What Men Want Read online

  But when it came to boyfriends, it seemed as though I was stuck buying the same clichéd goodies year after year—a new lamb’s-wool crewneck or a cashmere turtleneck sweater, a couple of whimsical ties from MOMA, although I really couldn’t remember the last time Chris wore one, and the old fall-back staples like the latest tomes of nonfiction (or anything by Stephen Ambrose) or the Swiss Army knife with multipurpose pullout tools that could do jobs ranging from opening beer bottles to jump-starting cars.

  Fortunately, Chris wasn’t obsessed with material wealth. He worked in advertising and was an REI (you know, the sporty catalog) kind of guy. His hair was dirty blond and he had pale blue eyes. His wardrobe? Think of Wranglers, Frye boots, pullover sweaters, T-shirts, a beat-up leather baseball jacket and one or two preppie-looking sport jackets. I don’t think that he owned a serious tie. If he ever wore ties, I wasn’t around to see it. In fact, the only time I remember seeing him take a tie out of his closet was when he decided to tie my hands together one day, on a whim, after we had finished a bottle of particularly good champagne and were feeling, well, experimental.

  I wanted to give him something that would remind him of me whenever he looked at it. Something that he would keep for ages that would get even better with time, like a great leather jacket. So pj’s were out, which he never wore anyway, and so was a bathrobe, even though I loved the thick terry ones that were as cozy as down on a cold night. Of course, Chris never got cold, and when he did, he pulled on a hooded gray sweatshirt.

  I walked the aisles of Saks, and then headed uptown to Bloomingdale’s—the after-hours pastime of every red-blooded, material New York woman. I started out in the men’s fragrance area sniffing one cologne after another until my nerve receptors were on overload and I was unable to tell the differences and was getting a dull headache. What was I doing? Chris didn’t wear cologne anyway—hated it, he once said—still I felt I had to cover all the bases. The store was hot, crowded and overheated—big surprise—and I peeled off my coat. The truth was, Chris was Dial-soap clean and on-sale shampoo. He had a full bottle of Calvin Klein body wash that was a gift from way back that he had never even opened.

  Finally, I picked out a great camel-colored leather overnight bag with lots of side pockets, which I knew that I’d probably use more than he would. It had great brass hardware, and I knew the leather would soften with age and look better the more he used it. Of course, he didn’t travel much—it was always tough for him to get away from the office, especially since he worked on so many different accounts, and inevitably seemed to be on deadline.

  As I stood in line to pay for the bag, it occurred to me that if Chris ever decided to leave me, he would be walking out in style, a disturbing thought. I bought it anyway, and as I was making my way out of the store, I passed a display for Calvin Klein underwear. I stopped and stared at the advertisement showing just the midsection of a very, very well-toned Men’s Health–type cover boy. Was it retouched, or was there a real man who actually looked like that? While it was a body that every woman craved to run her hands over, it was also the body of a man who spent countless hours working on himself. After using up all that strength for self-improvement, what did men like that have left to offer women? Undoubtedly, perfection took its toll. I put the package of briefs that I had in my hand back on the rack.

  When I got home, I wedged the overnight bag into the back of my closet, even though I knew that if I dropped it in the middle of the living-room floor, Chris would step over it without even realizing what it was. My timing was perfect.

  “Hey,” he said, coming through the door, as if on cue. How could I miss the cherry-red Saks shopping bag under his arm? Now, that was sweet. He had been shopping too. He wasn’t one to breeze into Saks and buy himself something. He’d sit at the computer and log on to Lands’ End and order whatever in blue (safe because it matched his eyes), or maybe green, yellow, on a whim. The only time he actually went shopping was when he was under the gun and just about out of shirts or sweaters, or if he found that the cuffs of his pants were frayed just before he had an appointment with a client.

  I’ll never forget the time that he needed a tuxedo for an awards ceremony. I took him to Macy’s (a daunting outing no matter how much you needed a store that offered variety) and he had a panicked look on his face like he was visiting an alien planet. He tried on jacket after jacket and stared at himself in the mirror as though he were trying to fit himself into a space suit. Personally, I thought that he looked adorable in black-tie, but that didn’t matter. After trying on the twentieth suit—I lost count—he finally just shook as if he were having a seizure and let the jacket shimmy down his arms and drop to the floor.

