Animal Husbandry Read Free Page A

there were windows—that opened. And the fact that half of the twenty-five people who worked there were men—and straight—and that all of them were good-looking wasn’t too hard to take either.
    Can you tell it had been a while since I’d been out on a date?
    “No way,” Joan had said enviously when I called to tell her about my first day. Joan and I had known each other since we were both assistants at
People
magazine sitting out in the samehallway, and we had never quite gotten over the thrill of having been promoted to windowed offices. Now she was an editor at
Men’s Times
magazine and I was chasing down celebrities, and though neither of us had time to go to the bathroom once we got to the office, we still managed to talk to each other on the phone at least eleven times a day.
    “It’s true,” I said, eyeing the painted mullions and pretending to enjoy a cold, damp breeze. “They open and everything.”
    Joan typed loudly into the phone. I imagined her thick dark hair exploding out of its ponytail the way it always did when it was rainy and humid. “I wasn’t talking about the
windows
,” she said, annoyed. “I was talking about the
view
.”
    Ray’s office was down the hall and around the corner from mine, on the other side of the floor, next to Diane’s office, and far enough away for me not to have much to do with him. As with most talk shows, people at my level reported to the executive producer. Diane, though, preferred that I report to her first and directly, so Ray and I had little direct contact on a day-to-day basis. All I knew about him then was that he was the new executive producer that PBS had assigned to us and that he drank a lot of coffee—information I had deduced from his ever-present clipboard and the thin fiber-optic microphones he wore around his neck like miniature stethoscopes, and from the number of times he passed by my office to and from the men’s room (six times, on the average, before noon alone). That, and the fact that he had dark-brown hair, dark-brown eyes, and a soccer player’s physique (my favorite combination of features) and an ass even a straight man would want to take a bite out of.
    At the end of the first week he came into my office for the first time and handed me a memo.
    “You don’t have to read it,” he said. “I write them so I won’t get fired.”
    I took my glasses off and checked his face. His mouth moved into a wry smile, and when it did, one eyebrow went up, and I could see his teeth—big, straight, bright-white teeth that momentarily fascinated me.
    “I’m kidding. I wish I
would
get fired.” He extended his hand and we shook. “I’m Ray Brown.”
    “I’m Jane Goodall.”
    “I know,” he said. He looked around my office nervously and paced, stopping only to look at the two photographs tacked onto my bulletin board.
    “Boyfriend?” he asked, pointing at the picture of David and me, taken the year before at a PBS fund-raiser when David still looked straight enough to trick people into thinking that he and I were dating.
    “No,” I said. “That’s David. Just a friend.”
    “Just a friend,” he repeated absently. Then he pointed at a strip of black-and-white pictures of Joan and me that we’d taken in a photo booth in the East Village. We went there together every year, on each of our birthdays, and this was the most recent strip, taken in late December, right after Joan had finally turned thirty too.
    “Girlfriend? Significant other?”
    I laughed and shook my head. “Practically. That’s Joan. My best friend.”
    “You guys look alike,” he said, still staring at the picture.
    “I know. That’s what happens when you spend too much time together.”
    Ray moved away from the bulletin board and back toward my desk. “So, that’s a great name you have. People must comment on it a lot, I bet.”
    I nodded. “They always ask me if I’m into chimps.”
    He smiled. “And? Are you?”
    “Not particularly. With the