Animal Husbandry (24 page)

Now that the article was finally finished, I applied myself to my day job.

I pursued Kevin Costner’s agent and team of publicists with renewed vigor—actually preparing and sending the pitch packet I had described to Eddie.

I ignored Ray, even when he would sit down in my office and try to be funny (“
Do you think Diane had her chin done in St. Bart’s?” “Do you think she’s forty-two or sixty-two?
”) or cop a few warm and fuzzy feels (“
Remember Wellfleet? Do you still have that bar of lobster soap I bought you?
”). I had gotten wise to his seeping attention-extracting ploys that never led anywhere and refused to acknowledge them—except in my notebook:

And I resumed watching Eddie again, though since I’d read about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle—the theory that an observer can have an inadvertent effect on the observed—I tried to be less intrusive and to keep my questions to a minimum.

At the end of the week, just when I was about to call Joan at the office to tell her about yet another variation of egregious dumping by Eddie (the default dump—dumping by nonresponse), the phone rang before I had even dialed it.

“I had to call you,” Joan said breathlessly. “The article sparked such a debate at the office all week that we’re running it early. Ben killed a piece on the new monogamy, and we’re rushing Dr. Goodall into the April issue. Isn’t that fabulous?”

I sat down on my bed. April was right around the corner, and I hadn’t even dealt with the reality of the article being published in the first place.

“The timing couldn’t be better. It’ll be on stands practically on the first day of spring,” she said. “We’ll show those pathological romantics who fucking
rules
.”

N
OTES TO
E
FILE:

“So what was it this time?” I asked. “Too beautiful? Too smart? Too rich? Too almost-perfect?” It was a Sunday night about a week after I’d finished the article, and Eddie had just returned from another weekend in the country with his new wife. At least by now I’d seen her—when she came by on Friday evening to pick him up—though I didn’t feel the urge to know her name since, given Eddie’s track record, I knew she wouldn’t be around long. Needless to say, she was beautiful.

Eddie pretended to ignore me, but I could tell he was as perplexed by the latest cessation of his husbandly feelings as I was. So I sat down on the couch and watched him pace, preparing to open my direct examination.

“You went to a movie,” I stated.

“Correct.”

“Then you went back to the house.”

“Correct.”

“And …?” I said leadingly.

Eddie lit a cigarette and paced evasively. At first I couldn’t understand why he submitted to these postmortems, which
were always unpleasant for him, not to mention disappointing, since they underscored his growing suspicion that he would never find a perfect wife to replace Rebecca. But as my expertise in the field of pathological narcissism grew, the answer became perfectly clear: Eddie participated in these discussions because they were about Eddie. This particular postmortem was especially disappointing, he told me, since he’d really thought she might be The One.

“And, we went into the kitchen to get something to drink. We’d had dinner after the movie, but she was still hungry. She’s always hungry, it seems.”

Always hungry
. I folded my arms across my chest. I remembered her standing in the living room with her car keys in her hand: tall, thick dark hair, definitely a mesomorph.

Check
.

Check
.

Check
.

Oh,
fuck
the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.

“Is that bad?” I asked. “Women who eat? I mean, she’s not fat.”

“No, she isn’t fat,” he said, perplexed. He continued to pace.

“Okay, so you’re in the kitchen. And she’s hungry—
again
. Then what happens?”

Eddie exhaled loudly. “Well, we were standing there, and she opened the refrigerator and took out a pint of Häagen-Dazs. And she started eating it out of the container. And, I don’t know, there was just something about it that made me think things weren’t going to work.”

I stared at him. “Was the refrigerator door open?”

He looked bewildered. “Why?”

“Was the refrigerator door
open
or
closed
?” I repeated, trying
to keep my voice from rising into hysteria. “Just answer the question.”

Eddie stared at his cigarette. “It was open, I think.”

I crossed my legs underneath me and sat up straight on the couch. “Would it have made a difference if the door was
shut
? Would
that
have made the act of a
not-fat woman eating ice cream out of the container a little less revolting?
”

Eddie looked at me like I was insane.

“Would it have made a difference if she
hadn’t
just eaten dinner? If she had instead been
legitimately
hungry when she
shoved her face into the trough of Häagen-Dazs
? Would it have
repulsed you less
if she’d put the ice cream into a
dish
?”

Eddie stubbed his cigarette out midway and went into his room. I leapt off the couch and chased after him to ask what flavor the ice cream was, but it was too late. He slammed the door in my face.

