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."

"Uh huh," says Mr. Big.

"Really, it's no problem."

"Okay," Mr. Big says, somewhat cautiously.

"Soooooo. . is that what you want?"

"Is it what you want?" says Mr. Big.

"No, not really. But I do want to be with someone who's in love with me," says Carrie.

"Well, I just can't make any guarantees right now. But if I were you, I'd hang around. See what happens."

Carrie lies back against the pillows. It's Sunday. It would be sort of a drag to have to go. What would she do with the rest of the day?

"Okay," she says, "but just for now. I don't have forever, you know. I'm probably going to die soon. Like in fifteen years or something." She lights up a cigarette.

"Okay," says Mr. Big. "But in the meantime, could you make me

some coffee? Please?"

Naomi, who got married last year at thirty-seven, is the president of an ad agency and typical of most of us women in New York. "I dated every kind of man—all shapes and sizes. Then one day, the right guy walks in the door, and he was the antithesis of everything I always thought I wanted." In other words, he wasn't the proverbial bad boy.

When she was thirty-five, Naomi was waiting for a cab on Madison Avenue, dressed in a suit and high heels, and a longhaired guy zoomed by on a motorcycle and he didn't check her out. "Suddenly, the allure of the starving-tortured-artist type became passe," she said. "I was always paying for their goddamn dinners."

Carrie goes to a book party at a museum, and she brings Sam. She hasn't seen Sam for a while. She hasn't seen any of her girlfriends for a while because it seems hke she spends all her time with Mr. Big. They're both wearing black pants and black patent leather boots, and as they get to the steps, Z.M., the media mogul, is coming down and getting into his car.

He laughs. "I was wondering who those two women were, stomping down the sidewalk."

"We weren't stomping," says Sam, "we were talking." The driver was holding open the door of his limousine. "Call me sometime, huh?" he says.

"Call me," Sam says, and you know neither of them will. Sam

sighs. "So, how's Mr. Big?"

Carrie starts hemming and hawing, going into her whole I-don't— know routine, they're planning to go to Aspen and he's talking about them getting a house together next summer, but she's not sure about him and. .

"Oh, come on," Sam says. "I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish I could find someone I wanted to spend a weekend with, for Christ's sake."

There's one big difference in New York between women who get married and women who don't. "Basically, it's like, Get over yourself," Rebecca said. "Get over the idea that you should be marrying Mort Zuckerman."

"I narrowed it down to three qualities," Trudie said. "Smart, successful, and sweet."

They also never believe that they will not get married. "I always thought that it would take me however long it would take me, but it was going to happen," said Trudie. "It would be horrible if it didn't. Why shouldn't I be married?"

But Manhattan is still Manhattan. "The thing you have to realize is that, in terms of socialization for men, getting them ready for marriage, New York is a terrible place," Lisa said. "Single men don't tend to hang around with couples. They're not used to that idea of coziness and family. So you have to get them there mentally."

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 936