IN THE BELLY OF EDDIE’S BEAST:
AN ALPHA MALE, HIS GROWING HAREM, AND THE CHIMPANZETTE WHO GOT AWAY
The number of women collected into harems is staggering by any standard. The emperor Bhuponder Singh had 332 women in his harem when he died, “all of [whom] were at the beck and call of the Maharaja. He could satisfy his sexual lust with any of them at any time of day or night.” In India, estimates of harems of sixteenth-century kings ranged between four and twelve thousand occupants. In Imperial China, emperors around 771 B.C. kept one queen, three consorts or wives of the first rank, nine wives of the second rank, twenty-seven wives of the third rank, and eighty-one concubines. In Peru, an Inca lord kept a minimum of seven hundred women “for the service of his house and on whom to take his pleasure.…”
—David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire
Though Eddie brought home no wives those first few weeks I lived with him, he did bring home many women.
Many, many beautiful women whom I found waiting in the living room while Eddie changed for dinner, or heard giggling late at night as they tiptoed past my curtain on their way to his bedroom.
And there I’d be, the loser, sitting on the what-will-become-of-me couch with the remnants of my loser supper of beer and toast nearby, or lying in my what-will-become-of-me futon bed amid the scattered contents of the manila envelope, wondering how I’d sunk to this low, low point.
The answer was always the same:
Ray.
Ray. Ray. Ray.
I thought about him constantly. From the first second I opened my eyes in the morning to the last second before I closed them in the early evening, drunk and bloated with liquid and solid carbohydrates.
I loved him.
I hated him.
I could not get over him.
Probably because I saw him constantly—locking his bike up in front of the studio; walking up and down the hallway with his purposeful walk; in planning meetings in the greenroom when I would sit across the table from him and wonder what he was thinking, what he was feeling, if he was sleeping with anyone, whether he missed me or ever regretted his decision to dump me.
Hardly, judging from his ability to derive pleasure and excitement from his job, which I was completely unable to do.
“This is going to be great!” he’d say after a meeting or in the hallway just outside the studio. “Diane’s agreed to do a whole hour on—”
Whatever.
It didn’t matter.
I didn’t care.
Just the fact that he was happy about something completely impersonal and unemotional was enough to send me back to my office with an urge to shoot myself in the head.
How could we be so different? How could he be so fine when I was so not fine?
I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t read. I couldn’t even watch television. All I could do when I got home was gum my toast and listen to the country music station Eddie’s receiver was tuned to and wallow in the singers’ sad, sorry stories, which I liked to think were almost as sad and sorry as mine.
And try to make sense of my daily encounters with Ray. Like this one, sometime in mid-November, when he came into my office and took something out of his pocket:
“Here,” he said.
I looked up from my computer and saw him put something rolled up in a napkin on my desk. “What’s that?”
“It’s for you.”
I stared at the napkin suspiciously.
“I made it for you.”
I took my glasses off and swiveled my chair toward it, then poked at it with a pencil a few times until the napkin fell open. Inside lay three slices of what appeared to be bread.
“You made this?” I said. I poked at the bread a few more times until he laughed.
“This weekend. You know, since I have no life, all I do on the weekends is dream of food and make it.”
I stared at him. No life. I had no life either, and the last thing I could imagine was having an appetite and waiting for the weekend to come to try to sate it.
An appetite for food, that is.
“I’ve been baking bread a lot lately,” he continued unprodded. “It’s good. Therapeutic. Very Zen. You mix it up, let it rise, beat it down, let it rise again, beat it some more.”
Kind of like what he did to me.
“And then an hour later you can eat it.”
Imagining him in an apron in his kitchen covered in flour and beating a pile of dough to pass the hours of his supposed loneliness had a surprising effect on me:
It worked.
For an instant I felt a thick knot of sympathy and nostalgia growing in my stomach—I have no life too! Why can’t we be lonely together?—and I smiled at him as he moved to the doorway of my office and backed out into the hallway.
But an hour later, when I passed Evelyn’s cubicle and saw two slices of the same bread on her desk, I wanted to uncover the warm towel from his dough head and beat him senseless, let him rise, then beat him down again.
“It’s me,” he said, almost in a whisper. Eddie had handed me the phone through the curtain. “I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“No,” I said, trying to sound calm. “We’re always up late.”
There was silence, I knew, because of my use of the word we, and I relished it.
“Really,” he said. “Doing what?”
“Just talking, mostly.” His question and tone surprised me, as did my capacity to lie and mislead him with innuendo.
Another pause.
Mostly.
“I didn’t think Eddie was the talking type.”
“Well, outside the office he is. He has a very active social life, as you know, and he’s always sort of falling in love with somebody.”
Ray was silent. “Is he falling in love with you?”
This was easier than I’d thought. But at that point I didn’t have the heart for the game—New Old Cows are very sensitive to hurting others the way they themselves have been hurt—and besides, I didn’t want to make it seem like I was totally unavailable in case he wanted to, you know, come crawling back.
“With me?” I laughed a little for effect. “We’re just friends.”
