Animal Husbandry

by Laura Zigman

  “And maybe I could see your apartment. Make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m okay,” I said, which was only half a lie.

  Things were looking up now that I might have a reason to put on my hat and little dress again.

  But Ray and I never did go to dinner, and he never did come by the apartment to check on my well-being. Which, besides pissing me off, hurting my feelings, and depressing me, surprised me. But not David.

  “Mind-fuck,” he pronounced when I called him from the office one night, well into the second week of waiting for Ray to stop in and ask me to dinner.

  Joan agreed, in essence, though she didn’t use that term, when I stopped by her apartment on my way home.

  “He’s fucking with you,” she said, gulping from a bottle of water. She had just come home from the gym and was still in her black one-piece Lycra space suit. “Look at me,” she said, wiping her mouth when she came up from the water bottle for air. “I’m sweating like a pig.”

  She poured me a glass of water from a different bottle and walked me out of the kitchen and into the living room. “That’s what Ben does,” she said when we sat down on the couch. “Whenever he’s being an asshole—which is, like, all the time—but particularly when he starts saying things that imply he’s feeling trapped or hemmed in, I try to make him jealous. I won’t call when I get home from work and I won’t answer the phone when I know it’s him. Or I’ll tell him I had dinner with some freelance writer guy, only I won’t tell him that he was really ugly.”

  “So it works.”

  Joan shifted on the couch and kicked off her big white high-top cross-trainers. “It works. For about a minute. He calls and calls. Gets very attentive. Stops complaining about how he sees too much of me and starts complaining about how he doesn’t see enough of me. Then a few weeks later, or maybe a month later, it goes back to the way it was, and the whole cycle starts again.”

  I shook my head. “What is that?” I asked, annoyed. “I mean, why would Ray call and say he missed me and that he wanted to have dinner and then not do anything?”

  She lifted her hair off her neck for a few seconds, then reached for a cigarette and lit it. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s what they do.”

  “But why? Why?”

  “It’s like, they want what they can’t have, and as soon as they can have it, they don’t want it anymore. It’s completely demoralizing to feel like you’re reduced to just being some emotional trigger that sets them off. Like, it almost doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do. You’re just a pawn, in this perpetual game of chess. And by the end you’re so exhausted you almost hope you don’t catch them.” She yawned and ran her hands over her face and then down her neck in long, slow strokes. “God,” she whispered. “I feel so old.”

  One night, on one of the rare occasions that Eddie was home, I made a list of all the girlfriends he’d had since I’d moved in. After I typed it up, I came through the curtain and stood in the doorway of Eddie’s room, where he was lying in bed, reading American Psycho.

  “I think I have them all,” I said, as if I were the first one back from a scavenger hunt. “Holly. Diana. Tina. Bettina. Pauline. Giulia. Deborah. Emily. Melissa. Alissa. Elaine.”

  Eddie looked up from his book. He took off his reading glasses and tightened the belt of his ripped and threadbare Black-Watch-plaid wool bathrobe.

  “You missed Jacqueline.”

  “Jacqueline?” I said, checking my notes. “Who’s Jacqueline?”

  “Between Diana and Tina and during Bettina,” he started to explain, but it was taking too much effort, and he soon became bored, so he put his glasses on and returned to his book.

  I dragged the phone into my room through the curtain and called Joan.

  “There’s so many of them I can’t keep track,” I whispered into the receiver. “It’s amazing. It’s horrible.” The mere thought of them made me envision a conga line of bunnies, dancing their way through the Playboy Mansion on their way to Hugh Hefner’s silk pajamas.

  Joan was unimpressed. “Really?” she said. “He dates that much?”

  “Every week there’s someone new. And these women—they’re gorgeous. Unbelievable. Sometimes—usually—he has several different women at the same time.”

  “At the same time? In the apartment?” She sounded momentarily intrigued.

  “No. I mean, he dates them simultaneously.”

  But no matter how many women Eddie could have, he always came back to the one he couldn’t have.

  “Jane. Wake up. I need to talk to you.”

  Eddie’s silhouette showed through the curtain, and for an instant I was tempted to feign sleep and take one night off from his drunken rantings. But there was something in his voice that night which made me reconsider, so I sat up in bed and opened the curtain.

  In the dark I saw Eddie pour himself a drink, and when he put the bottle down, he turned around and peered in at me. Then he shook his head.

  “No. You’re going to have to come out for this one. It’s important.”

  I crawled out past the sheet, past the plaster chunks, and over to the couch next to Eddie. He looked exhausted and slightly drunk, yet when I looked in his eyes, I saw an unfamiliar spark of alertness. “What is it?”

  “I saw her.”

  “You saw who?”

  “Rebecca. I saw Rebecca. At the Film Forum.”

  “Did she see you?”

  “Yes, she saw me,” he said, taking a quick sip of Scotch and then a long, slow drag of his cigarette. “We sat together.”

  I reached for his glass and took a sip too.

  “I knew she would be there. I went to the theater after work, and I just had this feeling I’d see her there.”

  “And you did.”

  “And I did. And it was great, of course, just like I’d always imagined it would be.”

  “So what happened?”