  “I’m not wearing one of these suckers,” he said, walking off and leaving it there. I waited for a moment to see if he went back to spit on it, but instead he strode out of the store as if he had just gleefully submitted his resignation from a dead-end job. He ended up going in a plain black wool suit with a ruffled tuxedo shirt and colorful red-and-black satin bow tie with a Mickey Mouse design on it that he bought in a children’s store.

  But now, package in hand, I could see that at least he had made the effort and had gone to a respectable store rather than a vintage junk shop recommended by one of the twentysomething art directors that he worked with, and it thrilled me. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the vintage polyester shifts in avocado-and-orange prints, or the glam o’rama sequined cardigans that you can find downtown on Broadway or in Soho. It’s just that I’m not the beanpole-model type who can carry off those quirky looks and appear as though I’m wearing what’s ahead on the runway for Prada. On me, they just look peculiar and “what was I thinking?”

  Not that I’m a classics girl by any means. When we first met, Chris got me a bottle of Chanel No. 5. Nice, traditional, but I had never worn it and never would. Everyone’s supposed to love the fragrance, of course, but to me it smells off, like something musty that you find on a dusty dressing table when you’re cleaning out the apartment of your dead grandmother. (He couldn’t have known that I was an Yves Saint Laurent fan—he was a copywriter not a nose.) Obviously, he had been taken under the wing of a saleswoman who saw his vulnerability and promised him, “You can’t go wrong with a classic scent.”

  “So,” I said, looking at everything but the bag. “How was work?”

  “Okay,” he said in a distant voice, like a child who hasn’t decompressed yet after coming home from school. Chris worked for a top Madison Avenue ad agency, a job that was as cool as a real job could be. Most of the employees shlumped around in jeans, T-shirts and carpenter’s overalls. The rare occasions when guys showed up in a suit and tie brought the expected droll comment from passersby:

  “Job interview?”

  Invariably, the answer was a small, somber shake of the head and then the barely audible utterance “funeral,” even though it was rarely, if ever, the case.

  Chris’s office resembled a teenager’s bedroom or something out of the Pottery Barn Teens catalog, with orange blow-up chairs, a white fluffy woolen rug, a boom box where he played his favorite CDs all day and a blue denim couch where he took naps or just stretched his legs to increase blood flow to the brain to boost creativity, or at least consciousness.

  Some copywriters and art directors even used their offices as if they were their primary residences, especially after divorces, when it was no surprise to see someone walking in with a blanket and pillow under their arm. It was that laid-back.

  Even though Chris didn’t shop much, he enjoyed coming with me to stores like Urban Outfitters where I always picked up whimsical versions of ordinary T-shirts and denim skirts, and he bought kitschy things for his office like copies of old-fashioned metal lunch boxes, a Venus-flytrap coin bank and a plastic-and-chrome clock that looked as if it belonged in a fifties-style diner.

  Did I mention the teen-room design made sense because Chris had just turned thirty-two, (although he looked twenty-one) and he was almo
st four years younger than I am? Whatever.

  Anyway, there was almost a carnival atmosphere at the agency most of the time—except when a client would call to say that there was a change in the marketing calendar because the CEO had to fly to London, and they needed to see a new campaign in two weeks instead of two months. Then laid-back employees snapped to, turning into frantic martinets who invariably came up with something brilliant to save their asses and careers.

  “We got a new account,” Chris said, dropping his overstuffed army-green military-surplus backpack in the middle of the living room. He kicked off his boots and stretched his legs out on our new white duck Pottery Barn couch with the down-wrapped cushions. It replaced the couch shrouded in black cotton that Chris had found on Craig’s List offered for free to anyone who would pick it up in Staten Island.

  Our new couch was the first piece of furniture that we bought together, not counting the cheapo coffee table from West Elm. Eventually, we hoped to buy chairs and decent lamps to go with the couch.

