The mood is so edgy and charged at the Prada party it feels as if they are piping small amounts of cocaine in through the ventilation system. There is a moment when Giuliani walks through with his Secret Service detail and former fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen when the room is forced to remember September 11 and what it left behind not far south of here. But before and after that, the vibe is undiluted nineties ice. Diane von Furstenberg arches an eyebrow as she motions toward a silver cage full of clothing suspended from the ceiling. Anna Wintour is scowling over her fur collar at the giant silver spaceship elevator in the middle of the room.

"Can I get some of that?" a nervous young guy in khakis asks one of the superhumanly handsome waiters strutting around the space with champagne in hand.

"I'm going to need to see some I.D. there, man," the waiter tells him. The young guy's face flashes a hot red as he fumbles through his wallet. When he finally locates his license, the waiter tells him, "I was just kidding, man," pours the champagne, and walks away smug.

"I think it's really silly to be 43 and look around and be like, 'Oh, I wanna have kids.' Because the fact is, most doctors will tell you, 'Your eggs are old! You're over!' "

A Prada P.R. assistant moves the mouthpiece of her headset out of the way to ask another staffer, "Who is that?" as Candace enters the enormous room and strikes a girlish pose for the cameras.

"Candace Bushnell."

"Who?"

"The Sex and the City girl."

"Oh," says Headset and mulls that for a moment. "Why isn't she with Matthew Broderick?" Candace looks lovely in her dress and shoes, even if her stockings do bunch at the knee. "Ooh! I need that!" she says, following a waiter behind the door to the drink station. She reemerges with a flute of champagne. "It's a ratfuck in here," Candace says, shrugging.

"Candace!" shrieks a fellow in odd glasses. He points at his date, who looks like an underwear model from the eighties, all big, yellow-streaked hair and red lips. "She just climbed Kilimanjaro."

"Twice," says the model. "For IMAX."

"That's great," says Candace. "Can we smoke in here?" She fidgets with the enormous emerald pendant dangling around her neck.

"I see you got the engagement ring made into a necklace," says her friend, grinning.

Candace's face freezes for a second, and then she changes the subject.

The guy from last night's party never shows.

Candace has been in Manhattan for 25 years now. When she was just 18, she "ran away" from Rice University in Texas to come to New York, where she dated, for starters, the legendary black composer, photographer, and film director (Shaft) Gordon Parks, who was 58 at the time. "Gordon was great," she says. "I met him at a celebrity tennis tournament in Houston, and he was just the coolest, most elegant person! One time he called my house and my mother answered the phone, and she was like, 'Oh, he's so wonderful, he's the most charming, brilliant man!' It was just like, wow. I was too young to be serious. I was totally electrified when I first got here," she remembers. "I used to go to Studio 54, and I would walk everywhere at like four in the morning. If you look back on it now, it's like, Oh god, all these horrible things happened to me! But at the time you could just get over them, because you had to."

"I used to hang out at Fiorucci in the afternoon," she continues, "and you'd meet so many weird people and kind of like be friends with them for just a couple of days? And everybody wanted to be famous. When I was 19, I had this boyfriend who was like 34, and he lived in a loft on Fifth Avenue and I was in love with him. He had this machine he was always working on, this painting machine, that would spray paint off these images, and it was quite brilliant. At four in the morning, he'd be working at this machine, and there was this other weird guy who was like this tall," she says, holding a hand to her knee, "and he lived on Avenue C in Alphabetland. But it was bad then! And there was this guy Norman, and he'd be like, Norman, run down to the store and get me some chicken. And he'd do it! And then there was what's-his-name — oh, Tony Shafrazi! He's still around — I went to his apartment once and we drank pink champagne and he said he was starting an art gallery!"

Improbably, that way of life has continued. "I know so many women who, when you're 50, you still think you're 18! One time I was with a couple girlfriends going down the Housatonic River in this raft, and we see these 16-year-old boys on this rope swing, and my girlfriends say, 'Let's go pick 'em up! Let's paddle over!' And it's like, Wait a minute, guys, we're not 16 anymore, don't you remember? We can't do this; we're old coots! But it's like we forgot! It's extended adolescence; the hippies killed adulthood. And I think it's wonderful."

I ask Candace if she wants to have children.

"Well, if I got pregnant I'd have it."

There is no velvet rope in front of Bret Easton Ellis's apartment, but there is a guy with a list in the lobby, and once you make it inside the door, there's a wall of bodies in every direction. The furniture has been cleared out to make way for all the people, and there is silver Mylar on everything. In the bathroom — for which the wait is around half an hour — there's the movie poster for Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City.

"Nothing changes," says a silver-haired film producer.

"And that's a good thing!" says Candace. She is laughing, with a cigarette in her hand and a lipstick kiss on her cheek. She is wearing a purple Prada peasant blouse, the shirt version of the dangerous, fat-exposing dress she noticed a few days earlier.

"The first time I met Candace," says Darren Star, "she was interviewing me for Vogue, and she said, 'Let's just go out.' So she took me to Bowery Bar, and the next thing I know she's hiding on the floor of a cab so five people could fit in and we're going to Tunnel." He was interested in optioning her book, he says, because he liked the idea of "a woman who writes a sex column but is still trying to figure it all out."

"Doesn't Monica look great?" Candace asks, motioning toward a slimmed-down Lewinsky across the room. "This is Cynthia Rowley!" Candace grabs the designer's hand. "We look for guys together."

