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month.”
    “So what are we saying here, that women want variety?” Mindy asked.
    “I don’t. I’m too old to have a stranger see me naked.” “We might want it, but we know we can’t have it. We can’t even talk about wanting it.” “It’s too dangerous. For men.” “Women just don’t want it the way men do. I mean, have you ever heard of a woman going to a male prostitute? It’s disgusting.” “But what if the male prostitute were Brad Pitt?” “I’d cheat on my husband in a second for Brad Pitt. Or George Clooney.”
    “So if the man is a movie star, it doesn’t count,” Mindy said.
    “That’s right.”
    “Isn’t that hypocritical?” Mindy said.
    “Yeah, but what’s the likelihood of it happening?”
    Everyone laughed nervously.
    “We’ve got some interesting ideas here,” Mindy said. “We’ll meet again in two weeks and see where we are.”
    After the women left her office, Mindy stared blankly at her e-mails.
    She received at least 250 a day. Usually, she tried to keep up. But now she felt as if she were drowning in a sea of minutiae.

    28
    Candace Bushnell
    What was the point? she wondered. It only went on and on, with no end in sight. Tomorrow there would be another 250, and another 250
    the day after, and the day after that into infinity. What would happen if one day she just stopped?
    I want to be significant, Mindy thought. I want to be loved. Why is that so difficult?
    She told her assistant she was going to a meeting and wouldn’t be back until after lunch.
    Leaving the suite of offices, she rode the elevator to the ground floor of the massive new office building—where the first three floors were an urban mall of restaurants and high-end shops that sold fifty-thousand-dollar watches to rich tourists—and then she rode an escalator down into the damp bowels of underground corridors and walked through a cement tunnel to the subway. She’d been riding the train ten times a week for twenty years, about a hundred thousand rides. Not what you thought when you were young and determined to make it. She arranged her face into a blank mask and took hold of the metal pole, hoping no male would rub up against her, rub his penis on her leg, the way men sometimes did, like dogs acting on instinct. It was the silent shame endured by every woman who rode the subway. No one did anything about it or talked about it because it was performed mostly by men who were more animal than human, and no one wanted to be reminded of the existence of these men or the disturbing baseness of the natural male human. “Don’t take the train!” exclaimed Mindy’s assistant after Mindy regaled her with yet another tale of one such incident. “You’re entitled to a car.” “I don’t want to sit in traffic in Manhattan,” Mindy replied. “But you could work in the car. And talk on the phone.” “No,” Mindy said. “I like to see the people.”
    “You like to suffer, is what,” the assistant said. “You like to be abused. You’re a masochist.” Ten years ago, this comment would have been insubordi-nation. But not now. Not with the new democracy, where every young person was equal to every older person in this new culture where it was difficult to find young people who even cared to work, who could even tolerate discomfort.
    Mindy exited the subway at Fourteenth Street, walking three blocks to her gym. By rote, she changed her clothes and got onto a treadmill.
    She increased the speed, forcing her legs into a run. A perfect metaphor O N E F I F T H AV E N U E
    29
    for her life, she thought. She was running and running and going nowhere.
    Back in the locker room, she took a quick shower after carefully tucking her blow-dried bob under a shower cap. She dried off, got dressed again, and thinking about the rest of her day—more meetings and e-mails that would only lead to more meetings and e-mails—felt exhausted. She sat down on the narrow wooden bench in the changing room and called James.