What Men Want (21 page)

We studied the menu and ordered salads, moussaka, grilled fish and a bottle of retsina. Even though I knew that he was still working on the account, Chris carefully avoided any talk of Model Thin or Bridget. Of course, I'd seen one print ad and a TV commercial. I must say, the ad looked convincing. They shot her walking along a beach in a bikini wearing a big straw hat. In her hand is a can of Model Thin. A smiling Bridget walks along the water, sipping happily, and finally turns to the camera and smiles.

“How do I stay model thin?” She holds up the can. In another commercial she's sitting at a beachside bar
with a thatched roof, drinking what looks like a piña colada, but, of course, it's a tall-stemmed glass filled with Model Thin. She turns to the camera, which slowly pans up and down her body.

“It's just me and Model Thin,” she says. “I have nothing to hide.”

I didn't discuss the commercials with Chris. What was the point? And in our one brief telephone conversation about what happened between them, he told me that he thought of her now as an airhead who loved being the center of attention, and all that she thought about were her wardrobe and career. He mentioned the “blank stare” that she gave him when he started talking one night about jazz greats like John Coltrane and Chet Baker. I suppose it didn't help things when she told him that the last book she had read was,
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

What he did tell me about were the ads that he started working on for a health-food chain that would be in direct competition with Whole Foods.

“Did you suggest that they call it Model Foods,” I asked archly.

“That's right,” he said, obviously emboldened by his third glass of retsina. “We'll use a perfect talking tomato in the ads,” he said, gesturing dramatically. “Or a hot chili pepper.” We laughed and suddenly he looked at me imploringly.

“Jen, can I move back in with you? I can't stay out of the apartment forever.”

“Chris, I—”

“If you want we'll get engaged,” he said, reaching over the table to take my hand. “I don't want to be with other women…we'll think about getting married,” he said.

I pulled my hand back, holding the edge of the table. The last thing I ever expected to hear from Chris at this point was a proposal. Was this a last-ditch effort on his part to get us back together, or did he really think it through and want to marry me?

Do you really love me? I wanted to ask him, because now there was this gulf of the unsaid between us. Just because his fling didn't work out, did that mean our relationship was perfect enough to lead to marriage? But I didn't say all of that because at that moment, reflecting on the prospect of spending the rest of my life with him, I knew what my answer was.

“I can't,” I said weakly.

“So we can just move back together…” he started. “We don't have to—”

“Chris, I bought an apartment.” I realized now that I had never told him. How could I have, we had spent so little time talking. “The board approved the sale and I'm moving in at the end of the month.” He looked as though he had been slapped.

“I'm sorry, Chris.” I looked up and the waiter was standing next to us.

“Would you like to see the dessert menu?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I'm really full.”

We left the restaurant more like strangers than former lovers. Despite the wine, I felt that for the first time I was seeing things clearly. I couldn't imagine being married to Chris. I didn't love him. What we had was comfortable. Convenient. Easy. But it wasn't love. It took Model Thin to shape me up.

T
he movers didn't arrive until after eleven, mumbling something about a truck that broke down. Then they had to compete for the service elevator with another company that was moving someone else out. By the time we got to my new apartment and all my belongings were carted up, it was after six o'clock in the evening.

I had forfeited my half of the Pottery Barn couch to Chris, along with the West Elm coffee table because I couldn't face the idea of trying to come up with acceptable terms for dividing them. I couldn't imagine what couples went through who had lived together for years and had a house filled with joint purchases, not to mention children and pets. At least there was no bitterness between us.

How could I ever forget the story that I heard
about a couple who was in the midst of an ugly divorce. Because the relationship had become so acrimonious, neither of them was willing to give the other their beloved dog. Instead, the poor creature was brought to a shelter and left for adoption.

Fortunately, Chris and I had never shared either pets or children and it was almost therapeutic to be forced to clean house. I ended up with a half-empty new apartment and it felt right to live in a raw, unfinished state, since it seemed to stand for the rest of my life. A queen-size mattress on a blond wood platform from Crate & Barrel sat in the L-shaped alcove, and a pine table and matching chairs from Ikea were outside the kitchen, defining a dining area. There wasn't much else in the room, except a desk with my computer and a leopard-print chair, but since I'd painted the apartment apple green, it felt fresh and happy to me.

