Is There Still Sex in the City?

“It’s terrific,” the nurse nodded. “It means they can be bikini-model big.”

“Like a twenty-one-year-old,” the doctor said proudly.

Luckily, Ess wanted to look like a twenty-one-year-old. Otherwise the whole thing would have creeped her out.

She had to pay for the procedure up front: thirty-five hundred dollars put on her credit card.

She awoke from the operation to what she was told was more good news: “Doctor was able to make you just a bit larger. You’re now officially an E cup!” the nurse squealed, so that “E cup” came out like the sound a mouse might make. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

Ess tried to take a deep breath and nearly panicked. There was an unfamiliar weight on her chest. The weight of breasts. Of sexiness. Of desire and of being desired. For a moment, she wondered what she’d done. Was she ready for this? She could tell the breasts were big from the weight. She wondered how she was going to maneuver these saline receptacles through the world—literally. Her breasts would be unavoidable, and everyone would look at them. The thought of men looking at her, of desiring her, turned her on again.

“You’re going to have so much fun in your new body. Shopping, buying bras,” the nurse waxed on. “And now you have the perfect excuse to buy yourself a whole new wardrobe. You’ll see. Your entire life is going to change.”

She looked wistful and why not? All women are familiar with the story of the makeover journey. Indeed, we relish it as a success story. If a woman can make herself over into a more pleasing, commercial, universally acceptable version of a stereotypical female, she can live an entirely different life.

Indeed, Ess discovered that having this new body was almost like having a baby. Everyone was celebrating. But this time around she wasn’t tired and she looked amazing and she could drink. It wasn’t long before she’d made some new girlfriends. She met them at happy hour at a bar on the pier near the train station. Some of them were married, some weren’t, but they were all tanned and groomed and wore expensive clothes and, like her, had breast implants.

Suffocating under the tacit disapproval of her parents, Ess took to leaving the house to cut loose with her new friends, who were sympathetic to her tale of woe. How she’d married the love of her life and he’d destroyed her and now she was going to do what she should have done in the beginning. She was going to marry a man for money.

Outwardly, her friends applauded her. In the world of women, using a man for his money is payback for men using women for, well, just about everything.

Nevertheless, while the idea of marrying a man for his money seems like a good one, the actual execution of it often proves vexing. Finding a man at all, even if he has an equal amount of money, is hard enough. In other words, when a woman says, “I’m going to find a rich man to marry,” most women are secretly thinking, “Yeah, right.”

But Ess said it and did it. And that’s what makes her story a bit different.

She also admitted that she wasn’t in love with the man, right up until her wedding day. This was also unusual. In the story of marrying a man for his money, the woman isn’t supposed to admit it. She’s supposed to at least pretend to love the guy. But Ess didn’t do that. As she got dressed in the ornate bridal suite in the thousand-dollar-a-night destination hotel, surrounded by her bridesmaids, Ess reminded everyone that she was only marrying Eddie for his dough.

“Then don’t do it, sweetie,” begged a couple of her friends.

“I have to. For my sons. Well, ladies,” she said as they lifted the bridal dress over her raised arms, “here goes nothing.”

For the next five years, even though her husband, Eddie, was mean-spirited and selfish, never seeming to tire of telling her and other people how stupid she was, Ess didn’t complain. Her boys had a fine roof over their heads, and they had the best schooling, and that was what mattered. And when her husband began to drink more and occasionally became violent, she brushed it off. She’d made her bed and would lie in it and make the best of it even if she had to do it for the rest of her life.

And then her husband went to the doctor and the doctor told him if he didn’t stop smoking cigars and drinking, he would die.

Some men would have brushed this off—after all, everyone is going to die “someday”—but not Eddie. He was one of those middle-aged men who suddenly see the light and run right into it.

Eddie returned from his doctor’s visit white and shaken. Ess was in the kitchen, mixing up a batch of white fruit sangria. When Ess saw Eddie’s pale, sweaty face, for a moment she thought he was having a heart attack, and for a moment her initial reaction was not one of fear or terror but of joy that perhaps her husband was going to die and solve all their problems. But life was not that kind.

“I’m scared,” Eddie said.

He immediately went on what was once known as a health kick.

This happens when a person who always had very little interest in their body suddenly becomes obsessed. They take up exercise and everything that goes with it, like gadgets to measure their progress and count calories. And one by one, they begin giving things up: carbs, sugar, gluten, wheat, meat, and dairy. And, of course, alcohol.

Back in the day, when this happened, everyone would kind of shake their heads and keep right on drinking that cocktail. Excessive interest in one’s health was considered self-­indulgent. You weren’t supposed to try to cheat god of his moment to decide when your time was up by trying to lengthen your life through exercise. Indeed, a sudden interest in one’s health was usually a sign that death wasn’t far behind. You could run as fast as you could, but death still caught up with you, as illustrated by the fact that it was common for middle-aged men to suddenly drop dead of a heart attack while running.

That night, while Ess drank white sangria, she and Eddie got into a nasty fight. Eddie insisted that since he had to stop drinking, she had to stop drinking as well. She also needed to give up meat and carbs. When she objected, he told her she’d become fat and didn’t take care of herself and didn’t turn him on anymore. The next morning, Eddie stormed off to Miami where he checked himself into a seventy-thousand-dollar-a-month rehab facility.

It worked. Sort of. Eddie returned sober, ten pounds lighter, obsessed with yoga and krav maga and kale. He also wanted a sectionorce.

He left the house and went to stay at a fancy hotel.

Ess began innocently nosing through his things. It wasn’t long before she found something: Yes, Eddie had gone to rehab for a month. But immediately afterward he’d gone to a hotel and paid thousands of dollars for transactional sex with a variety of women.

Ess reached out to her girlfriends, who rushed to her side.

More sordid details came out. How Eddie had once been so drunk he’d passed out on a plane and peed himself. How he had thrown a friend’s skis off the gondola because she asked him to put out his cigar. How he’d called Ess fat.