One Fifth Avenue - Candace Bushnell [9]
“No, silly. They’re for Mrs. Houghton. I’m not that famous,” she said. Hurrying across the lobby, she ran through the flashing cameras and jumped into the back of a white van.
Oh, yes, you are, Philip thought. You’re still that famous and more. Dodging the photographers, he headed across Fifth Avenue and down Tenth Street to the little library on Sixth Avenue where he sometimes worked. He suddenly felt irritated. Why had she come back? She would torture him again and then leave. There was no telling what that woman might do. Twenty years ago, she’d surprised him and bought an apartment in One Fifth and tried to position it as proof that she would always be with him. She was an actress, and she was nuts. They were all nuts, and after that last time, when she’d run off and married that goddamned count, he’d sworn off actresses for good.
He entered the cool of the library, taking a seat in a battered armchair. He picked up the draft of Bridesmaids Revisited, and after reading through a few pages, put it down in disgust. How had he, Philip Oakland, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, ended up writing this crap? He could imagine Schiffer Diamond’s reaction: “Why don’t you do your own work, Oakland? At least find something you care about personally.” And his own defense: “It’s called show ‘business.’ Not show ‘art.’”
“Bullshit,” she’d say. “You’re scared.”
Well, she always prided herself on not being afraid of anything. And that was her own bullshit defense: insisting she wasn’t vulnerable. It was dishonest, he thought. But when it came to her feelings for him, she’d always thought he was a little bit better than even he thought he was.
He picked up the pages again but found he wasn’t the least bit interested. Bridesmaids Revisited was exactly what it seemed—a story about what had happened in the lives of four women who’d met as bridesmaids at twenty-two. And what the hell did he know about twenty-two-year-old girls? His last girlfriend, Sondra, wasn’t nearly as young as Enid had implied—she was, in fact, thirty-three—and was an up-and-coming executive at an independent movie company. But after nine months, she’d become fed up with him, assessing—correctly—that he was not ready to get married and have children anytime soon. A fact that was, at his age, “pathetic,” according to Sondra and her friends. This reminded Philip that he hadn’t had sex since their breakup two months ago. Not that the sex had been so great anyway. Sondra had performed all the standard moves, but the sex had not been inspiring, and he’d found himself going through the motions with a kind of weariness that had made him wonder if sex would ever be good again. This thought led him to memories of sex with Schiffer Diamond. Now, that, he thought, staring blankly at the pages of his screenplay, had been good sex.
At the tip of Manhattan, the white van containing Schiffer Diamond was crossing the Williamsburg Bridge to the Steiner Studios in Brooklyn. Schiffer was also attempting to study a script—the pilot episode for Lady Superior—for which she had a table read that morning. The part was especially good: A forty-five-year-old nun radically changes her life and discovers what it means to be a contemporary woman. The producers were billing the character as middle-aged, although Schiffer still had a hard time accepting the fact that forty-five was middle-aged. This made her smile, thinking of Philip trying not to act surprised to see her in the elevator. No doubt he, too, was having a hard time accepting that forty-five was middle-aged.
And then, like Philip, she also recalled their sex life. But for her, the memory of sex with Philip was laced with frustration. There were rules about sex: If the sex wasn’t good the first time, it would probably get better. If it was great the first time, it would go downhill. But mostly, if the sex was really great, the best sex you’d had in your life, it meant the two people should be together. The rules were juvenile, of course, constructs concocted by young