Ray sighed then and made some joke about having heard that Eddie sometimes came home during lunch to watch reruns of Bonanza, but I lost track of what he was saying because I was still reeling from his apparent jealousy about Eddie and me.
“So does he?” Ray said.
“Does he what?”
“Does he come home at lunch to watch Bonanza?”
“I don’t know.” I’d heard the same story too, once, a long time ago, but forgotten about it since I’d moved in. It seemed like just the kind of rumor Eddie would start about himself to make people think he was more disconnected from his job than he already was so they’d leave him alone to concentrate on scheduling his Victoria’s Secret models.
“Anyway,” Ray said. “I was calling because I went to that party tonight and I was hoping I would see you there.”
I lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke away from the receiver. “I wasn’t really in the mood for a party.”
Another lie and misleading innuendo.
I wasn’t really in the mood to go on living.
“Neither was I. But Diane thought we should at least make an appearance—now that we’re national, she said we have to see and be seen so she made me and Evelyn go.”
“Schmooze.”
“Booze.”
Ray told me about the party, and then he told me how he’d wished I’d been there so we could have stood in a corner and made fun of people. Then, after a long, expectant lull, he said: “So listen—we should have dinner sometime. Maybe sometime this week. I feel like I never see you. I feel like—well, I miss you.”
My heart pounded. “Me too,” I said.
“And maybe I could see your apartment. Make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” I said, which was only half a lie.
Things were looking up now that I might have a reason to put on my hat and little dress again.
“Mind-fuck,” he pronounced when I called him from the office one night, well into the second week of waiting for Ray to stop in and ask me to dinner.
Joan agreed, in essence, though she didn’t use that term, when I stopped by her apartment on my way home.
“He’s fucking with you,” she said, gulping from a bottle of water. She had just come home from the gym and was still in her black one-piece Lycra space suit. “Look at me,” she said, wiping her mouth when she came up from the water bottle for air. “I’m sweating like a pig.”
She poured me a glass of water from a different bottle and walked me out of the kitchen and into the living room. “That’s what Ben does,” she said when we sat down on the couch. “Whenever he’s being an asshole—which is, like, all the time—but particularly when he starts saying things that imply he’s feeling trapped or hemmed in, I try to make him jealous. I won’t call when I get home from work and I won’t answer the phone when I know it’s him. Or I’ll tell him I had dinner with some freelance writer guy, only I won’t tell him that he was really ugly.”
“So it works.”
Joan shifted on the couch and kicked off her big white high-top cross-trainers. “It works. For about a minute. He calls and calls. Gets very attentive. Stops complaining about how he sees too much of me and starts complaining about how he doesn’t see enough of me. Then a few weeks later, or maybe a month later, it goes back to the way it was, and the whole cycle starts again.”
I shook my head. “What is that?” I asked, annoyed. “I mean, why would Ray call and say he missed me and that he wanted to have dinner and then not do anything?”
She lifted her hair off her neck for a few seconds, then reached for a cigarette and lit it. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “It’s what they do.”
“But why? Why?”
“It’s like, they want what they can’t have, and as soon as they can have it, they don’t want it anymore. It’s completely demoralizing to feel like you’re reduced to just being some emotional trigger that sets them off. Like, it almost doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do. You’re just a pawn, in this perpetual game of chess. And by the end you’re so exhausted you almost hope you don’t catch them.” She yawned and ran her hands over her face and then down her neck in long, slow strokes. “God,” she whispered. “I feel so old.”
“I think I have them all,” I said, as if I were the first one back from a scavenger hunt. “Holly. Diana. Tina. Bettina. Pauline. Giulia. Deborah. Emily. Melissa. Alissa. Elaine.”
Eddie looked up from his book. He took off his reading glasses and tightened the belt of his ripped and threadbare Black-Watch-plaid wool bathrobe.
“You missed Jacqueline.”
“Jacqueline?” I said, checking my notes. “Who’s Jacqueline?”
“Between Diana and Tina and during Bettina,” he started to explain, but it was taking too much effort, and he soon became bored, so he put his glasses on and returned to his book.
I dragged the phone into my room through the curtain and called Joan.
“There’s so many of them I can’t keep track,” I whispered into the receiver. “It’s amazing. It’s horrible.” The mere thought of them made me envision a conga line of bunnies, dancing their way through the Playboy Mansion on their way to Hugh Hefner’s silk pajamas.
Joan was unimpressed. “Really?” she said. “He dates that much?”
“Every week there’s someone new. And these women—they’re gorgeous. Unbelievable. Sometimes—usually—he has several different women at the same time.”
“At the same time? In the apartment?” She sounded momentarily intrigued.
“No. I mean, he dates them simultaneously.”
But no matter how many women Eddie could have, he always came back to the one he couldn’t have.
Eddie’s silhouette showed through the curtain, and for an instant I was tempted to feign sleep and take one night off from his drunken rantings. But there was something in his voice that night which made me reconsider, so I sat up in bed and opened the curtain.
