Animal Husbandry (6 page)

“Oh, come on. You probably do it all the time. Lure an unsuspecting woman out of her apartment at midnight to see some hair. Hint around after all the bars and diners within
walking distance have closed until she invites you over for coffee.”

“Then bore her with my entire life story until the sun rises and there’s nothing left to do but watch cartoons.”

“Cartoons?” I said.

“It’s Saturday morning.”

It was after seven when we went downstairs and sat on the bed, in the blue light, with the television on. Twice Ray got up to adjust the color/tint setting and each time he came back, it seemed he sat just an inch or two closer. But a little while later, at the end of Bugs Bunny, he turned to me and said: “You must be tired. Maybe I should go home and let you get some sleep.”

And before I could turn to him and tell him that I wasn’t tired, and that I didn’t want him to go home, he took my hand. He didn’t let go, and I didn’t let go, and later, after he kissed me and told me that he’d wanted to do that from the first moment we’d met, I remembered what a small miracle it was to like someone and have them like you back.

[
MATING SCENE DELETED
.]

I thought we would leave it at that.

At a “small miracle.”

At “like.”

After he left that morning—after I’d replayed and analyzed everything that had just happened, I spent half the day dementedly imagining what it would be like if Ray and I got married. Then, when I couldn’t get Joan on the phone, I called David, and spent the rest of the day at his apartment preparing what I would say when Ray came into my office on Monday morning for the Talk—the awkward, meandering, polite retraction of a “confused” man trying to get himself out of something he’d “accidentally” gotten himself into.

“Okay,” I said, sitting down on David’s couch. “So, like, I go to the office. And then I see him.”

“Right,” David said. He’d made coffee and poured us each a cup, then sat down in the armchair next to me. David had been in therapy for almost as long as I’d known him—long enough to treat me.

“Right.” I nodded my head.

David nodded too. “In essence, then, you see each other.”

“Right.” We’d
see each other
.

He brought his cup up to his mouth with both hands and blew at the steam. “It might help if you imagine exactly where this would happen. Like, at the reception desk.”

“Yes. Good,” I said. Then I said nothing. I could feel the autism setting in again, and so could David. I put my head down on the pillow and stared at his foot.

“Jane?”

I craned my head so I could see him.

“This really isn’t that hard.” But obviously, from my lack of response, it was. “So he’s there, and you’re there, and then Ray says something like—and I’m going out on a limb here—
‘Hello.’
And you say?”

I took hold of his shoelace and pulled. “Hello?” I sat up on the couch and reached for my coffee. “But how do I say it? I mean, am I friendly? Aloof? Embarrassed? Unfazed? What’s my motivation?”

“What’s your motivation?” He ran his hand over the short, short hair on the back of his head and sighed loudly. “Jane, Jane, Jane-Jane-Jane. Why are you being so retarded?”

He waited, and when I said nothing, he came over and put his hands on my shoulders and bent his head to mine.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said softly. “You always act this retarded when you really like someone.”

But Ray did not leave it at that. And I was grateful not to have to wait until Monday to try out my big hello line.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” he said late on Sunday afternoon when he rang my doorbell unexpectedly, “but I just happened to be in the neighborhood.”

Bothering me?

I opened the door, and he walked past me down the long, narrow hallway to the living room. He was wearing a baseball cap on frontward, an old gray Champion sweatshirt, basketball sneakers without socks, and a pair of khakis like the ones he’d bought in Washington, and when he leaned up against the wall, it occurred to me how good my apartment suddenly looked with him in it.

“I hope you like donuts,” he said, walking over to me and opening the white paper bag he was holding so I could see
inside. But I wasn’t looking at the bag, and neither was he, and before I could think of something clever to say, he moved closer and kissed me twice.

“I can’t stay. I’m house-sitting my friend’s apartment and I forgot to feed the cats today.” He looked at me and then away. “I guess I’ve been a little preoccupied.”

“Me too.”

“So. I was thinking maybe, tonight, if you wanted, you could come see the apartment I’m staying in. It’s a loft on Mercer Street.”

“A loft? In Soho?” I looked down at my black tank top and black jeans. “I don’t think I’m wearing enough black.”

He put his hands in his pockets and pulled up his pants until they came up to his shins. “Me either. But it’s air-conditioned.”

I looked at him standing there, with his sneakers sticking out like clown shoes, and at the expanse of calf revealed. I’d been too busy the other night to notice what nice ankles he had. “Okay,” I said, still ogling at them. “I’ll come.”

“You will?” Ray looked at me as if I’d just agreed to jump off a cliff with him. He wrote the address down on a corner of the paper bag, tore it off, and handed it to me.

“You know,” he said, “the only reason I came down to Washington for the convention was because I knew you were going to be there.”

Then he bent to kiss me, and I kissed him back, on his neck, where his shoulder and his sweatshirt and the nylon strap of his bag all came together.

I could tell you a lot of things about that night.

I could tell you how hot it was out and how I took a taxi to the address he had given me and how, when I got to the building
and the elevator door opened on the fourth floor, he was standing there, out in the hallway, waiting for me.

I could tell you what he wore and what I wore and what the apartment looked like, all three thousand square feet of it, with its huge windows and high ceilings and us tiptoeing through it, like trespassers, like two benevolent, misbegotten house thieves, whispering, snooping, looking without touching.

