Praise for Deborah Blumenthal’s debut novel, Fat Chance

“Food and men are two of Maggie O’Leary’s favorite pastimes…. To snag her star, she ignores her own antidieting dictates and sheds the pounds but eventually finds that you can get a man and eat your cake, too.”

—People

“Light as a cupcake and as fun to devour, Blumenthal’s debut novel will likely find many fans.”

—Booklist

“Deborah Blumenthal’s deliciously amusing novel offers a refreshing chick-lit twist: a heroine who embraces with gusto her inner—and generously proportioned outer—

food-loving self. Zaftig Maggie O’Leary happily devours barbecued ribs rather than obsessing about whether her own will be visible to the naked eye—and builds a high-profile career encouraging fellow females to do the same. Fat Chance is as much sparkling, laid-back fun as good champagne sipped from a bottle!”

—Wendy Markham, author of Slightly Single and Slightly Settled

What Men Want
Deborah Blumenthal

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Ralph

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter One

There are men that you meet and forget. And then there are men who keep you up at night…like Slaid Warren.

It’s not what you’re thinking. Yes, the newspaper photo made him look like a runway model with his deep-set brooding eyes and long dark bangs swept back off his forehead. But that was all beside the point.

Slaid worked for one major New York City newspaper, and I worked for another. So the thrusting and parrying between us was professional, all business, and it took place in print and on the phone, not between the sheets—not those sheets, anyway. We weren’t lovers. We weren’t friends. In fact, we had never even met.

So, you know that I would have done whatever it took to scoop him, not only to get ahead professionally and win kudos from my colleagues, but also to enjoy the end-of-the-day phone call that inevitably followed slighting my success, thus convincing me of my triumph. It was usually brief, just a couple of sentences. But in those few seconds, I chalked up the fact that I had him in a headlock and it wasn’t where he liked to be.

“You missed the story,” he said dismissively in one of our early conversations just months after I had been given the column. Of course he started the conversation without bowing to convention and introducing himself. Unthinkable to him that someone couldn’t recognize his voice, and anyway, we had an ongoing dialogue, interrupted just to allow for new columns to appear.

“If it helps you to deal with it,” I said, leaning back in my chair and warming to his discomfort with the realization that my column had left him in the dust. He laughed heartily as though acknowledging a good joke.

“No, babe,” he said, abruptly cutting off the laughter like a motorboat engine suddenly out of power. “Dealing is not the point. I was out nailing the real story. Your column was filler.” Before I could respond, he hung up.

To backtrack, Slaid Warren and I both covered city politics. “Slaid in the City” was his column. He had me there. How could I hope to top that? Through no effort of his own, he had the good fortune to be born to parents hip enough to give him a cool, albeit weird, name. The only damage I could inflict was to write him e-mails spelling it S-L-A-Y-E-D, in keeping with that of readers who disagreed with him.

My column, I’m loath to admit, had an agonizingly mundane name, echoing a sparrow chirping: “Street Beat.” Nothing there to summon the grit and substance of a tough investigative column. Then there was my vanilla name: Jenny George. As one well-intentioned boyfriend once commented, “It sounds more like the name of a cheerleader or talk-show host than a serious reporter. Why don’t you just change it?”

Just change it? Although there are more things about me that I would change than not, my name isn’t one of them. And while a name that was heftier or more commanding—Lana Davis Harriman or Katherine Clotilde Porter III, for example—might have drawn me into public prominence faster, I love and respect my parents—imperfect as they showed themselves to be when naming their children. (Can you imagine Burt as a name for my older brother? If they had a second son, would he have been Ernie?) Anyway, it was the name they gave me and it seemed almost sacrilegious to consider changing it. Whatever.

As for the column, it had been called “Street Beat” for years, it was well read, and as my editors saw it, why mess with success? To their credit though, they weren’t interested in redesigning the paper and coming up with younger, hipper column heads like, “Thing,” or “What I Was Thinking,” that other papers presumably thought would attract younger readers because they sounded edgier. The paper was secure in its identity and fortunately it had even advanced to the point of covering music written after the “Blue Danube Waltz.”

I had put in ten years at the New York Daily before taking over the column, starting as a secretary—not an assistant, the term used more often these days—right after college. Since I showed outstanding capability in juggling the phones and discreetly giving everyone the proper messages so that their colleagues didn’t find out that headhunters were returning their calls, or worse, places like AA, I was asked to stay on after my six-month probation, sparing me the humiliation of circling ads in the Times and calling people in human resources, a name that made me think of organ banks.

I was promoted to editorial assistant, and finally cub reporter, which meant that I earned the right to go downtown to cover a press conference by the Consumer Product Safety Commission on lawn-mower safety (never mind that as an apartment dweller I had never even seen one) and up to Connecticut to report on a factory that made walking sticks. I had my shorthand to thank—or blame—plus my trusty tape recorder and my reputation for staying with a story until every source was questioned practically to death. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m tenacious about ferreting out the truth, or that I’m so insecure that I overresearch. Let’s just say that I took the old journalism adage to heart—“If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

The column was actually something of a gift following a tense investigation of a shelter for women who were victims of domestic violence. I spent two nights in one and wrote a story exposing the failures of the system, including a lack of policing that led to boyfriends finding their way in and spending the night. Apparently the current columnist had opened the paper one morning to find an obit of a colleague who died at age fifty of a massive heart attack and immediately submitted his resignation so that he could spend more time with his family. But ultimately the decisive factor that led to my becoming a columnist with all the power that comes with it might well have been the fact that the stars were in proper alignment.

In any case, it was a prized, if competitive, job. It was a bit daunting, at first, to find myself up against some ace metro reporters, including Slaid, who had a far wider net of contacts than I did and far more experience. Being male didn’t hurt him either, plus he was slick at taking advantage of the buddy network built up through jobs at various papers and magazines, so that disgruntled insiders seemed to gravitate to him. Then once he sat down with them, he was one of the guys and always on their side, at least until he was in front of the computer screen and the story came out.

And how was I viewed? Think perky former cheerleader. In fact, I was told on my thirtieth birthday that I had the cherubic face and fawning grin of an eighteen-year-old Goldie Hawn. Not a bad thing, but needless to say, with only one year now on the job, I had a lot of catching up to do to earn credibility and authenticity.

