What Men Want (17 page)

“My guest room's ready,” she said. “It's all yours.” I already had her keys.

When my tote bag was packed, I grabbed my laptop and locked the door behind me.

 

I entered Ellen's apartment on East Seventy-second Street and felt as though I was beginning a new life. How long would it be until I had a place of my own? This was like going back in time. No doubt I'd end up with a studio apartment. With rents and co-op prices what they were, one room would probably be all that I could afford. Ellen was already asleep, so I locked the door and went into the guest room. It was cozy, inviting, painted forest green. Against the wall was a queen-size brass bed covered with a pale yellow and white Amish quilt. A stack of folded white towels were at the foot of the bed. The walls were lined with bookshelves. I walked around the room looking at the pictures that she had on some of the shelves. There was a new one that I hadn't seen in a small Adirondack-style wooden frame. It was a picture of Ellen and Moose standing on the edge of a mountain in their snowshoes. They both looked red cheeked and healthy, wearing thick jackets and hats. They had big smiles on their faces
as though they welcomed having their picture taken and that moment in time recorded.

Did I have pictures of me and Chris? Somewhere. I wanted to study them now to see if we looked that happy together. We hadn't traveled much together since one of us was always tied up when the other was free. And if we did take pictures, what would they tell me? Would I be able to divine how well we had related to each other? Would his expression tell me how close he'd felt to me? There were psychics who could look at current pictures of people and intuit enough information to tell you what was going on in their lives. Would I be able to look into Chris's eyes and know what was ahead for him, or for us?

I washed up and undressed, slipping between the fresh white sheets. I was just a guest in Ellen's house, but I felt as though life had arbitrarily relocated me to an unfamiliar world. I was single again, unattached, but this time, instead of feeling free and open to new relationships, I felt as though life had deserted me. With more and more time passing, my options were running out. Breakups were harder when you were older, and whether it was justified or not, I began to feel as though some personal failure of mine was behind the fact that I couldn't link up with someone who was right for me, while just about every other woman, good-looking or not, smart or not, successful or not, managed to find someone to spend her life with.

“Every pot has its cover,” my grandmother used to say. Well, this pot was still uncovered, exposed and ready to boil over.

Ellen would already be gone when I got up in the morning. She was energetic, committed, a real dynamo when it came to getting things done. Maybe she was the perfect match for Moose. I pulled the covers up around me. Instead of relationships, I fell asleep thinking about Reilly and the column. I didn't look forward to writing it. It was never fun to do pieces that were basically character assassinations. Still, it would be a bombshell. It would blow Slaid out of the water.

 

The next morning, after stopping for coffee, I made my way into the office, arriving earlier than usual. It was quiet, almost deserted. Good, I wasn't in the mood to make small talk with my colleagues or overhear their phone conversations as I was writing. There was no privacy in the office. No one had offices, they had cubicles, and inevitably voices rose above the overall din. If someone's kids didn't get into a school, or if someone had to refinance their mortgage, you not only heard about it, you heard it being discussed and then analyzed as the recipient talked to others and chewed it over. I remember writing one column while hearing a blow-by-blow of the birth process right down to “nine centimeters dilated,” and then the “crowning.”

I sat down at my computer and pressed the power button. I was about to go right to work, but before I did, I opened the
Trib
to glance at what Slaid had done. I started reading and immediately put my coffee cup down and pushed my chair away from the computer. His column started out about the benefits of taking up residence in St. Croix, and then zeroed in on Reilly.

 

Warm weather, sunlit skies and pristine beaches are just one reason to buy an ice cream-colored home in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Another one is to dodge the need to share your hard-earned money with Uncle Sam.

