Animal Husbandry (13 page)

“I do hate your guts.”

“This is really hard for me too, you know.”

“Right,” I said. “You look really
destroyed
.”

“I am.” His tone was both indignant and wounded at the same time. “Look, I’m feeling really fragile today.”

“
You’re
feeling fragile?” I rolled my eyes and snorted. “
Please
. I’m the one who’s going to be homeless in two weeks.” I could not believe that I’d been stupid enough to have given up my apartment.

Just then Eddie appeared. He was wearing all black too, like Johnny Cash, and when he walked over to the coffee machine Ray cowered slightly, the way he always did when Eddie was around.

“So, Eddie,” I began. “I was thinking about what you said the other day. About your needing a roommate.” I glared at Ray. “Since the apartment I was
supposed
to move into just fell through and my current apartment has already been rented, I was wondering if the offer was still good.”

Eddie nodded. Ray looked from him to me in disbelief. “You’re moving in with him?”

I shrugged, feigning indifference. “Maybe.” Then I turned back to Eddie. “Tell me about the apartment.”

Eddie took a sip from his coffee and then stared into it, leaning his hip against the counter. “Like I said, it’s big. It’s cheap. It has two bedrooms, a big living room, an eat-in kitchen, and a bathtub—in the bathroom.”

“It sounds great,” I lied. “When can I see it?”

He shrugged. “You can see it tonight.”

I stared at Ray until he turned pale and looked away. “Fabulous,” I said again. “Everything’s just
fab
ulous.”

Eddie and I left work together that evening and got on the F train heading downtown. I watched longingly as one by one the trains pulled into stations that signified more desirable neighborhoods: Fourteenth Street … West Fourth … Broadway/Lafayette … Second Avenue … until at Essex and Delancey, Eddie announced, “This is us.”

We emerged from the subway into a neighborhood that, on any given day, I would be afraid to walk through in broad daylight. Only now it wasn’t broad daylight. It was nearly dark at six, and we hadn’t even turned the clocks back yet.

“Is it safe here?” I asked.

He lit a cigarette. “Safer than it used to be. The junkie transvestite prostitutes pretty much keep to themselves.”

I felt better.

He pointed to one of the many corner bodegas we had passed. “You can get great pickles here. One of the many advantages of the neighborhood.”

Much better.

When we got to the corner of Stanton and Chrystie, Eddie stopped in front of a big old dirty stone mid-rise tenement with fluorescent lights coming from the long, stark hallway beyond the vestibule. He unlocked the door and held it open for me like an old-world gentleman.

“The manse,” he said, smirking. We went inside.

Up two flights of old white tiled steps was Eddie’s apartment, which I took to calling the Lair, and later, after I’d moved in and made it my home too, the Halfway House, a reference to our mutual, and seemingly unending, recovery from our breakups. Eddie led the way, through the barely secured
front door, down the long hallway with the wall-length coat rack, past the eat-in kitchen, and into the living room with its peeling paint and its book-lined walls and window boxes of ivy. Eddie’s bedroom and adjoining study lay behind a set of French doors, and as I looked around the living room again at the mission table and the green brocade Victorian sofa and
objets d’art
scattered around it was obvious that an eye was very much at work here, and I remarked on it.

“My father was an architect,” Eddie said, lighting a Camel and looking rather pleased with himself. No doubt this was not the first time a woman had commented on the decor.

I turned around again to take in the room, and it was then that I noticed the hole in the wall. Hole in the wall, actually, was a gross understatement, because what I was looking at was less a hole in the way that a mouse hole was a hole than a huge doorway-sized yaw in the plaster wall that adjoined the living room with what I suddenly realized was to be my room.

I pointed at the hole. “What is that?” I asked.

Eddie flicked his ash into the ivy and waved his hand, as if I were imagining it. He told me that one night he had spontaneously gotten the urge to “renovate,” that he had started to knock down the wall to make that room and the living room one “huge room.” “I’ve spent a lot of time in Wyoming, and I like big spaces,” he said, as if that would help make sense of his behavior, and, in a strange way, it did. But because Eddie looked uncomfortable and because I still couldn’t quite absorb the fact that I was actually considering moving in, I let the subject drop.

So I asked him something else instead. “Is there anything I should know about you?”
Like, the womanizing? And the tendency not to engage people in everyday conversation?
Except for sharing an apartment with David one summer during college
and cohabitating with Michael, I’d never had a male roommate, so I thought I should know, up front, if there was anything I should know.

“Like what?” Eddie said.

I thought for a minute. “Do you bring women home?”

“Sometimes.” Eddie waited for a reaction, but I didn’t flinch. “Do you bring men home?” he asked me.

