Chapter 19 #2
“I always have meetings, kid. I just don’t necessarily tell you about these meetings.”
You know the scene, it’s season 1 or 2. Big refers to Carrie as his girlfriend and she goes wild, and he says he calls her that a lot, but he just doesn’t say that to her face.
We are doing it, Vail. We are becoming the people you want us to be.
This is it, in that Rod Stewart tonight kind of way, where the spaghetti is spicy and the happiest people in the room are the ones at the worst fucking table.
You tug at your dress and bend over to rub your foot, your poor lovely bones trapped in that caustic Blahnik.
You are a girly girl and I am a manly man and the birds and the bees came alive for us, for the butterflies at play in our bodies.
You don’t go on and on about your job. Carrie loves her work, but she loves Mr. Big more. I sip on scotch. You guzzle cosmos. We laugh a lot. I ask you if you lost your boots in actual fucking combat, and you ask what time my rent-a-suit is due back.
You tell me to be nice, and I raise my fucking eyebrows. “Baby, I’m a lot of things, but nice isn’t one of them. And those boots really do have to go….”
The fireworks stop cold. We aren’t them anymore. We are us. You pull on your cardigan.
“Vail, wait. I was just kidding.”
I’ve never seen you like this, actively trying to find where you end, where Carrie begins, telling me that I hit a nerve. “You don’t know anything about fashion, Joe. Already I feel fat enough next to the girls at work, in the show. I don’t need this.”
“You’re not fat, Vail. You’re just not a beanpole.”
“Gee, thanks.”
Be the Big man. Cool cat. “Baby, come on. You know I love your boots.”
Your hands are shaking. The white tablecloth is stained, and you’re all Big-ged out. You gulp. “Sorry, I just…Joe, I don’t know how to tell you this.”
You love me. You can say it first. “There’s nothing to worry about, Vail. I’m here.”
You want me to get under the table. I comply.
Am I supposed to go down on you like Samantha’s awful fucking frenemy?
Do you think I have a fucking foot fetish?
! No. Your hand lifts the tablecloth. You make a little fist and you let go and then…
And then…You pull off a stiletto and…Holy.
Fucking. Six. You have six toes on your left foot.
Is this how you felt when you first saw my Portnoy?
I plant a kiss on that extra little piggy—you can do that in a dark New York restaurant—and I slide your special foot back into her high-heeled cage.
I come up for air, for you. The first word out of your mouth is a good one—wow—and you bubble on about your armor, your go-to tights and your boots.
“…And the last guy I dated was so cold, constantly teasing me and not in the fun sexy way, more like he was trying to get me to hate myself but you…That was pretty perfect.”
Perfect has to lead to sex. “Just being me, baby.”
“And it’s especially…wow…because I was such a bitch to you on V-Day. I’m always snapping at you or being ‘sensitive.’ I mean, that’s been an issue for me in the past….”
“It’s not an issue with me. You had every right to be pissed, Vail. I should’ve called.”
“And I shouldn’t have ditched you right after the Pop Rocks. Sometimes I think I’m allergic to good guys.”
I take your hand. It’s you and me. I say nothing. I know how Carrie needs Mr. Big to be quiet sometimes. You wipe away what might be a real tear or a crocodile tear, and I don’t care. You smile. “I like tonight.”
“Me too, kid.”
You giggle—that’s my last kid for a while—and we’re good. You say that Sarah Jessica Parker lives in this neighborhood and it’s easier now that I speak the language. You can’t believe I kissed your toes, and you sip your cosmo. “What is it about you, Joe?”
“Hell if I know.”
“Well, whatever it is…I do like tonight. I also like you tonight.”
You move the tip of your bare special foot under my slacks and you wink and, oh God, we are going to do it, aren’t we?
Yes. We are those in-your-face fuckers making out in the dining area and it’s the best it’s ever been.
We’re gonna make love until our bodies turn into Magnolia banana pudding and the waiter intervenes.
“Here’s your check. As it seems like you might be ready to leave.”
We die laughing and I pay the bill, and you can’t really walk in those heels and I can’t really afford this but WHO FUCKING CARES?! I sweep you off your feet and we look like we just left a benefit where we saw Charlotte and Trey and there is no back-and-forth, no where should we go. Not tonight.
Tonight, you want me. You pull on my lapels. “Take me home, baby.”
You want me to kiss you, but more than you want it, you want me to make you wait for it. I grin. “Abso-fucking-lutely.”
Your eyes. The lump in my throat. I didn’t just channel Big.
I quoted him. A word from the pilot. Abso-fucking-lutely.
It’s twelve degrees on the street, but it’s a million and a half degrees in my heart—Sometimes a girl needs a half—and was it too much?
Are you mortified? Time doesn’t slow down.
It stops. It ends. The Magnolia Bakery goes out of business, and I can’t take it back and you know.
You know what I did. You know what I tried to do.
You lay your head on my shoulder. “You watched it for me, huh?”
“Guilty.”
“No,” you say. Your hand slides under my jacket and down my torso. “Innocent.”
You kiss me and you are ComelyCarrieSluttySamanthaShyCharlotteMatureMiranda and I did good.
Very good. We’re in a cab and you can’t say it enough—I want you, I want you—and I tell you what you want to hear, what you need to hear—I want you, I want you—and we are better than Big and Carrie because they were actors.
Only pretending. This is real, Vail. Those are your teeth digging into my neck and your home is not Carrie’s.
It’s a two-bedroom shithole in a six-floor walk-up.
It smells like incense and strange men—fucking Cynthia—and there are movie posters taped to the walls.
No frames. Dirty panties in your overflowing laundry basket and my Portnoy comes alive.
We’re surrounded by love stories. Posters.
When Harry Met Sally goes to Manhattan to meet Swingers, and when I close my eyes, it’s just you.
Your sweet skin. That wisp of hair that gets caught in my teeth. You close your door and lock it.
“I mean, I know it’s messy, but it’s mine.”
“I could say the same of you.”
You lunge at me with your husky, musky little body.
You tease my foreskin—I am special, rare—and you are as shy as Charlotte, feisty as Samantha, cute as Carrie the way you call it my lovely boner.
I am clumsy (I have a little Steve in me) and you are awkward (you are part Miranda).
You bite me too hard; my touch is too gentle for you, but in time, we get there.
I went to boot camp and I am ready for the battle and it’s about to happen.
You pull out a condom and wrap my Portnoy in latex and roll over and I enter you all at once and is that…Are you looking at me? You are looking at me. Is that good? Bad?
“Slower,” you say.
“Faster,” you say.
“Wait,” you say.
“Go,” you say.
“Right there,” you say.
“Not there-there. Right there. Sort of there…Okay, Joe…Okay.”
I follow every command—I will beat Mr. Big—and you make a new sound, and your fingernails dig into my skin and is that…I’m done. “Wow,” you say. “I really needed that.”
I roll over and stare at Harry and Sally. Wow can be a bad word, flat. Something is off. Wrong. “Me too.”
My mind is in overdrive and why? We did it.
You trembled. You gasped. If it sounds like a duck and walks like a duck…
But Miranda faked it for that lovable ophthalmologist and is that what you did?
Did you fake it? Did you come, Vail? Did you?
Do girls finish first? You don’t hug me like you want more of me, but maybe that’s because you really didn’t fake it.
Maybe you are satisfied and spent. Then again, you’re breathing evenly and you’re not as sweaty as you were at first. I wish I was one of those guys who blacks out after he comes.
I really needed that is not That was the best sex of my life.
I think something’s wrong with me, Vail. My brain won’t die the way a dude’s brain should after he gets laid. I don’t want to be this guy, this Woody Allen worrywart. I wish we had Saltines or cigarettes. I say it out loud. “I wish we had Saltines or cigarettes.”
You don’t laugh. “Ha,” you say. “If only.”
You don’t sound like a woman who had the best orgasm of her life, and I don’t feel like the man who gave you one.
Did I? Did you? You yawn and roll away from me.
Wait. DO YOU THINK I CAN FUCKING SLEEP RIGHT NOW?
You’re out cold—Is that a good sign?—and I stare at the walls comparing myself to Billy Crystal and Vince Vaughn—Go away, fuckers—and eventually, the sun comes up. And then you.
“How’d you sleep, Joe?”
“Great!”
You pick up an old New Yorker and I feel like a guy who lasts one fucking episode. I was so bad that you’re gonna read?! Was I supposed to sneak out of bed and make you breakfast? You don’t look at me when you sigh. “So whatcha got going on today?”
