by Laura Zigman
Subject appears to be engaging in dash-and-hide method of escape.
It didn’t look good.
And it especially didn’t look good when Jason’s name appeared in boldface on Page Six along with the bluebloods announcing that the two of them were now an item.
Motherfucker! I spat into the notebook that night.
So much for scientific objectivity.
I wasn’t ready yet to tell Joan about the notebooks, but the next morning when she called, I couldn’t help giving her a taste of my findings on commitmentphobia and pathological narcissism. She was fascinated. Perhaps it was Jason, or the combination of Jason and Ben, but she suddenly seemed to have a voracious curiosity about what I was finding and a renewed interest in Eddie’s behavior. Not to mention a truer understanding of me vis-à-vis Ray. Night after night I filled her in, and sometimes even during the day, if some late-breaking situation with Eddie warranted it, I would call her at the office, and she would tell her assistant to hold her calls so that she could listen intently and process all the “new” information about men we now had.…
FIELD RESEARCH FROM BASE CAMP: EDDIE MEETS A WIFE
womanizer (woom-e-ni-zer) n a man who pursues or courts women habitually; a philanderer
philander (fi-lan-der) vi (of a man) to make love with a woman one cannot or will not marry; carry on flirtations
cad (kad) n a man who behaves dishonorably or irresponsibly toward women
lothario (lo-thar-e-o) n [Lothario, seducer in the play The Fair Penitent (1703) by Nicholas Rowe] a man whose chief interest is seducing women
Romeo (ro-me-o) n 1: the romantic lover of Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet 2: any man with a reputation for amatory success with women
Casanova (kaz-e-no-va) n 1: Giovanni Jacopo, 1725–98, Italian adventurer and writer 2: a man known for his amorous adventures; rake
Don Juan (don wan) n 1: a legendary Spanish nobleman famous for his many seductions and his dissolute life. 2: a ladies’ man or womanizer; romeo
Don Juanism n SATYRIASIS
satyriasis (sa-te-ri-e-sis) n abnormal, uncontrollable sexual desire in a male
“I should just marry this one. She’s definitely a wife,” Eddie said matter-of-factly, glass of Scotch in hand. He paced back and forth across the living-room floor in front of me the way he always did when he was contemplating the acquisition—or disposal—of a wife:
Step step step turn.
Step step step turn.
Step step step turn.
Not looking up from my copy of The Social Life of Monkeys and Apes (Zuckerman, second edition), I feigned indifference. This was not the first time that Eddie had come home from a party and announced that he had met his wife, only to announce two weeks later, without a trace of irony, that he had met another. I’d recorded it all in his notebook:
Case wives: #1–23.
Ages: 22–34.
Preliminary diagnosis of Subject E: satyriasis.
But despite the way of all his previous case wives’ flesh and the fact that the chapter on baboons I was reading was a real page-turner, the familiar twinge of curiosity overtook me and I remembered the new purpose of my living arrangement with Eddie:
Research.
Inserting a bookmark in mid-chapter, I approached the cage and threw Eddie a banana:
“So …” I said leadingly.
But Eddie didn’t seem to hear me, lost as he was in the stream-of-consciousness comparative-shopping thought processes I now knew by heart:
Step step step great body nice legs good breeding turn.
Step step step but she’s a blond ectomorph and I prefer brunette mesomorphs turn.
Step step step she’s smart but not smart enough which could be a problem since she has to be smart enough to “get” me which could be difficult as I’m very complex turn.
Step step step what did I do with my cigarettes? Stop.
He frisked himself, and finding a near-empty soft pack of Camel Ultra Lights in the torn breast pocket of his oxford cloth shirt, he shook out a wrinkled cigarette and lit it, then continued his slow, pensive three-step.
Now, where was I? Oh, yes, the question of hair color and whether or not she’ll be able to keep up with me intellectually.
I shifted uneasily on the couch.
This excessive pacing and interior monologue was a radical departure from Eddie’s usual post-cocktail-party, prenuptial ebullience. If I was going to make the most of his willing—if unwitting—participation in my research, I realized I was going to have to extract the reasons out of him. And while my objective, echoing method of questioning (“It sounds like you’re angry that she’s an ectomorph.”) usually achieved maximum results, this time, because memories of Ray and the wanton polygamy of the male stump-tailed macaque I had just read about had made me mad, I said:
“So are you old enough to be her father, or is she at least out of college this time?”
Raising an eyebrow, Eddie acknowledged my reference to his weakness for nubile wives, a weakness that had inspired me, some months back, when I still thought it—and everything else about Eddie’s womanizing—was hilarious, to refer to him “affectionately” as Humbert Humbert. But Eddie’s finding a wife was serious business these days, and so neither of us was laughing.
“Okay, I’m sorry,” I lied. “What’s she like?”
Inhaling and exhaling, sipping and pacing, Eddie, as always, considered the question carefully. Hypervigilant in his efforts to capture the true essence of each new wife with precision and accuracy, and in as few words as possible, he said finally, in a tone that implied he had given the question a great deal more than ten seconds of thought:
“She’s perfect.”
