Sex and the City

by Candace Bushnell

  Sometimes Mr. Big seems to retreat into himself, and then there is only the surface Mr. Big. Friendly to everyone. Maybe affable is the word. Always perfectly turned out. White cuffs. Gold cufflinks. Matching suspenders (though he almost never takes his jacket off). It isn’t easy when he’s in that mode. Carrie wasn’t always good with people she thought were too conservative. She wasn’t used to it. She was used to everybody being drunk and doing drugs (or not doing them). Mr. Big got mad when Carrie said outrageous things like, “I’m not wearing any underwear,” even though she was. And Carrie thought Mr. Big was too friendly to other women, especially models. They’d be out and a photographer would say, “Do you mind?” and then motion for Mr. Big to have his picture taken with some model, and it was insulting. One time a model sat on his lap, and Carrie turned and said, “Gotta go,” with a really pissed-off look on her face.

  “Hey, come on,” Mr. Big said.

  Carrie looked at the model, “Excuse me, but you’re sitting on my boyfriend’s lap.”

  “Resting. Just resting,” the model said. “There’s a big difference.”

  “You have to learn how to deal with this,” Mr. Big said.

  COMPARISON SHOPPING

  Rebecca, thirty-nine, a journalist who got married last year, recalls a moment when she found another woman’s phone number jumbled among her banker boyfriend’s business cards.

  “I called the number, and asked the bitch point-blank what was up,” Rebecca said. Sure enough, the woman revealed that Rebecca’s boyfriend had asked her out to dinner. “I hit the roof. I didn’t scream at her, but I became like something out of one of those nighttime soap operas. I actually told her to keep her hands off and not to call him again. She said, ‘You’ve got a great one there, you should be nice to him.’ I said, ‘Well, if he’s so great, how come he called you when he’s living with me?’

  “Then I called him. He had the nerve to be livid with me for ‘interfering in his private business.’ I said, ‘Get one thing straight, buddy. When you’re going out with me, there is no private business.’ Still, for about two days afterward, I thought we were finished. Then we got over it, and he asked me to marry him about three months later.”

  There are other methods. After Lisa had been seeing her future husband, Robert, for two months, he started to get squirmy.

  “What do you think if I go out with other people?” he asked.

  “I think you should do comparison shopping,” Lisa said, supercoolly. “How else can you possibly appreciate me? I’m not a jailer.”

  That really blew him away.

  “It’s all about self-esteem,” Lisa said. “Men have to feel that there are limits and you’re not going to take anything.”

  One well-known problem is living with a guy before you’re married, and then he doesn’t do anything about asking you to marry him. This can be taken care of with dispatch. “Just heard a story,” said Trudie. “Woman, living with guy for a year. One morning, she wakes up. ‘Are we going to get married?’ Guy says no. She says, ‘Move out right now.’ He asks her to marry him that weekend.”

  “One of the biggest mistakes women make is that they don’t discuss marriage from the beginning,” said Lisa.

  I SHOULD LEAVE

  I can’t take it, Carrie thinks, waking up one morning. She lies there, watching Mr. Big until he opens his eyes. Instead of kissing her, he gets up to go to the bathroom. That’s it, she thinks.

  When he comes back to bed, she says, “Listen, I’ve been thinking.”

  “Yeah?” says Mr. Big.

  “If you’re not totally in love with me and crazy about me, and if you don’t think I’m the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in your life, then I think I should leave.”

  “Uh huh,” says Mr. Big.

  “Really, it’s no problem.”

  “Okay,” Mr. Big says, somewhat cautiously.

  “Soooooo . . . is that what you want?”

  “Is it what you want?” says Mr. Big.

  “No, not really. But I do want to be with someone who’s in love with me,” says Carrie.

  “Well, I just can’t make any guarantees right now. But if I were you, I’d hang around. See what happens.”

  Carrie lies back against the pillows. It’s Sunday. It would be sort of a drag to have to go. What would she do with the rest of the day?

  “Okay,” she says, “but just for now. I don’t have forever, you know. I’m probably going to die soon. Like in fifteen years or something.” She lights up a cigarette.

