Animal Husbandry (7 page)

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
.]

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.

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.