What Men Want (3 page)

“Tell me that you're in the mood for Ecuadorian food, if there is such a thing, or god-awful brown rice and steamed vegetables. Why do you always have to be so accommodating?” But what was the point? Create tension because there was none?

I reached up and tugged on a rebellious lock of his hair, then pushed back the little-boy bangs that flipped right down again. Chris was cute, everyone who met him thought so. He was also smart—smart enough in his quiet, sure way to dream up campaigns that brought clients millions of dollars. He was also modest. I remember how he told me, just in passing one day, that he had gotten perfect SAT scores. No wonder he had gotten into Yale and Princeton, even though he turned them down to go to Bard, a small, artsy school for brainy types who didn't fit the Ivy League mold.

We were a curious couple. I spent my days going through documents and public records, not to mention interviewing city and state officials to report on how an unending group of colorful characters tried to circumvent the law, all in the interest of telling readers the bald truth.

Chris, on the other hand, wrote the copy for print ads and TV commercials trying to seduce consumers by obscuring the truth or dismissing it entirely, to convince them what should and could be. Sometimes I was tempted to change places with him so that I could have fun dreaming up ways to get consumers into the stores to buy the newest condiment concoction or over-the-counter remedy for everything from PMS to acid reflux.

“Maybe we should change jobs,” I said. “I'll come up with a campaign to sell black ketchup or Snapri
cot drink. You investigate the city parking violations bureau, and find out who's on the take.”

“No thanks,” Chris said. “Reality sucks.”

“Reality sucks?” I guess I was in a dark mood because before I went shopping, I had to redo a column on deadline, which meant denying myself all food after eleven in the morning because I couldn't spare the time to go to the cafeteria, and barely made it to the bathroom to pee. Because I have this low-blood-sugar thing, I have to eat every couple of hours—or “graze” as they say—otherwise I turn short-tempered and hostile—well, even more than usual.

“The award-winning copywriter who brought us the Nike Nirvana campaign declares that he opts for fantasy, illusion and role playing rather than the world as it is? Thank you for negating my whole career and my whole life.” Chris looked at me and narrowed his eyes slightly as if he was trying to figure out what I needed to hear.

“Do you want to eat a candy bar or take a nap or something, Jen?” he said, scratching the back of his neck.

“Candy is exactly what I don't want,” I said, making my way toward the refrigerator for real food, even though we didn't have much because neither one of us had time to shop.

“And I don't need to take a nap,” I said, like a cranky kid who did. “And don't change the subject.”

“I'm not changing the subject,” Chris said, holding up his hands helplessly and backing off. He went over to the refrigerator and took out a carton of Tropicana Grovestand orange juice, forgetting, as usual, to shake it, so that all the thick pulp remained at the bottom. He screwed off the orange plastic top and raised the container, about to start drinking directly from it.

“Oh my God, use a glass,” I said. “That's so disgusting.” I was starting to describe for the twentieth time how his germs would go back into the container to multiply, when he said, “Okay, okay,” as he poured the last of it into a glass. He reached for another container and filled the glass to the top, then briefly played with the magnetic letters on the refrigerator door, rearranging them in a large arc pattern, spelling out the word C-R-I-S-I-S, the only word that ad agency types pay any attention to.

I was always amused to hear his colleagues ask, “Why is there never time to do it right, but always time to do it over?”

Chris took the glass of OJ, oblivious to the fact that he had poured it too full so the juice was swishing over the top as he sat in front of the TV. He put the glass down on the table, searching among our collection of remotes (the TV, the DVD, the VCR and the CD player), finally finding the right one, flipping it on and channel surfing until he landed at the six o'clock news. As usual, it was top heavy with
sketchily reported stories of major traffic accidents, local fires and murders. We didn't quite finish the back-and-forth about reality versus fantasy, but there was no point in continuing, I had lost him.

That summed up the difference between men and women. He turned on the TV and I reached for the phone, sometimes more to hear my own voice than to talk to someone else. I had a colorful group of friends and depending on what was happening at the moment, I'd call the appropriate one. If all else failed, I called my mother.

