What Men Want

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.