I Can't Complain (8 page)

Retro happy ending? Of course. But who are we anyway but fans of a fairy tale set in a glittering, kindhearted New York, “the magic isle of opportunity—not ironically but with the old Gershwin spirit,” as Pauline Kael once wrote of
Saturday Night Fever.

A few hours and many over-the-top outfits from now, we will know. Yet something nags, suggested by the chilling line Big delivered last week to the Charlotte-Miranda-Samantha jury: “You’re the loves of her life. A guy’s lucky to come in fourth.”

I will be watching alone, nervously. Although my friends proposed gathering to experience the finale together, drink wine, and say goodbye, I want no distractions, no chatter, no knitting. I need my privacy. My husband, who not only hates the show but heckles it, is barred, unless he takes a vow of silence.

“Do your friends actually talk like that?” he asks.

No, they do not. Nor do they dress or party or sleep around in the manner of my best television friends. But therein lies the draw—the ticket to a distant land, the utterly unabashed, unapologetic girly-girlness of Carrie and Co., gorgeously overdressed for every occasion, in a paper-moon world sans parents or inhibitions or comfortable shoes.

I wasn’t always a
Sex and the City
watcher. I missed the first season entirely, then chanced upon a few episodes in subsequent years. What finally reeled me in was narcissism. My own. The Corner Bookstore in New York, in what I now think of as Charlotte’s neighborhood, had invited me to do a book signing. A crowd blocked my entry. The draw was not me, but
Sex and the City,
a crew filming in front of the store, whose windows were filled with piles of my hardcovers and nothing else.

Had I lucked into accidental product placement? Could the show’s famously acquisitive consumers/fans do for
The Dearly Departed
what Carrie had done for Manolo Blahniks? It wasn’t to be. I tuned in thereafter, religiously, hoping for a glimpse of my wares. Self-promotion, fruitless in the end, introduced me to four new friends.

It was the season of Charlotte’s first wedding, the engagement of Carrie to a hunky cabinetmaker, and the return of a married man named Big. I was ignorant of where he came from or why he’d left. To fill in the gaps, I rented. Here was the Chrysler Building from day one. Here was Carrie talking directly to the camera, not with her trademark voiceovers, but something else, something alien and since dropped, a direct address of the audience. Here was Charlotte unattached, Miranda a few shades less redheaded. And here was a slightly gentler Samantha before naughty words screeched at high volume substituted for punch lines.

When the marathon ended, I acknowledged what I felt: membership in the sorority. I was no longer a fly on the wall, but the virtual fifth girlfriend at the luncheonette. DVD immersion had washed me onto their shore. I forgave their excesses, the painful leads to Carrie’s columns, the rash weddings, and the rasher separations.

I still wince at many lines, and I don’t love these women equally. Where is the overlap, the reason for my devotion? I share no niche with anyone on the show, not age, not marital status, not zip code or dress code. I’ve never worn a ball gown to a Chinese restaurant, never aspired to mile-high feathered mules; never even left my house wearing a black bra under a white shirt. Yet I put my knitting down when Carrie exits her brownstone in tulle and satin, or tangled in a crazy combination of inner- and outerwear. I lean in, take note, and wish for a replay. It is fashion as spectator sport, post–Title IX, full circle back to caricature couture, perhaps applicable on a small scale to my world—a white glove, a strap, a string of pearls.

Tonight I will watch
Sex and the City: A Farewell,
the pregame special, onward till 9:40 and then no more. Fortunately, I’ve discovered within me a high tolerance for
Sex and the City
reruns. On reexamination, I hear throwaway lines and nuances that I missed, or see that Charlotte’s dress and sunglasses are invoking Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly.

There are rumors of a reunion, a special, a feature film. Until then I am steeling myself—and you must, too—for what I predict will actually happen tonight: the Russian and Mr. Big will prove to be a story editor’s tease. Carrie will choose Manhattan.

If I’m right, my longed-for happy-ending sellout will take a back seat to her city, her column, her bed-sit, her independence, her family of friends, her closet, her I-am-womanhood. And isn’t that what we’ve worked toward in these six short years—ongoing eligibility up to and including promiscuity, and men as mere accessories?