I could tell you how making love in a stranger’s home, in a stranger’s bed, with someone I hardly knew, felt both odd and surprisingly natural at the same time, the way wonderfully unfamiliar things often do, and how afterward, when he got up to put the cat out into the other room, he wrapped a long white towel around his waist even though no one else was there.

I could tell you how, when he returned with a cold bottle of water, he sat down beside me on the bed and we passed it back and forth, taking long, slow sips from the wet sweating bottle, and how good it tasted, and how we sat there for a long time, drinking and talking and listening to the sounds from the street, and how sometime after that, after I had removed the towel and after he had pushed back the sheet, how, a long time after that, when it was almost light, we finally fell asleep.

“So. Let’s go over the facts,” Joan said with intense, almost clinical interest after I told her everything early the next morning. Talking on the phone first thing in the morning from our desks was a kind of unspoken ritual—a way to debrief each other on our short time apart (“Did he call?” “Did you call?”); to restate unanswerable rhetorical questions (“What will become of me?” “What will become of us?”); and to plan the strategy for the day ahead based on what we had to work with from the night before.

“For starters, you work together.”

“Correct,” I said, taking a long suck off my Starbucks sip lid.

“And, he’s engaged.”

“Correct.”

“Engaged. To be married,” she repeated, pausing a second or two either for effect or to think. “Who is she?”

“She?”

“The fiancée.”

“Oh. Mia. I don’t know. I’ve never met her.”

“Well, what does she do?”

I told her what Ray had told me.

Joan snorted. “I can just picture her. Walking down the aisle in Birkenstocks and an unbleached hemp smock.”

I snorted. “Oh, and she’s also a vegan.”

“They’ve been together how long?”

“Long. Six years.”

“Six years. And when’s the wedding?”

“They haven’t set a date.”

“They haven’t set a date?”

“Nope.”

She paused again. “
Yet
.” Her tone was firm. Strategic. She must be good at this stuff, I thought, since she was secretly involved with someone she worked with—and someone who hadn’t specified when—or whether—he and Joan would ever get married.

“That’s good,” she went on. “Very good. Considering.”

“Considering what?”

She exhaled into the phone like I was an idiot. “Considering,” she said as slowly as she could without not speaking at all, “that the man has already picked out
his wife
.”

“Oh. Right.” What was I thinking?

What
was
I thinking? Maybe I was thinking that our two nights together were more than just a fluke.

Maybe I was wondering when he would get around to telling me that he was still in love with his fiancée, or that we shouldn’t be doing this because we worked together.

Or maybe I wasn’t thinking at all.

Joan lit a cigarette and blew into the phone. “Albeit that he’s put her on layaway.”

I lit a cigarette too. Strategy had never been my strong suit—the incomprehensible chess game, the ability to think three or four moves ahead and act accordingly (that is, defensively). At best I’d only been able to think one or two moves ahead. So I played with the phone cord and stared out the window, waiting for her to tell me what to do.

“Okay. This is what you do,” she said. “You pretend she doesn’t exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mention her. If he does, you nod politely, and then you change the subject.”

“But why?”

“Look. You like him, right?”

“Right.”

“And you’d like him to dump her, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, if you
acknowledge
her existence—talk about her, ask about her—he’ll never leave her. He’ll know you want him to, and he’ll start to feel pushed, and resentful. This way he’ll think you could care less, and that will drive him crazy.” She paused for a few seconds and then cackled at the obvious absurdity of what she’d just said. “I mean, I pretend that I could care less about Ben and look how well it’s worked for me.” Ben was the editor in chief of
Men’s Times
, and she had been seeing
him for almost two years, even though she frequently complained to me that she didn’t know where their relationship was going.

“Listen,” I said, getting a headache. “All I really wanted to know was what to do right now. When I see him. In the meeting. In five minutes.”

“Oh.” She sniffed. “That’s easy. Pretend
he
doesn’t exist.”

“Really? Why?”

“Because men don’t know how to deal with apathy and indifference. He’ll be thrown into a tizzy, whatever the guy-version of a tizzy is.”

We all met in the greenroom, taking our usual seats around the table like a family sitting down to Sunday dinner in some Diane Arbus photograph. When Ray walked in and sat down across from me, I felt so much adrenaline shoot through me that I thought I could almost see my hands shaking. Our eyes met and we both blushed instantly, then smiled, then looked away—Ray turning to Evelyn to share her copy of the agenda, and me turning to Eddie in desperation.

“Think she’ll ask me again about Kevin Costner?” I whispered.

He turned and stared at me, and when he did, I noticed a rather large hickey on his neck. The size and shape of it shocked me, as did the fact that I thought I could almost make out teeth marks.

Eddie acknowledged my acknowledgment of his hickey by turning back to his legal pad and lighting a cigarette. “I bit myself shaving,” he said, deadpan, then grinned slyly. Grinning seemed to make the hickey move slightly and change shape, like a tattoo on a flexed muscle, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I also couldn’t help running the tip of my tongue
over the edge of my two front teeth, trying to imagine what it was like to suck a piece of neck hard enough to cause internal bleeding.

Diane started talking about ratings and news stories, about who she wanted to book and who she didn’t, and as she flipped through her papers and pointed up at the unusually empty schedule board, I felt Ray’s knee touch mine.

“What do you think, Jane?” I heard Diane say.

What are the chances of your getting Ray every night this week?