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My Unsentimental Education:
Love in Manhattan?
I Don’t Think So . . .
Here’s a Valentine’s Day tale. Prepare yourself.
An English journalist came to New York. She was attractive and witty, and right away she hooked up with one of New York’s typically eligible bachelors. Tim was forty-two, an investment banker who made about $5 million a year. For two weeks, they kissed, held hands—and then on a warm fall day he drove her to the house he was building in the Hamptons. They looked at the plans with the architect. “I wanted to tell the architect to fill in the railings on the second floor, so the children wouldn’t fall through,” said the journalist. “I expected Tim was going to ask me to marry him.” On Sunday night, Tim dropped her off at her apartment and reminded her that they had dinner plans for Tuesday. On Tuesday, he called and said he’d have to take a rain check. When she hadn’t heard from him after two weeks, she called and told him, “That’s an awfully long rain check.” He said he would call her later in the week.
He never did call, of course. But what interested me was that she couldn’t understand what had happened. In England, she explained, meeting the architect would have meant something. Then I realized, Of course: She’s from London. No one’s told her about the End of Love in Manhattan. Then I thought: She’ll learn.
Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence. The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as backdrops for Edith Wharton’s bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing—but the stage is empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember—instead, we have breakfast at seven A.M. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How did we get into this mess?
Truman Capote understood our nineties dilemma—the dilemma of Love vs. the Deal—all too well. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak were faced with restrictions—he was a kept man, she was a kept woman—but in the end they surmounted them and chose love over money. That doesn’t happen much in Manhattan these days. We are all kept men and women—by our jobs, by our apartments, and then some of us by the pecking order at Mortimers and the Royalton, by Hamptons beachfront, by front-row Garden tickets—and we like it that way. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op.
When was the last time you heard someone say, “I love you!” without tagging on the inevitable (if unspoken) “as a friend.” When was the last time you saw two people gazing into each other’s eyes without thinking, Yeah, right? When was the last time you heard someone announce, “I am truly, madly in love,” without thinking, Just wait until Monday morning? And what turned out to be the hot non–Tim Allen Christmas movie? Disclosure—for which ten or fifteen million moviegoers went to see unwanted, unaffectionate sex between corporate erotomaniacs—hardly the stuff we like to think about when we think about love but very much the stuff of the modern Manhattan relationship.
There’s still plenty of sex in Manhattan but the kind of sex that results in friendship and business deals, not romance. These days, everyone has friends and colleagues; no one really has lovers—even if they have slept together.
Back to the English journalist: After six months, some more “relationships,” and a brief affair with a man who used to call her from out of town to tell her that he’d be calling her when he got back into town (and never did), she got smart. “Relationships in New York are about detachment,” she said. “But how do you get attached when you decide you want to?”
Honey, you leave town.
LOVE AT THE BOWERY BAR, PART I
It’s Friday night at the Bowery Bar. It’s snowing outside and buzzing inside. There’s the actress from Los Angeles, looking delightfully out of place in her vinyl gray jacket and mini-skirt, with her gold-medallioned, too-tanned escort. There’s the actor, singer, and party boy Donovan Leitch in a green down jacket and a fuzzy beige hat with earflaps. There’s Francis Ford Coppola at a table with his wife. There’s an empty chair at Francis Ford Coppola’s table. It’s not just empty: It’s alluringly, temptingly, tauntingly, provocatively empty. It’s so empty that it’s more full than any other chair in the place. And then, just when the chair’s emptiness threatens to cause a scene, Donovan Leitch sits down for a chat. Everyone in the room is immediately jealous. Pissed off. The energy of the room lurches violently. This is romance in New York.
THE HAPPILY MARRIED MAN
“Love means having to align yourself with another person, and what if that person turns out to be a liability?” said a friend, one of the few people I know who’s been happily married for twelve years. “And the more you’re able to look back, the more you’re proven right in hindsight. Then you get further and further away from having a relationship, unless something big comes along to shake you out of it—like your parents dying.
“New Yorkers build up a total facade that you can’t penetrate,” he continued. “I feel so lucky that things worked out for me early on, because it’s so easy not to have a relationship here—it almost becomes impossible to go back.”
THE HAPPILY (SORT OF) MARRIED WOMAN
A girlfriend who was married called me up. “I don’t know how anyone makes relationships work in this town. It’s really hard. All the temptations. Going out. Drinks. Drugs. Other people. You want to have fun. And if you’re a couple, what are you going to do? Sit in your little box of an apartment and stare at each other? When you’re alone, it’s easier,” she said, a little wistfully. “You can do what you want. You don’t have to go home.”
THE BACHELOR OF COCO PAZZO
Years ago, when my friend Capote Duncan was one of the most eligible bachelors in New York, he dated every woman in town. Back then, we were still romantic enough to believe that some woman could get him. He has to fall in love someday, we thought. Everyone has to fall in love, and when he does, it will be with a woman who’s beautiful and smart and successful. But then those beautiful and smart and successful women came and went. And he still hadn’t fallen in love.
We were wrong. Today, Capote sits at dinner at Coco Pazzo, and he says he’s ungettable. He doesn’t want a relationship. Doesn?
?t even want to try. Isn’t interested in the romantic commitment. Doesn’t want to hear about the neurosis in somebody else’s head. And he tells women that he’ll be their friend, and they can have sex with him, but that’s all there is and that’s all there’s ever going to be.
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 stalkers. Why not just be with your friends and have real conversations and a good time?”
“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 multi-millionaire 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.