But back to Slaid. Be assured that I would never denigrate a colleague needlessly. He was known to be trustworthy to a fault, at least judging from the fact that months back he had spent a few weeks locked up in prison for refusing to turn over his notes after he interviewed a mafia don following the murder of a member of a rival family. It led to a juicy column and his refusal to cooperate with a police investigation on the grounds that New York’s shield laws protected journalists from turning over their notes and revealing their sources.

I don’t believe for a minute that Slaid withheld his notes—as some of my more mean-spirited colleagues have flippantly suggested—because he knew he could count on his buddies from the six o’clock news to make a show of hanging out supportively at the prison 24/7, guaranteeing that his popularity would soar, not to mention bringing him hearty fare like pasta alfredo and osso bucco from Little Italy so that he would be spared the ordeal of subsisting on prison food. That wasn’t such a really big deal. After all, he didn’t get to drink the Pinot Grigio or the Barolo. They were confiscated; I know that for a fact.

But watching him on TV, I realized that he oneupped me in another, more fundamental way. As he was interviewed coming out of prison (and the hype! You’d think he’d served twenty years and a wrongful conviction was overturned), he stops and turns to stare directly into the camera’s eye, speaking softly, in a controlled, almost wounded kind of way—like an Italian film star in a noirish setting. No one could miss the fact that his deep-set eyes and shadow of a beard, combined with the upturned collar on his worn sport jacket, gave him that soulful bedroom look that I know he was going for. And what did he say? Would you believe he quoted James Madison? “‘Popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy.’”

Bravura performance. The erudition coupled with the intensity of his look. Little me, on the other hand, would try and fail at impersonating the lost, waifish air of a Daryl Hannah type. Instead, I’d look vulnerable and helpless. Instead of alerting viewers to the fact that my incarceration was part of a distressing new pattern of attack on the freedom of the press, I would merely look distraught as though I was weathering the flu. I’d undoubtedly say something rambling and incoherent because I hadn’t slept well due to the hard beds and thin mattresses, the claustrophobic sizes of the cells and the overcrowded conditions. My hair would be twirled up in a ponytail so that it didn’t droop like seaweed because of the absence of Aveda Sap Moss shampoo or Kiehl’s Silk Groom (do they let you take those things to jail?)—my lifelines to vibrant hair. And without Nars Orgasm blush and Chanel lip gloss, I’d look merely washed out, not sultry columnist wronged by the system.

So instead of reporting it, Slaid Warren was the news for a good week after that, and as I learned, spending time in the big house, especially for holding such high moral values, can really up your Internet-chatter quotient, not to mention boosting future book advances. If I didn’t know better, I would have guessed that Slaid had arranged it, maybe even sleeping with the judge (who was divorced and not half-bad-looking, even in her muumuu-size black robe) to set the whole thing up.

But these days, praise the Lord, Slaid was out, a free man—free to take himself to movie premiers and hang out at all-night celebrity-backed restaurant openings that were destined to be covered in the next day’s papers where he was photographed snuggling one fetching model or another and generally cavorting with the A-list.

And while we had very different types of social lives and went our separate ways, we both seemed to have similar instincts when it came to sniffing out a good story, leading to columns that were often breaking the same news.

The problem was we were more than just rivals in our columns; we had become rivals in our lives, elevating one-upmanship to a spectator sport for readers, not to mention the sword sharpening that went on privately between us, on the phone.

What do I mean?

When I wrote about the mayor using workers under city contract to renovate playgrounds to work in his Fifth Avenue town house, Slaid had a similar column as I guessed he would. So I was lucky enough to know someone who worked for the construction company. I topped him by offering obscure details about the particular style of moldings that the mayor was installing (egg and dart) and added another juicy detail—he had them working overtime so they could finish the job in time for his annual Christmas bash. (Catered by a company headed by a friend of a friend. I held off describing the canapés that he ordered, baja ceviche, crab rangoon and caviar d’aubergine, among others, and the cranberry Stoli martinis, juicy details to foodies, but really a bit beside the point.) That phone call was a memorable one too.

“Egg and dart?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What the hell is egg and dart?”

“Ask one of your interior-design sources,” I said.

“Why would I know people like that?”

“Aren’t you gay?” I asked, expertly choking back the laughter welling up in my throat.

“Fuck,” he said, hanging up.

Then there was the column I wrote about a writer at Slaid’s paper who was caught fabricating a news source in a story that he covered without ever going to the scene. Story after story ensued as if the paper was so guilt-ridden that it felt it had to purge itself repeatedly, in print.

I ended my column:

News about newsmakers is replacing the real news, inadvertently turning liars and cheats into media stars and future authors of tell-all books. Can’t TV-news types find more reputable people to interview? Can’t Slaid Warren drop his long columns about soul-searching over lunch at Vong and instead find someone gifted, talented or at least more illuminating to lunch with for his column? It’s time to leave the fate of bad journalists to the editors and publishers who hired them and move on to the real news.

“So why didn’t you write about your lunch with heads of state instead of wasting trees to write about my column?” he said, putting me on the spot.

“You’re too sensitive,” I said, yawning. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to take things so to heart?”

“It happens to be a major scandal among serious journalists. I guess that fact passed you by.”

“I got it,” I said, “about eight million words ago. Give it up.”

“Sweetheart,” he said, getting to his famous exit line. “I didn’t get where I am by giving up.” He hung up and there I was holding the phone once again after the line went dead. I pressed redial and he picked up on the first ring.

“Slaid?”

“Yeah.”

“Just one more thing,” I said. Then I hung up.

Chapter Two

It was several weeks before Christmas and I left the office early to buy presents. There were no time clocks to punch. As long as my columns were in on time, my hours were my own. Unfortunately, that meant that I usually worked myself harder than any boss would have dared. News didn’t stop for weekends or holidays, and neither did I. Almost any time of day or night, I might hear the first bars of “A Little Night Music,” my cell’s ring du jour. If I could have figured how to do it, I would have used “A Hard Day’s Night” or “Working on a Chain Gang.”

Every year I vowed to start squirreling away gifts in August, so that by December first I’d have the whole heap of them wrapped up all pretty and ready and I’d be spared any and all anxiety of what to buy and where to go. But that happens in the closets of meticulous homemakers who take pleasure in offering gifts of homemade flavored vinegars in antique bottles bearing scalloped labels hand printed in olive-colored ink, following instructions they’ve clipped from the perfect holiday pages of House & Garden or Real Simple.