Is that a hint? “A lot,” I say. “Which is why I should get the hell outta here.”
You flip a page and huff. “Well, okay then. Don’t let me stop you.”
You are not Carrie and I am not Big and was it all just role-play?
At the gym, in the locker room, Dick once said that most girls can’t get off the first time you bang them.
But then you give her that morning wood, Goldbitch.
I can’t do that—I am soft—and did I fuck up?
I fucked up. There’s a way to leave with you wanting more, but I can’t find my way in this tiny bedroom.
I stub my toe on your stupid New Yorker nightstand and you don’t ask if I’m okay and I hate myself for wanting you to ask if I’m okay.
“I’m okay,” I say. “Barely hit it.”
“Yep,” you say. “It’s not the best bedroom, but it’s mine….”
I remember when mine was a sexy thing. “Yeah, I hear you. I need a new place.”
You fake a yawn like an aunt or a teacher or an old lady on a bus stuck with a crazy person and did you fake your orgasm too? You close your New Yorker. “If you want to move, the best way to find a place is just kinda walking around. That’s how me and Cyn found ours.”
Nothing ever sounded better to me than a walk through the city with you, but I pull up my pants like a douchebag in your Swingers poster. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, you make a day of it. You get a feel for a neighborhood, you go into one of those internet café places and hit up Craigslist…It’s kinda fun. It’s like hunting.”
It feels like you want to do all that with me and I want it too, but you won’t come out and say that, and I can’t come out and say it. I pick up the only book in this room.
“Ah,” you say. “That’s my favorite.”
’Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy. The title alone…Like you want to be Carrie, close your eyes on real love to be the make-out queen of Manhattan.
“The book is famous song lyrics that we all get wrong in real life. Like it’s not ‘ ’Scuse me while I kiss this guy,’ it’s ‘ ’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.’ ” You pull your hair over one shoulder like you’re in a bar trying to pick up a stranger. “It’s good for small talk, you know?”
No, I don’t know and did you fake it? I fake it. “Sounds great. And who doesn’t love Jimi Hendrix?”
You bite your lip like I said the wrong thing, like you have no feelings about Jimi Hendrix and maybe we have nothing in common.
“Well, it’s not about him…. It’s more about misunderstandings, Joe.
Things we hear and mishear and don’t even know until…
I love that kinda stuff. Miscommunication, and reading into things.
You think you know the song, the world, a person and then whammo… you’ve been wrong all along.”
“Whores de var.”
“Huh?”
“That’s how I used to pronounce hors d’oeuvres.” SHUT UP, JOE, and did I really just say WHORES in bed? I don’t know how to relate to you. I don’t even know if you came. I just know that it can’t be a good thing, the way you go back to flipping through your old New Yorker.
“Anyway,” you say. “I got it at Urban Outfitters. You can borrow it if you want.”
You offered me a book. It’s not fiction, but it’s something.
I should wrap you up in my white button-down shirt and carry you out the door.
That’s how a bill becomes a law, how a night becomes a life.
We keep it going, drift down your stairs into the sea of less fortunate busy bodies rushing to start their dumb long days.
We’re that new couple moving slow as molasses.
Holding hands while everyone on every single sidewalk smells it on us, the sex.
Then we pop into some restaurant we never noticed that was clearly built for us, for today.
We devour eggs and pancakes—so good, best ever—and talk about maybe going to see a movie.
Obviously, we don’t do that. We go back to your place for another round and become the couple we’re supposed to be.
Night falls and we both know that I don’t need to find a place.
We have your place. Before you know it, Cynthia’s moving out and I’m moving in because you love me, because I love you.
But then you close your New Yorker. “Shit. I have to go pay my phone bill.”
Sex doesn’t “complicate” things. It destroys them.
I toss ’Scuse Me on your nightstand and I lean over your mysterious little body. I peck you on the forehead. “Do your thing, kid.”
When I turn my back on you, you don’t beg me to stay.
You flip through your New Yorker, the one from March 2001, the one you keep there for moments like this, when you realize that Sex and the City is just a TV show, that you are not Carrie Bradshaw, that men are Mr. Big in the bad way.
Dickheads, all of us. The way we just walk out the fucking door a couple hours after making you orgasm. Or not. Did you?
“I, um…I had a really good time, Vail.”
You don’t look at me. Not even a little. “Later, Joe.”