But now, in her second job, in her fourth year of teaching in the Midwest, Zoë was discovering something she never suspected she had: a crusty edge, brittle and pointed. Once she had pampered her students, singing them songs, letting them call her at home, even, and ask personal questions. Now she was losing sympathy. They were beginning to seem different. They were beginning to seem demanding and spoiled.
“You act,” said one of her Senior Seminar students at a scheduled conference, “like your opinion is worth more than everybody else’s in the class.”
Zoë’s eyes widened. “I am the teacher,” she said. “I do get paid to act like that.” She narrowed her gaze at the student, who was wearing a big leather bow in her hair, like a cowgirl in a TV ranch show. “I mean, otherwise everybody in the class would have little offices and office hours.” Sometimes Professor Hendricks will take up the class’s time just talking about movies she’s seen. She stared at the student some more, then added, “I bet you’d like that.”
“Maybe I sound whiny to you,” said the girl, “but I simply want my history major to mean something.”
“Well, there’s your problem,” said Zoë, and with a smile, she showed the student to the door. “I like your bow,” she added.
Zoë lived for the mail, for the postman, that handsome blue jay, and when she got a real letter, with a real full-price stamp, from someplace else, she took it to bed with her and read it over and over. She also watched television until all hours and had her set in the bedroom, a bad sign. Professor Hendricks has said critical things about Fawn Hall, the Catholic religion, and the whole state of Illinois. It is unbelievable. At Christmastime she gave twenty-dollar tips to the mailman and to Jerry, the only cabbie in town, whom she had gotten to know from all her rides to and from the Terre Haute airport, and who, since he realized such rides were an extravagance, often gave her cut rates.
“I’m flying in to visit you this weekend,” announced Zoë.
“I was hoping you would,” said Evan. “Charlie and I are having a party for Halloween. It’ll be fun.”
“I have a costume already. It’s a bonehead. It’s this thing that looks like a giant bone going through your head.”
“Great,” said Evan.
“It is, it’s great.”
“Alls I have is my moon mask from last year and the year before. I’ll probably end up getting married in it.”
“Are you and Charlie getting married?” Foreboding filled her voice.
“Hmmmmmmnnno, not immediately.”
“Don’t get married.”
“Why?”
“Just not yet. You’re too young.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re five years older than I am and you’re not married.”
“I’m not married? Oh, my God,” said Zoë. “I forgot to get married.”
Zoë had been out with three men since she’d come to Hilldale-Versailles. One of them was a man in the Paris municipal bureaucracy who had fixed a parking ticket she’d brought in to protest and who then asked her to coffee. At first she thought he was amazing — at last, someone who did not want Heidi! But soon she came to realize that all men, deep down, wanted Heidi. Heidi with cleavage. Heidi with outfits. The parking ticket bureaucrat soon became tired and intermittent. One cool fall day, in his snazzy, impractical convertible, when she asked him what was wrong, he said, “You would not be ill-served by new clothes, you know.” She wore a lot of gray-green corduroy. She had been under the impression that it brought out her eyes, those shy stars. She flicked an ant from her sleeve.
“Did you have to brush that off in the car?” he said, driving. He glanced down at his own pectorals, giving first the left, then the right, a quick survey. He was wearing a tight shirt.
“Excuse me?”
He slowed down at a yellow light and frowned. “Couldn’t you have picked it up and thrown it outside?”
“The ant? It might have bitten me. I mean, what difference does it make?”
“It might have bitten you! Ha! How ridiculous! Now it’s going to lay eggs in my car!”
The second guy was sweeter, lunkier, though not insensitive to certain paintings and songs, but too often, too, things he’d do or say would startle her. Once, in a restaurant, he stole the garnishes off her dinner plate and waited for her to notice. When she didn’t, he finally thrust his fist across the table and said, “Look,” and when he opened it, there was her parsley sprig and her orange slice, crumpled to a wad. Another time he described to her his recent trip to the Louvre. “And there I was in front of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, and everyone else had wandered off, so I had my own private audience with it, all those painted, drowning bodies splayed in every direction, and there’s this motion in that painting that starts at the bottom left, swirling and building, and building, and building, and going up to the right-hand corner, where there’s this guy waving a flag, and on the horizon in the distance you could see this teeny tiny boat.…” He was breathless in the telling. She found this touching and smiled in encouragement. “A painting like that,” he said, shaking his head. “It just makes you shit.”
“I have to ask you something,” said Evan. “I know every woman complains about not meeting men, but really, on my shoots, I meet a lot of men. And they’re not all gay, either.” She paused. “Not anymore.”
“What are you asking?”
The third guy was a political science professor named Murray Peterson, who liked to go out on double dates with colleagues whose wives he was attracted to. Usually the wives would consent to flirt with him. Under the table sometimes there was footsie, and once there was even kneesie. Zoë and the husband would be left to their food, staring into their water glasses, chewing like goats. “Oh, Murray,” said one wife, who had never finished her master’s in physical therapy and wore great clothes. “You know, I know everything about you: your birthday, your license plate number. I have everything memorized. But then that’s the kind of mind I have. Once at a dinner party I amazed the host by getting up and saying good-bye to every single person there, first and last names.”
“I knew a dog who could do that,” said Zoë, with her mouth full. Murray and the wife looked at her with vexed and rebuking expressions, but the husband seemed suddenly twinkling and amused. Zoë swallowed. “It was a Talking Lab, and after about ten minutes of listening to the dinner conversation this dog knew everyone’s name. You could say, ‘Bring this knife to Murray Peterson,’ and it would.”
“Really,” said the wife, frowning, and Murray Peterson never called again.
“Are you seeing anyone?” said Evan. “I’m asking for a particular reason, I’m not just being like mom.”
“I’m seeing my house. I’m tending to it when it wets, when it cries, when it throws up.” Zoë had bought a mint-green ranch house near campus, though now she was thinking that maybe she shouldn’t have. It was hard to live in a house. She kept wandering in and out of the rooms, wondering where she had put things. She went downstairs into the basement for no reason at all except that it amused her to own a basement. It also amused her to own a tree. The day she moved in, she had tacked to her tree a small paper sign that said Zoë’s Tree.
Her parents, in Maryland, had been very pleased that one of their children had at last been able to afford real estate, and when she closed on the house they sent her flowers with a Congratulations card. Her mother had even UPS’d a box of old decorating magazines saved over the years, photographs of beautiful rooms her mother used to moon over, since there never had been any money to redecorate. It was like getting her mother’s pornography, that box, inheriting her drooled-upon fantasies, the endless wish and tease that had been her life. But to her mother it was a rite of passage that pleased her. “Maybe you will get some ideas from these,” she had written. And when Zoë looked at the photographs, at the bold and beautiful living rooms, she was filled with longing. Ideas and ideas of longing.