It had been a year now that Chris and I had been living together. Since I had a one-bedroom apartment when we met and he had a two-, I moved in with him, a definite step up, so to speak from my small walk-up on the Upper East Side with no view to speak of.

Chris’s apartment was open, airy and contemporary, a mix of Mies, Ikea and Craig’s List. It was in Kips Bay, a modern high-rise complex in the East 30s designed by I. M. Pei with floor-to-ceiling picture windows and exterior walls of exposed concrete that gave it a spare, contemporary look, even though it was built decades back.

Things between us were good and I wanted to get Chris a serious present. Unfortunately, I hadn’t put in the time sleuthing through his closet to check his size or to figure out what he needed. Yes, I should have known, but for some reason I couldn’t keep the numbers in my head and remember whether he was a 32 or 34 waist, or a 16 shirt collar or 16-½. And then there was the question of what a medium translated to or whether a shirt or sweater should be bought in a large.

Why was it so much easier to shop for women? Off the top of my head I could come up with twenty things that would be perfect gifts for me: a cashmere scarf, a cashmere bathrobe, a pashmina wrap, a great silk nightgown, gold, anything gold, better yet platinum, a fabulous Marc Jacobs handbag, a Tod’s handbag (yes, they’re all a fortune, but don’t put a price on my happiness), Juicy anything, sable makeup brushes, or maybe even an expensive hairbrush.

I knew that I would buy my best friend, Ellen Gaines, a cashmere camisole and matching cardigan. My mother would get a silk blouse and a new scarf, and I’d buy my father plaid flannel pajamas and a robe from his favorite Web site, L.L. Bean.

But when it came to boyfriends, it seemed as though I was stuck buying the same clichéd goodies year after year—a new lamb’s-wool crewneck or a cashmere turtleneck sweater, a couple of whimsical ties from MOMA, although I really couldn’t remember the last time Chris wore one, and the old fall-back staples like the latest tomes of nonfiction (or anything by Stephen Ambrose) or the Swiss Army knife with multipurpose pullout tools that could do jobs ranging from opening beer bottles to jump-starting cars.

Fortunately, Chris wasn’t obsessed with material wealth. He worked in advertising and was an REI (you know, the sporty catalog) kind of guy. His hair was dirty blond and he had pale blue eyes. His wardrobe? Think of Wranglers, Frye boots, pullover sweaters, T-shirts, a beat-up leather baseball jacket and one or two preppie-looking sport jackets. I don’t think that he owned a serious tie. If he ever wore ties, I wasn’t around to see it. In fact, the only time I remember seeing him take a tie out of his closet was when he decided to tie my hands together one day, on a whim, after we had finished a bottle of particularly good champagne and were feeling, well, experimental.

I wanted to give him something that would remind him of me whenever he looked at it. Something that he would keep for ages that would get even better with time, like a great leather jacket. So pj’s were out, which he never wore anyway, and so was a bathrobe, even though I loved the thick terry ones that were as cozy as down on a cold night. Of course, Chris never got cold, and when he did, he pulled on a hooded gray sweatshirt.

I walked the aisles of Saks, and then headed uptown to Bloomingdale’s—the after-hours pastime of every red-blooded, material New York woman. I started out in the men’s fragrance area sniffing one cologne after another until my nerve receptors were on overload and I was unable to tell the differences and was getting a dull headache. What was I doing? Chris didn’t wear cologne anyway—hated it, he once said—still I felt I had to cover all the bases. The store was hot, crowded and overheated—big surprise—and I peeled off my coat. The truth was, Chris was Dial-soap clean and on-sale shampoo. He had a full bottle of Calvin Klein body wash that was a gift from way back that he had never even opened.

Finally, I picked out a great camel-colored leather overnight bag with lots of side pockets, which I knew that I’d probably use more than he would. It had great brass hardware, and I knew the leather would soften with age and look better the more he used it. Of course, he didn’t travel much—it was always tough for him to get away from the office, especially since he worked on so many different accounts, and inevitably seemed to be on deadline.

As I stood in line to pay for the bag, it occurred to me that if Chris ever decided to leave me, he would be walking out in style, a disturbing thought. I bought it anyway, and as I was making my way out of the store, I passed a display for Calvin Klein underwear. I stopped and stared at the advertisement showing just the midsection of a very, very well-toned Men’s Health–type cover boy. Was it retouched, or was there a real man who actually looked like that? While it was a body that every woman craved to run her hands over, it was also the body of a man who spent countless hours working on himself. After using up all that strength for self-improvement, what did men like that have left to offer women? Undoubtedly, perfection took its toll. I put the package of briefs that I had in my hand back on the rack.

When I got home, I wedged the overnight bag into the back of my closet, even though I knew that if I dropped it in the middle of the living-room floor, Chris would step over it without even realizing what it was. My timing was perfect.

“Hey,” he said, coming through the door, as if on cue. How could I miss the cherry-red Saks shopping bag under his arm? Now, that was sweet. He had been shopping too. He wasn’t one to breeze into Saks and buy himself something. He’d sit at the computer and log on to Lands’ End and order whatever in blue (safe because it matched his eyes), or maybe green, yellow, on a whim. The only time he actually went shopping was when he was under the gun and just about out of shirts or sweaters, or if he found that the cuffs of his pants were frayed just before he had an appointment with a client.

I’ll never forget the time that he needed a tuxedo for an awards ceremony. I took him to Macy’s (a daunting outing no matter how much you needed a store that offered variety) and he had a panicked look on his face like he was visiting an alien planet. He tried on jacket after jacket and stared at himself in the mirror as though he were trying to fit himself into a space suit. Personally, I thought that he looked adorable in black-tie, but that didn’t matter. After trying on the twentieth suit—I lost count—he finally just shook as if he were having a seizure and let the jacket shimmy down his arms and drop to the floor.

“I’m not wearing one of these suckers,” he said, walking off and leaving it there. I waited for a moment to see if he went back to spit on it, but instead he strode out of the store as if he had just gleefully submitted his resignation from a dead-end job. He ended up going in a plain black wool suit with a ruffled tuxedo shirt and colorful red-and-black satin bow tie with a Mickey Mouse design on it that he bought in a children’s store.

