by Laura Zigman
But his dates were.
Underage victim du jour?
A twenty-one-year-old Barnard senior.
“Why?” I asked him one Saturday night after he had put his lucky suit on. It was too broad and, perhaps, too stupid a question to ask, but I was annoyed by his never-ending supply of distraction while I had none, so I asked anyway. I’d been fairly subtle up until now with my questions about his sex life, but suddenly I felt like getting in his face.
Maybe that was because after almost three months of apartment sharing I felt I could get away with it without his really noticing—so sexless and uninteresting a fixture had I become in my misery and in comparison to his dates. Or maybe it was precisely because I had fallen so willingly into that role—into invisibility—that I suddenly wanted to break out of it, suddenly wanted Eddie to know that I was paying attention, that I noticed his incessant libidinous prowlings.
That I was a conscious, razor-sharp Old Cow who couldn’t be fooled again.
Okay. So the real reason was that I was sick and tired of sitting home alone with Evelyn the cat.
“Why not?” he responded.
“What could you possibly have in common with someone fourteen years your junior?”
“It’s not about what I see in her. It’s about what she sees in me,” Eddie clarified.
I nodded. “And what’s that?” I asked.
“Everything.”
Everything.
What an unbelievably huge ego.
The word resonated.
After he left I paced around the living room and then went to the dictionary.
Ego.
Egocentric.
Egoistic: being centered in or preoccupied with oneself and the gratification of one’s own desires. See: narcissistic personality.
I flipped to the N’s.
Narcissistic personality: a personality disorder characterized by extreme self-centeredness and self-absorption, excessive need for attention and admiration, and disturbed interpersonal relationships.
Next stop: Eddie’s room. The bed was neatly made; shirts and pants and dirty laundry were nowhere to be found, which was always the way he left his room when he went out on a Saturday night—to make a good impression on whomever he might bring home. I turned toward his bookshelves. Big dusty hardcovers and beat up paperbacks, some obviously left over from college and graduate school since they still had yellow and black USED stickers across their spines.
American history.
World history.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature.
It was after ten, and I knew Eddie wouldn’t be home for a few hours—if at all—so I sat down on his bed and scanned the shelves some more. And there, between The Federalist Papers and An American Tragedy, I found a textbook on abnormal psychology and a few other nonacademic but pertinent titles. I flipped through each of them quickly, but one—The Culture of Narcissism (Christopher Lasch, 1979)—I read hungrily.
Pathological narcissists show a dependence on the vicarious warmth provided by others combined with a fear of dependence, and a sense of inner emptiness.… Secondary characteristics of narcissism include pseudo self-insight, calculating seductiveness, nervous, self-deprecatory humor …
Sounded familiar.
Ray, I thought.
I read on.
Chronically bored, restlessly in search of instant intimacy—of emotional titillation without involvement and dependence.… these patients, though often ingratiating, tend to cultivate a protective shallowness in emotional relations.
My mouth dropped open.
Ray again. I could suddenly see his face the night he dumped me: impassive, emotionless, contrived.
I put the book down and stared at the bookshelves in amazement.
I dropped to my hands and knees and crawled along the floorboards in front of Eddie’s shelves, not knowing exactly what I was looking for but sensing instinctively for the first time that clarity might be close at hand. My eye caught a dusty paperback at the bottom of the last set of shelves: Men Who Can’t Love (Steven Carter and Julia Sokol, 1987), a cheesy self-help book that looked like it had never been read. I picked it up and opened it to the first page, which had been “dedicated” to Eddie by the giver in big, thick black permanent marker:
THIS IS YOU, the inscription read.
It was signed by someone who must have dated him before I’d moved in since I didn’t recognize her name.
Being in Eddie’s bedroom, sitting on his bed, on the very blankets and sheets he slept in, holding a self-help book that had been personally inscribed to him by some irate, tortured woman whom he’d obviously driven mad, I felt suddenly like I was at relationship ground zero, about to see a mushroom cloud rise from the bed and blind me momentarily with its gazillion subatomic particles of information.
I opened the book reverentially, and once engrossed, I found pages of fascinating and uncannily relevant descriptions about a subspecies of male human referred to by the author as “commitmentphobics”:
If you have attracted the interest of a commitmentphobic, you will discover that the man changes drastically when a relationship runs the risk of going on “forever.”
Typically, the classic commitmentphobic relationship goes through four separate and distinct stages.
1. The Beginning: All he can think about is how much he wants you.
2. The Middle: He knows he has you, and it scares him.
3. The End: You want him, and he’s running scared.
4. The Bitter End: It’s all over, and you don’t know why.
Me, I thought.
I read on.
Psychological confinement can be just as claustrophobic as physical confinement, with both representing a loss of freedom. As a result, any serious or lengthy commitment becomes viewed as a trap, and, like any other trap, it triggers anxiety. The greater the trap, the greater the anxiety and the greater the urge to flee.
What is clear now is that men’s reactions to the claustrophobic restrictiveness of commitment are no different than any other phobic reactions. In other words, commitmentphobia is not just a clever catch phrase. Commitmentphobia is a true phobia, replete with all of the classic physical and psychological phobic symptomatology.
Ray again.
I closed the book and sat on Eddie’s bed for a while, immobilized.
Who was this narcissistic subspecies of men, this Homo erectus commitmentphobe?
Just at that moment Evelyn came into the room, whining and pining for Eddie. She climbed up onto the bed and pushed me away as she nestled into the center of his bed and rolled around on her back languorously.
I stared at her.
She was waiting. She was waiting for him to come home.
I looked down at Evelyn and remembered all the nights she’d gotten whipped up into a frenzy when Eddie was around—running after him as he changed his clothes and fixed himself dinner; leaping up onto his pillow and flying into the air repeatedly as he took off his clothes and got into bed to read. Sometimes, as I’d stood in his doorway, I’d seen her rubbing herself all over him, trying to crawl in front of his book and pawing at his private parts as if they were catnip underneath the sheets.
I was horrified, then fascinated.
The next morning at work I felt whacked-out but excited, as if a vision of some great, brilliant psycho-scientific discovery had come to me and taken hold like a religious epiphany. At the office I xeroxed the pages from the books, and later I did a Nexus search on pathological narcissism that yielded a recent article from Time magazine. I brought the file of pages into my meeting with Diane and showed her the Time piece, which was written by a professor of psychiatry at Harvard. His theory was that pathological narcissism was on the rise and that some of New York’s most infamous megalomaniacs had self-destructed because of it. Diane had a weakness for New York megalomaniacs and Harvard professors, I knew, so I wasn’t surprised when she gave me her approval to go ahead.
“Book him,” she said en
thusiastically.
After which, of course, she added: “And where are we with Kevin Costner?”
JOAN MEETS A NEW BULL
A narcissistic patient experiences his relationships with other people as being purely exploitative, as if he were “squeezing a lemon and then dropping the remains.” People may appear to him either to have some potential food inside, which the patient has to extract, or to be already emptied and therefore valueless.
—Otto Kernberg, Ph.D.
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
That night Joan and I were supposed to have dinner, but in the afternoon she called me at the office and told me she had to cancel. When I asked her why, she said this:
“I’m in love.”
I got up from my desk chair and closed my door and ran back to the phone. “In love? Since when?”
“Today.”
“Today?” I said. “With whom?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“You can’t tell me?”
“He’s kind of famous,” Joan whispered.
“Famous,” I repeated. “Famous? Like, how famous? Like movie-star famous?”
“No.”
“Sports famous?”
“Please.”
“Then, how?”
“He’s a writer.”
Oh, fuck.
“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Writers suck. They’re the worst. I thought we’d both sworn off writers, given our past experience. ‘Oh, read this, please, and love it. Love me!’ ” I pleaded, the way Evan and George, two would-be loser short-story writers we’d met at a reading years ago, used to plead.
“I know,” Joan said, “but Jason’s different. Shit, I said his name.”
Different?
She was different. Joan sounded like a pod person, all gooey and sticky and … New-Cow-like. I tried to refocus on the disastrous matter at hand. “Jason who?”
“Jason Hughes.”
Hughes, Jason. “Never heard of him,” I pronounced. How famous could he be? “So tell me, already.”
“Last night I went out with Pat, another editor at Men’s Times, and she brought along Jason, who’s written a couple of stories for the magazine—two of them covers. Anyway, we all stayed out until about three o’clock in the morning. When I got home, the phone was ringing, and it was him calling from his car phone.” She made more squeaky pod sounds and went on. “He said he just had to call and tell me that it was the most wonderful evening he’d ever had, and then he asked me if he could see me again.”
“So then what happened?”
“I said yes, of course.”
“I meant, after that,” I said. After the truck pulled up in front of your apartment and replaced your body with the giant spotted New-Cow pod.
“We’re seeing each other tonight. And this afternoon, when he called, he asked me to drive out to the Hamptons with him on Saturday. He said he’s looking to buy a house and he wants me to come with him. Can you believe it?”
I didn’t answer. I felt the back of my throat get scratchy and then seize up, as if I were about to cough up a hair ball. I was starting to remember all the times Ray had said bullshit just like that, and for a moment I was tempted to tell Joan that Jason sounded just as full of bullshit as Ray had been. But because I couldn’t remember the last time she had sounded so happy, and because I knew that part of my reaction was jealousy—jealousy that she was climbing the arc of passion without knowing about the fall that was coming once she reached the top—I didn’t go whole hog.
“Just be careful,” I said.
“Of what?”
“Of, you know, going too fast.”
“Oh, like you and Ray?”
“Yeah.”
Joan was silent. “For one thing, this is just an affair right now.”
“And?”
“And, for another thing, Jason is different. I mean, this is different.”
No, it wasn’t. But I’d said too much already. “So … is it weird?” I asked.
Seemingly relieved to be off that point, she exhaled into the phone. “Is what weird?”
“Cheating on Ben.”
“Ben who?” she said.
Who was Ben?
But then, Who was Jason? or, for that matter, Who was Ray?
