Sex and the City (2 page)

And it's fine with him. It doesn't even make him sad anymore the way it used to.

LOVE AT THE BOWERY BAR, PART II

At my table at the Bowery Bar, there's Parker, thirty-two, a novelist who writes about relationships that inevitably go wrong; his boyfriend, Roger; Skipper Johnson, an entertainment lawyer.

Skipper is twenty-five and personifies the Gen X dogged disbelief in Love.

"I just don't believe I'll meet the right person and get married," he said.

"Relationships are too intense. If you believe in love, you're setting yourself up to be disappointed. You just can't trust anyone. People are so corrupted these days."

"But it's the one ray of hope," Parker protested. "You hope it will save you from cynicism."

Skipper was having none of it. "The world is more fucked up now than it was twenty-five years ago. I feel pissed off to be born in this generation when all these things are happening to me. Money, AIDS, and relationships, they're all connected. Most people my age don't believe they'll have a secure job.

When you're afraid of the financial future, you don't want to make a commitment."

I understood his cynicism. Recently, I'd found myself saying I didn't want a relationship because, at the end, unless you happened to get married, you were left with nothing.

Skipper took a gulp of his drink. "I have no alternatives," he screamed. "I wouldn't be in shallow relationships, so I do nothing. I have no sex and no romance. Who needs it? Who needs all these potential problems like disease and pregnancy? I have no problems. No fear of disease, psychopaths, or stalk-ers. Why not just be with your friends and have real conversations and a good time?"

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"You're crazy," Parker said. "It's not about money. Maybe we can't help each other financially, but maybe we can help each other through something else. Emotions don't cost anything. You have someone to go home to. You have someone in your life."

I had a theory that the only place you could find love and romance in New York was in the gay community—that gay men were still friends with extravagance and passion, while straight love had become closeted. I had this theory partly because of all I had read and heard recently about the multimillionaire who left his wife for a younger man—and boldly squired his young swain around Manhattan's trendiest restaurants, right in front of the gossip columnists. There, I thought, is a True Lover.

Parker was also proving my theory. For instance, when Parker and Roger first started seeing each other, Parker got sick. Roger went to his house to cook him dinner and take care of him. That would never happen with a straight guy. If a straight guy got sick and he'd just started dating a woman and she wanted to take care of him, he would freak out—he would think that she was trying to wheedle her way into his life. And the door would slam shut.

"Love is dangerous," Skipper said.

"If you know it's dangerous, that makes you treasure it, and you'll work harder to keep it," Parker said.

"But relationships are out of your control," Skipper said. "You're nuts,"

Parker said.

Roger went to work on Skipper. "What about old-fashioned romantics?"

My friend Carrie jumped in. She knew the breed. "Every time a man tells me he's a romantic, I want to scream," she said. "All it means is that a man has a romanticized view of you, and as soon as you become real and stop playing into his fantasy, he gets turned off. That's what makes romantics dangerous. Stay away."

At that moment, one of those romantics dangerously arA LADY'S GLOVE

"The condom killed romance, but it has made it a lot easier to get laid," said a friend. "There's something about using a condom that, for women, makes it like sex doesn't count. There's no skin-to-skin contact. So they go to bed with you more easily."

LOVE AT THE BOWERY BAR, PART III

Barkley, twenty-five, was an artist. Barkley and my friend Carrie had been

"seeing" each other for eight days, which meant that they would go places and kiss and look into each other's eyes and it was sweet. With all the thirty-five year olds we knew up to their cuffs in polished cynicism, Carrie had thought she might try dating a younger man, one who had not been in New York long enough to become calcified.

Barkley told Carrie he was a romantic "because I feel it," and he also told Carrie he wanted to adapt Parker's novel into a screenplay. Carrie had offered to introduce them, and that's why Barkley was there at the Bowery Bar that night.

But when Barkley showed up, he and Carrie looked at each other and felt .

. . nothing. Perhaps because he had sensed the inevitable, Barkley had brought along a "date," a strange young girl with glitter on her face.

Nevertheless, when Barkley sat down, he said, "I totally believe in love. I would be so depressed if I didn't believe in it. People are halves. Love makes file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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everything have more meaning."

"Then someone takes it away from you and you're fucked," Skipper said.

"But you make your own space," said Barkley.

Skipper offered his goals: "To live in Montana, with a satellite dish, a fax machine, and a Range Rover—so you're safe," he said.

"Maybe what you want is wrong," said Parker. "Maybe
1 .
^ ____1_________ _________i T - ^ - l - l - »

"I want beauty. I have to be with a beautiful woman. I can't help it,"

Barkley said. "That's why a lot of the girls I end up going out with are stupid."

Skipper and Barkley took out their cellular phones. "Your phone's too big," said Barkley.

Later, Carrie and Barkley went to the Tunnel and looked at all the pretty young people and smoked cigarettes and scarfed drinks. Barkley took off with the girl with glitter on her face, and Carrie went around with Barkley's best friend, Jack. They danced, then they slid around in the snow like crazy people trying to find a cab. Carrie couldn't even look at her watch.

Barkley called her the next afternoon. "What's up, dude?" he said.

"I don't know. You called me."

"I told you I didn't want a girlfriend. You set yourself up. You knew what I was like."

"Oh yeah, right," Carrie wanted to say, "I knew that you were a shallow, two-bit womanizer, and that's why I wanted to go out with you."

But she didn't.

