Carrie and Mr. Big go to a charity event in an old theater, and they have a beautiful evening. Carrie has her hair done. It seems like she's having to have her hair done all the time now, and when she says to the stylist, "I can't afford to do this," he says, "You can't afford not to."
At dinner, Mr. Big swoops down on the table with his cigar and moves their place cards so they're sitting next to each
other, saying, "I don't care." They hold hands the whole evening, and one of the columnists comes up and says, "Inseparable as always."
They have a good week after that, and then something tweaks in Carrie's brain. Maybe it's because they went to dinner at one of his friends' houses, and there were people there with kids. Carrie rode tiny plastic cars in the street with the kids, and one of the kids kept falling off her car. The parents came out and yelled at their kids to go back in the house. It didn't seem fair, because none of the kids got hurt.
She decides she has to torture Mr. Big again. "Do you think we're close?" she asks just before they're going to sleep.
"Sometimes," Mr. Big says.
"Sometimes isn't enough for me," she says. She continues to bug him until he begs her to let him go to sleep. But when she wakes up early the next morning, the bug is still there.
"Why are you doing this?" Mr. Big asks. "Why can't you think about the good things, like the way we were last week?"
He walks by the bed. "Oooh, look at that sad httle face," he says, which makes her want to kill him.
"I'll talk to you about this later, I promise," Mr. Big says.
"I don't know if there's going to be any 'later, " Carrie says.
Lisa was at a crowded party for a prominent pubhcist (we'll call her Sandy) in a town house in the East 50s. Lisa's husband, a handsome man who is in some kind of business, was in tow. In between sips of a pink margarita, she explained. "When I finally decided to look for someone, I thought about every place I'd ever met a man. It wasn't at Bowery Bar, it was at parties at people's houses. So I really spread the net. I went to every party at anyone's apartment.
"When you meet a guy, my rule is for the first few dates, no big parties. It's suicide. Do not be dressed up. Do not be on. Do not be working it, working the room. Men want to
feel comfort. You must elicit coziness. Talk about the person they are, because most men's self-image is them at fourteen."
Back at her office, Trudie nodded at a large photo on her desk of a curly-haired man leaning against a dune on a beach. "My husband is such a find. He really understands me. When you find the right person, it's so easy. People who have a lot of fights and drama— well, something is wrong. My husband doesn't give me any argument. We never really fight about anything. He is so giving to me 99 percent of the time, on the few occasions when he wants his way, I'll give in."
And then suddenly everything is, weirdly, fine.
Mr. Big calls. "What are you doing?"
"Oh, you know, that thing I do sometimes," Carrie says. "Writing a story."
"About what?"
"Remember how we said that someday we'd move to Colorado