Sex and the City (12 page)

"Oh, what a cute puppy," Carrie said, as a golden retriever raced barking across the lawn. But as the dog reached the edge of the yard, it was suddenly jerked back, as if yanked by

Miranda lit up a blue Dunhill. "Invisible electric fencing," she said. "They all have it. And I bet you anything we're going to have to hear about it."

For a moment, the four women stood in the driveway, staring at the dog, who was now sitting, subdued but valiantly wagging its tail, in the middle of the yard.

"Can we go back to the city now, please?" Sarah asked.

Inside the house, half a dozen women were already sitting in the living room, legs crossed, balancing cups of coffee and tea on their knees. A spread was laid out: cucumber sandwiches, quesadillas with salsa. Sitting off to one side, unopened, untouched, was a big bottle of white wine, its sides covered in a film of moisture. The bride-to-be, Lucy, looked somewhat terrified at the city women's arrival.

There were introductions all around.

A woman named Brigid Chalmers, Hermes from head to toe, was sipping what looked like a bloody mary. "You guys are late.

Jolie thought maybe you weren't coming," she said, with that particular breezy nastiness that only women can show to one another.

"Well, the train schedule," Sarah shrugged apologetically.

"Excuse me, but do we know you?" Miranda whispered in Carrie's ear. That meant as far as Miranda was concerned, it was war with Brigid from now on.

"Is that a bloody mary?" Carrie asked.

Brigid and one of the other women exchanged glances.

"Actually, it's a virgin mary," she said. Her eyes flickered in Jolie's direction for a second. "I did all that stuff for years. All that drinking and partying. And then, I don't know, it just gets boring.

You move on to more important things."

"The only important thing to me right now is vodka," Carrie said, file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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putting her hands to her head. "I've got the worst hangover. If I don't get some vodka . . . "

"Raleigh!" said one of the women on the couch, bending around to peer into one of the other rooms. "Raleigh! Go outside and play."

Miranda leaned over to Carrie: "Is she talking to her dog or her kid?"

"MARRIED SEX"

Miranda turned to Brigid. "So tell me, Brigid," she said. "What exactly is it that you do?"

Brigid opened her mouth and neatly inserted a quesadilla triangle. "I work at home. I've got my own consulting firm."

"I see," Miranda said, nodding. "And what do you consult on?"

"Computers."

"She's our sort of neighborhood Bill Gates," said another woman, named Marguerite, drinking Evian from a wine goblet.

"Whenever we have a computer problem, we call Brigid, and she can fix it."

"That's so important when you have a computer," Belle said.

"Computers can be so tricky. Especially if you don't use one every day." She smiled. "And what about you, Marguerite? Do you have children?"

Marguerite blushed shghtly and looked away. "One," she said a little wistfully. "One beautiful httle angel. Of course, he's not so httle anymore. He's eight, he's in that real-boy stage. But we're trying for another."

"Margie's on that in-vitro trail," Jolie said, and then, addressing the room, added, "I'm so glad I got my two over with early."

Unfortunately, Carrie chose that moment to emerge from the kitchen sipping on a large glass of vodka with two ice cubes floating on the top. "Speaking of rug rats," she said, "Belle's husband wants her to get preggers, but she doesn't want to. So she went to a drug store, bought one of those test kits that tell you when you're ovulating, and the woman behind the counter was like, 'Good luck!'

And Belle was like, 'No, no, you don't understand. I'm going to use this so I know when not to have sex.' Isn't that hysterical?"

"I can't possibly be pregnant during the summer," Belle said. "I wouldn't want to be seen in a bathing suit."

Brigid yanked the conversation back. "And what do you do, Miranda?" she asked. "You live in the city, don't you?"

"Well, actually, I'm the executive director at a cable company."

"Oh, I love cable," said a woman named Rita, who was wearing three heavy gold necklaces and sporting a twelve-carat sapphire engagement ring next to a sapphire-encrusted wedding band.

"Yes," Belle said, smiling sweetly. "We think of Miranda as our own little Bob Pittman. He started MTV, you know."

"Oh, I know," said Rita. "My husband is at CBS. I should tell him I met you, Miranda. I'm sure he'd—in fact, I was his assistant!

Until everyone found out we were seeing each other. Especially since he was married at the time." She and the other Connecticut women exchanged glances.

Carrie plunked down next to Rita, accidentally sloshing her with file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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some vodka.

"So sorry," she said. "I'm so damn clumsy today. Napkin?"

"That's okay," Rita said.

"It's just so fascinating," Carrie said. "Getting a married man. I would never be able to pull it off. I'd probably end up becoming best friends with his wife."

"That's why there are courses at the Learning Annex," Sarah said dryly.

"Yeah, but I don't want to take courses with a bunch of losers,"

Carrie said.

"I know a lot of people who have taken courses at the Learning Annex. And they're pretty good," Brigid said.

"What was our favorite?" Rita asked. "The S&M course. How to be a dominatrix."

"Well, whipping is just about the only way I can keep my husband awake," Brigid said. "Married sex."

Lucy laughed gamely.

SUBURBAN SURPRISE: BIDET

Carrie stood up and yawned. "Does anyone know where the bathroom is?"

Carrie did not go to the bathroom. Nor was she as drunk as she appeared to be. Instead, she tiptoed up the stairs, carpeted with an oriental runner, and thought that if she were Jolie, she would probably know what kind of oriental rug it was because that was the kind of stuff you were supposed to know if you were married to a rich banker and making him a home in the suburbs.

She went into Johe's bedroom. There was a thick white carpet on the floor and photographs everywhere in silver frames, some professional-looking shots of Johe in a bathing suit, her long blond hair swinging over her shoulders.

Carrie stared at those photographs for a long time. What was it like to be Johe? How did it happen? How did you find someone who fell in love with you and gave you all this? She was thirty-four and she'd never even come close, and there was a good chance she never would.

And this was the kind of life she'd grown up believing she could have, simply because she wanted it. But the men you wanted didn't want it, or you; and the men who did want it were too boring. She went into the bathroom. Floor-to-ceiling black marble. A bidet.

Maybe suburban husbands wouldn't play ball unless their wives were just-washed, unlike guys in the city. Then she almost screamed.

There was a fourteen-by-seventeen color photograph of Jolie, Demi Moore-style, naked save for a skimpy negligee that was open in the front to reveal humongous tits and a huge belly. Johe was staring proudly into the camera, her hand resting just above her belly button, which had been pushed straight out like a httle stem. Carrie flushed the toilet and ran breathless down the stairs.

"We're opening presents," Brigid scolded.

Carrie sat down in a chair next to Miranda. "What's your problem?" Miranda asked.

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"Photograph. In the master bathroom. Check it out," Carrie said.

"Excuse me," Miranda said, leaving the room.

"What are you two doing?" Jolie asked.

"Nothing," Carrie said. She looked at the bride-to-be, who was holding up a pair of red silk, crotchless panties bordered in black lace. Everyone was laughing. Which is what you do at showers.

«TM SHAKING"

"Could you believe the photograph?" Miranda asked. They were rocking gently on the train back to the city.

"If I ever get pregnant," Belle said, "I'm going to stay inside for nine months. I will see no one."

"I think I could get into it," Sarah said moodily, staring out the window. "They've got houses and cars and nannies. Their lives look so manageable. I'm jealous."

"What do they do all day? That's what I want to know," Miranda said.

"They don't even have sex," Carrie said. She was thinking about her new boyfriend, Mr. Big. Right now, things were great, but after a year, or two years—if it even lasted that long—then what happened?

"You wouldn't believe the story I heard about Brigid," Belle said. "While you guys were upstairs, Jolie pulled me into the kitchen. 'Be nice to Brigid,' she said. 'She just found her husband, Tad, in flagrante with another woman.'"

The other woman was Brigid's next door neighbor, Susan. Susan and Tad both worked in the city and for the last year had carpooled to and from the train each day. When Brigid found them, it was ten in the evening and they were both drunk in the car, parked at the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. Brigid had been out walking the dog.

She yanked open the car door and tapped Tad on his naked bum.

"Wheaton has the flu and wants to say good night to
his
HaHHv "

she
said, then went back inside.

For the next week, she continued to ignore the situation, while Tad became more and more agitated, sometimes calling her ten times a day from his office. Every time he tried to bring it up, she brought up something about their two children. Finally, on Saturday night, when Tad was getting stoned and mixing up margaritas on the deck, she told him. "I'm pregnant again. Three months. So we shouldn't have to worry about a miscarriage this time. Aren't you happy, dear?" Then she took the pitcher of margaritas and poured it over his head.

"Typical," Carrie said, cleaning under her fingernails with the edge of a matchbook.

"I'm just so happy I can trust my husband," Belle said.

"I'm shaking," Miranda said. They saw the city, dusky and brown, looming up as the train went over a bridge. "I need a drink.

Anyone coming?"

After three cocktails at Ici, Carrie called Mr. Big.

"Yo, yo," he said. "What up."

"It was awful," she giggled. "You know how much I hate those kinds of things. All they talked about was babies and private schools and how this friend of theirs got blackballed from the country club and how one of their nannies crashed a new Mercedes."

She could hear Mr. Big puffing away on his cigar. "Don't worry, kid. You'll get used to it," he said.

"I don't think so," she said.

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She turned and looked back to their table. Miranda had shanghaied two guys from another table, one of whom was already in deep conversation with Sarah.

"Gimme shelter—in Bowery Bar," she said, and hung up.

for Night of Topless Fun

Bad things can happen to city women when they come back from visiting their newly married-with-children friends in the suburbs.

The morning after Carrie, Miranda, Belle, and Sarah returned from a bridal shower in Greenwich, there were phone calls.

Sarah had broken her ankle rollerblading at four in the morning.

Miranda had had sex with some guy in a closet at a party, and they didn't use condoms. Carrie had done something so ridiculous she was sure her short relationship with Mr. Big was over. And no one could find Belle.

Miranda hadn't meant to go nuts at the party, to go into what she calls "my Glenn Close imitation."

"I was just going to go home and get a good night's sleep and wake up and work on Sunday." That was the great thing about not being married, not having kids, being alone. You could work on Sunday.

But Sarah made her go to the party. "There could be good contacts there," Sarah had said. Sarah, with her own PR company, was constantly on the lookout for "contacts," which could also translate to "dates." The party was on East
64th
Street. Some rich old guy's town house. Women in their thirties wearing black dresses and all with practically the same color blond hair. That type of woman always went to parties at rich old guys' houses, and they file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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always brought their girlfriends, so there were squadrons of these women looking for men and pretending not to.

Sarah disappeared into the throng. Miranda was left standing by the bar. She had dark, wavy hair, and she was wearing leggings with the boot part sewn in, so she stuck out.

Two girls walked by her, and Miranda—maybe she is a httle paranoid—swore that one of them said, "That's that girl, Miranda Hobbes. She's a total bitch."

So Miranda said, out loud, but so no one could hear, "That's right, I am a real bitch, honey, but thank God I'm not like you."

Then she remembered how at the end of the long afternoon in the suburbs, the low-fat carrot cake with low-fat cream cheese frosting had been served with tiny sterling forks with prongs so sharp they could break the skin.