Animal Husbandry (9 page)

But I wasn’t paying attention. I was too busy not eating, since “love” had made me lose my appetite. I fondled both newly protruding hipbones and sucked down another glass of water.

Joan finger-combed her hair behind her ears and stared expectantly at me again. “And then what did he say?”

I picked up one of her Marlboros and took my time lighting it, for effect. “He said he wanted to live together.”

“Live together? Oh, my God. What did you say?”

What did I say? What
did
I say? “I don’t really remember. I must have said yes, or something to that effect, because he left with the
Times’
real estate section.”

She stared at me. “It took Ben almost a year to say the
L
. word, and when he finally did, we were, you know,
doing it
, so it didn’t even really
count
.” Her hand pawed blindly at the plate in vain, since she had devoured the last french fry minutes ago. “I can’t be
lieve
this.”

I looked at the plate. “We can order more.”

She stared at it and then at me, and in seconds her eyes narrowed into slits. “Oh,
I
see. You’re trying to fatten me up while you get down to your
cohabitating
weight.” She grabbed a passing waiter by his Naugahyde menus and ordered a piece of Boston cream pie.

“Eat,” she said, handing me a fork. “Or I’ll tell Ray what a pig you are in real life.”

[
DESSERT-SPLITTING SCENE DELETED
.]

Fast forward:

Two months, ten days.

There was still this one little problem.

“So what should we do?” I asked one morning before work while we were still in bed in my apartment.
What should we do about the ball and chain?

“We start seriously looking for an apartment is what we do.”

Ray rolled over on top of me and kissed me with his eyes open. “Just think,” he whispered, opening his eyes even wider with obvious delight, “we’ll be able to do this all the time.”

“You mean, not just when Mia’s sleeping over at the shelter? Or away at some conference?” The latter of which was why we were together that morning. “Or when you tell her that you worked so late at the studio, you fell asleep on the couch in your office?” Despite his lies I couldn’t help feeling flattered that he’d lied for
me
.

“No. We’ll be together all the time. Every morning. Every night. Weekdays. Week nights. Weekends. The thought of it is almost too wonderful to imagine.” He sighed heavily and paused for maximum effect. “My joy knows no bounds.”

His joy knew no bounds?

How pretentious he sounded.

How affected.

But New Cows can’t be bothered with the details of foppish language—they are far too busy enjoying their esteemed status and waving good-bye to their Bull’s soon-to-be-ex Current Cow
.

It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it, though—Ray’s occasional
lapses into pretentiousness. One night, shortly after we’d first met, when we were leaving the office together at the same time, we walked out onto the street and found that it was raining. I flipped open my umbrella and turned to look at him. Already drenched, he shrugged and rummaged through his bag.

“No umbrella,” he had said, as he removed a thin-spined paperback book and put it over his head. Then he said a most revolting thing: “But e. e. cummings.”

“I was thinking we should live downtown. Soho maybe. Or Little Italy,” Ray continued, a beatific expression spreading across his face. “I’ve always wanted to live in Little Italy since I like to pretend I’m Italian. Except for the fact that there’s no real supermarket below Houston, there’s great shopping.”

He rolled onto his back and ran his hands up and down his own abs, presumably checking to make sure they had not disappeared overnight. Reassured, he turned to me again and took both of my hands in his and kissed them. “I make a great sauce,
cara mia
. We’ll find the perfect apartment with a great kitchen, and I’ll cook spaghetti for you every night.”

Despite myself and his annoying use of the Italian possessive I couldn’t help being momentarily distracted by his pitch—even if one wasn’t necessary at that point.

After all, I had been starring in the movie of my perfect New-Cow fantasy life for a while now, ever since he had said, practically in the same breath, that he loved me and wanted to move in with me. The only thing I couldn’t quite manage to splice out of the endless reels of fantasy footage was the persistent plaintive mooing of that fucking …

“But what about …?”

“What? Apartment hunting? We’ll find one. A great one. I have a good feeling about this. And once we do, we’ll each give
one month’s notice on our leases and be able to move in on September first.”

The footage continued.

The bedroom
.

The bed
.

The sheets and pillowcases
.

The kitchen
.

The Calphalon
.

The vats of marinara sauce boiling over on the …

“Actually, I was talking about … you know.” I still couldn’t say Mia without feeling a wave of nausea at the “uniqueness” of it. I would have been so much less jealous if she were just Susan or Donna or some other fat-girl name.

Ray released my hands and went back to fondling his abs, albeit more distractedly than he had before. He sighed heavily and shook his head against the pillow. “I guess I have to tell her, don’t I?”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, I would
think
so. Unless, of course, you want us
all
to move in together.”

The extra pillow
.

The extra place setting
.

The extra toothbrush
.

The extra name on the mailbox
.

All those macrobiotic cookbooks and packages of miso and fluffy clouds of tofu floating in watery …

“I know, I know,” he said. “I know I have to do it. I just haven’t known how. Somehow I feel like it’s the ultimate act of betrayal, of desertion.”

“That’s because it is.” I could hear myself saying the words slowly,
too slowly
, as if I were talking to a moron. “Look, I don’t want to feel like I’m forcing you to do something you don’t want to do. I mean, maybe it’s too soon to do this.
Maybe you need some time between Mia and me to process everything. And maybe we shouldn’t rush into living together just because in New York it’s too expensive not to.”

