Animal Husbandry (17 page)

Me
, I thought.

I read on.

Ray again
.

I closed the book and sat on Eddie’s bed for a while, immobilized.

Who was this narcissistic subspecies of men, this
Homo erectus commitmentphobe
?

Just at that moment Evelyn came into the room, whining and pining for Eddie. She climbed up onto the bed and pushed me away as she nestled into the center of his bed and rolled around on her back languorously.

I stared at her.

She was waiting. She was waiting for him to come home
.

I looked down at Evelyn and remembered all the nights she’d gotten whipped up into a frenzy when Eddie was around—running after him as he changed his clothes and fixed himself dinner; leaping up onto his pillow and flying into the air repeatedly as he took off his clothes and got into bed to read. Sometimes, as I’d stood in his doorway, I’d seen her rubbing herself all over him, trying to crawl in front of his book and pawing at his private parts as if they were catnip underneath the sheets.

I was horrified, then fascinated.

The next morning at work I felt whacked-out but excited, as if a vision of some great, brilliant psycho-scientific discovery had come to me and taken hold like a religious epiphany. At the office I xeroxed the pages from the books, and later I did a Nexus search on pathological narcissism that yielded a recent article from
Time
magazine. I brought the file of pages into my meeting with Diane and showed her the
Time
piece, which was written by a professor of psychiatry at Harvard. His theory was that pathological narcissism was on the rise and that some of New York’s most infamous megalomaniacs had self-destructed because of it. Diane had a weakness for New York megalomaniacs and Harvard professors, I knew, so I wasn’t surprised when she gave me her approval to go ahead.

“Book him,” she said enthusiastically.

After which, of course, she added: “And where are we with Kevin Costner?”

That night Joan and I were supposed to have dinner, but in the afternoon she called me at the office and told me she had to cancel. When I asked her why, she said this:

“I’m in love.”

I got up from my desk chair and closed my door and ran back to the phone. “In love? Since
when
?”

“Today.”

“Today?”
I said. “With whom?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“You
can’t tell me
?”

“He’s kind of famous,” Joan whispered.

“Famous,” I repeated. “Famous? Like, how famous? Like movie-star famous?”

“No.”

“Sports famous?”

“Please.”

“Then, how?”

“He’s a writer.”

Oh, fuck.

“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Writers
suck
. They’re the worst. I thought we’d both sworn off writers, given our past experience. ‘Oh, read this, please, and love it. Love
me
!’ ” I pleaded, the way Evan and George, two would-be loser short-story writers we’d met at a reading years ago, used to plead.

“I know,” Joan said, “but Jason’s different. Shit, I said his name.”

Different?

She
was different. Joan sounded like a pod person, all gooey and sticky and … 
New-Cow-like
. I tried to refocus on the disastrous matter at hand. “Jason who?”

“Jason Hughes.”

Hughes, Jason. “Never heard of him,” I pronounced. How famous could he be? “So
tell
me, already.”

“Last night I went out with Pat, another editor at
Men’s Times
, and she brought along Jason, who’s written a couple of stories for the magazine—two of them covers. Anyway, we all stayed out until about three o’clock in the morning. When I got home, the phone was ringing, and it was him calling from his car phone.” She made more squeaky pod sounds and went on. “He said he just
had
to call and tell me that it was the most wonderful evening he’d ever had, and then he asked me if he could see me again.”

“So then what happened?”

“I said yes, of course.”

“I meant,
after
that,” I said.
After the truck pulled up in front of your apartment and replaced your body with the giant spotted New-Cow pod
.

“We’re seeing each other tonight. And this afternoon, when he called, he asked me to drive out to the Hamptons with him on Saturday. He said he’s looking to buy a house and he wants me to come with him. Can you be
lieve
it?”

I didn’t answer. I felt the back of my throat get scratchy and then seize up, as if I were about to cough up a hair ball. I was starting to remember all the times Ray had said bullshit just like that, and for a moment I was tempted to tell Joan that Jason sounded just as full of bullshit as Ray had been. But because I couldn’t remember the last time she had sounded so happy, and because I knew that part of my reaction was jealousy—jealousy
that she was climbing the arc of passion without knowing about the fall that was coming once she reached the top—I didn’t go whole hog.

