You see, Cindy was one of those New York women who had been trying to get married for years. We all know them. They’re the women we’ve been reading about for the past ten years, who are attractive (not necessarily beautiful) and seem to be able to get everything—except married. Cindy sold advertising for a car magazine. She knew stereo equipment. She was as big as a man. She shot guns and traveled (once, on her way to the airport, she had to punch out a drunk cab driver, throw him in the back seat, and drive herself to the airport). She wasn’t exactly the most feminine woman, but she always had men.
But every year, she got older, and when I would run into her at an old friend’s cocktail party, she’d regale me and everyone else with stories of the big one who got away. The guy with the yacht. The famous artist who couldn’t get a hard-on without having a paintbrush pushed up his bum. The CEO who came to bed in mouse slippers.
And, you couldn’t help it. You’d look at her and feel a mixture of admiration and revulsion. You’d walk away thinking, She’ll never get married. If she does marry, it’s going to have to be some boring bank manager who lives in New Jersey. And besides, she’s too old.
Then you’d go home and lie in bed, and the whole thing would come back to haunt you, until you had to call up your friends and be a nasty little cat and say, “Sweetie, if I ever end up like her, be sure to shoot me, huh?”
Well, guess what. You were wrong. Cindy got married. He’s not the kind of guy she ever thought she’d end up with, but she’s happier than she’s ever been in her life.
It is time. Time to stop complaining about no good men. Time to stop calling your machine every half hour to see if a man has called. Time to stop identifying with Martha Stewart’s lousy love life even if she is on the cover of People magazine.
Yes, it is finally time to marry a man in Manhattan, and best of all, it can be done. So relax. You have plenty of time. Martha, pay attention.
THREE CASHMERE SWEATERS
It’s a fall weekend and it’s raining. Carrie and Mr. Big are at the restaurant they go to in Bridgehampton. It’s crowded, which is annoying, and the maître d’ who always gives them a table isn’t there. So she and Mr. Big are eating at the bar with their heads together. First, they were going to try this new thing that they’d tried on Mr. Big’s birthday—ordering four entrees, like having Chinese food.
But Mr. Big wants to eat exactly the same thing Carrie is eating so they just end up having twin dinners.
“Do you mind?” Mr. Big says.
“No, I don’t mind,” Carrie says in the ridiculous baby voice they seem to use with each other practically all the time now. “Me too tired to care.”
“Me too tired too,” Mr. Big says, in the baby voice. His elbow brushes against her. Then he jabs her with it. “Beep beep,” he says.
“Hey,” she says. “Here’s the line. Don’t cross it.”
“Sudden death,” Mr. Big growls, leaning over and spearing her pasta with his fork.
“I’ll give you sudden death,” Carrie says.
“C’mon, hit me,” he says, and she punches him in the arm and he laughs.
“Here you two are.” They turn around and Samantha Jones is standing there with like three cashmere sweaters wrapped around her neck. “I thought you guys might be here,” she says. Mr. Big says, “Uh huh.” Sam and Mr. Big don’t really get along. Once, when Sam asked why, Carrie explained it was because Sam always said mean things to her and Big didn’t like it. Sam snorted and said, “I think you can take care of yourself.”
Sam starts talking about movies, and Carrie has no choice—she has to start talking about movies, too. Mr. Big doesn’t like to talk about movies. Carrie starts wishing Sam would go away so she could just talk to Mr. Big about their favorite new subject—moving to Colorado someday. She doesn’t like herself for wishing Sam would leave, but sometimes when you’re with a man that’s the way it is, you can’t help it.
DWEEBS, NERDS, AND LOSERS
“It was David P. that did it,” Trudie said. Trudie is the editor in chief of a magazine for teenage girls. She is forty-one, but at times she looks like a lovely sixteen year old, with huge blue eyes and black hair.
She leaned back in her chair, pointed to a bookshelf crammed with photos. “I call that, ‘Trudie and . . .’” she said.
“It’s photos of me and all the losers I went out with. I like to catalogue things.
“I used to specialize in the two-year relationship. I did everything to make them work. Couples therapy. Talked for hours about commitment problems. Fought. And then I realized, you know what? I’m not going to change a forty-year-old guy who hates women. It’s—not—my—problem.
“I set a deadline for myself. I said, I have to be married by the time I’m forty. I was dating David P. He was fifty and dishonest. I told him I wanted to be married. He kept making excuses. Sucking me back in. ‘Let’s just go on this one trip to China, and when we come back, we’ll figure it out,’ he’d say. And then we were in Venice, at the Gritti Palace, one of those rooms with the wooden shutters that open onto the Grand Canal. ‘Let’s face it,’ he said. ‘You’re never going to find anyone in Manhattan who’s going to want to get married. So why don’t we just stay like this forever.’ And that’s when I left for good.”
When Trudie got back to Manhattan, she dug out all her old Filofaxes and called every man she’d ever met in Manhattan. “Yes, every one of them: all the guys I’d passed over, who I’d thought were dweebs, nerds, losers, didn’t have enough hair.”
“My husband’s name was on the list—he was the last one,” Trudie said. “I remember thinking, If he doesn’t work out, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” (This, of course, was typical New York–woman modesty, because New York women always know what they’re going to do.) The truth is, Trudie had three dinners with her future husband (she didn’t know he was going to be her husband then), and he went off to Russia for two months. It was the beginning of summer, and Trudie went to the Hamptons and completely forgot about him. In fact, she began dating two other guys.
Trudie smiled and examined her nails. “Okay, he called at the end of the summer, and we began seeing each other again. But the point is you have to be willing to walk at any time. You have to put your foot down. They can’t think you’re this poor, suffering little woman who can’t live without them. Because it’s not true. You can.”
When it comes to marrying a man in Manhattan, two rules apply. “You have to be sweet,” said Lisa, thirty-eight, a correspondent for a network news show. But at the same time, said Britta, a photo rep, “you can’t let them get away with anything.”
For these women, age is an advantage. If a woman has survived single in New York until her mid- to late thirties, chances are she knows a thing or two about how to get what she wants. So, when one of these New York women targets a man as a potential husband, there is usually very little he can do to get away.