 

It went on to discuss how growing numbers of wealthy Americans had taken up residence in the Virgin Islands over the past few years because an economic development program there confers big tax benefits. More detail on the incentive followed and then this:

 

Among the bigwigs to buy property in St. Croix is Jack Reilly, president and CEO of Reilly Films. His name may mean nothing to you unless you've been following the inside-baseball stuff of making movies. Ask our mayor about Reilly, or better yet, the mayor's staff in his film office. They've spent time with Reilly on the most beautiful beaches in the world, putting
their heads together about things like housing movie production crews and opening the Statue of Liberty for night filming, all the while sharing beach-barbecue dinners and drinking piña coladas while watching orange sunsets.

 

Slaid had discovered that Reilly purchased a two-million-dollar estate a year before and had established residency, raising questions, first, about whether the move—like so many others—was legitimate. Then he'd linked him to the financing of upcoming films, asking how logistically it would be possible to run his operation from his beachside villa.

I threw the paper down. I felt like calling Slaid to thank him for getting my adrenaline level soaring. Not only was I going to write my column, I was already sharpening my sword. Here I was feeling sorry for the bastard, only to discover that Reilly had already bought his Caribbean villa, not really as a getaway, but to avoid paying taxes. My fingers hit the keys, and for the next two hours, I wrote as though my hands were on fire. I laid out every detail of my trip, including the papers to show who had visited the resort, when, and how the bills were doctored to look as though the film office employees had paid. I tried to get comments from the three film department employees, only to get two mumbled “no comments,” and one denial of any wrongdoing, “‘I was there on business for the city,' that's all I'm going to say.”

At nine-thirty, I called Reilly in his New York office.

“He's tied up in a meeting,” his secretary said.

“Tell him to untie himself,” I said. “I need to talk to him.” I held for what seemed like an eternity. Finally he picked up the phone.

“Jen—”

“Did you establish residency in St. Croix?” I asked, skipping the usual pleasantries.

“I've had that house for a couple of years,” he said, exhaling for effect. “I intended to live there, but I've been pulled in ten different directions.”

“Was that a yes or a no, Jack?”

“It isn't the way Warren painted it. Listen, that was exactly what I was talking about and why I gave you the story,” he said, as if it was wearying for him to go over something he had already gone over. “He wanted to make headlines and he got carried away with himself.”

I paused for a minute. “You know what, Jack,” I said, tapping the edge of a pen against the edge of the table like a drummer. “I think you're bullshitting me.”

“You guys want things reduced to sound bites, Jen. Life isn't like that.”

“Is that what you tell the feds when they come knocking on your door?”

“Listen, let's talk about this over dinner.”

“I don't think so,” I said, and hung up.

 

When my column came out the following day with the headline Living in Dreamland, it triggered more calls and e-mails than anything I had ever written.

“Terrific job,” Marty said—his most effusive praise. Colleagues who usually walked past me in the corridor offering nothing more than a nod offered high fives, whistles and extravagant praise, one of them making knife-sharpening motions. My love life might be in tatters, but my career seemed to be at an all-time high.

I was heading away from my desk to go to lunch when the phone rang. I hesitated, and then went back to pick it up.

“Nice piece of work.”

“Now I'm worried,” I said.

“Why?” Slaid asked.

“Because you're never one to praise me,” I said.

“I told you he was a sleaze, but you don't know the half of it.”

I knew what I had missed would enter into the conversation. It was only a matter of time. “So tell me what I left out,” I said.

“I will,” he said, “before too long, along with our other nine hundred thousand readers.”

“Thanks for the call,” I said dryly. Then, feeling more vulnerable than usual, and annoyed by his perpetually cutting remarks, at a time when every
one else was praising me, I decided to tell him how I felt.

“Slaid,” I said, “why don't we just stop this infantile exchange of calls. You want to jerk off, do it without me on the other end.” I hung up before he could answer.

W
ith everything going on, a week had gone by and I had forgotten to tell Ellen about Kelly Cartwright. She rarely took time during the day, but I told her that she'd be interested in what I'd found. We agreed to meet at a small seafood restaurant in midtown. I got there first and sat sipping a San Pellegrino while trying to catch up with the other papers that I inevitably toted around to read in between appointments.

