LITMIR.BIZ

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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 pressure 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.

      The other possibility was that after spending day after day using the system to fight for the rights of the downtrodden, she had closed herself off to available men who came her way either by assuming that they had their private agendas or simply by feeling too mentally and physically exhausted from working twelve-or fourteen-hour days to even go out on a date and have a normal discussion.

      I could understand that. There were days when my job totally sucked the lifeblood from me. No wonder some women on the ladder to success find themselves without husbands or even boyfriends, because a demanding career chips away at how much you have to give to someone else. There is just so much loving and nurturing in all of us, and sometimes our careers become our little children, demanding full-time attention, and requiring us to wipe noses and behinds.

      Forget the image of superwoman; few of us can do it all, or at least do it all very well. And the knowledge of that—especially if you are a perfectionist and overachiever—always eats away at you and makes you feel somehow compromised.

      On Ellen’s birthday, I couldn’t resist buying her a T-shirt from a Soho street vendor that said, Just Fuck Off.

      “Whose rear did you save today?” I said when Ellen answered.

      “Not my own. Never complain again when your shower isn’t hot enough or when your super takes too long to turn on the air-conditioning. We sent a crew up to a rat-infested tenement in Harlem where the windows have holes in them big enough for a cat to crawl through and the water in the pipes is so rusty you can’t wash dishes.”

      Maybe Chris was right, reality did suck. “So what did you do?”

      “Well now, after six months, we’re forcing the landlord to do repairs and in the meantime we’re moving the family into a hotel.”

      “You did good,” I said, immediately forgetting about my gripes and feeling small for needing to vent about what was eating me.

      “Yes, for one family,” Ellen said, “after months of calls and intervention by the city. But what about the others who live in those burnt-out joints and never bother to contact consumer reporters for help because they’ve given up on everybody and everything or simply don’t know how to navigate the system?”

      “You save the world one person at a time,” I said, reaching for an old cliché. “If you dwell on the extent of the job, you’ll be paralyzed. But to change the subject, you sound like you could use a break, so how about joining me and Chris for dinner? His old roommate is in town.”

      “Now you’re trying to save me,” she said, exhaling. “A blind date?”

      “He’s not blind,” I said. “And you have to eat anyway.”

      There was silence on the other end of the line.

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