"204" " They Shoot Single People, Don't They" "In life, certain events come along so rarely that when they do, special attention must be paid." "Events like Halley's comet, solar eclipses getting that second latte for free." "One night at a salsa club in very downtown Manhattan four single girlfriends found themselves without a relationship at the exact same time." "She's not bad." "Here's to us without men." "Hear, hear." "I'm not toasting to that." "It's bad luck." "If I end up old and alone, it's all your fault." "Sweetie, we're all alone, even when we're with men." "You tell her, Mr. Sister." "My advice to you, is to embrace that fact slap on some armor and go through life like I do." "Enjoying men but not expecting them to fill you up." "Except when, well, you know...." "We know, we know." "Excuse me, I was wondering if you'd like to dance." "Thanks, but tonight it's just us girls." "I'm William, one of the club owners." "Samantha." "If you ever feel like a dance, we could have some fun." "I'm impressed, not dumping us for a guy." "Is that the kind of girl you think I am?" "I'm going." "I'm getting my picture taken for the magazine article in the morning." "What magazine article?" "all press needs to be cleared through me." "New York Magazine." "They're doing a profile of 20 Manhattan singles and it's called "Single and Fabulous."" "Why wasn't I picked?" "I'm single and I'm definitely fabulous." "I was picked because Stanford's new boyfriend is the assistant photo editor." "You can't leave." "We never go dancing." "Come on, one more drink." "all right, one drink." "To hot men." "One drink turned into many, and before I knew it I was dragging my tired, yet single and fabulous ass home at dawn." "I decided my best bet to avoid looking like I'd been up all night was to stay up all morning." "It's Stanford." "You're 40 minutes late." "I'm at the photo shoot and everyone's freaking out!" "I'm there, 20 minutes." "20 minutes!" "I said 20 minutes!" "I could not get a cab." "What did you do, let one drag you here?" "Stop, I was up all night." "I need a coffee the size of my head." "Carrie, this is Nevin." "Gosh, hi." "Stanford has told me so much about you." "It's really nice to finally meet you." "Hello, you're about a fucking month late!" "Follow me." "Don't look at me, you're the one who's about a fucking month late." "My poncho!" "Hi, I'm so sorry." "Could you sit?" "Sure." "There's gonna be time for makeup, right?" "Thank God!" "I wanna do a few test shots before I check the lighting." "Coffee." "Do you mind if I smoke?" "I don't care if you shoot up." "I never keep people waiting." "I got to bed really late last night." "And it's my personal belief, I lapsed into a coma." "Thank you." "They only had decaf." "Being single and fabulous also frees up one's weekends." "Saturdays usually spent browsing with him in Soho are left for practical things like power walking with your single and fabulous girlfriends." "We're walking too slow." "We're not burning off anything." "Let's gossip to get our heart rates up." "Miranda." "Josh, hi." "How are you?" "Good, great." "Training for the Marathon." "Right, I forgot you do that." "Five years in a row." "You've got my number, give me a call." "Cute." "Who's that?" "An ophthalmologist I once faked orgasms with." "We're officially stopping." "The idea that Miranda would fake anything stopped me cold." "I only slept with him twice." "The first time I faked it because it was never gonna happen." "The second time I faked it because I did the first time." "Naturally." "I didn't wanna fake it again, so I just forgot to return his call." "You broke up with an ophthalmologist over that?" "Orgasm, major thing in a relationship?" "But not the only thing." "Orgasms don't send you Valentine's cards and don't hold your hand in a sad movie." "Mine do." "You're seriously advocating faking?" "No, but if you really like the guy, what's one little moment of.... ...versus spending the whole night in bed alone?" "These are my options?" "Who's to say that one moment is any more important than when he gets up and pours you a cup of coffee in the morning?" "Let's go!" "I'll take an orgasm over a cup of French drip Colombian any day." "For me, it's a toss-up." "The usual, please." "Having smoked all my cigarettes during our workout I stopped for fresh supplies when...." "There I was hanging right next to Martha Stewart Living