What Men Want (2 page)

I
t was several weeks before Christmas and I left the office early to buy presents. There were no time clocks to punch. As long as my columns were in on time, my hours were my own. Unfortunately, that meant that I usually worked myself harder than any boss would have dared. News didn't stop for weekends or holidays, and neither did I. Almost any time of day or night, I might hear the first bars of “A Little Night Music,” my cell's ring
du jour.
If I could have figured how to do it, I would have used “A Hard Day's Night” or “Working on a Chain Gang.”

Every year I vowed to start squirreling away gifts in August, so that by December first I'd have the whole heap of them wrapped up all pretty and ready and I'd be spared any and all anxiety of what to buy and where to go. But that happens in the closets of
meticulous homemakers who take pleasure in offering gifts of homemade flavored vinegars in antique bottles bearing scalloped labels hand printed in olive-colored ink, following instructions they've clipped from the perfect holiday pages of
House & Garden
or
Real Simple.

It had been a year now that Chris and I had been living together. Since I had a one-bedroom apartment when we met and he had a two-, I moved in with him, a definite step up, so to speak from my small walk-up on the Upper East Side with no view to speak of.

Chris's apartment was open, airy and contemporary, a mix of Mies, Ikea and Craig's List. It was in Kips Bay, a modern high-rise complex in the East 30s designed by I. M. Pei with floor-to-ceiling picture windows and exterior walls of exposed concrete that gave it a spare, contemporary look, even though it was built decades back.

Things between us were good and I wanted to get Chris a serious present. Unfortunately, I hadn't put in the time sleuthing through his closet to check his size or to figure out what he needed. Yes, I should have known, but for some reason I couldn't keep the numbers in my head and remember whether he was a 32 or 34 waist, or a 16 shirt collar or 16-½. And then there was the question of what a medium translated to or whether a shirt or sweater should be bought in a large.

Why was it so much easier to shop for women? Off the top of my head I could come up with twenty things that would be perfect gifts for me: a cashmere scarf, a cashmere bathrobe, a pashmina wrap, a great silk nightgown, gold, anything gold, better yet platinum, a fabulous Marc Jacobs handbag, a Tod's handbag (yes, they're all a fortune, but don't put a price on my happiness), Juicy anything, sable makeup brushes, or maybe even an expensive hairbrush.

I knew that I would buy my best friend, Ellen Gaines, a cashmere camisole and matching cardigan. My mother would get a silk blouse and a new scarf, and I'd buy my father plaid flannel pajamas and a robe from his favorite Web site, L.L. Bean.

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? Un
doubtedly, 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 almost 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: