Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman Read Free Book Online Page A

five minutes.”
    “Oh.” She sniffed. “That’s easy. Pretend
he
doesn’t exist.”
    “Really? Why?”
    “Because men don’t know how to deal with apathy and indifference. He’ll be thrown into a tizzy, whatever the guy-version of a tizzy is.”
    We all met in the greenroom, taking our usual seats around the table like a family sitting down to Sunday dinner in some Diane Arbus photograph. When Ray walked in and sat down across from me, I felt so much adrenaline shoot through me that I thought I could almost see my hands shaking. Our eyes met and we both blushed instantly, then smiled, then looked away—Ray turning to Evelyn to share her copy of the agenda, and me turning to Eddie in desperation.
    “Think she’ll ask me again about Kevin Costner?” I whispered.
    He turned and stared at me, and when he did, I noticed a rather large hickey on his neck. The size and shape of it shocked me, as did the fact that I thought I could almost make out teeth marks.
    Eddie acknowledged my acknowledgment of his hickey by turning back to his legal pad and lighting a cigarette. “I bit myself shaving,” he said, deadpan, then grinned slyly. Grinning seemed to make the hickey move slightly and change shape, like a tattoo on a flexed muscle, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. I also couldn’t help running the tip of my tongueover the edge of my two front teeth, trying to imagine what it was like to suck a piece of neck hard enough to cause internal bleeding.
    Diane started talking about ratings and news stories, about who she wanted to book and who she didn’t, and as she flipped through her papers and pointed up at the unusually empty schedule board, I felt Ray’s knee touch mine.
    “What do you think, Jane?” I heard Diane say.
    What are the chances of your getting Ray every night this week?
    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