“So what's up?” Ellen said breathlessly, sliding into the seat facing mine. She was wearing a fabulous black-and-white Chanel suit. Only I knew that she'd bought it at a resale store. Instead of looking tired and strained, she had a glow.

“I know it has to do with Moose,” she said.

“You're not going to believe this,” I said. She sat
there, wide-eyed, waiting. I was about to start, when the waiter came by to take our order.

“Salmon for both of us,” I said, knowing without asking what she'd have. “Cooked through.” She nodded. We inevitably ordered the same thing. Salmon, shrimp, maybe snapper. Never beef. Never pork. And rarely the all-vegetarian entrée. There was a limit to the sacrifices we made for good health.

“So here goes,” I said when the waiter turned away. “Guess who was having an affair with that non-entity Kelly Cartwright?”

“Tell me.”

“Jack Reilly.”

“What?” She shook her head in disbelief.

“That was what I read about him,” she said, as if she suddenly remembered. “‘Page Six,' of course,” she said, slamming her hand on the table. “It was one of those sketchy items, but there was no doubt.”

“She got the role in
Living on the Edge
because of Reilly,” I said. “And after the movie was over she enjoyed being away from the Hollywood scene so much that she decided to stay for a while.” Although no one ever confirmed that Moose was the guy she was living with, we were convinced that it was him.

“So why did she end the relationship with Moose?” Ellen asked.

“Don't hold me to this,” I said, “but according to my sources in culture, she started seeing Jack romantically just before the filming. He expected her to
leave when the movie wrapped and he wasn't too happy about her taking time off and secluding herself. But she stayed for a month or so, and at that point, to lure her back to Hollywood he told her that he wanted to talk to her about a role in a chick-lit film that had a major star cancel out at the last minute. He flew her to Hawaii and they spent the weekend together.”

“Quel sleaze,” Ellen said.

I nodded. “His fascination with her lasted for a few weeks, and then he moved on to a Catherine Zeta-Jones look-alike.”

“Well, what we don't know for sure is that she was the one who lived with Moose,” Ellen said. “Did anyone see them together?” I opened my purse and took out a picture of the two of them that ran in the local paper that the research department found for me. I slid it across the table to Ellen.

She glanced down. “Case closed.”

After the salmon, and lemon sorbet, we talked about work and then Chris.

“I haven't been this down since my apartment was robbed,” I said, remembering when a former handyman in my building had let himself into several apartments and left the job, never to be found, with our cash and jewelry.

“What you do to get yourself out of that kind of funk is help someone else,” Ellen said. She took a deep breath.

“Uh-oh,” I said. “Are you asking me to give up a kidney?”

She shook her head. “Here's my idea. I've been working on a project to help the homeless, particularly schoolkids. But it's such a miserable situation and as usual I don't feel as though I'm doing enough just by helping a few families, so I've been trying to come up with other things that I can do.”

I looked at Ellen. She should have become an aid worker or a legal-aid lawyer, not a TV reporter. She really was the kind of person who would give you half of her last bite of food, if not all of it. I looked back at her, wishing I could measure up.

“Then it occurred to me to use my network connections to host a fund-raiser,” she said. “If you're part of it, we can bring together TV and news types, not to mention all the celebrities that we have access to so that we can raise money to make a real difference.”

I had given money to the United Way, I'd walked to raise money for AIDS and breast cancer research, but I had never done anything more ambitious. There was certainly no political reason why I couldn't participate, and if Ellen was part of it… Also, working on the benefit was a worthwhile way to take up my nights and weekends so that I wouldn't have spare time to lie around sulking and feeling sorry for myself. I couldn't remember the last time that I had done anything meaningful to help others.

“Great idea,” I said. “It can be our Valentine's Day present to the city.”

