She snorts. “Max thought a sonnet was something you ask for in the plumbing section of Home Depot.”
“I once told the head of the English department at school that I likedRomeo and Julietthe best,” I say, “and she told me I was a philistine.”
“What! Why?”
“Because it’s not as complex asKing LearorHamlet,I guess.”
“But it’s dreamier. It’s everyone’s fantasy, right?”
“To die with your lover?”
Zoe laughs. “No. To die before you start making lists of all the things about him that drive you crazy.”
“Yeah, imagine the sequel, if it had ended differently,” I reply. “Romeo and Juliet are disowned by their families and move into a trailer park. Romeo grows a mullet and becomes addicted to online poker while Juliet has an affair with Friar Lawrence.”
“Who, it turns out,” Zoe adds, “runs a meth lab in his basement.”
“Totally. Why else would he have known what drug to give her in the first place?” I loop my scarf around my neck as we brace ourselves to walk into the cold.
“Now what?” Zoe asks. “You think it’s too late to grab dinner some . . .” Her voice trails off as we step outside. In the three hours we have been in the theater, the storm has thickened into a blizzard. I cannot see even a foot in front of me, the snow is whirling that fiercely. I start to step into the street, and my shoe sinks into nearly eight inches of accumulation.
“Wow,” I say. “This sort of sucks.”
“Maybe we should wait it out before driving home,” Zoe replies.
A limo driver who’s leaning against his vehicle glances over at us. “Settle in for a nice long wait, then, ladies,” he says. “AccuWeather says we’re getting two feet before this is all over.”
“Sleepover,” Zoe announces. “There are plenty of hotels around—”
“Which cost a fortune—”
“Not if we split the cost of a room.” She shrugs. “Besides. That’s what credit cards are for.” She links her arm through mine and drags me into the wild breath of the storm. On the other side of the street is a CVS. “Toothbrushes, toothpaste, and I need to get some tampons,” she says, as the sliding doors close behind us. “We can get nail polish, too, and curlers, and make each other up and stay up late and talk about boys . . .”
Not gonna happen,I think. But she is right—to drive home in this would be stupid, reckless.
“I have two words for you,” she says, cajoling. “Room service.”
I hesitate. “I pick the pay-per-view movie?”
“Deal.” Zoe holds out her hand to shake.
There is no real reason for me to fight an impromptu hotel stay. I can afford the luxury of a room for one night, or at least justify it to myself. But all the same, as we check in and carry our CVS bags upstairs, my heart is racing. It’s not that I’ve been dishonest to Zoe by not talking about my sexual orientation, but it hasn’t exactly been a topic of discussion, either. Had she asked, I would have told her the truth. And just because I am a lesbian doesn’t mean that I will ravish any female in close proximity, in spite of what homophobes think. Yet there’s an extra wrinkle here: it would be ludicrous to think that a straight woman would not be able to maintain a platonic friendship with a man . . . and yet, if she found herself in this situation, she probably wouldn’t be sharing a room with that male buddy.
When I told my mother, finally, that I was gay, the first thing she said was “But you’re so pretty!” as if the two were mutually exclusive. Then she got quiet and went into the kitchen. A few minutes later she came back into the living room and sat down across from me. “When you go to the Y,” she asked, “do you still use the ladies’ locker room?”
“Of course I do,” I said, exasperated. “I’m not a transsexual, Ma.”
“But Vanessa,” she asked, “when you’re in there . . . do you peek?”
The answer, by the way, is no. I change in a stall, and I spend most of my time in there staring down at the floor. In fact, I probably am more uncomfortable and hyperaware being in there than anyone else would be if she knew the woman in the purple Tyr suit was gay.
But it’s just one more thing I have to worry about that most people never do.
“Oooh,” Zoe says, when she steps into the room. “Swank-o-la!”
It is one of those hotels that is being redone to accommodate the metrosexual businessman, who apparently likes tweedy black comforters, chrome lighting, and margarita mix on the minibar. Zoe opens the curtains and looks down on the Boston Common. Then she takes off her boots and jumps on one of the beds. Finally, she reaches for the CVS bag. “Well,” she says, “I guess I’ll unpack.” She holds out two toothbrushes, one blue and one purple. “Got a preference?”
“Zoe . . . you know I’m a lesbian, right?”