But now, package in hand, I could see that at least he had made the effort and had gone to a respectable store rather than a vintage junk shop recommended by one of the twentysomething art directors that he worked with, and it thrilled me. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the vintage polyester shifts in avocado-and-orange prints, or the glam o’rama sequined cardigans that you can find downtown on Broadway or in Soho. It’s just that I’m not the beanpole-model type who can carry off those quirky looks and appear as though I’m wearing what’s ahead on the runway for Prada. On me, they just look peculiar and “what was I thinking?”

Not that I’m a classics girl by any means. When we first met, Chris got me a bottle of Chanel No. 5. Nice, traditional, but I had never worn it and never would. Everyone’s supposed to love the fragrance, of course, but to me it smells off, like something musty that you find on a dusty dressing table when you’re cleaning out the apartment of your dead grandmother. (He couldn’t have known that I was an Yves Saint Laurent fan—he was a copywriter not a nose.) Obviously, he had been taken under the wing of a saleswoman who saw his vulnerability and promised him, “You can’t go wrong with a classic scent.”

“So,” I said, looking at everything but the bag. “How was work?”

“Okay,” he said in a distant voice, like a child who hasn’t decompressed yet after coming home from school. Chris worked for a top Madison Avenue ad agency, a job that was as cool as a real job could be. Most of the employees shlumped around in jeans, T-shirts and carpenter’s overalls. The rare occasions when guys showed up in a suit and tie brought the expected droll comment from passersby:

“Job interview?”

Invariably, the answer was a small, somber shake of the head and then the barely audible utterance “funeral,” even though it was rarely, if ever, the case.

Chris’s office resembled a teenager’s bedroom or something out of the Pottery Barn Teens catalog, with orange blow-up chairs, a white fluffy woolen rug, a boom box where he played his favorite CDs all day and a blue denim couch where he took naps or just stretched his legs to increase blood flow to the brain to boost creativity, or at least consciousness.

Some copywriters and art directors even used their offices as if they were their primary residences, especially after divorces, when it was no surprise to see someone walking in with a blanket and pillow under their arm. It was that laid-back.

Even though Chris didn’t shop much, he enjoyed coming with me to stores like Urban Outfitters where I always picked up whimsical versions of ordinary T-shirts and denim skirts, and he bought kitschy things for his office like copies of old-fashioned metal lunch boxes, a Venus-flytrap coin bank and a plastic-and-chrome clock that looked as if it belonged in a fifties-style diner.

Did I mention the teen-room design made sense because Chris had just turned thirty-two, (although he looked twenty-one) and he was almost four years younger than I am? Whatever.

Anyway, there was almost a carnival atmosphere at the agency most of the time—except when a client would call to say that there was a change in the marketing calendar because the CEO had to fly to London, and they needed to see a new campaign in two weeks instead of two months. Then laid-back employees snapped to, turning into frantic martinets who invariably came up with something brilliant to save their asses and careers.

“We got a new account,” Chris said, dropping his overstuffed army-green military-surplus backpack in the middle of the living room. He kicked off his boots and stretched his legs out on our new white duck Pottery Barn couch with the down-wrapped cushions. It replaced the couch shrouded in black cotton that Chris had found on Craig’s List offered for free to anyone who would pick it up in Staten Island.

Our new couch was the first piece of furniture that we bought together, not counting the cheapo coffee table from West Elm. Eventually, we hoped to buy chairs and decent lamps to go with the couch.

I raised my eyebrows.

“A liquid diet,” he said, unenthused.

“Another one?”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“What’s it called?”

“That’s my job,” he said, frowning. “The client was toying with ‘skinny shake,’ but when they proposed it, the conference room went silent so they gave me a week to come up with something to make it fly.”

I screwed up my face. Would clones of Metrecal, the meal-in-a-can diet drink that my mother tried long ago, be reborn again and again? I remembered the commercials showing the likely candidates for the drink—two girls walking along a beach wearing sweatshirts to cover up their chubby bodies.

A new generation of suckers is born every minute, I guess, and that was what Madison Avenue banked on. It always amazed me that Chris made twice the money that I did by coming up with ways of selling products that nobody needed but everybody bought because they were convinced that they did, at least until something new came along to take its place.

“Striptease,” I said.

“Striptease,” he repeated, bobbing his head from left to right like a wooden doll with a spring-loaded head. Knowing Chris, it would take him a while to rule on it. “Striptease.” Still bobbing. He shook his head finally.

“Wouldn’t work for Middle America.”

“Wanna eat out?” I said, changing the subject.

“Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “Oh, Moose is in town,” he said, coming over and briefly nuzzling my neck before going over to the refrigerator. Moose was his college roommate. “Maybe we should set up a dinner.” I nodded.

I think the reason that Chris and I stayed together for going on a year now was that he was so easy to get along with. Sometimes to a fault. If I wanted to eat Indian food, he went along. Stay home and call for Chinese? Fine. Campbell’s tomato soup and saltines? A nod of his head. Sometimes I was tempted to just shake him:

“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 Snapricot 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 because 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.”

Chapter Three

On 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.

Chapter Four

“So where do we have dinner with a mountain man who probably eats grilled roadkill for dinner?” I asked Chris when I got home from Bloomingdale’s.

“Moose?”

“Who else?”

“He’s easy,” Chris said. “He eats meat when he has to, but he prefers vegetarian.”

“Hmm,” I said. I thought of a local health-food restaurant, but then remembered the soy burger that I had there that tasted as if it was made from corrugated paper. Mexican? We could have fajitas with beans and rice and guacamole—and margaritas.

“He does drink,” I said, more as a statement than a question.

“Everything except the worm in the mescal,” Chris said. We agreed to meet at a Mexican restaurant in the Village. Characteristically, Chris and I walked. Since both of us spent our days sitting and didn’t have much time to exercise, we looked forward to a chance to take long walks together. Even when we weren’t talking, we usually felt very much in sync. I knew when he was quiet, he was absorbing things around him, which usually ended up, in one form or another, in one of his ads or TV commercials. There were talking beagles in a commercial for dog food that reminded me of the sad brother and sister up for adoption in the neighborhood pet store. In a commercial for packaged deli meat, Chris incorporated a character with black beady eyes and curly hair who looked like a man who worked in Todaro, our favorite Italian grocery.

“Life is all ad copy,” he said. I knew what he meant. Half of the things I experienced day to day worked into upcoming columns. We walked down First Avenue past Bellevue Hospital and New York University Hospital and then past apartment complexes. Chris thought of what he could use in commercials for pain relievers, while for me, the scenery triggered thoughts of the latest hospital mergers, Medicaid and the best emergency room to go for gunshot wounds.

“When was the last time you saw Moose?”

“I visited him a couple of years ago,” Chris said. “He had just split with his girlfriend and was having a tough time, so we went skiing during the day and drank a lot of beer at night.”

“It must be hard for him to meet the kind of women who’d like the same lifestyle that he does.”

“Just the opposite,” Chris said. “Women love his mountain life—at least for a while. They’re fed up with the big-city bullshit. Land is cheap, you have all the space and quiet that you want, and you only concern yourself with the basics, like survival. You don’t go to four-star restaurants, you don’t go out to Broadway shows. You don’t run down the street and shop at Victoria’s Secret.” (How did he know?) “You’re together a lot at home working on your house or cooking and canning and doing blue-collar stuff, so you find out very fast if you’re compatible.”

“So what happened to his relationship?”

“I guess when the initial fascination faded, she felt cut off and she wasn’t pulling her weight.”

The image of a woman as a member of a dogsled team came to mind. “What do you mean?”

“He wanted to share his life and for Moose that means someone who could help him cut down trees for firewood and build an addition to the house. She liked to cook and help him fix up the house, but that was it.”

“You mean she couldn’t even chop down trees?”

He nodded, laughing.

“He’s liberated—to a fault,” I said.

Chris shrugged. “He has a lot to give, but he hasn’t found a girl who’s big enough to take it.” I thought about Ellen. I hoped that wouldn’t be a big mistake, unless he wanted someone to stand by him to fight with local industry about polluting the air or water.

When we got to the restaurant, neither one of them was there yet so we sat down in a booth and ordered a pitcher of frozen pomegranate margaritas. After sipping half of one, I started to forget about Moose and Ellen.

“We should do this more at home,” I said to Chris. His knees touched mine under the table and he reached down and took my hand.

“You’re wasted already?”

I started to laugh. I spotted Ellen as she walked in, but then wasn’t sure if I was waving at the right girl. Something was different, and then I realized that I was seeing more of her face. The haircut was short and almost boyish, an impossible style for most women, but on Ellen it looked delicate, pixieish and feminine, not to mention that the red color looked richer than I remembered. It framed her face and pale complexion. Ellen is five-four with big blue expressive eyes. She’s almost thirty-three, but could pass for ten years younger. I think it’s because she works mostly indoors, away from the sun. With less hair, her eyes seemed to pop.

“Love the hair,” I said as she took a seat. She smiled.

“I cut it off because I was fed up, but it turns out that everybody likes it. At work they call me Peter Pan.”

Chris poured her a drink and she sat back and sipped it and then shook her head. “I had a day…I’m beginning to doubt—except for present company—that there are any honest, upstanding citizens in the world.”

“There aren’t,” I said flatly. “That’s why we’ll never run out of copy.” Ellen just shook her head.

“What are you working on?” Chris asked her.

“Shabby contractors, bogus long-distance phone charges, car complaints, spoiled dog food, unsafe toys…” She shook her head. “I could go on and on.”

I looked up to see a giant standing next to our table wearing a thick suede jacket. He was bearlike, maybe six foot five, with a beard and brown curly hair.

“Hey,” Chris said, coming around the table and hugging him the way men do, in a hard, standoffish kind of way. It reminded me of a Broadway play that I saw years back called Defending the Caveman that homed in on the differences between the sexes, showing in one particular scene how old female friends greet each other, as opposed to the male approach. Women squeal in delighted high-pitched voices and then come together screeching, laughing, crying and embracing. And men? One goes up to the other and punches him in the arm while saying something endearing like: “You still driving that old piece of shit?”

Moose patted him on the back. “How you doing?” Chris introduced him to me and then to Ellen.

“Ladies,” he said, nodding.

Chris poured him a drink and we toasted. I looked at Chris, then at Moose. His blue eyes peered out, surrounded by curly locks as though he were Santa. The immediate impression that I got was of shyness.

“How come you’re in town?” I said.

“Came to see my mom. I can’t get her to come up and visit me…” He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.

“It’s pretty cold up there,” I said, feeling for some reason as if I had to take her side.

“Twenty below last week,” he said matter-of-factly.

“So you live in an igloo?” Ellen teased.

Moose shook his head as if he had considered that and then decided against it. “Log cabin. I built it. Great woodstove, keeps the place really warm.”

“What do you do all winter?” I said. “Doesn’t it get lonely?”

He looked at me curiously and smiled slightly. “I have work to do in the house, firewood to cut, I’m preparing to put on an addition, and I have my books, carpentry work in town, journals, my dog and I’m writing a guide to wilderness survival. Not much time to get lonely.”

“Wilderness survival?” Ellen said.

Actually, it turned out that he was working on his third book. Ever since he was small, Moose said, he spent most of his life outdoors. After we looked at our menus and ordered he told us that his mother was a nature lover who grew up on a farm and unlike other mothers who baked, cleaned, shopped and maybe went off to work, she spent much of her time with her children outdoors, hiking, swimming in the ponds, and teaching them about birds, snakes, turtles, insects, trees and plants. By age ten, he was an expert marksman with a slingshot and a bow and arrow, he knew how to start a fire, build a shelter and forage for food, distinguishing between the edible plants and berries and the poisonous ones so that he could basically survive outdoors, no matter what the temperature. He learned how to carve plates out of wood polished with beaver fat and could weave baskets out of split white oak, make his own clothes and get by in the woods with just some basic clothes and a knife.

That was a world that, of course, was unknown to me. I never did understand all the esoterica about camping and being able to use a compass if I was lost, build a tent for shelter or cook over an open fire.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t welcome being in the wilderness with the right guide, particularly if he looked like the six-foot-four Australian who took me and a group of friends on a rafting trip in Colorado, our present to ourselves after we graduated from college.

“So you spent your summers camping out?” Ellen asked Moose.

“I camped outside my house from the age of eight,” Moose said. “My parents built me a tepee in the backyard instead of a tree house and I spent most of the year out there. I grew my own fruits and vegetables in the garden and made my own clothes. Even my own shoes.”

Ellen and I looked at each other. Manolo of the Adirondacks.

“And I bet you never went to the doctor,” I said.

“To get my shots and all, sure. But when I was sick I tried to treat myself with medicine from plants. I haven’t been to the doctor in the past twenty years.”

“Germs probably can’t survive where you live,” I said. He smiled.

