You First: A Joe Goldberg Prequel (You, #0)(53)

Season 3 and I want a TV in my fucking kitchen. I pop an Advil. My back hurts.

The girls are in the Hamptons and Charlotte is lying about her age and Carrie is making a list of everything wrong with a nice, sheepish doctor. But ooh…Big is back and he has a new girlfriend. She’s pretty. Sarah, Plain and Tall. Carrie is puking on the beach, literally green with envy. Now she’s calling his house and hanging up because the stick figure with no soul picked up. I’m a little scared for Big. It’s his engagement party and Carrie is skulking around and Big leaves his beautiful plain fiancée to go talk to Carrie.

Big is better than that, and poor Natasha rolls down the window like “Where’s my man?” Carrie touches Big’s hair like she owns him. Like she didn’t make this mess. I’m tired, Vail; I have to put my pen down. I’ll write more when I’m all caught up.



* * *



—

Okay, I’m baaack. And I made it to the present. I know where we are.

I think I know why you fear the end of love in Manhattan, Vail. Big lost everything because he couldn’t let go of Carrie. He cheated on Natasha in their bed. Same way Carrie cheated on her dull, cigarette-hating boyfriend Aidan. Big’s wife broke a tooth. It was all gross and it’s all on Carrie. She’s not a tube of red lipstick like Samantha. She’s not a string of pearls like Charlotte or a hot slice of rye like Miranda. She’s all show, all capes and sequins. Big is the opposite. A still water that runs deep. You once told me you’re afraid of not having a dream. Because of Sex, you think the road to happy is paved with crazy obsession. On our first date, you warned me that you couldn’t tell me about the fate of Carrie and Aidan. It kills me that you believe there was ever any chance of those two sticking it out. Two matches can’t start a fire. They need the book, the charcoal, the friction. Same way a rowboat without oars just sits in the Central Park Reservoir. You need me to be your Big, and yesterday I turned into Aidan on you. A pathetic, aspiring heart-shaped candy of a man. Well, those days are over, my peanut M&M. I’m gonna get a suit or, at the very least, a blazer. I need an umbrella. I need my hair to get thick again, and I need to make reservations and talk a little slower, use fewer words. More biting my lip and raising my eyebrows. I stand here in front of the mirror like some doubtful loser in a movie and love is supposed to be a Billy Joel ballad where you love the person just the way they are, but I’m hooked. Invested. I just watched hours of fucking television for you and learned a language and…and…

Still, I like you. Still.





19


Sex is in my skin, in my blood, in my ears. I can’t call you. Not like this.

I try to get my brain back. I open Franny and Zooey. I cut the cosmos and the cupcakes with Salinger, but now his name makes me think of the one about the guy who came too fast with the cool mom who said Salinger used to get me high. Did I come too fast?

I toss the Salinger aside. My Sex-athon killed my brain. It’s no better at the shop. I’m slapsticking left and right, and Mr. Mooney says this “punning phase” of my life had better end soon. I leave the shop and hear that tinkly calypso theme music when I strut down Fifth Avenue. I walk into the Beanery and unconsciously scan the room for my buddy Steve. We would be friends in real life, but there is no Steve in real life. In real life, Steve is Schlitz. I hit the men’s room and flush the toilet, but even here, I am altered. Brainwashed.

I look down at the bowl and can’t help but wonder where it all goes, the shit.

I sit at the counter, and Dick wants to know what’s wrong.

“I did it,” I say. “I speak Sex and the Fucking City.”

He high-fives me, and I talk to him like he is a Steve, a bartender. The Big of it all (oh, shut up, Joe!) and the way you creamed your panties when you thought I had a fat pad on the Upper West Side. You want to be Carrie, and I wanna go Big for you. But do you know how much it costs to buy a nice fucking umbrella in Manhattan? Who has that kinda dough?

Dick sighs. “Goldberg,” he says. “You need to chill. Those chicks are in their thirties. It’s not about the money. It’s…Seduce and Destroy. Anyway,” he says. “You back at the gym?”

“No.”

He frowns and did I get fat overnight? Am I a puffy third banana, the worst of all the men in that fucking show…Am I…“Dick, do I…do I look like Aidan?”

Not yet, according to the barista, but who am I kidding? I’m not Aidan. He’s a furniture designer—WHY ARE THEY ALL SO RICH—and he has a dog and he doesn’t own a hairbrush and he got dumped in Serendipity. In theory, this is a good thing. Carrie doesn’t love Aidan. How could she with those my-family-went-to-Jamaica necklaces? He’s a barn jacket of a man. Ick. But then the truth hits me like a Magnolia cupcake sugar bomb from the West Fucking Village. I am in the Beanery because of the off chance that you will walk into the Beanery. I live for you. I dwell on you and am I…Dick hands me a coffee. I can’t help it. “Dick, am I a Carrie?”

“Decaf, son. You’re scaring me.”

“You’re the one who told me to do this.”

“Yeah,” he says. “But can you ever just take it down a notch? It’s not…it’s not literal. You learned the language. Do your thing. Call her up.”