 

For the next two weeks, we spent all our free time looking for locations, restaurants to give us donations, and large-ticket donors. It would be a black-tie event and ultimately we decided to do it outdoors, in a white tent that we would erect outside a restaurant. We planned the event for a few days before Valentine's Day, so the theme was a natural: Have a Heart.

There are times when New York shows its largesse, and its warm, compassionate spirit—often buried below self-protective layers—rises to the surface. This was one of them. I collected pledges of catered food from prominent restaurants and stores. We collected raffle prizes ranging from Knicks tickets, luggage and jewelry, to donated weekends at Hamptons beach houses.

“Are you actually going to sit down and do some work?” Marty asked when he heard me one afternoon later that week in the corridor talking to some other reporters about the event.

“What gives, Marty? You're grumpier than usual.”

“I got a call from Jack Reilly's lawyer. They're thinking of suing us for defamation of character.”

“On what basis?”

“He'll come up with something.” Marty said flatly.

“If he only knew what we
didn't
use,” I said, think
ing of all the tidbits about Reilly's love life that would have been perfect for the gossip column, including the voice on the phone at the Waldorf who I realized was a barely legal actress who was in one of his upcoming films. Some of his other flames, if there was truth to the rumors, were celebrating their sweet sixteens.

Marty shrugged. “I think he was just trying to intimidate us, or at the least, find out if we're working on a follow-up.”

“I could spend my whole career investigating Reilly. But to what end? Everyone knows his number now, and I doubt whether he'll be as blatant anymore, assuming that he stays in the business, which he says he isn't.”

“Let's wait for the indictments to come in. That will be our peg for starting the ball rolling again.”

 

Things were moving along pretty smoothly, and for once I felt as though I was doing something worthwhile. It might have been my upbeat mood, but I started thinking about Chris again. This time I didn't feel angry, just curious. I missed him, I did. I didn't realize how much I welcomed coming home to him at the end of the day and the way we shared stories of what went on. I was still camping out at Ellen's, and it was no fun being in someone else's empty apartment.

I tried to imagine his new life with Bridget. There
must have been lots of parties and openings to attend. Models were always invited to improve the scenery. I thought of the expression
arm candy.
Idiotic, offensive; still, in this case, it seemed to fit. Was she his arm candy? Did it up his status at the agency to be dating her? Guys were probably all over her, how did that sit with him?

I was sure his name would start appearing in gossip columns as the mystery man she had alluded to on TV. I also wondered how the client would like that. Would it help sales of Model Thin? Maybe she wasn't hypoglycemic and crabby. Or defensive about her career. Maybe she was not only beautiful, but easy to live with. Clearly, cooking and cleaning weren't issues. She could afford lots of help, end of story. Amid it all, I wondered if sometimes he still thought of me. Did he miss me at all and think of the life that we had together? And if he did, would he have the nerve to pick up the phone?

For the rest of the day, I was consumed with the idea of calling him just to hear his voice and find out how he was. Despite my compulsiveness, I decided to hold off and think about it before I did anything.

What did I hope to accomplish by phone? Did I expect him to say it was all a big mistake? I thought back to how our relationship started. I called him. He said that he was going to call me
but he never did. After going out to lunch and mulling over all the possible scenarios, I decided it was infantile to rehearse it. So the moment I got back to my desk, I lifted the phone—so much for my reserve.

So what, the little voice in my head kept saying. Just because we broke up didn't mean that we had to stop speaking. We had a lot of shared history together—why did we have to become total strangers. The phone rang and on the second ring he answered.

“Hi,” I said, wondering if I now needed to identify myself. No, that was ridiculous. He'd moved on to another woman, but he didn't have amnesia.

“Hey, Jen,” he said, not sounding particularly surprised, but not particularly thrilled either. “How're you doing?”

“I'm okay,” I said, as if I was trying to convince myself that I was. “How about you?”

“Working a lot,” he said. There was an awkward silence.

“Maybe you need a break.”

“Yeah, actually, I was going to call you. Are you still staying at my place?”

