Animal Husbandry

by Laura Zigman

  Science.

  Reason.

  Logic.

  Facts.

  I put my cigarette out and reached for the file. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, only three percent of all mammals pair-bond,” I said. “Which means that ninety-seven percent of them are—”

  “Either fucking New-Cow assistants or the subjects of their magazine profiles?”

  I looked up from my file. “That too,” I said. “But the word I was looking for was polygamous.”

  Joan leaned toward me on the couch and tried to read from my file upside down. “But have you found anything more about why they’re that way? Why they say they’re in love with us if they’re just going to cheat on us?”

  I recognized Joan’s Old-Cow rage and wished there was something I could say that would alleviate it. But judging from personal experience, nothing short of death of the beloved Bull could do that. I made a sympathetic face and nodded for a few seconds, then turned back to the file with clinical deliberation.

  “It has something to do with reproductive opportunities. You know, the more the male mates, the more offspring it can produce. By definition male fitness is the ability to maximize mating frequency.”

  “Maximize mating frequency,” Joan repeated. “But with different mates.”

  “Correct.”

  I flipped through my articles and the yellow legal pad where I’d scribbled down long paragraphs of notes, then through my secret spy pad from the day before, and found something I was looking for. “Okay, here.” I started to read the notes I’d taken from Sex, Evolution, and Behavior (Daly and Wilson):

  “ ‘Throughout the animal kingdom, males generally woo females, rather than the reverse. This element of the male strategy has been labeled the Copulatory Imperative. As much concerned with quantity as with quality, males are often rather indiscriminate in courtship.… Among invertebrates as diverse as butterflies and hermit crabs, males are apt to court an astonishing variety of objects, indeed almost anything that bears some resemblance to a female. The principle also holds up in our own species.’ ”

  “I see,” Joan said, standing up and heading toward the kitchen with the Mrs. Butterworth’s syrup I’d brought. “So the next time we’re stupid enough to fall in love, we have to worry about them cheating on us not only with other women but also with maple-syrup bottles?”

  No sooner had I gotten home and digested Joan’s pancakes than she called me.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said.

  A bad sign.

  “About what we talked about this afternoon.”

  Eddie was in the living room watching a John Wayne movie, so I took the phone through the hole and closed the curtain. “Specifically?” I said, reaching for the general file.

  “Well, it just sort of clicked after you left. We had a staff meeting last week about an idea someone had that is kind of related.”

  “Kind of related how?”

  “The idea was to add a column in the magazine for women. A column for women about men.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “At the time it was going to be about obvious stuff, like how every man thinks he’s going bald. You know, like that.”

  “But why have a column for women if it’s a men’s magazine?”

  “Because girlfriends read it. Wives read it.”

  Made sense. “I should read it,” I said.

  I made a mental note to add Men’s Times to my reading list. It seemed so obvious, I wondered why I had never thought of it myself: reading a magazine specifically targeted at men to find out what and how they think.

  “And … so?” I said, wondering where this was leading.

  “And so after our conversation today I started thinking: Fuck baldness. Baldness isn’t the issue. The real issue is their behavior—insights into what they do and why they do it. Like the New-Cow theory.”

  I laughed. “One theory does not a column make, Joan,” I said.

  “I know. But there must be other things you’re finding out that are pertinent.”

  I glanced over at the pile of notebooks and the file on my little desk. Somehow I didn’t think the sixteen-inch fecal trail of the greater dwarf lemur was what she had in mind.

  We were both silent for a few minutes. “Hello?” Joan finally said. “So, what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  “About the column?”

  I shrugged. “It depends.”

  “On what?”

  I played with the phone cord. “On who writes it.”

  “Well, a woman would have to write it.”

  “Obviously,” I said. “But you’d have to get a particular kind of woman to write it.”

  “Right,” she said matter-of-factly. I could tell she was pretending to be only mildly interested in what I was saying, but I knew she was staring intently at the split ends on her hair. “Particular how?”

