FIRST DAYS AT BASE CAMP
We think of science as manipulation, experiment, and quantification, done by men dressed in white coats, twirling buttons and watching dials in laboratories. When we read about a woman who gives funny names to chimpanzees and then follows them into the bush, meticulously recording their every grunt and groom, we are reluctant to admit such activity into the big leagues.…
The laboratory technique of stripping away uniqueness and finding quantifiable least common denominators cannot capture the richness of real history. Nature is context and interaction—organisms in their natural environment. The individuality of chimps matters.… You must observe in nature. You cannot take a few random looks now and then. You must follow hour after hour, at all times and places, lest you miss those odd, distinctive (and often short) events that set a pattern and history for entire societies.
—Stephen Jay Gould, the introduction to the revised edition of Jane Goodall’s In the Shadow of Man
I didn’t see much of Eddie that first week, since I left for work in the morning about three hours before he did and he came home at night well after I’d fallen asleep. But the following Sunday night I saw a hand come through the curtain. It was Eddie’s hand, and in it was a glass of Scotch.
“Morphine,” the hand said, ice cubes tinkling against the glass. “For the pain.”
Eddie seemed to know about that pain, seemed to know its ins and outs, its cycles, its resistance to resistance. I took the glass and considered drinking it in the privacy of my room, but since I didn’t want to seem rude, I put a sweatshirt on over my nightgown and came out through the curtain and into the living room, where Eddie was sitting in the dark on the couch with a glass for himself.
This would be the first of many nights that we would meet out there after Eddie had come in late, looking sadly into his penultimate drink, both of us beyond the consolation of liquor and cigarettes and our shared tales of misery.
And it would be from living with Eddie that I would learn almost everything I knew about the ways of men.
But an education is a relative thing, I found out—as much about the teacher as it is about the student, as much too about the answers as the questions asked, which is why I’ve spent almost as much time unlearning what I learned from Eddie as I spent learning it in the first place.
“So you never did tell me what really happened to my wall.” I looked into my drink. I’d never liked Scotch, but Eddie made me almost uncomfortable enough to gulp it down. Something about the way he looked at me—or didn’t look at me—made me feel like I was the kind of woman he’d never think twice about: I wasn’t tough enough, I wasn’t downtown enough; I wasn’t pretty enough or sexy enough.
Not that I would have been capable of being interested at that point anyway:
My heart still belonged to my Cow-heart breaker.
“It was right after she moved out. I started tearing it down one night with an ax, but I stopped because I had to carry the hunks of plaster down at night in garbage bags so the super wouldn’t see me and think I was carrying out body parts.” Eddie watched me take a large sip from my glass and try not to gag. “Are you scared of me now?” he asked.
“Should I be?”
“Maybe.” He laughed, then shifted on the couch.
I asked him, “Was ‘she’ your old girlfriend?”
He nodded and tipped his head back to drain his glass, and then he stood up to get himself another drink. But somewhere between the living room and the kitchen he stopped, as if he’d suddenly realized he was drunk enough and wouldn’t need any more to sleep.
“Morphine,” he said, walking back past me toward his room. “For the pain of Rebecca.”
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said through the curtain.
“What’s downstairs?”
“Night Owls. One of the bars where Jack Abbott used to drink after he wrote In the Belly of the Beast, before he killed that waiter.”
We walked in just after midnight, past the jukebox and the television set and the plate-glass windows facing the street. We sat down at the bar, and the bartender nodded at Eddie, an obvious regular, and set him up with a Scotch. Then he looked at me. I shivered at the blasts of chilly October air coming through the door when it opened and closed.
“She’ll have a Wild Turkey,” Eddie said, “with ice.”
I stared at him. “I usually order my own drink, you know.”
“I know. But you need hard stuff now, and you have to learn how to drink it.”
He picked up his glass and sipped off half an inch of Scotch. “The first time we broke up she came back in a week,” he started without my asking him to. “But the second time she left that was it. I’m still waiting for her to come back.”
“How did you meet?”
“Blind date. We were together for three years, and it was perfect. Well, it wasn’t perfect. I was a monster sometimes.”
“You cheated on her?”
“I never cheated on her. She was the only woman I was ever completely faithful to. Except once, but that didn’t count because she had just moved out the first time.”
“That was, what, a year and a half ago? And you’re still sad?”
Eddie looked up at the ceiling with a knowing look on his face, the way he always would whenever he was about to impart a piece of hard-earned wisdom about “relationships.” “Yes.” He sighed heavily. “But it’s a different kind of sadness now. You go through a lot of different stages, and each stage has a very particular and distinct kind of sadness.”
I looked up at the television set and then out at the street. It was late now, and cold, and I was actually starting to long for my room.
“So that’s my story, not that you’ve heard the last of it by any means,” Eddie said. “Now what’s yours?”
Mine? I didn’t really have a story yet. Months would pass before I would become truly bitter and hatch the Old-Cow–New-Cow theory and all its ancillary theorems. So all I could do was lay out the bones of what had happened with Ray and hope that Eddie could make some sense of them:
“I fell in love with someone. Who I thought fell in love with me. We were going to move in together, were about to sign a lease, and then, all of a sudden, for seemingly no reason, he dumped me.” I took a sip of bourbon, and the warmth of it moving like a lit fuse all the way to my stomach made me understand for the first time why serious drinkers drink.
“Did he say why?” Eddie drained his glass and signaled the bartender for a refill.
“He said he didn’t know.”
He nodded knowingly.
“What? Does that mean something?”
“It depends.”
“On what?” I said insistently, my voice betraying a desperate need for explanation.
But he would only shrug. “He probably just got scared.”
I put my drink down on the bar, and my rage escaped in a controlled whisper. “Of what?”
Eddie seemed surprised by my show of temper. “Of you.”
“Oh, fuck you.”
“Okay.” He grinned at me, but I ignored him and stared back into my drink.
“So who is this guy, anyway? Do I know him?”
I looked up at the television. The eleven o’clock news was over, and a rerun of Cheers was starting. For a minute I thought I should be discreet and not tell Eddie since we all worked together, but when I saw Ted Danson skirt chasing, I was reminded that exactly two weeks ago Ray had dumped me a block away.
So I sang like a canary.
“You’re kidding,” Eddie said. “I always thought that Ray and Evelyn had a thing.”
I told him that’s what I had thought too, once, until Ray had explained that they’d always just been friends. “Besides,” I added like an idiot, “he said she’s not his type.”
Eddie sucked intently on a Scotch-infused ice cube. “Any woman is a man’s type.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“I speak from experience.”
I stared into my glass. “You know what, Eddie? Even though I wouldn’t have thought it possible, I’m even sadder now than I was an hour ago. Or maybe, as you would say, it’s just a different kind of sadness.”
Eddie sucked the last ice cube in his glass and looked almost pleased with himself. Obviously, misery loved company.
“Well, now I’m stuck in that office, and I have to see him every day.”
He thought a minute. “There’s only one true prescription for a broken heart.”
“Which is?”
“Get back on the horse.”
“Meaning what?” I was not yet used to his Rancho Wyoming shorthand.
“Get a new boyfriend.”
I shook my head and took a perfunctory sip of my drink. “I don’t think so. I don’t think I’m ready yet. I mean, this just happened.”
“It didn’t just happen. It’s been two weeks already.” He looked dismissively at me and then up at the television set. “Do what you want, but it’s worked for me. Dating has become my sport and my pastime.”
“Well, women are different, obviously. We need time to get over things.”
“You can get over things a lot more quickly when you’re back in the saddle,” he said, reaching for his wallet. “It’s all I do these days.”
Fat lot of good it seemed to be doing Mr. Morphine.
I stood at the bar nervously nursing a glass of champagne, unsure of whether or not Ray would show up—half-hoping he would and half-hoping he wouldn’t—when I spotted Evelyn. She had put her drink down on the bar and was starting to pull on her coat. I was so happy to see someone I knew that I almost hugged her.
“Hi,” I said, practically tugging at her sleeve. My desperation was palpable.
She turned to me and smiled widely. “Hi!” she said, as if she hadn’t seen me for three years even though we worked together every day. She was so incredibly sweet, and while I sometimes wondered what—if anything—went on behind those big green eyes, I was immensely grateful for her enthusiasm.
We nodded at each other and smiled. I had no idea of what to say. There was something completely overwhelming about such blatant sweetness. It rendered me stupid and made me feel like little devil horns were butting out of my scalp.
“So,” I finally blurted with thick sarcasm, “great party.”
Evelyn’s eyes opened even wider with wonder. “I know. I wish I didn’t have to leave, but I’m meeting someone and I’m really late.”
My face fell, but hers didn’t. She was beaming—luminous, almost. We said good-bye, and I stared into the crowd again.
A few minutes later Eddie appeared with a tall blonde on his arm. Gracefully losing her, he made his way over to me, stopping to greet and kiss many other beautiful women along the way. As I watched him crossing the room, I suddenly got it: Eddie really was a very handsome man. Thank God he wasn’t my type.
“One Scotch and one champagne,” Eddie said to the bartender.
I looked him up and down. He must have gone home and changed after work, because he was wearing a suit—a perfectly tailored gray flannel suit and exquisite silk tie—a far cry from his usual Johnny Cash wear.
He felt my stare but didn’t look at me. “What?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“You like my suit.” He turned toward me, leaning his back against the bar.
“Do I?”
He took a sip of his drink and a drag off his cigarette. “This is my favorite suit,” he said, raising an eyebrow. “It’s my lucky suit.”
I turned to him. “Lucky suit?” Joan was right. He was an asshole.
He laughed a long, deep, throaty laugh and elbowed me. “I’m just teasing you,” he said. “It’s my only suit.”
I grinned and scanned the crowd. Okay, so he wasn’t a total asshole. “So who’s your date?”
“Pauline,” he answered, seemingly unexcited.
“She’s beautiful,” I said. “Is it serious?”
“It’s never serious.”
I finished my glass of champagne. The bubbles floated up into my brain and made me feel suddenly calm. I looked at Eddie and then back at some of the women he’d kissed on his way in. “Who were all the others?”
Eddie dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it, then turned his attention back to the room. He indicated the various women with a subtle point of his nose and talked into my ear.
“The redhead in the corner talking to her bald boyfriend is Diana. An actress. I saw her for about two weeks. Very wild but ultimately unfulfilling.”
I nodded. “She looks like she’s twelve.”
“She’s twenty-two.”
“Like I said: twelve.” I took a sip from Eddie’s glass and handed it back to him. “Go on.”
“The tall brunette with long, wavy hair. That’s Giulia. The Victoria’s Secret model. Looks great in a thong but surprisingly not very sexy.”
“Sure.”
“And Emily. The blonde near the ficus plant. Chapin School. Andover. Radcliffe. Smart. Beautiful. Great cook.”
But?
“Too perfect.”
“I see. You’re kind of picky, don’t you think?”
He considered the question. “I know what I want.”
“And,” I said, “what do you want?”
Eddie looked distractedly into the crowd, as if he had just seen someone he’d been waiting for.
He had.
I followed his pointing nose and saw a tall, shapely brunette. I awaited his comment. “That,” he said. “I think I just saw my wife.”