As Joan constantly updated me on what was happening with Jason in the weeks that followed, I’d go home to drink my beer and eat my toast and think back to what had happened with Ray. The more she told me and the more I thought about it, the clearer my sense was that our two situations had a lot in common: Homo erectus commitmentphobe. One night while she and I were on the phone, I found myself jotting words down on the pad of paper I kept by my bed:
Same pattern.
Whirlwind courtship.
Instant intimacy.
Extremely romantic verbalists.
Jason asking Joan after first date to see house in Hamptons implied commitment to relationship; Ray telling me after two weeks he wanted to live together implied long-term commitment to relationship.
After we got off the phone, I kept writing.
By 3 A.M. I was out of paper.
The next night, on my way home from work, I went to the drugstore on the corner and bought one of those cheap, fake, old-fashioned–looking black and white composition notebooks and got into bed with it and a pen. I wrote and wrote, reconstructing my relationship with Ray—from the first day he came into my office and fixed his hair in my window, to the night at the hair bar, through the summer and into September, when things started to fall apart. I wrote in incomplete sentences (… pursued me … said “I love you” first … made it seem at the end like I was chasing him …), in fits and spurts, and sometimes with bullets and arrows (… breakup with Mia→guilt … lease signing→panic … panic→retreat … retreat→dumping …)—a kind of scientific shorthand, a way of recording a factual account of what had happened, one devoid of feeling or emotion.
The facts. That’s all I was concerned with now. Analyses and interpretation would come later.
After that night writing in the notebook became the one thing I actually looked forward to at the end of the day, the one worthwhile thing I could funnel all my obsessive energy into and feel like I was producing something of note:
Notes.
Sometimes, when Eddie was home, we’d eat dinner at the Thai restaurant downstairs that was next to Night Owls and come back upstairs and watch reruns of The Odd Couple while I secretly thought about what that night’s notebook entry would focus on: Eddie’s Current Cow? Jason’s latest verbal bouquet? On other nights, when Eddie was out, I’d listen to the country-music station for a while, then shut it off before I started writing so that sentimentality wouldn’t creep into my scientific objectivity:
Re: Joan’s phone call, 10:45 P.M., Jan. 15:
She cooked subject dinner at his apartment. Subject looked at her and said she looked good in his kitchen.
Or:
Ray has cold. Hoping it will turn to flu, then pneumonia. Weeks of bed rest would cause abdominal muscle definition to atrophy.
Or:
Re: Notebooks. Seven filled. Approx. 25,000 words written. Research hours logged: 73. Buy more. Another notebook for me. A separate one to be devoted to Joan. Two to be devoted to Eddie.
Those notebooks, my database, would, in quite short order, become files—case files—which I filled with newspaper clippings, magazine articles, xeroxed pages from books, and anything else that helped explain why Ray dumped me, why Eddie dumped everyone, why Jason would undoubtedly dump Joan—and why everything seemed so impossibly, inexplicably fucked up.
Three weeks into the notebook keeping Joan called me at home one night from Los Angeles. She had gone out there to work on the magazine’s special West Coast double issue, and coincidentally, she told me, Jason was out there too. She didn’t sound as podlike as she had the last time we spoke, so I asked her how things were going with him.
“They’re okay,” she said. “Act
ually they’re kind of weird. He just got this big assignment from Vanity Fair to profile some obscure, small-time royal, and he has to turn it around in three weeks. I guess that would make anyone a little preoccupied and short-tempered, right?”
“And assaholic.” I grabbed the notebook marked “J.” I could smell another New Cow—one newer than Joan—lurking somewhere in Jason’s periphery, and it pissed me off.
Suspect subject has “new” interest, I wrote.
“We’re staying in the same hotel, but I haven’t seen him since I got here. I keep leaving messages, but when I finally reach him late at night, he tells me he’s still transcribing his interview tapes. I mean, how long was the fucking interview?”
Subject using interview transcriptions as excuse for distancing behavior, I wrote.
I could tell she was holding on to her hat and frilly dress for dear life.
“I don’t get it. I mean, before we left New York, everything was fine, and when he found out that we were both going to be in L.A., he was thrilled.” She paused, and I could hear her pacing back and forth in her hotel room. “Maybe I should try calling again.”
“Whatever you do, do not call him,” I said, writing DO NOT CALL! in big block letters and underlining it three times. “Calling him will only make it worse.”
Joan stopped pacing and exhaled into the phone. “This is exactly what happened to you. The minute you and Ray were supposed to move in together, he stopped calling.”
I put the notebook down. “That’s a tactful way of putting what happened,” I said. “But essentially, yes. That’s right. He ‘stopped calling.’ ”
“So why is it so hard to see it coming when it’s happening to you?”
I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I saw Ray prancing by my office, looking as happy-go-lucky as he ever had. But I also felt an odd sense of something—relief, probably—that, for the first time since the fall, it seemed that Joan truly understood what I’d been ranting about all those months.
“Uch. I feel sick to my stomach.”
“Joan, Joan, Joan,” I moaned. “You don’t know the half of it.”
But she did, unfortunately, get to know all of it over the next few weeks—the unanswered phone calls, the vaporizing of a “love” affair into thin air, the sleepless nights, the obsession. He called her only twice after they came back from L.A., and both times it was to cancel dinner.