“I can’t either. You don’t deserve this, Zee. No one does.”
At one point, when the flame swelled the cover, it even made a tiny sound like a human voice crying out from somewhere far away, though soon it was drowned out by the sound of the fire alarm clanging through the halls of Woolley. Dr. Albrecht hadn’t been trying to be cruel; she believed what she had written. And maybe Zee, to her own horror, believed it a little bit too.
She was used to thinking that you could be as queer as you wanted these days if you lived in the right geographical area. But though the book had burned and become unrecognizable, causing Zee to pay the Metzger Library a lost-book fine of sixty-five dollars, and though she had hooked up with a couple of gasping women in college, she felt part of a sometimes unworkable struggle. She had already been betrayed by two different older women in her life: Linda Mariani, that cunt; and of course Dr. Albrecht, who had seemed so warm and trustable as they danced around the room.
Zee distracted herself from the incident with the book by joining the school’s terrible improv troupe, and sleeping with one of the other members, Heidi Klausen, who was fair-haired and European and refined. She had told Zee about the Swiss cookies called Schwabenbr?tli that she used to bake when growing up in Zurich, and she said that she and Zee would bake them together sometime. So one day Zee came to her off-campus apartment and said, “Teach me to make those Schwaben-whatever cookies,” and Heidi had agreed. They’d fed each other warm cookies on Heidi’s futon. Zee didn’t understand what drove her, a few days later, to hook up with her former RA, the confident Shelly Bray. Of course Heidi found out about it, because Shelly Bray could not keep it to herself, and Heidi became furious, yelling at Zee in the middle of the quad, “Fock you, Eisenstat, I made myself vulnerable to you in all ways. I even showed you how to bake Schwabenbr?tli!” In reply, Zee said, nastily, “Right, your Nazi cookies,” but Heidi was Swiss, not German, and anyway she had done nothing wrong.
Zee went through women, or they went through her. “I’m a slut,” she once said easily to Greer as she headed across campus for a late-night meeting with a girl she’d met in an anthropology seminar. She had never been in love, but only temporarily infatuated. There had been bursts of physical pleasure, ephemeral shooting stars.
Her good friend Dog watched her longingly throughout college as she went about her all-female business. He watched all women longingly, she’d noticed, but he had a particular soft spot for Zee. He was always hanging around her room, flopped on the bed. He was extremely good-looking, objectively, though he had a beard that was just shy of Amish. Why didn’t anyone tell men that women didn’t like that look? They could leave them anonymous notes saying, “Friends don’t let friends wear beards without mustaches.”
Dog was one of the kindest people Zee had ever met, and he listened to all her stories about her hookups, nodding and taking it in and being very understanding and contemplative—he himself had had many hookups with women since he’d been at Ryland, but he never liked to talk about himself, and instead always ceded the floor to Zee—but then at the end of her filibuster he said, “So will you give me a shot?”
“A shot? No.”
“Is it because I’m a ginger?” he asked with a puckish smile.
“Dog, seriously? I’ve just been sitting here talking about being gay, and you want me to give you a shot?”
“We could just do some things,” he said shyly, long-lashed, looking down.
“No,” she said. “Sorry.”
But then one Friday night, after the Heidi debacle had taken place and Zee was worn out, and Greer was off visiting Cory at Princeton, and Chloe was at a party, it got really late, and Dog was lying on top of the covers on her bed half-asleep, so Zee, feeling affectionate and bored, lay down beside him. He put an arm around her, delighted.
“See, that’s not so bad,” he said.
She thought that they would just sleep, maybe, if it was possible to fall asleep under these conditions, but he said to her, “Would you mind?” and took her hand and held it for a second in his own much larger one, and then, when she didn’t object, he took it and placed it on his chest, at the place where the bramble of hair crept over the top of his T-shirt. She felt his heart, and didn’t pull away. And then, finally, he put her hand on the hardest, hottest crotch in the world. A big, hot boulder. She practically leaped away.
“Sorry,” he said. “I ache for you. I walk around campus like this all the time. It’s almost a disability. I should get extra time on tests.”
She returned her hand there out of friendship, but didn’t look, imagining that beneath his pants he had a nest of hair as red and mohairlike as his beard. He was the nicest guy in the world, and she thought this as she moved her hand awkwardly, like the mechanical claw in one of those crane games at arcades. He was much too excited now, and she was much too unexcited. It was a mistake to have done anything with him, and she knew this right away.
“You can’t sleep here, you know,” she said to him after he had an orgasm on high volume, and they lay together with his chest heaving in recovery.
“Why? We could talk all night. You could tell me more things. I’d like that.”
“I don’t want to talk all night, Dog. You are the greatest, you really are. But I am only attracted to girls. It’s the way God made me,” she added uncertainly, though since her bat mitzvah she had pretty much left God in the dust.
Finally he loped off down the hall and went back upstairs to the room he shared with Kelvin, while Zee lay in bed and felt confused and even a little ashamed. Over time Dog got involved with all kinds of other girls on campus, and his friendship with Zee stayed as strong as it had ever been, and neither of them ever referred to what had happened. Once in a while Zee wondered if she had even dreamed it. Women were it for her, but even so, she knew she had problems with them; something difficult often happened between her and them, but she didn’t know what, or why.
After college, she had thought it would be great to work with Greer at Faith Frank’s foundation, but apparently that couldn’t happen. She felt rootless and lost at Schenck, DeVillers, her first job after graduation. By winter she knew she had to get out and go someplace where she felt needed. Then, one late night at the law firm, the arachnodactyly guy, whose name was Ronnie, mentioned to Zee that his sister worked for Teach and Reach, the nonprofit that trained recent college graduates and then placed them in jobs in public and charter high schools around the country. The training session for the current batch of teachers had taken place over the summer—a whirlwind six weeks—though now it was the middle of the school year and everyone was in place. But there had been a few dropouts recently, Ronnie explained, and the organization was worried about what to do and getting frantic. Did Zee want his sister’s email?
It was startling how easy it was to be hired by Teach and Reach. “I’ll be honest. We are looking for enthusiasm as much as anything else,” the woman on the phone told her. So that was how Zee found herself relocating to Chicago in late winter. “I hate not being in the same city as you,” she’d said to Greer, though really the two friends hadn’t seen each other as often as they would have liked. Zee had stayed over in Brooklyn once in a while, but their schedules didn’t often overlap. Zee didn’t spend too much time thinking about why there were openings for teachers now, and why she was so easily welcomed in. She was too desperate to get out of her paralegal job. Instead she allowed herself to feel flattered by the job offer, even though in retrospect there was no reason to feel that way.