“I don’t want to live with you because it’s
cheaper
,” Ray said.

“I know.” I paused. “It’s just that if you really want us to move in together—to be together—then I think you better tell her before someone throws her a surprise bridal shower.”

Ray stopped fondling mid-ab and looked stricken. “God. You’re right.”

“Not to mention,” I added, since I had his attention, “the fact that it’s wrong to continue deceiving her like this. I mean, if my fiancé wasn’t in love with me anymore and was in love with someone else,” I began, not knowing where I was going with that sentence but suspecting I was headed for a big fat fucking lie, “I’d … well, I’d want to know.”

“You would?”

“Of course I would.” I clicked my tongue and hissed like a pissed-off twelve-year-old. “Wouldn’t you?”

Ray looked pale. “I guess.” He lay on the bed not moving, barely breathing. For a moment I almost felt sorry for him.

Maybe a triple bed wouldn’t be so bad
.

I put his hands on his stomach and moved them around slowly, hoping he’d catch on. But he didn’t.

“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her tomorrow after work.”

The next night Ray didn’t call. Imagining the worst about what they were doing (talking, crying, consoling, reconciling, having sex for the first time in however long they hadn’t had it for), I paced, called Ray’s apartment, called Joan, called Ray’s apartment
again, called Joan again, then swore to dump him before he had the chance to dump me.

But the next morning, when he walked into my office, he looked like he’d been hit by a bus.

“I feel like I’ve been hit by a bus,” he said.

“You told her?”

“I told her.”

“How bad was it?”

“It was bad.”

I paused. “How bad?”

“Let’s put it this way: We started talking at seven, and at four in the morning she was still crying.”

“Four in the morning?”

Ray nodded. “I’ve never seen her so upset. It was gut wrenching.”

Like I cared.

“I wish you’d come over afterward.”

“Well, I couldn’t exactly excuse myself. She wanted me to stay with her until she fell asleep, and I felt like it was the least I could do.”

“You
stayed
until she
fell asleep
?” I hated women who made their boyfriends stay until they had fallen asleep on the nights they’d been broken up with. Besides practically forcing Ray into breaking up with his fiancée, it was the most pathetic thing I could ever imagine doing.

“I think so. I kind of fell asleep first.”

“Really.”

Ray sat down and took off his glasses, rubbing his eyes with his hands. “Look, I couldn’t leave after that. We’ve been together for six years.” He put his glasses back on. “Nothing happened, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I bit my thumbnail and stared at him. It didn’t
look
like anything had happened—not that I was certain I’d be able to tell if it had. And besides,
nothing had happened for two and a half years
, he’d always told me. I stared at him for another few seconds to make sure he didn’t take me for too easy a mark, and then I took my thumb out of my mouth.

Ray put his hands in his pockets and lifted his pants up above his ankles. “So. Want to go see a one bedroom on Mulberry Street during lunch?”

The twelve-hundred-dollar one bedroom on Mulberry Street had a pigeon nesting in the bedroom window.

The thirteen-hundred-and-fifty-dollar one bedroom on Spring Street had the requisite bathtub in the kitchen.

The fourteen-hundred-dollar one bedroom on Elizabeth Street reeked of kimchi and, though it didn’t have a bathtub in the kitchen or a bird nesting in the bedroom, seemed to be architecturally deformed in some way I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But after standing in the kitchen for a full five minutes, I squinted suspiciously at the refrigerator and the sink and the stove until it came to me.

“This kitchen has no counters,” I whispered to Ray. He looked around and nodded. “It’s not that there aren’t
enough
counters. There aren’t
any
counters.” I stared in horror and fascination, as if I were looking at a face without a nose. “And it’s not just that they forgot to put them in. There’s no space for them.”

Later, after we’d returned to the office, depressed and annoyed that we’d wasted our two-hour lunch on such a pathetic selection of apartments, Ray called me from the control room.

“I hate this,” he said. “This city is a dump.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it shouldn’t be so hard to find an apartment for under two thousand dollars that isn’t a shithole.”

“I know.”

There was silence. I wondered if Ray’s next statement was going to be that maybe we should quit looking for now, that there was really no reason to rush into a place we hated, that we should wait until we found something great and move then, so I held my breath. David was right, I realized. Of course it was all too good to be true.

“You know, I just remembered something,” Ray said excitedly.

I just remembered that I don’t really love you
.

“I had drinks last week with a guy I used to work with at MacNeil/Lehrer. His old girlfriend, Tracy, who works at CBS, is being transferred next month to their London bureau. He said that she owns a co-op and either didn’t have time to sell it or didn’t want to sell it.”

I exhaled as inaudibly as I could. “Where is it?”

“Chelsea.” He paused. “Which is why I didn’t really think about it then. I mean, it’s not Little Italy, but at this point who the fuck cares, right?”

“Right.”

“If I can arrange to see it, are you free during lunch tomorrow or right after work?”

I told him I was.

“Great. I’ll call you back.” And he hung up.

At the end of the day he called back. “Okay. Tomorrow after work. And it sounds amazing.”

“Tell me.”

“One bedroom. Brownstone building. Nineteenth Street just off Eighth Avenue.”

“That’s right near the Joyce Theater, isn’t it?”