“And what about when you’re doing all that outdoor work. Don’t you ever fall or hurt yourself?” Ellen asked.

“I broke my ankle a few years ago. Set it myself.”

We were all silent. I was proud of myself when I closed a wound with ointment and a butterfly bandage.

“So you’re writing your book with a quill pen, or what?” I said. He shook his head.

“I have a computer and all that. I’m connected.” I imagined him hunkering down by candlelight and writing on a computer.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You built your own with twigs and leaves.”

“Actually I have a Dell,” Moose said, laughing. “But now that you mention it…” With a smile he steered the subject to me, obviously eager to get himself out of the spotlight. “So what about you, how are you doing with the column?”

“The pressure gets me a little crazy,” I said. “But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”

“I read your stuff from time to time online,” he said. “I try to keep up with the papers.”

“We don’t cover your part of the world that much. Any good investigations to be done where you are?”

He was silent for a moment. “Local political stuff, sure, but it’s a small town and people tend to get along.”

“And if they don’t?”

“They don’t go running to the media.”

“Sounds idyllic,” Ellen said.

“What do you do?” Moose asked Ellen. She reached into her bag and gave him her card. Moose looked at it and smiled slightly.

“Consumer reporter,” he read. “That raises your blood pressure.”

“I try not to let it,” Ellen said. He stared at her for a long minute and didn’t say anything.

“How long you been doing it?”

“Six years,” she said. She looked back at me. “Remember when I took the job?”

I couldn’t forget. It was a year after she started with the network. She was nervous and we arranged to have lunch at 21 to celebrate, even though most of the time she talked about all the reasons why she secretly felt she wasn’t up to the job, couldn’t do it and shouldn’t have agreed to take it. With all the negativity out of the way, we agreed never to have another conversation like that, ate every bit of the amazing hamburgers that the place is famous for—each seemed to be made up of at least half a pound of meat—finished off most of a bottle of very expensive wine and had to practically hold hands to steady ourselves as we walked across Fifth Avenue and over to Saks to buy her clothes that would look good on television.

“We didn’t think you’d stay there for more than two years,” I said. “Six is a record.”

Ellen nodded resignedly.

“So what keeps you going when everyone else burns out?” Chris asked.

“Venom,” Ellen said, “and determination. I can’t let the bastards win.”

Moose nodded, weighing that. “But there are more of them,” he added. “So at some point you have to stop and concentrate on fixing your own head.”

“Is your head fixed?” she asked, confronting Moose. “Are you balanced? Normal?”

“I’ve never been accused of being normal,” he laughed. “But I’m better than I was,” he said, continuing to look at Ellen. The waiter brought the food and we all stopped talking as he set it in front of us.

“Guess you don’t eat like this too much in the mountains,” Chris said to Moose.

He shook his head. “I used to live with a girl who liked to cook,” he said, then shrugged. “Since then, I make do.” He looked down at himself and laughed. “Doesn’t look like I’m starving, does it?” Ellen smiled at Moose, a real smile. I poked Chris with my foot, under the table. He glanced at me questioningly for a second.

“Listen, I don’t know what your timing is,” he said to Moose. “But I’m probably getting some concert tickets next weekend for a group that’s getting big around here.” He looked at Ellen and then back at Moose. “If you guys want to join us, I can get two more tickets.”

Every once in a while Chris surprises me with how fast he can operate. I suppose that was why at work he was able to focus at a crucial moment and create something that was right on target for his audience.

“Sure,” Moose said. “I’m going to be here through the week.”

“Anything that gets my mind off what I do,” Ellen said, unusually upbeat.

“Great,” Chris said. “Saturday then.” We ordered flan and Mexican cheesecake and then talked about Adirondack life, hiking in the snow, cooking dinner on an open fire under the stars, and then sleeping in a tent with down sleeping bags made to withstand temperatures up to 20 degrees below. Moose didn’t camp out in winter, but even in the summer, temperatures at night and in the early morning can get down into the 50s, sometimes dropping dramatically as the wind picked up.

By the end of dinner, I think all of us were ready to drive home with him to explore an alternative way of living. We walked outside and Chris and I headed to First Avenue to go home.

“I’m going up Lexington,” Ellen said to Moose.

“So am I,” he said. “Do you want company?” They turned and walked off together and I watched them from a distance. Moose was a foot taller, if you counted the mop of curly hair.

“He’s a sweet guy,” I said to Chris.

“Sweet?” he hesitated. “Hmm…on one level. But on another…” He paused again. “He’s the most determined, tough-minded, independent son of a bitch.” I listened to Chris and didn’t say anything. It was one thing to hear it from a guy, and another to get a female perspective.

When we got home, we undressed and fell into bed and made love in a soft, easy way—part comfortable affection, part margaritas making my blood cells feel as though they were dancing. I was about to fall asleep, when I thought of Ellen. She was close to my age, but still, I felt as though she was my little sister. Did Moose walk her all the way home? Did she ask him in for a drink? She spent her life fighting to help other people get by. Why did I think that I had to watch out for her?

“What were the other women in Moose’s life like?” I asked Chris.

“I can only remember one,” he said sleepily. I waited, but he didn’t say anything.

“I think you told me about her, but I’ve forgotten what you said.”

Chris rolled over and I could tell from the sound of his breathing that he was about to fall asleep. It never took him more than twenty seconds. He could fall asleep standing on the subway. I was insanely jealous. I needed total darkness, quiet, even the right temperature. And if there was a faucet dripping…

“CHRIS…”

“What?” he said, jumping up as though I had startled him.

“What was she like?”

“Who?”

“The girl he was seeing,” I said.

“Hot,” he said.

“So what happened?”

“Do we have to talk about this now,” he mumbled.

Why, at one in the morning, when I should have been concerned about falling asleep, was I wondering about the love life of a mountain man? Ellen hadn’t even dated him, and for all I knew, she wasn’t even interested.

I don’t know about you, but I feel as though for my entire life I’ve been wasting my own time, not to mention that of friends and family trying to figure out why men act the way they do. And what they’re looking for.

Chapter Five

“Who was she?” I asked Chris a few minutes later.

“An actress,” he said. “Pretty famous, I think, but he never told me.” Trivia expert that I am, my brain scanned all the names of the current actresses who might have traveled up to the Adirondacks to do a film or prepare for one, and then, thanks to my devotion to gossip columns and celebrity trivia, bingo, it hit me.

I never saw the movie. It was some type of outward-bound-thriller flick where something goes terribly wrong. I don’t remember whether the girl gets chased by a bear, or whether her food supplies are invaded by a mountain lion and her campsite ransacked or whatever, but fear gets the better of her and she has a breakdown. Because of it, she packs up and goes home to her cushy New England life a changed woman from the spoiled princess who left. The actress that they cast in the role was a young, blue-eyed ingenue who, I read, spent three months in the area learning survival skills to prepare for the role.

Clearly, I was jumping the gun, but it was one of those intuitive moments when you just know something, so I was willing to swear that Kelly Cartwright was the girl who had been Moose’s live-in. After I was sure that Chris was deep asleep, I crept out of bed and sat down at my computer.

I went from one site to another and finally found some bios of her and magazine articles that described how she prepared for the role.

The article discussed how she read every book she could find on wilderness survival and made an extended trip up to the Adirondacks to talk to hiking guides, campers, outdoorsmen and survivalists to learn about getting along outdoors, alone, in the company of four-legged friends such as bears, moose, mountain lions and God knows what else.

So, enter Moose. Even though I never saw his name mentioned in any of the articles, how could K.C. not be the one that he was seeing? I mean, how many guys like him were there who got involved with a movie star?

Two in the morning. Should I call Ellen? No, dumb idea. What if Moose was there with her? And if he wasn’t, she’d be in a dead sleep. I bookmarked the sites, and then slid back into bed. Chris rolled over toward me and slipped his arm around me. I snuggled up next to him and fell asleep.

“Kelly Cartwright? Is she the one who looks like an eighteen-year-old Robin Wright Penn?” Ellen asked. When I finally reached her on Monday. Why was it that every celebrity was described as looking like somebody else, as if there was a limited gene pool from which all players were created? It was similar to the way book reviewers described authors. They were always crosses between two or three others—Hemingwayesque, or Shavian, Faulknerian—who wrote in the same genre, as if no one was original and every work was merely a crazy quilt of what had come before.

“Well, a younger Robin Wright Penn,” I said, “but not as good an actress.”

“Mmm, I thought she was miscast in Hometown Queen,” Ellen said. It was clear why we were friends. “She didn’t have the breadth of character to carry it off.”

“Agreed,” I said. Still, we were getting ahead of ourselves. Two plus two didn’t equal ten.

“Any number of people could have helped her for the role, and it was quite possible that she wasn’t the one at all,” Ellen said. “Maybe some celebrity just went up there looking for property. You know how they always want to buy houses in places like upstate New York, Montana, Wyoming or up-and-coming spots like Marfa, Texas, where no one would run into them.”

But the more I thought about it, the more convinced I became.

“I know it’s her,” I said, and then changed the subject back to Moose. “So what happened with him?”

“He came back here and we sat on the floor talking about everything from television to books to seasons for planting,” Ellen said. “He even went outside to examine the garden in the back of the building and we talked about starting a vegetable garden,” she said. “Then we went through a bottle of wine.”

“And?”

“He left at two,” Ellen said. I couldn’t tell whether she was relieved or disappointed.

“Did he want to?”

“Well, he didn’t jump me, if that’s what you mean.”

He already got four stars for good behavior. “Did he act interested?”

“Well…we talked for two hours,” she said. “But the crazy thing is, I think he was trying to pretend that he wasn’t interested.”

“Well, that’ll make it better when it does happen,” I said.

“Maybe,” Ellen said. “I don’t know.”

“Did he say he’d call before we go to the concert?”

“No. He just smiled and said he’d better push off.” She paused. “But he has my card….”

When Chris walked in from work, I told him about Moose and Ellen.

“If he jumped her bones she would have resented it,” he said, peeling off his jacket and tossing it on the couch. “So he played it cool and that put her off? We can’t win.”

“Well, I just thought he might have said something—‘I’ll call you,’ or whatever—to let her know that he was interested,” I said, jumping to Ellen’s defense. “I think he’s the first guy that she’s had an iota of interest in in the last six months. I know she probably wouldn’t admit it, but I could tell. I saw a sparkle in her eye that I haven’t seen since you know who.”

“So let her make a move on him,” he said, sinking onto the couch. “She’s a big girl.”

“Do you like it when a woman comes on to you?”

Major shoulder shrug. “Depends who,” he said. “Yeah, why not?”

I dropped down on top of him and tried to pin his arms above his head. “This okay?” I said.

He laughed. “Yeah, definitely.”

Men always said they wanted women to come on to them, but that didn’t make it true. While initially it flattered the hell out of them if a woman pursued them, after the first date, most men liked to take charge. If the relationship wasn’t on their terms, it made them uneasy.

“How’s the diet-drink campaign going?” I said, dropping the subject.

He shrugged. “We’ve been brainstorming, but I don’t have anything yet.

“What’s your deadline?”

He massaged his temples. “Forty-eight hours.” He picked up the TV page of the paper, scanned it, and then grabbed the remote and started to channel surf. When I first met Chris it surprised me to see him come home from work and spend most of the night in front of the TV when he had a deadline the next morning. I thought he’d be sitting in front of the computer, or staring at pictures of the product. Only later did I realize that he really wasn’t watching television as much as using it to help him think. It became the backdrop for the movie that he was making in his head. Maybe he needed the visual wallpaper to stimulate his thinking.

I was the opposite. The blare of radio or TV destroyed my concentration, which may explain why we had the different kinds of jobs that we did. Clearly, he was a right-brain kind of guy—holistic, random and intuitive, and I was a left-brain—more logical, analytical and sequential.

I slipped out of the room and went into the kitchen to start making dinner, something that I didn’t do on a regular basis. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to cook, it was just that I didn’t want to fall into a routine that would regularly take a chunk out of my day and that wasn’t, as I saw it, effective in terms of the time spent cooking/time spent eating it ratio.

But tonight at least, I wanted to help Chris in any way that I could. I really sympathized with him. The pressure of having to produce under a deadline could make the most secure person crumble. I took out a steak, made a marinade, and then let it sit for a while before putting it under the broiler. I put baked potatoes into the microwave and cut up a salad. When the steak was ready—rare for him, medium-well for me—I brought a tray over to the coffee table. He turned to me for a minute, intuiting the moral support that I hoped to be offering along with the food.

