Animal Husbandry (25 page)

Luckily for me after a few days, Dr. Marie Goodall was already starting to be old news to people in the business. Diane gave up the chase, albeit reluctantly, along with everyone else in the media. At Friday’s meeting Eddie was taken off Dr. Goodall’s scent. Joan, however, was not so lucky. Ben was tormenting her in and out of the office. He simply could not believe that Joan was unable to get Dr. Goodall into even one interview. How could she not find her star columnist? They were missing an opportunity to sell even
more
magazines. When would her next six columns be ready? Joan placated him by holding out the promise of an America Online chat session with Dr. Goodall. She wasn’t sure how long she could stall Ben, but this seemed to be working for now.

Ray and I left the greenroom together and walked down the hallway without speaking, but when we got to my office, he lingered in the doorway for a while and started talking about Diane.

“So I guess she’ll live,” Ray said. “It’s a good thing she has such a short attention span.”

“But she has the memory of an elephant,” I said. I sat down in my chair, and Ray sat down too, and then I slid the copy of
Men’s Times
across my desk. I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to ask him for a man’s opinion of Dr. Goodall’s article.

“It’s pretty interesting,” he said. “I think she’s right about some things.”

“Which things?”

He shifted in his chair and held his clipboard against his chest like a little Lucite shield. “That men are driven by insecurity and low self-esteem.”

“I would agree.”

“But it’s not intentional. I think we act out of the fog of our
own confusion. It’s like we spend our lives stumbling around in the dark, and sometimes we find the light switch and sometimes we don’t.” I raised an eyebrow, and he smiled guiltily. “And the few times someone takes us by the hand and shows us where the light switch is and even turns it on for us, it’s too big of a shock. It’s too wonderful and scary and unknown, and for some reason the darkness seems safer. It’s what we’re used to. There’s no risk of getting hurt.”

Just what I thought he’d say.

Bull-shit
.

After lunch Joan called.

“Have you seen the
Times?
”

I hadn’t. It had been a hectic morning, which had been made even more hectic by the fact that Carla had called in sick and therefore was unable to catch my overflow calls. I told Joan to hold on, and then I rummaged through a pile of mail and newspapers that had been delivered that morning and dumped on Carla’s desk. I found the
Times
, went back to my office, and picked up on Joan.

“Turn to the Op-Ed page,” Joan said, and when I did, I gasped. There was a huge piece by an ad hoc collective of feminists, decrying Dr. Goodall’s findings as intrinsically sexist and arguing that females were just as polygamous as males.

“
Fuck!
” I whispered.

“Ben just came in here and told me to contact Dr. Goodall. No one’s paid this much attention to this shitty magazine since … well … 
ever
. He wants the next article to run earlier than June.”

“
Fuck!
” I started to panic.

“Look. Don’t panic. We’ll have dinner at your place tonight and figure it out.”

“But Eddie will be there.”

“Fine. We’ll pick his brain and see if he has any brilliant ideas.”

“So what do you think?” Joan asked Eddie when we were all back at the apartment. “Are men driven by insecurity and low self-esteem? Do they act out of the fog of their own confusion?”

I had told him that she was coming over, and much to my surprise he’d offered to cook—probably to show off his dormant couple skills to someone he could possibly impress.

Eddie looked up at me and Joan and shrugged. He had just stuffed half a stick of butter into the cavity of a chicken and was now rubbing the other half over the chicken’s skin. “Who wants to know?”

Joan and I exchanged glances. “We were just wondering what you thought about that piece a few weeks ago in Joan’s magazine, the one by that doctor you were trying to track down for Diane.”

“I liked her name,” he said.

“Anything else?” Joan said, getting edgy.

“I thought it was interesting, but I think there were a few things that weren’t entirely accurate.”

“Like what?” Joan and I blurted at the same time.

Eddie looked at us and lit a Camel. “Like the New-Cow theory. I think there’s a counterpart to that.” We looked at him expectantly while he took a bong hit off his cigarette. “The New-
Bull
theory.”

“Yes, we know,” Joan said. “We read the Op-Ed piece too, and I’m sure there are some wild women out there, but you know as well as I do that women don’t cheat anywhere as much as men do.”

“I agree,” I said, and Eddie looked at us.

“Well maybe not as much, but they do cheat,” he said.

Joan squeezed a lime wedge into her vodka and stirred the ice with her finger. “What makes you such an expert? From what I hear you’ve been too busy playing the field to notice.”

Eddie took a sip of Scotch. “Because Rebecca was seeing someone else.”

“She was?” I asked. “While you were living together?”

“No,” Eddie said, pouting like a baby. “After we split up.”

“The answer is: Skinner’s rats.”

It was after dinner, and Joan and I had gone into the living room once Eddie had closed his door and gone to bed. When she didn’t reply, I rephrased the
Jeopardy!
answer into a question.

“Why do men advance and retreat during a relationship and even after they’ve dumped you?” Like Ray had with me.