  I sat down on my futon and stuffed the pillow between my back and the wall. “She’d have to be smart. She’d have to have been around the block a time or ten. She’d have to have lost her romantic virginity and had it replaced with—” I stopped to try to think of the right word.

  “Bitterness?” Joan offered.

  “Not bitterness,” I said before thinking about it. “Well, yes. I guess she would have to be a little bit bitter.” It sounded as absurd as saying someone could be a little bit pregnant.

  “In other words, this woman would have to see men for what they really are,” she said.

  “Right.”

  Pause.

  “Whatever that is.” We both snorted.

  An hour later, at six-thirty, the phone rang again.

  “Believe it or not, I’m in your neighborhood,” Joan said. “Come meet me at that disgusting bar you always go to with Don Juan de Eddie.”

  So I did, and there she was, sitting on a stool with a vodka straight up in front of her and a cigarette already lit. Her eyes widened when she saw me.

  I could tell the plot was coming.

  I caught the bartender’s eye and mouthed the word Jack as I sat down on a stool.

  “I think you should do it,” Joan said.

  “Do what?”

  “The column.”

  She was wasting no time.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Why?” she asked, as if it weren’t obvious.

  “Why?” I picked up my drink and sucked in a mouthful of thick, undiluted bourbon. “Because.”

  “Because why?”

  My mouth dropped open as I turned to her. “Because—one, I’m not a writer, and two, I’m not a psychologist.”

  She waved her hand at me dismissively. “You write fine, and I’m not looking for a psychologist.”

  “Right. You’re just looking for any wacko off the street who’s known her fair share of assholes.”

  “No. I’m looking for someone who’s been in the trenches. Someone who gets it. Someone who can communicate that to the multitudes of women who don’t.” She sipped her drink and shivered. She couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “Look, everything you’re finding out, everything about psychology and animal behavior and how it explains male behavior—”

  “Correction,” I interrupted. “Nothing will ever begin to explain male behavior.”

  “I know. But it’s something. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anything that even begins to identify what this—this thing is.”

  “You make this thing sound like a disease.”

  Joan nodded. “Well, maybe it is. I mean, look what happened to you with Ray and what happened to me with Jason. A few things were different, but the essence was exactly the same.”

  “Hmmm,” I said. I knew that, after making the list that night in the notebook.

  “So I think we should use it.”

  “We?”

  “You. Me. The magazine. Think of it as providing a service, for which you’ll be amply paid.”

  “But I don’t know what I’m talking
about, Joan.” I flailed my arm out toward the ceiling, and the apartment. “All I have is a bunch of notebooks with unrelated facts and rantings. This isn’t a full-time job. It’s just a hobby. A sick, twisted, pathetic hobby. It’s not exactly something I’m proud of, something I’d want to advertise.”

  “So you’ll do it under a pseudonym. You already have one: Dr. Goodall,” she said.

  “Some pseudonym. Everyone would know it was me.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. We’d just change the first name. To Marie, like Marie Curie. With ‘Goodall’ conjuring up chimps and scientific observation you’ve got the perfect composite, impartial, unbiased persona.”

  I was silent.

  Dr. Marie Goodall.

  Not bad.

  “Look. It’s the ultimate revenge fantasy. You get rich and famous writing about something you’re already obsessed with. If nothing else it’ll be cathartic.”

  I looked at Joan and then at my drink. I had to admit, it was tempting—the idea of revenge and relief. Like a public flogging. But I told Joan that the prospect of actually pulling it off—doing the research, writing the articles without anyone finding out Dr. Marie Goodall didn’t exist—or that she did, and it was me, and even getting Men’s Times interested in something that would most certainly assassinate the collective ego of the exact gender demographic it was trying to reach—seemed impossible.

  “Let me worry about that,” Joan said. “First thing tomorrow, when Ben is refreshed after his red-eye back from New Jersey or Queens, I’ll pitch the idea to him in the meeting. We’ll deal with Dr. Goodall later.”

