Sex and the City (20 page)

You see, Cindy was one of those New York women who had been trying to get married for years. We all know them. They're the women we've been reading about for the past ten years, who are attractive (not necessarily beautiful) and seem to be able to get everything—except married. Cindy sold advertising for a car magazine. She knew stereo equipment. She was as big as a man.

She shot guns and traveled (once, on her way to the airport, she had to punch out a drunk cab driver, throw him in the back seat, and drive herself to the airport). She wasn't exactly the most feminine woman, but she always had men.

But every year, she got older, and when I would run into her at an old friend's cocktail party, she'd regale me and everyone else with stories of the big one who got away. The guy with the yacht. The famous artist who couldn't get a hard-on without having a paintbrush pushed up his bum. The CEO who came to bed in mouse slippers.

And, you couldn't help it. You'd look at her and feel a mixture of admiration and revulsion. You'd walk away thinking, She'll never get married. If she does marry, it's going to have to be some boring bank manager who lives in New Jersey. And besides, she's too old.

Then you'd go home and lie in bed, and the whole thing would come back to haunt you, until you had to call up your friends and be a nasty little cat and say, "Sweetie, if I ever end up like her, be sure to shoot me, huh?"

Well, guess what. You were wrong. Cindy got married. He's not the kind of guy she ever thought she'd end up with, but she's happier than she's ever been in her life.

It is time. Time to stop complaining about no good men. Time to stop calling your machine every half hour to see if a man has called.

Time to stop identifying with Martha Stewart's lousy love life even if she is on the cover of
People
magazine.

Yes, it is finally time to marry a man in Manhattan, and best of all, it can be done. So relax. You have plenty of time. Martha, pay attention.

It's a fall weekend and it's raining. Carrie and Mr. Big are at the restaurant they go to in Bridgehampton. It's crowded, which is annoying, and the maitre d' who always gives them a table isn't there. So she and Mr. Big are eating at the bar with their heads together. First, they were going to try this new thing that they'd tried on Mr. Big's birthday—ordering four entrees, like having Chinese food.

But Mr. Big wants to eat exactly the same thing Carrie is eating file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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so they just end up having twin dinners.

"Do you mind?" Mr. Big says.

"No, I don't mind," Carrie says in the ridiculous baby voice they seem to use with each other practically all the time now. "Me too tired to care."

"Me too tired too," Mr. Big says, in the baby voice. His elbow brushes against her. Then he jabs her with it. "Beep beep," he says.

"Hey," she says. "Here's the line. Don't cross it."

"Sudden death," Mr. Big growls, leaning over and spearing her pasta with his fork.

"I'll give you sudden death," Carrie says.

"C'mon, hit me," he says, and she punches him in the arm and he laughs.

"Here you two are." They turn around and Samantha Jones is standing there with hke three cashmere sweaters wrapped around her neck. "I thought you guys might be here," she says. Mr. Big says,

"Uh huh." Sam and Mr. Big don't really get along. Once, when Sam asked why, Carrie explained it was because Sam always said mean things to her and Big didn't hke it. Sam snorted and said, "I think you can take care of yourself."

Sam starts talking about movies, and Carrie has no choice— she has to start talking about movies, too. Mr. Big doesn't hke to talk about movies. Carrie starts wishing Sam would go away so she could just talk to Mr. Big about their favorite new subject—moving to Colorado someday. She doesn't hke herself for wishing Sam would leave, but sometimes when you're with a man that's the way it is, you can't help it.

DWEEBS, NERDS, AND LOSERS

"It was David P. that did it," Trudie said. Trudie is the editor in chief of a magazine for teenage girls. She is forty-one, but at times she looks like a lovely sixteen year old, with huge blue eyes and black hair.

She leaned back in her chair, pointed to a bookshelf crammed with photos. "I call that, 'Trudie and . . .'" she said.

"It's photos of me and all the losers I went out with. I like to catalogue things.