“Perfect,” I echoed.
“Well, almost perfect,” Eddie clarified.
“Almost perfect,” I echoed again. I was stalling for time. Almost perfect was not in the notebook.
“Six inches shy of perfect, to be exact. You see,” he said by way of explanation, “she’s only five foot one.”
The first serious wife contender to come along while I lived with Eddie was the wife he met in early February.
It was a Friday night when he came home and announced his news, parading in front of me in his lucky suit, more than slightly drunk.
“Speak,” I slurred.
I, of course, had been sitting on the what-will-become-of-me couch all night, sipping Jack Daniel’s daintily from an oversized coffee mug.
He told me that he’d seen his wife at a cocktail party, that she was a cellist, and that she was very beautiful and very rich. In fact, she was so beautiful and so rich, he said, that he’d found out he would have to get her permission to call her.
“Permission to call her?” I slurred again.
“She’s had some unfortunate luck with men,” Eddie purred, lighting a Camel and continuing to pace back and forth in front of me. “Luck that I plan to change.”
“Good thing you were wearing your lucky suit.”
Eddie stared at me. Obviously, at a time like this—post-hunt, prepursuit—he was not in the mood for humor.
“So, what,” I said, “you’ll call her to ask her if you can call her?”
“No. My friends who had the party will call her. Then they’ll tell me if I can proceed.”
“Permission? How come we don’t require permission to be called?” Joan asked when I called her later that night. But before I had a chance to answer, Eddie hit my curtain a few times.
He needed the phone.
An hour or so later he poked his hand through the curtain.
Opposable thumbs up.
Their first date would be one week thence, Eddie briefed me, the following Saturday night. All weekend long he paced back and forth across the apartment, planning and refining his strategy for the date.
I watched him from my bed through the slit between the curtain and the wall and made notes:
Subject E’s attempts to pursue “wife” have pr
oduced specific feelings of anxiety; convinced that a “perfect plan” for first formal encounter must be executed to produce desired effect in wife object.
Subject E grappling intensely with details of said plan (i.e. activity, feeding venue, etc.), as well as with issues of manipulation of wife object’s feelings vis-à-vis her perception of his plan of action.
Subject E displaying “deep thought” behavior patterns but has not verbally communicated to on-site observer.
Finally, on Sunday night, he filled me in on the details of his plan: because Catherine had lived her whole life in a rarefied environment and undoubtedly missed out on her childhood, he would take her to the circus and then to dinner someplace “common.”
Such plotting
Such planning.
Such psychological deconstruction and silent deliberation.
Bulls become eerily focused when they’re formulating their plan of attack.
Eddie’s date went off without a hitch.
Catherine loved the circus, and she loved the Greek diner he carefully picked out. The following week he took her ice-skating in Central Park and to Rumpelmayer’s afterward for hot chocolate and grilled cheese sandwiches. It seemed his lost-childhood-theme-park strategy was working perfectly.
“Let’s celebrate downstairs,” he said to me when he’d returned from the date, his Hans Brinker cheeks aglow.
It was only three in the afternoon, and I had never been to Night Owls in daylight. We sat down at the bar, and before we had even taken our coats off, our drinks arrived.
I looked at Eddie. “What did you do? Call ahead?”
Eddie took a sip of his Scotch before launching into his update. “I thought you’d be interested to know that we haven’t slept together yet.”
No burying the lead this time.
I stopped in mid-sip. “But you’ve been seeing her for two weeks. Standard operating procedure for you is normally two hours.”
“I know. But this is different. It’s special,” he said, his voice revoltingly full of reverence.
“Special?”
“You see,” he explained, “sometimes, when a man meets someone special—a wife,” he clarified, “it’s better to wait. To take things slow.” He went on. “You don’t want to sleep with a wife on the first date.”
I nodded for a few seconds, processing. “But I thought that’s what men wanted—to sleep with a woman as soon as possible so that they could fall in love as soon as possible.”
Eddie shook his head dismissively. Clearly, I wasn’t getting it.
“So you didn’t sleep with Rebecca on the first date?” I asked.
He looked past me to the windows that faced the street. “No,” he said. “Though she would have.”
I looked out at the street too. The air was thick and gray, the way it gets before it snows. “I slept with Ray on the first date,” I said, almost to myself. “Maybe that’s why it didn’t work.”
Eddie turned and looked me in the eyes. “No, Jane. It didn’t work because Ray’s an idiot.”
I stared at him. In all the months I’d lived with him he’d never offered an opinion of Ray. His words surprised me. “You think?”
“He doesn’t know what he wants yet. He’s too young.”
Too young.
Ray was thirty. And Eddie was thirty-five. That didn’t seem too young to me to know whether or not you love someone, and what to do about it if you did.
“You need someone older,” he continued. “Someone more mature. Someone who can keep up with you.”
“Keep up with me?” I said. “I’m a fucking mess.” I saw my current life flare up in front of me like a lit match and laughed—the hole in my wall, the curtain, the ten-by-fifteen-foot bedroom cell, the notebooks. My life felt suspended in a way it never had: stalled, impermanent, surreal.
