What Men Want

“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.”