Animal Husbandry (14 page)

“How did you meet?”

“Blind date. We were together for three years, and it was perfect. Well, it wasn’t perfect. I was a monster sometimes.”

“You cheated on her?”

“I never cheated on her. She was the only woman I was ever completely faithful to. Except once, but that didn’t count because she had just moved out the first time.”

“That was, what, a year and a half ago? And you’re still sad?”

Eddie looked up at the ceiling with a knowing look on his face, the way he always would whenever he was about to impart a piece of hard-earned wisdom about “relationships.” “Yes.” He sighed heavily. “But it’s a different kind of sadness now. You go through a lot of different stages, and each stage has a very particular and distinct kind of sadness.”

I looked up at the television set and then out at the street. It was late now, and cold, and I was actually starting to long for my room.

“So that’s my story, not that you’ve heard the last of it by any means,” Eddie said. “Now what’s yours?”

Mine? I didn’t really have a story yet. Months would pass before I would become truly bitter and hatch the Old-Cow–New-Cow theory and all its ancillary theorems. So all I could do was lay out the bones of what had happened with Ray and hope that Eddie could make some sense of them:

“I fell in love with someone. Who I thought fell in love with me. We were going to move in together, were about to sign a lease, and then, all of a sudden, for seemingly no reason, he dumped me.” I took a sip of bourbon, and the warmth of it moving like a lit fuse all the way to my stomach made me understand for the first time why serious drinkers drink.

“Did he say why?” Eddie drained his glass and signaled the bartender for a refill.

“He said he didn’t know.”

He nodded knowingly.

“What? Does that
mean
something?”

“It depends.”

“On what?” I said insistently, my voice betraying a desperate need for explanation.

But he would only shrug. “He probably just got scared.”

I put my drink down on the bar, and my rage escaped in a controlled whisper. “Of
what
?”

Eddie seemed surprised by my show of temper. “Of you.”

“Oh,
fuck
you.”

“Okay.” He grinned at me, but I ignored him and stared back into my drink.

“So who is this guy, anyway? Do I know him?”

I looked up at the television. The eleven o’clock news was over, and a rerun of
Cheers
was starting. For a minute I thought I should be discreet and not tell Eddie since we all worked together, but when I saw Ted Danson skirt chasing, I was reminded that exactly two weeks ago Ray had dumped me a block away.

So I sang like a canary.

“You’re kidding,” Eddie said. “I always thought that Ray and Evelyn had a thing.”

I told him that’s what I had thought too, once, until Ray had explained that they’d always just been friends. “Besides,” I added like an idiot, “he said she’s not his type.”

Eddie sucked intently on a Scotch-infused ice cube. “Any woman is a man’s type.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“I speak from experience.”

I stared into my glass. “You know what, Eddie? Even though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, I’m even sadder now than I was an hour ago. Or maybe, as you would say, it’s just a
different kind
of sadness.”

Eddie sucked the last ice cube in his glass and looked almost pleased with himself. Obviously, misery loved company.

“Well, now I’m stuck in that office, and I have to see him every day.”

He thought a minute. “There’s only one true prescription for a broken heart.”

“Which is?”

“Get back on the horse.”

“Meaning what?” I was not yet used to his Rancho Wyoming shorthand.

“Get a new boyfriend.”

I shook my head and took a perfunctory sip of my drink. “I
don’t think so. I don’t think I’m ready yet. I mean, this just happened.”

“It didn’t
just
happen. It’s been two weeks already.” He looked dismissively at me and then up at the television set. “Do what you want, but it’s worked for me. Dating has become my sport and my pastime.”

“Well, women are different,
ob
viously. We need time to get over things.”

“You can get over things a lot more quickly when you’re back in the saddle,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “It’s all I do these days.”

Fat lot of good it seemed to be doing Mr. Morphine.

The following Thursday night I left work and went to a book party at The Rainbow Room for Diane’s best friend who was now an author. The book, a novel titled
Save the Last Dance for Me
, was stacked on the bar and displayed on the tables. Well-dressed and self-important media types floated by, en route to Diane’s friend, who was standing in the center of the room, air kissing and pressing flesh.

I stood at the bar nervously nursing a glass of champagne, unsure of whether or not Ray would show up—half-hoping he would and half-hoping he wouldn’t—when I spotted Evelyn. She had put her drink down on the bar and was starting to pull on her coat. I was so happy to see someone I knew that I almost hugged her.

“Hi,” I said, practically tugging at her sleeve. My desperation was palpable.

She turned to me and smiled widely.
“Hi!”
she said, as if she hadn’t seen me for three years even though we worked together every day. She was so incredibly sweet, and while I sometimes wondered what—if anything—went on behind
those big green eyes, I was immensely grateful for her enthusiasm.

We nodded at each other and smiled. I had no idea of what to say. There was something completely overwhelming about such blatant sweetness. It rendered me stupid and made me feel like little devil horns were butting out of my scalp.

“So,” I finally blurted with thick sarcasm, “
great
party.”

Evelyn’s eyes opened even wider with wonder. “I
know
. I wish I didn’t have to leave, but I’m meeting someone and I’m really late.”

My face fell, but hers didn’t. She was beaming—luminous, almost. We said good-bye, and I stared into the crowd again.

