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I smiled briefly, to trivialize the compliment, not knowing how else to handle it. He was right about the picture. I photographed like a deer caught in the headlights.
“Is this where you usually hang out after work?” I said, trying to gloss over my discomfort. He leaned over to whisper in my ear.
“If I can’t actually slip behind the velvet curtains.”
I turned back to him and studied him briefly—noting the worn jeans teamed with a black cashmere sweater and black leather Pumas. But while I was surveying his outfit, the silky nightgown slipped from my grasp. We nearly collided as we simultaneously kneeled down to get it. He got there first, and handed it to me, amused by my discomfort.
“Thanks,” I said, pulling it back to me. “Nice to see you,” I said, unable to come up with anything better than a platitude. I turned abruptly toward the cashier ready to pay for the nightgown, although at that point I had decided the thing was plain, boring and matronly and that I didn’t want it. I considered telling him to keep away from dressing rooms or he’d be the subject of my next column, but then decided to keep quiet and head off without starting up a dialogue.
“Wait,” he said, reaching out to touch my arm to stop me. “I want to show you something.” He led me over to a designer rack and took out a long, low-cut charcoal-gray silk nightgown with a deeply cut back that was held together with delicate crisscross laces of pale yellow satin. He held it up to me.
“This is the one that will knock your guy’s socks off,” he said with a small smile on his face. To be honest, it was heavenly, beautiful and sexy in an elegant, sophisticated way that nearly made me swoon. If I had seen it I would have grabbed it.
“Hmm,” I said. “Not bad.” He nodded. I looked at the price tag, then shook my head. “Can’t afford it. They must pay more generously at the Trib.”
“A gift from me,” he said, starting to lead me to the cashier with his platinum card in hand. “A peace offering.”
“No thanks,” I said. “I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I was sleeping with the competition.”
“I wouldn’t either. I’m all for the naked truth.”
I looked back at him briefly and then looked away, swiping the nightgown from his hand and hanging it back on the rack. He picked it up again and tossed it over his shoulder.
“Too nice to pass up,” he said. “I’ll buy it for a friend.”
“Lucky girl,” I said, regretting the words just a nanosecond after I said them, knowing how he’d misinterpret them.
He nodded, amused.
“Well, merry Christmas,” I said, scooping up the underwear that I had tried to hide beneath my handbag. I was about to head across the floor to another register to pay.
He pointedly stared at the underwear that was squished up in my fist and narrowed his eyes.
“Lucky guy,” he whispered, then walked off the other way.
Chapter Four
“So where do we have dinner with a mountain man who probably eats grilled roadkill for dinner?” I asked Chris when I got home from Bloomingdale’s.
“Moose?”
“Who else?”
“He’s easy,” Chris said. “He eats meat when he has to, but he prefers vegetarian.”
“Hmm,” I said. I thought of a local health-food restaurant, but then remembered the soy burger that I had there that tasted as if it was made from corrugated paper. Mexican? We could have fajitas with beans and rice and guacamole—and margaritas.
“He does drink,” I said, more as a statement than a question.
“Everything except the worm in the mescal,” Chris said. We agreed to meet at a Mexican restaurant in the Village. Characteristically, Chris and I walked. Since both of us spent our days sitting and didn’t have much time to exercise, we looked forward to a chance to take long walks together. Even when we weren’t talking, we usually felt very much in sync. I knew when he was quiet, he was absorbing things around him, which usually ended up, in one form or another, in one of his ads or TV commercials. There were talking beagles in a commercial for dog food that reminded me of the sad brother and sister up for adoption in the neighborhood pet store. In a commercial for packaged deli meat, Chris incorporated a character with black beady eyes and curly hair who looked like a man who worked in Todaro, our favorite Italian grocery.
“Life is all ad copy,” he said. I knew what he meant. Half of the things I experienced day to day worked into upcoming columns. We walked down First Avenue past Bellevue Hospital and New York University Hospital and then past apartment complexes. Chris thought of what he could use in commercials for pain relievers, while for me, the scenery triggered thoughts of the latest hospital mergers, Medicaid and the best emergency room to go for gunshot wounds.
“When was the last time you saw Moose?”
“I visited him a couple of years ago,” Chris said. “He had just split with his girlfriend and was having a tough time, so we went skiing during the day and drank a lot of beer at night.”
“It must be hard for him to meet the kind of women who’d like the same lifestyle that he does.”
“Just the opposite,” Chris said. “Women love his mountain life—at least for a while. They’re fed up with the big-city bullshit. Land is cheap, you have all the space and quiet that you want, and you only concern yourself with the basics, like survival. You don’t go to four-star restaurants, you don’t go out to Broadway shows. You don’t run down the street and shop at Victoria’s Secret.” (How did he know?) “You’re together a lot at home working on your house or cooking and canning and doing blue-collar stuff, so you find out very fast if you’re compatible.”
“So what happened to his relationship?”
“I guess when the initial fascination faded, she felt cut off and she wasn’t pulling her weight.”
The image of a woman as a member of a dogsled team came to mind. “What do you mean?”
“He wanted to share his life and for Moose that means someone who could help him cut down trees for firewood and build an addition to the house. She liked to cook and help him fix up the house, but that was it.”
“You mean she couldn’t even chop down trees?”
He nodded, laughing.
“He’s liberated—to a fault,” I said.
Chris shrugged. “He has a lot to give, but he hasn’t found a girl who’s big enough to take it.” I thought about Ellen. I hoped that wouldn’t be a big mistake, unless he wanted someone to stand by him to fight with local industry about polluting the air or water.
