Animal Husbandry Read Free

him, thinking it was the kind of thing two coworkers did at three in the morning after everyone else had gone home.
    Ray looked at me and smiled shyly. “I was hoping this would happen,” he whispered.
    Then he looked away, and I looked away, and we both started walking west.
    That’s how it started.
    With a phone call.
    With a nightcap.
    With a hair imitation.
    With
shyness
.
    That’s how it always starts.
    (Let me just interrupt myself for a minute to dispel a myth—that men are shy.
    Men are not shy
.
    They may
seem
shy, they may even act shy, at the beginning, with all their Uriah Heep hand-wringing and obsequious seeping, but they are not, by any stretch of the imagination, shy.
    Trust me. You’ll see.)

PRECOPULATORY PHASE: STAGE II
ATTRACTION
    The [fruit fly mating] ritual begins with a step called orientation. The male, who needs no instruction in this process, stands facing the female, about 0.2 millimeter away. Then he taps her on the abdomen with a foreleg and follows her if she moves away. Next, he displays one wing and flutters it to execute his form of a “love song.” Depending on the female’s level of interest at this point, he may go back and repeat his actions.… Fruit flies will not mate unless the males have gone through this entire routine and the female has become receptive.
    Scientific American
, April 1995
    Ray and I actually started shortly after we met at work.
    I was booking talent for
The Diane Roberts Show
, a serious late-night David-Susskind-esque talk show taped in New York. When the show was picked up nationally by public television that January, the station moved Diane and her assistant Evelyn over first, along with Diane’s treadmill. But when the exercise equipment didn’t fit in her office, Diane insisted that her space be reconfigured so that there was ample room in her three-windowed office for herself, the treadmill, her rack of wool blazers and turtlenecks, and her cases of personal-size bottles of Volvic water, which she kept unrefrigerated—and, of course, Evelyn, whose cubicle just outside Diane’s office was reduced by half in the process. A few weeks later they moved the rest of us out of our shabby, cramped offices on 57th Street and Ninth Avenue into the slightly less cramped but still shabby studios on 57th Street and Eighth Avenue.
    “Isn’t this
fab
ulous?” Diane gushed the first morning we were all together again, camped out on the floor of her office because the greenroom hadn’t been painted green yet. Diane’s hair had just been triple-processed to “Diane Sawyer blond,” as she called it, and she still had her post-Christmas St. Bart’s glow. She touched a few of us on the head as she shimmied excitedly across the floor on her way back to her desk chair.
    “Now. Before we get started on this month’s schedule, I want to introduce our new executive producer, Ray Brown.” Diane looked expectantly around the office. “Ray?” She fondledthe rim of her Volvic bottle and swiveled around in her chair. “Evelyn, where’s Ray?”
    Evelyn poked her blond head out from under the rack of blazers. “He’s in the studio.”
    “Oh,” Diane said. She swiveled again and touched the intercom button that connected her to the studio’s control room and spoke into the speaker unit. “Ray,” she said with Helen Gurley Brown flirtatiousness. “We’re meeting now.” She kept her finger on the button and smiled until she heard his voice through the static.
    “Yes. I know,” the voice said. “But unfortunately I’m tied up in about fourteen feet of videotape that just exploded out of its cassette.”
    Diane laughed. “Okay. Then say hello to everyone I’ve just introduced you to.”
    There was a pause.
    “Hello,” the voice said.
    “Good-bye,” said Diane.
    And that was the first I heard of the man who would, months later, ruin my life.
    After exploring our new space, I liked the fact that there were actual offices instead of cubicles and that