Candace Bushnell: SEX and the CITY

Two days later, I ran into George at a party. "It's all about having children," he said. "If you want to get married, it's to have kids, and you don't want to do it with someone older than thirty-five, because then you have to have kids immediately, and then that's all it's about."

I decided to check with Peter, forty-two, a writer, with whom I've had two dates. He agreed with George. "It's all about age and biology," he said. "You just can't understand how immense the initial attraction is to a woman of child-bearing years. For a woman who's older, forty maybe, it's going to be harder because you're not going to feel that strong, initial attraction. You'll have to see them a lot before you want to sleep with them, and then it's about something else."

Sexy lingerie, perhaps?

"I think the issue of unmarried, older women is conceivably the biggest problem in New York City," Peter snapped, then thoughtfully added, "It provides torment for so many women, and a lot of them are in denial."

Peter told a story. He has a woman friend, forty-one. She'd always gone out with extremely sexy guys and just had a good time. Then she went out with a guy who was twenty and was mercilessly mocked. Then she went out with another sexy guy her age, and he left her, and suddenly she couldn't get any more dates. She had a complete physical breakdown and couldn't keep her job and had to move back to Iowa to live with her mother. This is beyond every woman's worst nightmare, and it's not a story that makes men feel bad.

Roger was sitting in a restaurant on the Upper East Side, feeling good and drinking red wine. He's thirty-nine, and he runs his own fund and lives on Park Avenue in a classic-six apartment. He was thinking about what I'll call the mid-thirties power flip.

"When you're a young guy in your twenties and early thirties, women are controlling the relationships," Roger explained. "By the time you get to be an eligible man in your late thirties, you feel like you're being devoured by women." In other words, suddenly the guy has all the power. It can happen overnight.

Roger said he had gone to a cocktail party earlier in the evening, and, when he walked in, there were seven single women in their mid— to late thirties, all Upper East Side blond, wearing black cocktail dresses, and one wittier than the next. "You know that there's nothing you can say that's wrong," Roger said. "For women, it's desperation combined with reaching their sexual peak. It's a very volatile combination. You see that look in their eyes—possession at any cost mixed

with a healthy respect for cash flow—and you feel like they're going to Lexis and Nexis you as soon as you leave the room. The worst thing is, most of these women are really interesting because they didn't just go and get married. But when a man sees that look in their eyes—how can you feel passionate?"

Back to Peter, who was working himself into a frenzy over Alec Baldwin. "The problem is expectations. Older women don't want to settle for what's still available. They can't find guys who are cool and vital, so they say screw it—I'd rather be alone. No, I don't feel sorry for anyone who has expectations they can't meet. I feel sorry for the loser guys who these women won't look at. What they really want is Alec Baldwin. There isn't one woman in New York who hasn't turned down ten wonderful, loving guys because they were too fat or they weren't powerful enough or they weren't rich enough or indifferent enough. But those really sexy guys the women are holding out for are interested in girls in their mid-twenties."

By now, Peter was practically screaming. "Why don't those women marry a fat guy? Why don't they marry a big, fat tub of lard?"

I asked that very question to Charlotte, the English journalist. "I'll tell you why," she said. "I've gone out with some of those guys—the ones who are short, fat, and ugly—and it doesn't make any difference. They're just as unappreciative and self-centered as the good-looking ones.

"By the time you get to your mid-thirties and you're not married, you think. Why should I settle?" Charlotte said. She said she'd just turned down a date with a beautifully eligible, recently divorced forty-one-year-old banker because his unmentionable was too small. "Index finger," she sighed.

Then Sarah beeped in. She'd just gotten money to make her first independent film, and she was ecstatic. "This idea of

women not being able to get married? It's so small-minded, I can't even deal with it. If you want to get these guys, you have to shut up. You have to sit there and shut up and agree with everything they say."

Luckily, my friend Amalita called and explained it all to me. Explained why terrific women are often alone, and not happy about it, but not exactly desperate about it, either. "Oh honey," she cooed into the phone. She was in a good mood because she'd had sex the night before, with a twenty-four-year— old law student. "Everyone knows that men in New York make great friends and lousy husbards. In South America, where I come from, we have an expression: Better alone than badly accompanied."

There was just the slightest stir as "Gregory Roque," the conspiracy filmmaker, slipped into the Bowery Bar on a recent Friday night. The auteur of such controversial films as G.R.F. (Gerald Rudolph Ford) and The Monkees, Mr. Roque was wearing a tatty tweed jacket and keeping his head

down. Surrounding him was a swarm of six young women, new models with a well-known modeling agency. All of the girls were under twenty-one (two were as young as sixteen), and most of them had never seen Mr. Roque's films and, frankly, couldn't have cared less.

Functioning like two small tugboats in keeping the swarm moving and intact were the modelizers, Jack and Ben—two self-employed investors in their early thirties—men of nondescript features, save for the buckteeth of one and the stylish spiky haircut of the other.

At first glance, it looked like a merry group. The girls were smiling. Mr. Roque sat in a banquette, flanked by his beauties, while the two young men sat in the aisle chairs as if to

ward off any unwelcome intruders who might try to talk to Mr. Roque or, even worse, steal one of the girls.

Mr. Roque would lean toward one or another girl, engaging in snippets of conversation. The young men were lively. But it wasn't quite as charming as it appeared. For one thing, if you looked closely at the girls, you could see the boredom pulling down their features like old age. They had nothing to say to Mr. Roque and even less to say to each other. But everyone at the table had a job to do, and they were doing it. So the group sat and sat, looking glamorous, and after a while, they got in Mr. Roque's limousine and went to the Tunnel, where Mr. Roque danced dispiritedly with one of the girls and then realized he was bored up to his eyeteeth and went home alone. The girls stayed for a while and took drugs, and then Jack, who had the spiky haircut, grabbed one of the girls and said, "You stupid slut," and she went home with him. He gave her more drugs and she gave him a blow job.

That sort of scenario is acted out just about every night in New York, in restaurants and clubs. There, one invariably finds the beautiful young models who flock to New York like birds, and their attendants, men like Jack and Ben, who practically make a profession of wining and dining them and, with varying degrees of success, seducing them. Meet the modelizers.

Modelizers are a particular breed. They're a step beyond womanizers, who will sleep with just about anything in a skirt. Modelizers are obsessed not with women but with models. They love them for their beauty and hate them for everything else. "Their stupidity, their flakiness, their lack of values, their baggage," says Jack. Modelizers inhabit a sort of parallel universe, with its own planets (Nobu, Bowery Bar, Tabac, Flowers, Tunnel, Expo, Metropolis) and satellites (the various apartments, many near Union Square, that the big modeling agencies rent for the models) and goddesses (Linda, Naomi, Christy, Elle, Bridget).