Animal Husbandry (5 page)

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 legal 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.

“I had just learned to drive a standard, and after I’d fuck up my two-hour shift, Michael would take the wheel and make me get the Hewlett-Packard calculator out of the glove compartment and turn around in my seat and get the bags of maps out of the back to figure out the average number of rest stops that had bathrooms
and
gas stations. Then I’d get carsick from turning around, and then I’d divide wrong, and then we’d fight all the way to the next Rock Formation National Park and he’d lock me out of the car. He locked me out at Yosemite, at Yellowstone, and somewhere in the Badlands. Then we lived together for three more years. And somewhere in between all that I stopped sleeping with him too.”

Ray shook his head empathetically as we reached the car. “God. I wonder what that would feel like,” he said wistfully, looking up at the sky. “To really get along with the person you’re with. I wonder if that’s actually possible.”

I looked up at the sky too. It was clear and black and full of stars. “Probably,” I said, but the word came out sounding fake and halfhearted, like an unconvincing white lie. And as I looked at him, then at the little lines etched in the skin on either side of his mouth, I wondered, for the first time in a long time, when it was that I had stopped believing in the possibilities of things.

It hadn’t happened overnight.

Those things never do.

Hope erodes slowly, over time, until you wake up one night
at three o’clock in the morning and realize:
I am not meant for that kind of thing
.

That kind of thing:

Romance.

Passion.

Being the object of someone’s desire.

Showing up in someone else’s dreams.

There had, of course, been men who had liked me, who had even loved me—men I’d been friends with and never slept with had told me so, months or even years later; men I’d slept with and never been friends with had told me too, sometimes, afterward. And obviously Michael had been in love with me once, at the beginning—before he knew that I’d never fully grasp the basic principles of particle physics—but never like that. Never enough.

Which, I suppose, made Michael and me equal in at least that one regard, since I had never been in love with him like that either.

But sometime after they had all left me to go back to their lives, their wives, to new women in whom they presumably saw what they hadn’t seen in me—some spark of promise, some reflection of themselves they had never seen before but had always imagined seeing, some vision of their future—I would ride out the varying waves of crushing disappointment or secret relief until I came to assume that I was missing some element, some particular, elusive, intangible, crucial quality that made other women keepers. I didn’t know exactly what that quality was, but I suspected it had something to do with clarity, with a lack of ambivalence, with the certainty of knowing what kind of relationship you wanted enough to be willing to try to get it. But after Michael and after a long string of
short-term attachments—some intense, some not so intense; some bad, some not so bad—I was less sure about what I wanted than what I didn’t want:

I didn’t want to spend the rest of my thirties imprisoned in my office.

I didn’t want to have to accept the idea that I might never have children.

And I didn’t want to think about the fact that I might never find a soul mate.

Like Ray. Maybe.

Not that I thought that yet.

And not that he was such a prize either.

He was
engaged
, after all, and therefore, technically, unavailable.

And although he was smart and funny and tall and not Jewish, and even though I liked his mouth and his teeth and especially his hands—even the left one, the one with the imitation wedding band firmly embedded on the ring finger—he wasn’t really my type.

Not really.

Not the type I’d always been attracted to and that had always been attracted to me.

Perpetually depressed.

Emotionally damaged.

Slightly secretive.

Desperate to be loved.

Desperate to be saved.

No, Ray was none of those things, and he displayed none of the usual neurotic psychopathic behaviors that initially ignited my imagination, my curiosity, my rescuer fantasies; that made
me want to rip off the veil of his psyche and find out what lonely monster lurked underneath.

Ray, it seemed to me at the time, had no veil; he was just some above-normal average guy, a little obsessed with and unsure of himself, who seemed slightly, vaguely, improbably interested in me.

In the metamorphosis from Cow to New Cow, the Current-Cow sob story is an important phase.

This, of course, is when a man “accidentally” lets it slip out how unhappy he is with his Current Cow while he is ostensibly telling you some innocent and charmingly revealing story about himself and his past.

Sometimes confused with the almost identical Poor-Guy sob story, the Current-Cow sob story is so full of intimate Good-Bull-Bad-Cow details that it will seem completely believable—and even romantic—so much so that you will immediately find yourself in the throes of a full-blown crush and forget about one very important detail:

The Current Cow.

Allow me to deconstruct the essential elements:

1.
I know we just met, but did I happen to mention how sad, miserable, misunderstood, and lonely I’ve been my whole life?

This is crucial to introducing the myth of male shyness and the Poor-Guy persona—common disguises for a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

2.
You’re so easy to talk to—not like my Current Cow
.

While you will think he is flattering you by trusting you with his life story, he is actually busy flattering himself by showing off how open, honest, and sensitive he is.

3.
I am not the asshole. She is, poor thing
.

Just in case you’re starting to think he is a coldhearted, home-wrecking womanizer,
don’t be so quick to judge
, because his description of her wounding inattention and indifference
will prove that he is putting the Current Cow out to pasture for good reason and that he is tormented by guilt at the thought of abandoning her.

4.
What’s that thing they always say about the love of a good woman (hint, hint)?

That it can save a man from drowning. This is your cue to put the little white cap on and get the life preserver out of storage.
You’re going on another rescue mission, Florence Nightingale
.

5.
Do I hear bells ringing?

Yes, he does. And so should you.
New-Cow bells
. The empty barn beckons, the Bull awaits, so don’t bother with the Old-Cow hat and red-lace Merry Widow.
You won’t need them—yet
.

It was three weeks after Washington that Ray called me from the East Village. That night, after the hair, after the nightcap, after we got to Charles Street and climbed the four flights of stairs to my apartment and made coffee, we climbed two more flights to drink it on the roof and watch the sun come up.

“I can’t remember the last time I did this,” I said, “staying up all night talking with a virtual stranger.” I looked down onto Bleecker Street and beyond to the Hudson River, feeling completely awake even though I’d barely touched my coffee. Whenever the last time was, it had been a long time—a very long time—since I’d felt that … happy.

Ray sat on the ledge of the roof with his back to the skyline and stretched his legs out. “I don’t think I’ve ever done this before.”