What Men Want

by Deborah Blumenthal

  After circling the ads that I wanted to call on, I made a list of corporations that I could hit up for donations to our party. I’d already called the publisher of my paper, next I’d try the Trib, Slaid’s paper.

  We hadn’t talked since my nasty outburst, although he did send one e-mail with the subject line that read, “Addendum to hang-up.” I deleted the message without opening it. He deserved it, he’d acted infantile, and since he’d never as much as throw me a crumb, what was the point of the clever repartee? Still, I suppose that I had regrets. It wasn’t necessary to be testy and hostile. I could have just said that I preferred not to converse with the competition. Did the drama critic from the Times talk to the drama critic from the Post? Did The New Yorker talk to New York Magazine about its coverage? Of course not. So why did we have to engage in such ridiculous exchanges?

  But now, I was concerning myself with something real, and I was sure that the Trib would want to be part of it. We were all on the side of helping kids. So when the assistant to the publisher told me that they wouldn’t be contributing to my effort, needless to say, I was surprised.

  “Oh, I’m disappointed,” I said.

  “Well, Ms. George,” the publisher’s assistant said, “it’s not that we don’t support your effort, it’s just that this year, the Trib has decided to host a fund-raiser of its own.”

  “Oh,” I said, surprised.

  “Yes,” she said. “We were motivated by all the stories on TV and in the papers about the homeless, so we’re holding a fund-raiser just before Valentine’s Day too.”

  I didn’t say anything for a minute.

  “Really? Who’s heading up the effort,” I said. “Maybe we can join forces.”

  “Well, that would be up to the publisher,” she said.

  “Can I talk with him?”

  “He’s out of town, Ms. George. But you can talk to the committee chair.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What’s her name?”

  “Actually, it’s a him,” she said. “Slaid Warren.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  There’s nothing that does a better job at chipping away at your sense of self than an apartment search. No matter your budget, it’s a paltry sum in the eyes of a real estate agent. They gloat over the fact that you’re competing with people who are better off, urging you to grab that downstairs apartment, never mind that it’s dark and dank.

  After giving up on finding a decent rental, I looked into buying a co-op. Yes, I’d have to plunk down a chunk of money, but assuming I could get it together, I was planning for my future and real estate was always a sound investment. I started looking on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, but when I found out that prices in doorman buildings were really out of my reach, I moved on to the West Side, and finally down to the Village.

  I kept looking and eventually came upon a studio in a building on University Place in the Village. It was a prewar building with some small studio apartments that had a view of Washington Square Park just across the street. After putting down a binder, about ten percent of the purchase price, I began to put together all my financial information, not to mention those ridiculous letters of recommendation that would then be scrutinized by the co-op board who would then rule on my acceptability as a neighbor.

  “Just write it yourself and I’ll sign it,” Marty said when I asked him to write a letter testifying to my upstanding character. I had also asked Ellen and a federal judge who had become a tennis partner to write letters on my behalf, and those went a long way to compensate for my lack of a million-dollar salary. Within a week, I had collected all the financial documents that I needed and then turned my thoughts back to the fundraiser. I didn’t relish the thought of contacting Slaid, but I knew that I had to. He was trying to one-up me again, and I was determined to confront him. But first, I decided to use my column—writing a story in two parts—as a forum for laying out the problem and then soliciting donations. I usually don’t do things like that, but in this case, I made an exception, and fortunately my editor didn’t object.

  No Place Called Home

  Eight-year-old Laverne Jones doesn’t go to bed the same time each night the way other boys his age do. And he doesn’t sit down at the dinner table at six or seven or even eight the way other boys do.

  Why?

  Because he doesn’t have a bed of his own, a place to have breakfast or dinner. In fact, he doesn’t even have a place called home. Laverne and his mother, Laura, are two of the many thousands of New Yorkers who were evicted from their apartments because they couldn’t pay the rent. So now, they are shuttled from one part of the city to the other where City Services assigns them to spend the night. School, when he can get there, is a poor elementary school in the Bronx that doesn’t have enough chairs for all the students or even rooms to put them.

  When it was Christmastime, Laverne Jones didn’t find any gifts under the Christmas tree, because when you’re homeless you don’t have a tree or a place to put one if you did. Christmas is a holiday that you celebrate in your head, because there’s no money for presents and not even for a Christmas dinner. On Christmas Day, Laverne and his mother went to McDonald’s and had a hamburger and fries. Then they went back to the city office to wait around until they were told where they could spend the night.

  And then my pitch:

  Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is

  Instead of buying your loved one Belgian chocolate for Valentine’s Day, French champagne or long-stemmed roses, you can show your heart’s in the right place by giving to kids who aren’t showered with love and affection. At eight o’clock on Saturday evening, I’m proud to announce that I’m joining forces with TV reporter Ellen Gaines to host a fundraiser to help kids who through no fault of their own don’t have a place called home.

  I usually don’t use this space to advertise for needy causes, but the number of kids without homes is growing every year, and none of us can afford to look away. Imagine your life without a regular bed to sleep in. Without a refrigerator to hold eggs and bread. Without a place to shower. Imagine not knowing where you were going after school—assuming you even went to school. Imagine sleeping on the subway or bus because you were exhausted and didn’t have a bed of your own.

  About 17,000 kids in New York don’t have to imagine what it would be like—they know….

  The column brought an outpouring of support, not only from colleagues, but also from readers who were happy to find someone in the media using her clout for the public good.

  “We’re getting tremendous interest,” Ellen said a day later. She did her part by making a quick announcement of the benefit on the morning news show, even though she was never on camera at that hour.

  Interesting that Slaid didn’t call. But then I opened the paper and saw how he’d filled his space.

  Open Your Heart and Open Your Home

  Instead of thinking of buying gifts for a loved one this Valentine’s Day, how about showing your love of New York by hosting a small dinner party devoted to raising money for people who don’t have homes of their own? This is a call to New Yorkers to gather around their dinner tables the weekend before Valentine’s Day. You don’t have to live on Park Avenue to take part. You don’t have to have a real dining room at all. And your party doesn’t have to be large. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Just a party of six, eight, ten people or twelve, depending on the size of your apartment or house. Instead of having your guests bring wine or dessert, ask them to make a donation to help the homeless…it’s as simple as that.

  I hated to admit it, but his approach was brilliant. Instead of feeling intimated about coming to a black-tie event, or writing a check that was sizable enough, he suggested a more modest effort that could have a far wider reach and involve more people than we could ever hope to bring in. Smart. Destined to succeed. But I resented his imitating our project, and taking some of the wattage out of our effort by staging his at the same time.

  But I’d be big about it. I wouldn’t call hi
m or denigrate his effort. We were both working for the good of people who had a lot less than we did. He’d oversee his network of parties and I’d host the black-tie fund-raiser with Ellen. A lot of money was needed, and one plan wouldn’t bring it all in.

  If Chris were in town, I would have called his agency to help with advertising. But he wasn’t, and I called someone at Omnicom, the biggest ad agency I knew. I was beginning to accept that he was gone and it was over. I thought of him in Paris, watching Bridget pose for covers of French and Italian Vogue. I enjoyed imagining him squirming in his seat as she spent hours having her makeup done and her clothes fitted and accessorized before she got to the point of sitting in front of the camera. And then once she did, I imagined him sitting by idly as the photographer moved her this way and that until he got the right picture. It would torture him.

  I remembered the one and only time that he came with me to keep me company while I had a manicure. He sat there, uncomfortable, as if he had come from outer space and didn’t understand what he was seeing. Finally, he got up and went out for a walk. I called him on the cell when I was ready to leave.

  Of course, once they got back to their room after some fabulous coq au vin, perhaps, and an aged Merlot, he’d forget about how bored he’d been. Her perfect body would be clad in French underwear from a Parisian boutique that only the cognoscente knew about. It would be lime green or sea foam, and he’d lie in bed watching her undress, as if a present was being unwrapped for him. They’d make love and then maybe go out on the balcony and in the darkness watch the twinkling lights of the Bateaux-Mouches carrying tourists along the Seine.

  I refused to think about him making love to her, especially when I was still sleeping in his bed. It didn’t help that I dreamed about them. And it didn’t help when I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, only to kick something small and light that skidded across the hardwood floor. I turned on a light and walked over to see something gold and glittery. I lifted it up, and held it to the light, trying to focus my eyes. It looked like a child’s necklace, and then I realized that no, it was an ankle bracelet with tiny pearls and diamonds. Engraved on a small gold plate in the middle was the word Bridget. I turned it over. The other side said, Chris.

  Just before my fund-raiser, Jack Reilly called me. He was the last one I expected to hear from after the story ran.

  “Your column got to me. Even I have a heart.”

  He said he wanted to send me a check for the event. I felt uncomfortable taking money from him, so I told him I was in the middle of something and that I’d call him back. Then I went to discuss it with Marty.

  “As long as he isn’t writing the check to you,” he said with a smirk. I called Reilly back and told him he could mail me the check and gave him the name of the group to make it out to.

  “I’m going down to St. Croix. I wanted to thank you for being the driving force behind changing my life.”

  “Jesus, Jack, you’re something else.” My article had no doubt sicced the D.A. on him, and now he was thanking me?

  “I admire you,” he said. “I really do. You’ve got your head on straight.”

  If he only knew. “Well, it’s not on straight,” I said. “It just looks that way compared to the posture of some of the people who I write about.”

  “Well, I hope we can have dinner when I’m back,” he said. I didn’t say anything.

  Ellen was heading up to the Adirondacks to see Moose and she invited me along. I was prepared to protest. I’d be the third wheel, I was about to say. I’d get in the way. But I really wanted to go. We hadn’t been together in so long, and I had been working so hard without a break. Just a few days out of the city would help me clear my head. I’d see how things went. I could always go off sight-seeing on my own for a few hours, if they wanted time to themselves.

  There was also something particularly inviting about going to a place that was bitingly cold. It was a test of you against nature. And of course, I would be getting away from Chris’s apartment. Somewhere in my bitter musings, I decided that until I got board approval for my co-op, I wasn’t budging. If that inconvenienced him, it was too bad. He could wait it out at Bridget’s place.

  Ellen and I flew to Albany and then boarded a small commuter plane to Lake Placid. Moose met us at the airport in a pickup. Next to him, on the passenger seat, was a black-and-white Border collie. Her name was Sadie. Moose told her to jump into the back seat. She looked at us suspiciously for a moment, but then complied.

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “Twelve,” Moose said, shaking his head slightly. “She’s getting up there.” Sadie looked over at him lovingly, and then settled down on the blanket on the back seat and went to sleep.

  He drove us to his house. When he opened the door, unlocked, it was as appealing as Ellen had described it.

  “You’ll always have a fallback career as a designer,” I said, looking around at the spacious layout of the log cabin with the giant fireplace in the middle of the living room and all the bright colors of upholstery fabric on the rustic furniture, artfully arranged. “This should be photographed for a home-design magazine.”

  “It was,” Moose said, clearly nonchalant by the whole thing. “The wife of a college buddy of mine was up here with him and she’s an editor at House & Home. A crew came up and moved things around a little, and then took pictures.”

  “Did you get offers to buy it?”

  “Oh sure,” he said. “That always happens.”

  I got the tour of the kitchen—pine cabinets and concrete counters that he poured himself, and a wooden floor made of some type of barn siding. There was a large round dining table in the center of the room that, of course, he had made as well. Moose showed me a small sleeping loft, just above the living room, where there was a queen-size mattress covered with red flannel sheets and a down comforter. There was a skylight above it. During the day the room was filled with sun. At night there would be a view of the stars.

  “And here I thought that you were some kind of hermit living in an outhouse-size place when Chris first told me about you,” I said.

  He smiled. “A little money goes a long way up here, especially if you can do the work yourself.”

  While he didn’t have a regular job, Moose did carpentry work to earn money, and also wrote for various outdoor magazines. In the summer, he worked as a tour guide, and also had a small business making custom fly-fishing rods.

  He obviously had a talent (the carpentry gene?). Could anyone just learn those skills or did you need to be wired to know how to build things and understand the laws of physics? What seems logical and natural to someone adept at using their hands is incomprehensible to me. I didn’t share that with Moose, but I’m sure that he already knew it.

  After coffee and sandwiches, we got into his truck with Sadie and he showed us the area. We drove down the main street of town that looked like a set design out of the forties. Then we drove to Lake Placid, sometimes dubbed Lake Plastic because the shops and restaurants are upscale—and so are the prices of real estate. I couldn’t resist buying a pair of white furry Eskimo boots. Moose looked at me as if I was out of mind paying what I did. Of course, he could probably make a similar pair, except these, to my great relief, were made of fake fur. One less animal to slaughter.

  I didn’t discuss that with Moose. The more time I spent with him and Ellen, the more I began to think that he had it right. But did that mean that everyone should follow in his footsteps and give up city life for the wilderness? I didn’t know if I could survive up here. I wondered about Ellen.

  We walked halfway around Mirror Lake before going back to Moose’s for dinner. After pasta with homemade marinara sauce, salad, bread and wine, he made a fire and we sat watching it.

  “How’s Chris?” Moose asked.

  “Sore subject,” Ellen said.

  “He’s in Paris with Bridget, the model for Model Thin, the diet drink he’s writing about,” I said.

 
; He looked at me, surprised, and shook his head. “I don’t give that long.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s sort of commitment phobic.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He dated a lot of girls in college, but he never seemed to stay with them for very long.”

  “Why do you think that was?”

  “His parents were never any role models when it came to stability,” he said. “They divorced and moved around a lot, never finding the right people to share their lives with.”

  “We were together for over a year.”

  “So what about you?” Ellen asked. “Didn’t you have some kind of celebrity relationship?” I couldn’t believe that she’d just asked him outright. I didn’t add that we had the picture of him and Kelly Cartwright.

  “For a while,” he said.

  “What happened?” Ellen asked.

  “She went back to Hollywood to make another film.”

  “Did she break your heart?”

  Moose looked at Ellen as though he was trying to figure out how much his answer meant to her. He shook his head.

  “It was a fling—anyway, women usually give up on me,” he said. “They don’t think of this place as an antidote to civilization the way I do. For me, it’s home, and I’m not going anyplace else.”

  “Not even New York?” I said in exaggerated disbelief.

  “Not likely.”

  I smiled at Moose. He was a misfit, in a good way. He didn’t fit in with the people that I knew and lived among, but he was an original. Moose knew himself and his needs. And he was principled. That alone would make him appeal to Ellen. If only she could figure out a way to make their relationship work geographically.