“That was the worst part,” I said. “Half of them looked like shrinks. I’ll never be able to go to therapy again without imagining a bearded fat man lying naked and glassy-eyed on a mat on the floor, getting an hour-long blow job. And still not being able to come.”
Yes, I told Charlotte, we did take our clothes off—but we wore towels. No, we didn’t have sex. No, I didn’t get turned on, even when a tall, attractive, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties entered the rumpus room and caused a stir. She exposed her bottom like a monkey, and within minutes, she was lost in a tangle of arms and legs. It should have been sexy, but all I could think about were those National Geographic nature films of mating baboons.
The truth is, exhibitionism and voyeurism are not mainstream events. And neither, for that matter, is S&M, despite what you may have recently read elsewhere. The problem, in the clubs, anyway, always comes down to the people. They’re the actresses who can never find work; the failed opera singers, painters, and writers; the lower-management men who will never get to the middle. People who, should they corner you in a bar, will keep you hostage with tales of their ex-spouses and their digestive troubles. They’re the people who can’t negotiate the system. They’re on the fringes, sexually and in life. They’re not necessarily the people with whom you want to share your intimate fantasies.
Well, the people at Le Trapeze weren’t all pale, pudgy sex zombies: Before we left the club, Sam and I ran into the attention-grabbing tall woman and her date in the locker room. The man had a clean-cut, all-American face and was talkative: He was from Manhattan, he said, and had recently started his own business. He and the woman had been colleagues, he said. As the woman slipped into a yellow business suit, the man smiled and said, “She fulfilled her fantasy tonight.” The woman glared at him and stalked out of the locker room.
A few days later, Sam called and I screamed at him. Then he asked, hadn’t the whole thing been my idea?
Then he asked, hadn’t I learned anything?
And I said yes, I had. I told him I had learned that when it comes to sex, there’s no place like home.
But then you knew that, didn’t you? Didn’t you? Sam?
3
We Loved a Serial Dater
On a recent afternoon, seven women gathered in Manhattan, over wine, cheese, and cigarettes, to animatedly discuss the one thing they had in common: a man. Specifically, an Eligible Man of Manhattan, a man we’ll call “Tom Peri.”
Tom Peri is forty-three years old, five feet, ten inches tall, with straight brown hair. There is nothing remarkable about his appearance, save for a penchant, a few years ago, for dressing in black Armani suits paired with wacky suspenders. He comes from a wealthy manufacturing family and grew up on Fifth Avenue and in Bedford, New York. He lives in a modern high-rise on Fifth Avenue.
Over the last fifteen years, Peri, who is almost always referred to by his last name only, has become something of a legend in New York. He’s not exactly a womanizer, because he’s always trying to get married. Peri is, rather, one of the city’s most accomplished serial daters, engaging in up to twelve “relationships” a year. But after two days or two months, the inevitable happens. Something goes wrong, and, he says, “I get dumped.”
For a certain type of woman—thirtyish, ambitious, well placed socially—dating Peri, or avoiding his attentions, has become nothing less than a rite of passage, sort of like your first limo ride and your first robbery, combined.
Even among the city’s other notorious ladies’ men, Peri stands out. For one thing, he appears to be holding far fewer cards. He has neither the well-bred good looks of Count Erik Wachtmeister nor the free-flowing cash of Mort Zuckerman.
I wanted to know, What’s Peri got?
Each of the women I contacted had been involved with Peri—either intimately or as an object of his ardent affections—and each said she had dumped him. None refused my request to get together for a session of Talking about Peri. Each woman, perhaps, had something . . . unresolved about Peri. Maybe they wanted him back. Maybe they wanted him dead.
“LIKE DARYL VAN HORNE”
We met at the home of Sarah, a filmmaker who used to be a model, “until I got sick of the bullshit and gained twenty pounds.” She wore a dark pinstripe suit. “When you look over the list of guys you’ve dated, Peri is the one guy that doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “You think, What was that about?”
But before we could even get to the juicy bits, we made a disturbing discovery. Although none of the women had heard from Peri for months, that morning he had called four of them.
“I don’t think he knows anything, I think it was just coincidence,” said Magda. Magda has been friends with Peri for years—in fact, most of her girlfriends are former dates of Peri’s, whom she met through him.
“He knows everything about us,” one woman said. “He’s like Daryl Van Horne in The Witches of Eastwick.”
“Van Horney is more like it,” said another. We opened the wine.
“The thing with Peri is this,” said Sarah. “The reason he’s so charming is, when you first meet him, he is articulate, he is funny—and, he’s available at all times, because he doesn’t work. What’s more fun than a guy who says, ‘Meet me for lunch,’ then you go back to work, then he says ‘Meet me for cocktails at six?’ When was the last time you went out with a guy who actually wanted to see you three times a day?”
“‘Cocktails’ is such a loaded word,” said Magda. “It’s like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.”
Jackie, a magazine editor, said, “When I met him, we started seeing each other instantly—five nights a week. He won’t leave you alone.”
“He’s smart, because the thing that he does is, he loves the phone,” said Sarah. “Which to a woman, you think, He must really be into me, because he calls you ten times a day. And then you start to disregard the fact that he’s like a funny-looking little thing.”
“Then you start to look at his suspenders, and you think, My God,” said Maeve, a poet who is half Irish.
“Then you begin to realize he’s not funny,” said Sarah. “He has a good stack of jokes, but once you’ve heard them a million times, they get really annoying. It’s like a loop. He’s looping himself.”
“He told me that I was the only girl he ever went out with who got his jokes,” said Maeve, “and I didn’t think they were funny.”