Animal Husbandry (16 page)

“What about
our
tunnels?” Joan said the next day on the phone. “I mean, the man has hot and cold running underwear models and you feel sorry for him.”

“I don’t feel sorry for him. I just think he’s interesting.”

“What’s so interesting? He’s an animal. He preys on unsuspecting prepubescent girls and rips their hearts out. You’re the one who sees the carnage.”

Yes, I had seen it. And each of his hunt-and-kills was worthy of its own PBS science documentary.

But wasn’t it interesting how, at times, he seemed almost … 
human
.

And so the next few months passed. The dreaded holidays came, during which Eddie went to Wyoming and I went to Tortola with David, who was going to stay on there after New Year’s for a shoot. It was a short, quiet vacation, and I spent most of my time lying on my what-will-become-of-me chaise watching David swim back and forth across the patch of ocean our private beach looked out on.

The first night Eddie and I were home together from our trips, we went downstairs to Night Owls for a reunion. He told me that while he’d been away, he’d made two big decisions: that he had to get over Rebecca once and for all, and that I had to do the same with Ray.

“I need to find a wife, and you need to find a husband,” he said.

I sucked on some bourbon-soaked ice. But he was right, I knew. I just didn’t want to admit it, and I certainly didn’t want to start going out on blind dates, which is the route he suggested I take to accomplish his mandate. In fact, he said, he had several possibilities for me, including one guy he’d met at a wedding the previous summer, and two guys who came highly recommended by recent or current girlfriends of his.

Losers
, I snorted.

But after another bourbon I agreed. “Fine. Set me up,” I said to Eddie, which of course, the bartender took as a request for another round, which we sucked down without complaint.

“Since you’re being so agreeable,” Eddie said as we left the bar and stumbled back upstairs, “Giulia asked me if I would
mind taking her cat for a month while she’s in Rome for a catalog shoot.”

I nodded drunkenly. “Sure. Fine. Whatever.” I couldn’t care less. “What’s its name?” I asked him as he unlocked the door to the apartment and pushed it open.

“Evelyn,” he said.

“Evelyn,” I slurred as I wove down the hallway to my bedroom. “Evelyn with the big sweet face.”

After each of the blind dates that Eddie had pimped for me Joan and I had virtually the same conversation:

“How was it?”

“Awful.”

“Bad?”

“Jesus.”

“So there was no—?”

“Chemistry? None.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Not even—?”

“No way.”

“Was he—?”

“Unappealing? Completely.”

“Was there anything—?”

“Remotely attractive? No. He had that—”

“Thing?”

“With his lips. You know. Too—”

“Moist?”

“With little bits of spit—”

“In the corners?”

“In the middle. Like a little white thread.”

“What about—?”

“His shoes? Hideous.”

“Jazz shoes?”

“Crepe soles.”

“Were you—?”

“Repulsed? Yes.”

“What about his—?”

“Hands? Fleshy. No knuckles. Little.”

“So you couldn’t imagine—?”

“Them on me?”

“Or in you?”

“Never. No way.”

“So if he called, you wouldn’t—?”

“No.”

“Not even just in case he—?”

“Has a friend? No.”

“Did he—?”

“Pay? No.”

“Did it—?”

“Depress me and remind me even more how much I miss Ray even though it was supposed to do the exact opposite? Yes.”

“Well, maybe next time you’ll—”

“There won’t be a next time.”

But there always was a next time.

“So what was the physical-feature caveat this time?”

“Big hair.”

“As big as—?”

“Ours? Bigger.”

“Jesus.”

“Muammar Qaddafi hair.”

“Oh, my God. Could you—?”

“See it from the street through the plate-glass windows of the restaurant? Yes.”

“Did you try to—?”

“Block it out by putting my hands up and closing one eye while I talked to him? Yes.”

“What would he look like if he—?”

“Were bald? Like Muammar Qaddafi with a stocking over his head.”

“Wasn’t he also the guy who—?”

“Just got off the Optifast program? Depends what you mean by
just
.”

“Was he—?”

“Still fat or fat again? Yes.”

“Did he—?”

“Eat anything? You mean, besides the two bowls of chips and salsa, five chicken-and-cheese enchilladas, and a chimi-changa? No.”

“Did he—?”

“Pay? Yes. For his ‘half.’ ”

And a next time.

“Now, didn’t you see this guy’s head shot before to ensure against—?”

“Big hair and fat? Yes. But I should have known that an actor with a head shot would want to make—”

“An entrance?”

“A scene.”

“Was he—?”

“Standing at the crowded bar with a huge hand-painted sign with fourth-grade-esque glued-on glitter that read
I’m your Mystery Date
? Yes.”

“Oh, my God.”

“And was there a big white beribboned box on the bar next to the sign that contained a big white beribboned wrist corsage? Yes.”

“Jesus. Did you—?”

“Put it on because he said he wouldn’t stop singing until I did? Yes.”

“Were you—”

“So mortified that I had to run into the bathroom and breathe into a paper bag to control my panic attack? Yes.”

“And was he—?”

“Still there when I came back, pulling file cards from his breast pocket with suggestions of what we could do on our
mystery date
? Yes.”

“Did you—?”

“Want to kill him as much as I wanted to kill Eddie? Almost.”

It was late January, and Eddie had been going out a lot lately. As he reasoned, he wasn’t getting any younger.

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.

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”: