What Men Want

by Deborah Blumenthal

  Debris was scattered everywhere, and it looked as if the hotel staff was all out doing their best to clean things up. I walked up and down the length of the beach, tucking some seashells into my pocket. I lifted up a toppled lounge chair and sat in the sun, staring out at the water. There was such a rough edge to the day, it was almost more appealing than when things were perfectly manicured. Regardless of your stress level, the view of an endless body of water, the same one that generations and generations of vacationers before you have stared out at, can serve to remind you that in the scheme of things, you and your problems fade into insignificance.

  Did I really care that Slaid might beat me on this story? Yes and no. I was more concerned about getting the whole story and getting it right than getting it into the paper before he did. How many times had journalists cut corners to file a story before another paper or news station, only to realize that they didn’t get the story quite right, and went ahead when they should have showed restraint.

  But what really infuriated me was the way Slaid had played me. First he was the true friend, the colleague, not a competitor. He established a rapport, put me at ease. Was there even a sparkle of interest in his eye? And then bam!, when my guard was down, he made sure that I’d be too exhausted to get up and leave while he skipped off to the airport to be at his desk before I opened my eyes.

  What I really wanted to know was how hard he had leaned on Reilly and what he had gotten from him. Reilly would never have offered that he was footing the bill for the entire group. At best, he would have fabricated some convoluted story. Of course, Slaid had ways of getting information though, and maybe if he confronted Reilly with what he’d found, Reilly wouldn’t be able to deny it.

  Taking another approach, Slaid had dated his fair share of models and celebrities. Maybe he knew Reilly from the L.A.–New York party scene or from movie premiers or restaurant openings. Maybe they even had girlfriends in common. In any case, it was useful to make a friend out of someone who was a member of the press, especially someone of Slaid’s professional stature. Instant access when you needed to get out a message. Hollywood hotshots got off on publicity and recognition. Sometimes they talked too much.

  I had a few hours before I left. It would be my last chance to talk to Reilly. I went back to my room and changed and put on makeup. It was lunchtime, he’d probably be somewhere near the restaurant. Sure enough, he was sitting at an outdoor table, this time alone. It looked as though he had just finished eating.

  “Hey, movie man,” I said. “Want company?” He gestured for me to sit down.

  “When do you leave?”

  “At eight.”

  “Your pal Warren took off at the crack of dawn, I think,” he said. He looked at me for confirmation.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said. I turned in early, well, early in the morning. I don’t think he believed me.

  “I have to ask you something,” I said, trying a last-ditch approach.

  “Shoot.”

  “Did you bring the crew from the film office down here?”

  “Is this Jenny George the reporter talking now?” He leaned into me and smiled in a way that crinkled the corners of his eyes. His recognition unsettled me for a minute, but it shouldn’t have. How could I possibly have thought that he didn’t know who I was?

  “That’s the only Jenny George there is,” I said, softly using the same approach to him that he’d tried to use on me. The truth was, I really didn’t want to hurt him. I had grown to like him, even feel sorry for him in some inexplicable way. Still, I didn’t want to hear something that was off the record.

  “Here’s my idea. Why don’t we spend the afternoon together getting to know each other…and I’ll tell you more about the way I do business.”

  I looked at Reilly for a long minute and he held my eyes. Was this some kind of sexual quid pro quo?

  “I need to know more about the way you do business right now,” I said, looking at him levelly, keeping my voice as calm as Ellen’s when she was on the air. “Slaid Warren’s working on his column about you and the film office and so am I. I want to get it right, Jack, and I don’t want to hurt you. I like you, I really do.”

  “I’m flying back to New York in three hours. Do you want to join me?” I thought about flying back on his Learjet instead of being scrunched up in economy class. Hard to say no, however, it was a suicidal career move. I shook my head. He got up and pushed his chair in.

  “You write what you have to, newspaper lady,” he said softly. “But I hope you get it right, because if you don’t,” he added, leaning so close to me that our lips almost brushed, “I’m going to sue the pants off you and your paper, and the only thing that you’ll have to cover yourself up with will be the First Amendment.” He started to walk away, but I called him back.

  “Jack.”

  He turned and waited.

  “Someone in hotel administration showed me your bill.”

  He looked surprised for a minute and then recovered. “When all else fails, use the bluff,” he said.

  I gave him an enigmatic smile and walked the other way.

  Chapter Twelve

  I got home close to midnight. Chris was sitting up in bed with the TV on Jay Leno. I dropped my bag and went over to him.

  “Hey, stranger,” I said. “I missed you.”

  “Missed you too,” he said, hugging me. I couldn’t help glancing around the room. Except for a shirt on the floor and the unmade bed, things weren’t tossed all over the place the way I expected to find them.

  Quickly, I ran to my closet and pulled out the present. He looked at it and then got his gift from under the bed. Without speaking we unwrapped the boxes. He stared at the bag for a moment and didn’t say anything. “Thanks,” he said awkwardly. “It’s great.”

