Deborah Blumenthal - What Men Want

“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. With 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.

“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.