Animal Husbandry Read Online Free PDF Page B

parking-lot conversation.
    “Oh, come on. I just told you my embarrassingly pathetic tale of woe, so you have to tell me yours.”
    I thought a minute. If I told, I risked sounding like a loser. If I didn’t tell, I risked sounding like an
uptight
loser. “I drove cross-country too, the summer after the physicist and I met at Brown. In a Toyota station wagon with a hundred and thirty-six thousand miles on it. Michael—that was his name—was very into science, obviously, so we went to
AAA
and got all these maps. Maps of the entire United States, maps of the Northeast, the Southeast, the Midwest,the Southwest, the West Coast, the Northwest. Trip-tik maps with spiral bindings that showed every inch of road and had little symbols that stood for rest stops and bathrooms and gas stations.
    “I had just learned to drive a standard, and after I’d fuck up my two-hour shift, Michael would take the wheel and make me get the Hewlett-Packard calculator out of the glove compartment and turn around in my seat and get the bags of maps out of the back to figure out the average number of rest stops that had bathrooms
and
gas stations. Then I’d get carsick from turning around, and then I’d divide wrong, and then we’d fight all the way to the next Rock Formation National Park and he’d lock me out of the car. He locked me out at Yosemite, at Yellowstone, and somewhere in the Badlands. Then we lived together for three more years. And somewhere in between all that I stopped sleeping with him too.”
    Ray shook his head empathetically as we reached the car. “God. I wonder what that would feel like,” he said wistfully, looking up at the sky. “To really get along with the person you’re with. I wonder if that’s actually possible.”
    I looked up at the sky too. It was clear and black and full of stars. “Probably,” I said, but the word came out sounding fake and halfhearted, like an unconvincing white lie. And as I looked at him, then at the little lines etched in the skin on either side of his mouth, I wondered, for the first time in a long time, when it was that I had stopped believing in the possibilities of things.
    It hadn’t happened overnight.
    Those things never do.
    Hope erodes slowly, over time, until you wake up one nightat three o’clock in the morning and realize:
I am not meant for that kind of thing
.
    That kind of thing:
    Romance.
    Passion.
    Being the object of someone’s desire.
    Showing up in someone else’s dreams.
    There had, of course, been men who had liked me, who had even loved me—men I’d been friends with and never slept with had told me so, months or even years later; men I’d slept with and never been friends with had told me too, sometimes, afterward. And obviously Michael had been in love with me once, at the beginning—before he knew that I’d never fully grasp the basic principles of particle physics—but never like that. Never enough.
    Which, I suppose, made Michael and me equal in at least that one regard, since I had never been in love with him like that either.
    But sometime after they had all left me to go back to their lives, their wives, to new women in whom they presumably saw what they hadn’t seen in me—some spark of promise, some reflection of themselves they had never seen before but had always imagined seeing, some vision of their future—I would ride out the varying waves of crushing disappointment or secret relief until I came to assume that I was missing some element, some particular, elusive, intangible, crucial quality that made other women keepers. I didn’t know exactly what that quality was, but I suspected it had something to do with clarity, with a lack of ambivalence, with the certainty of knowing what kind of relationship you wanted enough to be willing to try to get it. But after Michael and after a long string ofshort-term attachments—some intense, some not so intense; some bad, some not so bad—I was less sure about what I wanted than what I