Animal Husbandry (11 page)

The only thing you won’t be able to predict is which method of escape they will choose.

Three months, two days:

Ray had been avoiding me for the past two weeks.

Like the plague.

Like an Old Cow
.

“What is it?” David asked when I showed up at his apartment unannounced on a chilly Sunday afternoon in late September. “Is Ray starting to give you the runaround?”

He said “runaround” as if it were some kind of dreaded but expected gift, his sympathetic tone implying that he was much more intimately acquainted with the bestower than I might be. He wasn’t wrong. Ever since we’d moved to New York after college, he had indeed been with—and been left by—more men than I had.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s like he’s pulling away and there’s nothing I can do about it. One minute he’s consumed with self-loathing and misery at the thought of ‘abandoning’ Mia. The next minute he’s consumed with self-loathing and misery at the thought of being stuck with her for the rest of his life. Then it’s how busy and under pressure he suddenly is at work. Then it’s—”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Not sleeping with you?”

I stared at him. “How did you know that?”

He shrugged. “Because I know.”

I paced around the kitchen and leaned up against the refrigerator door. I was terrified and I felt sick to my stomach. “Something’s changed, but I don’t know what it is or when it happened.”

David walked toward me and sat on the counter next to the stove. “It’s the tomato-seed phase. That’s what men turn into when they get too
involved
—slippery, evasive, impossible to pin down—tomato seeds on a cutting board.”

I stared at David. “But he’s
in love
with me,” I said. “He
said
so. Not to mention the fact that he broke off his engagement and we’re about to sign a lease.”

David shook his head. “I know what he
said
. I’ve probably heard the same thing, or said it myself, a hundred times. But fear is not a rational emotion. It changes people, makes them behave like animals—
caged
animals.” He sounded weary, as tired of the collective fear of all the men who had left him in a panic of emotion as he was of his own. “It all comes down to the survival instinct: fight or flight. And in my experience most men, most of the time, pick flight.”

Suddenly the strange sound of Ray’s voice the last time we spoke on the phone the previous Friday night—distant, preoccupied, inexplicably uncomfortable—came back to me. We’d been trying to figure out a time to sign the papers with Tracy, and Ray used all the aforementioned excuses to explain why he couldn’t, except the one about not sleeping with me, which he saved for the end of the conversation when I asked him if he wanted to come over. I felt even sicker now and looked at David. “So what do I do?”

David forced a smile, trying to signal that the situation wasn’t as bad as it seemed. But neither of us was buying his
body language. “I’m sorry,” he said, momentarily distracted. “It just reminds me of what happened with Andrew, which I still haven’t gotten over.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I guess I didn’t know that.” I stared at him and didn’t say anything until he pulled me toward him on the counter. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me until I cracked.

“I
hate
this,” I said, feeling the knot in my stomach tighten and my throat constrict and my eyes fill up with big hot tears. “I
really, really
hate this.”

Three months, seven days:

After almost three weeks of Ray’s not calling in the evenings and not coming over I was completely wrecked. I’d stopped eating, stopped sleeping, even stopped calling David and Joan. I didn’t know what to tell them since I had no idea what was happening, and I knew if I called them I wouldn’t be able to help feeling embarrassed and ashamed, as if I’d done something to scare Ray off or somehow exaggerated his feelings for me in the first place.

The Monday morning after my conversation with David, Ray stood in my office doorway holding a cup of coffee and bearing a faint resemblance to something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

And then it came to me.

Tomato seed
.

“Good morning,” the seed said, adhering to the wall with its hands in its pockets. It was smiling, but its voice was thin, as if it were greeting a fellow-colleague seed instead of the New-Cow seed it was supposedly in love with.

“Good morning,” I said back, half-expecting it to move closer and kiss me once it made sure no one was looking, the
way it used to do. But it didn’t budge. It just looked at me and then down at its feet.

The seed was getting nervous.

It could tell that
I
could tell it was acting strangely.

It knew it had to do something to distract me from the truth.

So it slid.

“You look tired. What time did you finally leave here last night?”

“Late,” I told it. Then I mentioned that I had tried to call it when I got home, but there was no answer. Checking its face and clothes for signs of fatigue and finding them, I decided not to mention that I had tried the studio too.

But it was too late. It slid again.

“Sorry.” It yawned apologetically, taking its glasses off and rubbing its eyes. “I was in the edit room until after two in the morning trying to demumble the William F. Buckley interview.” It tried to laugh but ended up yawning again—and sliding—instead. “But enough about me. How are you?”

I said I was fine.

That I’d been packing.

That I’d seen a couch I liked.

That we really had to sign the lease and start figuring out the details of the move since it was only two weeks away and since my apartment had already been rerented.

Then it really slid.

“God, this week is going to be terrible,” it said, shifting from one leg to the other. “I’m completely swamped.” It looked out into the hallway as if it had just heard Diane call its name, even though it hadn’t. “Gotta go,” it said, rolling its eyes. “
Mommy’s
waiting.”

I heard nothing more from Ray that day.

