Animal Husbandry

by Laura Zigman

  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?

  I looked up at Ray, who was smiling and seemed guilty only of doodling on his pad, then at Diane, then at the empty board across the room, and as I flipped open my date book and uncapped my pen, I thought:

  I think they’re good, Diane. I think they’re very good.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  Ray and I were sitting on a bench in Central Park after work. His arm was around me, and the sun was going down. “Are you seeing anyone, besides me?”

  I looked up at him. For a second I considered lying, considered telling him that I was seeing several people, none of them seriously. It was the no-one-wants-to-eat-at-a-diner-where-there-are-no-cars-parked-in-front theory of why men shy away from women who aren’t in demand—a theory which was tactfully passed on to me by a guy from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that I’d gone out with a few times several years before. But because I’d never lied about that and didn’t think I’d be able to sound convincing, and because it somehow seemed unnecessary to lie to Ray at that moment, in that perfect fading light, under all those trees, I shook my head.

  “No,” I said. “I’m not seeing anyone. Besides you.”

  (What an idiot I was.

  Always, always lie.)

  Ray sighed heavily, and when he did, I felt his chest fall, and his arm pulled me closer to him. “I have to admit,” he said, “I’m glad you’re not seeing anyone.”

  “Are you?” I asked, somewhat disingenuously. Like a good lawyer, I’d learned from Joan, never ask a question like that without being ninety-nine percent sure of what the answer will be.

  He stared at me. “Of course I am.”

  “So you’re not secretly involved with Evelyn?”

  “Evelyn? Why do you say that?”

  “Because you spend a lot of time together in the office. And because you came down to Washington together.”

  He stretched his legs out in front of him. “No, Evelyn and I are just friends. Although I think sometimes she’s wondered why there hasn’t been more between us.”

  I stretched my legs out too and touched his foot with mine. “Why hasn’t there been?”

  “Because of Mia,” he said. “And because she isn’t really my type.”

  I looked at him. “Oh? And what is your type?”

  He took my hand and squeezed it hard. “You.” He smiled. “You’re my type.”

  “Can I ask you something else?” I said. Darkness had fallen almost completely, and I looked up through the branches at what was left of the sky. Despite Joan’s advice, I needed to know where things stood—where I stood—no matter how impossibly premature it was to form the question or trust the answer. And no matter how well I knew that asking was against the rules (read: their rules)—that it could tip your hand enough for the game to stop, I suddenly decided that I’d had enough of keeping myself in the dark until it was too late. So I asked.

  “Have you told Mia anything about this? About—” I hesitated for a moment and decided not to use the word us.

  Ray kicked at the gravel under his feet. “No. Not yet. I’m her only friend, really, and somehow I feel like she would be devastated if I abandoned her.”

  I paused, feeling another rush of New-Cow hormones coming on. “Are you going to tell her?”

  He looked at me. “Of course,” he said. “Of course I’m going to tell her. I have to.”

  I smiled, relieved. New Cows always believe everything Bulls tell them.

  He stood up and I stood up and we started walking. It was almost nine o’clock and the park was silent, except for the sound of distant cars and the wind rustling through the tops of the trees. Ray put his arm around me and kissed my forehead.

  “Let’s go home,” he said, and though I didn’t know which home he was referring to, his or mine, I leaned against him and followed him out of the park and into a cab.

  That night, when we were in bed, in my apartment, as it turned out, lying under the sheet, Ray said, “Tell me about your old boyfriends.”

  (It is only a matter of time before they ask you this.

  Men are obsessed with this question, and they delude themselves—and you—with the idea that their interest in asking and your answering is purely clinical and informational: that is, that the details you disclose during warm, fuzzy moments like these will never come back to haunt you.)

  So I refused.

  “Why not?” Ray asked.

  “Because.”

  “Because there are too many?”

  “No. Because there were too few.”

  “Tell me about Michael, then.”

  “I already told you about him.”

  “Tell me more.”

  I turned away from Ray and stared at the wall. “Why?”

  �
�Because,” he said, pulling me back toward him, “I’m curious.”

  Curious George. My long-lost monkey crush.

