Zee got through lunch by pretending it was Cole’s retirement party. And when that fantasy failed, she imagined relaying one of her own less amusing Cole anecdotes. She might tell about his sophomore advisee who came to Zee crying, after she’d shown Cole a course list including Stage Makeup for her double major in theater. “So you’re learning to put on makeup?” he’d asked. The girl had shrugged and said, “Basically.” He took her face in his hand, turned her head to the side, and said, “Well, it’s about damn time.” But even if Zee had worked up the nerve to tell this story, to say “Let’s raise a glass to the most insensitive man in Illinois,” the others would have chuckled, waiting with bated breath for the old man’s reply.
Cole, she realized, was talking to her from down the table, pointing his empty fork at her chest. “Comrade Grant is uncharacteristically withdrawn today,” he called. “I suspect she’s planning her Marxist revolution!” Before the laughter died down, he continued. “This is why I’ll never leave. She’ll replace me with her minions and all the seniors will take ‘Why Dickens Was a Stalinist.’”
She felt, as she often did around Cole, like a child outwitted by a clever uncle for the amusement of other adults. Mercifully, the conversation swelled again, and the waiter brought coffee. Zee wished he would sweep her up with the empty wine glasses and carry her back to the kitchen and plunge her into the sink, where she could remain till the lunch was over.
The other day, her mother had called her office number. “I was thinking,” she said. “Why couldn’t Douglas work in Admissions? Because that doesn’t require you to publish, does it?”
“Admissions is bubbly twenty-four-year-olds with diverse backgrounds.”
“Well he’s diverse. He certainly didn’t grow up here.” Zee had said she had to go, and her mother said, “It’s not going to fall in his lap, dear. To be perfectly frank, I don’t know what good that biography will do. There are so many books nowadays! But we’ll think of something.”
Sitting there sober with her drunken department, Zee did think of something. Doug was a man who needed a job. Cole was a man who did not deserve the job he had. And here she was, passively wishing. And leaving Doug home alone all day with that woman. When Chantal had said to keep him on his toes, she’d probably meant something along the lines of meeting him at the door in lingerie. But Zee had more at her disposal than underwear. And she knew how to do more than grade papers and wait.
She turned her tiramisu slab on its side to cut it better. She had nearly forgotten who she was.
8
They were all due at the big house at six, for cocktails and dinner to welcome the Texans “officially.” The Breens, Doug tried calling them in his head, but to him Bruce and Gracie were the Breens, so Texans it was. Maybe if he started calling Case “Tex,” he’d like him better.
In the two weeks they’d shared the house, the couples had fallen into a routine of cooking separate dinners, perhaps overlapping in the kitchen for five or ten awkwardly sociable minutes. Doug and Zee found themselves eating takeout downstairs more and more.
Zee came into the bathroom when Doug was brushing his teeth. She said, “I have some motivation for you. I think something might be happening with Cole. This might be his last year.”
Doug made a mouth-full-of-toothbrush noise. Zee wasn’t often prone to wishful thinking, but Doug knew enough about Cole not to get his hopes up.
They all four walked up the drive together, Doug carrying a bottle of wine too cheap for Gracie and Bruce to drink. They passed Case’s new car: a black 2000 BMW 3 Series convertible, liquid-shiny, parked beside their own weathered Subaru. Doug had gladly joined in Zee’s eye rolling, wondering how Case thought he could blow through his savings, how weirdly sure he was of landing a new job the moment he started looking. How a convertible would get him through a Chicago winter. But privately, all Doug wanted to do was lick the hubcaps.
He marveled anew at the way the thick ivy turned the big house into an organic entity. The house turned brown every fall, it died every winter, and by late spring it was in full foliage.
The front door was locked, and so they stood waiting as Hidalgo, Gracie’s standard poodle (“Is there something bigger than standard?” Doug had asked Zee several times now. “Because he’s really not normal”) flung himself at the window again and again, claws scraping the glass.
“Oh God,” Miriam said, “I hate poodles.”
“Just wait,” Doug said.
Bruce answered the door himself, tossing Hidalgo peanuts to keep him at bay. “Welcome!” He gave each woman a long kiss on the wrist like a lecherous Austrian prince, pumped Doug’s hand, and slapped his arm around Case. “My boy!” he shouted, as if he’d never talked to his son before in his life.
Bruce was red-faced, with big cheeks and a ring of white hair and a belly of hardened fat. Later, he would bully Doug into smoking a cigar with him out back. But he was a good man, and Doug hadn’t really had a father, so the handshakes, the cigar, the talk about bumping into the Clintons on Martha’s Vineyard — he found them weirdly thrilling.
Doug saw Hidalgo advancing and kneed him in the chest before the claws could make contact with his shoulders, before the beast could leave welts down his arms again. Hidalgo was not one of those poodles with the haircuts. He was shaggy, fur the color of a rotten peach, breath like hot compost. Bruce threw another peanut.
Gracie stood waiting in the library, in a long, gauzy green thing that Doug’s mother would have called a Hostess Dress. Zee kissed her cheek. “So you’re locking us out now?”
“Bruce,” Gracie said, “did you lock the door? The ghost must’ve done it.”
“The ghost only ever does three things,” Doug whispered to Miriam. “Closes doors, knocks on things, and flushes toilets.”
Miriam whispered back: “Maybe it died from getting locked out of the bathroom.”
Bruce mixed everyone gin and tonics without asking, and poured himself his standard glass of Mount Gay rum. “Let me tell you something, though,” he said, in a voice that wasn’t at all asking permission to let it tell you something. “We’re going to need new locks anyway. Y2K, December thirty-one, these fancy security systems are worthless. Crime will shoot up, credit cards won’t work, and are you aware, even your car, your car has a computer. I’m buying a ’57 Chevy. No computer, and I’ve always wanted one anyway. But I’ll tell you, no one should be out celebrating that night. Nuclear power plants, think about that. Best we can do is hunker down with the canned goods and barricade the doors.”
“How festive,” Gracie said. Bruce had given the same speech at every opportunity for the past year, but this was the first time he’d mentioned the nuclear plants. “Let’s change the subject, shall we? Something less apocalyptic. Case, how’s your job search?”
Case, sprawling on the couch, stretched his legs out. “I got some fish in the water,” he said.
Zee said, “Some lines?”
“One could say that, Zee. One could say that.”