That night I went home and got into bed at eight-thirty with a box of Kleenex, sick to my stomach with confusion and panic. When hours had passed and there was still no call from Ray, I tried him at the studio, and after eight or nine rings he picked up, breathless and seemingly exhausted. I listened for a second or two before hanging up, the shameful criminal adrenaline pumping through my limbs. Maybe it
was
work that was making him behave so strangely all of a sudden. But the tightness in my stomach muscles and the silent sobbing told me otherwise. Though I didn’t know why and though I couldn’t quite believe it, I knew, the way you always know in that deep, dark place in yourself you never want to return to, that he was leaving me.

On the Friday before Columbus Day weekend I was going through my overflowing
IN
box, getting ready to leave for nowhere, when Ray passed my office from the men’s room and waved.

“I’ll talk to you,” he said over his shoulder, which, I later learned, was seed-speak for not saying “I’ll call you.”

Which he didn’t.

But he hadn’t lied either.

You see, he’d simply slid.

Are you still with me?

You’d better be, because here comes Eddie.

I continued to listlessly sift through the week’s accumulation of junk mail and interoffice flotsam until I came across a notice that someone had apparently circulated in house about an available sublet.
Own room in spacious two-bedroom apartment. Cutting-edge neighborhood. Walking distance to great bars. Smokers
only
. There was no name, only an extension given, but I knew it had to be Eddie.

Cough. Cough.

I looked up and saw Eddie leaning in my doorway, looking like the Marlboro Man minus the Stetson and the swinging doors.

“I see you got my personal ad,” he said.

Before I could say anything, he had sat down in my guest chair and put his booted feet up on my desk.

“Interested?”

“Eddie Alden—
the
Eddie Alden—asked you to move in with him?” Joan said when she called at the end of the day after Eddie’s “proposal.” “Is this a joke?”

“He needs a roommate, Joan. Or, actually, he needs money.”

“Remember the Christmas party?” she said, referring to the one time she’d met him, which had obviously left a lasting impression. “Sitting there sipping a drink while some young drunken waif sucked on his thumb. I mean, he’s attractive in a dissipated way, but he’s kind of an—”

“Idiot?”

“Asshole, was what I was going to say. Who wants to live with that?”

I closed my eyes and tried hard to decide whether he was an asshole or not. I had never quite made up my mind about him; never quite known what to make of his completely antisocial behavior. But following that afternoon’s brief conversation I thought maybe his aloofness was just a by-product of depression. Or, given his excessive smoking—and skirt chasing, oxygen deprivation. But before I could finish hypothesizing, Joan jumped back in, thinking out loud.

“Now it’s coming back to me. Something about an old girlfriend who broke his heart? They were living together and she moved out? Am I right?” Joan said, as if there were a prize involved if she was. There were few things she loved more in life than being right, and, luckily for her, she usually was. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter since you’re moving in with Ray.”

I opened my eyes, then squeezed them shut again. “I guess so.”

“What do you mean, you
guess
so?”

I leaned back in my desk chair and moaned into the phone.

“Jane?”

“What?”

“
Are
you moving in with Ray?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does
that
mean?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t exactly seen him lately.”

“I see,” she said, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke into the receiver. “Has he called you?”

“No.”

“I see,” she said again. “Have you figured out who he’s been sleeping with?”

“Who he’s been sleeping with? What are you talking about?”
What was she talking about?
“He’s not sleeping with someone else. He’s not like that. And besides, he wouldn’t have had time to. He’s been working until midnight for the last few weeks.” I lit a cigarette too and exhaled loudly. “Isn’t that why he hasn’t had time to sleep with
me
?” I blurted.

“Listen to me,” Joan said. “Rule Number One: There’s no such thing as a man who doesn’t have time to fuck around. They always have time for that. And Rule Number Two: If a man isn’t sleeping with you, he’s not sleeping alone. He’s sleeping with someone else.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes. It’s true.”

I could tell she was waiting for me to agree that she was right again, but I wouldn’t. Not this time. I had far too much invested in my belief in Ray—in the belief that he was precisely the kind of man who would be sleeping alone if he wasn’t sleeping with me.

That’s just the way New Cows are, all right?

“Okay, okay, I take it back. Maybe I’m wrong … for a change …” she said in a tone of contrition she used when she realized she’d gone too far and unintentionally hit a nerve. “Look, if I were you, I’d have a talk with Ray. Soon. This isn’t normal.”

“I know,” I said. And I did.

“Just talk to him,” she said, her voice softening. “Whatever he says, it can’t be any worse than not knowing.”

Oh, yes it can be.

“So …” I said when Ray and I met after work the Tuesday following the long weekend. The meeting was my idea; the hair bar in the East Village was his.

That’s because men don’t dump women in private.

They dump them in public.

Where there are other people around.

Where they can’t make a scene.

Men do this because they are afraid.

Hell hath no fury like an Old Cow scorned
.

“So,” he said back.

Seeing that I was going to need a little inside joke to break the proverbial iceberg—a
remember-me-I’m-your-New-Cow
kind of joke, I reached my arm out across the table so that it hovered above his hand without touching it. And I almost retracted it when I saw my hand shaking from the extreme patheticness of the situation: my having had to
ask
him to see me. The only thing I could cling to was the fact that he’d chosen the hair bar—a place where we had some history, a place that held some sentimental value.

Ha
.

“Fourteen inches, Diane,” I finally said. “Think we can make an exception this one time?”