I have considered the options. I understand that Aleksandr Petrovsky is the mature choice, an unexpectedly appealing diversion on the road posted with signs pointing to Big. At first I resented his intrusion, the deus ex machina arrival of this stable, rich, world-weary, unattached love interest.
How inorganic,
I thought.
How old.
But I came around. For four episodes I gave my blessing, defending him to myself against the ill wishes of Miranda and the doubts Carrie herself telegraphed to my couch. Younger friends of mine deemed him selfish, but I saw him as merely busy, distracted, his own man. Perhaps he was perfect: an artiste who loved her and could pay the Prada bills.

I hope I’m wrong. I haven’t devoted all these hours to Carrie’s welfare to see her settle for self-determination and freedom. I don’t want to watch her flying home in coach, smiling her bittersweet smile, her head tilted against the portal window, Simon and Garfunkel singing, “So here’s to you New York.” In that scenario dear friends will be waiting at the airport—please, at least could Charlotte be pregnant?—no men except Stanny, with a pitcher of Cosmopolitans, balloons, puppies, the New York skyline. Gershwin. Credits will run much slower than usual. Begrudgingly I’ll admit that any tighter closure would rule out sequels.

HBO will owe me a wedding with three bridesmaids in nonmatching dresses of blinding originality, and the most fabulous bridal gown of all time. I’ll see it in a theater, instead of waiting for the DVD. I predict I will cry at the wedding, and I’ll learn Big’s given name. Ideally, I’ll see it with three close, inseparable girlfriends, and then we’ll grab a bite at a café, even if it’s in a Massachusetts mall and not Manhattan. We’ll gossip about our dates and lovers until one of us points out that we don’t have any, and that Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte are only make-believe.

EPILOGUE

Four years later, I met Sarah Jessica Parker, star of the show, at the movie premiere of
Then She Found Me,
which featured her husband, Matthew Broderick. After spotting her across the room (Nobu 57, scene of the after-party), I darted in her direction but was headed off by someone from her past. (
Summer camp?
I remember thinking.
Or
Annie
?
) I didn’t want to form a queue, especially because she was eating and because I didn’t want to look as obsequious as I felt. But as I was leaving the restaurant, standing at the bottom of a long, wide stairway, wondering where my husband and son had gone, down came SJP alone, heading toward me in this empty space—“as if we were the only two people in the world,” I have often described the sensation.

I introduced myself as the author of the book behind the movie, then rushed to say, in case I needed more bona fides, that years before, the
Boston Globe
had asked me to write about the finale of
Sex and the City
in advance of the last episode and to predict how it would end.

She listened graciously, patiently, adorably. Her dress was white with a big splashy blue print. I later learned it was from her new collection and cost $14.

I added, “I didn’t get anything right. Well, one thing: that we would find out Big’s real name.”

Her already darling expression turned to one of astonishment at my prognostication. “No one guessed that!” she exclaimed.

I said, “I didn’t mean I guessed his actual
name
—just that we’d find it out.”

“Still,” she said, with a firm shake of her blond head, “no one guessed that.”

I told her I was looking forward to the upcoming
Sex and the City
movie.

Her expression changed, from earnestness to consternation. She said, with what felt like great sincerity, “Oh! I hope you like the choices we made.”

I said, “I will. I know I will.”

I
N THE
1970
S, WRITING
for the
Massachusetts Teacher,
I helped sneak a headline into the magazine that later brought complaints. The one-paragraph item reported that the United Arab Emirates would be funding a Maryland school district. A coworker had submitted it with the gag headline, “Uh-oh. There Goes the School Hanukkah Festival.” We were greatly amused—we underlings never got jokes into print—when it ran that way.

Letters arrived. Most fittingly, a member of the Arab De- fense League wrote to say that our headline, with its assumption of Arab anti-Semitism, offended him, and he was, of course, exactly in the right. Less expected were two letters from Jewish readers. They complained not because they recognized an offense to their Arab brethren, but because we had made a joke in boldface type that—as best as I could interpret—had a Jewish . . . what? Word? Punch line? Invitation to discriminate? Suggestion of passivity?

