“Okay.”
Greer took in a ragged breath and then stood up in front of Zee as if about to do a little presentation. “I wasn’t going to say this, ever,” she said, “but now I guess I am. Now I guess I have to.” She closed her eyes, then opened them again. “I never gave Faith the letter.”
“What are you talking about? What letter?”
Greer looked down at the floor and her mouth twisted up strangely, in the stroke face of the about-to-cry. “Your letter,” Greer said, and then she stopped there, as though it would be so obvious what she meant.
“What?”
“Your letter,” Greer tried again with agitation now, and a little sob. Then she thrust out her hands, as if that would clarify it. “The one you gave me like four years ago to give to Faith, when you wanted a job there too. I still have it. I haven’t opened it or anything. But I have it. I never gave it to her.”
Zee just kept looking at her. She let the silence expand, trying to work out what this actually meant. “I’m confused,” Zee said. “Because you told me you gave it to her, back then, and that she said there were no jobs.”
“I know. Zee, I lied to you.”
Zee let this moment bloom its shitty little bloom. Whenever she found out something shocking or even disappointing about someone she cared about, she was taken by surprise. She thought about her clients, and how surprised they always were by behaviors in the people they loved, which, from the outside, might not have seemed surprising. A depressed husband took his own life. A grandmother collapsed. A daughter who had been agitated had a psychotic episode. Zee’s clients were more than surprised by all of this; they were shocked to the point of trauma.
Today, Greer had come to Chicago in her own kind of shock. She had been an acolyte of Faith’s, but had been startled by Faith’s betrayal. It hadn’t ever been even between Greer and Faith, and never could be.
But maybe it wasn’t entirely even between Greer and Zee either. Greer had made it uneven, and now they too needed a correction. What was astonishing was that Greer and Zee, unlike Greer and Faith, had had an actual friendship. It had been real, but look at that, Greer had secretly fucked Zee over anyway.
Zee might actually have had a chance to work for Faith back in the beginning, to help push the foundation forward. It was possible that Faith would’ve said yes after reading her letter. “I know it was horrible,” Greer was saying. “I mean, I’m sure it doesn’t make it better to say that you wouldn’t even have liked working there, but it’s true. In the beginning it was good, but then you know it got so impersonal, and I stopped getting to meet the women whose lives we were trying to help. It was like we were just pouring money into a speakers’ bureau and that was it. And I literally had the thought, several times: Zee would hate this. In your work you’re actually there on the ground. And we’re just at arm’s length too much of the time. I remind myself of this sometimes, as though it somehow makes it better that I did what I did to you. But I know it doesn’t make it better. It was horrible of me,” she repeated.
“Yeah, it was,” said Zee in a quiet, contained little voice. Maybe Greer was right, and she would have hated it there. But what did it matter? The thing that mattered was that Greer had kept her from being there, which was so peculiar, so hurtful, and made everything between them appear strange and different now. “But why would you do that?” Zee asked. “I was the one to talk to you about her. I was the one who basically led you into everything. You had barely even heard of Faith Frank.”
“It was . . . about my parents, I think,” Greer said. “About wanting someone to see something in me.”
“I saw something in you. And Cory did too.”
“I know. This was different.” Greer looked down; she couldn’t even seem to make eye contact with Zee, and maybe that was just as well. They needed a rest from looking so hard at each other. All Zee did all day was look hard at people. Her eyes were tired from all that looking, studying, empathizing with, scrutinizing; all that helping, helping, helping.
Now Greer was ashamed, so let her be ashamed, Zee thought. Greer had actually done a thing to her, a real thing.
Zee had gotten over her disappointment four years earlier and gone on to have a life that Faith would approve of; she was sure of that. Working one-on-one with people, instead of with roomfuls of them. She did emergency work that mattered, often involving issues that concerned women. But as the truth of what Greer had done became familiar information now, Zee felt as if the long affection that she had felt for Greer since college was made thin and wan. She felt exhausted, and was sorry that she’d invited Greer here for the weekend. Were they going to discuss the letter, and what Greer had done to Zee, again and again?
Greer came forward on the couch and took Zee’s wrists like a desperate suitor. “Zee,” she said. “I’m the worst person, I know I am.” Zee stayed furiously silent. “Apparently I never knew that I’m one of those women who hates women, like you always say. I confessed to Faith about your letter back in the beginning. She reacted like it wasn’t a big deal! But yesterday when I quit my job, she was hurt and angry, and out of the blue she brought it up in front of everyone. She busted me. Said I was a bad friend. A bad feminist. A bad woman. And I guess she’s right. I didn’t want to share her, I didn’t want to let you in. I am the cuntiest woman, Zee. I am a cunt,” Greer said fiercely. “I seriously am.”
Zee was still shocked and a little lightheaded, but she also felt tight and ungiving. She was probably supposed to say no, no, Greer, you aren’t any of those things. You made a stupid mistake. Women sometimes do really bad things to each other, just like men do, and just like men and women do to each other too. But she didn’t know if she felt this way, and anyway she didn’t want to comfort Greer; she didn’t want to direct her trauma training at her when she could have been directing it all day today at other people who needed it. Zee imagined telling Noelle everything tonight in bed while Greer lay on the opened sleeper sofa in the living room. “You won’t believe what Greer confessed to me,” she would whisper. And Noelle would of course be furious on her behalf.
“It was a really selfish thing you did,” Zee finally said to Greer now. Greer nodded vigorously, relieved. “You could have just told me you weren’t comfortable with me working there. You could have said that to me.”
“I know.”
“And you know that I have a history of being betrayed by women, right?” said Zee. “Starting with that law clerk of my mom’s who outed me, remember?”
“Yes,” Greer said in a trembling little voice.
“And now you’ve done it too.”