“No, you’re not. You just fell in love with someone who wasn’t ready for it.”
I exhaled slowly and closed my eyes, hoping to see in that blackness the glimmer of the future husband that Eddie was describing. But that place was empty, and I didn’t want to stay there. I opened my eyes and tried to refocus on the present.
“So what are you going to do about Catherine?”
“We’re going to spend the weekend at the Plaza,” he said, standing up and leaving a ten-dollar bill on the bar.
I put my cigarette out and slid off the barstool.
“Bring me back a shower cap, okay?”
Eddie and Catherine never made it to the Plaza that weekend.
The beginning of the end started that Sunday night, after 60 Minutes, while Eddie was out running.
That’s when the phone rang.
“Is Eddie at home?” a female voice said. While I rummaged around the living room for a scrap of paper and a pen, I told the voice that Eddie was out running and that I expected him back momentarily.
“Would you be so kind, then,” the voice began again, “as to tell him that Catherine called?”
I scribbled furiously: Would you be so kind.
Would you be so kind?
Who talked like this?
It was his wife, being so kind as to call for Eddie for the first time.
I was thrilled for Eddie, then immediately envious. I wished it were a husband calling for me.
Would you be so kind as to tell Jane that I’m completely in love with her?
And then, before I knew it, I was overcome with dread. I had never really considered what I’d do if Eddie actually got involved with someone for longer than a week:
Where would I live?
Who would I talk to?
What would become of me?
Nowhere.
No one.
Nothing.
Sometime later Eddie returned. Momentarily forgetting my impending loserdom, I ran up to him and tugged at his ratty Yale sweatshirt. “Guess who called?” I said, barely able to contain myself. I held the message slip up in front of his face. “Catherine!”
He brushed past me through the living room and into his bedroom, removing his running clothes as he went. “Huh,” he said, without expression. “I’m going to shower.”
Seconds passed.
Minutes passed.
Eddie came out of the shower.
He made rice.
He read the Sunday Times cover to cover.
He did the dishes.
Even the silverware.
Then he retreated into his study and closed the door, coming out now and again only to empty his ashtray.
I sat in my room, furious. Three and a half hours had passed since Catherine had called, and still Eddie had not called her back. Just a few weeks before, he could talk of nothing but whether or not she would grant him permission to call her, and now, after two dates and the promise of a third, he suddenly didn’t seem to want any part of her.
Finally, when I couldn’t take the waiting any longer, I stormed out through the curtain.
“Obviously this isn’t any of my business,” I said, standing in his doorway, “but when are you going to call her back?”
He looked up at me over his reading glasses and put his pen down, and that’s when he said it:
“I just got home.”
“You just got home? You just got home? What are you talking about? You’ve been home for three and a half hours!”
Eddie took his glasses off. I waited for him to explain himself voluntarily the way he usually did. But this time he didn’t.
“Okay, look,” I said. “When you say ‘I just got home,’ do you really believe you just got home? Is that Guy Time? I mean, does time actually feel different to you? Do three and a half hours really only feel like ten minutes?”
For the first time since I’d known Eddie he looked sheepish. “No,” he admitted. “I just don’t feel like calling her.” He picked up his pen again and put his glasses back on.
Case file closed.
Well, not quite.
I don’t know if Eddie ever really did call Cathe
rine back that night, but I do know that he must have called her eventually, because about a week later he told me they’d had a talk.
“I dumped her,” Eddie clarified, looking both ashamed and very pleased with himself, as if he’d managed to unload a beautiful but problematic old Mercedes on an unsuspecting sucker. “She was too stiff, too formal, too uptight.”
I imagined her trying to digest the news while he let himself off the hook, like I had when Ray dumped me. The acute misery and confusion of that night and those that followed it pissed me off.
“You’re an asshole,” I said.
He looked at me like I was kidding. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
Eddie’s face fell slightly as he considered the accusation. “I’m just confused.”
“That’s the least of it.”
I got up off the couch, went into my room through the curtain, and opened up his notebook.
Note to the case file:
Wife object dumped.
Subject E exhibiting classic signs of nonempathetic sociopathic behavior.
Prognosis: Ass-holicism.
THE ORIGINS OF THE NEW-COW THEORY
The males of most mammalian species have a definite urge towards seeking variety in their sexual partners. If a male rat is introduced to a female rat in a cage, a remarkably high copulation rate will be observed at first. Then, progressively, the male will tire of that particular female and, even though there is no apparent change in her receptivity, he eventually reaches a point where he has little apparent libido. However, if the original female is then removed and a fresh one supplied, the male is immediately restored to his former vigor and enthusiasm.
—Glenn Wilson, The Great Sex Divide
It was, by all accounts, an inauspicious morning.
In fact, it was just like every other morning I’d had since being dumped.
I woke up before the alarm.
I remembered a dream I’d had about Ray. (A wild boar was chasing him around the greenroom. Was I the wild boar?)