“It’s too late for sweet,” Carrie said.
“Then I guess you’re just going to have to become a bitch,” Magda said. “But there’s one thing you forgot.”
“What?”
“Falling in love.”
“I don’t think so,” Carrie said. She leaned back in her chair. She was wearing jeans and an old Yves Saint Laurent jacket. She sat like a man, legs apart. “I’m going to do it—I’m going to become a real bitch.”
We looked at her and laughed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“You’re already a bitch.”
MEETING MR. BIG
As part of her research, Carrie went to see The Last Seduction at three in the afternoon. She had heard that the movie portrayed a woman who, in pursuit of money and hot sex and absolute control, uses and abuses every man she meets—and never has a regret or one of those expected “Oh my God, what have I done?” epiphanies.
Carrie never goes to movies—she had a WASPy mother who told her that only poor people with sick kids send their kids to the movie theater—so it was a big deal for her. She got to the theater late, and when the ticket taker told her the movie had already started, she said, “Fuck you. I’m here for research—you don’t think I’d actually go see this movie, do you?”
When she came out, she kept thinking about the scene where Linda Fiorentino picks up the man in the bar and has sex with him in the parking lot, gripping a chain-link fence. Was that what it was all about?
Carrie bought two pairs of strappy sandals and got her hair cut off.
On a Sunday evening, Carrie went to a cocktail party thrown by the designer Joop—one of those parties that should be in a movie, with everyone crowded in and the gay boys so lively, and even though Carrie had to work the next day, she knew she’d eventually have too many drinks and go home too late. Carrie doesn’t like to go home at night and she doesn’t like to go to sleep.
Mr. Joop cleverly ran out of champagne halfway though the party, and people were banging on the kitchen door and begging the waiters for a glass of wine. A man walked by with a cigar in his mouth, and one of the men Carrie was talking to said, “Oooooh. Who is that again? He looks like a younger, better-looking Ron Perelman.”
“I know who it is,” Carrie said.
“Who?”
“Mr. Big.”
“I knew that. I always get Mr. Big and Perelman mixed up.”
“How much will you give me,” Carrie asked. “How much will you give me if I go over and talk to him?” She does this new thing she’s doing now with her short hair. She fluffs it up while the boys look at her and laugh. “You’re crazy,” they say.
Carrie had seen Mr. Big once before, but she didn’t think he’d remember her. She was in this office where she works sometimes, and Inside Edition was interviewing her about something she wrote about Chihuahuas. Mr. Big came in and started talking to the cameraman about how Chihuahuas were all over Paris, and Carrie leaned over and tightened the lace on her boot.
At the party, Mr. Big was sitting on the radiator in the living room. “Hi,” Carrie said. “Remember me?” She could tell by his eyes that he had no idea who she was, and she wondered if he was going to panic.
He twirled the cigar around the inside of his lips and took it out of his mouth. He looked away to flick his ash, then looked back at her. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
ANOTHER MR. BIG (AT ELAINE’S)
Carrie didn’t run into Mr. Big again for several days. In the meantime, something was definitely happening. She bumped into a writer friend she hadn’t seen for two months, and he said, “What’s going on with you? You look completely different.”
“I do?”
“You look like Heather Locklear. Did you get your teeth fixed?”
Then she was at Elaine’s, and a big writer, a big one, someone she’d never met, gave her the finger and then sat down next to her and said, “You’re not as tough as you think you are.”
“Excuse me?”
“You walk around like you’re so fucking great in bed.”
She wanted to say, “I do?”—but instead she laughed and said, “Well, maybe I am.”
He lit her cigarette. “If I wanted to have an affair with you, it would have to last a long time. I wouldn’t want a one-night stand.”
“Well, baby,” she said, “you’ve got the wrong girl.”
Then she went to a party after one of those Peggy Siegal movie openings and ran into a big movie producer, another big one, and he gave her a ride in his car to Bowery Bar. But Mr. Big was there.
Mr. Big slid into the banquette next to her. Their sides were touching.
Mr. Big said, “So. What have you been doing lately?”
“Besides going out every night?”
“Yeah—what do you do for work?”
“This is my work,” she said. “I’m researching a story for a friend of mine about women who have sex like men. You know, they have sex and afterwards they feel nothing.”
Mr. Big eyed her. “But you’re not like that,” he said.
“Aren’t you?” she asked.
“Not a drop. Not even half a drop,” he said.
Carrie looked at Mr. Big. “What’s wrong with you?”
“Oh, I get it,” said Mr. Big. “You’ve never been in love.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“And you have?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.”
They went back to his apartment. Mr. Big opened a bottle of Crystal champagne. Carrie was laughing and carrying on and then she said, “I have to go.”
“It’s four A.M.,” he said. He stood up. “I’m not going to let you go home now.”
He gave her a T-shirt and boxer shorts. He went into the bathroom while she changed. She got into the bed and lay back against the down pillows. She closed her eyes. His bed was so comfortable. It was the most comfortable bed she’d ever been in in her life.
When he came back into the bedroom, she was sound asleep.
7
The International Crazy Girls
If you’re lucky (or unlucky, depending on how you look at it), you might one day run into a certain type of woman in New York. Like a constantly migrating, brightly colored bird she’s always on the go. And not in the mundane, Filofax-filled way. This woman travels from one international hotspot to another. And when she gets tired of the party season in London, when she’s had enough of skiing in Aspen or Gstaad, when she’s sick of all-night parties in South America, she might come back to roost—temporarily, mind you—in New York.
On a rainy afternoon in January, a woman we’ll call Amalita Amalfi arrived at Kennedy International Airport from London. She was wearing the white fake-fur Gucci coat, black leather pants custom-made at New York Leather (“They’re the last pair they made in this leather—I had to fight with Elle Macpherson over them,” she said), and sunglasses. She had ten T. Anthony bags, and she looked like a movie star. The only thing missing was the limo, but she took care of that by prevailing upon a wealthy-looking businessman to help her with her bags. He couldn’t resist—as virtually no men are able to resist Amalita—and before he knew what had hit him, he, Amalita, and the ten T. Anthony bags were crawling toward the city in his company-paid-for limousine, and he was offering to take her to dinner that night.
“I’d love to, darling,” she said in that breathless, slightly accented voice that hints at Swiss finishing schools and palace balls, “But I’m terribly tired. I’ve really just come to New York for a rest, you see? We could have tea tomorrow though. At the Four Seasons? And then maybe a little shopping afterwards. There are a few things I have to pick up at Gucci.”
The businessman agreed. He dropped her off in front of an apartment building on Beekman Place, took her number, and promised to call later.
Upstairs in the apartment, Amalita put in a phone call to Gucci. Affecting an upper-crust English accent, she said, “This is Lady Caroline Beavers. You have a coat
on hold for me. I’ve just arrived in town, and I’ll be picking it up tomorrow.”
“Very good, Lady Beavers,” the salesperson said. Amalita hung up the phone and laughed.
The next day, Carrie was on the phone with an old friend, Robert. “Amalita’s back,” she said. “I’m having lunch with her.”
“Amalita!” Robert said. “Is she still alive? Still beautiful? She’s dangerous. But if you’re a guy and you sleep with her, it’s like becoming a member of a special club. You know, she was with Jake, and Capote Duncan . . . all those rock stars, billionaires. It’s a bonding thing. You know, the guy thinks, Me and Jake.”
“Men,” Carrie said, “are ridiculous.”
Robert wasn’t listening. “There aren’t very many girls like Amalita,” he said. “Gabriella was one of them. Marit too. And Sandra. Amalita’s so beautiful, you know, and really funny, and very bold, I mean, she’s incredible. You’ll run into one of these girls in Paris, and they’ll be wearing a see-through dress and it will drive you nuts and you see their pictures in W and places like that, and their allure keeps growing on you. Their sexual power is like this amazing, dazzling force that can change your life, you think, if you can touch it, which you can’t, which . . .”
Carrie hung up on him.
