What Do Women Want

slim and his fucking wasn’t as fierce or as new as Christian’s, and her name on his lips didn’t bring on vertigo.
    “Y es,” Adriaan Tuiten said, he thought often about reinforcement and neglect, about the bolstering or weakening of the circuits of desire, as he developed Lybrido and Lybridos. He was the founder of Emotional Brain. He was a Dutch researcher in his late fifties with a doctorate in psychopharmacology, whose shirt collars were skewed, whose hair was rumpled, whose dishevelment was half style and half disarray. We met periodically when he was in New York to check on the trials and to sell partnership rights and raise millions for the studies the FDA would still require. He was putting everything into getting past the American agency before its European equivalent; it was too expensive to do both at once. As we walked through Manhattan or leaned over coffee, he railed sometimes that back in the Netherlands people were rifling through his garbage. International companies, vastly larger than his own outfit of forty, were sending spies to get hold of his secrets. They were hacking into EB’s computers. Behind his chunky, tinted glasses, his eyes filled with anxiety. He seemed to be, now and then, on the edge of paranoid, crazed. But how crazy were his suspicions? So much money was at stake. And scientists like Pfaus, whose rats hadn’t been enlisted by EB, but who knew the field perhaps better than anyone—who had a small advisory role on Lybrido and Lybridos but no monetary interest in EB’s success—said that Tuiten could well be the one.
    Yet when Tuiten spoke about the conception of his drugs, the germ of his ideas, a story of scientific ingenuity and monumental potential profit came down to a young man’s broken heart. It wasn’t something he wished to recollect. “What I’m working on now is functionally independent of the past,” he said. Then, slowly: “The starting point is very personal.”
    Abruptly, when he was in his mid-twenties, his girlfriend, a woman he had been in love with since the age of thirteen and had lived with for years, told him she was leaving. “I was—flabbergasted. You can say that?” he asked me, making sure, in his stiffly accented, halting, but elaborate English that he was using the right word. “I was shocked. I was suffering. And she told me something at that point. She said she was so relieved by her decision that her menstruation came back.” She’d stopped using oral contraceptives two years earlier, but her period didn’t return, not until the day after she pronounced the relationship over. She believed her body was confirming that she’d made the right choice, no matter how agonizing it had been.
    He felt stricken. But it wasn’t long before she asked for another chance, and he took her back. “And after a year, the same pattern repeated.” She had started taking the pill again, then quit, then went months without ovulating or menstruating; meanwhile, she realized that she really was not meant to be with this man she’d been entangled with for half her life. She let him know it was absolutely finished. And within a day or two: her period.
    Battered by this cosmic verdict, he talked with the woman’s sister, who was sympathetic but informed him that yes, of course, there could be emotional causes for long stretches without menstruation, that sadly it all made sense. He wasn’t a scientist then. He was a belated university student, who’d been determined, until recently, to be a furniture builder. But he’d gravitated back to school because of books friends had given him, books that had begun to captivate him, volumes by the logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell and by Johannes Linschoten, a Dutch experimental psychologist. His mind was shifting, growing more and more avidly analytic. And it dawned on him that something was amiss. If breaking up had set his soul mate’s body free to bleed, how had this occurred within twenty-four or forty-eight hours?
    How, he thought, had she skipped past ovulation and the two weeks that generally need to go by? Her uterus couldn’t have compressed into a day or two what takes half a month. True, it was conceivable that, both times, she’d resolved to end it two weeks before letting him know, but this wasn’t the story she told, and, brooding about how he’d been so blindsided, ended up so shattered, about how it could have happened twice—“I stood always under the shower, thinking and