  I raised my eyebrows.

  “A liquid diet,” he said, unenthused.

  “Another one?”

  He closed his eyes and nodded.

  “What’s it called?”

  “That’s my job,” he said, frowning. “The client was toying with ‘skinny shake,’ but when they proposed it, the conference room went silent so they gave me a week to come up with something to make it fly.”

  I screwed up my face. Would clones of Metrecal, the meal-in-a-can diet drink that my mother tried long ago, be reborn again and again? I remembered the commercials showing the likely candidates for the drink—two girls walking along a beach wearing sweatshirts to cover up their chubby bodies.

  A new generation of suckers is born every minute, I guess, and that was what Madison Avenue banked on. It always amazed me that Chris made twice the money that I did by coming up with ways of selling products that nobody needed but everybody bought because they were convinced that they did, at least until something new came along to take its place.

  “Striptease,” I said.

  “Striptease,” he repeated, bobbing his head from left to right like a wooden doll with a spring-loaded head. Knowing Chris, it would take him a while to rule on it. “Striptease.” Still bobbing. He shook his head finally.

  “Wouldn’t work for Middle America.”

  “Wanna eat out?” I said, changing the subject.

  “Whatever,” he said, shrugging. “Oh, Moose is in town,” he said, coming over and briefly nuzzling my neck before going over to the refrigerator. Moose was his college roommate. “Maybe we should set up a dinner.” I nodded.

  I think the reason that Chris and I stayed together for going on a year now was that he was so easy to get along with. Sometimes to a fault. If I wanted to eat Indian food, he went along. Stay home and call for Chinese? Fine. Campbell’s tomato soup and saltines? A nod of his head. Sometimes I was tempted to just shake him:

  “Tell me that you’re in the mood for Ecuadorian food, if there is such a thing, or god-awful brown rice and steamed vegetables. Why do you always have to be so accommodating?” But what was the point? Create tension because there was none?

  I reached up and tugged on a rebellious lock of his hair, then pushed back the little-boy bangs that flipped right down again. Chris was cute, everyone who met him thought so. He was also smart—smart enough in his quiet, sure way to dream up campaigns that brought clients millions of dollars. He was also modest. I remember how he told me, just in passing one day, that he had gotten perfect SAT scores. No wonder he had gotten into Yale and Princeton, even though he turned them down to go to Bard, a small, artsy school for brainy types who didn’t fit the Ivy League mold.

  We were a curious couple. I spent my days going through documents and public records, not to mention interviewing city and state officials to report on how an unending group of colorful characters tried to circumvent the law, all in the interest of telling readers the bald truth.

  Chris, on the other hand, wrote the copy for print ads and TV commercials trying to seduce consumers by obscuring the truth or dismissing it entirely, to convince them what should and could be. Sometimes I was tempted to change places with him so that I could have fun dreaming up ways to get consumers into the stores to buy the newest condiment concoction or over-the-counter remedy for everything from PMS to acid reflux.

  “Maybe we should change jobs,” I said. “I’ll come up with a campaign to sell black ketchup or Snapricot drink. You investigate the city parking violations bureau, and find out who’s on the take.”

  “No thanks,” Chris said. “Reality sucks.”

  “Reality sucks?” I guess I was in a dark mood because before I went shopping, I had to redo a column on deadline, which meant denying myself all food after eleven in the morning because I couldn’t spare the time to go to the cafeteria, and barely made it to the bathroom to pee. Because I have this low-blood-sugar thing, I have to eat every couple of hours—or “graze” as they say—otherwise I turn short-tempered and hostile—well, even more than usual.

  “The award-winning copywriter who brought us the Nike Nirvana campaign declares that he opts for fantasy, illusion and role playing rather than the world as it is? Thank you for negating my whole career and my whole life.” Chris looked at me and narrowed his eyes slightly as if he was trying to figure out what I needed to hear.

  “Do you want to eat a candy bar or take a nap or something, Jen?” he said, scratching the back of his neck.

  “Candy is exactly what I don’t want,” I said, making my way toward the refrigerator for real food, even though we didn’t have much because neither one of us had time to shop.