  A FRAUD IS BORN

  We tend to study animals for what they can teach us about ourselves or for facts that we can turn to our advantage. Most of us have little interest in the aspects of their lives that do not involve us.

  —Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life of Dogs

  “Opposable thumbs up!” Joan said when she called me at the office the next morning. She had just gotten out of her editorial meeting and was thrilled to report that the staff’s response to the idea had been unanimous.

  “Most importantly—Ben took the bait,” she gloated. “He was practically licking my fingers.”

  I sat back in my chair, confused. “But why?” I asked. “Why would he want to expose his readers to themselves in such an unflattering way?”

  “He said, and I quote, ‘Men are narcissistic enough to want to read about themselves no matter what is being said about them.’ ” She paused a minute for dramatic effect. “See? Aren’t you even more convinced about the need for this?”

  Kind of.

  “But what are we going to do about the fact that Dr. Marie Goodall doesn’t exist?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t exist yet. Meet me at my office after work. We’ll draft her bio and resumé, and then we’ll figure out what to do about a photograph.”

  I stayed at work until seven-thirty and walked over to Joan’s office by eight. When I got there, she shut the door and sat down at her desk.

  “Okay. I’ve made some notes.” She turned to her computer and adjusted the monitor so I could see it too. “I picture Dr. Marie Goodall as being somewhere in her sixties—mid sixties. She’s foreign, British probably, maybe South African. And she’s a doctor of something, though I’d hesitate making her a medical doctor because that might send up a red flag for our fact checkers.”

  I felt a Nixonian sweating attack coming on but tried to keep it from mushrooming by focusing on why I was doing this.

  Why was I doing this?

  And then I remembered.

  Ray.

  Jason.

  Eddie.

  Ben.

  Money.

  Revenge.

  Catharsis.

  The sweating subsided. “Born in Sussex,” I said.

  “Okay.” Joan started typing.

  “And the degree. Couldn’t she just have a Ph.D. in something nebulous, like biology? I mean, does anyone know what Dr. Ruth’s degree is in?”

  Joan considered the question and typed something into the computer. “Anthropology. And we’ll bury that in the body of the bio and resumé, and then we’ll load the top with work experience.”

  We looked at each other and blinked. Like two stupid cows.

  “This shouldn’t be so hard,” Joan said. “Men lie all the time! This should be fun!”

  Fun.

  I was helping concoct the background details of a nonexistent psychologist-cum-monkey-scientist-cum-professor whose persona I had invented to help me deal with getting dumped and who was about to publish her delusional insights into the male psyche in a national men’s magazine.

  Joan was right.

  This was fun. Or, at least, the most fun I’d had since my last notebook entry.

  “Okay,” I said, determined now to really free-associate. “Disciple of Freud, Jung, and Erikson. Trained extensively at the University of blah-and-blah”—I waved my hand at Joan as she typed to indicate that I would fill in those minor details later—“where she concentrated on clinical research and … psychiatric … investigation.”

  Joan stopped typing. “It sounds like she got her Ph.D. from a police academy.”

  I looked at her. “Need I actually say that all research into male behavior is a kind of police investigation?” I asked, but when neither of us answered, we went back to staring at each other, intent on coming up with a better word.

  “Exploration,” I said.

  “Exploration,” she echoed, and kept typing. “Cofounder and director of the Institute for the Study of Pathological Narcissism in Vienna. Lectures extensively around the world about said topic and related topics, including one of her subspecialties, the courtship and mating preferences of farm animals. Currently divides her time between Vienna, Prague, Freiburg, and …”

  “Oxford.”

  “Why Oxford?” I asked.

  “It grounds her firmly in academia. Readers love that.”

  I considered it for a minute and then shook my head. “No. Too big of a lie. Too traceable. It’s like saying Harvard or Yale. Let’s say Edinburgh instead. That’s where Darwin went to school.”