  “We sat together. We talked. Afterward we had dinner.” Eddie sighed and looked at his drink. “It was … perfect.”

  For a minute or two we didn’t speak. This was the first time either of us had had a sign of hope, and we were too afraid to acknowledge it.

  “Will you see her again?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.” Eddie lit another cigarette and inhaled so deeply I was afraid the smoke would never come out of his lungs. “Maybe.”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “Sort of. I think. She said she’s been seeing someone, but it’s not working out.”

  “Too bad,” I said, and we both laughed quietly.

  Eddie put his glass down and ran his hands through his hair. “You know, since she left, I’ve probably been with a dozen women—” He looked at my raised eyebrow and recalculated accordingly. “Okay, three dozen women—beautiful women, intelligent women, rich women. But when I’m with Rebecca, there’s just this thing, this feeling, like I’ve come home after being away for a long time.”

  I took another sip of Eddie’s Scotch and thought of Ray. “I know,” I said.

  “I’m still in love with her,” he whispered, expecting me to be surprised. But I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t.

  “Do you have a picture of her?” I watched his face while he didn’t answer, but it betrayed nothing. “It would help me understand everything if I knew what she looked like.”

  “There is only one picture,” he said finally. “A Polaroid. And I had to hide it.”

  Eddie got up, and I followed him, not into his bedroom but into the kitchen, to the big, deep cabinet above the refrigerator. Standing on a chair, he pulled out a huge old cardboard box, full of hammers and nails and electrical wire and camping supplies, and as he passed me a saw to hold, he slipped something into the palm of his hand and jumped down off the chair.

  “It was New Year’s Day,” he said, standing next to me under the light. “Two years ago. We had some people over.” I looked into his hand, and there they were, in the kitchen by the sink, smiling. Eddie h
ugging Rebecca from behind.

  For a moment I couldn’t speak. Maybe it was because Rebecca was so unlike all the women Eddie had brought home those two months—a grown-up tomboy with regular hair and a denim shirt and no makeup—that I was caught off guard. Or maybe it was seeing the Halfway House in its previous incarnation, a place where two people in love lived together. Or maybe it was how different Eddie looked—how full of color his face was, how full of life his eyes were compared to now.

  Eddie asked me, “Is she what you expected?”

  I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know what I expected. I wouldn’t have thought she was your type.”

  His eyes were still fixed to the photograph. “She’s exactly my type.”

  “She looks so … normal.” I looked up at Eddie. “And you look so happy.”

  “I was happy.”

  I was stunned. Not only by the fact that Rebecca looked like someone I would probably be friends with but also because, for the first time since I’d known Eddie—for the first time since I’d moved in, he seemed almost—friendly. Like someone I could actually be interested in.… I stared at him for a few seconds and then felt a shiver snake through my body.

  What was I thinking?

  Shame on me for taking pity on an Old Bull.

  Eddie stood there for a while, looking lost, but then he took a deep breath and stole one last private look at the photo.

  “My Rebecca,” he said sadly. He got up on the chair, put the Polaroid in the box, and pushed the box as far back as it would go, then slammed the cabinet doors shut.

  “Back you go,” he said to the woman in the picture, the woman who used to live here but didn’t anymore. “That’s what you get for leaving me.”

  A few dinners later, when Eddie came home the night he asked Rebecca if she wanted to get back together, I knew it was over even before he told me, knew from the way I heard him sit down on the couch without turning on the light or pouring himself a drink. And because I knew, I did not wait for him to ask me to come out.

  There was no frenetic pacing this time, no strategizing, no lectured theories about time, and change, and second chances. It was as if Eddie had seen, in a flash of dreaded truth, that the black-velvet box of hope he had carried around all those months had been empty all along:

  She was never coming back.

  Looking at his silhouette in the dark, listening to his voice tremble and crack, I saw the dark tunnel of Eddie’s loneliness; knew that the women who came and went from his life only passed by it, without entering. And as I watched Eddie get up from the couch and walk into his room, I thought how full of tunnels the world was, each containing a different person, each with his or her own sadness.

  “What about our tunnels?” Joan said the next day on the phone. “I mean, the man has hot and cold running underwear models and you feel sorry for him.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for him. I just think he’s interesting.”

  “What’s so interesting? He’s an animal. He preys on unsuspecting prepubescent girls and rips their hearts out. You’re the one who sees the carnage.”

  Yes, I had seen it. And each of his hunt-and-kills was worthy of its own PBS science documentary.

  But wasn’t it interesting how, at times, he seemed almost … human.

  EDDIE AND JANE SEARCH FOR MATES

  The female chooses not the male which is most attractive to her but the one which is the least distasteful.

  —Charles Darwin

  The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871)

  And so the next few months passed. The dreaded holidays came, during which Eddie went to Wyoming and I went to Tortola with David, who was going to stay on there after New Year’s for a shoot. It was a short, quiet vacation, and I spent most of my time lying on my what-will-become-of-me chaise watching David swim back and forth across the patch of ocean our private beach looked out on.

