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. Wi
th 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 a
ctress.”
“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….”
What Men Want Page 4