Candace's ex-boyfriend Bob Guccione Jr. enters the room, and she gives a little yelp.

"You look awesome!"

"No, you look awesome!"

"Did you get married yet?" Candace asks.

"Not yet."

"Where's your fiancée?" she asks. "Home? I think it's so good not to keep tabs on each other in a relationship."

"Bunny!" he says.

"Bunny!" she says.

"Bunny!"

"Bunny!"

"The bunny thing came about when we were lying in bed one morning and Candace was giving me grief about not going out to enough parties," Guccione explains on the phone, later. "And I said, 'You're like a little bunny who hops out to the edge of the riverbank and sees the bright lights of the big city and feels the lure of the fabulous bunnies.' It was an issue that Candace wanted to get married. During our relationship, she turned 40 and she didn't want to be dating anymore; she'd been dating her whole life."

"Guys always think you want to marry them, don't they?" Candace says, on the way from Ellis's party to a late-night drink at the bar Pop. And then: "But Bob was great."

Ellis, McInerney, and a few others are already seated around a table. It is a scene of people who did something big, got on the map, and have been hanging out there ever since, doing pretty much the same things for recreation. Candace orders the pink drink she made famous. Everyone drinks — a lot — but no one gets drunk. In fact, everyone stays wide awake. A young man with big muscles and flowing curly hair wearing a fur pelt and a pentagram approaches the table. "I think he's a Prada model," says Candace.

"A young one," says her friend Adam.

"Adam's a really good dad," she says.

"It's the most important thing," he says.

"When I was a teen, I was always mad at my dad," Calvin Bushnell, an engineer who patented the fuel cell that powered the Apollo's first run. "I had so many rules! But now it's like, if my dad doesn't like a guy, he's gone. I brought Ron up to meet my dad. Ron was always like, 'My friends all think you want something, but they don't know what it is.' I'm like, 'I just want to be successful!' " She gives a little snort. "It's those BFDs" — Big Fucking Deals. "They're always trying to put you down a little bit and like put you in your place."

"I'm really trying to do better than my dad," says Adam. "It's really too bad my ex-wife is bipolar, but I'm dealing with that."

"Um, how's your son dealing with that?" Candace asks.

"That's his burden to carry. I have mine, and this will be his."

"Are you a Scorpio?" asks the pagan Prada model.

"I'm constantly trying to do better, to find my flaws," Adam says.

"Flaws?" says Candace. "When I think of my flaws, my flaws are like, I smoke. I drink too much sometimes. I yell at men. You don't want to sit around dwelling on your flaws."

"Yes!" Adam shouts. "Self-criticism is the most important thing! You always have to be looking for what's wrong with you, what you can fix."

"I don't think so," says Candace. "I think that would be like the worst flaw of all."

It's a new year, and Candace is in no mood for it. She's up in Connecticut at a house she shares with a friend. "Isn't this the worst day: January 2nd?" Candace asks. She is glum and unmade-up as she drives her car under an old covered bridge in Litchfield County, not so far from where she grew up with her two sisters and their parents. She just spent Christmas with the family and her sister's new baby. "I never feel that comfortable picking up other people's kids, but it's different with my nephew. It sounds stupid, but you really can play with babies." She zooms past a field of grazing cows.

"When I see my sister with the baby, she's so in love, and I just think that's a unique and special kind of love. But I think it's really silly to be 43 and look around and be like, 'Oh, I wanna have kids.' Because the fact is, most doctors will tell you," she scowls and adopts a monster voice, " 'Your eggs are old! You're over!' I wouldn't respect myself if I suddenly changed my mind at 43. It's like, No. It doesn't work that way."

You hear a lot about time and place when you are with Candace. It's about being in your twenties or it's about being in your forties or it's a New York thing, rather than a Candace thing. "Part of being from New England is about being really realistic. So instead of being driven by neurotic kinds of emotions like, 'Oh, my god, I have to have children so I can fit in and do what society tells me,' I just have an ability to not get pulled into that."

Her house up here is simple clapboard on a big piece of land with a swimming pool and a pond. Inside, there's a lot of chintz, bricks, and old wood planks. In her bedroom, there's a picture of her with Darren Star in Tuscany, another with her first publisher, Morgan Entrekin, and quite a few of her — just her. There's also a shot of her with Stephen Morris in Switzerland. "Look what he gave me for my birthday," she says. It's a rabbit's foot on a gold chain, engraved with her birthdate. "He has a good sense of humor," she says, sounding not entirely amused. She does not say anything about "great."

"When I was in that relationship, I did feel like it was a priority. But I think at a certain point it sort of needs to move on. You're going to get married, and if you're not, it's probably better to just end it."

Candace makes her way to the kitchen, where she has a little pile of Ipswich clams she's frying for lunch. "We have this fantasy of some guy coming along, and he's going to be so madly in love he's just dying to marry you. But if you talk to most men, most men will tell you: No man wants to get married. We all think it's like our right as human beings to be loved by somebody, and I don't think that's necessarily true. You can love people, but it seems a little immature to me to think just because you're a human being somebody's going to love you back."

She laughs and starts dropping clams in hot Crisco. "I don't know what I'm saying. My father used to say to me, 'The older you get, the less you know.' When you're younger, you think you have the answers to everything. Then you get older, and you realize actually you just . . . you don't."

From the February 11, 2002 issue of New York magazine