“No,” I said. “Why?” I was actually thinking about moving back in though. I'd decided that it wasn't fair to keep imposing on Ellen.

“I'm going out of town for a while.”

“Oh, where?”

He paused, as if deciding whether to tell me. But Chris was never one to play games.

“Paris and Rome.”

“Nice,” I said. “With Bridget?”

“Yeah, she has to go on a fashion thingie, and she wants me to come along.”

“How long are you staying?”

“Two weeks. I just wanted to let you know so that you could have the apartment to yourself if you need it, or wanted to stay.” He sounded awkward, uncomfortable. Obviously he must have realized how hard it was for me to find another place. New Yorkers didn't leave their apartments until they died or won the lottery. It was that hard, and expensive, to find a place.

But what really stuck in my craw at that moment was thinking about all the times that I wanted to go away and how I could never get him to take more than a long weekend. We drove up to the Cape once. Big deal. But now, suddenly, he had arranged to go away for two weeks, and it wasn't even summer. Where would they stay, the George V? The Ritz? Her agency was probably putting them up in grand style. Not only was the ditz going to Europe where I was dying to go with my boyfriend, she was staying in hotels that I couldn't afford, and probably modeling designer clothes that would then be thrown her way as a
petit cadeau.
It always made me laugh how models and Hollywood stars, the only
ones who could afford designer clothes and jewels, got them from the designers as gifts.

“Nice,” I said, not bothering to disguise the coldness in my voice. “I hope you have a blast.”

“Let's try to be friends, at least. I don't want to feel alienated from you.”

No, we should embrace each other, take joy in all the good times we had. Take joy in the new directions that life is taking us. Life was short, why be bitter?
Yeah, right.

Unfortunately, Chris didn't get involved with a woman blessed with a warm, benevolent spirit. I was bitter, and I felt more alone than ever. You screwed me over, I wanted to say, but I didn't.

“I gotta go,” I said quickly. I hung up and took the paperweight with the name of his advertising agency on it and threw it into the bottom of the garbage pail along with a picture of him that I had snapped when he was vegging out in front of the TV one day.

 

With him on his way to the most romantic cities in the world, I moved back into the apartment. I wanted to have my own things around me. But everywhere I turned, I saw reminders of Chris—from his beer in the refrigerator to his old hairbrush in the bathroom and his posters on the wall.

Would he move in with her permanently and give up the apartment or just stay there occasionally, once I was gone? He probably didn't even think that far
ahead. I was the practical one, trying to decide where to go, what to take. How did you divide a couch? The photograph of the empty highway out in West Texas that we both loved that was up in the kitchen? I leaned over and smelled his pillow. It held his scent. It registered with me viscerally by now on some deep biological level like my mother's Joy perfume, or the smell of the soup that my grandmother made every time I visited.

I picked up the
Times
real estate section and started going through the ads, circling the appropriate ones, aghast, as usual, at the prices. There weren't many options. I wanted to stay in Manhattan—so I could live and work in the same zip code. That meant that I'd probably end up in a studio apartment because the rentals on the one and two bedrooms were prohibitive. That was okay. A studio apartment could be cozy, womblike. Nothing got lost, there was no place for it to go.

After circling the ads that I wanted to call on, I made a list of corporations that I could hit up for donations to our party. I'd already called the publisher of my paper, next I'd try the
Trib,
Slaid's paper.

We hadn't talked since my nasty outburst, although he did send one e-mail with the subject line that read, “Addendum to hang-up.” I deleted the message without opening it. He deserved it, he'd acted infantile, and since he'd never as much as throw me a crumb, what was the point of the clever
repartee? Still, I suppose that I had regrets. It wasn't necessary to be testy and hostile. I could have just said that I preferred not to converse with the competition. Did the drama critic from the
Times
talk to the drama critic from the
Post?
Did
The New Yorker
talk to
New York Magazine
about its coverage? Of course not. So why did we have to engage in such ridiculous exchanges?