he was in love with her too. The problem was that although he must have liked her on some level, everyone knew he was gay. She was totally blind to it. Like looking at a field of healthy grass and insisting that it was purple, she would ignore any of the glaring signs. Sadly, she used to have to get him wired or wasted or something just so he’d screw her. She thought she was pregnant once, but no one really believed her. She claimed he broke her heart when it finally ended. Then, when she found out he was gay, and that not one other person in the world was shocked, she went into a kind of depression. She didn’t get over it until after she graduated. It was tragic.
Shortly after graduation Zoe met Danny. Or should I say, re-met him. Relatively instantly Danny became the new love of her life. Danny’s younger than us—than Zoe—so he was still in college when they met again. They ran into each other at the U.S. Open for the first time in years. They had gone to summer camp together a lifetime ago and they remembered each other while waiting in the wine line during a boring match. Anyway, they began this torrid affair. Two weeks later they were madly in love. She’d never been so happy in her life. No one had ever been so good to her; no one had ever made her feel that way. She went on an on. They talked every day, saw each other every weekend while he was away at school. Total bliss. You could vomit they were so fucking happy.
Fast forward. Their relationship had been going strong for more than a year. They were still together, still madly in love. She was thinking about wedding dresses and caterers and he was finishing his five-year, undergrad-and-master’s degree combo deal. He was still away at school during the year, in Boston actually, and Zoe lived in New York City.
Okay, fast forward again. Now it’s his graduation weekend. His parents, his sister, his brother and his wife, and Zoe all went up to Boston for the graduation. He was going to BU and had an apartment in the Back Bay. His parents were staying at the Four Seasons and Zoe loved that. Status is like oxygen to her. They all went out for dinner on Friday and then they spent Saturday traipsing around Newbury Street, leisurely shopping, having lunch and drinks: the basics.
On Saturday night they were all at a trendy bar with banquettes, sitting in one of those semi-circle booths having drinks. Danny got up to go to the bathroom while Zoe was sitting there with his family, talking to his sister, appraising his mother’s jewelry, basically just passing time. Now Zoe had thought that Danny had been acting weird all weekend, but she wrote it off as just nerves about graduating and his parents being there and everything. So she thought.
So an hour went by and Zoe and the family were still sitting at the table and Danny hadn’t come back. Then another half hour went by and Zoe was like, “Where the hell is Danny?”
They all began to wonder for a while and by then it was almost two hours since he’d gotten up. The family didn’t really seem all that concerned. His father ordered another bottle of wine, but Zoe was about to have a coronary. So she got up to look for him. She glanced around the bar, peeked back by the bathrooms, glanced into the kitchen—you know, because there was such a likely chance he’d be in the kitchen. But of course she didn’t find him anywhere. So she went over to the bouncer and asked him if he’d seen a guy about so high, who looked like she described, etcetera, etcetera, you know the drill.
The bartender smirked and he was like, “Lady, you just described every guy in the bar.” Then, before she had a chance to get annoyed at the less-than-helpful response, he said, “But…there’s been this guy in the bathroom for a while.”
In no time flat Zoe whipped around and stormed toward the bathrooms. By the time the bouncer noticed she was gone, it was too late for him to tell her that she couldn’t go in the men’s room. She was never all that concerned with propriety anyway and she stormed right into the bathroom. There she found Danny, standing up, drinking a beer from a bottle while talking on the pay phone.
When Danny saw Zoe, posed in her dense cloud of make-up, perfume and anger, he said, “Oh shit! I’ve gotta go. Bye,” and he hung up the phone.
Now, Zoe loves to cause scenes almost as much as I like sex, and, well, she was in the men’s room. So she screeched his name at the top of her lungs to get his attention, not to mention the attention of the two guys over at the urinals and the grunting man in the farthest stall. Then, since she basically had the entire city’s attention, she screamed at him to tell her why he’d been in the bathroom for the past two hours. Why had he left her alone with his lecherous family, she demanded to know. Why was he not sitting with her? Paying attention to her? Why? Why? She didn’t ask Danny if anything was wrong. No, that would’ve been too selfless; in her world, everything had to be about Zoe.
When she got no response to her barrage of questions other than a confused, blank stare, she lowered her voice to a mere howl and asked, “What the fuck is going on?”
Danny just looked at her, still dumbfounded. By the way, this is exactly how Zoe told the story, chock full of all these nutty, totally daft details that make you realize she’s a little off her rocker.
Anyway, she said that Danny was staring at her speechless. Since she was clearly not generating enough attention cooped up in the men’s room, she grabbed Danny by the arm and dragged him outside the bar onto the sidewalk. There was a line of people waiting to get into the bar. Even though she liked an audience, at this point she knew she needed to find out what was up. He had been acting weird all weekend and now this and he didn’t even have any answers for her; fuck answers, he had no response at all. So she pulled him to the side, away from the crowd, and once again demanded he tell her what was going on. Sometimes you should be careful what you ask for.
He burst into tears. His big puppy-dog eyes filled with tears and he started to bawl. Taken aback, she looked at him like he had nine heads; she’d never seen him cry before. Then he started talking. At first she couldn’t understand him and she just tried to console him while he cried onto the shoulder of her expensive silk shirt. In the back of her mind she was thinking, if this guy tells me he’s gay after what I went through with Todd, I’m gonna go Bobbit on his ass and cut that dick of his right off.
“Besides,” she said, when she recounted the story, “he was blubbering all over me and silk stains.”
He got hold of himself, held back the tears, and began again. “Zoe, everything I’ve ever told you has been a lie.” Now when someone starts with a line like that you know you don’t want to hear the rest. But like watching a plane crash in slow motion you are powerless to stop it.
“It’s like you don’t even know me,” he said. “No one does. Shit, my life is such a mess.” He started crying again but he quickly got himself back under control, sniffled, and continued. “My whole life is a lie. Our whole life together’s been a lie. I’m so fucked up; everything sucks, my life is falling apart, I should just die. But, I love you.”
He was smart enough to stick that “I love you” in at the end. Based on the history of those who have crossed Zoe before and lived to tell, her reaction to Danny was not nearly as bad as it could have been; we all think that’s because he stuck in the cry of love. His life didn’t suck badly enough for him to miss that trick. Either that or she was getting soft in her old age: her late early twenties.
Still though, Zoe was wondering what the hell was wrong and praying—for his sake and hers—that he wasn’t about to tell her that he was gay. He sniffled some more and cleared his tears again and then he said it: he told her that he was a drug addict. “Cocaine actually,” Danny said.
Then the details just started to spill out of him like vomit. He told her that he was a total addict, that he’d been using almost every day, that he was in enormous debt, and that he’d stolen a ton of money. Danny told Zoe how he stole money from his parents and from her and how he was on the phone in the bathroom trying to find some money and when he couldn’t