  I pulled the sheet up under my arms and looked at the ceiling. “There’s not much more to tell,” I lied. “We lived together for three years. We used to talk about getting married, but it didn’t work out.”

  Ray rested his head on his hand and leaned his elbow into the pillow. Obviously he wasn’t going anywhere. “Why not?”

  “We argued a lot.”

  “About what?”

  “About sex mostly.”

  Ray raised an eyebrow. “What about sex?”

  I rolled my eyes and exhaled loudly. “About how we didn’t do it enough.”

  Ray nudged me under the sheet. “I think we do it enough.”

  “You would, considering that ‘doing it’ hasn’t exactly been the mainstay of your other relationship.”

  He laughed but wouldn’t be distracted from the question at hand. “Go on,” he said.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of a way to say the rest of it without really saying it, but because Ray was always telling me about how unhappy he was with Mia and because I felt somehow that if anyone would understand, he would, I finally just said this: “I think he wanted someone smarter.”

  Ray looked at me. “Smarter?”

  I nodded.

  “Than you?”

  I shrugged, pretending it hadn’t registered that he’d taken it for granted that I was smart. But it had registered. As sharply and as deeply as Michael’s belief had that I wasn’t.

  “What was he, fucking chapter president of Mensa?”

  I shrugged again.

  “You mean, he came home one day and said, ‘You’re stupid?’ ”

  “Not exactly.” It hadn’t just been one day, and it hadn’t been expressed so eloquently.

  Ray touched my hair, and we looked at each other for a minute or two without saying anything.

  “Were you ever happy with him?”

  I sighed. “I don’t know. I thought I was. I remember being happy at the beginning and then a few flashes in the middle and at the end. I loved him and he loved me, and at the time I thought being in love and being happy was all the same thing. But I guess sometimes it isn’t.”

  Ray moved on top of me and took my face in his hands. “Are you happy with me?”

  I stared into his eyes, eyes that were kinder than any I had ever seen looking back at me. “Yes,” I whispered. “I’m happy with you.”

  [MATING SCENE DELETED.]

  POST-COPULATORY PHASE:

  STAGE II THE BLISS OF MATING

  When two people find each other attractive, their bodies quiver with a gush of PEA (phenylethylamine), a molecule that speeds up the flow of information between nerve cells. An amphetamine-like chemical, PEA whips the brain into a frenzy of excitement, which is why lovers feel euphoric, rejuvenated, optimistic, and energized, happy to sit up talking all night or making love for hours on end. Because “speed” is addictive, even the body’s naturally made speed, some people become what Michael Liebowitz and Donald Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute refer to as “attraction junkies,” needing a romantic relationship to feel excited by life.

  —Diane Ackerman, The Nature of Love

  It is, of course, bliss to mate!

  It is beyond description!

  The ecstasy of it!

  The rapture of it!

  There are no words, really, or maybe, there are too many, and they’ve all been used already, so you should just shut up.

  But you can’t.

  You won’t.

  You are a New Cow now, and the whole world must know about it!

  You tell your friends, you tell acquaintances, you tell strangers—all of whom, you suspect with pity, have no idea what you’re talking about since they have probably never really mated, not like this, anyway.

  They look at you like you are mad, possessed, and you are:

  You have New-Cow disease and it shows—the inexcusable clichés, the ridiculous hyperbole, the disgusting earnestness, the incessant messianic need to enlighten the unenlightened:

  You can’t imagine …!

  It’s the most amazing …!

  It’s impossible to put into …!

  If only you could hear yourself: your complete lack of irony, your complete lack of humor, your complete lack of wit, all those fucking ellipses … and italics and exclamation points!

  But you can’t. The sound of your own mooing is deafening.

  And so we were happy.

  Blissfully, ecstatically, elatedly, annoyingly, cloyingly happy.

  During the ten days that followed we’d pass each other in the hallways or in the studio, trying not to let on that anything was going on between us since everyone knew about Ray’s engagement status—one aspect of Ray that Joan didn’t like much.

  “Why is he keeping you such a secret?” she’d ask me, and I’d tell her that as soon as he told Mia, we wouldn’t have to be so sneaky. Which made sense to me even if I didn’t like being hidden and even if I didn’t know exactly when he planned on telling her.