Advice columnists sometimes tell you that it's healthy to argue. I suppose what they mean is that you keep the lines of communication open by voicing your differences rather than bottling them up. But Chris and I didn't argue. Whenever I brought up something controversial, he considered it momentarily and then seemed to decide that it wasn't worth raising his blood pressure over. In fact, he had very low-blood pressure, a medical marker of potentially long life. Chris was cool in every sense. That was usually fine with me, but sometimes, I guess, I just wanted him to take me by the hair and push his own agenda, so to speak. The only time that I could recall seeing him get really angry was when he went downstairs to the parking lot one day and saw that someone had dented the passenger door of his new grass-green Volkswagen bug, scraping off a strip of paint. He began yelling out a string of obscenities,
like a ranting madman, until he was almost hoarse, kicking everything in sight until he ran out of steam, not to mention almost breaking his big toe. He had the car fixed, and never said another word about it, except that every time we went down to get the car, I know that he eyed it from every angle like a private detective about to dust for fingerprints.

Instead of picking on poor Chris anymore, I called Ellen Gaines, my former college roommate and best friend. First, I wanted to invite her to have dinner with us, and second, I needed to vent, something she understood particularly because she made a career of it. Ellen was a consumer reporter for ABC news and venting was her MO, in a nice way. It always amused me to watch her on TV where she looked not only perfectly coiffed, but also appeared to have this cool and controlled way of speaking, never raising her carefully modulated voice. Off the air, however, the reserve was put aside, and she could be as loud and abrasive as she wanted.

If someone had a grievance and had nowhere else to turn, they contacted Ellen's team, and if they were lucky enough to be one of the people that she and her staff had time to help, she inevitably got them satisfaction by holding the offenders up to public scrutiny. (It helps to shove a microphone in a scoff-law's face as he's on camera and ask him questions that he can't answer like, “How could you rent out an apartment with broken windows and rats running
around it?” and taking prompt legal action if he failed to rectify things on his own.)

If only her own life was that simple. Ellen dated a succession of men, few of them leading to any long-term relationships. I was never sure whether she attracted dysfunctional guys or whether she was beaming out signals that said she didn't want to get involved. Then again maybe they simply assumed that as a consumer reporter, if they did anything wrong, especially to her, she'd have the might at her fingertips to cut them off at the knees—or worse.

The other possibility was that after spending day after day using the system to fight for the rights of the downtrodden, she had closed herself off to available men who came her way either by assuming that they had their private agendas or simply by feeling too mentally and physically exhausted from working twelve-or fourteen-hour days to even go out on a date and have a normal discussion.

I could understand that. There were days when my job totally sucked the lifeblood from me. No wonder some women on the ladder to success find themselves without husbands or even boyfriends, because a demanding career chips away at how much you have to give to someone else. There is just so much loving and nurturing in all of us, and sometimes our careers become our little children, demanding full-time attention, and requiring us to wipe noses and behinds.

Forget the image of superwoman; few of us can do it all, or at least do it all very well. And the knowledge of that—especially if you are a perfectionist and overachiever—always eats away at you and makes you feel somehow compromised.

On Ellen's birthday, I couldn't resist buying her a T-shirt from a Soho street vendor that said, Just Fuck Off.

“Whose rear did you save today?” I said when Ellen answered.

“Not my own. Never complain again when your shower isn't hot enough or when your super takes too long to turn on the air-conditioning. We sent a crew up to a rat-infested tenement in Harlem where the windows have holes in them big enough for a cat to crawl through and the water in the pipes is so rusty you can't wash dishes.”

Maybe Chris was right, reality did suck. “So what did you do?”

“Well now, after six months, we're forcing the landlord to do repairs and in the meantime we're moving the family into a hotel.”

“You did good,” I said, immediately forgetting about my gripes and feeling small for needing to vent about what was eating me.

“Yes, for one family,” Ellen said, “after months of calls and intervention by the city. But what about the others who live in those burnt-out joints and never bother to contact consumer reporters for help be
cause they've given up on everybody and everything or simply don't know how to navigate the system?”

“You save the world one person at a time,” I said, reaching for an old cliché. “If you dwell on the extent of the job, you'll be paralyzed. But to change the subject, you sound like you could use a break, so how about joining me and Chris for dinner? His old roommate is in town.”

“Now you're trying to save me,” she said, exhaling. “A
blind
date?”

“He's not blind,” I said. “And you have to eat anyway.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Well?”

“Fine,” Ellen said. “But let's not talk about what
I
do, okay? Last time we double-dated I woke up the next morning and found that he had slipped his résumé under my door along with several letters of recommendation.”

I didn't remember that. “Why?”

“He wanted to get out of law and break into TV journalism. He thought, it was ‘sexier.' And if they don't want to change careers, they start telling me about how their banks screwed them, how the dry cleaner burned their suit, or how they couldn't cash a traveler's check without two forms of ID, even though it's the same thing as cash.” She had my sympathy there. Everyone who had a particular beef usually ended up sharing it with a friend from the media.

