by Laura Zigman
Suddenly the strange sound of Ray’s voice the last time we spoke on the phone the previous Friday night—distant, preoccupied, inexplicably uncomfortable—came back to me. We’d been trying to figure out a time to sign the papers with Tracy, and Ray used all the aforementioned excuses to explain why he couldn’t, except the one about not sleeping with me, which he saved for the end of the conversation when I asked him if he wanted to come over. I felt even sicker now and looked at David. “So what do I do?”
David forced a smile, trying to signal that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. But neither of us was buying his body language. “I’m sorry,” he said, momentarily distracted. “It just reminds me of what happened with Andrew, which I still haven’t gotten over.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I guess I didn’t know that.” I stared at him and didn’t say anything until he pulled me toward him on the counter. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me until I cracked.
“I hate this,” I said, feeling the knot in my stomach tighten and my throat constrict and my eyes fill up with big hot tears. “I really, really hate this.”
Three months, seven days:
After almost three weeks of Ray’s not calling in the evenings and not coming over I was completely wrecked. I’d stopped eating, stopped sleeping, even stopped calling David and Joan. I didn’t know what to tell them since I had no idea what was happening, and I knew if I called them I wouldn’t be able to help feeling embarrassed and ashamed, as if I’d done something to scare Ray off or somehow exaggerated his feelings for me in the first place.
The Monday morning after my conversation with David, Ray stood in my office doorway holding a cup of coffee and bearing a faint resemblance to something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
And then it came to me.
Tomato seed.
“Good morning,” the seed said, adhering to the wall with its hands in its pockets. It was smiling, but its voice was thin, as if it were greeting a fellow-colleague seed instead of the New-Cow seed it was supposedly in love with.
“Good morning,” I said back, half-expecting it to move closer and kiss me once it made sure no one was looking, the way it used to do. But it didn’t budge. It just looked at me and then down at its feet.
The seed was getting nervous.
It could tell that I could tell it was acting strangely.
It knew it had to do something to distract me from the truth.
So it slid.
“You look tired. What time did you finally leave here last night?”
“Late,” I told it. Then I mentioned that I had tried to call it when I got home, but there was no answer. Checking its face and clothes for signs of fatigue and finding them, I decided not to mention that I had tried the studio too.
But it was too late. It slid again.
“Sorry.” It yawned apologetically, taking its glasses off and rubbing its eyes. “I was in the edit room until after two in the morning trying to demumble the William F. Buckley interview.” It tried to laugh but ended up yawning again—and sliding—instead. “But enough about me. How are you?”
I said I was fine.
That I’d been packing.
That I’d seen a couch I liked.
That we really had to sign the lease and start figuring out the details of the move since it was only two weeks away and since my apartment had already been rerented.
Then it really slid.
“God, this week is going to be terrible,” it said, shifting from one leg to the other. “I’m completely swamped.” It looked out into the hallway as if it had just heard Diane call its name, even though it hadn’t. “Gotta go,” it said, rolling its eyes. “Mommy’s waiting.”
I heard nothing more from Ray that day.
That night I went home and got into bed at eight-thirty with a box of Kleenex, sick to my stomach with confusion and panic. When hours had passed and there was still no call from Ray, I tried him at the studio, and after eight or nine rings he picked up, breathless and seemingly exhausted. I listened for a second or two before hanging up, the shameful criminal adrenaline pumping through my limbs. Maybe it was work that was making him behave so strangely all of a sudden. But the tightness in my stomach muscles and the silent sobbing told me otherwise. Though I didn’t know why and though I couldn’t quite believe it, I knew, the way you always know in that deep, dark place in yourself you never want to return to, that he was leaving me.
On the Friday before Columbus Day weekend I was going through my overflowing IN box, getting ready to leave for nowhere, when Ray passed my office from the men’s room and waved.
“I’ll talk to you,” he said over his shoulder, which, I later learned, was seed-speak for not saying “I’ll call you.”
Which he didn’t.
But he hadn’t lied either.
You see, he’d simply slid.
Are you still with me?
You’d better be, because here comes Eddie.
I continued to listlessly sift through the week’s accumulation of junk mail and interoffice flotsam until I came across a notice that someone had apparently circulated in house about an available sublet. Own room in spacious two-bedroom apartment. Cutting-edge neighborhood. Walking distance to great bars. Smokers only. There was no name, only an extension given, but I knew it had to be Eddie.
Cough. Cough.
I looked up and saw Eddie leaning in my doorway, looking like the Marlboro Man minus the Stetson and the swinging doors.
“I see you got my personal ad,” he said.
Before I could say anything, he had sat down in my guest chair and put his booted feet up on my desk.
“Interested?”