At two o’clock that afternoon, Carrie was sitting at the bar at Harry Cipriani, waiting for Amalita to arrive. As usual, she was half an hour late. At the bar, a businessman, his female associate, and their client were talking about sex. “I think men are turned off by women who have sex with them on the first night,” the woman said. She was dressed in a prissy navy blue suit. “You’ve got to wait at least three dates if you want the man to take you seriously.”
“That depends on the woman,” said the client. He was late thirties, looked German but spoke with a Spanish accent—an Argentinian.
“I don’t get it,” said the woman.
The Argentinian looked at her. “You middle-class American women who always want to hook a man, you’re the ones who must play by the rules. You can’t afford to make a mistake. But there is a certain type of woman—very beautiful and from a certain class—who can do whatever she wants.”
At just that moment, Amalita walked in. There was quite a stir at the door as the maître d’ embraced her—“Look at you!” she said. “So slim. Are you still running five miles a day?”—and her coat and packages were whisked away. She was wearing a tweedy Jil Sander suit (the skirt alone cost over a thousand dollars) and a green cashmere shell. “Is it hot in here?” she said, fanning herself with her gloves. She removed her jacket. The entire restaurant gaped. “Sweetpea!” she said, spotting Carrie at the bar.
“Your table is ready,” said the maître d’.
“I have so many things to tell you,” Amalita said. “I have just barely escaped with my life!”
Sometime in April, Amalita had gone to London to attend a wedding, where she met Lord Skanky-Poo—not his real name—“but a real lord, darling,” she said, “related to the royal family and with a castle and foxhounds. He said he fell in love with me instantly, the idiot, the moment he saw me in the church. ‘Darling, I adore you,’ he said, coming up to me at the reception, ‘but I especially adore your hat.’ That should have been a dead giveaway. But I wasn’t thinking clearly at the time. I was staying with Catherine Johnson-Bates in London and she was driving me crazy, she kept complaining about my stuff all over her fucking flat . . . well, she’s a virgo, so what can you expect? Anyway, all I could think about was finding another place to stay. And I knew Catherine had had a crush on Lord Skanks—she used to knit him scarves out of that horrendous worsted wool—and he wouldn t give her the time of day, so naturally, I couldn’t resist. Plus, I needed a place to stay.”
That night, after the wedding, Amalita basically moved into the Eton Square house. And, for the first two weeks, everything was great. “I was doing my geisha routine,” Amalita said. “Back rubs, bringing him tea, reading the newspapers first so I could point out what was interesting.” He took her shopping. They entertained, throwing a shooting party at the castle. Amalita helped him with the guest list, got all the right people, charmed the servants, and he was impressed. Then, when they got back to London, the trouble began.
“You know, I’ve got all of my lingerie that I’ve been collecting over the years?” Amalita asked. Carrie nodded. She knew all about Amalita’s vast collection of designer clothing, which she’d been acquiring over the past fifteen years—knew it well, in fact, because she had had to help Amalita wrap it up in special tissues to be put in storage, a job that had taken three days. “Well, one evening he comes in when I’m dressing,” she said. “‘Darling,’ he says, ‘I’ve always wondered what it would be like to wear one of those merry widows. Mind if I . . . give it a try? Then I’ll know what it feels like to be you.’
“Fine. But the next day he wants me to spank him. With a rolled-up newspaper. ‘Darling, don’t you think you’d get more out of life if you read this instead?’ I asked. ‘No! I want a good thrashing,’ he said. So I complied. Another mistake. It got to the point where he would wake up in the morning, put on my clothes, and then he wouldn’t leave the house. This went on for days. And then he insisted on wearing my Chanel jewelry.”
“How did he look in it?” Carrie asked.
“Pas mal,” Amalita said. “He was one of those beautiful English types, you know, you can never really tell if they’re gay or straight. But the whole thing just got so pathetic. He was crawling around on his hands and knees, exposing his bum. And to think that before this I was considering marrying him.