Carrie Bradshaw, dying of embarrassment." ""Single and Fabulous?"" "There was no question mark implied." "I would never agree to be in an article, "Single and Fabulous?"" "I was set up." "I agree." "You're single, fabulous and fucked." "Not after that picture I won't be." "They said, "Single and Fabulous!"" "They did not say, "Single and Fabulous?"" "That question mark is hostile." "Can't we sue them or something?" "For what, mis-punctuation?" "It's too late." "I'm all over the city looking like something that got caught in a drain." "You know what?" "I just quit smoking." ""Single was fun at 20." "But you wanna ask these women:" ""'How fun will all night club hopping be at 40?"'" "Who's out all night?" "Who's 40?" "Do you know what I say, "Fuck them, exclamation point!"" "Fuck them!" "Fuck them!" "Charlotte said, "Fuck."" "Every couple of years, an article like this surfaces as a cautionary tale to scare young women into marriage." "I'm a cautionary tale?" "Shoot me." ""Filling their lives with an endless parade of decoys and distractions..." ""...to avoid the painful fact that they're completely alone."" "How is that helping?" "This piece of trash has nothing, I repeat, nothing to do with us." "Exactly, we are single and fabulous." "Absolutely." "But I had a sneaking suspicion they didn't quite believe it." "Somehow, the question mark had leapt off my cover and on to each of them." "Because, within a week Miranda met Josh for old time's sake." "Samantha met William for a dance." "And Charlotte met a deadline head-on." "So, I'm moving to Salt Lake City." "What?" "Why?" "The acting thing in New York is definitely not happening." "I've a chance to get on a Christian soap opera if I move out West." "A Christian soap opera?" "The Days of our Mormon Lives or some shit." "Hand me that receiver cable." "The...." "What'll you do around here without me?" "Tom was an out of work actor friend Charlotte had come to depend on to do the occasional male things she needed done around her apartment." "Because he was an out of work actor, he had a lot of time." "And because he had a lot of time, he had a lot of tools." "Okay." "That is the VCR." "After I rewire your lamp, I'm out of here." "Unless you have something else you need done." "Charlotte made a decision." "She decided she wasn't gonna let her Mr. Fix-It get away." "While women are certainly no strangers to faking it we faked our hair color, cup-size." "Hell, we've even faked fur." "I couldn 't help but wonder, has fear of being alone suddenly raised the bar on faking?" "Are we faking more than orgasms?" "Are we faking entire relationships?" "Is it better to fake it than be alone?" "My boyfriend and I were really compatible except for one thing:" "He liked thin, blond, Waspy types." "So now I am." "I think my wife's an idiot." "Every day with her is like a trip to Idiot Island." "I don't tell her how I really feel." "I'm pretty sure she'd leave me." "I don't understand sign language." "A glamorous city like New York offers a sea of single and fabulous things for the fabulous and single to do." "As long as the magazine's on newsstands, I'm not going out in public for fear of being scorned and chased with sticks." "One, one!" "I'm not smoking." "Look." "He climbs on top of her, next thing you know, she's coming." "No wonder they're lost, they've no idea there's more work involved." "Still faking it?" "Is he that bad in bed?" "No, he's just...." "He's a guy." "They can rebuild a jet engine, but when it comes to a woman...." "What's the big mystery?" "It's my clitoris, not the Sphinx!" "You just found the title for your autobiography." "It's really not their fault." "They don't come with a manual." "If I had a son, I'd teach him all about the vagina." "If you had a son, we'd call social services." "The other night, he told me he really likes that I can come while he's fucking me." "How can he believe that that's all it takes?" "Because you're faking it!" "I'm really hating myself right now." "Could you please just tell me why?" "He's a nice guy." "He means well." "It's codependent coming." "Well, I have to go." "I got a date." "I'm meeting William after work, and then, who knows?" "From the way he dances, I'm fairly certain I won't have to fake anything." "This is a great club." "Wait until you see my club in the Hamptons." "Salsa East." "Do you like the Hamptons?" "No, love love the Hamptons." "I'm