Then Cici got kicked out of the apartment she was sharing with a lawyer from Philadelphia—the older sister of one of her high school friends. The woman said, “Cici, you’ve changed. I’m really worried about you. You’re not a nice person anymore and I don’t know what to do.” Cici yelled at her that she was just jealous, then she moved to Carolyne’s couch.
Around that time, an unfortunate item came out about Carrie in one of the gossip columns. She was trying to ignore it when Cici called up all excited.
“Omigod, you’re famous,” she said. “You’re in the papers. Have you read it?” Then she began reading it, and it was awful, so Carrie started screaming at her. “Let me explain something. If you want to survive in this town, never, ever call anybody up and read something terrible about them from the papers. You pretend you never saw it, okay? And if they ask you if you did, you lie and say, ‘No, I don’t read trash like that.’ Even though you do. Get it? Jesus, Cici,” she said, “whose side are you on here?” Cici started crying, and Carrie hung up the phone and felt guilty afterward.
MR. RESIDUE
“I’m going to introduce you to a guy, and I know you’re going to fall in love with him, but don’t,” Carolyne said to Cici. So she did.
Ben was forty, a sometime restaurateur and party promoter who’d already been married twice (in fact, he was still married, but his wife had gone back to Florida) and been in and out of rehab a dozen times. Everyone in New York knew about him, and when his name came up, people would roll their eyes and change the subject. After all his drinking and coke snorting, he still possessed a residue of what he was before—charming, amusing, handsome—and Cici fell in love with the residue. They spent two great weekends together, even though they never actually had sex. Then they went to a party, he disappeared, and Cici found him rubbing up against a sixteen-year-old model who had just come to town. “You’re disgusting!” she screamed.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “You’ve got to let me live out my fantasies. I have a fantasy of being with a sixteen year old.” He grinned, and you could see that his teeth needed to be rebonded.
The next morning, Cici turned up uninvited at his apartment. His three-year-old daughter was visiting. “I brought you a present,” she said, acting like nothing had happened. The present was a baby bunny. She put it on the couch, and it peed several times.
Meanwhile, Carolyne sort of moved in with Sam. She kept her apartment but spent every night at his and always left something—shoes, perfume, earrings, dry-cleaned b
louses, six or seven different kinds of face cream—behind. This went on for three months. The night before Valentine’s Day, he exploded. “I want you out,” he said. “Out!” He was screaming and breathing heavily.
“I don’t get it,” Carolyne said.
“There’s nothing to get,” Sam said. “I just want you, and your stuff, out of here now!” Sam cranked open a window and began throwing her things out.
Carolyne said, “I’ll fix your wagon, buster,” and she smacked him hard across the back of his head.
He turned around. “You hit me,” he said.
“Sam . . .,” she said.
“I can’t believe . . . you hit me.” He began backing across the floor. “Don’t come near me,” he said. He cautiously reached down and picked up his cat.
“Sam,” Carolyne said, walking toward him.
“Stay back,” he said. He grabbed the cat under its armpits so its legs were sticking straight out at Carolyne; he held it up like a weapon. “I said, get back.”
“Sam. Sam.” Carolyne shook her head. “This is so pity-ful.”
“Not to me,” Sam said. He hurried into the bedroom, cradling the cat in his arms. “She’s a witch, isn’t she, Puffy?” he asked the cat. “A real witch.”
Carolyne took a few steps toward the bed. “I didn’t mean . . .”
“You hit me,” Sam said in a weird, little-boy voice. “Don’t ever hit me. Don’t hit Sam no more.”
“Okay . . .,” Carolyne said cautiously.
The cat struggled out of Sam’s arms. It ran across the floor. “Here kitty kitty,” Carolyne said. “C’mere kitty. Want some milk?” She heard the TV click on.
“HE WAS SO MORTIFIED”
Carrie was always promising Cici and Carolyne that she’d have dinner with them, so one day, she finally did. On a Sunday night. Her only free night. Carolyne and Cici were sitting back on the banquette, their legs crossed, stirring their drinks, and looking very smart. Carolyne was talking on a cellular phone. “I have to go out every night for my job,” Cici said, sounding bored. “I’m just so tired all the time.”
Carolyne flipped her cellular phone closed and looked at Carrie. “We’ve got to go to this party tonight. Downtown. Lots of models. You should come,” she said, in a tone that suggested she definitely should not.
“Well, how is everything?” Carrie said. “You know, like Sam and . . .”
“Everything is fine,” Carolyne said.
Cici lit a cigarette and looked off in another direction. “Sam went around telling everyone that he and Carolyne had never slept together, even though tons of people had seen them making out, so we mortified him.”