Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

  For a second I thought, Why is Stacey calling me?

  And then I knew.

  * * *

  Marilyn took her life sometime late Sunday night or early Monday morning.

  She left no note, but she did leave a will.

  She wanted to be cremated.

  And that was it. No ceremony. No nothing. Just a box full of gritty ashes.

  At first, some of Marilyn’s close friends and family from out of town rushed in and there was a poignant and naturally awkward memorial, but then they left and it was just Sassy and Kitty and me and sometimes Queenie. We felt Marilyn’s loss everywhere and especially in the day-to-day. As Kitty said, she couldn’t believe that Marilyn wasn’t going to come walking through the door at any second, her laptop computer under her arm and the large leather sack containing her purse and files slung over her shoulder. Marilyn had moved to the country but a part of her would always be a schlepper.

  We felt encased in our grief, trapped under a perpetual low-hanging cloud. We couldn’t move. We couldn’t breathe. We were exhausted. We’d go to each other’s houses and sit at the kitchen table and stare.

  We’d ask why.

  We pointed out that she was in love and about to get married. That she and her MNB would have had a great life together. She was doing so well. Feeling so good. Maybe she was feeling too good and she’d stopped taking her medication? It was the only explanation we could come up with.

  There had been a spate of deaths and suicides that month. Mostly women in their fifties, women like Marilyn who’d appeared to have had it all. Like everyone else, they didn’t. Lurking in the background were financial issues or relationship issues or health issues. But mostly, what you sensed was the fear. The pure terror of the unknown future.

  The fear that you were a failure. That no one would love you ever or again. That you were truly alone. That no one cared and it was only going to get worse. That there was no imaginary bright future to hide behind when it came to the truth.

  These were the fears that crept into our bones like the cold, damp weather during that long winter. And so we worried. About ourselves and each other. When you’re a single, child-free woman like Marilyn, the world wonders what’s going to happen to you, and so you wonder yourself. As a single, child-free woman, there really is no script for you.

  * * *

  Time passed, and though we no longer talked about Marilyn every day I couldn’t stop thinking about her. When I went to the beach, I’d drive by the house of her MNB, and I’d remember that last weekend and wonder what she’d been doing.

  Sometimes my route would take me by Marilyn’s house. This was always startling. Her small white car was still in the driveway, parked where it always had been, and it was impossible not to imagine that Marilyn herself was inside the house, perched on one of the couches across from the large coffee table where she did her work on her laptop while fielding calls.

  And sometimes I’d pretend that Marilyn was still here. I’d tell myself that she went away for a couple of months and she’ll be back soon and I’d think about all the things I’d tell her. Like the news that MNB and I are still together. And that Tilda Tia has given up dating and is only going to concentrate on her career but still has hopes of a picket fence love someday. And mostly that Sassy bought a new house on our favorite street in the Village. It has a view, and it’s right across the water from Kitty’s house. There’s been lots of talk about paddle-board parties that we both know will never happen because Sassy hates wearing bathing suits and Kitty refuses to exercise.

  And then the day came when I passed by Marilyn’s house and her car was gone.

  And that, I thought sadly, was that.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Sassy and I had some of Marilyn’s ashes.

  Marilyn’s brother had given her MNB her ashes and her MNB had given some of them to us. They were in stacked, clear plastic containers that Marilyn, an ace organizer, had given to him just before she’d died, back when she was cleaning things up to airbnb her house. “Here,” she’d said to him. “You might need these someday.”

  Now the containers with the ashes were resting in a large, silver-plated urn in the front parlor of Sassy’s house. The ashes themselves were dark gray and flecked with white grit that might have been bone. Sassy had to pass by them every day.

  At least once a week, she’d call me up. “We’ve got to do it,” she’d say.

  And so, on what Sassy called a navy-blue day at the end of September, the kind of day on which Marilyn had hoped to get married, instead of scattering rose petals, we would scatter her ashes.

  Or at least we thought we would.

  Tilda Tia came and stayed with me. She said, “How are you?” And I said, “I’m doing fine,” even though Marilyn’s was the second major death, including my dad’s, that I’d had in six months.

  Of course, I wasn’t the only one. Two months ago Tilda Tia had lost one of her childhood friends to cancer. She’d been there when it happened and had held her friend’s hand.

  We hugged.

  And that’s one of the things you learn from MAM. How to accept loss and keep going.

  We walked over to Sassy’s new house, where we met up with Kitty, who had just learned she was going to become a grandmother, and Queenie, whose daughter had gone off to college.

  We talked about how great it would have been if Marilyn were there with us. How she would have loved seeing all her friends together. How, partly thanks to her, we’d all ended up in the same place.

  And then we walked to the end of the dock on the bay where Marilyn had first landed in the Village just three years ago.

  Sassy and I each carried a container of the ashes. The idea was that we would open them and everyone would take a handful and when the ashes were scattered, we would light sparklers.

  Immediately, there was a glitch. The ridges in the tops of the containers were embedded with the dust of Marilyn’s ashes and were stuck. No amount of gentle prying was going to get them loose.

  For a moment we stood there, wondering what to do. This, we agreed, was very Marilyn. As Sassy said, she’d always had a stubborn side. She’d usually do the opposite of what everyone told her to do. A trait, frankly, that could be applied to all of us, in this group anyway.

  “It’s a sign,” Queenie said. “She doesn’t want to go.”

  And so we brought Marilyn’s ashes back into the house.

  I was relieved. There was something about the ash scattering that didn’t sit right with me.

  The week before, I’d run into Marilyn’s MNB on the beach. He’d just gotten the toxicology report and it turned out that Marilyn had been taking the proper medications all along.

  In short, she’d done everything right, and somehow it still wasn’t enough. We’ll never understand the reason for her death.

  But that wasn’t the only mystery. There was the disappearance of those bills on the day she died. Someone mailed them and it wasn’t me, because days after Marilyn’s death, I was getting angry calls from creditors over the checks I’d had to cancel.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if somehow Marilyn—or her spirit anyway—was involved.

  And as we gathered once again around the kitchen table, I realized we did know one thing.

  Now, more than ever, we had to be there for each other. And we would be.

  The End

  epilogue

  Happily Ever After After All?

  The inevitable happened. Time passed. And suddenly it was almost a year and a half that MNB and I had been dating. Somewhere along the way, we’d entered coupledom.

  We didn’t technically live together, but we knew one another’s patterns and did couple things, like going out with other couples and traveling together and creating a family adjacent scenario in which my two dogs, Pepper and Prancer, were sort of our kids. But mostly we’d
developed a routine that worked. A way of being around each other in the same space. Because what is a relationship really but two bodies orbiting each other in space and time?

  And like planets, it’s hard to resist the pull of partnering. Once you enter into the relationship phase it’s like being inside one of those Russian dolls or Dante’s Inferno or maybe just Mario Brothers—you reach one level and you just have to try to get to the next. In other words, for the first time, after nearly a year and a half together, I found myself asking, what if MNB and I got married and he became MNH?

  I didn’t know why I was asking the question. It wasn’t that I couldn’t see myself growing old with MNB in some vague and fuzzy future, but at this moment, irl, it would only make our lives much more complicated.

  And yet, there was something about later-life marriage that was in the air. These days, when people ask what I’m writing about and I tell them, they all have a story. It’s a story, they promise, that will be unlike anything I’ve ever heard before.

  “Try me,” I say.

  Then they tell me a convoluted tale about two people who suddenly find themselves single and finally, after all these years, discover each other (usually again) and fall in love and get married and have a wedding with a hundred of their friends. And there is nothing new about this story except for the age of the participants. They are always over seventy. Sometimes they are eighty-three. Sometimes they are ninety-four. In any case, when these weddings happen they’re apparently really beautiful because what is more beautiful than showing the world that true love does work in the end. And everyone cries.

  Then the wedding bug hit Tilda Tia.

  She called me up. “You won’t believe what’s happened,” she said.

  I already knew what had happened from Kitty and Queenie. As of one month ago, Tilda Tia had a new boyfriend and he was a real MNB. He had a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side and a regular job in finance, and, since he was a really nice guy, he was helping Tilda Tia move into her new apartment.

  “I met someone,” she announced.

  “I heard,” I said.

  “No, but I mean, I met someone. I mean, I would not be surprised if I have a ring on my finger by this time next year.”

  “Really?”

  “Seriously. And when I say ring, I mean my wedding ring. My engagement ring I’ll probably get in six months.”

  “So you’ll be married in a year?” I said.

  “Yes. Why not?” she said.

  “Are you going to have a wedding?”

  “Of course I’m going to have a wedding,” she said. “What is wrong with you?”

  “And bridesmaids?”

  “Yes. And they are all going to match,” she said.

  I tried to envision this phenomenon of middle-aged people getting married with all the fixings. Like dance floors and eighties music. With some super middle spinning around on his back in a long-forgotten break-dancing move. Getting teary-eyed over “St. Elmo’s Fire” and pointing fingers at each other as everyone boogied. Sure, it was embarrassing. But if you didn’t care, it could be fun.

  “Hello?” Tilda Tia said. “Are you there?”

  “Are you going to play Michael Jackson?” I asked. “And what about ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’?”

  “‘St. Elmo’s Fire’? What is wrong with you?” Tilda Tia asked. “By the way, Kitty and I are wondering what you’re going to do for your birthday.”

  My birthday. I groaned.