“Just be careful,” I said.

“Of what?”

“Of, you know, going too fast.”

“Oh, like you and Ray?”

“Yeah.”

Joan was silent. “For one thing, this is just an affair right now.”

“And?”

“And, for another thing, Jason is different. I mean, this is different.”

No, it wasn’t. But I’d said too much already. “So … is it weird?” I asked.

Seemingly relieved to be off that point, she exhaled into the phone. “Is what weird?”

“Cheating on Ben.”

“Ben who?” she said.

Who
was
Ben?

But then, Who was Jason? or, for that matter, Who was Ray?

As Joan constantly updated me on what was happening with Jason in the weeks that followed, I’d go home to drink my beer and eat my toast and think back to what had happened with Ray. The more she told me and the more I thought about it, the clearer my sense was that our two situations had a lot in common:
Homo erectus commitmentphobe
. One night while she and I were on the phone, I found myself jotting words down on the pad of paper I kept by my bed:

After we got off the phone, I kept writing.

By 3
A.M
. I was out of paper.

The next night, on my way home from work, I went to the drugstore on the corner and bought one of those cheap, fake, old-fashioned–looking black and white composition notebooks and got into bed with it and a pen. I wrote and wrote, reconstructing my relationship with Ray—from the first day he came into my office and fixed his hair in my window, to the night at the hair bar, through the summer and into September, when things started to fall apart. I wrote in incomplete sentences
(… pursued me … said “I love you” first … made it seem at the end like I was chasing him …)
, in fits and spurts, and sometimes with bullets and arrows
(… breakup with Mia→guilt … lease signing→panic … panic→retreat … retreat→dumping …)
—a kind of scientific shorthand, a way of recording a factual account of what had happened, one devoid of feeling or emotion.

The facts. That’s all I was concerned with now. Analyses and interpretation would come later.

After that night writing in the notebook became the one thing I actually looked forward to at the end of the day, the one worthwhile thing I could funnel all my obsessive energy into and feel like I was producing something of note:

Notes
.

Sometimes, when Eddie was home, we’d eat dinner at the Thai restaurant downstairs that was next to Night Owls and come back upstairs and watch reruns of
The Odd Couple
while I secretly thought about what that night’s notebook entry would focus on: Eddie’s Current Cow? Jason’s latest verbal bouquet? On other nights, when Eddie was out, I’d listen to the country-music station for a while, then shut it off before I started writing so that sentimentality wouldn’t creep into my scientific objectivity:

Those notebooks, my database, would, in quite short order, become files—case files—which I filled with newspaper clippings, magazine articles, xeroxed pages from books, and anything else that helped explain why Ray dumped me, why Eddie dumped everyone, why Jason would undoubtedly dump
Joan—and why everything seemed so impossibly, inexplicably fucked up.

Three weeks into the notebook keeping Joan called me at home one night from Los Angeles. She had gone out there to work on the magazine’s special West Coast double issue, and coincidentally, she told me, Jason was out there too. She didn’t sound as podlike as she had the last time we spoke, so I asked her how things were going with him.

“They’re okay,” she said. “Actually they’re kind of weird. He just got this big assignment from
Vanity Fair
to profile some obscure, small-time royal, and he has to turn it around in three weeks. I guess that would make anyone a little preoccupied and short-tempered, right?”

“And assaholic.” I grabbed the notebook marked “J.” I could smell another New Cow—one newer than Joan—lurking somewhere in Jason’s periphery, and it pissed me off.

Suspect subject has “new” interest
, I wrote.

“We’re staying in the same hotel, but I haven’t seen him since I got here. I keep leaving messages, but when I finally reach him late at night, he tells me he’s still transcribing his interview tapes. I mean, how long was the fucking interview?”

Subject using interview transcriptions as excuse for distancing behavior
, I wrote.

I could tell she was holding on to her hat and frilly dress for dear life.

“I don’t get it. I mean, before we left New York, everything was fine, and when he found out that we were both going to be in L.A., he was thrilled.” She paused, and I could hear her pacing back and forth in her hotel room. “Maybe I should try calling again.”