  “Okay,” says Mr. Big. “But in the meantime, could you make me some coffee? Please?”

  Naomi, who got married last year at thirty-seven, is the president of an ad agency and typical of most of us women in New York. “I dated every kind of man—all shapes and sizes. Then one day, the right guy walks in the door, and he was the antithesis of everything I always thought I wanted.” In other words, he wasn’t the proverbial bad boy.

  When she was thirty-five, Naomi was waiting for a cab on Madison Avenue, dressed in a suit and high heels, and a long-haired guy zoomed by on a motorcycle and he didn’t check her out. “Suddenly, the allure of the starving-tortured-artist type became passé,” she said. “I was always paying for their goddamn dinners.”

  Carrie goes to a book party at a museum, and she brings Sam. She hasn’t seen Sam for a while. She hasn’t seen any of her girlfriends for a while because it seems like she spends all her time with Mr. Big. They’re both wearing black pants and black patent leather boots, and as they get to the steps, Z.M., the media mogul, is coming down and getting into his car.

  He laughs. “I was wondering who those two women were, stomping down the sidewalk.”

  “We weren’t stomping,” says Sam, “we were talking.”

  The driver was holding open the door of his limousine. “Call me sometime, huh?” he says.

  “Call me,” Sam says, and you know neither of them will.

  Sam sighs. “So, how’s Mr. Big?”

  Carrie starts hemming and hawing, going into her whole I-don’t-know routine, they’re planning to go to Aspen and he’s talking about them getting a house together next summer, but she’s not sure about him and . . .

  “Oh, come on,” Sam says. “I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish I could find someone I wanted to spend a weekend with, for Christ’s sake.”

  There’s one big difference in New York between women who get married and women who don’t. “Basically, it’s like, Get over yourself,” Rebecca said. “Get over the idea that you should be marrying Mort Zuckerman.”

  “I narrowed it down to three qualities,” Trudie said. “Smart, successful, and sweet.”

  They also never believe that they will not get married. “I always thought that it would take me however long it would take me, but it was going to happen,” said Trudie. “It would be horrible if it didn’t. Why shouldn’t I be married?”

  But Manhattan is still Manhattan. “The thing you have to realize is that, in terms of socialization for men, getting them ready for marriage, New York is a terrible place,” Lisa said. “Single men don’t tend to hang around with couples. They’re not used to that idea of coziness and family. So you have to get them there mentally.”

  ELICIT COZINESS

  Carrie and Mr. Big go to a charity event in an old theater, and they have a beautiful evening. Carrie has her hair done. It seems like she’s having to have her hair done all the time now, and when she says to the stylist, “I can’t afford to do this,” he says, “You can’t afford not to.”

  At dinner, Mr. Big swoops down on the table with his cigar and moves their place cards so they’re sitting next to each other, saying, “I don’t care.” They hold hands the whole evening, and one of the columnists comes up and says, “Inseparable as always.”

  They have a good week after that, and then something tweaks in Carrie’s brain. Maybe it’s because they went to dinner at one of his friends’ houses, and there were people there with kids. Carrie rode
tiny plastic cars in the street with the kids, and one of the kids kept falling off her car. The parents came out and yelled at their kids to go back in the house. It didn’t seem fair, because none of the kids got hurt.

  She decides she has to torture Mr. Big again. “Do you think we’re close?” she asks just before they’re going to sleep.

  “Sometimes,” Mr. Big says.

  “Sometimes isn’t enough for me,” she says. She continues to bug him until he begs her to let him go to sleep. But when she wakes up early the next morning, the bug is still there.

  “Why are you doing this?” Mr. Big asks. “Why can’t you think about the good things, like the way we were last week?”

  He walks by the bed. “Oooh, look at that sad little face,” he says, which makes her want to kill him.

  “I’ll talk to you about this later, I promise,” Mr. Big says.

  “I don’t know if there’s going to be any ‘later,’” Carrie says.