  “And I don’t need to take a nap,” I said, like a cranky kid who did. “And don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m not changing the subject,” Chris said, holding up his hands helplessly and backing off. He went over to the refrigerator and took out a carton of Tropicana Grovestand orange juice, forgetting, as usual, to shake it, so that all the thick pulp remained at the bottom. He screwed off the orange plastic top and raised the container, about to start drinking directly from it.

  “Oh my God, use a glass,” I said. “That’s so disgusting.” I was starting to describe for the twentieth time how his germs would go back into the container to multiply, when he said, “Okay, okay,” as he poured the last of it into a glass. He reached for another container and filled the glass to the top, then briefly played with the magnetic letters on the refrigerator door, rearranging them in a large arc pattern, spelling out the word C-R-I-S-I-S, the only word that ad agency types pay any attention to.

  I was always amused to hear his colleagues ask, “Why is there never time to do it right, but always time to do it over?”

  Chris took the glass of OJ, oblivious to the fact that he had poured it too full so the juice was swishing over the top as he sat in front of the TV. He put the glass down on the table, searching among our collection of remotes (the TV, the DVD, the VCR and the CD player), finally finding the right one, flipping it on and channel surfing until he landed at the six o’clock news. As usual, it was top heavy with sketchily reported stories of major traffic accidents, local fires and murders. We didn’t quite finish the back-and-forth about reality versus fantasy, but there was no point in continuing, I had lost him.

  That summed up the difference between men and women. He turned on the TV and I reached for the phone, sometimes more to hear my own voice than to talk to someone else. I had a colorful group of friends and depending on what was happening at the moment, I’d call the appropriate one. If all else failed, I called my mother.

  Advice columnists sometimes tell you that it’s healthy to argue. I suppose what they mean is that you keep the lines of communication open by voicing your differences rather than bottling them up. But Chris and I didn’t argue. Whenever I brought up something controversial, he considered it momentarily and then seemed to decide that it wasn’t worth raising his blood pre
ssure over. In fact, he had very low-blood pressure, a medical marker of potentially long life. Chris was cool in every sense. That was usually fine with me, but sometimes, I guess, I just wanted him to take me by the hair and push his own agenda, so to speak. The only time that I could recall seeing him get really angry was when he went downstairs to the parking lot one day and saw that someone had dented the passenger door of his new grass-green Volkswagen bug, scraping off a strip of paint. He began yelling out a string of obscenities, like a ranting madman, until he was almost hoarse, kicking everything in sight until he ran out of steam, not to mention almost breaking his big toe. He had the car fixed, and never said another word about it, except that every time we went down to get the car, I know that he eyed it from every angle like a private detective about to dust for fingerprints.

  Instead of picking on poor Chris anymore, I called Ellen Gaines, my former college roommate and best friend. First, I wanted to invite her to have dinner with us, and second, I needed to vent, something she understood particularly because she made a career of it. Ellen was a consumer reporter for ABC news and venting was her MO, in a nice way. It always amused me to watch her on TV where she looked not only perfectly coiffed, but also appeared to have this cool and controlled way of speaking, never raising her carefully modulated voice. Off the air, however, the reserve was put aside, and she could be as loud and abrasive as she wanted.

  If someone had a grievance and had nowhere else to turn, they contacted Ellen’s team, and if they were lucky enough to be one of the people that she and her staff had time to help, she inevitably got them satisfaction by holding the offenders up to public scrutiny. (It helps to shove a microphone in a scoff-law’s face as he’s on camera and ask him questions that he can’t answer like, “How could you rent out an apartment with broken windows and rats running around it?” and taking prompt legal action if he failed to rectify things on his own.)

  If only her own life was that simple. Ellen dated a succession of men, few of them leading to any long-term relationships. I was never sure whether she attracted dysfunctional guys or whether she was beaming out signals that said she didn’t want to get involved. Then again maybe they simply assumed that as a consumer reporter, if they did anything wrong, especially to her, she’d have the might at her fingertips to cut them off at the knees—or worse.