Joan sighed and reached for a cigarette. “To get to the other side?”

“Look, I’m sorry if I’m boring you, but this second article was
your
brilliant idea, remember?”

“You’re not boring me. You never bore me. I would very much like to know the answer to that question.”

“It’s about evolutionary psychology,” I said, then ducked in through the curtain to my room for the file and came back out.

“I can’t believe you
sleep
in there,” Joan said.

“Neither can I.”

“Then, why don’t you move? Get your own place. Take your furniture out of storage so you can have more than just a futon bed to call your own.” She stopped herself. “Like I should talk. Practically all I have in my apartment is a futon bed too.”

“And leave now? In the middle of my research? No way.”

“Of course,” Joan said. “I almost forgot.”

I sat down and opened the file. “Okay, B. F. Skinner did all these experiments with rats. In one experiment he tested dispensing food to rats via a food-pellet dispenser that had a bar on it that the rats could hit to make a pellet drop down into the cage. The experiment focused on how the rats would react when the predictability with which the machine released the pellets varied.”

Joan exhaled. “Continue.”

“If a rat hit the bar and the food always came, the rat would quickly become bored and lose interest. It was too easy. Too predictable.
Hit the bar, food! Hit the bar, food!
It wasn’t enough of a challenge.”

Joan exhaled again. And began to study her split ends.

“If the rat hit the bar and the food never came, the rat would get angry and frustrated and also lose interest. It was too hopeless, too discouraging.
Hit the bar, hit the bar, hit the bar, no food! Hit the bar, hit the bar, hit the bar, no food!
The rat would get depressed and stop trying.”

I reached out my fingers for a drag off Joan’s cigarette before continuing. “
But
, if the food was dispensed sporadically, randomly,
unpredictably
, the rat would become frenzied.
Hit the bar, hit the bar, hit the bar, food! Hit the bar, hit the bar, hit the bar, no food! Hit the bar, hit the bar, hit the bar, still no food! Hit the bar, hit the bar, hit the bar, food food food!
The more randomly the rat was rewarded, the more obsessive it became.”

Joan didn’t move and didn’t blink. “It’s the chase thing again. Playing hard to get. They love that.”

“She hates me, she hates me not.”

“Why is that so damn hard to remember?”

“I know.” I went back to my file.

“What? More?” Joan said.

“Gynogenetic reproduction,” I said.

Joan tried to pronounce the word, but she couldn’t.

“Gy-no-gen-e-tic reproduction,” I repeated. “
The method of reproduction of female species that reproduce clonally using their own DNA but rely on the sperm of males from closely related species to spark the formation and development of the embryo
.”

“I have no idea what you just said.”

“Scientists could never understand why a male would engage in sex without the possibility of siring offspring. Producing sperm is a very big expense metabolically, and mating in general is dangerous—and males, of course, aren’t exactly known for their altruism. But what they’ve found is that when male fish called sailfin mollies mate with the females of a related but gynogenetic species called Amazon mollies, the males become much more attractive to the females of their own species.”

I paused. “You see,” I continued, “the Amazon mollies look enough like female sailfin mollies to convince the female sailfins that when they see a male sailfin courting and mating with an Amazon, what they’re seeing is a sailfin mating. And the females are attracted by sexually successful males. Therefore a male sailfin that bothers to help a female of another species reproduce ends up with a surplus of females for himself.”

Joan stubbed out her cigarette and recrossed her legs. “Too confusing. Are you saying that Jason got involved with me for the express purpose of attracting someone else?”

“More like Ben staying with you to attract other women. Or Ray staying with Mia to attract me. Or George Costanza wearing a wedding ring. It’s kind of like there’s something in it for them if they appear to be domestic—if they appear to be attached to another woman.”

“More sympathetic. More comfortable or experienced at being a couple.”

“Right.”

Joan sounded relieved, and then she sounded excited. “You had me worried for a minute there, but that’s our second article.”

“You think?”

“Yes, I think. And I’m going to leave now before you miss your flight back to the Institute.”

If this were a scene in the screenplay of my life, some twenty-three-year-old studio executive would make me take it out.

“Over the top,” they would have pronounced.

“Too obvious.”

“Too
deus ex machina
.”

“You can do better.”

But I didn’t make it up. It’s true. And it would definitely be restored in the director’s cut.

It really happened.

And because it really happened, it became, as we embittered loser monkey scientists like to say,
material
.

The day I’m referring to is the day that I saw Evelyn walking down the hall at work wearing Ray’s shirt.

The light-blue-and-white-striped long-sleeved T-shirt.

The one I had bought for him on a warm Sunday afternoon in late August the weekend after we’d seen the apartment in Chelsea.

It was just about a week after my second article had appeared, and I was finally starting to enjoy the media buzz it had generated. That Friday morning I had awoken with an unusual amount of vim and vigor, and I had raced to the office propelled by the private and premature self-congratulatory belief that my homegrown form of therapy seemed to be working: