Animal Husbandry (19 page)

“You need someone older,” he continued. “Someone more mature. Someone who can keep up with you.”

“Keep up with
me
?” I said. “I’m a fucking mess.” I saw my current life flare up in front of me like a lit match and laughed—the hole in my wall, the curtain, the ten-by-fifteen-foot bedroom cell, the notebooks. My life felt suspended in a way it never had: stalled, impermanent, surreal.

“No, you’re not. You just fell in love with someone who wasn’t ready for it.”

I exhaled slowly and closed my eyes, hoping to see in that blackness the glimmer of the future husband that Eddie was describing. But that place was empty, and I didn’t want to stay there. I opened my eyes and tried to refocus on the present.

“So what are you going to do about Catherine?”

“We’re going to spend the weekend at the Plaza,” he said, standing up and leaving a ten-dollar bill on the bar.

I put my cigarette out and slid off the barstool.

“Bring me back a shower cap, okay?”

Eddie and Catherine never made it to the Plaza that weekend.

The beginning of the end started that Sunday night, after
60 Minutes
, while Eddie was out running.

That’s when the phone rang.

“Is Eddie at home?” a female voice said. While I rummaged around the living room for a scrap of paper and a pen, I told the voice that Eddie was out running and that I expected him back momentarily.

“Would you be so kind, then,” the voice began again, “as to tell him that Catherine called?”

I scribbled furiously:
Would you be so kind
.

Would you be so kind?

Who talked like this?

It was his wife, being so kind as to call for Eddie for the first time.

I was thrilled for Eddie, then immediately envious. I wished it were a husband calling for me.

Would you be so kind as to tell Jane that I’m completely in love with her?

And then, before I knew it, I was overcome with dread. I had never really considered what I’d do if Eddie actually got involved with someone for longer than a week:

Where would I live?

Who would I talk to?

What would become of me?

Nowhere.

No one.

Nothing.

Sometime later Eddie returned. Momentarily forgetting my impending loserdom, I ran up to him and tugged at his ratty Yale sweatshirt. “Guess who called?” I said, barely able to contain myself. I held the message slip up in front of his face. “
Catherine!
”

He brushed past me through the living room and into his bedroom, removing his running clothes as he went. “Huh,” he said, without expression. “I’m going to shower.”

Seconds passed.

Minutes passed.

Eddie came out of the shower.

He made rice.

He read the Sunday
Times
cover to cover.

He did the dishes.

Even the silverware.

Then he retreated into his study and closed the door, coming out now and again only to empty his ashtray.

I sat in my room, furious. Three and a half hours had passed since Catherine had called, and still Eddie had not called her back. Just a few weeks before, he could talk of nothing but whether or not she would grant him permission to call her, and now, after two dates and the promise of a third, he suddenly didn’t seem to want any part of her.

Finally, when I couldn’t take the waiting any longer, I stormed out through the curtain.

“Obviously this isn’t any of my business,” I said, standing in his doorway, “but when are you going to call her back?”

He looked up at me over his reading glasses and put his pen down, and that’s when he said it:

“I just got home.”

“You just got home?
You just got home?
What are you talking about? You’ve been home for three and a half hours!”

Eddie took his glasses off. I waited for him to explain himself voluntarily the way he usually did. But this time he didn’t.

“Okay, look,” I said. “When you say ‘I just got home,’ do you really believe you just got home? Is that Guy Time? I mean, does time actually feel different to you? Do three and a half hours really only feel like ten minutes?”

For the first time since I’d known Eddie he looked sheepish. “No,” he admitted. “I just don’t feel like calling her.” He picked up his pen again and put his glasses back on.

Case file closed.

Well, not quite.

I don’t know if Eddie ever really did call Catherine back
that night, but I do know that he must have called her eventually, because about a week later he told me they’d had a talk.

“I dumped her,” Eddie clarified, looking both ashamed and very pleased with himself, as if he’d managed to unload a beautiful but problematic old Mercedes on an unsuspecting sucker. “She was too stiff, too formal, too uptight.”

I imagined her trying to digest the news while he let himself off the hook, like I had when Ray dumped me. The acute misery and confusion of that night and those that followed it pissed me off.

“You’re an asshole,” I said.

He looked at me like I was kidding. “No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are.”

Eddie’s face fell slightly as he considered the accusation. “I’m just confused.”

“That’s the least of it.”

I got up off the couch, went into my room through the curtain, and opened up his notebook.

It was, by all accounts, an inauspicious morning.

In fact, it was just like every other morning I’d had since being dumped.

I woke up before the alarm.

I remembered a dream I’d had about Ray.
(A wild boar was chasing him around the greenroom. Was I the wild boar?)

I recalled a few choice aspects of our relationship (his washboard stomach, his bad-love-poetry E-mails, his impeccable taste in cheesy vacation souvenirs).

