Man Camp Read Online Free

fish, dunks it in soy sauce, and pops it in her mouth. A moment later, she reaches for the menu. “Anything else for you?”
    “I know what you’re doing and it’s not going to work,” Martha says. “You’re forgetting that money is no longer an issue. I had four FirstDates last week, so eat until you burst.”
    Lucy sighs and orders a pot of green tea instead. “How were those dates anyway? Any more religious fanatics?”
    Martha shakes her head. “They were a peculiar bunch, all strangely nonmasculine. You know the type I mean. Good-looking, immaculately dressed, very witty, but with zero sexual vibe. Yet supposedly straight.”
    “Exactly the kind of man you don’t want to be stranded on a desert island with, right?”
    Martha nods and is silent for a moment. “Here’s a question for the biologist in you: If these femmy straight guys don’t know how to seduce women, aren’t they bound for extinction?”
    “Only time will tell, I guess,” Lucy says, thinking of Adam, who’s gentle and cerebral, and arguably not a paragon of masculinity.
    “Why is it that so many guys today don’t seem to know how to do basic man stuff? How have we lost that in a single generation?” Martha tries to think if she’s ever had a handy boyfriend. “Our fathers knew how to repair things, yet no man within ten years of our age does. What do you do when something breaks around your apartment?”
    “The little things I take care of myself,” Lucy says. “For the complicated stuff, I wait for Cooper’s visits. Last time he was in town, he rewired a lamp, fixed the vacuum cleaner, and built shelves for my shoes in my bedroom closet.”
    “Ah, that Cooper,” Martha says, thinking of Lucy’s best friend from college. “What do you think accounts for the difference in him? How does he know how to do everything?”
    “Growing up on a dairy farm had to have helped. It wasn’t as if the Tuckingtons could call the superintendent every time something broke,” Lucy says. “Cooper’s just so capable and resourceful, he could survive in the woods for weeks with only a penknife. But he’s also polite in the way men from our fathers’ generation are. He holds doors and carries things, and it never feels patronizing. It feels natural.”
    “And as I recall, he’s also big and handsome and strong,” Martha says, smiling. “Now remind me again why you two never hooked up?”
    Lucy recollects the huge crush she had on Cooper when he was her residence counselor freshman year. “Oh, you know. In the beginning, one or the other of us was always involved with someone and then we just got to know each other too well to date.”
    “What does that mean, exactly?”
    “It means the man drinks Coke with breakfast, for God’s sake, and reads the last page of a novel first.”
    And the problem with that would be?
Martha wonders.
    Lucy takes a sip of tea. “We do have the Pact, of course,” she says, referring to their promise to be each other’s backup if neither was married by the time Lucy turned thirty. Four years ago (on Lucy’s twenty-ninth birthday), they upped it to thirtyfive.
    The last of Martha’s backups got married years ago. “At the risk of sounding like a snob, how does a Columbia graduate end up a dairy farmer?”
    Lucy had asked Cooper the same question a dozen times in college. “If he were here, he’d challenge you to explain why the lessons of literature and philosophy are more germane to your life than his,” she says, picturing Cooper milking cows at dawn with a copy of Nietzsche’s
Beyond Good and Evil
in his back pocket.
    “I guess he has a point. It’s not as if my psychology degree has done a whole lot for my acting career,” Martha says, applying a perfect coat of bloodred lipstick. “So, do you have any plans after dinner?”
    “An article on the monogamous nature of the California mouse and then bed,” Lucy replies.
    “You mean all mice aren’t rats? And here I’ve been looking for a man