Animal Husbandry (12 page)

Ray tried to laugh but couldn’t quite manage it. He moved his hand away to reach for his beer, and as he did, I watched the muscles in his face pull and bend into an incredibly strained smile, one I would later come to recognize as a “false smile” (
The New York Times
, March 12, 1994). But the true horror came when I noticed what was revealed in the split-second transition of his face from nonsmile to false smile: pity.

It was an expression I suddenly realized I had seen him make before over the last few weeks, only I hadn’t recognized it then, hadn’t recognized the subtle distinctions between it, say, and its first, second, and third cousins: detachment, distraction, and remoteness. How was I supposed to know? Until he had disappeared, there had been no ebbing of our physical passion for each other; no visible fault lines in our attraction that would have made his look make sense to me, which would have explained why I was suddenly feeling sick to my stomach.

I held my breath and then exhaled it in one long, slow push. “It seems like something’s been wrong lately.”

Ray nodded.

“
Is
something wrong?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He scratched at the label on the bottle of beer he was gripping. His knuckles were white. “I think maybe we should cool things for a while.”

I watched him work the wet paper until the edge of the label curled up and revealed the glue underneath, and tried to focus on his words:

Cool things for a while
.

I translated them out loud: “You mean, not see each other. For a while.”

He nodded. He looked troubled, burdened.
This is hard for
me too
, his expression implied. “I know I’ll probably regret this. But I just think it would be best.”

I translated out loud again, thinking this time, though, that I must be wrong—that I’d been wrong for the past two weeks imagining the worst and that he would tell me so: “You want to end things.”

“The sex part, anyway. I just don’t think I could handle that right now.”

I was unable to translate that. I felt the way foreigners must feel when they come up against an idiom wall.

“Why?” was all I could manage before my lower jaw went slack.

Ray looked at me blankly, inscrutably. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You must know. There must be something, some reason why. Just tell me what it is. I want to know. I
have
to know.”

Ray shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

I sat back in my chair and searched his face, but I found nothing in it that was familiar. The realization terrified me. It defied reason, negated the rules of intimacy. I shook my head in utter confusion. “But I thought you
wanted
this,” I said, immediately horrified by the naked pleading in my voice. “I thought we both felt the same way—lucky, incredibly lucky, like we’d found
the thing
.”

“I did. I mean, it’s just that it all happened so fast. Things started to get too serious all of a sudden.”

I leaned hard against the back of my chair. A million thoughts exploded in my head—not the least of which was that in two weeks I would have to move out of my apartment and would then have no place to live. Only I couldn’t focus
on anything except the immediate matter at hand. “But things were always serious with us. Right from the beginning.
You
were the one who said you wanted us to live together.
You
were the one who said ‘I love you’ first.
You
were the one who broke your engagement. Why did you say all that if you didn’t mean it?”

Ray looked at his beer and then at me. “I
did
mean it.
At the time
. But just because you say you love someone doesn’t mean you’re
tied
to them.”

I stared at him in shock.

“Look,” he said quickly, trying to recover. “That didn’t come out right. I don’t know how to explain this. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say.”

“Well, that’s a first.” Tears welled up behind my eyes, but I forced them back. I would not cry here, in front of him. Again I searched his face, his eyes, his mouth for something to tell me who he was, who he had been for the past three months, but it was as if a pod had replaced him across the table, and I knew, suddenly, that it was true what people always say about never being able to know another person completely.

“All those things you said, all those things you said you felt,” I said. “Was it all just horseshit? Because everything I said was the truth.”

He looked at me with more emotion in his face than I had seen in weeks. “No,” he said. “I swear, Jane. It was real.” He took my hand in both of his and held it tightly. “I still love you,” he whispered. “I still want us to be important to each other. To be friends.” He bent his head and kissed my hand solemnly, reverentially. “I’ll never forget you.”

I looked down at our hands and then at him, not sure if he was actually crying or just trying to make it look like he was. And then two words flashed across my mind:
crocodile tears
.

“I have to go,” I said.

I was crying now. He was still holding my hand, and I was still too shocked to withdraw it, so I stood up slowly, steadying myself with my other hand on the table until we both let go. I put my jacket on, picked up my bag, and looked around the bar one last time.

“How ironic,” I hissed. “This is where we started out that first night. And this is where we end up. You couldn’t have planned it better.”

Ray looked wounded. “I didn’t plan on this part happening.”

“Oh,
right
.” I stood there, unable to move, as if I were half-expecting him to take it all back. But he just put some money down on the table, walked with me to the door, and put his arms around me there in the ugly little vestibule.

And though I knew better—knew that I shouldn’t allow myself to accept his comfort, his consolation—when his arms tightened around me, I couldn’t help leaning my head lightly against his shoulder out of habit until I realized that what he was offering me was not actual comfort but only the memory of it.

