Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman Read Free Book Online

long time, drinking and talking and listening to the sounds from the street, and how sometime after that, after I had removed the towel and after he had pushed back the sheet, how, a long time after that, when it was almost light, we finally fell asleep.
    “So. Let’s go over the facts,” Joan said with intense, almost clinical interest after I told her everything early the next morning. Talking on the phone first thing in the morning from our desks was a kind of unspoken ritual—a way to debrief each other on our short time apart (“Did he call?” “Did you call?”); to restate unanswerable rhetorical questions (“What will become of me?” “What will become of us?”); and to plan the strategy for the day ahead based on what we had to work with from the night before.
    “For starters, you work together.”
    “Correct,” I said, taking a long suck off my Starbucks sip lid.
    “And, he’s engaged.”
    “Correct.”
    “Engaged. To be married,” she repeated, pausing a second or two either for effect or to think. “Who is she?”
    “She?”
    “The fiancée.”
    “Oh. Mia. I don’t know. I’ve never met her.”
    “Well, what does she do?”
    I told her what Ray had told me.
    Joan snorted. “I can just picture her. Walking down the aisle in Birkenstocks and an unbleached hemp smock.”
    I snorted. “Oh, and she’s also a vegan.”
    “They’ve been together how long?”
    “Long. Six years.”
    “Six years. And when’s the wedding?”
    “They haven’t set a date.”
    “They haven’t set a date?”
    “Nope.”
    She paused again. “
Yet
.” Her tone was firm. Strategic. She must be good at this stuff, I thought, since she was secretly involved with someone she worked with—and someone who hadn’t specified when—or whether—he and Joan would ever get married.
    “That’s good,” she went on. “Very good. Considering.”
    “Considering what?”
    She exhaled into the phone like I was an idiot. “Considering,” she said as slowly as she could without not speaking at all, “that the man has already picked out
his wife
.”
    “Oh. Right.” What was I thinking?
    What
was
I thinking? Maybe I was thinking that our two nights together were more than just a fluke.
    Maybe I was wondering when he would get around to telling me that he was still in love with his fiancée, or that we shouldn’t be doing this because we worked together.
    Or maybe I wasn’t thinking at all.
    Joan lit a cigarette and blew into the phone. “Albeit that he’s put her on layaway.”
    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 seeinghim 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