Free Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell

about it," Ray said.
    "I heard she freaked out on your couch and you had to take her to the bughouse." "She's out now. Has a job. PR."
    "Poor Relations, I call it," Ray said. "They want to use her for her social connections, but her eyes are so glazed over you can't hardly talk to her. She just sits there like a bug while they paw through her Rolodex."
    Carrie couldn't help it. She laughed.
    Ray glared at her. "Well, it ain't funny. You know?"

8
    Manhattan Menage! Seven Men
    Pop the Inevitable Question
    I'm at dinner with a man. We're into a second bottle of 1982 Chateau Latour. Maybe it's our third date, maybe our tenth. It doesn't matter.
    Because, eventually, it always comes up. The Inevitable.
    "Errrrrr," he begins.
    "Yes?" I ask, leaning forward. He rests his hand on my thigh.
    Perhaps he's going to "pop the question." It's not likely, but then again, what is?
    He begins again. "Have you ever . . . "
    "Yes?"
    "Have you ever . . . wanted to . . ."
    "What?"
    "Have you ever wanted to . . . have sex with another woman?" he asks, triumphant.
    I'm still smiling. But there it is, sitting on the table like a puddle of vomit. I already know what's coming next.
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    "With me, of course," he says. "You know, a threesome." Then comes the kicker: "We could maybe get one of your friends."
    "Why would I want to do that?" I ask. I don't even bother mquiring why he thinks one of my friends might be interested.
    "Well, I would like it," he says. "And besides, you might like it, too."
    I don't think so.
    "A SEXUAL VARIANT"
    New York is a place where people come to fulfill their fantasies.
    Money. Power. A spot on the David Letterman show. And while you're at it, why not two women? (And why not ask?) Maybe everyone should try it at least once.
    "Of all the fantasies, it's the only one that exceeds expectations,"
    said a photographer I know. "Mostly, life is a series of mild disappointments. But two women? No matter what happens, you can't lose."
    That isn't exactly true, as I discovered later. But the threesome is one fantasy at which New Yorkers seem to excel. As one male friend of mine said, "It's a sexual variant as opposed to sexually deviant." Another option in a city of options. Or is there a darker side to threesomes: Are they a symptom of all that's wrong with New York, a product of that combination of desperation and desire particular to Manhattan?
    Either way, everyone has a story. They've done it, know someone who did, or saw three people about to do it—like those two "top models" who recently pulled a male model into the men's room at Tunnel, forced him to consume all his drugs, and then took him home.
    A menage a trois involves that trickiest of all relationship numbers: three. No matter how sophisticated you think you are, can you really handle it? Who gets hurt? Are three really better than two?
    Lured perhaps by the promise of free drinks, free joints, and free honey-roasted peanuts, seven men joined me on a recent Monday evening in the basement of a SoHo art gallery to talk about threesomes. There we found the photographer and 1980 ladies' man Peter Beard on his hands and knees. He was
    "collaging": painting shapes on some of his black-and-white animal photographs. Some of the photos had rust-colored footprints on them, and I remembered I had heard Peter was using his own blood.
    He was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt.
    Peter is a sort of "wild man," about whom one hears stories.
    Like: He was married to 1970s superbabe Cheryl Tiegs (true); that once, in Africa, he was hogtied and nearly fed to some animals (probably not true). He said he would work while we talked. "I'm just doing work all the time," Peter said. "Just to ward off boredom."
    Everyone made cocktails, and then we lit the first joint. Except for Peter, the men asked me to change their names for this article.
    "Using our real names wouldn't be good for our client base," said