sassy wondered if we should all wear hats. She was going to wear a hat and she wasn’t going to walk.

  Kitty didn’t want to walk either and had already decided she wasn’t going to eat any of the breakfast and would only have coffee. We wondered if the whole bridesmaids thing was silly. Then we decided we should do what we wanted. Why should we care what other people thought?

  Marilyn said she wanted someone to scatter rose petals on the beach.

  The very idea of Marilyn’s wedding felt like a triumph. Of the possible over the impossible. Of the moving forward against decline. Of personality and passion and belief over age and MAM and whatever else life throws at you.

  Marilyn’s getting married felt like proof that every once in a while, just like in a movie, a person can get their happy ending. And of all the women we knew, it felt like Marilyn deserved hers the most.

  But life just doesn’t work that way.

  chapter ten

  Middle-Aged Sadness: Marilyn’s Story

  The year before, at the end of that MAM winter when we’d all been scared about our futures, Marilyn took these fears one step further and slit her wrists. Although she slit them vertically and not horizontally—a difference she’d looked up on the internet she would explain later—Marilyn did not die. Instead she bled for two hours and then got in her car and drove herself the half mile to the walk-in clinic. She was swiftly transported to Southampton Hospital, from which she was able to make a few quick phone calls before being transferred to the state clinic mid-island.

  Every couple of days I’d get a phone call from her and she’d tell me about it. It was grim. No matter what happened she said, she was never, ever going back there again.

  They finally let her out ten days later. Marilyn’s brother flew in from Australia to take Marilyn back to Sydney. And it was there that Marilyn finally got the right diagnosis: she was bipolar.

  It made sense. Her father was bipolar as well. Even so, Marilyn resisted the diagnosis at first. She told me she cried when the doctor told her. She couldn’t accept it. She didn’t want to be a bipolar person. She was ashamed.

  But the doctor explained it was really just a disease, like diabetes. Lots of people had diabetes and they managed it by taking medication.

  Marilyn vowed to change her life. She stopped drinking, and she exercised every day. She saw her shrink regularly and looked better than she had in years.

  And she fixed up her house. It was now pristine, a pretty white house that sat straight up on top of a small hill, with a violet-colored front door. Violets being her favorite flowers, and “Violet” being the name of both her grandmother and her former dog.

  Her gardens were in bloom. Marilyn had been working on them for three years, including a year of mulching. At the beginning, I’d gone with her to the gardening classes she attended every Sunday morning at ten like a regular churchgoer. I abandoned them after fidgeting through a sixty-­minute lecture about the right way to water plants. But Marilyn kept at it, and now her hard work was paying off. She and her house had come a long way.

  And once again, we could talk. Especially about that MAM summer when we’d had the terrible altercation. She hadn’t realized it, but she was manic at the time.

  Was she sure about getting married? I asked. Why, when she didn’t have to?

  “Because I’ve finally found him,” she said. “My man.”

  * * *

  Marilyn and her MNB went to Italy and Marilyn came back with a gold ring with two diamonds, although she insisted that technically they weren’t officially engaged. And then three months passed. Three months in which Marilyn seemed more than happy. Indeed, everyone said she was better than ever. She was working and she was very, very fit. She would stare adoringly at her MNB at the parties and dinners we sometimes attended now as a foursome with my MNB.

  And then, as usually happens with the addition of a relationship, Marilyn and I didn’t see each other as much as we used to. None of us did. Marilyn was busy. She was planning to airbnb her house during summer weekends and spent all her spare time organizing her belongings to get it ready.

  It wasn’t until two weeks after Memorial Day that Kitty, Sassy, and I compared notes and realized that none of us had actually talked to Marilyn for a few days. I thought I had the answer: Marilyn was sick. The day before, she had canceled on a girls’ lunch at the last minute, claiming she wasn’t feeling well.

  Now we tried calling her to no avail. A couple of minutes later, we got a text. Her health insurance was canceled and did we know of a good insurance company?