Which made me cry.

Which made me mad.

Which propelled me into the shower, and then to make coffee, and then to sit at the kitchen table smoking cigarettes until I realized that nothing would become of me unless I got dressed and dragged my ass to work.

Little did I know that when I opened the science section of the newspaper at my desk an hour later, I would find the nugget, the germ, the essence of what would become my obsession over the next year: a reference to the mating preferences of bulls buried in an article on human male behavior.

I stared at the article.

My heart pounded.

My breath became shallow.

I started to sweat like Richard Nixon.

I read the article twice, clipped it, stapled it together, then read it again—this time with a yellow highlighter.

The Coolidge Effect was the technical name for it—
it
—the need to provide bulls with multiple cows for mating.

Multiple cows for mating
.

I took my reading glasses off, then stood up and checked my watch: forty-five minutes before the production meeting with Diane. I call-forwarded my phone and ran down the hallway to our reference library, small but well stocked, where all PBS staff could do preliminary research on news stories, show topics, and guests.

The Coolidge Effect.

The Coolidge Effect.

I stared at the shelves trying to figure out which books to pull out. I opened the
C
volume of the encyclopedia and checked under
Cattle
.

History of the U.S. Cattle Industry
.

Cattle Raising
.

Domestication
.

Breeding Techniques
.

See Animal Husbandry
.

I scanned the shelves.

A
volume missing.

No books on agriculture.

Or farming.

Or animals.

I took a step back and ran my eyes over each section of the shelves—history; politics; psychology; literature; sociology. Finally something caught my eye:
The Great Sex Divide
(Glenn Wilson, 1989). I lunged for it. As soon as I saw the Coolidge Effect listed in the index, I knew victory was close at hand.

Unmistakably resistant to repeating sex with the same female
.

I read on:

Already serviced
.

New
Cow→
Old
Cow.

I stared at the book.

I smiled.

Then I faxed Joan and told her to meet me at Aphrodite for lunch in two hours.

“So, Dr. Goodall. What’s the meaning of this cryptic fax?” Joan said, pulling it out of her bag:

New-Cow theory sheds much-needed light on narcissistic behavior in the male species. Stop. Dr. Goodall, disciple of Freud, Leakey, Fossey, and Jung and founder of the Institute for the Study and Prevention of Male Behavior, will present research findings at emergency Aphrodite lunch symposium. Stop. Nota bene: No cameras, please. Stop
.

Once Joan had finished scanning it, Dr. Goodall checked the hair in her nonexistent bun. “Yes, you see, my rather busy
schedule of research at the Institute and lectures at various conferences around the world about male behavior have, I’m sorry to say, prevented me from transcribing my rather illegible findings into formal papers, and I’m afraid it would do science a great disservice were the press to review my data prematurely—”

Joan lit a Marlboro and looked at her watch. “Come on, Jane. Tell Dr. Goodall to make it snappy.”

I pushed the menus aside and leaned forward. “Remember the time I saw that graffiti on the subway?”

“ ‘Baby I loves the toilet you sit on?’ ”

“No, no, no.
‘I’s tired of fucking the same woman every night.’
Remember how we thought there might actually be something to that? Like maybe it was some kind of window into their—”

“Schizophrenic behavior?”

“Well, it is,” I said, taking out the newspaper. “The New-Cow theory—‘I’s tired of fucking the same woman every night’—
same thing
.”

I spread the article out on the table and watched Joan read it. Then I showed her
The Great Sex Divide
.

“You see, we were Old Cow,” I said, pointing at the book. “We were ‘already serviced.’ And they wanted to move on to ‘less familiar females.’ ”

Joan shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s too simple. And besides, that applies to animals.”

“So?”

“So … you can’t extrapolate that the same is true in humans.”

“Why not?”

We looked at each other. “Why can’t we extrapolate that?” I asked, as much of myself as of Joan.

She thought a minute. “Because. Because humans are more
complex. There are a thousand things that affect what happens between them. This Coolidge Effect or the New-Cow theory is too simple, too one-dimensional. It’s much more complicated than that.”

“But maybe it isn’t,” I said, thinking out loud. “Maybe we just assume it’s more complicated than that with men when in reality it’s something as incredibly obvious as this.”

Joan didn’t blink. “You really think so?”

“I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been wondering about lately.”

In about eleven different notebooks
.

“What?” she asked. “Cows and bulls?”

“No.” I lit a cigarette and exhaled slowly. “About what the answer is. About why men flip-flop from passion to panic until they finally disappear.” I thought about the notebooks and the clippings I’d collected. I thought about Evelyn the cat. And for a moment I was tempted to mention them, to tell Joan more of what I’d been reading and finding. But I didn’t. It was too soon—my thoughts were too jumbled, too unformed, the data still too raw.