I was sitting on the edge of my bed one day channel surfing when I came upon a commercial for Model Thin and it made me think of Chris. It had been almost a month since I had seen him. There was Bridget once again, this time standing on the side of a yacht, her hair blowing softly in the breeze. She was wearing a three-quarter-sleeve, black T-shirt with just a tiny black-and-white polka-dot bikini bottom accenting legs that were about eight feet long.

She smiled at the camera, and took a sip of the drink. “Find the new and better you, inside of you,”
she said. I smiled. Inadvertently, Chris and Bridget had helped me script my life, no thanks to the drink though. It took losing him to gain the recognition of who and what I was and what I needed. It reminded me of the gym motto—“No pain, no gain.”

My thirty-sixth birthday came and went uneventfully, despite the fact that I was thinking about it as if it were some kind of middle-aged milestone. Thirty-six sounded much more definitive than thirty-four or thirty-five, and was edging up there toward forty. Still, I didn't feel any different the next day. No gray hairs suddenly revealed themselves along the part of my hair. No age lines were etched into my skin around my eyes, beyond the ones that were already there. What I did do was go to a hair colorist recommended by the beauty editor at my paper and for the first time, I had a mixture of highlights and lowlights so that I felt as though my hair color accented my skin, like makeup, even when I wasn't wearing any. Then I went to Saks and bought myself a sleek navy blue silk nightgown. It wasn't to impress anyone. I bought it because I liked it and it made me feel sexy and womanly, even though these days I was sleeping in the middle of the bed instead of on one side and it wouldn't have mattered if the nightgown were made of flannel, or was as tough as horsehair.

FedEx dropped a package at my building on my birthday. It was a pair of snowshoes from Ellen and
Moose and an invitation to come up to the house for a weekend. I called Ellen just after I was sitting down to dinner one night and saw her on TV. I usually did a double take. It's not that I should have been surprised. I knew when she was on. It was just that her TV persona was so different from the best friend that I knew in real life. As soon as she was off the air, I knew that I'd be able to reach her. She usually went back to her office and started by scrubbing off her heavy theatrical makeup.

“Thanks for the great gift,” I said.

“It was the one thing that I knew you wouldn't have.”

“I love them, and I accept your offer.” Then I moved on to her. “So how are you?”

“Happy to be back working, but I'm looking forward to seeing Moose again in a couple of weeks. It was so great to take off all that time.” Then she paused. “I really like him, actually love him,” Ellen said matter-of-factly.

“Did he ask you to stay?”

“Well, he knew I wouldn't stay, but we talked about spending more time together. And I agreed to come up for holidays and all of August if he'd come down and see me.”

“He agreed?”

“I think he realizes that if he's going to have a life with someone, he's got to give a little,” she said. “I'm not about to give up my career—at least not at this
point—but I also don't want to spend my life alone and never see him.”

“So let me guess. The action reporter took action.”

“Of course.”

The plan was smart, it combined his love of the outdoors with Ellen's commitment to mentoring kids in need. She put together a group from an innercity high school who, as part of a science project, would meet with Moose on a monthly basis at the school, and the rest of the time communicate by e-mail. He would put together an outdoor-survival course (Adirondack Survival?) and at the end of school the three kids who scored the highest got to get out of the city and, along with the science teacher, spend five days camping in the Adirondacks with Moose, applying what they had learned.

“He loved the idea,” Ellen said. “I think he always wanted to do something with kids but didn't know how to get started.”

While Moose got calls from schools periodically to come in and do workshops on nature, he was never able to find anything on a steady basis.

“The kids loved him. He has a better rapport with them than with their teachers.” They were fascinated with the frontier clothes that he wore and told them that he had made them himself, not to mention the tepee that he put up on the front lawn of the schools so that the kids could play inside.

It was obvious to me that anyone who met Moose and talked to him for more than a minute about the outdoor world would see that he'd be a perfect teacher. It took Ellen to find a way for him to work with students without the requisite teaching credits.

 

As usual, Slaid Warren and I were keeping pace with each other and covering many of the same stories. Ever since I had seen him at the book party for our music critic, he had been uncharacteristically silent. One column of mine came out, and then another, and still, no phone calls.

