Animal Husbandry

by Laura Zigman

  “So tell me,” he said, once the waiter had walked away. “How did you get into television?”

  I sat back in the booth and thought a minute. “By accident. The way everyone in New York ends up doing what they’re doing, probably: a lucky break from a temp job.” I opened my big black bag (in New York, the bigger and blacker the accessory, the better) and put my sunglasses back in their case. “I was living in Princeton with my then-boyfriend, who was getting his Ph.D. in physics, and I was trying, with my pathetic little minor in art history, to get a job at one of the museums in the city. So I started temping, thinking I’d work for a year or two before going to graduate school too. One of my temp jobs was working for an assistant managing editor at People magazine, and because I typed a hundred words a minute, back when there were still typewriters, he begged me to stay. And that’s where Joan and I met.”

  Ray’s milk shake came, and he took a big gulp of it, sans straw. He wiped off the milk shake moustache and pushed the glass toward me. “Have some,” he ordered. “It’ll coat your stomach, protect it from the meat.” So I did.

  “Anyway,” I continued, “I graduated from assistant to assistant editor, then associate editor. After six years there, not really writing but essentially ‘producing’ stories—spying, begging, tracking down handlers, coordinating everything so that the piece would coincide perfectly with whatever movie-book-video-CD-funeral-birth-wedding diet it was pegged to, I had this incredible Rolodex. One of those huge double-wheel ones that loomed on my desk like that big black thing in 2001. I got tired of it, though, all that chasing around every week, the traveling, the deadlines, and I started thinking of getting it over with and applying to graduate school. But I didn’t even know what I wanted to go back to school for. So when I heard about Diane’s show starting up, I thought it would be a good compromise—something different but Rolodex applicable. Serious place. Serious interviews. Issues. A paycheck while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life.”

  Ray nodded knowingly. “Less star-fucking.”

  “Little did I know that Diane lived to star-fuck.”

  Our sandwiches came, and for a few seconds neither of us spoke because our mouths were full.

  “So whatever happened to the physicist?” Ray said finally.

  I wiped a big yellow smear of mustard off my thumb onto my napkin. “Who?”

  “Your boyfriend. The one you were living with in Princeton.”

  “Oh. Sorry.” I chewed quickly. “Yeah, well, you know. Nothing. We’d been together for two years in college and then that year in Princeton, and, I don’t know, it just didn’t work out.” The understatement of the millennium. Michael’s incessant pushing me to go to graduate school too and my not wanting to stick around to find out exactly what was going on with him and his unnervingly attractive research partner made me make the move to Manhattan, where I never really believed I’d end up and where I’d certainly never planned on staying. But I did end up there, and I had stayed, and now, seven years later, I was still killing time.

  Trying not to let the gaze of an incredibly handsome Bull interfere with the digestion that was supposed to be taking place in my four-compartment New-Cow stomach.

  “How did we start talking about this?” I said and pushed my plate away.

  “I asked you where you came from. How you got here. How you ended up in this place, having lunch with me.” I glanced at Ray, and when our eyes met, I felt my heart race. He put his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands and looked right at me. “What?” he said softly. “What are you thinking?”

  You mean, what am I thinking about besides your Current Cow?

  My heart raced again. I loved it when men asked me what I was thinking even though I was never sure how to answer them. I couldn’t tell if they really wanted to know what I was thinking, or if they just wanted to make it look like they wanted to know. It was one of the gazillion questions I asked myself during moments like that, rare moments when I was sitting across from a man who was looking at me, waiting for me to speak; those split seconds every few years when the world seemed to stop and there was no noise in it, just the sound of my own breathing as I looked at a man’s face and wondered what lay behind it, and what would happen next.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I was thinking that it’s been a long time since I thought about all that.” Which was only partially true. I was thinking that it felt like all of it had happened a lifetime ago, that I had been a completely different person; and that I had no more idea of who I was then, at twenty-three, than of who I was now, at thirty.

  When I got back to my desk, I called Joan.

  “So I had lunch with this guy.”

  “What guy?”

  “A guy. From here.”

  “Which guy from there?”

  “Ray. The executive producer.”

  “Cute?”

  “Very.”

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “Tall. Dark. Thick, straight, longish hair. J. Crew type but not as Waspy.”

  Joan paused. I could tell she was scanning her mental hard drive left over from People to come up with the perfect celebrity quasi look-alike.

  “Jimmy Smits but not Latino?”

  “No.”

  “Andy Garcia but preppier?”

  I thought a minute. “Yes, actually. Kind of.”

  “Hmm. Age?”

  “Our age. Early thirties, I think.”

  “Marital status?”

  “Uhm.… Engaged.”

  “Engaged.” There was a pause. “Jane?”

  “What?”

  “Then, why are you calling me?”

  I paused. “To ask you what I should wear to the wedding?”

  Okay. Then I called David. Even invited him to dinner.