“Then there was the guy who thought that when you were fixing him up with an action reporter you meant a journalist who put out,” Ellen said. I never doubted that if she left TV she could become a stand-up comic.

We arranged to meet for dinner on Saturday. What I didn't tell her was that Chris's former roommate, who I hadn't met because he lived in upstate New York, wasn't like the other guys that she knew.

“What's his name?” she asked, almost as an afterthought.

I paused for a minute. “His name…”

“His name, yes… Is that such a hard question?”

“Moose,” I mumbled.

Silence. “
What?
What did you say?”

“Moose.”

“Is he one?” Ellen said, cracking up.

“No…he's not an animal. He just lives up in the Adirondacks to be near them. Likes wildlife more than city people.”

“Oh,” Ellen said, considering that. “I can understand
that.
”

I started to hang up, when I heard her call my name. “Jenny?”

“What?” I said, lifting the receiver back up to my ear.

“You're not fixing me up with some freaky loner like Ted Kaczynski, are you?”

“The Unabomber?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh please,” I said. “Definitely not. He lived in Montana. Moose lives in upstate New York.”

“Oh,” Ellen said. “That sets my mind at ease.”

O
n a regular basis I get one or two angry letters from readers complaining that the media always dwells on what is “base and unsavory about the human condition, and that it can never find good news to report,” as one reader put it. I thought about that and with Christmas approaching and a warm, generous spirit warming my soul as the holiday got closer, I put off a column about major fraud in a prestigious Manhattan co-op in favor of a column about what was working well in New York and what reflected its essential goodness. I wrote up a charitable group that came to the aid of homebound people in need; animal shelters that had gone from kill to no-kill, and a group of college graduates who banded together to renovate houses for the poor on the Lower East Side. That brought a few favorable
calls, and a pound of homemade dog-shaped short-bread cookies (for human consumption, I assumed) from an animal rights group.

Slaid was obviously feeling less charitable. His column zeroed in on accounting discrepancies between what a major charity reported and what it actually took in and the fact that the authorities had found that the chairman had a criminal record. He described the widening investigation hinting at indictments to come. A coup for him, but I was above calling him to take potshots at his reporting, particularly his obvious failure to respect a news embargo. But I'd be big about that, let it slide. I considered sending him the cookies, but decided against it, once I tasted them.

Of course, I could have taken the opportunity to call and demonstrate my largesse—simply congratulate him. Christmas was in the air, why be mean-spirited? It was a nice piece of reporting and we were all working for the common good. But he'd never accept my praise at face value. He would ponder my real agenda, so I held back.

So what did the high-brow columnist do? He called up and started making barking noises—combining the bark of a Lab with the howl of a beagle. Can I swear that it was him? No, but I racked my brains to think of who else might have stooped to that level and I came up dry. Rather than dignify the call with a reaction of any sort, I hung up, annoyed,
and left my desk to escape to Bloomingdale's, this time to buy myself a gift or two.

Bloomingdale's is a place where you can lose yourself for hours. And even if you have one of those days when every garment you pick makes a mockery of your face and body, you can always find a pair of Pumas in a scrumptious new space age–type design or color combination; treat yourself to a jar of something heavenly like Origins White Tea body cream, or at the very least, find solace in a quick cup of vegetable soup and half a tuna sandwich or a large dish of custardlike yogurt with health pretensions downstairs at the in-store restaurant called Forty Carrots.

I started my outing by going through the aisles of costume jewelry, trying on various Tahitian pearl-wanna-be necklaces, and wondering what it would feel like to wear the real thing. Then, even though I rarely wear earrings, I tried on dangly chandelier styles, hoping that they would help liberate that uninhibited part of me that lurked close to the surface. After that charade was over, I headed upstairs like a kid in a candy store to lingerie, my weakness. I examined bras, thongs and string bikinis as delicate as snowflakes, looking for my favorite brands, Natori, Hanro and Cose Belle. Now I'm in my element. It amazes me how just a few ounces of the right underwear can make one's sexuality confidence soar. I'm hoping that a few new purchases will make
Chris's head swivel from the TV to me as I undress in front of him in lingerie that if calculated by the pound, probably costs about three hundred and fifty dollars.

Never for a moment do I forget that he could as easily have chosen to live with someone who was a decade younger, not to mention firmer. A career that has you sitting for ten hours a day has cumulative effects. It's not that I'm what you would call fat. I'm not. It's just that everything could benefit from a large body stocking that would cinch it all in, raise it up just a tad, and overall smooth out the flesh.