  The first night Eddie and I were home together from our trips, we went downstairs to Night Owls for a reunion. He told me that while he’d been away, he’d made two big decisions: that he had to get over Rebecca once and for all, and that I had to do the same with Ray.

  “I need to find a wife, and you need to find a husband,” he said.

  I sucked on some bourbon-soaked ice. But he was right, I knew. I just didn’t want to admit it, and I certainly didn’t want to start going out on blind dates, which is the route he suggested I take to accomplish his mandate. In fact, he said, he had several possibilities for me, including one guy he’d met at a wedding the previous summer, and two guys who came highly recommended by recent or current girlfriends of his.

  Losers, I snorted.

  But after another bourbon I agreed. “Fine. Set me up,” I said to Eddie, which of course, the bartender took as a request for another round, which we sucked down without complaint.

  “Since you’re being so agreeable,” Eddie said as we left the bar and stumbled back upstairs, “Giulia asked me if I would mind taking her cat for a month while she’s in Rome for a catalog shoot.”

  I nodded drunkenly. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.” I couldn’t care less. “What’s its name?” I asked him as he unlocked the door to the apartment and pushed it open.

  “Evelyn,” he said.

  “Evelyn,” I slurred as I wove down the hallway to my bedroom. “Evelyn with the big sweet face.”

  After each of the blind dates that Eddie had pimped for me Joan and I had virtually the same conversation:

  “How was it?”

  “Awful.”

  “Bad?”

  “Jesus.”

  “So there was no—?”

  “Chemistry? None.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Not even—?”

  “No way.”

  “Was he—?”

  “Unappealing? Completely.”

  “Was there anything—?”

  “Remotely attractive? No. He had that—”

  “Thing?”

  “With his lips. You know. Too—”

  “Moist?”

  “With little bits of spit—”

  “In the corners?”

  “In the middle. Like a little white thread.”

  “What about—?”

  “His shoes? Hideous.”

  “Jazz shoes?”

  “Crepe soles.”

  “Were you—?”

  “Repulsed? Yes.”

  “What about his—?”

  “Hands? Fleshy. No knuckles. Little.”

  “So you couldn’t imagine—?”

  “Them on me?”

  “Or in you?”

  “Never. No way.”

  “So if he called, you wouldn’t—?”

  “No.”

  “Not even just in case he—?”

  “Has a friend? No.”

  “Did he—?”

  “Pay? No.”

  “Did it—?”

  “Depress me and remind me even more how much I miss Ray even though it was supposed to do the exact opposite? Yes.”

  “Well, maybe next time you’ll—”

  “There won’t be a next time.”

  But there always was a next time.

  “So what was the physical-feature caveat this time?”

  “Big hair.”

  “As big as—?”

  “Ours? Bigger.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Muammar Qaddafi hair.”

  “Oh, my God. Could you—?”

  “See it from the street through the plate-glass windows of the restaurant? Yes.”

  “Did you try to—?”

  “Block it out by putting my hands up and closing one eye while I talked to him? Yes.”

  “What would he look like if he—?”

  “Were bald? Like Muammar Qaddafi with a stocking over his head.”

  “Wasn’t he also the guy who—?”

  “Just got off the Optifast program? Depends what you mean by just.”


  “Was he—?”

  “Still fat or fat again? Yes.”

  “Did he—?”

  “Eat anything? You mean, besides the two bowls of chips and salsa, five chicken-and-cheese enchilladas, and a chimi-changa? No.”

  “Did he—?”

  “Pay? Yes. For his ‘half.’ ”

  And a next time.

  “Now, didn’t you see this guy’s head shot before to ensure against—?”

  “Big hair and fat? Yes. But I should have known that an actor with a head shot would want to make—”

  “An entrance?”

  “A scene.”

  “Was he—?”

  “Standing at the crowded bar with a huge hand-painted sign with fourth-grade-esque glued-on glitter that read I’m your Mystery Date? Yes.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “And was there a big white beribboned box on the bar next to the sign that contained a big white beribboned wrist corsage? Yes.”

  “Jesus. Did you—?”

  “Put it on because he said he wouldn’t stop singing until I did? Yes.”

  “Were you—”

  “So mortified that I had to run into the bathroom and breathe into a paper bag to control my panic attack? Yes.”

  “And was he—?”

  “Still there when I came back, pulling file cards from his breast pocket with suggestions of what we could do on our mystery date? Yes.”

  “Did you—?”

  “Want to kill him as much as I wanted to kill Eddie? Almost.”

  THE QUEST FOR ANSWERS AND THE METAMORPHOSIS OF JANE GOODALL, OLD COW, INTO JANE GOODALL, MONKEY SCIENTIST

  Jane Goodall’s first encounter with chimpanzees came at age two, when she was given Jubilee, a stuffed toy. Fascinated by animals, Jane later read Dr. Doolittle and dreamed of living in Africa. In 1957, at the age of 23, she traveled to Kenya and met paleontologist Louis S. B. Leakey, who stunned everyone by assigning her to study chimpanzees in what is now Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. Her patient, unobtrusive approach brought her close to the chimps.

  National Geographic, December 1995

  It was late January, and Eddie had been going out a lot lately. As he reasoned, he wasn’t getting any younger.