“Good night, you psycho,” I heard him say jeeringly through the door.

“Good night, you
neophiliac
,” I said back.

I went to sleep that night satisfied that we were both, finally, properly diagnosed.

Dateline: February 15. New York City
.

Joan and I sat in her office, beaming at an early copy of
Men’s Times
.

“Look at this,” she said, flipping the pages. “The art department really outdid themselves. Look at this great picture they found of cows grazing. And look how well Dr. Marie Goodall came out.” She pointed to the contributor’s page where there was a little-bigger-than-postage-stamp-sized Dr. Goodall, peering out kindly, but wisely, from her obituary pose.

We read the article silently from start to finish, and then we looked at each other.

Blink. Blink. Blink
.

Copies would be on newsstands nationwide by the end of the week.

Dateline: February 22
.

The following week, a few minutes before I had to go into a meeting with Diane, Joan called.

“Are you sitting down?”

“No, I’m just on my way into—”

“Sit,” she said.

So I sat.

“The phone has been ringing off the hook all day. We’ve gotten three hundred letters, mostly from women, and we haven’t even seen today’s mail or E-mail from our Web site. Everyone wants Dr. Goodall.”

“What do you mean ‘wants’?”

Joan lit a cigarette and rustled through the papers on her
desk. “
Oprah
called.
The Today Show
called.
Good Morning America
called.
Larry King. Geraldo
. CNBC. CNN.” She rustled some more and continued. “
USA Today
, the
Chicago Tribune
, the
Boston Globe, Miami Herald, L.A. Times
. Everyone wants an interview. Not to mention book publishers and literary agents. They’re calling this the Nuclear War of the Sexes.”

Diane poked her head into my office, but I rolled my eyes and mouthed the words
Kevin Costner’s publicist
. She nodded excitedly and disappeared. I closed the door and swiveled my chair toward the window.

“
Fuck!
” I whispered. “This wasn’t part of the plan.”

“I know,” Joan said. “I mean, I knew we’d get
some
letters, and
USA Today
calls about everything, but I never thought we’d be deluged like this.”

“
Fuck!
” I whispered again. “What are we going to do?”

“There’s nothing we
can
do. Obviously Dr. Goodall is ‘unavailable for interviews.’ That’s what I keep telling our PR department every time they buzz me. ‘
She’s shy
,’ I say. ‘
She’s reclusive.’ ‘She’s in Vienna.’ ‘She’s in Paris.’ ‘She’s at a conference in Tangiers
.’ ”

“Tangiers?”

“Hey, these talk-show Nazis will go almost anywhere to track down someone they want. You should know that.”

Diane poked her head in again, and I told Joan I had to go. Then I raced down the hallway to the greenroom and sat next to Eddie and across from Ray and Evelyn, who were sharing a legal pad and agenda because he had forgotten his.

What an idiot he was.

Diane looked at me expectantly. “So what’s the word on our Kevin?”

I looked down at the one word on my pad and shook my
head sadly. “We just missed him.” I sighed. “He’s in, um, Tangiers.”

“I shouldn’t have used up Tangiers on fucking Kevin Costner,” I told Joan the next day. It was after five, and I was tired and cranky. My nerves were frazzled. The pressure was getting to me.

Joan laughed.

“Hey, this isn’t funny! Diane spent the entire meeting reading passages from my article, saying how accurate everything was, going by her own ‘research’ with men. She kept repeating ‘
Get me this New-Cow doctor! Get me this New-Cow doctor!
’ over and over, and then she sent Eddie back to his office to start digging.”

I heard Joan’s other line ring, and she told me to hold.

“It’s Don Juan de Eddie, sniffing around about Dr. Marie,” she said, breathless. “This is going to be fun. I’ll call you back.”

An hour later, at six, I put my coat on and swung by Eddie’s office to see what, if anything, he’d found.

“Any luck with Dr. What’s-her-name?” I asked.

Eddie looked up from his cigarette-butt-covered desk and rubbed his eyes. “No, not yet. I spoke to your friend Joan today, though, and she’s messengering over a bio and photo. Maybe that’ll give me some leads to follow.”

I sat down in his guest chair and tried to appear disinterested. It wasn’t easy.

“I called Joan too. But she said this ‘doctor’ never gives interviews. Spends all her time researching. And besides, she’s based in Europe.”

Eddie turned off his computer and picked up his pack of cigarettes and bag as we left his office. “I hope this doesn’t turn into another Kevin Costner thing.”