So half an hour later, I've collected four thongs—fuchsia, petal pink, black and navy, and matching demi bras with just the slightest layer of padding that do an amazing job of creating impressive cleavage so that the unsuspecting would immediately assume that I'm a 36C rather than a 34B.

Then I'm on to nightgowns. I spy a plain, ivory-colored silk slip-style nightgown and hold it up in front of me in the mirror, trying to decide whether it's classically simple and elegant, or simply dull and sexless. I stare into the mirror, but it's a tough call, not to mention that the fluorescent light is turning my skin a coordinating shade of jaundiced yellow.

As I'm studying myself in the mirror with the gown pressed up against me, in my peripheral vision I pick up the outline of a man in a black leather jacket. I have to confess that one of my pet
peeves is seeing men lingering about awkwardly in the women's lingerie department. It's not that they're not entitled to be there. Or that they don't actually belong there. They might be buying gifts for women or accompanying girlfriends on shopping outings or what have you, and legally their presence is as defensible as mine is. Still, this little catty voice in the back of my head keeps saying, “Oh, get out of here, you're invading my privacy.” I do get some consolation, however, from the fact that at least some of the men look away when you stare at them because they're uncomfortable and feel out of place.

So those kinds of thoughts were swirling around in my head as I gazed at myself. I tried to ignore the image and turned back to the nightgown, holding it this way and that, but then the image moved closer, and then closer, until he was almost next to me and I was about to pivot and yell out for security.

At the sound of a low wolf whistle, I looked back, startled. He was leaning up against the corner of the mirrored column, black eyeglasses now pushed up on the top of his head.

“Yes?” I said in a too-loud voice, intended to alert fellow shoppers to beware as well.

“Jenny George,” said a low teasing voice.

It took me several seconds to realize I was staring at the face I had seen only in the newspaper that appeared with his column.

“Slaid Warren,” I cooed back, moving only my eyes, leaving the nightgown pressed against me.

He tilted his head to the side, as if in judgment, holding my gaze. “Your picture doesn't do you justice.”

I smiled briefly, to trivialize the compliment, not knowing how else to handle it. He was right about the picture. I photographed like a deer caught in the headlights.

“Is this where you usually hang out after work?” I said, trying to gloss over my discomfort. He leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“If I can't actually slip behind the velvet curtains.”

I turned back to him and studied him briefly—noting the worn jeans teamed with a black cashmere sweater and black leather Pumas. But while I was surveying his outfit, the silky nightgown slipped from my grasp. We nearly collided as we simultaneously kneeled down to get it. He got there first, and handed it to me, amused by my discomfort.

“Thanks,” I said, pulling it back to me. “Nice to see you,” I said, unable to come up with anything better than a platitude. I turned abruptly toward the cashier ready to pay for the nightgown, although at that point I had decided the thing was plain, boring and matronly and that I didn't want it. I considered telling him to keep away from dressing rooms or he'd be the subject of my next column, but then decided to keep quiet and head off without starting up a dialogue.

“Wait,” he said, reaching out to touch my arm to stop me. “I want to show you something.” He led me over to a designer rack and took out a long, low-cut charcoal-gray silk nightgown with a deeply cut back that was held together with delicate crisscross laces of pale yellow satin. He held it up to me.

“This is the one that will knock your guy's socks off,” he said with a small smile on his face. To be honest, it was heavenly, beautiful and sexy in an elegant, sophisticated way that nearly made me swoon. If I had seen it I would have grabbed it.

“Hmm,” I said. “Not bad.” He nodded. I looked at the price tag, then shook my head. “Can't afford it. They must pay more generously at the
Trib.
”

“A gift from me,” he said, starting to lead me to the cashier with his platinum card in hand. “A peace offering.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I wouldn't want anyone to think that I was sleeping with the competition.”

“I wouldn't either. I'm all for the naked truth.”

I looked back at him briefly and then looked away, swiping the nightgown from his hand and hanging it back on the rack. He picked it up again and tossed it over his shoulder.

“Too nice to pass up,” he said. “I'll buy it for a friend.”

“Lucky girl,” I said, regretting the words just a nanosecond after I said them, knowing how he'd misinterpret them.

He nodded, amused.

“Well, merry Christmas,” I said, scooping up the underwear that I had tried to hide beneath my handbag. I was about to head across the floor to another register to pay.

He pointedly stared at the underwear that was squished up in my fist and narrowed his eyes.

“Lucky guy,” he whispered, then walked off the other way.