Animal Husbandry (22 page)

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.”

For the next week I lived a double life: Jane Goodall, distracted talk-show talent booker, by day (“
Who
died?” “A terrorist bomb went off
where?
”), and Dr. Marie Goodall, delusional fraudulent obsessive monkey scientist, by night.

Every day I’d rush home from the studio, make a little small talk with Eddie, and after he’d go out, I’d get to work, poring over the books and magazines I’d bought or brought home from the library, searching for something that would lay bare the secret workings of the human male heart and mind.

No small task.

I read Freud and Jung and Skinner.

I read Darwin and Margaret Mead and Richard Leakey and the real Jane Goodall.

I read about oral cravings and anal fixations and separation anxiety, about natural selection and sexual selection and courtship and mating rituals in birds, fish, mammals, primates, and humans.

I watched
Nova, Nature, Wild Kingdom
, and
Love Connection
.

I read
Time
and
Newsweek, Natural History, Scientific American, Discover, Nature
, the science section of
The New York Times; Nature Genetics, GQ, Esquire, Cosmopolitan, The Farmer’s Almanac
and, of course,
Men’s Times
.

And as I did, I thought and contemplated and theorized and analyzed.

And I wrote and wrote and wrote.

Not just about the particulars of primate copulation, for instance (though I did become quite fascinated by this subspecialty:
brown-headed spider monkey: mating lasts for 5–10
minutes; chacma baboon: 3–11 minutes; dusky titi monkey: 10–30 seconds
), but about anything and everything that struck me as interesting, potentially relevant, annoying, or just plain weird.

Like the fact that three months of back issues of the
Science Times
yielded thirty-one existing and emerging scientific subspecialists all very hard at work trying to figure out the complexities of human behavior, including evolutionary psychologists, medical anthropologists, psychobiologists, and fish scientists.

Or that an elephant’s vagina is called a
vestibule
.

Or the extremely irritating wire-service item about Stephen Hawking, author of
A Brief History of Time
, which reported that he had married his nurse, one of fifteen such helpers who take care of him (read: feed him, bathe him, wipe him, change him). Item also reported that Hawking married said nurse after a twenty-six-year marriage to his first wife.

(Can I just say?

Hawking is a quadriplegic?

A twisted, contorted, immobile
man
?

If he were a woman, he would never have gotten married
once
, let alone
again
.)

Or a
Newsweek
article that described recent experiments conducted to map the brain differences in men and women. The study showed that when both sexes were presented with photographs of facial expressions and asked to determine what emotion was being expressed, women were able to correctly identify a sad face ninety percent of the time on men and women. Men, of course, had more trouble with this. While they could correctly identify sadness on
men’s
faces ninety percent of the time (big surprise), they had a seventy-percent success rate when it came to identifying sadness on
women’s
faces. In addition, PET scans revealed that men used significantly
more
of their brains during this exercise than women did, and they
still
got fewer answers right.

And, one of my favorites: an article from the
Washington Post
which reported that “most mammals actually have two ‘noses’ for sensing odors: the familiar, visible one, which responds to a broad spectrum of odors in the environment; and the ‘erotic’ nose, or vomeronasal organ, a specialized structure hidden near the base of the nasal cavity in reptiles and in most mammals, which responds only to pheromones.” This “erotic” nose is not related to areas of the brain that control higher functions but to the amygdala, a primitive part of the brain that mediates emotions.

Such provocative though somewhat unrelated findings as those just mentioned gave me a lot of ideas, and sometimes, in between tomes and scientific journals and factoids, I would jot down a follow-up reminder like this in my own personal notebook:

By the time Saturday morning rolled around, I felt like my head was going to explode.

“I’m leaving,” I heard Eddie say from the living room.

I looked up. I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before, let alone showered. My hair was falling out of its bun, and I pushed my glasses back up my nose. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually seen Eddie—sometime after Freud but before Leakey, I guessed.

I opened the curtain just enough to expose my face. “Leaving?” I said. “For where?”

He was wearing old khakis, a white T-shirt, and canvas basketball sneakers. Weekend wear.

He stared at me. “East Hampton.”

“Good. Good. Who with?”

“My new wife.”

“Good. Good.”

His mouth dropped open. “Aren’t you going to ask me who she is?”

I adjusted my glasses and smiled absently. “Nope. Nope. I’m sure she’s lovely, whoever she is. Just have a good time.”

“Wait,” he said as I started to close the curtain. “What’s wrong with you? What have you been doing in there every night this week?”

“In where?”

“In your bat hole.”

“I’m just, you know, working.”

“Working? On what?”

“Something … for … Diane,” I mumbled. “A special project. A special thing she asked me to do. Big rush on it.”

He lit a cigarette and put his hands on his hips. “Tell me, Jane, or I’ll come in there and find out.” His voice was low, faux-threatening.

“Okay, okay,” I said, taking my glasses off. “But don’t tell Diane I told you.” I paused for effect and to think of a lie. “You know her thing about Kevin Costner?”

He nodded.

“Well, she wants me to write a special letter to him. Kind of like a proposal.” I had no idea what I was talking about, so I just kept going. “A package to send to him with videotapes and other material to try to convince him to come on the show. A
pitch
, if you will.”

“But that’s what you do—at work.”