  Lisa was at a crowded party for a prominent publicist (we’ll call her Sandy) in a town house in the East 50s. Lisa’s husband, a handsome man who is in some kind of business, was in tow. In between sips of a pink margarita, she explained. “When I finally decided to look for someone, I thought about every place I’d ever met a man. It wasn’t at Bowery Bar, it was at parties at people’s houses. So I really spread the net. I went to every party at anyone’s apartment.

  “When you meet a guy, my rule is for the first few dates, no big parties. It’s suicide. Do not be dressed up. Do not be on. Do not be working it, working the room. Men want to feel comfort. You must elicit coziness. Talk about the person they are, because most men’s self-image is them at fourteen.”

  Back at her office, Trudie nodded at a large photo on her desk of a curly-haired man leaning against a dune on a beach. “My husband is such a find. He really understands me. When you find the right person, it’s so easy. People who have a lot of fights and drama—well, something is wrong. My husband doesn’t give me any argument. We never really fight about anything. He is so giving to me 99 percent of the time, on the few occasions when he wants his way, I’ll give in.”

  And then suddenly everything is, weirdly, fine.

  Mr. Big calls. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, you know, that thing I do sometimes,” Carrie says. “Writing a story.”

  “About what?”

  “Remember how we said that someday we’d move to Colorado and raise horses and shit? That’s what I’m writing about.”

  “Oh,” says Mr. Big. “It’s a beautiful story.”

  19

  Manhattan Psycho Moms Go

  Gaga for Goo-Goos

  Mr. Big calls, only a little pissed off, from China. He’d sent his luggage via an express delivery service and now it’s lost, and he’s sitting in his hotel room with only a pair of jeans and a shirt and no clean underwear. “If this happened five years ago, someone would have been fired,” he says. “But I’ve changed. It’s the new me. If they can’t deal with me in dirty jeans, fuck ’em.”

  “Guess what?” Carrie says. “Your friend Derrick called. He said Laura is trying to get pregnant and he doesn’t want her to, so every night he pretends to come but doesn’t, and then he goes into the bathroom and jerks off. And every night she’s watching ‘You and Your Baby’ videos.”

  “What a wuss,” says Mr. Big.

  “And he says he can’t do it because he’s not far enough along in his career to afford a kid.”

  “And how about you?” Mr. Big asks, in his singsong way.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” Carrie says darkly. “I think I might be pregnant.”

  “A baby. We’re going to have a baby,” says Mr. Big.

  Carrie isn’t sure what to think.

  You see, things happen to people when they have kids in New York. Some parents remain normal. But others, decidedly, do not. They go a little bit crazy. Take all that energy and aggression, those hangups and unresolved issues that go into one’s career, and imagine applying them to a child. When it comes to kids, people who were once garden-variety New York City neurotics can become, well, just plain crazy.

  That was evidenced immediately when Carrie went to brunch at the SoHo loft of her friends Packard and Amanda Deale. Packard and Amanda (normal) are the parents of Chester, who was marching around the loft banging an umbrella on the floor. One mother (not so normal) couldn’t help but point out that he was “parallel-playing and not sharing, but it’s okay, because he’s only one, and no one expects him to share his toys—yet.”

  Like most couples who suddenly have children, the Deales have mysteriously taken on a whole new group of friends who also have kids. How does this happen? Did Packard and Amanda meet them at some early-admission nursery school gathering? Or were they always friends who, having kids, kept Amanda and Packard on the back burner until they caught up? The newfound friends include Jodi, who insisted that everyone give her only white baby clothes, because she believes that dye in clothing will cause an allergic reaction on her baby’s skin; Suzanne, who won’t let her nannies wear perfume because she doesn’t want to come home and find her baby smelling of someone else’s (cheap) cologne; and Maryanne, who kept firing babysitters, secretly on purpose, until she finally just had to quit her job to take care of the kid.

  That kind of behavior is not limited to mothers. After all, isn’t there something just a wee bit nutsy about fathers and sons who dress in identical Patagonia jackets with matching Rollerblade helmets? Or the father who, kissing his son repeatedly on the head in between holding his little mitts in his hand and dancing around the child’s stroller (if it is possible for a two year old to look embarrassed, the kid does), explains, “All you have to do is have one of these and then take three or four years off.”

