"You
can answer the phone, but people have told me that they've left messages and I didn't get them."
She just gave him a look.
The message was, as she'd known it would be, from Keemi for Mr. Big.
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Frantic. "I just wanted to let you know that Carrie saw me tonight. . . "
She saved it. When Mr. Big arrived at 12:43, she played it for him. "Oh, that's nothing," he said. He was in a very good mood. "Keemi doesn't know what's going on."
Carrie did not remind him about their conversation that afternoon. Two days later, she ran into someone who claimed to be in the restaurant where Mr. Big was having dinner, who claimed that it was obviously business, although there was some girl there, but she was obviously part of the business, too.
By then, Carrie wasn't paying attention. She didn't care. By then, she was disassociating, moving into her own space.
She still can't remember who the person was who claimed to be in the restaurant.
On Fourth of July weekend, Mr. Big kept disappearing with Mr.
Marvelous in Mr. Marvelous's Hummer. They claimed they were going to the store. They claimed they were going to the store six times in two days.
They came back with pickles. Then they claimed they were going rollerblading. Carrie wasn't paying attention.
As soon as Mr. Big left, she'd turn the stereo all the way up and dance around the house. K.C. and the Sunshine Band.
"YOU'RE OUT OF CONTROL."
"What are you going to do with your life?" he'd ask. "I'm going to become famous."
"That is so sad.
You
won't like it when you get there." "Get off our planet."
Then he'd go and smoke a cigar and sulk, or go to the store again with Mr. Marvelous. In the middle of July:
"Is there someone else?"
"This is not about anyone else. This is about us." "That's not answering the question." "This is about us."
"It's a yes or no question. Is there somebody else?" "No."
"Liar. %u've been coached, haven't you?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Someone's been coaching you on what to say."
"This is about us. Not about anyone else."
"See? There you go again."
"Why do you have to make this harder?"
"I'm not making it harder. I have to get a cigarette."
"I have to go to sleep. Why won't you let me sleep?"
"You
don't deserve to sleep."
"I haven't done anything wrong."
"You
haven't done anything right, either. I want to get to the bottom of this coaching business." "What are you talking about?"
"Someone's been telling you what to say. It's an old shrink trick. When you're in a difficult situation, you keep repeating the same phrase over and over again. That way, you can't have a conversation."
One hour later:
"What are you doing? Who are you seeing? What time are you getting home?"
"Early. I'm getting home early."
"^bu're out of control."
"I am not. I'm home at eleven."
"Don't lie to me."
"Don't lie to me."
"I could have you followed. How do you know that I'm not already having you followed? I'm rich enough to have you followed."
This was several weeks after Carrie had begged to be taken to a mental institution.
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Mr. Big's Plea: You
Love Me, Damn It!
There was an afternoon in September when Carrie was going someplace or another, and there was too much traffic and she got out of the cab and walked down the middle of Madison Avenue in an expensive pantsuit. Let's face it, she thought:
You
own this town.
"Listen, sweetie," Mr. Big had said, several weeks earlier, "people don't like you as much as you'd probably like to think they do." "\eah? So what?"
She got a beer out of the refrigerator. "They think you have an agenda. But they don't know what it
is."
"Is that supposed to be my problem?" "That's exactly what I'm talking about." "Who are these 'people,' anyway?"
"I'm just trying to give you some advice," he'd said. "I'm just trying to help you.
Youve
too aggressive."
Carrie felt herself slipping into that bad place again in her head. For the umpteenth time in months.
"If you want to help me, don't regale me with the misguided, ignorant opinions of your coddled, spoiled friends who don't even have the guts to be single," she screamed. "Who never had to eat hot dogs for a month because they didn't have enough money to buy damn food. O.K.? So don't tell me I'm too aggressive." "Stop shouting," Mr. Big said.
Carrie pointed her cigarette at him. " 'Stop shouting. Stop showing off.
Stop having an a-gen-da.' Do you think I give a damn? I don't see your friends paying my rent."
That's right:
You own
this town.
She hadn't expected to break up that weekend. She was expecting to remain in a holding pattern. Hating him, loathing herself. Going through the routine motions of the relationship.
That week, she'd stayed out at the big house in East Hampton by herself.
He called every evening at eleven. One evening he called and said some thirty-year-old soap star had been flirting with him at an event.
"Am I supposed to be impressed by this?" she said.
"I'm just telling you," he said.
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"^bu're getting awfully cocky," she said. "What makes you think you can be so damn cocky?"
"I don't want to have this conversation."
"You
never want to have any conversation," she said.
He hung up on her.
When he turned up Friday early evening, she was lying in bed, watching the progress of the hurricane on the Weather Channel. Watching the satellite pictures over and over. "It's gong to be a miss," she said. "It's always a damn miss."
"Remember last year?" he said.
Another hurricane. Also a miss.
It had been one of their best weekends, even though she'd nearly drowned. On Sunday after the so-called hurricane, they'd gone to the beach and the waves had carved the beach in half. Everyone was swimming in the backwash and it was warm and deceptively tempting, and Carrie had gotten rolled by a wave and swept down the beach, panicking but also realizing, with that strange detachment that occurs in moments of danger, that her mouth was open and she was screaming.
It hadn't occurred to her that when you were drowning, your mouth would be open, water rushing in.
She washed up on shore, and when she got out, Mr. Big was standing there, laughing.
She was drowning and he thought it was funny. He didn't get the difference.
He couldn't read between the lines, see nuances. He didn't have to. That wasn't what the shareholders paid him for. It was black or white. In or out.
"YOU'RE A LITTLE CRAZY."
When they got home from dinner the weekend the hurricane missed, he said he didn't know what to do. He couldn't move forward. He thought they should move on. He started crying. Not for himself, for her. He'd rescued her from her lousy life, and now he was throwing her back. He felt like a shit for doing it, for things having to be that way, for not being able to give her what she wanted. The last thing he wanted was to hurt her.
The only part that wasn't in the manual was her response: She started to laugh. "Oh, give me a break," she said.
"I know you're really in love with me," he said.
"You
think I'm really in love with you," she said.
"I know you are."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Well," she said, "I'm not."
"This is me," he said.
"You
don't have to lie."
"I'm not. How can I be in love with you if you're not in love with me?
That's one of the rules. Don't break the rules."
She went into the bathroom and took off her contact lenses. This will be the last time I spend the night in this house, she thought. When she came back out, he said, "I didn't want it to be this way."
"Yes,
you did," she said, "because it is."
"I just want to be with someone normal," he said. "I just want to have a normal life." "Excuse me," she said.
"You're a little crazy," he said. "%u're too old to act the way you do.
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afraid for you.
You
can't think that people are going to take care of you all the time." "So what?" she said.
"You
can't act like you're twelve," he said.
"You
can't come home at four in the morning."
"Most twelve-year-olds don't come home at four in the morning."
"You
know what I mean. I can't take it. No normal man can take it. What are you always doing out until four in the morning?"
"Talking," she screamed. "Talking to my friends. Talking to people who have something to say."
Silence.
"Don't worry about it," she said. "Don't get your knickers in a twist. We both served a purpose for each other and now it's over. That's the way relationships are. Think of it as a learning experience."
"I don't believe that," he said. "I believe in real love."
Then she thought: Maybe she didn't have all the information.
"WHERE WERE YOU?"
Nico Barone had resurfaced for an obvious reason: She'd just gotten divorced. "I find marriage boring and intellectually stultifying," she said.
She was in her office, wearing tooth-bleaching trays. She was having nightmares: Bob Woodward chasing her around an underground parking garage. "I don't ever want to go there again," she said.
This was a couple of days after the breakup weekend. In the middle of the week, Mr. Big had called and asked Carrie if she wanted to go out to the house in East Hampton. The relationship wasn't quite over. "I'll have to think about it," she had said.
Instead, Carrie and Nico went to Martha's Vineyard, where she spent the weekend numbing herself with alcohol. On Saturday night, they went to a party where they met a guy they called "the Mr. Big of Martha's Vineyard."
"What is it that you do?" Nico asked him.
"I'm in natural resources development and exploration in the former Soviet Union," he said.
"Oh, you're in gold and oil in Russia," Nico said. She paid for their drinks with a new hundred-dollar bill. Nico always had new hundreds.
"We've got to get rich," Carrie said. "It's the only way."
"Don't worry, baby," Nico said. "We'll get there."
When Carrie got back Monday morning, there was a message from Mr.
Big. "Where were you? I didn't hear from you all weekend."
As if.
He called back Monday, late afternoon. His voice sounded strange, even given the circumstances. "This isn't working for me. I can't do this. For my own sanity . . . I can't go on. It's counterproductive . . . for me."
"Thank you for calling," Carrie said. "I can see you've got a lot of misery ahead of you." She hung up and called Nico Barone. "I'm free," she said.
"Really?" Nico said.
There was something about the way she said that word, "really," and that's when Carrie began to suspect that there might be somebody else.
Because that was part of the pattern.
EATING THE OYSTER
Nico's recently ex-husband was Dirk Winston, a pale, stocky novelist who was considered potentially important for about ten minutes after his first book came out six years ago. When he moved to New ^tfbrk from Boston, he was taken up by the Diekes, a young married couple who were both ambitious journalists. He and Winnie Dieke had been friends at Harvard.
The two couples would have dinner at Dirk and Nico's house in Sag Harbor. Winnie would sit at the table and poke at Nico's
cordon bleu
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cooking with her fork. "Well, it certainly looks interesting," she'd say Then she'd put her fork down and touch her mouth with her napkin. "Nico, why do you want to be on television?" she'd say. "There's no real journalism on the television.
You
should be a chef."
"I like TY" Nico would say.
Months later, Nico and Dirk were walking through Grand Central Terminal and a well-dressed young man in a suit walked up to Nico and said, "Aren't you on ABC?" Dirk turned and walked briskly out of the station. Nico went to the Oyster Bar and ordered a Bloody Mary and six bluepoints. At eleven-thirty A.M.
THE PRIVATE DICK
At the end of July, Carrie was sitting in a downtown studio having her picture taken for a magazine. The makeup artist was applying liquid foundation to her face with a paintbrush. The photographer was saying, "We want you naked.
You
don't mind being naked. You've done it before, eh?" in a European accent of indeterminate origin.
"Can I wear my underwear?" Carrie asked.
I just want to be with
someone normal.
"Can we have some music?" the makeup artist asked.
Do you
mind
being naked?
In the morning, Carrie had heard from the Australian. The Australian was a female private detective, a friend of a friend's. Carrie had met her at a dinner after a movie premiere. She was standing in a corner, eating a slice of beef with her fingers off a bloody napkin.