Barkley called her the next afternoon. "What's up, dude?" he said.
"I don't know. You called me."
"I told you I didn't want a girlfriend. You set yourself up. You knew what I was like."
"Oh yeah, right," Carrie wanted to say, "I knew that you were a shallow, two-bit womanizer, and that's why I wanted to go out with you."
But she didn't.
"I didn't sleep with her. I didn't even kiss her," Barkley said. "I don't care. I'll never see her again if you don't want me to."
"I really don't give a shit." And the scary thing was, she didn't.
Then they spent the next four hours discussing Barkley's paintings. "I could do this all day, every day," Barkley said. "This is so much better than sex."
THE GREAT UN-PRETENDER
"The only thing that's left is work," said Robert, forty-two, an editor. "You've got so much to do, who has time to be romantic?"
Robert told a story, about how he'd recently been involved
was clear that it wasn't going to work out. "She put me through all these little tests. Like I was supposed to call her on Wednesday to go out on Friday. But on Wednesday, maybe I feel like I want to kill myself, and God only knows how I'm going to feel on Friday. She wanted to be with someone who was crazy about her. I understand that. But I can't pretend to feel something I don't.
"Of course, we're still really good friends," he added. "We see each other
all the time. We just don't have sex."
NARCISSUS AT THE FOUR SEASONS
One Sunday night, I went to a charity benefit at the Four Seasons. The theme was Ode to Love. Each of the tables was named after a different famous couple—there were Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker, Narcissus and Himself, Catherine the Great and Her Horse, Michael Jackson and Friends. Al D'Amato sat at the Bill and Hillary table. Each table featured a centerpiece made up of related items—for instance, at the Tammy Faye Bakker table there were false eyelashes, blue eye shadow, and lipstick candles. Michael Jackson's table had a stuffed gorilla and Porcelana face cream.