  “Nice touch.”

  Joan finished the bio and then went back to the resumé and added some dates and notes to it. Then she printed out a copy of each, and we looked them over.

  “We’re going to need a photo of her, you know,” Joan said.

  “A photo?” I looked at her in disbelief. “But that’s impossible. Where are we going to find a picture of a sixty-five-year-old woman with white hair and glasses who doesn’t exist?”

  Joan looked at me, and a smile crept slowly over her face. “Come with me.”

  I followed her out of her office and down the hallway to a large interior office. Joan flipped on the overhead fluorescent light, and I saw newspapers and magazines neatly stacked everywhere. Above each stack were dates.

  “The morgue,” Joan said. “Back issues of everything from the past year.”

  She took a stack of New York Posts from one of the shelves and put it down on a big table at the back of the room. We both sat down. “Let’s go through the obits,” she said, “and see what we come up with.”

  We went through almost four stacks of newspapers—four months of obituaries—trying to find someone who would fit our fictional description. Finally Joan sat back in her chair and looked at me as if she’d just discovered radon.

  “Look,” she whispered, and pointed to a photo.

  I got up from my chair and went around to her side of the table. I bent down and looked at the grainy photo and saw what Joan had seen. “Dr. Marie Goodall,” she whispered again. “Definitely Dr. Goodall.”

  I agreed. “It’s unbelievable. She’s perfect.”

  “She’s exactly what we’ve envisioned.”

  I stared at the photograph, awestruck. “She looks so … scientific … and trustworthy. She even has a bun.”

  “And once we make a few alterations, no one
will ever know she’s the recently deceased Edith Gold of Astoria.”

  Our next stop was the art department, where Joan showed me something she said was called the Scitex machine. If we fed the photo into it, she explained, we could alter the features of the face slightly and make her less recognizable. Apparently all the women’s magazines used the machine to make the models’ faces and bodies even more perfect than they already were, and at Men’s Times they used it to enhance men’s muscle definition.

  Joan fed the photo into the scanner and looked at it on the screen. Using the mouse, she thinned the lips, raised the eyebrows, thickened the nose, and little by little the features of the face changed so that when we held the two photos side by side, they looked different enough.

  “Like sisters,” I said.

  Joan turned off the scanner and shut off the lights, and we took the photos back to her office.

  “Tomorrow I’ll go through the software manual and figure out how to add a white lab coat.”

  I took one last look. “And a stethoscope.”

  The next day Joan went to Ben and proposed Dr. Marie Goodall as the writer for the Animal Husbandry series. She showed him the bio, resumé, photo, and a list of possible topics, and he approved the contracts. One article would have to be delivered at the end of February to run in the May issue, she said when she called me at the office, and if it got a good reception, a second article would have to be delivered in March for the June issue. Our deadline schedule: one week to decide on the topics for the first article and two weeks to research and write it. Joan’s only stipulation was that she wanted the article to start with the New-Cow theory, commitmentphobia, and pathological narcissism. The rest would be up to me.

  “I mean, up to Dr. Goodall,” she corrected herself.

  We’d go over my ideas on the weekend, and until then, she said, I should read everything I could get my hands on.

  Little did she know my notebooks were overflowing. But I felt I hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface.

  “Immerse yourself,” she said. “We’ll edit later.”

  THE ONSET OF MAD-COW DISEASE

  “It was the twenty-fifth of April 1985,” veterinarian [Dr. Colin Whitaker] remembers, “when one of my dairy clients phoned up to say he’d got a cow behaving oddly and would I come and have a look at it.” Whitaker drove to Plurenden Manor farm outside Ashford, in central Kent.… One of the Plurenden Manor Holsteins was sick. “When you approached her,” Whitaker recalls, “she would shy away. She was previously a quiet cow and had started becoming aggressive, rather nervous, knocking other cows, bashing other cows and so on and becoming rather dangerous to handle.…”