Candace Bushnell - SEX and the CITY

"I really don't give a shit." And the scary thing was, she didn't.

Then they spent the next four hours discussing Barkley's paintings. "I could do this all day, every day," Barkley said. "This is so much better than sex."

"The only thing that's left is work," said Robert, forty-two, an editor. "You've got so much to do, who has time to be romantic?"

Robert told a story, about how he'd recently been involved

was clear that it wasn't going to work out. "She put me through all these little tests. Like I was supposed to call her on Wednesday to go out on Friday. But on Wednesday, maybe I feel like I want to kill myself, and God only knows how I'm going to feel on Friday. She wanted to be with someone who was crazy about her. I understand that. But I can't pretend to feel something I don't.

"Of course, we're still really good friends," he added. "We see each other

all the time. We just don't have sex."

One Sunday night, I went to a charity benefit at the Four Seasons. The theme was Ode to Love. Each of the tables was named after a different famous couple—there were Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, Narcissus and Himself, Catherine the Great and Her Horse, Michael Jackson and Friends. Al D'Amato sat at the Bill and Hillary table. Each table featured a centerpiece made up of related items—for instance, at the Tammy Faye Bakker table there were false eyelashes, blue eye shadow, and lipstick candles. Michael Jackson's table had a stuffed gorilla and Porcelana face cream.

Bob Pittman was there. "Love's not over—smoking is over," Bob said, grinning, while his wife, Sandy, stood next to him, and I stood behind the indoor foliage, trying to sneak a cigarette. Sandy said she was about to climb a mountain in New Guinea and would be gone for several weeks.

I went home alone, but right before I left, someone handed me the jawbone of a horse from the Catherine the Great table.

Donovan Leitch got up from Francis Ford Coppola's table and came over. "Oh no," he said. "I totally believe that love conquers all. Sometimes you just have to give it some space." And that's exactly what's missing in Manhattan.

It all started the way it always does: innocently enough. I was sitting in my apartment, having a sensible lunch of crackers and sardines, when I got a call from an acquaintance. A friend of his had just gone to Le Trapeze, a couples— only sex club, and was amazed. Blown away. There were people naked— having sex—right in front of him. Unlike S&M clubs, where no actual sex occurs, this was the real, juicy tomato. The guy's girlfriend was kind of freaked out—although, when another naked woman brushed against her, she "sort of liked it." According to him.

In fact, the guy was so into the place that he didn't want me to write about it because he was afraid that, like most decent places in New York, it would be ruined by publicity.

I started imagining all sorts of things: Beautiful young hardbody couples. Shy touching. Girls with long, wavy blond hair wearing wreaths made of grape leaves. Boys with perfect white teeth wearing loincloths made of grape

leaves. Me, wearing a super-short, over-one-shoulder, grape-leaf dress. We would walk in with our clothes on and walk out enlightened.

The club's answering machine brought me back to reality with a thump.

"At Le Trapeze, there are no strangers, only friends you haven't met yet," said a voice of mdeterminate gender, which added that there was "a juice bar and a hot and cold buffet" — things I rarely associate with sex or nudity. In celebration of Thanksgiving, "Oriental Night" would be held on November 19. That sounded interesting, except it turned out that Oriental Night meant oriental food, not oriental people.

I should have dropped the whole idea right then. I shouldn't have listened to the scarily horny Sallie Tisdale, who in her yuppie-porn book, Talk Dirty to Me, enthuses about public, group sex: "This is a taboo in the truest sense of the word. . If sex clubs do what they aim to do, then a falling away will happen. Yes, as is feared, a crumbling of boundaries. . The center will not hold." I should have asked myself, What's fun about that?

But I had to see for myself. And so, on a recent Wednesday night, my calendar listed two events: 9:00 p.m., dinner for the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, Bowery Bar; 11:30 p.m., Le Trapeze sex club, East 27th Street.

Everyone, it seems, likes to talk about sex, and the Karl Lagerfeld dinner, packed with glam-models and expense-accounted fashion editors, was no exception. In fact, it got our end of the table worked up into a near frenzy. One stunning young woman, with dark curly hair and the sort of Seen-It-All attitude that only twenty year olds can pull off claimed she liked to spend her time going to topless bars, but only "seedy ones like Billy's Topless" because the girls were "real."

Then everyone agreed that small breasts were better than fake breasts, and a survey was taken: Who, among the men at the table, had actually been with a woman who had silicone implants? While no one admitted it, one man, an artist

in his mid-thirties, didn't deny it strongly enough. "You've been there," accused another man, a cherub-faced and very successful hotelier, "and the worst thing is. . you. . liked. . it."

"No, I didn't," the artist protested. "But I didn't mind it." Luckily, the first course arrived, and everyone filled up their wineglasses.

Next round: Are messy women better in bed? The hotelier had a theory. "If you walk into a woman's apartment and nothing's out of place, you know she's not going to want to stay in bed all day and order in Chinese food and eat it in bed. She's going to make you get up and eat toast at the kitchen table."

I wasn't quite sure how to respond to this, because I'm literally the messiest person in the world. And I probably have some old containers of General Tso's Special Chicken lying under my bed at this moment. Unfortunately, all of it was eaten alone. So much for that theory.

Steaks were served. "The thing that really drives me crazy," said the artist,

"is when I see a woman wearing one of those tartan skirts and high knee socks. I can't work all day."

"No," countered the hotelier, "the worst thing is when you sort of follow a woman down the street and she turns around and she is as beautiful as you thought she was going to be. It represents everything you'll never have in your life."

The artist leaned forward. "I once stopped working for five years because of a woman," he said.

Silence. No one could top that.

The chocolate mousse arrived, and so did my date for Le Trapeze. Since Le Trapeze admits couples only—meaning a man and a woman—I had asked my most recent ex-date, Sam, an investment banker, to accompany me. Sam was a good choice because, number one, he was the only man I could get to go with me; number two, he'd already had experience with this kind of thing: A million years ago he had gone to Plato's Retreat. A strange woman had come up to him and

pulled out his unmentionable. His girlfriend, whose idea it had been to go there, ran screaming from the club.

The talk turned to the inevitable: What kind of people go to a sex club? I seemed to be the only one who didn't have a clue. Although no one had been to a sex club, everyone at dinner firmly asserted that the clubgoers would generally be "losers from New Jersey." Someone pointed out that going to a sex club is not the kind of thing you can just do, without a pretty good excuse, e.g. it's part of your job. This talk wasn't making me feel any better. I asked the waiter to bring me a shot of tequila.