Sing You Home: A Novel Read online

  Another laugh. “I have cancer,” she says, incredulous. “I actually have cancer.”

  “Maybe you can get gangrene, too, before sunset.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be greedy,” Zoe answers. “I mean, surely someone else needs a plague of locusts or the swine flu—”

  “Termites!” I add. “Dry rot!”

  “Gingivitis . . .”

  “A leaky muffler,” I say.

  Zoe pauses. “Metaphorically,” she points out, “that was the problem in the first place.”

  This makes us laugh even harder, so much so that the guidance department secretary pokes her head in to make sure we’re all right. By then, my eyes are tearing, my abdominal muscles actually ache. “I need a hysterectomy,” Zoe says, bent over to catch her breath, “and I can’t stop laughing. What’s wrong with me?”

  I stare at her as soberly as I can. “Well . . . I believe you have cancer,” I say.

  When I came out to Teddy, my college boyfriend, at the Matthew Shepard vigil, the most remarkable thing happened: he came out to me, too. There we were, two gays who had tried to act as straight as possible for the rest of the college community—and now, happily, were coming clean. We still cuddled and hugged but with the utter relief of knowing that we no longer had to try (unsuccessfully) to arouse each other, or to fake attraction. (When I’ve told heterosexual people in the past that I had a boyfriend in college, slept with him, the whole nine yards, they are always surprised. But just because I’m gay doesn’t mean I can’t have sex with a guy—only that it’s not at the top of my to-do list.) In the wake of our newfound same-sexual awakening, Teddy and I went to Provincetown over Memorial Day weekend. We ogled drag queens racing down Commercial Street in high heels and bronze-oiled men in butt floss walking the beach. We went to a tea dance at the Boatslip and afterward went to the PiedBar—where I’d never seen so many lesbians in one room in my life. That weekend, it was as if the world had been turned upside down, and straight folks were the anomaly rather than the norm. And yet, I didn’t feel like I fit in there, either. I have never been one of those gay people who hangs out exclusively with gay people, or parties all the time, or lives a wild and decadent lifestyle. I’m not butch. I wouldn’t know how to ride a motorcycle if my life depended on it. No, I’m much more likely to be in my pajamas by 8:00 P.M., watching reruns of House on the USA network. Which means that the women I run across most of the time are more likely to be straight than to be lesbian.

  Everyone who’s gay has had the unfortunate circumstance of falling for someone who’s not. The first time it happens, you think: I can change her. I know her better than she knows herself. And invariably, you are left with a broken relationship and an even more broken heart. The straight equivalent, in a way, is the woman who’s sure that the guy she loves—the one who beats her every night—will eventually stop. The bottom line in both cases is that people don’t change; that no matter how charming you are and how fiercely you love, you cannot turn a person into someone she’s not.

  I had crushes on straight girls my whole childhood, even if I couldn’t put a name to the feeling—but my first grown-up mistake was Janine Durfee, who played first base on a college intramural softball team. I knew she had a boyfriend—one who was continuously cheating on her. One night when she came to my dorm room in tears because she’d walked in on him with someone else, I invited her inside while she calmed down. Somehow listening to her cry morphed into me kissing her and ten phenomenal days as a couple before she went back to the guy who treated her like dirt. It was fun, Vanessa, she said apologetically. It’s just not me.

  It’s important to point out that I have plenty of straight friends, women I’ve never been attracted to but still like to meet for lunch, movies, whatever. But over the years there have been a few who made a tiny flame fan inside me, a what if. They are the ones I have to actively keep my distance from, because I’m not a masochist. There are only so many times you can hear: It’s not you. It’s me.

  I am not a proving ground. I don’t want to be the experiment. I have no interest in seeing if my personal charms can overpower the wiring of someone’s brain.

  I believe I was born the way I am, and so I have to believe that someone straight is born that way, too. But I also believe you fall in love with a person; it stands to reason sometimes that could be a guy, and sometimes that could be a girl. I’ve often asked myself what I’d do if the greatest love of my life turned out to be male. Are you attracted to someone because of who they are, or what they are?

  I don’t know. But I do know that I’m at the stage of my life where I want forever, not right now.

  I know that the first person I kissed won’t be nearly as important as the last person I kiss.

  And I also know better than to dream about things that can’t happen.

  I am sitting at my desk getting nothing done.

  Every two minutes I check the clock in the corner of the computer. It’s 12:45, which means that Zoe should be long out of surgery.

  Her mom is at the hospital. I thought about going there, too, but didn’t know if that would seem weird. It’s not like Zoe asked me to come, after all. And I didn’t want to impose, if she just felt like being alone with her mom.

  But I wonder if the reason she didn’t ask is because she didn’t want me to feel obligated to come.

  Which I wouldn’t have, at all.

  12:46.

  Last weekend Zoe and I had gone to the art museum at RISD. The current exhibition was an empty room, with cardboard boxes on the perimeter. I’d sat down on one and been shooed out by a museum guard before realizing that I was inadvertently making myself part of the art. “Maybe I’m a philistine,” I had said, “but I like my art on canvas.”

  “Blame Duchamp,” Zoe had answered. “The guy took a urinal, signed it, and put it on display in 1917 as a work of art called Fountain.”

  “You’re kidding . . .”

  “No,” Zoe had said. “It was recently voted the most influential art by, like, five hundred experts.”

  “I suppose that’s because you’re supposed to realize anything can be art—like a urinal or a cardboard box—if you stick it in a museum?”

  “Yes. Which is why,” Zoe had said, straight-faced, “I’m donating my uterus to RISD.”

  “Make sure you have cardboard boxes, too. And a window. Then it can be called Womb with a View.”

  She had laughed, a little wistfully. “More like Empty Womb,” Zoe said, and before she got tangled in her own thoughts, I had pulled her down the street to a place where they make the most amazing lattes, with foam designs on top that truly are art.

  12:50.

  I wonder if Dara will call me when Zoe’s out of surgery. I mean, it’s perfectly normal that I’d want to make sure she sailed through it. I tell myself that just because I haven’t heard from her doesn’t mean anything’s wrong.

  I am the kind of person who imagines the worst. When friends fly somewhere, I check the arrivals online, just to make sure there wasn’t a crash. When I go out of town, I unplug all my appliances in case there is a power surge.

  On my computer browser, I pull up the main page of the hospital where Zoe’s having her surgery. I type in the words “laparoscopic hysterectomy” on Google and look on the tab for a list of possible complications.

  When the phone rings I pounce on it. “Hello?”

  But it’s not Dara, and it’s not Zoe. The voice is tiny, so faint that it’s gone before it even registers. “Just calling to say good-bye,” Lucy DuBois murmurs.

  It’s the girl—a junior—whom I mentioned to Zoe weeks ago, the one who has suffered from depression for some time now. This isn’t the first time she’s called me in the middle of a crisis.

  But it’s the first time she’s sounded like this. Like she’s underwater and sinking fast.

  “Lucy?” I yell into the phone. “Where are you?” In the background, I hear a train whistle, and what sounds like church bells.

&nb