The question caught me off guard, and I felt momentarily undone, as if the tight little fistful of will I had mustered to talk myself through the day and what lay ahead had turned into a fistful of air. I was tired and terrified and sick to my stomach with misery, but there seemed no other choice than to try, at all costs, to maintain some level of composure. After all, I couldn’t afford the luxury of gut-wrenching sadness when so much was at stake: namely, homelessness. I shoved my hands in my jacket pockets and looked away, trying to hide my shame. “Not anymore.”

Eddie eyed me. “Break up?”

I nodded.

“Me too. Recently?”

I nodded again.

“Me too. Well, a year and a half ago. But it feels like only yesterday.”

I looked at Eddie, then at the living room, then at the pile of plaster chunks on the floorboards in my room, and I wondered if I would still not be over Ray in a year and a half. But it was impossible to think about that, just as it was impossible to think about having to move in with someone I hardly knew and barely liked because I had nowhere else to go and couldn’t face looking at apartments again—this time without Ray—while staying indefinitely with Joan or David. How could I
have been so stupid as to get myself into this ridiculous situation?

So I told Eddie then that we would have to do something about the hole.

Eddie told me that he would take care of it, that he would put in French doors, that it would look “as good as new,” and I believed him. So I told him I would move in.

Eddie never did put up any French doors, so we put up a curtain instead, an old white sheet that we nailed into what was left of the studs. I put almost everything I owned into temporary storage and moved in with only a few essentials: some books, my clothes, a computer, and the manila envelope full of all the poems and love letters Ray had written me and all the photographs we had taken that summer. I bought a futon without a frame and put it down on the floor beside an old sewing table I’d picked up at a junk shop on the Bowery. Behind the futon was a big mullioned window that looked out into an airless black alley.

I moved out of my Charles Street apartment and into Eddie’s apartment on a Sunday, less than a week after I’d come to see it. That night Eddie got up on a chair and put a fresh light bulb in the overhead socket and gave me a green ginger-jar lamp that he said he never used, and within a few hours my Zen bedroom was complete. I kept the books on the windowsill and my clothes on the shallow shelves and rack in the closet.

But I kept the manila envelope on the floor next to my bed, where I could always reach it.

Later the manila envelope and all that it contained would become the file of evidence. But back then it was filled only
with what was left of Ray, and at night, after I’d turned the big light off and the little lamp on, I would crawl onto the floor and into the futon bed and pour its contents out onto the blanket and obsess over them for hours.

Then I would shut the barn door and cry myself to sleep.

[
WEEPING SCENES DELETED
.]

I didn’t see much of Eddie that first week, since I left for work in the morning about three hours before he did and he came home at night well after I’d fallen asleep. But the following Sunday night I saw a hand come through the curtain. It was Eddie’s hand, and in it was a glass of Scotch.

“Morphine,” the hand said, ice cubes tinkling against the glass. “For the pain.”

Eddie seemed to know about that pain, seemed to know its ins and outs, its cycles, its resistance to resistance. I took the glass and considered drinking it in the privacy of my room, but since I didn’t want to seem rude, I put a sweatshirt on over my nightgown and came out through the curtain and into the living room, where Eddie was sitting in the dark on the couch with a glass for himself.

This would be the first of many nights that we would meet out there after Eddie had come in late, looking sadly into his penultimate drink, both of us beyond the consolation of liquor and cigarettes and our shared tales of misery.

And it would be from living with Eddie that I would learn almost everything I knew about the ways of men.

But an education is a relative thing, I found out—as much about the teacher as it is about the student, as much too about the answers as the questions asked, which is why I’ve spent almost as much time unlearning what I learned from Eddie as I spent learning it in the first place.

“So you never did tell me what really happened to my wall.” I looked into my drink. I’d never liked Scotch, but Eddie
made me almost uncomfortable enough to gulp it down. Something about the way he looked at me—or didn’t look at me—made me feel like I was the kind of woman he’d never think twice about: I wasn’t tough enough, I wasn’t downtown enough; I wasn’t pretty enough or sexy enough.

Not that I would have been capable of being interested at that point anyway:

My heart still belonged to my Cow-heart breaker
.

“It was right after she moved out. I started tearing it down one night with an ax, but I stopped because I had to carry the hunks of plaster down at night in garbage bags so the super wouldn’t see me and think I was carrying out body parts.” Eddie watched me take a large sip from my glass and try not to gag. “Are you scared of me now?” he asked.

“Should I be?”

“Maybe.” He laughed, then shifted on the couch.

I asked him, “Was ‘she’ your old girlfriend?”

He nodded and tipped his head back to drain his glass, and then he stood up to get himself another drink. But somewhere between the living room and the kitchen he stopped, as if he’d suddenly realized he was drunk enough and wouldn’t need any more to sleep.

“Morphine,” he said, walking back past me toward his room. “For the pain of Rebecca.”

The next night, when Eddie came home late, I was in my room pretending to read when he knocked on my wall. A little shower of plaster chunks fell to the floor.

“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.”