  I always asked David about men I was interested in, not only because he was just as hopelessly attracted to attractive men as I was but because attractive men were his business. He was a freelance fashion photographer whose most recent credit was a men’s underwear bus-ad campaign for a knock-off version of Calvin Klein briefs and boxers called Boy’s Shorts, and as such he had become a keen observer of what made pretty boys tick. Being a pretty boy himself—just over six feet tall with a biweekly maintained edgy crew cut and a thrice-weekly pumped body—gave him an added advantage in understanding the male psyche. Which was why, over the years since college, where we had met, I had come to rely on his intuition and instincts in these situations more than my own.

  “Hmm,” David said later that night at the Sheridan Square diner. He lived around the corner from me on Bleecker Street, and the diner was around the corner from him. I’d arrived first and secured a booth by the window, and a few minutes later I saw him walking down the sidewalk with a guy I’d never seen before but who could have been his twin—both of them were wearing black leather car coats, white T-shirts, baggy pants, and big black Army boots. When he came in, he kissed me on the cheek and slid into the booth and then ordered a Greek salad. I ordered a bagel and coffee since my stomachs were still busy digesting my lunch.

  “I don’t know.” He made a face and spit an olive pit into his hand. “Girlfriend, maybe. But”—he made the face again—“fiancée?”

  “Yeah, but he makes all these disparaging remarks about her.”

  “Then you should wonder about him.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. It’s stupid.”

  He wiped his mouth and finished his glass of water. “It’s not stupid. It’s just complicated.”

  “Too complicated, probably.”

  “Maybe. But maybe not. If you really like him, if you think you could really feel something for him, it might be worth trying for. I mean, he’s not married yet.” He picked up the check and put down a ten and a five. “My treat,” he said, refusing to take my money. “So how do you feel about him?”

  I wasn’t sure, suddenly. “I barely know him. I mean, what can you know about someone after just one lunc
h?”

  “You can know a lot. You can know how you feel.” He stared at me and laid out a few singles when the waiter returned with the change. “So how do you feel, Jane? Do you like him? Do you like being with him? Do you feel happy when you’re talking to him?”

  I nodded.

  “Then, why not try?”

  I considered the question. “Because,” I said finally. “I’m tired of things that are this hard. This would be too hard. It would take too much work, and even if something did happen and it was great, he’d probably marry her anyway.”

  So I decided it was best to leave it alone. Leave Ray alone. Which, after a few days, wasn’t as hard as I’d thought it would be. As the weeks passed, the show got busier and busier. With our new national profile it was easier getting the guests we wanted, and harder getting rid of the ones we didn’t.

  “Who booked Brooke Shields?” Diane asked one morning during a planning meeting in the greenroom, which was where the guests waited at night before their interviews and where the staff met during the day for meetings like this and cups of coffee and harried half-smoked cigarettes. Ray sat at the small rectangular Formica table across from Diane and across from Evelyn, who took the minutes. I sat next to him and next to Eddie, Diane’s private detective–style researcher, who no one ever wanted to sit next to during meetings because he refused not to smoke.

  Eddie was tall and rangy and rugged (“like an unshaven, slightly dissipated Harry Hamlin,” Joan had decided after meeting him at our office Christmas party), and though he and I had worked together for six months and had offices right next to each other, we’d barely spoken. All I knew about him was that he came to work most mornings well after eleven, smoked incessantly, always looked tired and depressed, and, according to office legend, was a womanizer—all of which apparently had something, if not everything, to do with a serious girlfriend who had left him.

  Eddie looked at me, and I looked at Carla, and Carla looked at Evelyn, and Evelyn looked at Ray, and then they all looked at Diane except for me.

  “I did,” I said finally, confessing my heinous crime. “I booked Brooke Shields.”

  Diane took a swig of her Volvic water. “Why? I think she’s a loser. She’s B list. We’re not B list anymore. We’re A list now. And we need A-list guests. A plus-list guests.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s just that last year we canceled her twice because of scheduling conflicts—and now, because we’re national and because a play she’s in is just about to open, her publicist called in the chit.”

  Diane stared at me—her chief talent booker, who’d just admitted she’d been worn down by some twelve-year-old publicist—and before I could think of what to say next, Eddie lit a cigarette and cleared his throat.

  “I think Brooke Shields is cute.”

  There was silence for a few seconds, and then everyone started laughing. Even Diane. I turned to Eddie in disbelief and gratitude: Out of nowhere he’d come to my rescue and saved my ass.

  “Thanks,” I whispered.

  Eddie graciously responded by blowing a long stream of smoke in my face. Then he grinned and leaned toward me almost imperceptibly. “You owe me,” he said under his breath. “Big time.”

  At the end of May, Diane sent me down to Washington to scout for prospective guests at the annual book publishers’ convention, and at the end of the first day, on Saturday, Ray showed up unexpectedly with Evelyn. It was almost three o’clock when they arrived on the convention floor, wearing shorts and T-shirts and fake badges, and when I asked him, he told me that they had decided to drive down at the last minute because Evelyn was going anyway to visit her parent, who lived nearby, and because he hadn’t been to Washington for a while. It made me wonder whether the office scuttlebutt about their being involved, fiancée notwithstanding was really true. But then he said, “If you’re free later, after I drop Evelyn off, we could go to the Mall and see the sights,” and I wasn’t so sure.

