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 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.”