“Thanks,” he said, turning back to the TV. He cut into the meat and ate like a hungry dog. I sat next to him, amused, and we watched a mindless quiz show followed by an episode of Animal Planet. Were we melding into a Middle American couple? But no, there was no TV Guide on the coffee table, no popcorn or even Bud Light. And I’m proud to say that there were no Barcaloungers in our living room and never would be, despite the fact that the horrendous-looking things were amazingly comfortable. But there we were, not exchanging as much as a word for the entire time we sat in front of the TV. Finally, Chris turned to me.

“Metamorphosis?

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Yeah,” he said, giving me his signature half smile. We sat there for another minute without speaking.

“How about ‘The Change’?” I said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Yeah.” We sat some more. How ridiculous was this? Two mature adults trying to come up with the name of a diet drink that would be no more effective than a low-fat malted but at twice the price. Who could give up food for any length of time without going back to it with a vengeance that would ultimately negate all the weight lost while enduring sweet diet drinks instead of real meals. I thought of “Fraud,” but thought better of suggesting it. Maybe “Waste.” Those who couldn’t spell might think that it would give them one.

“Slice of Life,” I said brightly, starting to toss out ideas and brainstorming. “Close Shave. Beanpole, Svelte, Stick, Stick Figure, Slim, Shape—oops, forget that, they already used that—ummm…” More silence. But then, in a flash of inspiration, I knew that I had it.

“Wait,” I said suddenly. “I’ve got your name.”

He looked at me. “Well?”

I nodded my head up and down. “I have it, it’s great, really great.” He held out his hands.

“So?”

I thought I’d torture him for a bit. I was a super-hero to the rescue. The pressure was off, Chris was home free and tomorrow he’d be a star in the client’s eyes thanks to yours truly.

“Yep, it’s really great. Really, really fresh, original. This one will bring you a raise. Maybe even a Clio.”

“So what the hell is it?” he asked, losing patience.

The pregnant pause. “Model Thin,” I said softly with a self-satisfied expression on my face. And again for more emphasis. “Model Thin.”

“Hmm,” Chris said in a positive voice, nodding his head slightly. I had struck a nerve. “Hmm,” he said again, biting the corner of his thumbnail. “That’s not bad. That is definitely not bad at all.”

“Think of all the models that you could hire for the shoot,” I said, regretting the words the instant they rolled off my tongue. He sat there, mulling it over.

“I could work with that,” Chris said. “Model Thin.”

“Can we go out and take a walk now?” I said. “I’m getting tired of vegging out in front of the TV.” He clicked it off decisively and we headed out, walking downtown, toward the Village, always a good destination because it was about three miles there and back. We stopped at a coffee bar for espresso and pastries that would never allow me to become model thin, scanned magazines and out-of-town newspapers hanging along a wooden rack on the wall, and then got up to leave. As we got outside, fate reared its head, and a six-foot-tall blonde strutted by. Perfect skin, hair piled sloppily on top of her head, arresting blue eyes and, of course, she was totally without makeup, which I can’t stand because it tells me that that’s how she looks in the morning or the middle of the night if, say, she runs out to the street because her house is on fire.

I looked her up and down. Never mind the ragged jeans that are made to look grungy, so unappealing to me, and the tired-looking down jacket, she was ready for the cover of Vogue. If she wasn’t a model yet, she’d be discovered in a heartbeat. She just had that camera-ready look—you can always tell.

“Model Thin,” Chris said, looking right into her eyes. “I like that.” She looked at him curiously and then just smiled. I took his hand and pulled him away, in the direction of uptown, trying to ignore the knot eating into the base of my stomach.

Chapter Six

There is no shortage of stories for my column, only a shortage of waking hours to write about them and all the colorful characters who enjoy operating outside the law. Someone on the rewrite desk here once said that after people who are in public office finish serving their terms, they should go directly to jail for the same amount of time that they were in office. My sentiments exactly. In fact, on my wall I had a blow up of the “Go to Jail” square from the Monopoly board. Around it I arranged pictures of various felons who I had written about.

I was coming up in the elevator one morning when I overheard a conversation that made my ears perk up. An editor from the travel section was chatting with a colleague. He had just come back from St. Croix, he said, where he’d checked out some new resorts. He mentioned that he had seen someone that he knew from the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. The editor asked him if he was on vacation and he said no, he was there on business. They laughed about it, but I didn’t see the humor. Instead, my antennae went up. Business? Who was he meeting? And why in St. Croix? Call it my reporter’s instinct for a big story but I went back to my desk and started making phone calls.

I’d heard rumors some time back about Caribbean trips, but at the time I had been so swamped that I didn’t pay any attention to them. But now, if it came up again, it convinced me that it was something that I should look into. Were people in the mayor’s office on film purportedly meeting Hollywood producers to encourage them to bring big-budget films to the city? More and more these days, American films were being made in Canada because of the considerable financial savings due to the favorable exchange rate. But while the goals of people in the film office might have been honorable, there was no justification for spending taxpayers’ money for meetings in the Caribbean that could well have taken place in New York. Clearly, New York wanted and benefited from having movie studios use the city as home base for their filming. New York City’s Made In New York Incentive Program offered film and TV crews tax and marketing credits as well as customer services if most of the movies were made in the five boroughs. But there was a line between proper give-and-take and giving out bigger pieces of the tax-deduction pie to some studios and not others. City negotiators were not supposed to be for sale to the highest bidder.

And why have a meeting at a resort in St. Croix instead of a Lower Manhattan conference room, other than to acquire a tan? Couldn’t the information be gathered in writing or via conference calls? Was it really critical to go to the Caribbean? A colder view of it was that the city officials were taking their wives or girlfriends with them on free junkets that would turn into improper deals.

My phone book was filled with the names of disgruntled employees from almost every city agency, and I made my initial string of phone calls rounding up “the usual suspects”—people you can usually count on to talk in sound bites and give you dependable quotes and insights.

I heard snickers, guffaws, theatrical coughs. Did they know more than they let on? I imagined eyebrows being raised, but none of that could make an airtight story. Trying a different tack, I called officials from the previous administration and asked them about conferences outside of the city.

“Does Brooklyn count?” one aide responded. “Because that’s as far as I ever traveled on the city payroll.” Someone else pointed me to an airline employee who would check the passenger lists to see whether the mayor’s aides had flown regularly scheduled airlines—or instead hopped free flights on corporate jets belonging to Hollywood movie studios, which might be offered sweet deals to bring their crews into the city for months at a time.

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