【英文有声书】欲望都市sex and the city - 08（有文稿）

"LIKE DARYL VAN HORNE" We met at the home of Sarah, a filmmaker who used to be a model, "until I got sick of the bullshit and gained twenty pounds." She wore a dark pinstripe suit. "When you look over the list of guys you&`&ve dated, Peri is the one guy that doesn&`&t make any sense," she said. "You think, What was that about?" But before we could even get to the juicy bits, we made a disturbing discovery. Although none of the women had heard from Peri for months, that morning he had called four of them. "I don&`&t think he knows anything, I think it was just coincidence," said Magda. Magda has been friends with Peri for years—in fact, most of her girlfriends are former dates of Peri&`&s, whom she met through him. "He knows everything about us," one woman said. "He&`&s like Daryl Van Home in The Witches of Eastwick." "Van Horney is more like it," said another. We opened the wine. "The thing with Peri is this," said Sarah. "The reason he&`&s so charming is. when vou first meet him. he is articulate, he is funny—and, he&`&s available at all times, because he doesn&`&t work. What&`&s more fun than a guy who says, &`&Meet me for lunch,&`& then you go back to work, then he says &`&Meet me for cocktails at six?&`& When was the last time you went out with a guy who actually wanted to see you three times a day?" "&`&Cocktails&`& is such a loaded word," said Magda. "It&`&s like Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant." Jackie, a magazine editor, said, "When I met him, we started seeing each other instantly—five nights a week. He won&`&t leave you alone." "He&`&s smart, because the thing that he does is, he loves the phone," said Sarah. "Which to a woman, you think, He must really be into me, because he calls you ten times a day. And then you start to disregard the fact that he&`&s like a funny-looking little thing." "Then you start to look at his suspenders, and you think, My God," said Maeve, a poet who is half Irish. "Then you begin to realize he&`&s not funny," said Sarah. "He has a good stack of jokes, but once you&`&ve heard them a million times, they get really annoying. It&`&s like a loop. He&`&s looping himself." "He told me that I was the only girl he ever went out with who got his jokes," said Maeve, "and I didn&`&t think they were funny." "And then you see his apartment. Those twenty-five doormen—what&`&s that about?" "You wonder why he doesn&`&t just throw out all his furniture and go to the Door Store instead." "Once he showed me these napkin holders he had gotten. They were in the shape of handcuffs. Like this was how he was going to seduce a girl, with napkin holders." FIRST DATE: 44 So how does it all start? Jackie&`&s story was typical. "I was waiting for a table at Blue Ribbon." she said. "He walked un to me and started talkine. He was instantly funny. I thought, Omigod, we&`&re really clicking. But I&`&ll probably never hear from him again." Everyone nodded. After all, hadn&`&t we all been there? "He called at something like eight the next morning," Jackie said. " &`&Want to go out to lunch?&`& he asked. He asks you to lunch at 44 the next day." Sapphire, a blond divorced mom, laughed. "He didn&`&t take me to 44 until the second day." "While you think he&`&s still funny and clever, he asks you to go away with him for the weekend," said Jackie. "He asked me to marry him on something like the tenth day," said Sarah. "That was pretty quick, even for him." "He took me to dinner at his parents&`& house on like the third date," said Britta, a tall, rangy brunette who works as a photo rep and is now happily married. "It was just me and his parents and the butler. The next day, I remember I was sitting on his bed, and he was showing me home movies of him as a kid. He was begging me to marry him. He was saying, &`&See, I can be a serious guy.&`& And then he ordered some cheesy Chinese food. I thought, Marry you? What, are you smoking something?" Ramona sighed. "On the other hand, I had just broken up with someone, and I was pretty upset. He was always there." A pattern emerged. The women who had dated Peri had all just left their husbands or long-term boyfriends when Peri found them. Or, was it they who found him? "He&`&s rebound man," Sarah said, definitively. "It&`&s like, &`&Excuse me, are you broken? Let&`&s get intimate.&`&" "He&`&s the emotional Mayflower," said Maeve. "He gets women from point A to point B. You arrive at Plymouth Rock feeling enormously better." His ability to empathize was a strong point. The phrase "He&`&s just like a girl" came up over and over again. "He reads more fashion magazines than most women," said Sapphire, "and he&`&s much more willing to fight your battles than he is his own." "He&`&s extremely confident," Maeve continued. "I think it&`&s a mistake when men present themselves as helpless idiots who can&`&t even find their socks. Peri says, T&`&m totally secure. Lean on me.&`& And you think, What a relief! Really, it&`&s all that women want. Most men don&`&t understand that. At least Peri is clever enough to affect that." And then there&`&s the sex. "He&`&s awesome in bed," said Sarah. "He&`&s unbelievably great at making out," said Sapphire. "You thought he was awesome?" Jackie asked. "I thought he was awful. Can we please talk about his feet?" Nevertheless, so far, Peri seemed to be the embodiment of the two things women always say they want most—a guy who can talk and be understanding like a woman, but who also knows how to be a man in the sack. So what went wrong?