A few minutes later Eddie appeared with a tall blonde on his arm. Gracefully losing her, he made his way over to me, stopping to greet and kiss many other beautiful women along the way. As I watched him crossing the room, I suddenly got it: Eddie really was a very handsome man. Thank God he wasn’t my type.

“One Scotch and one champagne,” Eddie said to the bartender.

I looked him up and down. He must have gone home and changed after work, because he was wearing a suit—a perfectly tailored gray flannel suit and exquisite silk tie—a far cry from his usual Johnny Cash wear.

He felt my stare but didn’t look at me. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

“You like my suit.” He turned toward me, leaning his back against the bar.

“Do I?”

He took a sip of his drink and a drag off his cigarette. “This is my favorite suit,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s my lucky suit.”

I turned to him. “
Lucky
suit?” Joan was right. He was an asshole.

He laughed a long, deep, throaty laugh and elbowed me. “I’m just teasing you,” he said. “It’s my
only
suit.”

I grinned and scanned the crowd. Okay, so he wasn’t a total asshole. “So who’s your date?”

“Pauline,” he answered, seemingly unexcited.

“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Is it serious?”

“It’s never serious.”

I finished my glass of champagne. The bubbles floated up into my brain and made me feel suddenly calm. I looked at Eddie and then back at some of the women he’d kissed on his way in. “Who were all the others?”

Eddie dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it, then turned his attention back to the room. He indicated the various women with a subtle point of his nose and talked into my ear.

“The redhead in the corner talking to her bald boyfriend is Diana. An actress. I saw her for about two weeks. Very wild but ultimately unfulfilling.”

I nodded. “She looks like she’s twelve.”

“She’s twenty-two.”

“Like I said: twelve.” I took a sip from Eddie’s glass and handed it back to him. “Go on.”

“The tall brunette with long, wavy hair. That’s Giulia. The Victoria’s Secret model. Looks great in a thong but surprisingly not very sexy.”

“Sure.”

“And Emily. The blonde near the ficus plant. Chapin School. Andover. Radcliffe. Smart. Beautiful. Great cook.”

But?

“Too perfect.”

“I see. You’re kind of picky, don’t you think?”

He considered the question. “I know what I want.”

“And,” I said, “what
do
you want?”

Eddie looked distractedly into the crowd, as if he had just seen someone he’d been waiting for.

He had.

I followed his pointing nose and saw a tall, shapely brunette. I awaited his comment. “That,” he said. “I think I just saw my wife.”

Though Eddie brought home no wives those first few weeks I lived with him, he did bring home many women.

Many, many beautiful women whom I found waiting in the living room while Eddie changed for dinner, or heard giggling late at night as they tiptoed past my curtain on their way to his bedroom.

And there I’d be, the loser, sitting on the what-will-become-of-me couch with the remnants of my loser supper of beer and toast nearby, or lying in my what-will-become-of-me futon bed amid the scattered contents of the manila envelope, wondering how I’d sunk to this low, low point.

The answer was always the same:

Ray.

Ray. Ray. Ray
.

I thought about him constantly. From the first second I opened my eyes in the morning to the last second before I closed them in the early evening, drunk and bloated with liquid and solid carbohydrates.

I loved him.

I hated him.

I could not get over him.

Probably because I saw him constantly—locking his bike up in front of the studio; walking up and down the hallway with his purposeful walk; in planning meetings in the greenroom when I would sit across the table from him and wonder what he was thinking, what he was feeling, if he was sleeping with anyone, whether he missed me or ever regretted his decision to dump me.

Hardly, judging from his ability to derive pleasure and excitement from his job, which I was completely unable to do.

“This is going to be
great
!” he’d say after a meeting or in the hallway just outside the studio. “Diane’s agreed to do a whole hour on—”

Whatever.

It didn’t matter.

I didn’t care.

Just the fact that he was happy about something completely impersonal and unemotional was enough to send me back to my office with an urge to shoot myself in the head.

How could we be so different? How could he be so fine when I was so not fine?

I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t even watch television. All I could do when I got home was gum my toast and listen to the country music station Eddie’s receiver was tuned to and wallow in the singers’ sad, sorry stories, which I liked to think were almost as sad and sorry as mine.

And try to make sense of my daily encounters with Ray. Like this one, sometime in mid-November, when he came into my office and took something out of his pocket:

“Here,” he said.

I looked up from my computer and saw him put something rolled up in a napkin on my desk. “What’s that?”

“It’s for you.”

I stared at the napkin suspiciously.

“I made it for you.”

I took my glasses off and swiveled my chair toward it, then poked at it with a pencil a few times until the napkin fell open. Inside lay three slices of what appeared to be bread.

“You made this?” I said. I poked at the bread a few more times until he laughed.

“This weekend. You know, since I have no life, all I do on the weekends is dream of food and make it.”

I stared at him.
No life
. I had no life either, and the last thing I could imagine was having an appetite and waiting for the weekend to come to try to sate it.

An appetite for
food
, that is.

“I’ve been baking bread a lot lately,” he continued unprodded. “It’s good. Therapeutic. Very Zen. You mix it up, let it rise, beat it down, let it rise again, beat it some more.”