  “It’s a big one, isn’t it?”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  “Are you going to tell people your age? Because I wouldn’t if I were you. You could just keep saying you’re fifty-nine. I know four women who did that through their late sixties. And who cares? After a certain age, no one pays that much attention.”

  This, I had to agree, was true.

  One of the things about fiftysomething birthdays is that people tend to forget them. Once you pass the big five-oh, they’re not that significant. Partly because at a certain point, you realize there’s not that much of a difference between fifty-eight and fifty-two. And partly because after fifty, it’s easy to somehow lose track of your age and not remember whether you are fifty-two, fifty-five, or fifty-eight, as happened to Kitty a couple of months ago. It turned out she was fifty-five, which to Kitty was such a “nothing” number that she actually forgot it was even her birthday. I could also recall a couple of birthdays in the last decade where I’d been content to just raise a glass of champers to myself and call it a day.

  But then I’d met MNB. MNB was a lot of things, but mostly he was an organizer guy. And so, three months before the big six-oh, MNB began asking questions. What did I want to do to celebrate? Did I want to fly to London and have dinner at a nightclub? Or maybe go someplace warm for the weekend? All of which sounded wonderful, but would also require extra helpings of effort. There would be packing and then getting to the airport and waiting in line at security and then possibly at customs and I realized that while I was often willing to do these things for others, the one person I wasn’t willing to do it for was myself. And especially not for my birthday.

  Plus, I hate “decade” birthdays the way I hate New Year’s Eve. Somehow, they’re supposed to be more fun than any other party, when in reality the best times are always the parties that aren’t planned, when things just happen.

  And sure enough, when I think back on decade birthdays, with the exception of thirty, both forty and fifty were a bit of a bummer. I’d been dumped a week before my fortieth by a guy I’d dated for six months. He said, “I’m breaking up with you because you’re turning forty and you’re totally neurotic about it and I can’t deal.” Even though I thought I was handling it really well. Still, on the morning of my birthday when my mother called, I started crying. “I’m forty. And I’m not married and I never will be.”

  “Please don’t make a big deal out of it,” my mother said. “Age is not that important.”

  And she was right, because lots of great things happened in my forties. I did get married. I worked a lot. I made a home. And for some reason, I thought it would go on forever.

  What it did was grind on, because by the time fifty came along, all I remember was that I was tired. So very, very tired. I had a recurring dream that I was in an office building on my way to a meeting and I collapsed in front of the elevators and I just lay there and could not get up.

  And now another decade has passed. And, as it has been for so many others, it was a decade of change. Of moving, sectionorce, and death. Of rediscovering old friendships and finding new ways to have relationships. People in their fifties have to be like little engines that could, restarting themselves again and again until something kicks in, turns over, and there you are on the track once more.

  And it’s okay. Because who would have thought that turning sixty feels a bit like waking up from a bad dream?

  Maybe it was time to have a party after all. Even just a small one. And no, I wasn’t going to lie about my age. Fifty-nine forever?

  I don’t think so.

  And so as Kitty, Queenie, Sassy, Tilda Tia, my MNB, and I gathered at Omar’s, we raised a glass to all that had passed and all we hoped was to come. And looking around I knew one thing. Sixty had arrived and it was going to be fabulous.

  acknowledgments

  * * *

  Thank you to Morgan Entrekin, Elisabeth Schmitz, Judy Hottensen, Katie Raissian, Deb Seager, Justina Batchelor, Gretchen Mergenthaler, Julia Berner-Tobin, and the rest of the terrific team at Grove Atlantic. Thanks also to Nicole Dewey and, as always, to Heather Schroder.

  © Wendy Carlson

  * * *

  CANDACE BUSHNELL is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, The Carrie Diaries, One Fifth Avenue, Trading Up, Four Blondes, Summer and the City, and Killing Monica
. Sex and the City, published in 1996, was the basis for the HBO hit series and two subsequent blockbuster movies. Lipstick Jungle became a popular television series on NBC, as did The Carrie Diaries on the CW.

  * * *

  HOUSE OF ANANSI PRESS was founded in 1967 by writers Dennis Lee and David Godfrey. Anansi started as a small press with a mandate to publish Canadian writers, and quickly gained attention for publishing authors such as Margaret Atwood, Matt Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, and Erín Moure, as well as George Grant and Northrop Frye. French-Canadian works in translation have always been an important part of the list, and prominent Anansi authors in translation include Roch Carrier, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hébert, and France Daigle. Today, the company specializes in finding and developing writers of literary fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction, including Katherena Vermette, Lisa Moore, Patrick deWitt, Tanya Talaga, Djamila Ibrahim, Kathleen Winter, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and in maintaining the culturally significant backlist that has accumulated in the decades since the house was founded.