In the dark I saw Eddie pour himself a drink, and when he put the bottle down, he turned around and peered in at me. Then he shook his head.
“No. You’re going to have to come out for this one. It’s important.”
I crawled out past the sheet, past the plaster chunks, and over to the couch next to Eddie. He looked exhausted and slightly drunk, yet when I looked in his eyes, I saw an unfamiliar spark of alertness. “What is it?”
“I saw her.”
“You saw who?”
“Rebecca. I saw Rebecca. At the Film Forum.”
“Did she see you?”
“Yes, she saw me,” he said, taking a quick sip of Scotch and then a long, slow drag of his cigarette. “We sat together.”
I reached for his glass and took a sip too.
“I knew she would be there. I went to the theater after work, and I just had this feeling I’d see her there.”
“And you did.”
“And I did. And it was great, of course, just like I’d always imagined it would be.”
“So what happened?”
“We sat together. We talked. Afterward we had dinner.” Eddie sighed and looked at his drink. “It was … perfect.”
For a minute or two we didn’t speak. This was the first time either of us had had a sign of hope, and we were too afraid to acknowledge it.
“Will you see her again?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Eddie lit another cigarette and inhaled so deeply I was afraid the smoke would never come out of his lungs. “Maybe.”
“Does she have a boyfriend?”
“Sort of. I think. She said she’s been seeing someone, but it’s not working out.”
“Too bad,” I said, and we both laughed quietly.
Eddie put his glass down and ran his hands through his hair. “You know, since she left, I’ve probably been with a dozen women—” He looked at my raised eyebrow and recalculated accordingly. “Okay, three dozen women—beautiful women, intelligent women, rich women. But when I’m with Rebecca, there’s just this thing, this feeling, like I’ve come home after being away for a long time.”
I took another sip of Eddie’s Scotch and thought of Ray. “I know,” I said.
“I’m still in love with her,” he whispered, expecting me to be surprised. But I wasn’t. Of course I wasn’t.
“Do you have a picture of her?” I watched his face while he didn’t answer, but it betrayed nothing. “It would help me understand everything if I knew what she looked like.”
“There is only one picture,” he said finally. “A Polaroid. And I had to hide it.”
Eddie got up, and I followed him, not into his bedroom but into the kitchen, to the big, deep cabinet above the refrigerator. Standing on a chair, he pulled out a huge old cardboard box, full of hammers and nails and electrical wire and camping supplies, and as he passed me a saw to hold, he slipped something into the palm of his hand and jumped down off the chair.
“It was New Year’s Day,” he said, standing next to me under the light. “Two years ago. We had some people over.” I looked into his hand, and there they were, in the kitchen by the sink, smiling. Eddie hugging Rebecca from behind.
For a moment I couldn’t speak. Maybe it was because Rebecca was so unlike all the women Eddie had brought home those two months—a grown-up tomboy with regular hair and a denim shirt and no makeup—that I was caught off guard. Or maybe it was seeing the Halfway House in its previous incarnation, a place where two people in love lived together. Or maybe it was how different Eddie looked—how full of color his face was, how full of life his eyes were compared to now.
Eddie asked me, “Is she what you expected?”
I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know what I expected. I wouldn’t have thought she was your type.”
His eyes were still fixed to the photograph. “She’s exactly my type.”
“She looks so … normal.” I looked up at Eddie. “And you look so happy.”
“I was happy.”
I was stunned. Not only by the fact that Rebecca looked like someone I would probably be friends with but also because, for the first time since I’d known Eddie—for the first time since I’d moved in, he seemed almost—friendly. Like someone I could actually be interested in.… I stared at him for a few seconds and then felt a shiver snake through my body.
What was I thinking?
Shame on me for taking pity on an Old Bull.
Eddie stood there for a while, looking lost, but then he took a deep breath and stole one last private look at the photo.
“My Rebecca,” he said sadly. He got up on the chair, put the Polaroid in the box, and pushed the box as far back as it would go, then slammed the cabinet doors shut.
“Back you go,” he said to the woman in the picture, the woman who used to live here but didn’t anymore. “That’s what you get for leaving me.”
There was no frenetic pacing this time, no strategizing, no lectured theories about time, and change, and second chances. It was as if Eddie had seen, in a flash of dreaded truth, that the black-velvet box of hope he had carried around all those months had been empty all along:
She was never coming back.
Looking at his silhouette in the dark, listening to his voice tremble and crack, I saw the dark tunnel of Eddie’s loneliness; knew that the women who came and went from his life only passed by it, without entering. And as I watched Eddie get up from the couch and walk into his room, I thought how full of tunnels the world was, each containing a different person, each with his or her own sadness.
“I don’t feel sorry for him. I just think he’s interesting.”
“What’s so interesting? He’s an animal. He preys on unsuspecting prepubescent girls and rips their hearts out. You’re the one who sees the carnage.”
Yes, I had seen it. And each of his hunt-and-kills was worthy of its own PBS science documentary.
But wasn’t it interesting how, at times, he seemed almost … human.