"I used to specialize in the two-year relationship. I did everything to make them work. Couples therapy. Talked for hours about commitment problems. Fought. And then I realized, you know what? I'm not going to change a forty-year-old guy who hates women. It's—not—my—problem.

"I set a deadline for myself. I said, I have to be married by the time I'm forty. I was dating David P. He was fifty and dishonest. I told him I wanted to be married. He kept making excuses. Sucking me back in. 'Let's just go on this one trip to China, and when we come back, we'll figure it out,' he'd say. And then we were in Venice, at the Gritti Palace, one of those rooms with the wooden shutters that open onto the Grand Canal. 'Let's face it,' he said.

'You're never going to find anyone in Manhattan who's going to want to get married. So why don't we just stay like this forever.'

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And that's when I left for good."

When Trudie got back to Manhattan, she dug out all her old Filofaxes and called every man she'd ever met in Manhattan. "Yes, every one of them: all the guys I'd passed over, who I'd thought were dweebs, nerds, losers, didn't have enough hair."

"My husband's name was on the list—he was the last one,"

Trudie said. "I remember thinking, If he doesn't work out, I don't know what I'm going to do." (This, of course, was typical New York-woman modesty, because New York women always know what they're going to do.) The truth is, Trudie had three dinners with her future husband (she didn't know he was going to be her husband then), and he went off to Russia for two months. It was the beginning of summer, and Trudie went to the Hamptons and completely forgot about him. In fact, she began dating two other guys.

Trudie smiled and examined her nails. "Okay, he called at the end of the summer, and we began seeing each other again. But the point is you have to be willing to walk at any time.

You have to put your foot down. They can't think you're this poor, suffering httle woman who can't live without them. Because it's not true. You can."

When it comes to marrying a man in Manhattan, two rules apply.

"You have to be sweet," said Lisa, thirty-eight, a correspondent for a network news show. But at the same time, said Britta, a photo rep,

"you can't let them get away with anything."

For these women, age is an advantage. If a woman has survived single in New York until her mid- to late thirties, chances are she knows a thing or two about how to get what she wants. So, when one of these New York women targets a man as a potential husband, there is usually very httle he can do to get away.

"You have to start the training from day one," said Britta. "I didn't know that I wanted to marry my husband at the beginning. I only knew that I wanted him, and I would do whatever it took to get him. And I knew I would.

"You can't be like these stupid girls who only want to marry rich guys," she continued. "You have to be a bit calculating. You always have to expect more than you have. Take Barry [her husband]. As much as he hated it, he didn't want a typical girl who would let him do whatever he wanted. If someone got him now, they'd be so lucky. He's smart, sweet, he cooks and cleans. And you know what?

He hated it every step of the way."

Before Barry, Britta was the kind of woman who once made her date go to the coat check to get her a pack of cigarettes and ran out the back door with someone else while he wasn't looking. "I once called Barry from the top of a mountain in Aspen and cussed him out for ten minutes because he had another date for New Year's Eve.

Of course, it was only a month after we'd met, but still."

After that, Barry pretty much came around, except for two shghtly sticky problems. He liked to look at other women, and he sometimes complained about not having his space, file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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especially after she moved in with him. "Well, first of all, I always made sure we had lots of fun," says Britta. "I cooked. We both gained thirty pounds. We got drunk together. We watched each other get drunk. We took care of each other when we puked.

"You have to do unexpected things. Like one time he came home and there were candles all over the place and I served him up a TV

dinner. Then I used to make him put on some of my clothes. But you've got to watch these men all the time. I'm sorry, but they spend 80 percent of their time away from you. When they're with you, they can pay attention. Why should they be checking out some other chick when they're eating with you? One time, when Barry's eyes were wandering, I hit him over the head so hard he nearly fell off his chair. I told him, 'Put your tongue back in your mouth and your tail between your legs and finish your dinner.'"

Keeping him, however, is another story. "Women in this town don't care if a guy is married or engaged," Britta said. "They'll still go after him. You have to be on top of it all the time."

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 vsrith this," Mr. Big said.

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 hke 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 file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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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."