"I didn't sleep with her. I didn't even kiss her," Barkley said. "I don't care.

I'll never see her again if you don't want me to."

"I really don't give a shit." And the scary thing was, she didn't.

Then they spent the next four hours discussing Barkley's paintings. "I could do this all day, every day," Barkley said. "This is so much better than sex."

THE GREAT UN-PRETENDER

"The only thing that's left is work," said Robert, forty-two, an editor. "You've got so much to do, who has time to be romantic?"

Robert told a story, about how he'd recently been involved was clear that it wasn't going to work out. "She put me through all these little tests. Like I was supposed to call her on Wednesday to go out on Friday. But on Wednesday, maybe I feel like I want to kill myself, and God only knows how I'm going to feel on Friday. She wanted to be with someone who was crazy about her. I understand that. But I can't pretend to feel something I don't.

"Of course, we're still really good friends," he added. "We see each other file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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all the time. We just don't have sex."

One Sunday night, I went to a charity benefit at the Four Seasons. The theme was Ode to Love. Each of the tables was named after a different famous couple—there were Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, Narcissus and Himself, Catherine the Great and Her Horse, Michael Jackson and Friends. Al D'Amato sat at the Bill and Hillary table. Each table featured a centerpiece made up of related items—for instance, at the Tammy Faye Bakker table there were false eyelashes, blue eye shadow, and lipstick candles. Michael Jackson's table had a stuffed gorilla and Porcelana face cream.

Bob Pittman was there. "Love's not over—smoking is over," Bob said, grinning, while his wife, Sandy, stood next to him, and I stood behind the indoor foliage, trying to sneak a cigarette. Sandy said she was about to climb a mountain in New Guinea and would be gone for several weeks.

I went home alone, but right before I left, someone handed me the jawbone of a horse from the Catherine the Great table.

LOVE AT THE BOWERY BAR: EPILOGUE

Donovan Leitch got up from Francis Ford Coppola's table and came over. "Oh no," he said. "I totally believe that love conquers all. Sometimes you just have to give it some space." And that's exactly what's missing in Manhattan.

Swingin' Sex? I

Don't Think So . .

It all started the way it always does: innocently enough. I was sitting in my apartment, having a sensible lunch of crackers and sardines, when I got a call from an acquaintance. A friend of his had just gone to Le Trapeze, a couples-only sex club, and was amazed. Blown away. There were people naked—

having sex—right in front of him. Unlike S&M clubs, where no actual sex occurs, this was the real, juicy tomato. The guy's girlfriend was kind of freaked out—although, when another naked woman brushed against her, she

"sort of liked it." According to him.

In fact, the guy was so into the place that he didn't want me to write about it because he was afraid that, like most decent places in New York, it would be ruined by publicity.

I started imagining all sorts of things: Beautiful young hardbody couples.

Shy touching. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grape file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.

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leaves. Me, wearing a super-short, over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress.

We would walk in with our clothes on and walk out enlightened.

The club's answering machine brought me back to reality with a thump.

"At Le Trapeze, there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet,"

said a voice of mdeterminate gender, which added that there was "a juice bar and a hot and cold buffet"—things I rarely associate with sex or nudity. In celebration of Thanksgiving, "Oriental Night" would be held on November 19.

That sounded interesting, except it turned out that Oriental Night meant oriental food, not oriental people.

I should have dropped the whole idea right then. I shouldn't have listened to the scarily horny Sallie Tisdale, who in her yuppie-porn book,
Talk Dirty to
Me,
enthuses about public, group sex: "This is a taboo in the truest sense of the word. . . . If sex clubs do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries. . . . The center will not hold." I should have asked myself, What's fun about that?

But I had to see for myself. And so, on a recent Wednesday night, my calendar listed two events: 9:00
P.M
., dinner for the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Bowery Bar; 11:30
P.M
., Le Trapeze sex club, East 27th Street.

MESSY WOMEN; KNEE SOCKS

Everyone, it seems, likes to talk about sex, and the Karl Lagerfeld dinner, packed with glam-models and expense-accounted fashion editors, was no exception. In fact, it got our end of the table worked up into a near frenzy.

One stunning young woman, with dark curly hair and the sort of Seen-It-All attitude that only twenty year olds can pull off claimed she liked to spend her time going to topless bars, but only "seedy ones like Billy's Topless" because the girls were "real."

Then everyone agreed that small breasts were better than fake breasts, and a survey was taken: Who, among the men at the table, had actually been with a woman who had silicone implants? While no one admitted it, one man, an artist

in his mid-thirties, didn't deny it strongly enough. "You've been there,"

accused another man, a cherub-faced and very successful hotelier, "and the worst thing is . . . you . . . liked . . . it."

"No, I didn't," the artist protested. "But I didn't mind it." Luckily, the first course arrived, and everyone filled up their wineglasses.

Next round: Are messy women better in bed? The hotelier had a theory.

"If you walk into a woman's apartment and nothing's out of place, you know she's not going to want to stay in bed all day and order in Chinese food and eat it in bed. She's going to make you get up and eat toast at the kitchen table."

I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this, because I'm literally the messiest person in the world. And I probably have some old containers of General Tso's Special Chicken lying under my bed at this moment.

Unfortunately, all of it was eaten alone. So much for that theory.

Steaks were served. "The thing that really drives me crazy," said the artist, file://D:\Bushnell, Candace - Sex and the City.htm 2008.09.06.