“Anyway, I told him I was leaving. He wouldn’t let me. He locked me in the bedroom, and I had to escape out the window. And I was stupidly wearing Manolo Blahnik spike heels instead of the more sensible Gucci ones because I let him fondle my shoes and the Manolos were the only ones he didn’t like—he said they were last year. Then he wouldn’t let me back in the house. He said he was holding my clothes ransom because of some stupid, itsy-bitsy phone bill I’d racked up. Two thousand pounds. I said, ‘Darling, what am I supposed to do? I have to call my daughter and my mother.’
“But I had my trump card. I took his cellular phone. I called him from the street. ‘Darling,’ I said, ‘I’m going to meet Catherine for tea. When I get back, I expect to see all my suitcases, neatly packed, on the front stoop. Then I’m going to go through them. If anything’s missing—one tiny earring, one G-string, the rubber on the heel of any shoe—I’m going to call Nigel Dempster.’”
“Did he do it?” Carrie asked, somewhat in awe.
“Of course!” Amalita said. “The English are scared to death of the press. If you ever need to bring one to heel, just threaten to call the papers.”
Just then, the Argentinian walked by the table. “Amalita,” he said, extending his hand and giving her a little bow.
“Ah Chris. Cómo está?” she asked, and then they said a bunch of stuff in Spanish that Carrie couldn’t understand, and then Chris said, “I’m in New York for a week. We should get together.”
“Of course, darling,” Amalita said, looking up at him. She had this way of crinkling her eyes when she smiled that basically meant bug off.
“Argh. Rich Argentinian,” she said. “I stayed on his ranch once. We rode polo ponies all over the campos. His wife was pregnant, and he was so cute I fucked him and she found out. And she had the nerve to be upset. He was a lousy lay. She should have been happy to have someone take him off her hands.”
“Miss Amalfi?” the waiter asked. “Phone call for you.”
“Righty,” she said triumphantly, returning to the table after a few minutes. Righty was the lead guitarist in a famous rock band. “He wants me to go on tour with him. Brazil. Singapore. I told him I’d have to think about it. These guys are so used to women falling at their feet, you have to be a bit reserved. It sets you apart.”
Suddenly, there was again a flurry of activity at the door. Carrie looked up and quickl
y ducked her head, pretending to examine her fingernails. “Don’t look now,” she said, “but Ray’s here.”
“Ray? Oh, I know Ray,” Amalita said. Her eyes narrowed.
Ray wasn’t a man but a woman. A woman who could be classified, loosely anyway, as being in the same category as Amalita. She was also an international beauty, irresistible to men, but a nut case. A late-seventies model, she had moved to L.A., ostensibly to pursue an acting career. She hadn’t landed any roles, but she had reeled in several well-known actors. And, like Amalita, she had a love child, rumored to be the offspring of a superstar.
Ray scanned the restaurant. She was famous for her eyes—among other things—which were huge, round, the irises of such a light blue they appeared almost white. They stopped on Amalita. She waved. Walked over.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, seemingly delighted, even though the two were rumored to be sworn enemies in L.A.
“I just got in,” Amalita said. “From London.”
“Did you go to that wedding?”
“Lady Beatrice?” Amalita asked. “Yes. Wonderful. All the titled Europeans.”
“Durn,” Ray said. She had a slight southern accent, which was probably put on, since she was from Iowa. “I shoulda gone. But then I got involved with Snake,” she said, naming an actor well known for action films—he was in his late sixties but still making them—“and, you know, I couldn’t get away.”
“I see,” Amalita said, giving her the crinkly-eye treatment.
Ray didn’t seem to notice. “I’m supposed to meet this girlfriend a’mine, but I told Snake I’d meet him back at the hotel at three, he’s here doin’ publicity, and now it’s nearly two-fifteen. You know, Snake freaks out if you’re late, and I’m always en retard.”
“It’s just a question of handling men properly,” Amalita said. “But I do remember that Snake hates to be kept waiting. You must tell him hello for me, darling. But if you forget, don’t worry about it. I’ll be seeing him in a month, anyway. He invited me to go skiing. Just as friends, of course.”
Sex and the City Page 5
