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.