  In the evenings he’d stop by my office, and we’d make a plan for how and when and where we would meet next. The nights he had to stay home with Mia I’d pace around the tight square of my apartment with the phone, listening to Joan script ultimatums, but on all the other nights we’d meet at my apartment, where he would always tell me, early in the morning when we’d first wake up, or late at night right before we’d fall asleep, that I made him feel things he’d never felt before.

  “It’s like a dream,” he would say in a whisper.

  And it was.

  It was as close a place to heaven as I had ever imagined, and those first two weeks, as I walked through those gates and beheld the promise of the future, it seemed we would always exist there, forever suspended in the blissful, ecstatic, elated glow of each other’s adoration.

  POST-COPULATORY PHASE: STAGE III

  THE EMERGENCE AND INTEGRATION OF A NEW MALE INTO THE GROUP

  The chances are that most of the females will agree with each other on which are the best males, since they all have the same information to go on.

  —Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

  I’d been thinking, as the days with Ray wore on, that the time had come for him to meet David and Joan and vice versa. It seemed a necessary step in all of my relationships—not only so Ray could know and understand me better by meeting my two closest friends but also, and perhaps more important, so David and Joan, my judge and jury, could provide an objective opinion about the person I was becoming increasingly involved with.

  Or, at least, a semi-objective opinion.

  Joan, I knew, would focus on all the practical aspects of whether or not Ray was worthy of me: Was he attractive? Articulate? Well mannered? Duly attentive and infatuated? A pivotal issue would be humor, about which she would declare at the end of the evening or the following morning one of two things: “Funny” or “Not funny.”

  David too would address all those points, but his opinion would ultimately come down to one immutable thing: the bullshit factor. Being “one of them” himself, he’d once explained to me, it was only natural that he could be a better judge of a man’s character than I could: He knew the game and how it was played. David had a sixth sense about male falseness; could detect it in the most unobvious of circumstances and was rarely proven wrong.

  And so I guess I should have paid attention when David asked me if I’d met any of Ray’s friends yet, which I hadn’t. But I was too preoccupied with Ray’s meeting my friends. It wouldn’t exactly be a carefree event for me since so much was at stake, but I looked forward to it. I was confident that Ray would pass their tests with flying colors.

  And so, obviously, was he.

  “I was wondering when you were going to bring me home to meet the family,” he’d said when I asked him one night as we were leaving the office. It was one of the few nights
we weren’t going to spend together—he had to see Mia and I had bills to pay. Ray looked in his date book after we got off the elevator and told me the few nights that week that didn’t work for him, and then we said good-bye—not kissing because we never kissed anywhere near the office.

  Once I’d arranged the date—the following Thursday night—I told Ray.

  “I’ll even cook,” he offered, and I readily agreed.

  Ray in an apron would most certainly put him over the top.

  But a week later, an hour before Joan and David were due to arrive at eight, Ray, who’d been holed up in my kitchen since the minute we’d come back to my apartment from work, cracked under the pressure.

  “Maybe I should go home and change,” he said, pulling at his white shirt.

  “Why?” I said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should wear a tie. Or a different shirt. A blue shirt.”

  “You look perfect. You always look perfect.”

  “Are you sure?” He walked over to look at himself again in the full-length mirror on the inside of my closet door. “I want to make a good impression. I just—well, I really want them to like me.”

  I walked over to him and put my arms around his waist from behind. “They will,” I said. Then I went into the kitchen and swallowed two mouthfuls of bourbon.

  “So what do you think they thought?” Ray asked me the minute they’d left, full of his poached salmon and the delight of having regaled him with stories about my epic fear of water bugs.

  “I think they liked you,” I said, making a trip to the kitchen with both hands full of dishes. Ray followed.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “But why?” He stood next to me at the sink, hovering obsessively.

  “Why do I think they liked you, or why am I sure they did?”

  “Both.”

  “Because,” I said, hoping the word would answer both questions.

  “No, really,” he said. “I mean, I barely said anything. I was just laughing like an asshole the whole night.”