Free Animal Husbandry by Laura Zigman Page B

once we’re in, we’re in.”
    “Fuck,” I exhaled.
    “I know. I thought in addition to the bliss of moving in together, we’d get the added-value-bonus bliss of saving money. But we can swing it.” He paused. “So what do you think? You wanna see it?”
    Of course I did.
    From the moment we walked into that apartment the next evening we knew—or, at least, I knew—that we had found the perfect apartment. Standing there, in the little sunken living room, with the little bedroom and the little kitchen and the little bathroom all within view, I felt a thrill and a calmness I had never known before.
    To borrow a phrase from Ray: My joy knew no bounds.
    When Tracy left us alone for a while, Ray reached for my hand and walked us into the bedroom and over to the window. It was just after seven-thirty, but there was still light in the summer sky—a blue and orange and violet drape being pulled closed behind the rooftops of the city. He put his hand under my hair on the back of my neck and held my head against his chest, and I could hear his heart beating against the noise of the traffic from the street below.
    “I love this place,” he whispered.
    I tightened my arms around his back and closed my eyes.
    “Not just this apartment, but this place we’re in right here, right now. This is how I always imagined it could be—dreamed it could be, this feeling of bliss, of complete certainty. But I never believed it would really happen to me.”
    “Me either,” I said.
    “We’re going to come home here every night—come home to each other every night, after shitty days at work, and we’re going to be happier than anyone else in the whole world.” I lifted my head, and he kissed me on the forehead, then on the neck, and then he put his mouth against my ear. “I love you, Jane,” he said, just like the first time.
    And, as it turned out, for the last time.

POST-COPULATORY PHASE: STAGE VI
DIMINISHED BLISS, THE DAWNING OF THE AGE OF DISCONTENT, AND THE MYSTERIOUS METAMORPHOSIS FROM NEW COW TO OLD COW
    Despite the vigor of the male [animal’s] courtship, he is actually in a state of some trepidation. In fact, in the early stages, when fear still outweighs ardor, he seems so insecure that any movement toward him by the female sends him fleeing.
    —Mark Jerome Walters,
The Dance of Life
    Of course I didn’t know that it would be the last time he’d say those words, that it would be the last time I’d be as completely happy as I was during those few final minutes we were alone together in Tracy’s apartment.
    But it was.
    Later I would come to view that scene as the final peak in a series of peaks—the benchmark peak, the peak that would soon become the crest of the wave over which I would float, then fall all the way to the bottom of the ocean. Had I known that standing by the window would be the last good moment, the last true moment of my time with Ray, I would have done something to mark it: I would have told him that the breath of relief I’d exhaled the night he told me he loved me came from a well of loneliness and sadness so deep and so hidden and so constant that no one else before him had ever reached it, taken the edge off its pain. That his empathy and tenderness had unearthed it—my nameless, silent grief—and that was why I had felt so inexplicably connected to him.
    Had I known, I would have gone over every moment we’d spent together—the nights in my apartment, in his apartment, in the apartment he had house-sat; the weekend we drove out to Sagaponack; the two weeks’ vacation we took in August in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod; Labor Day weekend, when we stayed in the city and he bought me a pair of teeny-tiny gold hoop earrings and I bought him a long-sleeved striped T-shirt; all the conversations we’d had in the car, in the dark, on the phone, or right before we’d fall asleep. I would have tried, and undoubtedly failed, to express the inexpressible: that for thefirst time in my life I knew what