Animal Husbandry (8 page)

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.”

“Listen, obviously they liked you. I like you. You’re immensely likable.”

“But why?”

“You mean, besides the apron?”

He nodded.

I turned and stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“Kind of.”

“Why is it so important whether they liked you or not? Or whether you liked them or not?”

“I liked them.”

“But why do you care so much?”

He picked at a piece of the leftover apple tart but quickly grew bored with it. “Because I hate it when people don’t like me. Mia’s friends never liked me. I never knew what to say, and then when I’d think of something, it was never the right thing. Dinners were always like an E. F. Hutton commercial: Whenever I opened my mouth, they’d all stop talking and listen, as if they were sure I was going to say something politically offensive. Which I guess I did after a while. On purpose.”

“But tonight wasn’t like that. Joan loved you. I could tell. She would never have talked so much if she didn’t like you.” Which was true. Joan would have just sat there looking either extremely bored or extremely annoyed.

“And what about David?”

“What about David?”

“I don’t know. I felt like he was watching me the whole time. As if he knew something I didn’t.”

“That’s just the way he is. He’s very protective of me. Like a brother would be if I had one. We’ve known each other a long time—he was there when I was with Michael, and I was there when he still slept with girls. We know a lot about each other that no one else knows, and we understand each other in ways other people don’t. If he was watching you, he was doing it for me. To make sure I’m not going to get screwed.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of?”

“I’m always afraid of that.”

Ray looked at me. “I’ll never screw you,” he said, pulling me out of the kitchen and over toward the bed. “At least not like that.”

[
SCREWING SCENE DELETED
.]

“Funny,” Joan declared first thing the next morning when she called me at the office. “Definitely funny.”

“You think?”

“Hilarious.”

“Really?” I tried to remember Ray being hilarious the night before, but nothing came immediately to mind, so I thought I’d just take the compliment and run.

“Also, very, very cute.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure you do. Great hands too.”

“I know.”

“Very important.”

“The most important.”

“Can’t get very far without great hands.”

“I know.”

“And very attentive. You should see the way he looks at you. Turning his chair to stare at you while you’re talking. Ben never does that. Look rapt.”

“Wrapped?”

“Rapt. As in fascinated. Mesmerized. Enchanted. All of which Ray looked the entire evening.”

“So …?”

“So I approve. As soon as he ditches the phantom vegan …”

One down.

One to go.

I waited all morning to hear from David, but by noon he hadn’t called, so I called him.

“So what’d you think?” I asked when I reached him at his studio.

“Great dinner,” he said.

“And?” I said expectantly. “What did you think about Ray?”

“You mean, besides the fact that he has a great ass?”

I stopped short. “How could you tell he has great abs?”

“
Ass
,” David enunciated. “I said he has a great
ass
. Obviously your
second
choice.”

I laughed quietly. “Third, actually.”

“I see.”

“But what did you
think
think?”

There was silence on the phone as he considered the question.

“David?”

“Yes, Jane?”

“What?”

David exhaled loudly, and I could tell he was fidgeting. “Look, he seemed nice. He seemed very nice.”

“But?”

“But I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“Tell me what you aren’t telling me.”

He exhaled again. “I just got this feeling. This feeling like he was a little too good to be true. Perfect cook. Perfect looking. Perfect boyfriend. It’s like there’s something going on underneath all that perfectness, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Well, what do you
think
it is?”

“There’s just something lost about him.” He paused for a minute, thinking. “It’s as if he’s never really belonged anywhere. As if he’s never quite figured out how not to feel lonely.”

I nodded, as if I understood, but I didn’t really. Not yet. I just waited expectantly on the other end of the phone for him to say something else.

“What?” he said. “You want me to tell you that you’re going to live happily ever after? That your kids—all two point five of
them—are going to be brown-eyed child-pornography underwear models?”

I didn’t answer.

“What do you think I am?” he said. “An
ass
reader?”

I thought all day about what David had said, but by the afternoon I had decided to put it aside, to chalk it up to the over-protectiveness I’d described to Ray the night before. In the past I’d always seen what David had seen, what he’d try to explain to me. But this time I didn’t. When I looked at Ray, I believed what I saw:

Bull’s bullshit factor: zero
.

You’ll never forget where you were when someone tells you they love you.

Where you were.

What you were doing.

What exactly they said when they said it.

Ray and I were putting fresh sheets on my bed. It was sometime after eleven o’clock on a Friday night, only two weeks after our relationship had begun, and we had just come upstairs from doing my laundry. The windows were open and it was raining outside, and I remember the smooth hissing sound the cars made as they drove by on the wet pavement.

I reached across my side of the bed to pull up the corner of the sheet and waited for Ray to pull up the other side. But he just looked at me and didn’t move.

And that’s when he said it.

He must have said something else just before it—something like
I’ve never felt this way with anyone
or
How did I ever live without you?
or some other combination of words that he had often strung together and that had always made him seem like such an emotion-filled person—but I don’t remember exactly what he said. What I do remember is that he said it, and that he used my name when he said it.

I love you, Jane
is what he said. And then, without really thinking, without really knowing if it was true, even though in retrospect, of course, it was, I said,
I love you too, Ray
. Just like he’d said it, just so he’d know how it felt to hear his name used in a sentence like that.

Ray came around to my side of the bed and said something
about fate, or about destiny, and I remember saying that I felt a very strong sense of some force too, of an invisible hand having led us both down separate paths to this point. And as we leaned against each other, waiting for the meaning of our words to sink in and settle, we both exhaled a long, slow, heavy breath, a breath that seemed to come not from our lungs but from a place much deeper and more unknown—the same place where relief comes from when finally it comes.

[
MATING SCENE DELETED
.]

In high school, when you start reading real books, about the suspension of disbelief—about how you will either be able to momentarily overlook a story’s contrived details and petty inconsistences and fall headfirst into the hole of the narrative, or you won’t.

Staring into a man’s eyes, at some critical juncture of a relationship, trying to decide whether or not you will close your own and fall farther into the deep, dark abyss of love is much the same thing, I think. Though the latter requires more than just a leap of the imagination. It requires a leap of faith as well.

I used to think about that Friday night a lot, when I was still trying to fit the pieces of Ray’s personality back together again. I used to think of him standing across the bed from me, telling me he was in love after only two weeks. Telling me he wanted us to move in together—without ever explaining what he planned on doing about Mia. And I often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t been sucked in by him that night, what would have happened if I had heeded the old proverb, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” Or if I had, say, thrown
the sheet over his head and tried to suffocate him, knowing that he would break my heart ten weeks later.

Would he have retracted it then and there?

Would I have been spared two and a half more months of bliss, and thus, given the calculations of the layaway payment plan for passion, two and a half years of pain?

Or would he simply have mistaken my horseplay for foreplay and thrown me down on the bed and covered me with the sheet too?

“He just came out and said it. Just like that. After only two weeks.”

Joan and I had met the next day, on Saturday afternoon, at Aphrodite, a diner on Sixteenth Street which was halfway between her apartment in Chelsea and mine in the Village. She was staring at me while her hand went back and forth from the plate of french fries we were sharing to her mouth, and her eyes looked like they were open about a quarter of an inch too wide. Had I been paying attention, I would have noticed the split second or two between french fries, between sentences, when the expression in Joan’s eyes changed from shock and amazement to sadness and probably jealousy—that thin curtain that comes down occasionally between two friends when one is happy about the other having something but wishes she herself had it too.