Ellen’s grandfather was famous in TV. A real big deal. Stephen met her at a work party. They’d both gone outside on the balcony to smoke cigarettes and started talking. She was funny. A real firecracker, a wiseacre. She was dating somebody else. After that, she and Stephen would run into each other at work events.
“We became actual friends,” said Stephen, “which for me is rare with women. I had no sexual designs on her. I could go out with her and shoot the shit like a guy. She could talk about movies, Letterman, she knew TV—and most women don’t understand TV. If you try to talk about TV with a pretty girl, her eyes glaze over.”
They went to the movies, but “just as friends.” She might have been secretly angling for him; but if she was, Stephen didn’t notice. They’d talk about their relationships. Their dissatisfactions. Stephen was seeing someone who had gone to Europe for three months, and he was writing her forced, unenthusiastic letters.
One afternoon, they were having lunch, when Ellen began describing a recent sexual encounter with her boyfriend. She had given him a hand job using Vaseline. Stephen suddenly popped a woody. “I began to see her as a sexual being,” he said. “The thing about these girls who aren’t beauties—they have to put sex on the table. They can’t nuance it.”
Ellen broke up with her boyfriend, and Stephen began dating lots of women. He would tell Ellen about these women. One night they were at a restaurant, having dinner, and Ellen leaned over and gave him a tongue kiss in his ear that got him thumping his foot.
They went to her place and had sex. “It was great,” Stephen said. “I performed, on an objective basis, better than I had with other women. I was going back for seconds and thirds. I was giving her the forty-five-minute fuck.” The “relationship” progressed from there. They would watch TV in bed and then have sex with the TV on. “A pretty woman would never let you have the TV on during sex,” Stephen said. “But it’s relaxing somehow, with the TV on. You’re not the focus. Women like Ellen allow you to be yourself.”
Stephen admitted that from Ellen’s point of view, their relationship probably wasn’t so great. “During the six months we went out, well, we had probably gone to more movies back when we were friends. Our dates became the worst kind of dates—takeout food and videos. I felt tremendously guilty. I felt shallow. She wasn’t quite up to snuff in the looks department, and I felt shallow for thinking of her looks. She was a great girl.”
THEN SHE BROKE
Ellen started in with the pressure. “‘When are you going to meet my grandfather,’ she kept asking me. ‘He really wants to meet you.’”
“I wanted to meet her grandfather,” Stephen said. “He was a huge deal. But I couldn’t. When you meet someone’s grandparents, it means the relationship is real.”
To solve his problem, Stephen began pimping for Ellen, trying to fix her up with guys. They would talk about guys she could date. One night, Ellen went to a party where she was supposed to meet one of Stephen’s friends. But the guy wasn’t interested in her and she got upset. She went to Stephen’s place and they had sex.
A couple of weeks later, Stephen met a girl, a babe, late one night at a party in a grungy loft in TriBeCa. He introduced her to his parents almost immediately, even though he had none of the kinds of conversations with her that he had with Ellen. He continued to sleep with both girls, taking what he had learned from sex with Ellen and applying it to the new girl. Ellen wanted to hear all about it. What they did. What the new girl was like in bed, what she felt like, what they talked about.
Then she broke. She went to Stephen’s apartment on a Sunday afternoon. They had a screaming fight. She was punching him, “literally raining down punches on me,” Stephen said. She left but called two weeks later.
“We made up on the phone,” Stephen said, “and I went to her house for the usual. But when we got to the crucial moment, she kicked me out of bed. I didn’t get mad at her. I was too angry with myself for that, but I respected her, too. I thought, Good for you.”
Walden put a knee up against the bar. “About six months after I stopped seeing Libby, she got engaged. She called me and said she was getting married.”
“I was in love with Ellen but I never told her,” Stephen said.
“I was in love, too,” Walden said. “In love in an utterly mundane way.”
16
Clueless in Manhattan
There are worse things than being thirty-five, single, and female in New York. Like: Being twenty-five, single, and female in New York.
It’s a rite of passage few women would want to repeat. It’s about sleeping with the wrong men, wearing the wrong clothes, having the wrong roommate, saying the wrong thing, being ignored, getting fired, not being taken seriously, and generally being treated like shit. But it’s necessary. So if you’ve ever wondered how thirty-five-year-old, single, New York women get to be, well, thirty-five-year-old, single, New York women, read on.
A couple of weeks ago, Carrie ran into Cici, a twenty-five-year-old assistant to a flower designer, at the Louis Vuitton party. Carrie was trying to say hello to five people at once when Cici materialized out of the semidarkness. “Hiiiiii,” she said, and when Carrie glanced over at her, she said, “Hiiiii,” again. Then she just stared.
Carrie had to turn away from a book editor she was talking to. “What, Cici?” she asked. “What is it?”
“I don’t know. How are you?”
“I’m fine. Fabulous,” Carrie said.
“What have you been up to?”
“The usual.” The book editor was about to talk to someone else. “Cici, I . . .”
“I haven’t seen you for so long,” Cici said. “I miss you. You know I’m your biggest fan. Other people say you’re a bitch, but I say, ‘No, she’s one of my best friends and she’s not like that.’ I defend you.”
“Thanks.”
Cici just stood there, staring. “How are you?” Carrie asked.