renting a great house in East Hampton." "We can go out on the weekends." "We can go sailing and cook big lobsters." "We can walk on the beach...." "At first Samantha listened, fascinated, detached." "It was rare to hear a man use the "we" word, so comfortably so early on." "Or, we could just lay around and do this." "Whatever we want." "Pretty soon she gave in." "She lay back, opened up and let the "we" wash over her." "Hello." "Guess where I'm spending the summer?" "I don't know, Gucci?" "East Hampton." "William's renting a house and he's inviting me for the summer." "Isn't it a little early?" "Honey, no." "all the great places are taken by January." "I mean, early in the relationship." "You should have heard him last night." ""We" can cook, "we" can swim." "He's a "we" guy." "So he's a "we" guy, who cares?" ""We" are going to spend the summer in East Hampton." "And the "we" I'm referring to right now is you and me." "They say that every great actor knows when to stop performing." "I'm getting close." "Come with me." "Come with me." "For Miranda, it was that Saturday night at exactly 10:40." "Come with...." "God." "Is everything all right?" "Are you sure?" "You didn't come." "Did you?" "No." "Did I do something wrong tonight, because you came every other time." "What?" "Tell me." "I didn't exactly come all those other times." "You faked it?" "How many of the other times?" "all of the other times?" "Do you have a physical problem or something?" "What makes you assume it's me?" "No offense, it's just...." "Nobody I've ever slept with has had to fake it." "A lot of women fake it and until five minutes ago you didn't know I was faking it, so...." "What are you saying?" "all the women I've slept with have been faking it?" "What are you looking at?" "Nothing, I was just running a list in my head." "Look, Josh." "A woman's anatomy is a little more complicated" "I know all about a woman's anatomy." "I'm a doctor." "You're an eye doctor." "Give me some tips." "Pardon me?" "Tips to get you off." "I am nobody's charity case." "I run the Marathon for Christ's sake." "Do you know how the clitoris works?" "Yes." "Do you know where it is?" "Yes." "It's about two inches from where you think it is." "My God." "Relax, I'll show you." "Later that week, I went over to Charlotte's to see some of Tom's handiwork." "After we finish with the lighting, we'll move to the kitchen." "We're retiling everything." "First Samantha and now Charlotte went "we, " "we, " all about her home." "That's amazing!" "How will you get all that done before you leave?" "I'm not leaving." "I've decided to stay." "I have to go to my place and get a voltmeter." "Okay." "I'll be right back, okay?" "Bye, honey." ""Bye, honey?"" "When he told me he was leaving, I suddenly had feelings what if he was the one?" "He'd been under my nose the entire time and I'd never even seen him." "I let the "almost-40-out-of-work-actor" thing get in the way." "He is strong and masculine and he can fix things around the house." "You can't create a relationship with a guy just because he can caulk your tub." "Yes, you can." "As I walked home, I couldn't help but wonder when did being alone become the modern day equivalent of being a leper?" "Will Manhattan restaurants soon be divided up into sections?" "Smoking, non-smoking, single, non-single?" "The usual, please." "Then I had a frightening thought." "Maybe I was the one who was faking it." "All these years faking to myself that I was happy being single." "Yes, it's me." "And there it was, pity." "Pity from the man who sells me my Marlboro Lights." "It was the final straw." "I decided I wasn 't gonna let a magazine or my friends or the Surgeon General stop me from being who I was:" "Single and fabulous, exclamation point." "Tartini?" "Excuse me?" "Tartini: cranberry flavored vodka." "I've been out of commission for four days and there's a new drink?" "I invited Stanford to join me at a fabulous party downtown to honor the fabulous conceptual photographer Ellen von Unwerth." "Unfortunately, he invited his new boyfriend, Nevin "von Bitchy."" "Hi, I hate you." "Join the club, I hate me, too." "I'm so sorry about the cover." "I had nothing to do with it." "Who cares?" "Next week you'll have a coke-dealing slumlord on the cover." "You are fabulous." "Excuse me." "You realize you'll have to dump him." "I can't." "We're getting a summer share in Sagaponack." "Tartini!" "While