POST-COPULATORY PHASE: STAGE VIII
FLIGHT, ESCAPE, AND THE DEATH OF A NEW COW
As the middle of the country endured its sixth day of sweltering summer heat, operators of feed lots in Iowa faced a new problem—exploding cows. The extreme heat causes gases to rapidly expand in animals after they die of heat-related distress. In many cases, they literally burst. “We’ve got to get them picked up right away or otherwise when you pick them up all you get is pieces,” said one Iowa resident.
Time
“Eddie Alden—the Eddie Alden—asked you to move in with him?” Joan said when she called at the end of the day after Eddie’s “proposal.” “Is this a joke?”
“He needs a roommate, Joan. Or, actually, he needs money.”
“Remember the Christmas party?” she said, referring to the one time she’d met him, which had obviously left a lasting impression. “Sitting there sipping a drink while some young drunken waif sucked on his thumb. I mean, he’s attractive in a dissipated way, but he’s kind of an—”
“Idiot?”
“Asshole, was what I was going to say. Who wants to live with that?”
I closed my eyes and tried hard to decide whether he was an asshole or not. I had never quite made up my mind about him; never quite known what to make of his completely antisocial behavior. But following that afternoon’s brief conversation I thought maybe his aloofness was just a by-product of depression. Or, given his excessive smoking—and skirt chasing, oxygen deprivation. But before I could finish hypothesizing, Joan jumped back in, thinking out loud.
“Now it’s coming back to me. Something about an old girlfriend who broke his heart? They were living together and she moved out? Am I right?” Joan said, as if there were a prize involved if she was. There were few things she loved more in life than being right, and, luckily for her, she usually was. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter since you’re moving in with Ray.”
I opened my eyes, then squeezed them shut again. “I guess so.”
“What do you mean, you guess so?”
I leaned back in my desk chair and moaned into the phone.
“Jane?”
“What?”
“Are you moving in with Ray?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does that mean?”<
br />
“I don’t know. I haven’t exactly seen him lately.”
“I see,” she said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke into the receiver. “Has he called you?”
“No.”
“I see,” she said again. “Have you figured out who he’s been sleeping with?”
“Who he’s been sleeping with? What are you talking about?” What was she talking about? “He’s not sleeping with someone else. He’s not like that. And besides, he wouldn’t have had time to. He’s been working until midnight for the last few weeks.” I lit a cigarette too and exhaled loudly. “Isn’t that why he hasn’t had time to sleep with me?” I blurted.
“Listen to me,” Joan said. “Rule Number One: There’s no such thing as a man who doesn’t have time to fuck around. They always have time for that. And Rule Number Two: If a man isn’t sleeping with you, he’s not sleeping alone. He’s sleeping with someone else.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes. It’s true.”
I could tell she was waiting for me to agree that she was right again, but I wouldn’t. Not this time. I had far too much invested in my belief in Ray—in the belief that he was precisely the kind of man who would be sleeping alone if he wasn’t sleeping with me.
That’s just the way New Cows are, all right?
“Okay, okay, I take it back. Maybe I’m wrong … for a change …” she said in a tone of contrition she used when she realized she’d gone too far and unintentionally hit a nerve. “Look, if I were you, I’d have a talk with Ray. Soon. This isn’t normal.”
“I know,” I said. And I did.
“Just talk to him,” she said, her voice softening. “Whatever he says, it can’t be any worse than not knowing.”
Oh, yes it can be.
“So …” I said when Ray and I met after work the Tuesday following the long weekend. The meeting was my idea; the hair bar in the East Village was his.
That’s because men don’t dump women in private.
They dump them in public.
Where there are other people around.
Where they can’t make a scene.
Men do this because they are afraid.
Hell hath no fury like an Old Cow scorned.
“So,” he said back.
Seeing that I was going to need a little inside joke to break the proverbial iceberg—a remember-me-I’m-your-New-Cow kind of joke, I reached my arm out across the table so that it hovered above his hand without touching it. And I almost retracted it when I saw my hand shaking from the extreme patheticness of the situation: my having had to ask him to see me. The only thing I could cling to was the fact that he’d chosen the hair bar—a place where we had some history, a place that held some sentimental value.
Ha.
“Fourteen inches, Diane,” I finally said. “Think we can make an exception this one time?”
Ray tried to laugh but couldn’t quite manage it. He moved his hand away to reach for his beer, and as he did, I watched the muscles in his face pull and bend into an incredibly strained smile, one I would later come to recognize as a “false smile” (The New York Times, March 12, 1994). But the true horror came when I noticed what was revealed in the split-second transition of his face from nonsmile to false smile: pity.
It was an expression I suddenly realized I had seen him make before over the last few weeks, only I hadn’t recognized it then, hadn’t recognized the subtle distinctions between it, say, and its first, second, and third cousins: detachment, distraction, and remoteness. How was I supposed to know? Until he had disappeared, there had been no ebbing of our physical passion for each other; no visible fault lines in our attraction that would have made his look make sense to me, which would have explained why I was suddenly feeling sick to my stomach.
I held my breath and then exhaled it in one long, slow push. “It seems like something’s been wrong lately.”
Ray nodded.
“Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He scratched at the label on the bottle of beer he was gripping. His knuckles were white. “I think maybe we should cool things for a while.”
I watched him work the wet paper until the edge of the label curled up and revealed the glue underneath, and tried to focus on his words:
Cool things for a while.
I translated them out loud: “You mean, not see each other. For a while.”
He nodded. He looked troubled, burdened. This is hard for me too, his expression implied. “I know I’ll probably regret this. But I just think it would be best.”
I translated out loud again, thinking this time, though, that I must be wrong—that I’d been wrong for the past two weeks imagining the worst and that he would tell me so: “You want to end things.”
“The sex part, anyway. I just don’t think I could handle that right now.”
I was unable to translate that. I felt the way foreigners must feel when they come up against an idiom wall.
“Why?” was all I could manage before my lower jaw went slack.
Ray looked at me blankly, inscrutably. “I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? You must know. There must be something, some reason why. Just tell me what it is. I want to know. I have to know.”
Ray shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
I sat back in my chair and searched his face, but I found nothing in it that was familiar. The realization terrified me. It defied reason, negated the rules of intimacy. I shook my head in utter confusion. “But I thought you wanted this,” I said, immediately horrified by the naked pleading in my voice. “I thought we both felt the same way—lucky, incredibly lucky, like we’d found the thing.”
“I did. I mean, it’s just that it all happened so fast. Things started to get too serious all of a sudden.”
I leaned hard against the back of my chair. A million thoughts exploded in my head—not the least of which was that in two weeks I would have to move out of my apartment and would then have no place to live. Only I couldn’t focus on anything except the immediate matter at hand. “But things were always serious with us. Right from the beginning. You were the one who said you wanted us to live together. You were the one who said ‘I love you’ first. You were the one who broke your engagement. Why did you say all that if you didn’t mean it?”
Ray looked at his beer and then at me. “I did mean it. At the time. But just because you say you love someone doesn’t mean you’re tied to them.”
I stared at him in shock.
“Look,” he said quickly, trying to recover. “That didn’t come out right. I don’t know how to explain this. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”
“Well, that’s a first.” Tears welled up behind my eyes, but I forced them back. I would not cry here, in front of him. Again I searched his face, his eyes, his mouth for something to tell me who he was, who he had been for the past three months, but it was as if a pod had replaced him across the table, and I knew, suddenly, that it was true what people always say about never being able to know another person completely.
“All those things you said, all those things you said you felt,” I said. “Was it all just horseshit? Because everything I said was the truth.”
He looked at me with more emotion in his face than I had seen in weeks. “No,” he said. “I swear, Jane. It was real.” He took my hand in both of his and held it tightly. “I still love you,” he whispered. “I still want us to be important to each other. To be friends.” He bent his head and kissed my hand solemnly, reverentially. “I’ll never forget you.”
I looked down at our hands and then at him, not sure if he was actually crying or just trying to make it look like he was. And then two words flashed across my mind: crocodile tears.
“I have to go,” I said.
I was crying now. He was still holding my hand, and I was still too shocked to withdraw it, so I stood up slowly, steadying myself with my
other hand on the table until we both let go. I put my jacket on, picked up my bag, and looked around the bar one last time.
“How ironic,” I hissed. “This is where we started out that first night. And this is where we end up. You couldn’t have planned it better.”
Ray looked wounded. “I didn’t plan on this part happening.”
“Oh, right.” I stood there, unable to move, as if I were half-expecting him to take it all back. But he just put some money down on the table, walked with me to the door, and put his arms around me there in the ugly little vestibule.
And though I knew better—knew that I shouldn’t allow myself to accept his comfort, his consolation—when his arms tightened around me, I couldn’t help leaning my head lightly against his shoulder out of habit until I realized that what he was offering me was not actual comfort but only the memory of it.
Short of death, I think, there are few things sadder in this life than watching someone walk away from you after they have left you, watching the distance between your two bodies expand until there is nothing but empty space, and silence.
Standing there on First Avenue watching Ray walk away from me, until he was lost in the crowd of foot traffic and there was nothing else for me to do but walk away too, I felt the air escape from my lungs in a long, slow rush. And then, because nature abhors a vacuum, I felt a deep, heavy weight move in and take its place, the deep, heavy weight that was my heart, and I thought:
You asshole. You fucking asshole.
(Of course I would have taken him back in a second.)
It’s funny now to think about how different I was then, how I still believed in boyfriends coming back, eventually. If Ray left me today, I’m sure I would make a lot of bitter jokes or simply keep my mouth shut. Because I’ve learned that most of the time they don’t come back, no matter how long you wait for them to. But at that point I hadn’t been left yet, at least not that way—for seemingly no reason, while we were seemingly still in the throes of passion—and so I still thought there were ways to bring people back, will them back, like mediums calling spirits.