  I looked past him at Evelyn’s long tan legs and shoulder-length horse hair, and tried not to think about my humidity-induced frizzball hair or about what his invitation might mean.

  “Okay,” I said. I had never seen the Mall at night.

  “Isn’t this amazing?” he said. “The scope of it? The expansiveness of it? The manifest destiny of it?”

  It was around eight o’clock that evening, and we were standing in front of The Gap, on the third level of the Pentagon City Mall, as it turned out. Ray strode into the store and over to a table of folded khakis. He held a pair by the waistband up to his stomach, and the pants dropped down, hitting his legs just above the ankles.

  “Do you think they’re too short?” he said, looking at me over the wire rims of his glasses.

  He was like a kid, with his glasses, and his hair falling into his eyes, and his flood-level test-pants, but when he pulled up his T-shirt to reposition the waistband, I saw a ripple of abdominal muscles that made my mouth water.

  I think I nodded.

  “Good,” he said, taking one last look and then refolding them. “If my pants aren’t short, I trip over them.”

  Still salivating from the flash of flesh I had seen, I followed him stupidly as he headed toward the register. “I love to shop,” he said, taking his wallet out of his back pocket. “I find it very comforting, the idea of being able to satisfy a need so easily. Like now: I came down here with only an extra pair of boxer shorts and I needed a pair of pants—and now I have them.” He looked at me and grinned. “Everything should be this easy. Mia thinks I’m insane. She thinks men are supposed to hate shopping. But I can’t help it. I grew up on Long Island—Mall Country.”

  He paid for the pants with a credit card, then slipped the card and receipt into his wallet and slid the bag off the counter.

  Mia again. I considered ignoring this second reference to her, but something—New-Cow hormones?—made me decide to take him by the horns and find out what the deal was.

  “So. When’s the wedding?” I said, my talk-show-producer guest-preinterview skills kicking in—asking direct, to-the-point questions you really don’t want to know the answer to but that you need to know the answer to.

  “When?” Ray slung the bag of pants over his shoulder and stared into the window of Williams-Sonoma. There were wicker picnic baskets bursting with long-stemmed champagne flutes and red-checkered tablecloths, and he eyed them suspiciously. “Is May National Picnic Month? If it is, maybe Diane’ll want to do a show on that. You know, get a few retail gurus together. Maybe add Faith Popcorn. Talk about trends.”

  I stared into the window too but noticed only our reflection in it: one tall; the other short. One J.-Crew-model-bone-structure-endowed; the other Semitically challenged. It felt strange suddenly to be shopping, together, in a mall, in another city, when we’d never been outside the studio except for that lunch. I saw him roll his eyes and turn away from the window, and then we started walking again.

  “When am I getting married? I don’t know, actually. Sometime next year. We haven’t quite figured it out.” He looked at me. “Do you think that’s weird?”

  Of course it was weird. “I don’t know you well enough to know if it’s weird or not.”

  “Well, it probably is. Most people who are getting married usually know when they’re getting married.” He smiled, and we kept walking.

  “How did you meet?” I asked.

  “At a friend’s party in Montauk. I was about to start my master’s in American history at Stanford. Mia had just graduated from Barnard, and I guess the thought of driving crosscountry to San Francisco appealed to her. Which appealed to me.” He looked down at his feet. “I guess I’ve always been shocked when someone shows the slightest bit of interest in me.” He slung the Gap bag down off his shoulder and carried it in front of him like a small child. “Anyway, so we did, and we found this great apartment, the top floor of this big old house, and it was bliss for the first few years, but then, I don’t know, something changed. I had this shitty lega
l proofreading job at night to help pay for tuition, and Mia started working at some rape crisis center, after which she stopped talking to me and stopped sleeping with me, and I would bike twenty miles a day, in the hills, down to the water, trying to figure out why I was with her. Now it’s six years later and I’m still trying to figure that out.”

  I looked away. Even then I knew enough not to say anything negative about a man’s girlfriend—past or present—no matter how much he seemed to want me to. Or, in Ray’s case, how much he seemed to be begging me to. Sooner or later it always backfired.

  “She’s not an easy person,” Ray continued. “I mean, she’s a vegan.” He laughed and took his glasses off. “I don’t know. Maybe I like being berated. Maybe I’m just naturally obsequious.”

  “Well, you must get something from each other,” I said. “People don’t usually stay together for no reason.”

  “It’s not that we don’t love each other,” he clarified, which was surprising given what he’d just said. “We do. Just never at the same time.” He rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on. “Only now, we’re practically like brother and sister. Sometimes it just seems harder to leave than to stay.”

  (Better a Bull has some Cow than no Cow at all.)

  We walked through a set of automatic sliding doors and into the dark, humid air. Ray looked at me and elbowed me lightly. “So what about you? Were you ever going to get married without knowing exactly when you were going to get married?”

  “Me? No.” I smiled. “I came close once, but not since.” Not since Michael.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. Michael was not exactly 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.