Short of death, I think, there are few things sadder in this life than watching someone walk away from you after they have left you, watching the distance between your two bodies expand until there is nothing but empty space, and silence.

Standing there on First Avenue watching Ray walk away from me, until he was lost in the crowd of foot traffic and there was nothing else for me to do but walk away too, I felt the air escape from my lungs in a long, slow rush. And then, because nature abhors a vacuum, I felt a deep, heavy weight move in and take its place, the deep, heavy weight that was my heart, and I thought:

You asshole. You fucking asshole
.

(Of course I would have taken him back in a second.)

It’s funny now to think about how different I was then, how I still believed in boyfriends coming back, eventually. If Ray left me today, I’m sure I would make a lot of bitter jokes or simply keep my mouth shut. Because I’ve learned that most of the time they don’t come back, no matter how long you wait for them to. But at that point I hadn’t been left yet, at least not that way—for seemingly no reason, while we were seemingly still in the throes of passion—and so I still thought there were ways to bring people back, will them back, like mediums calling spirits.

David was the only person I knew who had been left like that, and when I trudged across town to his apartment and stood in his doorway shaking and sobbing, he seemed to understand what had happened and what I was thinking and feeling more than I did.

“After Andrew,” he said, “I forced myself to go out, to meet people, to date. But every time I did, every time I was out with someone or in bed with someone, I’d think,
But they’re not him
. And they weren’t. And you’re going to think that for a while too, because they’re not Ray either, and somehow you’re going to have to believe that even though they’re not Ray, there’s going to be someone else someday who will make you just as happy as he did.” He sat down next to me on the couch and sighed, as if he knew what I wanted to hear. “Maybe he’ll come back. And maybe he won’t. But nothing you do will affect that. You can wait for something that may never happen or you can start trying to get over him now.”

His words had a sense of finality to them, of hard-won
realism, and after they’d hung in the air for a few seconds, I realized suddenly that my life would never be the same.

Of course it wouldn’t be.

I had gone through the looking glass and entered a parallel universe.

I had become an Old Cow
.

[
WEEPING SCENE DELETED
.]

You never sleep the night someone dumps you.

There is too much pain.

Too much confusion.

Too much wrestling with your New-Cow suit, trying to keep it on while it is trying to come off
.

Probably you will sleep in your clothes, too afraid to remove them because then you’ll be confronted with your naked body—
the body that was left for countless imperfections; the body that will remain untouched, celibate, unmated for the rest of your natural life
.

You might lie on top of the covers because it is easier that way. Or, if you do muster the will to pull them down and crawl under them, you will have to be very careful not to suffocate or strangle yourself with them, though you will desperately want to.

Whatever you do with the sheets, you will curl up in the fetal position with a handful of Kleenex. You will sob and weep and roll over to no avail, since comfort and peace will elude you.

The words
Why? Why? Why?
will play in your head like an endless tape. After a few hours the words might become altered slightly, to
Why me?
or even
What will become of me?
These are transformational rhetorical questions and you should not try to answer them; they are simply part of the metamorphosis from New back to Old, and you must endure them.

At around five or six in the morning you will drift off momentarily from sheer exhaustion into a light and very brief REM sleep, from which you will awaken in tears. You will stare
intently into space with your mouth open, then roll over again and sob into your pillow, because what you just dreamed was that he had come back, and for those few surreal semiconscious moments before you opened your eyes, you thought it was true.

The morning after, I got up and stared into the closet. Somehow I had the presence of mind to know that I needed to pick my clothes carefully to face Ray, something dark and impenetrable, something that could not, in any way, resemble a bathrobe and slippers.

But since I didn’t own a suit, I put together something that looked like one: a mourning suit—black jacket, black skirt, black tights—and after I showered and dressed, I went into the bathroom and shut the door.

I don’t know how long I stayed in there, sitting on the toilet seat cover, weeping, but I do know that it must have been a long time, because when I finally stood up and looked in the mirror, I almost didn’t recognize myself. Staring back at me from the mirror was not the New Cow I had come to know and love the past few months but something else entirely:

A big, fat, sad, pathetic Old Cow with Kleenex sticking out of her nose
.

All my efforts to prepare myself for seeing Ray dissolved when I actually saw him, in the greenroom, getting coffee. Our greenroom, unlike most television greenrooms, actually was green, a color long ago believed to have a calming effect on actors. As I stood there waiting for it to take effect on my nervous system, I was determined not to let him see how devastated, panicked, and suddenly furious I was.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” I said with my back to him, filling my cup.

“Are you okay?”

I threw the pot of coffee back onto the burner and turned around. “Don’t I look okay?”

“You look like you hate my guts.”