by Laura Zigman
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said through the curtain.
“What’s downstairs?”
“Night Owls. One of the bars where Jack Abbott used to drink after he wrote In the Belly of the Beast, before he killed that waiter.”
We walked in just after midnight, past the jukebox and the television set and the plate-glass windows facing the street. We sat down at the bar, and the bartender nodded at Eddie, an obvious regular, and set him up with a Scotch. Then he looked at me. I shivered at the blasts of chilly October air coming through the door when it opened and closed.
“She’ll have a Wild Turkey,” Eddie said, “with ice.”
I stared at him. “I usually order my own drink, you know.”
“I know. But you need hard stuff now, and you have to learn how to drink it.”
He picked up his glass and sipped off half an inch of Scotch. “The first time we broke up she came back in a week,” he started without my asking him to. “But the second time she left that was it. I’m still waiting for her to come back.”
“How did you meet?”
“Blind date. We were together for three years, and it was perfect. Well, it wasn’t perfect. I was a monster sometimes.”
“You cheated on her?”
“I never cheated on her. She was the only woman I was ever completely faithful to. Except once, but that didn’t count because she had just moved out the first time.”
“That was, what, a year and a half ago? And you’re still sad?”
Eddie looked up at the ceiling with a knowing look on his face, the way he always would whenever he was about to impart a piece of hard-earned wisdom about “relationships.” “Yes.” He sighed heavily. “But it’s a different kind of sadness now. You go through a lot of different stages, and each stage has a very particular and distinct kind of sadness.”
I looked up at the television set and then out at the street. It was late now, and cold, and I was actually starting to long for my room.
“So that’s my story, not that you’ve heard the last of it by any means,” Eddie said. “Now what’s yours?”
Mine? I didn’t really have a story yet. Months would pass before I would become truly bitter and hatch the Old-Cow–New-Cow theory and all its ancillary theorems. So all I could do was lay out the bones of what had happened with Ray and hope that Eddie could make some sense of them:
“I fell in love with someone. Who I thought fell in love with me. We were going to move in together, were about to sign a lease, and then, all of a sudden, for seemingly no reason, he dumped me.” I took a sip of bourbon, and the warmth of it moving like a lit fuse all the way to my stomach made me understand for the first time why serious drinkers drink.
“Did he say why?” Eddie drained his glass and signaled the bartender for a refill.
“He said he didn’t know.”
He nodded knowingly.
“What? Does that mean something?”
“It depends.”
“On what?” I said insistently, my voice betraying a desperate need for explanation.
But he would only shrug. “He probably just got scared.”
I put my drink down on the bar, and my rage escaped in a controlled whisper. “Of what?”
Eddie seemed surprised by my show of temper. “Of you.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Okay.” He grinned at me, but I ignored him and stared back into my drink.
“So who is this guy, anyway? Do I know him?”
I looked up at the television. The eleven o’clock news was over, and a rerun of Cheers was starting. For a minute I thought I should be discreet and not tell Eddie since we all worked together, but when I saw Ted Danson skirt chasing, I was reminded that exactly two weeks ago Ray had dumped me a block away.
So I sang like a canary.
“You’re kidding,” Eddie said. “I always thought that Ray and Evelyn had a thing.”
I told him that’s what I had thought too, once, until Ray had explained that they’d always just been friends. “Besides,” I added like an idiot, “he said she’s not his type.”
Eddie sucked intently on a Scotch-infused ice cube. “Any woman is a man’s type.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I speak from experience.”
I stared into my glass. “You know what, Eddie? Even though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, I’m even sadder now than I was an hour ago. Or maybe, as you would say, it’s just a different kind of sadness.”
Eddie sucked the last ice cube in his glass and looked almost pleased with himself. Obviously, misery loved company.
“Well, now I’m stuck in that office, and I have to see him every day.”
He thought a minute. “There’s only one true prescription for a broken heart.”
“Which is?”
“Get back on the horse.”
“Meaning what?” I was not yet used to his Rancho Wyoming shorthand.
“Get a new boyfriend.”
I shook my head and took a perfunctory sip of my drink. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m ready yet. I mean, this just happened.”
“It didn’t just happen. It’s been two weeks already.” He looked dismissively at me and then up at the television set. “Do what you want, but it’s worked for me. Dating has become my sport and my pastime.”
“Well, women are different, obviously. We need time to get over things.”
“You can get over things a lot more quickly when you’re back in the saddle,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “It’s all I do these days.”
Fat lot of good it seemed to be doing Mr. Morphine.
The following Thursday night I left work and went to a book party at The Rainbow Room for Diane’s best friend who was now an author. The book, a novel titled Save the Last Dance for Me, was stacked on the bar and displayed on the tables. Well-dressed and self-important media types floated by, en route to Diane’s friend, who was standing in the center of the room, air kissing and pressing flesh.
