What Men Want (6 page)

T
here is no shortage of stories for my column, only a shortage of waking hours to write about them and all the colorful characters who enjoy operating outside the law. Someone on the rewrite desk here once said that after people who are in public office finish serving their terms, they should go directly to jail for the same amount of time that they were in office. My sentiments exactly. In fact, on my wall I had a blow up of the “Go to Jail” square from the Monopoly board. Around it I arranged pictures of various felons who I had written about.

I was coming up in the elevator one morning when I overheard a conversation that made my ears perk up. An editor from the travel section was chatting with a colleague. He had just come back from St. Croix, he said, where he'd checked out some new
resorts. He mentioned that he had seen someone that he knew from the Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. The editor asked him if he was on vacation and he said no, he was there on business. They laughed about it, but I didn't see the humor. Instead, my antennae went up. Business? Who was he meeting? And why in St. Croix? Call it my reporter's instinct for a big story but I went back to my desk and started making phone calls.

I'd heard rumors some time back about Caribbean trips, but at the time I had been so swamped that I didn't pay any attention to them. But now, if it came up again, it convinced me that it was something that I should look into. Were people in the mayor's office on film purportedly meeting Hollywood producers to encourage them to bring big-budget films to the city? More and more these days, American films were being made in Canada because of the considerable financial savings due to the favorable exchange rate. But while the goals of people in the film office might have been honorable, there was no justification for spending taxpayers' money for meetings in the Caribbean that could well have taken place in New York. Clearly, New York wanted and benefited from having movie studios use the city as home base for their filming. New York City's Made In New York Incentive Program offered film and TV crews tax and marketing credits as well as customer services if most of the movies were made in the five bor
oughs. But there was a line between proper give-and-take and giving out bigger pieces of the tax-deduction pie to some studios and not others. City negotiators were not supposed to be for sale to the highest bidder.

And why have a meeting at a resort in St. Croix instead of a Lower Manhattan conference room, other than to acquire a tan? Couldn't the information be gathered in writing or via conference calls? Was it really critical to go to the Caribbean? A colder view of it was that the city officials were taking their wives or girlfriends with them on free junkets that would turn into improper deals.

My phone book was filled with the names of disgruntled employees from almost every city agency, and I made my initial string of phone calls rounding up “the usual suspects”—people you can usually count on to talk in sound bites and give you dependable quotes and insights.

I heard snickers, guffaws, theatrical coughs. Did they know more than they let on? I imagined eyebrows being raised, but none of that could make an airtight story. Trying a different tack, I called officials from the previous administration and asked them about conferences outside of the city.

“Does Brooklyn count?” one aide responded. “Because that's as far as I ever traveled on the city payroll.” Someone else pointed me to an airline employee who would check the passenger lists to see
whether the mayor's aides had flown regularly scheduled airlines—or instead hopped free flights on corporate jets belonging to Hollywood movie studios, which might be offered sweet deals to bring their crews into the city for months at a time.

I spent the morning making phone calls, and then bingo, just before I was about to leave, I got a call back from an employee of a boutique hotel in the Caribbean who confirmed that several city employees were already staying there, supposedly to attend a film production conference.

“I don't have any conference rooms booked,” he said. “But there's a big buffet dinner and beach party tonight. Maybe meetings are going on in private suites. That often happens.”

“Beach party,” I repeated, as a statement, not a question. The words stuck in my craw.

“Yes,” he said. “We have outdoor grills and set up tables facing the water—”

“I know,” I said tolerantly. I thought of how much was deducted for city and state taxes on my last paycheck and I saw red. I grabbed my notebook and knocked on the glass partition of my editor's door. He waved me in.

“Marty,” I said. He turned his florid face up to me. He was wearing his usual blue oxford button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a blue print tie that was perpetually loose and askew. There was always a half-finished paper cup filled with coffee on
his desk. He motioned to a chair facing his desk and I fell back into it.

“It looks as though some of the mayor's people are down in the Caribbean supposedly on business. This has come up before, and I think it's a pattern.” I had his attention. He pushed his chair back from his desk and folded his arms across his chest.

“How do you know?”

“It started with a conversation in the elevator. John Carey from travel was down in St. Croix. Then I made some calls and found out that three or four of the people from the mayor's film office are down there.”

“Any idea who they're meeting with?”

“All I could find out is that there's a corporate jet from a leading production house called Reilly Films parked at the airport.”

“Call travel and go down there,” he said, turning back to his screen. That surprised me. It usually took Marty more than sixty seconds to decide to send one of his people out of town, particularly to a destination like the Caribbean, a guaranteed red flag when the department's monthly expense sheet went to accounting. They took particular pleasure in using red-felt tipped markers to add question marks and crowd the margins with small questions for expenses that exceeded the cost of a sesame bagel and cream cheese.

“When?” I said. I honestly never expected to be so summarily dispatched, so close to Christmas. It
threw all of my plans with Chris and my parents awry. Marty glanced at his watch.

“Now,” he said, without looking back up to me.

“You sure?”

“You want to nail the bastards?”

“You don't have to ask me twice.”

He reached around and scratched the back of his head. “So get out of here.”

I eased the door closed behind me, called travel to arrange the ticket, and then gathered up my bag and coat. I headed outside to flag down a cab. It was snowing lightly, but there was a whipping wind sending tendrils of hair winding around my face like Medusa's. I started drawing up a list.

