Sex and the City: Andrea, August 30
To whoever finds this:
They do not tell me what day it is. They do not let me read.
Outside my door I hear the clink of champagne flutes and the scrape of four-inch pumps on imported Spanish tile. A laugh, like wind chimes, or a sprinkler. A woman's? I cannot tell. I have started assuming that everything is a woman.
I do not know where they are keeping me. It smells of receipts and orange peel.
On one end of my room, there is an enormous bay window. We are many stories up—too many to count. Every time I try my eye slips like an unfortunate window washer. I know this is Manhattan, but nothing more. From here the city is infinitely self-similar, an urban fractal. It kaleidoscopes around the edges of my vision. Uptown is downtown. The whole island is a sea shell. I am at the center. This means: I am nowhere.
At night (is it night? is it ever night, here?) I hear a couple fucking up against the wall. Or fucking is one thing it sounds like. Fucking, or utterly ignoring each other. I can't be sure which.
All I have are boxed sets of Sex and the City, seasons 2, 3, and 4. They say I can leave when I have finished watching them. The DVD player hums like a man trying to perform cunnilingus through a mustache. I am doomed.
*
I eat only the scraps they bring me: leftover hors d'oeuvres, mostly. "Of course Charlotte is a horse girl," I mutter halfway through a salmon puff.
I try to focus on the plots, but I cannot. Each date is like celery: a caloric net loss. There's Premature Ejaculation Guy, S&M Guy, Uncircumcised Guy, Divorced Guy, Married Guy, Widower Guy, Handyman Guy, Angry Guy, Photographer Guy, Wedding Guy, Punching Guy, Short Guy, Risky Sex Guy, Foot Fetish Guy, Too Big Guy, Crabs Guy, Alcohol Guy, Bi Guy. Like a big stiff lighthouse on a sloppy wet sea, there is John Slattery, lending his charm and expressive forehead to Politician Guy, a.k.a. Golden Showers Guy (but not That Guy, who does randomly lend his tawny thatched roof to a brief cameo alongside Old Rich Guy).
And then there is Mr. Big. Oh, Mr. Big. You are the only constant I have in this weary detention, the slightest curve of a season arc, the tiniest morsel of a Purpose! But still you are an old meal, a slice of tilapia, a lonely, tremendous badger, you are a cement truck in the morning, leaves trapped in the gutter in autumn, solid lard in the small of a sauce pan, you are any film about boxing, you are a plain bagel, a meat market, a farm pond, a grease fire, you are socks with sandals, you are a jar of olives, you are a neatly folded used napkin, you are the flu, an old orange, and a pair of sunglasses, you are a casserole, you are dead wood on the beach, you are a rash, a tire, a drought, an eel. You are a haircut with a haircut. You, sir, are a piece of paper.
As a rule, heterosexuality does not make a lick of sense to me. You see, I am a lesbian. (Please do not hold this against me, friend!) Indeed, it is only on television that heterosexuality has ever made any kind of sense. This is a low bar for a TV show, I think: Make heterosexuality plausible. Every show on ABC or the CW or Syfy for crying out loud has figured out how to sell us on the idea that heterosexuality is good for women. Just let the women enjoy themselves! It's easy.
Then why, oh why, I ask myself, gnawing absently on the season 4 DVD case in the return of some infantile distraction, why are they so miserable on Sex and the City? Of course being in love with Mr. Big would suck IRL, but this isn't real life—this is fiction. Just lie.
The girls flee to Los Angeles for a few episodes. I envy them. I feel I must be going insane.
*
A cheer erupts outside my door, and I am roused from my viewing. I have gleaned through the cunning native to my sex (and a listening device I have been carefully crafting from the remains of an antique lamp) that tonight's celebration marks some kind of electoral event—perhaps the end of a campaign for mayor or senator. Judging by the tune of the assembled guests, their candidate has won easily. This chills me, though I cannot say why.I look out the bay window. On all sides the buildings shoot into the sky like cigars. There are people in them, thousands. They never look up. They are all too busy having sex, or thinking about having sex, or they are out shopping for shoes, or they are hosting parties no one enjoys. They are the all the same. Sometimes, when I am tired, I gaze out into another apartment, any apartment. I imagine that I am there, instead of here. It makes no difference. I am every woman in every window. I am the world itself, locked in perpetual selfsameness. I am weather. I am steel. I am Sex. I am the City.
Friend, whoever you are, however you came into possession of these memoirs hastily scribbled onto this copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus I discovered wedged behind a removable piece of molding in the corner of the second guest bedroom where they are keeping me, however you unscrambled the clever cipher in which I wrote them, which I invented as a lonely child, however it is that my thoughts reach like ribbons across space and time to you—friend, you must find me. You must free me. Then I shall tell you everything—all of it, down to the darkest cherry pit.
It is almost too late. They are at my door now. I fear the next cosmopolitan shall be my last.
Haste, friend.
x
The Slow Burn, v. 4: An Introduction
Ivan Ramos (Guest Post), October 1
Audrey Wollen (Guest Post), October 22
*
The Slow Burn, volume 4, will run in this space all summer. Previous summers can still be found on Post45:
2015: A Summer of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels - Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Jill Richards
2016: Summer of Knausgaard - Diana Hamilton, Dan Sinykin, Cecily Swanson, and Omari Weekes
2017: Welcome (back) to Twin Peaks - Michaela Bronstein, Len Gutkin, and Benjamin Parker