  Insurance issues weren’t unusual for Marilyn. Over the years, as a single woman with her own business, with financial ups and downs, and with a variety of small medical issues, Marilyn occasionally had these battles. Sassy texted her a few recommendations.

  Another day went by. Marilyn texted Sassy that her MNB was going to help her figure out her insurance and not to worry after all.

  We were worried. But unlike in the past when she’d had difficult days, this time Marilyn wasn’t alone in her house. She was staying with her MNB.

  I knew this for a fact because her car was parked at his place. I passed by every day on my way to the beach, the same beach where Marilyn was hoping to get married.

  That Saturday, when I saw her car, I thought about stopping in. But then I didn’t want to bother her. It would be rude to go barging in on her when she was at her boyfriend’s house.

  Late Sunday afternoon, when I passed the house again, I noticed that Marilyn’s car wasn’t there. I assumed this meant the renters had vacated and Marilyn had gone back to her place.

  I called her, but it went to voice mail.

  When I went to bed, I tried her again. Her mailbox was full. This was strange. Marilyn always checked her messages. I decided to stop by her house the next morning.

  I never got there. I was prevented by a strange set of circumstances that I still can’t explain to this day.

  I woke late and decided to run some errands in town and then because it was a beautiful day to bike over to Marilyn’s house.

  I wrote out some checks for bills, placed stamps on the envelopes, and stowed them in the zippered bike pouch along with my wallet and cell phone.

  My first stop was the bank. I plucked my wallet out of the bike pouch, went into the bank, and stuck my card in the ATM.

  Immediately there was a problem.

  “Transaction denied.”

  I felt a sense of foreboding.

  “What the hell?” I stomped over to a teller. “There’s something wrong with my card.”

  A sigh. “It’s probably the machine.”

  It wasn’t. We tried all the machines and then the people in the bank tried their computers and still couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so they did the transactions by hand.

  I left the bank not at all reassured. On my way out, a young man called my name. “Hey, Candace. How are you?”

  “Fine?” I said, flustered. Who was this guy and how did he know me?

  “I recognized your bike outside.”

  Ah, right, the guy from the bike shop. “It’s a beautiful day for a ride,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” I replied.

  My mood lifted. I reminded mys
elf that the bank incident was but one small glitch in what would undoubtedly be a good day. I’d head to the post office next, then over to Marilyn’s.

  But as I approached my bike, I noticed that something else was wrong. The bike pouch was unzipped.

  I hadn’t left it like that, had I? If I had, that would be unusual. But perhaps I hadn’t been paying attention. I opened the flap and gasped.

  It was empty—or at least the bills were gone. My cell phone was still there.

  Had I been robbed? If so, why hadn’t they taken my cell phone?

  I approached a young traffic cop, ruddy faced and barely an adult, who was standing in the crosswalk.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Did you see anyone lingering around that orange bike over there?”

  He glanced over. “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I think I’ve been robbed.”

  That got his attention. He strolled over, grasping the intercom on his shoulder and bringing it closer to his mouth, as if ready to report the crime. “What’d they take?” he asked.

  “Some mail.”

  “Mail?”

  “Bills.”

  He put down the walkie-talkie. “Why would anyone take someone’s bills?”

  I struggled to explain. “They weren’t really bills. They were checks. You know. When you pay bills? They had stamps on them.”

  “Why would anyone take that?”

  I could see how I looked to him: a confused middle-aged woman with frazzled hair and a neon green safety vest on an orange bike insisting that someone stole her bills.

  I don’t think so.

  “Maybe I forgot them at my house,” I whispered as I edged away.

  I got back on the bike. Panting my way towards home, I went over this strange series of events again and again. They felt connected by a force field of unstable, chaotic energy. And with a plunge, I realized I’d had this feeling before—on the day that Tucco died.

  I got to my house, threw down my bike and checked my phone. I’d gotten a call from Stacey, one of Marilyn’s Miami friends.