  I tore open the red paper on his gift and lifted the cover of the box. I lifted out a blue cashmere cardigan. “It’s beautiful,” I said. “I love it.”

  I stared around the room. “You even cleaned up for my return,” I said. “I’m impressed.”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been too busy to even spend any time here. Things were all screwed up at the office…” He shrugged and didn’t go on. I was too exhausted to press him. I washed up and got into bed next to him and he flicked off the TV. Almost instinctually, I turned to him. We had been apart for almost a week. I wanted to devour him. He kissed me back briefly and then shook his head.

  “Jen, I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m just so bummed, I’ve got to go to sleep.” I didn’t remember Chris ever turning me down. I was usually the one pleading exhaustion or depression.

  “Sure,” I said. I rolled over and tried to sleep, but I was more consumed with listening to the sound of his breathing to see if he would go right to sleep or lie awake. I knew that I would. He got moody occasionally, who didn’t? But this wasn’t like him. I decided not to dwell on it. Maybe it was just the pressure of the job getting to him. And at any rate, the last thing I wanted right now—as selfish as it seemed—was to be thinking about problems with Chris. I had enough on my head with the way the story was going—or wasn’t. If I started dwelling on what was going wrong in our relationship, it would sap me of all the energy I needed at work.

  Of course, Chris went right to sleep, while most of the night I lay there imagining every possible scenario of what was ahead, not only between me and Chris, but also with Slaid’s upcoming column. He would beat me, I’d play catch-up and my reporting would look weak and lackluster to my colleagues. My ego was on the line. I had to do better than him, especially after the way he fled St. Croix, leaving me behind, oblivious.

  I tried to relax by fixating on mind-numbing things like the arrangement of the furniture in the room. That usually helped. But now, it felt as though my brain was prisoner to some drug that kept me alert.

  In the early-morning light, I felt calmer, more secure. I wouldn’t worry last night to death. I’d act as though nothing had happened. Maybe I had just overreacted. So I was a
way. His life went on and he was entitled to be depressed if things at work weren’t going well. There was a lot of pressure to get the copy right, and he was the lead writer on the ad campaign. Maybe being on his own made things worse because he had no one else to share the burden with. It was a new day, we’d start over.

  When I woke up, I wanted Chris even more. We needed to make love, reconnect with each other. But I rolled over and found his side of the bed empty. I got up and went into the living room. Was he up having coffee? Then I saw the note on the table:

  Jen: Had to rush off to an early meeting. See you tonight. C

  With the column to write, I couldn’t let my mind wander. Years before, I had a boyfriend who taught me a very useful skill—compartmentalizing.

  “I don’t worry about things until I have to,” he said.

  I remember looking back at him quizzically.

  “You don’t stop worrying,” he said. “You just decide that right now the time’s not right and you tell yourself that you’ll worry about that issue more productively when it is.”

  It sounded completely ridiculous at the time, impossible to follow. I was sure that there was no way I’d be able to rigidly control my thinking. Eventually, however, with everything I had to do each day, I found out that I could do it, even had to do it. It was a survival mechanism that prevented me from frittering away my time unproductively. In fact, it was like establishing a mental to-do list that brought some order to a chaotic mind.

  Slaid’s column came out the day after I got back. I grabbed the newspaper and opened to his page, scanning the column. At first I thought that I was reading the wrong one. It had nothing to do with Reilly or the movie business. The headline threw me:

  Who Doesn’t Have Time to Volunteer?

  WHAT? A column about a new program to get more New Yorkers involved in volunteering? That came out of left field. Now I was consumed with wondering what he had or didn’t have, and why he was holding off writing about Reilly and the city.

  No matter what he knew, my ace in the hole, however, were those few words out of Alex’s mouth that told me all I needed to know. “There is no competition. Lerner and Dateline send mugs and flashlight key chains. You’re the only class act in town.” My version of things, written from the point of view of a firsthand observer, would be stronger than anything that he could come up with.

  As it turned out, there would be mystery on both ends. I didn’t have time to finish my column either, so I used one unrelated to Reilly as well—on library budget cuts.

  “Libraries, huh?” he laughed.

  I didn’t say anything, and anyway, I was still seething.

  “You decided to save his ass?”

  “Not exactly,” I said, a trifle patronizing. I didn’t go on to explain.

  “We both know he’s finished, he hung himself,” Slaid said.

  “First of all, it’s ‘hanged’ himself,” I said impatiently. “Pictures are hung, people are hanged.”

  “I’m—”

  “Don’t…” I said.

  “So how did things with you and Reilly end up?”

  “Oh please,” I said, hanging up.

  The truth was, Jack Reilly was right—I tried to bluff him, and he caught me. I knew what the story was, it was just that I couldn’t prove it—yet. The hotel computer confirmed what I suspected, but that wasn’t something I could put into the column. And if I rushed to print something and made a mistake, I would open myself and the paper to a big fat lawsuit. I knew that he had paid for the trip, I just had to find the proof. What I really needed was his American Express bill, a receipt if he had paid cash, or some other explanation why he didn’t need to provide a credit card number and neither did the others from the mayor’s film office.

  I sat at my desk, getting depressed. How would I possibly get what I needed? When all else fails, go back to the clips, read over everything that has been done on the person you’re interested in a second time to see if there is something that you missed.

  I noticed that one of our reporters did a story on Reilly a few years before that I hadn’t read. It mentioned the names of several executives in the company. I noted them down and then checked to see whether they still worked for him. It turned out that a former vice president—Keith Watson—left to open his own production house and that he had an office in New York as well as L.A. He had had differences with Reilly, one of the stories said. That immediately opened up a window of opportunity. Disgruntled employees make good sources, but first I checked to see which, if any, of our reporters might have interviewed him. Keith’s name came up in a financial story. His office told me that he was out of town, so I called the reporter who wrote the story and she gave me his cell number. I called, and he agreed to talk to me.

  We had an amicable meeting a few days later in his office in Turtle Bay, a largely residential part of Manhattan that’s close to the East River. Keith’s company wasn’t in Reilly’s league—he had only been on his own for a few years. He briefly mentioned differences with Reilly, but he didn’t specify what they were. At the end of our discussion, I popped the question.

  “Keith, I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position or anything—but I know how expensive and overwhelming it can be to film in New York City and that the mayor is eager to attract new business here.” I paused, and he nodded.

  “But what I’m concerned about is whether city officials may have crossed the line and are either using taxpayers’ money to treat themselves to lavish trips to invite business here or whether Reilly’s trying to get favors by paying for Caribbean trips taken by city officials.”

  Keith smiled. “Jen, I don’t know whether he did or not…not that it wouldn’t be his style to buy his way…but I can give you the phone number of the girl who used to be his secretary, maybe she can help.”

  “Used to be?”

  “She left,” he said.

  “Why should she talk to me?”

  “Well…” He paused. “She didn’t leave under the most opportune circumstances.”

  “Oh?”

  “You didn’t hear it from me,” he said, “but rumor has it that she was sleeping with him, and rumor has it that things didn’t end all that well.”

  “I’d love her phone number,” I said, sitting up straight. He pressed a few keys on his keyboard and then wrote down the number on a piece of paper and slid it across the desk to me.

  I left the office feeling as though someone had given me the winning lottery numbers. I had no real reason to get so excited, but my sixth sense told me that I had hit pay dirt.

  Hell has no wrath like a woman scorned, and Marilyn Morgan was living proof. We met at the bar of the W Hotel in Union Square, and I had no trouble finding her, the tall redhead with pale skin and cat green eyes among a sea of far more ordinary-looking women.

  “Mmm, I worked for Jack in L.A. for almost a year, and then I moved here,” she said, sipping a gin and tonic and leaving a dark lipstick stain on the white straw. It didn’t take much imagination to picture her next to Reilly. In her fitted black suit with short flared skirt that showed her long legs, she looked like the type that was used to getting in and out of black limos, not to mention black negligees. We chatted about how she got the job—through an actress friend who knew Reilly—and what he was like to work for.

  “Cool…charming…testosterone driven. Easy to get along with unless you got on his bad side.”

  “So why did you leave?” I asked.

  She looked at me quizzically for a moment, then smiled benignly as if she had made the decision to destroy him.

  “Jack and I had an affair for almost five months,” she said in a deep, kind of smoky voice. “It began less than a month after I started working for him. We were together a lot, worked late, had dinner together all the time, often with clients, but sometimes not….” She looked off, as if reliving it. “It was almost inevitable. After a month or two, he realized how helpful I could be to the company, and he started taking
me on business trips with him out of town.” She held her head up high. “On the rare occasions when his wife would leave town, he would stay over at my place.” She described the places they went—the upscale West Coast resorts, the Hawaiian Islands and the Caribbean.

  “It was like a honeymoon. Plus I got paid well and he taught me the business. Eventually I became more of a partner than an assistant, going out with directors, actors and actresses on my own and bringing in considerable business.” She dropped names along the way of superstars with whom she had worked in film. But then her face clouded over and she looked down at the table.

  “Then at some point, I had the feeling that he’d met someone else,” she said. “I thought it was a young actress who he wanted to lure for an upcoming film…. He kept asking me to find out where she was and how he could reach her.” She shrugged. “He was always looking to sleep with women he’d just met…I think he needed the validation.”

  “When was that?”

  “Sometime in March of last year.”

  I held back asking who it was, not wanting to stop her recollection. “I didn’t find out at the time, but he started traveling more on his own, not always explaining where he was going and who he was with. Once he told me he would be in Europe and needed me to stay behind.” She pushed a stray lock of hair back off her face.

  “Then one day, someone called up saying that she had to cancel dinner. She had a soft, breathy voice—familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. I asked her to leave her name, but all she gave me was her first name. She said he’d know who it was. I realized instantly that she was Jack’s latest conquest.” I watched her shaking around the ice cubes in her drink, reliving the moment. I waited for her to go on.