I stood at the bar nervously nursing a glass of champagne, unsure of whether or not Ray would show up—half-hoping he would and half-hoping he wouldn’t—when I spotted Evelyn. She had put her drink down on the bar and was starting to pull on her coat. I was so happy to see someone I knew that I almost hugged her.
“Hi,” I said, practically tugging at her sleeve. My desperation was palpable.
She turned to me and smiled widely. “Hi!” she said, as if she hadn’t seen me for three years even though we worked together every day. She was so incredibly sweet, and while I sometimes wondered what—if anything—went on behind those big green eyes, I was immensely grateful for her enthusiasm.
We nodded at each other and smiled. I had no idea of what to say. There was something completely overwhelming about such blatant sweetness. It rendered me stupid and made me feel like little devil horns were butting out of my scalp.
“So,” I finally blurted with thick sarcasm, “great party.”
Evelyn’s eyes opened even wider with wonder. “I know. I wish I didn’t have to leave, but I’m meeting someone and I’m really late.”
My face fell, but hers didn’t. She was beaming—luminous, almost. We said good-bye, and I stared into the crowd again.
A few minutes later Eddie appeared with a tall blonde on his arm. Gracefully losing her, he made his way over to me, stopping to greet and kiss many other beautiful women along the way. As I watched him crossing the room, I suddenly got it: Eddie really was a very handsome man. Thank God he wasn’t my type.
“One Scotch and one champagne,” Eddie said to the bartender.
I looked him up and down. He must have gone home and changed after work, because he was wearing a suit—a perfectly tailored gray flannel suit and exquisite silk tie—a far cry from his usual Johnny Cash wear.
He felt my stare but didn’t look at me. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You like my suit.” He turned toward me,
leaning his back against the bar.
“Do I?”
He took a sip of his drink and a drag off his cigarette. “This is my favorite suit,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s my lucky suit.”
I turned to him. “Lucky suit?” Joan was right. He was an asshole.
He laughed a long, deep, throaty laugh and elbowed me. “I’m just teasing you,” he said. “It’s my only suit.”
I grinned and scanned the crowd. Okay, so he wasn’t a total asshole. “So who’s your date?”
“Pauline,” he answered, seemingly unexcited.
“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Is it serious?”
“It’s never serious.”
I finished my glass of champagne. The bubbles floated up into my brain and made me feel suddenly calm. I looked at Eddie and then back at some of the women he’d kissed on his way in. “Who were all the others?”
Eddie dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it, then turned his attention back to the room. He indicated the various women with a subtle point of his nose and talked into my ear.
“The redhead in the corner talking to her bald boyfriend is Diana. An actress. I saw her for about two weeks. Very wild but ultimately unfulfilling.”
I nodded. “She looks like she’s twelve.”
“She’s twenty-two.”
“Like I said: twelve.” I took a sip from Eddie’s glass and handed it back to him. “Go on.”
“The tall brunette with long, wavy hair. That’s Giulia. The Victoria’s Secret model. Looks great in a thong but surprisingly not very sexy.”
“Sure.”
“And Emily. The blonde near the ficus plant. Chapin School. Andover. Radcliffe. Smart. Beautiful. Great cook.”
But?
“Too perfect.”
“I see. You’re kind of picky, don’t you think?”
He considered the question. “I know what I want.”
“And,” I said, “what do you want?”
Eddie looked distractedly into the crowd, as if he had just seen someone he’d been waiting for.
He had.
I followed his pointing nose and saw a tall, shapely brunette. I awaited his comment. “That,” he said. “I think I just saw my wife.”
IN THE BELLY OF EDDIE’S BEAST:
AN ALPHA MALE, HIS GROWING HAREM, AND THE CHIMPANZETTE WHO GOT AWAY
The number of women collected into harems is staggering by any standard. The emperor Bhuponder Singh had 332 women in his harem when he died, “all of [whom] were at the beck and call of the Maharaja. He could satisfy his sexual lust with any of them at any time of day or night.” In India, estimates of harems of sixteenth-century kings ranged between four and twelve thousand occupants. In Imperial China, emperors around 771 B.C. kept one queen, three consorts or wives of the first rank, nine wives of the second rank, twenty-seven wives of the third rank, and eighty-one concubines. In Peru, an Inca lord kept a minimum of seven hundred women “for the service of his house and on whom to take his pleasure.…”
—David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire
Though Eddie brought home no wives those first few weeks I lived with him, he did bring home many women.
Many, many beautiful women whom I found waiting in the living room while Eddie changed for dinner, or heard giggling late at night as they tiptoed past my curtain on their way to his bedroom.
And there I’d be, the loser, sitting on the what-will-become-of-me couch with the remnants of my loser supper of beer and toast nearby, or lying in my what-will-become-of-me futon bed amid the scattered contents of the manila envelope, wondering how I’d sunk to this low, low point.
The answer was always the same:
Ray.
Ray. Ray. Ray.
I thought about him constantly. From the first second I opened my eyes in the morning to the last second before I closed them in the early evening, drunk and bloated with liquid and solid carbohydrates.
