Animal Husbandry (2 page)

But no. In order to rebuild my life—or, actually, in order to
get
a life—I had to quit my personal version of animal husbandry cold turkey.

I had to come up with my own recovery program.

I share it with you now, in its entirety, in case you might find it useful:

They will never make sense; you will never understand them
.

Nothing makes another Old Cow cry more than a good Old-Cow story.
Their
Old-Cow story.

You start telling someone your tragic little tale—how Cow met Bull, or Bull met Cow, or Bull met Bull—and before you can get to the part about the hat and the little dress, they interrupt you and start telling you
their
story, and before you can say “Hey, what about me?”, they’re waving for another drink and repeating what they were told when they were in your condition.

This is how it usually goes.

Broken hearts mend
, they say.

Time heals all wounds
, they say.

Have another Wild Turkey. Trust me
, they say.

Then, when you don’t trust them, and you won’t, because you trusted before and all it got you was two fifty-minute sessions a week, you play with your straw and lean back from the table. Because here come the human body arguments, the parade of mending limbs, near-invisible incisions, minds learning to rewire themselves—tangible proof of the body’s amazing ability to recover, to heal, to forget.

But you already know about those metaphors. You’ve watched the same science documentaries, sifted out the same small stones of truth. You know how bones bond stronger in the broken places, like glued dinner plates; how scars spread over split skin and fill in the cracks like soft spackle; how memories die slowly and quietly, taking their light with them like stars. They’re the familiar rationalizations you once told others and now refuse to tell yourself.

When all else fails, which it will, because no one can trick you into parting with your pain for even an instant—
it’s all you have left now, besides the shrink bills
—they pull out all the stops.

Time wounds all heels
, they say.

Maybe he’ll come back
, they say.

I think
I’ll
have another Wild Turkey
, they say.

My God.

The things people will say to make themselves stop sobbing.

For me it was the word
time
.

At the beginning I tried to imagine what it would be like when time had passed and I was over Ray—at night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d close my eyes and try to picture all those days and months, all the passing seasons and the changing light, rushing ahead like some time-lapse film clip.

But there are some leaps the mind can’t make.

Those nights with my eyes closed I learned many lessons.

That kissing the perfect washboard stomach is not something you can be expected to forget overnight.

That there is a high-interest layaway payment plan for passion: one year of pain for every month of pleasure spent.

That most of the things men say turn out to be lies, even if they don’t mean them to be, and even if they never admit it.

That there is something different in the eyes of lost-boy men—a certain sadness, a need, a tenderness—which can make you forgive them almost anything.

There was more.

I learned a lot that year after Ray left me.

Like how to tell my Old-Cow story without sounding too much like Glenn Close.

I can do that now, almost, after two years. And a hundred and ninety-two sessions.

There’s not much good you can say about sensory-deprivation weekends and therapy except that they give you time to get your story straight.

I came up with several Old-Cow stories, actually, several different versions of the same truth that I could pick from, like wines, depending on my mood and the nature of my audience.

This was one:

Cow met Bull.

Cow and Bull mated.

Bull dumped Cow.

The
veni, vidi, vici
version was another:

Bull
met
Cow.

Bull
mated
Cow.

Bull
dumped
Cow.

This one was classified for my own case file:

Cow met Bull.

Cow thought Bull was attractive in a shy, muscular, fine-boned, J. Crew sort of way but assumed, since this was New York, that he liked Bulls too. So Cow did a little digging and found out that Bull did indeed like Cows—in fact, he had a Cow, a difficult and demanding vegetarian Heifer to whom he was engaged.

But while they were away on a business trip together, Bull told Cow how unhappy he was with his Current Cow—how they didn’t really have much in common and how they barely mated anymore. Cow was intrigued, but she didn’t get up and charge—she had heard this line before, and besides, given her last two experiences with emotionally enyoked males, there was her new golden rule:
No more Bulls with Cow complications
.

However, Cow liked the way Bull looked in his button-down
shirts and ties and the way he was always pushing his wire-rimmed glasses back up his nose. She liked that he grew up on Long Island and that he rode his bicycle to work from the Upper West Side and that he wore the same dark-green rubber field coat every day. So a few weeks later, when Bull asked her to meet him for a drink, Cow got up and ambled toward the barn.

Like an idiot.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There are few things people distrust more in this world than an Old Cow’s Old-Cow story, no matter which version it is, so I just want to say now, before I go any further, that I know you don’t believe me.

You may want to; you may, in fact, believe that
I
believe what I’m saying is true, but inside, to yourself, I know what you’re thinking.

That it was me.

That I did something wrong.

That it was my fault.

If by that you mean that I mistook lust for love, that he never loved me, that I was a fool, then perhaps you’re right.

Maybe I did.

Maybe he didn’t.

Maybe I was.

Sometimes I don’t believe myself either.

But if you mean that it was my fault for misreading the situation—that if you had been me, you would have been able to tell the difference, that you would have been able to distinguish the lies from the truth, that you wouldn’t have believed, to the depths of your soul, to the very core of your being, that this was, positively, unmistakably, at long last,
love
—then, for
you I have a different version of my Old-Cow story, a version I didn’t tell you about.

It’s the one I almost never tell anyone—not even myself—anymore. It isn’t glib and bitter and well rehearsed like the others, and, more importantly, it isn’t tearproof. Sad, sorry truths almost never are.

Ray and I met.

I fell in love.

And for a brief moment in time, when he was in my life and I was in his, the world became a very different place.

And when he left, and when it was over, and when I realized, finally, that he was never, ever coming back, it broke my heart.

Looking back now, of course, I can see that it wasn’t just me who got dumped.

It was just one of those years.

We all became casualties of love, survivors of the same shots through the heart. We were all led down the garden path and left to crawl our way back from the middle of the jungle.

First David, my friend from college.

Then me.

Then my best friend, Joan.

And then there was my roommate, Eddie, the veteran of luv, the one with the post-traumatic stress disorder, wheeling around the proverbial ward and goosing all the nurses.

It was his apartment I moved into right after Ray dumped me.

And it was from living with Eddie—living inside the belly of the beast, as it were—that led me to my research. Because a woman doesn’t just wake up one morning like something out of Kafka’s
Metamorphosis
, a fully formed psycho, holding a
Portable Freud
in one hand and Darwin’s
Origin of Species
in the other.

She doesn’t just start reading
Black’s Law Dictionary
or
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
one day, out of the blue, for pleasure.

She is driven to it.

Slowly.

Over time.

Like I was.

It all started when Ray and I were standing on First Avenue, late one Friday night at the end of June, after everyone else had gone home.

A few hours earlier he had called me from a bar in the East Village I had never heard of. “Hurry hurry,” he had said over the noise, “or you’ll miss
the hair
.”

It was midnight.

I put the phone down and sat up in bed, shocked that he had called. As I’d left the office earlier that evening, he was standing with a few people talking about meeting up later for drinks to celebrate our boss’s brief vacation. “You should come,” he’d said. “It’ll be fun.”

Fun. My idea of fun most nights was going straight home from work and climbing into bed with a pile of back issues of
The New Yorker
and a bowl of Cheerios. Which is what I’d done that night since Joan was going to a screening and David was in like again.

“Maybe,” I’d told Ray. But later, once I was in bed, it occurred to me that he had been nervous when he asked me for my number so that he could call me later in case I changed my mind, and I’d regretted being so offhand about his invitation.

At that moment I considered my situation: snug as a bug in a rug in the safety and quiet of my sensory-deprivation tank—a perfect but miniature studio in a prewar elevator building in the West Village, with built-in bookshelves and a working fireplace—and I shook my head.