“I’m not famous,” Sam said. “I don’t even want to be famous,” and they started making out.
Sam touched his unmentionable, and it was a big one. A really big one. “There’s just something about those really, really big ones,” she said later to Carrie. “They make you want to have sex.”
“So did you?” Carrie asked.
“No,” Sam said. “He said he wanted to go home. Then he called the next day. He wants to have a relationship. Can you believe that? It’s just so silly.”
THE TALKING PARAKEET
Carrie and Mr. Big went to Carrie’s parents’ house for the weekend. In her house, everybody cooked. Mr. Big was making a beautiful effort to get along. “I’ll make the gravy,” he said.
“Don’t screw it up,” Carrie whispered as she walked by him.
“What’s wrong with my gravy? I make great gravy,” Mr. Big said.
“The last time you made it, you put whiskey or something in it, and it was terrible.”
“That was me,” her father said.
“Oh. So sorry,” Carrie said meanly. “I forgot.”
Mr. Big didn’t say anything. The next day, they went back to the city and had dinner with some of his friends. They were all couples who’d been married for years. Somebody started talking about parrots. How they’d had a parrot that talked.
“I went into a Woolworth’s once and bought a parakeet for ten bucks and taught it how to talk,” Mr. Big said.
“Parakeets can’t talk,” Carrie said.
“It talked,” Mr. Big said. “It said, ‘Hello Snippy.’ That was the name of my dog.”
In the car on the way home, Carrie said, “It couldn’t have been a parakeet. It must have been a mynah bird.”
“If I say it was a parakeet, it was a parakeet.”
Carrie snorted. “That’s stupid. Everyone knows that parakeets can’t talk.”
“It talked,” Mr. Big said. He lit up a cigar. They didn’t say anything the rest of the way home.
DON’T GO THERE
Carrie and Mr. Big went to the Hamptons for a weekend. It wasn’t quite spring yet, and it was depressing. They lit a fire. They read their books. They rented movies. Mr. Big would watch only action movies. Carrie used to watch them with him, but now she didn’t want to watch them anymore. “It’s a waste of time for me,” she said.
“So read,” Mr. Big said.
“I’m bored with reading. I’m going to take a walk.”
“I’ll take a walk with you,” Mr. Big said. “As soon as this movie is over.”
So she sat next to him and watched the movie and sulked.
They went to the Palm for dinner. She said something, and he said, “Oh, that’s stupid.”
“Really? How interesting. That you should call me stupid. Especially since I’m smarter than you,” Carrie said.
Mr. Big laughed. “If you think that, you’re really stupid.”
“Don’t fuck with me,” Carrie said. She leaned across the table, suddenly so angry she didn’t even know who she was anymore. “If you fuck with me, I will make it my personal business to destroy you. And don’t think for a second that I won’t take a great deal of pleasure in doing it.”
“You don’t get up early enough to fuck with me,” Mr. Big said.