Sex and Candy

By Crispin Sartwell

Do you ever have the sudden, vertiginous sense that life may have no meaning, that perhaps human existence is a mad, cruel, cosmic joke?

Sometimes you gaze straight into the abyss. Sometimes your very life seems a mere morsel in the all-devouring existential Maw of Fate.

I had that sensation today as I read about Candace Bushnell's wedding in the "Vows" column of the New York Times.

Bushnell, the sex columnist and author who is played on television by Sarah Jessica Parker, married a principal dancer in the New York City Ballet: Charles "Chuck" Askegard. She is 43, he 33.

They met at a benefit for the ballet company. "By the end of the night," reports the Times, Ms. Bushnell was whisking Mr. Askegard downtown to Bungalow 8, the Chelsea boîte, where they danced and exchanged meaningful dialogue.

"I told him he was too tall to be a ballet dancer," she said. "And I asked if he was gay." Mr. Askegard said no, he was not, on both counts, and their relationship took off from there. "At first he seemed too young, but then I looked into his eyes and it was like, `Whoa!' " she said.

Writers who interview Bushnell are always struck by how sleekly she is made up and how skinny she is. Rarely do they seem as impressed by her prose style. But Candace reads like Tolstoy, if Tolstoy had been lobotomized and entered into a career as a softcore pornographer.

Bushnell once wrote a short story for use in an advertising campaign for Bulgari, the Italian jeweler. It featured prose of this caliber:

A New York Love Affair

Scene 3. Pursuit

She opens her leather agenda. To the date, that date, November Fifth. 730 Fifth Avenue. Ten p.m. circled in felt-tip pen. Under that, underlined, "espresso bar." Different pen, different handwriting.

Now she has all the information.

Candace Bushnell for Bulgari

Bushnell's world is a world of meaningless coupling and product placement, a world of conspicuous consumption and vacuous prose, a world, in short, of emptiness and despair and really good hair.

One suspects, indeed, that Bushnell's marriage, like her writing, is sponsored by Prada or Versace. It may be that in their married life Candy and Chuck will cross the final frontier and actually sell advertising space in every segment of their lives: even their pseudo-ecstatic lovemaking may be logoed.

"I was happy for them because Candace is an alpha-female, and it's hard to find a guy who isn't threatened by that," Nadine Johnson, a friend, said. "But I told her every girl should be married at least once. We're here to procreate and nurture each other in life, and for all these years she's only been nurturing herself."

Call me a cynic, but I have the funny feeling that Candace will continue to nurture only herself. I'm not sure where the happy couple is registered, but if was going to send them something, it would be an existential crisis. Like, whoa!

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Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at the Maryland Institute College of Art. Contact him through www.crispinsartwell.com