 

*
Plus side:

 

1. Getting a chance to walk in on a meeting of sleazy city officials partying on my tax dollars.

2. Escaping the freezing air and icy sidewalks of New York during one of its harshest winters.

 

*
Minus side:

 

1. On my own for Christmas.

2. Chris would be on his own.

3. No presents under the tree.

4. No Christmas dinner with my parents.

5. No break from the office to just hang out with Chris and enjoy each other's company.

So the minuses outweighed the pluses, but I had no choice. I turned my thoughts back to the trip and getting away as soon as possible. It had already snowed seven times this winter, and according to the weather report, another storm was on the way. I pulled up the collar of my coat and then started waving again. One cab passed and then another and another, all filled with passengers (how did they get cabs, there were none) or with off-duty signs. Finally I spotted a cab with someone in it slowing down. I strode toward it purposefully, sending the signal to anybody else within a twenty-foot radius that I had staked a claim. New York was like that. You had to strategize to trump the competition. But at that moment, a slick garmento type with greased-back hair had the same idea. But he stopped abruptly. He had seen the puddle. I hadn't. Frozen water splashed up over the front of me like an icy tsunami, spraying the front of my camel's-hair coat.

“Damn,” I said, climbing into the cab.

He laughed slightly and turned away, already at work flagging down another cab. I blew him a kiss off my middle finger as we headed downtown.

For the first time since Marty gave me the green light, I realized that it would be the first Christmas that I ever spent alone. And in all the time that Chris and I had been together, we had never been apart for an entire night. Was there any chance that he could just pack up and come with me? I had to work but
I could take time to be with him and explore the island. And then there were the evenings we would have on the beach, or in the hotel, looking out at the water. We got away together so infrequently, and it would give us time to relax and just focus on each other. You couldn't take a relationship for granted, someone in an advice column once said. You had to work at it. We spent so little time working at it because our jobs pulled us in different directions. While neither of us was ready to make any commitments yet, we got along well, we liked the same things, and when we weren't exhausted we were great together in bed. And if things continued to go well, maybe in a couple of years…

Then, of course, I remembered the new ad campaign that he was about to embark on. He'd never be able to get away, how could I imagine it? Holiday or not, if the client wanted to get moving, everyone would be called in, destroying plans and commitments made long in advance.

I became furious with myself for getting so involved in following the story. Who cared if some city workers went to the Caribbean, whether it was ethical or not? There were liars, cheats and employees on the take in every government, everywhere. What was the big deal? Would my work stop that and make everyone become honest? I was one journalist at one paper. What difference could I possibly make in the overall scheme of city government? Was
it all so important that I had to give up my Christmas and jeopardize my relationship?

How stupid and shortsighted of me not to first consider how it would affect my personal life. Were my career and my bank account more important than my soul? Where would that kind of thinking ultimately lead—to journalism awards on my bookshelf, while I slept alone in an empty bed wearing frumpy nightgowns?

And even if I did manage to do work that I was proud of, tomorrow was another day and yesterday's newspapers were used to wrap dead fish. There was always a bigger scandal, all you had to do was wait a day. People forgot and the person who was close to indictment today was the same one who was running for office six months later. None of it really made any long-term difference in the world. I looked down at the water stain on my coat as if it was a blight on my character.

At home, I hung my coat up to dry and searched through the back of my closet for summer clothes, another depressing thought. I wish I could say that last year's Gap wardrobe was all neatly folded, but no—clothes were jammed in, and I knew without looking that the white shorts and slacks were stained.

I snatched up one bathing suit, and then a second, a skimpy bikini with a halter top that Chris bought me the weekend we spent in the Hamptons. It was our first weekend alone together and except for
afternoons at the beach, the rest of the time was spent in bed in an East Quogue house owned by an art director at Chris's agency. I stood there clinging to the suit, thinking about those days with Chris, until reluctantly I realized what time it was and how little of it I had to pack. I folded the suit and put it in the bag, not sure whether it would still fit.

While packing the rest of my things, I dialed Chris at the office to tell him that I was leaving. I heard the perky voice of the secretary in creative instead.

“He's tied up in a meeting, Jen. Can I give him a
massage?
” Cutesy advertisingspeak.

“Tell him that I had to go down to the Caribbean for a story—it just came up and I—”

“Luck-y!” she said. I guess she heard some hesitation in my voice, because a moment later she said, “Anything else?”

Out of nowhere, tears welled up in my eyes when I thought back to last year and what I was now walking away from. I remembered how we spent hours strolling around from one tree seller to another, searching for the right tree, and then, finally, found one that was too big to fit into a cab so we carried it home, balancing it precariously over our heads. We were going to cook a turkey with corn bread stuffing and make cranberry sauce for Christmas dinner and then drive out to my parents' house in Westchester. Chris didn't cook much, but when he did, it seemed to unlock a whole new
domestic part of his personality, and he enjoyed searching through cookbooks, looking for unusual recipes.

Last year, we drove out to Long Island to a turkey farm to pick out a fresh turkey rather than buying a frozen one in our local supermarket, and we bought fresh sage, rosemary and thyme to season it, along with sausage, apples and corn bread for the stuffing.

It was obvious Chris enjoyed being with my parents. They were a normal, middle-class couple who were still in love after forty years of marriage, such a departure from the kind of house that he grew up in with his dysfunctional family. His parents divorced when he was eight, and he grew up going back and forth from his father's place to his mother's, half the time not remembering where his clothes and school-books were. His mother was a shrink, need I say more? They both lived in San Francisco, but other than staying true to the city, everything else about them was perpetually in flux, ranging from their lovers to their phone numbers. Chris rarely visited either of them anymore and except for the annual birthday card, which interestingly enough they both remembered to send, there was little else that physically reminded us that they existed. With me going out of town, he'd be alone for the holiday.