When we got to the restaurant, neither one of them was there yet so we sat down in a booth and ordered a pitcher of frozen pomegranate margaritas. After sipping half of one, I started to forget about Moose and Ellen.
“We should do this more at home,” I said to Chris. His knees touched mine under the table and he reached down and took my hand.
“You’re wasted already?”
I started to laugh. I spotted Ellen as she walked in, but then wasn’t sure if I was waving at the right girl. Something was different, and then I realized that I was seeing more of her face. The haircut was short and almost boyish, an impossible style for most women, but on Ellen it looked delicate, pixieish and feminine, not to mention that the red color looked richer than I remembered. It framed her face and pale complexion. Ellen is five-four with big blue expressive eyes. She’s almost thirty-three, but could pass for ten years younger. I think it’s because she works mostly indoors, away from the sun. With less hair, her eyes seemed to pop.
“Love the hair,” I said as she took a seat. She smiled.
“I cut it off because I was fed up, but it turns out that everybody likes it. At work they call me Peter Pan.”
Chris poured her a drink and she sat back and sipped it and then shook her head. “I had a day…I’m beginning to doubt—except for present company—that there are any honest, upstanding citizens in the world.”
“There aren’t,” I said flatly. “That’s why we’ll never run out of copy.” Ellen just shook her head.
“What are you working on?” Chris asked her.
“Shabby contractors, bogus long-distance phone charges, car complaints, spoiled dog food, unsafe toys…” She shook her head. “I could go on and on.”
I looked up to see a giant standing next to our table wearing a thick suede jacket. He was bearlike, maybe six foot five, with a beard and brown curly hair.
“Hey,” Chris said, coming around the table and hugging him the way men do, in a hard, standoffish kind of way. It reminded me of a Broadway play that I saw years back called Defending the Caveman that homed in on the differences between the sexes, showing in one particular scene how old female friends greet each other, as opposed to the male approach. Women squeal in delighted high-pitched voices and then come together screeching, laughing, crying and embracing. And men? One goes up to the other and punches him in the arm while saying something endearing like: “You still driving that old piece of shit?”
Moose patted him on the back. “How you doing?” Chris introduced him to me and then to Ellen.
“Ladies,” he said, nodding.
Chris poured him a drink and we toasted. I looked at Chris, then at Moose. His blue eyes peered out, surrounded by curly locks as though he were Santa. The immediate impression that I got was of shyness.
“How come you’re in town?” I said.
“Came to see my mom. I can’t get her to come up and visit me…” He shrugged and didn’t finish the sentence.
“It’s pretty cold up there,” I said, feeling for some reason as if I had to take her side.
“Twenty below last week,” he said matter-of-factly.
“So you live in an igloo?” Ellen teased.
Moose shook his head as if he had considered that and then decided against it. “Log cabin. I built it. Great woodstove, keeps the place really warm.”
“What do you do all winter?” I said. “Doesn’t it get lonely?”
He looked at me curiously and smiled slightly. “I have work to do in the house, firewood to cut, I’m preparing to put on an addition, and I have my books, carpentry work in town, journals, my dog and I’m writing a guide to wilderness survival. Not much time to get lonely.”
“Wilderness survival?” Ellen said.
Actually, it turned out that he was working on his third book. Ever since he was small, Moose said, he spent most of his life outdoors. After we looked at our menus and ordered he told us that his mother was a nature lover who grew up on a farm and unlike other mothers who baked, cleaned, shopped and maybe went off to work, she spent much of her time with her children outdoors, hiking, swimming in the ponds, and teaching them about birds, snakes, turtles, insects, trees and plants. By age ten, he was an expert marksman with a slingshot and a bow and arrow, he knew how to start a fire, build a shelter and forage for food, distinguishing between the edible plants and berries and the poisonous ones so that he could basically survive outdoors, no matter what the temperature. He learned how to carve plates out of wood polished with beaver fat and could weave baskets out of split white oak, make his own clothes and get by in the woods with just some basic clothes and a knife.
That was a world that, of course, was unknown to me. I never did understand all the esoterica about camping and being able to use a compass if I was lost, build a tent for shelter or cook over an open fire.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t welcome being in the wilderness with the right guide, particularly if he looked like the six-foot-four Australian who took me and a group of friends on a rafting trip in Colorado, our present to ourselves after we graduated from college.
“So you spent your summers camping out?” Ellen asked Moose.
“I camped outside my house from the age of eight,” Moose said. “My parents built me a tepee in the backyard instead of a tree house and I spent most of the year out there. I grew my own fruits and vegetables in the garden and made my own clothes. Even my own shoes.”
Ellen and I looked at each other. Manolo of the Adirondacks.
“And I bet you never went to the doctor,” I said.
“To get my shots and all, sure. But when I was sick I tried to treat myself with medicine from plants. I haven’t been to the doctor in the past twenty years.”
“Germs probably can’t survive where you live,” I said. He smiled.
“And what about when you’re doing all that outdoor work. Don’t you ever fall or hurt yourself?” Ellen asked.
“I broke my ankle a few years ago. Set it myself.”
We were all silent. I was proud of myself when I closed a wound with ointment and a butterfly bandage.
“So you’re writing your book with a quill pen, or what?” I said. He shook his head.
“I have a computer and all that. I’m connected.” I imagined him hunkering down by candlelight and writing on a computer.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You built your own with twigs and leaves.”
“Actually I have a Dell,” Moose said, laughing. “But now that you mention it…” With a smile he steered the subject to me, obviously eager to get himself out of the spotlight. “So what about you, how are you doing with the column?”
“The pressure gets me a little crazy,” I said. “But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.”
“I read your stuff from time to time online,” he said. “I try to keep up with the papers.”
“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.