I loved him.
I hated him.
I could not get over him.
Probably because I saw him constantly—locking his bike up in front of the studio; walking up and down the hallway with his purposeful walk; in planning meetings in the greenroom when I would sit across the table from him and wonder what he was thinking, what he was feeling, if he was sleeping with anyone, whether he missed me or ever regretted his decision to dump me.
Hardly, judging from his ability to derive pleasure and excitement from his job, which I was completely unable to do.
“This is going to be great!” he’d say after a meeting or in the hallway just outside the studio. “Diane’s agreed to do a whole hour on—”
Whatever.
It didn’t matter.
I didn’t care.
Just the fact that he was happy about something completely impersonal and unemotional was enough to send me back to my office with an urge to shoot myself in the head.
How could we be so different? How could he be so fine when I was so not fine?
I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t even watch television. All I could do when I got home was gum my toast and listen to the country music station Eddie’s receiver was tuned to and wallow in the singers’ sad, sorry stories, which I liked to think were almost as sad and sorry as mine.
And try to make sense of my daily encounters with Ray. Like this one, sometime in mid-November, when he came into my office and took something out of his pocket:
“Here,” he said.
I looked up from my computer and saw him put something rolled up in a napkin on my desk. “What’s that?”
“It’s for you.”
I stared at the napkin suspiciously.
“I made it for you.”
I took my glasses off and swiveled my chair toward it, then poked at it with a pencil a few times until the napkin fell open. Inside lay three slices of what appeared to be bread.
“You made this?” I said. I poked at the bread a few more times until he laughed.
“This weekend. You know, since I have no life, all I do on the weekends is dream of food and make it.”
I stared at him. No life. I had no life either, and the last thing I could imagine was having an appetite and waiting for the weekend to come to try to sate it.
An appetite for food, that is.
“I’ve been baking bread a lot lately,” he continued unprodded. “It’s good. Therapeutic. Very Zen. You mix it up, let it rise, beat it down, let it rise again, beat it some more.”
Kind of like what he did to me.
“And then an hour later you can eat it.”
Imagining him in an apron in his kitchen covered in flour and beating a pile of dough to pass the hours of his supposed loneliness had a surprising effect on me:
It worked.
For an instant I felt a thick knot of sympathy and nostalgia growing in my stomach—I have no life too! Why can’t we be lonely together?—and I smiled at him as he moved to the doorway of my office and backed out into the hallway.
But an hour later, when I passed Evelyn’s cubicle and saw two slices of the same bread on her desk, I wanted to uncover the warm towel from his dough head and beat him senseless, let him rise, then beat him down again.
Or this one, a few weeks later, when he called me after getting home from a work party I didn’t go to:
“It’s me,” he said, almost in a whisper. Eddie had handed me the phone through the curtain. “I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“No,” I said, trying to sound calm. “We’re always up late.”
There was silence, I knew, because of my use of the word we, and I relished it.
“Really,” he said. “Doing what?”
“Just talking, mostly.” His question and tone surprised me, as did my capacity to lie and mislead him with innuendo.
Another pause.
Mostly.
“I didn’t think Eddie was the talking type.”
“Well, outside the office he is. He
has a very active social life, as you know, and he’s always sort of falling in love with somebody.”
Ray was silent. “Is he falling in love with you?”
This was easier than I’d thought. But at that point I didn’t have the heart for the game—New Old Cows are very sensitive to hurting others the way they themselves have been hurt—and besides, I didn’t want to make it seem like I was totally unavailable in case he wanted to, you know, come crawling back.
“With me?” I laughed a little for effect. “We’re just friends.”
Ray sighed then and made some joke about having heard that Eddie sometimes came home during lunch to watch reruns of Bonanza, but I lost track of what he was saying because I was still reeling from his apparent jealousy about Eddie and me.
“So does he?” Ray said.
“Does he what?”
“Does he come home at lunch to watch Bonanza?”
“I don’t know.” I’d heard the same story too, once, a long time ago, but forgotten about it since I’d moved in. It seemed like just the kind of rumor Eddie would start about himself to make people think he was more disconnected from his job than he already was so they’d leave him alone to concentrate on scheduling his Victoria’s Secret models.
“Anyway,” Ray said. “I was calling because I went to that party tonight and I was hoping I would see you there.”
I lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke away from the receiver. “I wasn’t really in the mood for a party.”
Another lie and misleading innuendo.
I wasn’t really in the mood to go on living.
“Neither was I. But Diane thought we should at least make an appearance—now that we’re national, she said we have to see and be seen so she made me and Evelyn go.”
“Schmooze.”
“Booze.”
Ray told me about the party, and then he told me how he’d wished I’d been there so we could have stood in a corner and made fun of people. Then, after a long, expectant lull, he said: “So listen—we should have dinner sometime. Maybe sometime this week. I feel like I never see you. I feel like—well, I miss you.”
My heart pounded. “Me too,” I said.