Candace Bushnell: SEX and the CITY

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 Home 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 vou 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."

"And then you see his apartment. Those twenty-five doormen—what's that about?"

"You wonder why he doesn't just throw out all his furniture and go to the Door Store instead."

"Once he showed me these napkin holders he had gotten. They were in the shape of handcuffs. Like this was how he was going to seduce a girl, with napkin holders."

Jackie's story was typical. "I was waiting for a table at Blue Ribbon." she said. "He walked un to me and started talkine.

He was instantly funny. I thought, Omigod, we're really clicking. But I'll probably never hear from him again." Everyone nodded. After all, hadn't we all been there?

"He called at something like eight the next morning," Jackie said.

" 'Want to go out to lunch? he asked. He asks you to lunch at 44 the next day."

Sapphire, a blond divorced mom, laughed. "He didn't take me to 44 until the second day."

"While you think he's still funny and clever, he asks you to go away with him for the weekend," said Jackie.

"He asked me to marry him on something like the tenth day," said Sarah. "That was pretty quick, even for him."

"He took me to dinner at his parents' house on like the third date," said Britta, a tall, rangy brunette who works as a photo rep and is now happily married. "It was just me and his parents and the butler. The next day, I remember I was sitting on his bed, and he was showing me home movies of

him as a kid. He was begging me to marry him. He was saying, 'See, I can be a serious guy. And then he ordered some cheesy Chinese food. I thought, Marry you? What, are you smoking something?"

Ramona sighed. "On the other hand, I had just broken up with someone, and I was pretty upset. He was always there."

A pattern emerged. The women who had dated Peri had all just left their husbands or long-term boyfriends when Peri found them. Or, was it they who found him?

"He's rebound man," Sarah said, definitively. "It's like, 'Excuse me, are you broken? Let's get intimate. "

"He's the emotional Mayflower," said Maeve. "He gets women from point A to point B. You arrive at Plymouth Rock feeling enormously better."

His ability to empathize was a strong point. The phrase "He's just like a girl" came up over and over again. "He reads more fashion magazines than most women," said Sapphire, "and he's much more willing to fight your battles than he is his own."

"He's extremely confident," Maeve continued. "I think it's a mistake when men present themselves as helpless idiots who can't even find their socks. Peri says, T'm totally secure. Lean on me. And you think, What a relief! Really, it's all that women want. Most men don't understand that. At least Peri is clever enough to affect that."

And then there's the sex. "He's awesome in bed," said Sarah. "He's unbelievably great at making out," said Sapphire. "You thought he was awesome?" Jackie asked. "I thought he was awful. Can we please talk about his feet?"

Nevertheless, so far, Peri seemed to be the embodiment of the two things women always say they want most—a guy who can talk and be understanding like a woman, but who also knows how to be a man in the sack. So what went wrong?

"It's like this," said Maeve. "As long as you're neurotic and crazy, he's great. But once he solves all your problems, he becomes the problem." "He gets incredibly mean," said one woman. The others nodded. "Once," said Jackie, "when I said I was a size eight, Peri said, 'There's no way you're a size eight. You're a size ten, at least. I know what a size eight looks like, and believe me, you're no size eight. "

"He was always telling me to lose fifteen pounds," said Sarah, "and when I went out with him, that was the thinnest I'd been in years."

"I think when men tell women to lose weight, it's a diversion from their own lack of size in certain areas," one of the women added dryly.

Maeve remembered a ski trip to Sun Valley. "Peri did everything right. He bought the tickets, he booked the condo. It was going to be great." But they started fighting in the limo to the airport—they wanted to sit on the same side. By

the time they got on the plane, the stewardess had to separate them. ("By that time, we were arguing about who got to breathe more air," Maeve said.) They fought on the slopes. On the second day, Maeve began packing her bags. "He said, 'Ha ha ha, there's a blizzard outside, you can't leave, " Maeve recalled. "I said, 'Ha ha ha, I'm going to take a bus. "

A month later, Maeve went back to her husband. Her situation was not unusual—many of the women ended up dumping Peri, only to go back to the men they had broken up with.

But that didn't mean that Peri went away. "There were faxes, letters, and hundreds of phone calls," said Sapphire. "It was sort of awful. He does have a huge heart, and he's going to be a great guy someday."

"I kept all his letters," Sarah said. "They were so touching. You could practically see the streaks of his tears on the pages." She left the room and returned seconds later holding a letter. She read aloud: " 'You don't owe me your love, but I hope you'll have the courage to step forward and embrace mine. I don't send you flowers because I don't want to share or demean your love with objects not of my creation. " Sarah smiled.

Post-Peri, the women claimed they had uniformly done well. Jackie said she was dating her personal trainer; Magda had published her first novel; Ramona was married and pregnant; Maeve had opened a cafe; Sapphire had rediscovered an old love; Sarah said she was happy to be pursuing a twenty— seven-year-old boy-toy.

As for Peri, he recently moved abroad, in search of fresh marriage prospects. One of the women had heard he got dumped by an English woman who had really wanted to marry a duke. "He always dates the wrong women," Sapphire said.