Then, a week later, Slaid ran a column describing the plight of a man accused of robbery who was facing a long prison term because his attorney practically slept through the case. My column the next day went into the city's shortage of legal-aid lawyers. After that one, he didn't call me to offer praise, he called to ask me to have dinner.

“How about someplace French, snobby and obscenely expensive?” he said.

“Serious food?”

“Very,” he said.

“That might work.”

“Eight o'clock?”

“Perfect,” I said.

 

We went to Le Bernardin. It opened in 1986 after Gilbert and Maguy Le Coze had made a name for
themselves with their restaurant in Paris. Billed as French, formal and all about fish, it received four stars months after it opened, and again in 1995, just a year after the death of Gilbert. There was usually a wait to get a reservation. I didn't ask Slaid how he got the table, but I assumed that he'd probably offered his firstborn.

“Have you been here before?” I asked him as we were seated in a formal dining room with navy blue walls and honey-colored wooden chairs and banquettes.

“No,” he said, “but
Gourmet
magazine said that if you can't close the deal here, you probably can't close it anywhere. That kind of stuck with me.”

“Oh,” I said, not sure how to take that. Was he about to hit me up for a donation to some new charity? I hoped not.

The sommelier brought the wine list and Slaid studied it briefly before asking for something white, from California. That was followed by blackened red-fish tournedos, truffled Napa cabbage roll with goat's-milk yogurt sauce and a mushroom tart. Those were the appetizers. For the main course we had steamed striped bass and okra in a spicy pineapple-lime nage with coriander-jasmine rice and eggplant chutney and crispy Chinese spiced black bass in a Peking duck bouillon scented with maitake and enoki mushrooms.

“Same old, same old,” I said as the food was brought to the table.

“They do these dishes in our cafeteria every day,” he said, shaking his head in dismay. “It's so yesterday.”

We didn't do a tremendous amount of talking as we ate. It seemed almost sacrilegious to divert our attention from the food. When it was time for dessert, I looked at the menu.

“I'll have the yuzu,” I said, which was a lemon tart with ginger parfait topped with a thin caramel tuile.

“Kudzu? Jesus, don't order that, the damn vines start growing around your intestines…”

“Yuzu,” I said.

He ordered the dark chocolate, cashew and caramel tart, put his fork into it and held out the fork to me.

“In case it's poison?”

“Are we always going to be battling this current of competition?” Slaid said, pulling back the fork teasingly as I was about to taste the dessert.

“Well, I doubt that we're going to forget that we're competitors,” I said.

He shook his head up and down in agreement. “It does make it hard to relate like a normal couple who are open and honest with each—”

“Who share their secrets, their concerns and their work,” I said, finishing his thought.

He nodded again. “Yeah, well, you're right. I thought maybe there was a chance, but—”

“But nothing,” I said, finishing his thought again. “It was a marvelous dinner, truly memorable, espe
cially tomorrow when I step on the scale. You were fun to be with and I really appreciate your generosity. I'm sure this dinner cost you a bundle.”

“And how,” he said, shaking his head in mock disbelief.

“Well, I guess I'd better head home,” I said. “I've got to file tomorrow, and I hate to start a column when I'm sleep deprived.”

“Understand,” he said.

We walked out on West Fifty-first Street, and headed for the East Side.

“Maybe we should walk just a little, to help digest the meal,” he said. We walked toward Fifth Avenue, toward the lights of Trump Tower. Slaid had his arm lightly on my shoulder, and we admired jewels in the windows of Harry Winston and Tiffany as we crisscrossed the streets.

We stopped when we got to the carriages of Central Park to part ways and head home.

“It would have been nice,” he said, “if things had been different.”

“Mmm, maybe some other place, some other time,” I said. He kissed me lightly on the forehead, and headed to the subway to go downtown. I began walking toward the street where someone had just gotten out of a cab that pulled up. Then, just as suddenly, I turned around, putting my hands together in front of my mouth.

“Hey, Slaid,” I yelled out. He stopped and turned
around to face me with a questioning look on his face. Slowly, it was replaced by an impish grin. I ran up to him, and then jumped up, pulling myself up on his shoulders. He grabbed my legs and walked forward, carrying me, piggyback, down along the street.