Stanford and I did downtown Samantha was uptown waiting for William at her favorite romantic restaurant." "Alone?" "No, I'm waiting for someone." "At first she thought she had the wrong time." "When he still wasn't there 20 minutes later, she called her machine." "No message." "I don't know what's keeping him." "Could you ask the waiter to bring me a red wine?" "She hadn't expected to be caught out in public alone without a book, project, or any of her "dining-out-alone-armor. "" "She had nothing to do but sit and wait for him." "By now she knew that "we" William wasn 't ever gonna show up." "He was one of those men who faked a future to get what he wanted in the present." "More water?" "No." "No more water." "She felt exposed, vulnerable, like a fool." "My God, people are looking." "I'm so embarrassed." "It's okay." "Where's the ladies' room?" "This way." "Show me the way." "You okay?" "Thank you." "You're very sweet." "I'm not usually like this." "I can't believe I fell for some guy's line." "But sometimes you just need to hear "we."" "You know?" "Samantha let the Pakistani busboy kiss her." "After all, he'd been so sweet and attentive with the bread." "You take me home, you're not alone." "As Samantha looked into his sweet and hopeful eyes, she realized something." "No matter how much it hurts sometimes it's better to be alone than fake it." "Meanwhile, downtown, I heard the funniest thing I'd ever heard from a man I just met." "My God." "I'm sorry, your pants." "I'm sorry." "It's fine." "Well, fuck you." "Exclamation point." "Okay, you little Tartini." "Time to go home." "You've had enough." "C'mon, it's early." "It's 2:00 a.m. on a Tuesday." "Just go." "Go, go, go home." "Take your tired, fabulous ass home." "I want to meet cute guys." "Everyone here is gay, gay, gay." "I don't think so." "Need a light?" "His name was Jake." "He was everything I was looking for that night." "Single, straight and a smoker." "There wasn't quite as much smoke uptown." "How's that?" "Is that better now?" "How about now?" "Miranda's two-day tutorial with her ophthalmologist had turned lovemaking into a kind of naked eye exam." "Maybe we should just try and let it happen for a second." "I wanna do it right." "How's that?" "Even with all Josh's good intentions, Miranda found herself no closer." "She realized she was not a jet engine." "She was a lot more complicated." "It would never work between them." "I'm close, are you close?" "I'm close." "She wanted to give him something for learning so much and trying so hard." "So, Miranda came." "She came out of retirement for one final performance." "I'm the man." "Wanna go for a ride in my Porsche?" "Fabulous." "I need some smokes." "Do you want anything?" "I'll be right back." "How you doing?" "I want a pack of Marlboro Lights." "I looked at myself in the mirror." "What had I been so afraid of all week?" "I was still young, still desirable." "I would never wind up alone." "Is this you?" "And there it was." "My question mark staring me right in the face." "Was that me?" "If I went home with him, it'd be the only time I'd ever had sex to validate my life." "The question mark would no longer be a question, it would be a fact." "I gotta go home." "No way, I'm not letting you out." "Fine." "I think I should go to Salt Lake City." "Give it a try." "No, really?" "Charlotte was faking it." "She'd realized two days ago, while she had no problem faking orgasms she could never fake intimacy." "My heart's still in acting." "I'm not ready to let it go." "Tom was faking, too." "He was mostly just sick of New York and needed an excuse to leave." "I'll miss you." "I'll miss you, too." "It was a perfectly timed double fake." "Under other circumstances, they could've shared a long life together." "Over the next week, things returned to normal." "Miranda, babe, it's Josh." "I'm home." "Give me a call." "Miranda forgot to return Josh 's last call." "Samantha made peace with her feelings about "we" William." "And Charlotte learned you don 't have to rely on men 's affections to get things fixed around the house." "You can pay them." "As for me, after I was recycled I decided instead of running away from the idea of a life alone I'd better sit down and take that fear to lunch." "Waiting for someone?" "No, it's just me." "Thanks." "So, I sat there and had a glass of wine alone." "No books, no man, no friends, no armor no faking."