  Of course, being crazy about your kid and being just plain crazy are two slightly different things. Taken to extremes, there is only one word for a certain kind of New York parenting: psycho. You don’t know who it will strike or what form it will take, but, said Packard, “It’s not about love or caring; it’s about obsession.”

  “ALEXANDRA!”

  Carrie was sitting on the couch in the loft talking to a woman who appeared fairly ordinary. Becca had straight blond hair and the sort of long, thin nose that makes you think it could suck martinis out of a glass on its own. She’d just moved into a new apartment in the East 70s and was explaining the pros and cons of hiring a decorator—“One friend couldn’t get this decorator to stop buying things, it was awful”—when suddenly she was interrupted by a five-year-old girl in a frilly dress and a black ribbon in her hair. “Mommy, I want the tit,” demanded the child.

  “Alexandra!” (Why is practically every kid named Alexander or Alexandra these days?) Becca said in a stage whisper. “Not now. Go and watch videos.”

  “But he’s having titty milk,” said the child, pointing to a woman who was nursing a baby in the corner.

  “He’s a baby. A little bitty baby,” said Becca. “You can have juice.”

  “I don’t want juice,” Alexandra said. She actually had her hands on her hips.

  Becca rolled her eyes. She stood and hauled the little girl onto her lap. The girl immediately started fussing with her mother’s blouse.

  “Are you still . . . breast feeding?” Carrie asked, as politely as possible.

  “Sometimes,” Becca said. “My husband wanted to have another child right away, and I didn’t. It’s so much work having a kid in New York. Isn’t it, you little monster?” She gazed down at her child, who was now sucking her thumb, staring up at Mother, waiting for the unbuttoning. The child turned to Carrie, fixing her with an evil eye. “Titty milk. Titty milk,” she said.

  “Come on, Alexandra, I’ll take you to the bathroom,” said Becca. “We keep meaning to stop this now, don’t we?”

  The child nodded.

  Becca wasn’t the only mother at the party having problems getting an appropriate grip on her relationship with her child. Off in the bed
room, Julie, a small, dark-haired woman who manages a restaurant, was perched next to her six-year-old son, Barry. Barry is an adorable child, bearing an uncanny resemblance to his mother, with his dark curls. But he didn’t look happy. He clung to Julie ferociously; when someone else tried to talk to her, he crawled all over her. “Oh, get off me. You’re such a pain,” Julie said to Barry, but she didn’t really do anything about it. Barry won’t play with the other children, nor will he let Julie talk to any adults. Later on, Carrie found out that it’s always like this with the two of them—they go to parties, sometimes adult parties, and talk only to each other. She also learned that Julie keeps a mattress in Barry’s room; most nights, she sleeps on the mattress. Julie’s husband sleeps in the other room. They are planning on getting divorced.

  “Well, that’s pretty normal,” said Janice, a corporate lawyer, who is one of the few psycho moms who has no problem admitting it. “I love my son,” she said. “Andy is eleven months old. He is a god, and I tell him every day. The other day I found him in his crib saying, ‘Me, me, me.’

  “I was driven to have a baby since I was thirty,” she continued. “So when I finally had him [she’s now thirty-six], I was like, This is my calling in life. I’m a mom. I wasn’t going to go back to work, but frankly, after three months, I knew I had to go back to work. I’m in his face too much. In the park, I’m jumping up and down in front of him—the nannies think I’m crazy. I kiss him a thousand times a day. I can’t wait to get home to give him a bath. His body makes me crazy. I never felt this way about any man.”

  Janice went on to say that if she sees Andy glance at another child’s toy, she has to go out and buy it for him. One time she thought he was looking at something called the exer-saucer. She finally found it on 14th Street, and she was running down 14th Street with it on her head because she couldn’t get a cab and she couldn’t wait to bring it home to him. “People were literally pointing at me on the street,” she said. “Everyone thought I was insane. Then I get home and I give it to him and he starts crying.”