Free Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman Page A

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?”
    “Right behind it. She renovated the apartment about two years ago, just after she bought it. New kitchen. New bathroom. Refinished hardwood floors. Working fireplace.”
    “No way,” I said. My fireplace was the one and only regret I had about giving up my apartment on Charles Street.
    “Wait. There’s more. Sunken living room.”
    “Shut
up
.”
    “I’m not kidding. I don’t think it’s like Park-Avenue-sunken-living-room sunken living room, but she said it’s two or three little steps down.”
    “Sounds sunken to me.” I sat back in my chair and tried to picture what the apartment looked like, and what it would look like with us in it—
the perfect Cow and Bull couple, the envy of all our friends
. I was so excited that I was afraid I was getting too excited. “What’s the bad news?”
    “The bad news is the money. Sixteen hundred dollars a month. That’s her mortgage and maintenance. But it’s a two-year official sublet, so