It taught me this: people are touchy about words on the page and happy to tell you about it. I left education journalism for fiction and didn’t hear too many complaints about the political content of my hardly political novels until I wrote my fourth,
The Inn at Lake Devine.
Where I’ve gone wrong, in the words of one letter writer, is the implied endorsement of “rampant intermarriage” in my books. I myself didn’t know that intermarriage was the thesis of my novel, which begins with a thirteen-year-old narrator saying, “It was not complicated, and, as my mother pointed out, not even personal: They had a hotel; they didn’t want Jews; we were Jews.” Years before, when I sent that opening and a few pages more to my editor, she called and said, “This is it. This is your next novel.” I said, “But it’s all I have. I don’t know if I can sustain it.”

“You have to,” she said.

I asked why.

“Because no one’s ever written about anti-Semitism in comedic fashion,” she answered.

Comedic to her, maybe, but no laughing matter to readers praying that their real-life daughter won’t find, as my narrator did, love among the Lutherans. Random House published
The Inn at Lake Devine
in 1998 and Vintage in paperback a year later. Thus began my book group adventures among those whose hands shoot up to ask, “Don’t you think you have a social responsibility to make Jews marry Jews?”

No, I do not. I have a social responsibility to tell an interesting tale. I explain: “This is
not
a story about a man and a woman who meet through a Jewish singles network.” And might they at least agree that a fitting punishment for an anti-Semitic innkeeper is to lose her sons to Jews? Add to that the loss of her inn. Her empire. Like
Hamlet
!

I plead sociology: Mixed marriages to the left and right of me, long and successful ones, family, friends, neighbors. I grew up in a city with a large Catholic and Greek Orthodox population, which is to say I went to dances at the Transfiguration Church and to my senior prom with a boy named McCarthy. I married a Jew with the same degree of religiosity as my own, which is to say negligible. We raised our son in Northampton, Massachusetts, where the Unitarian Society delivers Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Easter, and election sermons. I try to explain my attitude—people should marry for love in this century—to the complainers (it’s always women and it’s always—don’t write me—Jewish women), who want me to recant. I might throw in another example of the world I live in. I tell them that our son came home from school one day complaining, “I’m the
only
kid in third grade who celebrates
only
Hanukkah.”

“It’s true,” I tell the hostile audience. “That happened. He actually was the only kid . . .” Et cetera. I ask if they don’t see themselves as, well, let’s be frank: prejudiced. No, they don’t. Sometimes I add this, hoping to broaden the topic and get me off the hot seat: A novel about a Jewish family is a Jewish novel. (I name a few.) One cannot bring forth an American novel about the Everyman Family and name them the Shapiros unless the author is making a point. Ethnicity, religion, and race can’t be dropped casually into a novel as if casting a television commercial with a multicultural aim.

At one particularly bracing night as keynote speaker for the Worcester, Massachusetts, Jewish Federation’s annual banquet, a woman seated next to me at dinner announced that she found my portrayal of Jews in the Catskills more anti-Semitic than that of the anti-Semitic Vermont innkeeper. I gasped. I’d been taught that one is polite to the guests in one’s house, and for that evening the Radisson was this federation board member’s base of hospitality. Of course she had to repeat this later and louder at the Q and A in front of hundreds of women. I was flummoxed. A braver author might have snapped, “I don’t defend the content of my books.” I tried to get across what I used to ask my Hampshire College students, who grumbled when a female character under discussion tossed a salad or burped a baby. “In other words, you should follow the character into a voting booth, then judge the story by what lever he pulls?” No one used to back down in that workshop of the intensely politically correct, and no one gives an inch after I make my case for artistic freedom. “If one Jewish woman ever fell in love with one Lutheran man, are you saying I couldn’t write their story? Can a novel be about Hitler? Are you offended by mysteries that involve murders? Are you mad at Tolstoy and Flaubert for those adulterers they dreamed up?” I quote as best as I can from memory (now from a document I wrote titled “Bring to Book Groups”) what Flannery O’Connor once said, that “everybody approaches the novel according to his particular interest—the doctor looks for a disease, the minister looks for a sermon, the poor look for money . . . If they find what they want . . . then they judge the piece of fiction to be superior.”