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to ask if she’d noticed that Jerry Keaton was calling his seminar “The Gay Canon.”
    “You were at that meeting,” she said. “Weren’t you?”
    “I’m going to teach a class called ‘Milton the Marginalized.’ How about ‘Chaucer, the Forgotten Poet’?”
    Zee knew better than to pick a fight, even on someone else’s behalf. She said, “If it makes you feel better, I think he’s got some Shakespeare sonnets on the syllabus.”
    “Haaa!” Cole made a great show of collapsing against her wall. “Shakespeare, that famous queer. The Pansy of Stratford-on-Avon.”
    The second thing was that Doug had begun working harder on the monograph. The very day after she told him something might be happening with Cole, she came home to find him still at the computer at five thirty, still in the boxers and undershirt he’d slept in. He’d forgotten to eat lunch. It almost broke her heart, to see him working this hard on something no one really cared about, something no one but Zee was waiting for. (The book wasn’t for the masses, but for the fifteen people in the world who already knew everything about Parfitt, and the hiring committees that would never read it but would care that he’d written it.) She couldn’t bear if his effort were all for nothing.
    It was funny how much she’d hated Doug when she met him in grad school. He had that lingering, sideways half smile that so often presaged trouble: Here was a man who’d make you feel like the center of the universe, until, just after you’d become hopelessly attached, you realized he looked this way at all women. Besides which he had questionable taste in both shirts and poetry (Edwin Parfitt was a poet her father had once rightly called “miniscule”), and he’d somehow conned all the professors into believing he was the greatest student ever to walk through the program. She invited him to her February spaghetti party along with everyone else, but she’d been rude enough to him over the past six months that she was shocked when he showed up. He held out a bottle of sake, which he told her he’d brought precisely so she couldn’t serve it with spaghetti. “You have to save it for yourself.”
    Much later, as the lingerers helped clean up, his wayward elbow knocked a picture frame off her end table, and although the glass was fine, the frame, made of porcelain, had cracked into quarters. The picture was the one of herself, age five, reading Green Eggs and Ham to her father. She didn’t want him to fix it. “I know you have superglue,” he said. “Don’t lie to me.” And long after everyone else had gone, he sat on the couch holding pieces together until the glue was set and the thing was whole, if spiderwebbed. “She’s not quite seaworthy,” he said. He put it in the middle of the coffee table, a sort of offering.
    It was certainly not his macho insistence on solving her problems that won her over—she did not see herself as a fragile thing that needed fixing—but the fact that he seemed so determined to make her not hate him. It became hard not to root for him. It was another six months before they became romantically involved, but the dots weren’t hard to connect. Was there much distance between rooting for someone and loving him? Was there any difference at all, even now?

13
    F ive weeks in (and a week overdue) Doug was still stuck on the soccer team tryout, so he was going back to chapter two, which he’d saved because it was easiest. This was the plagiarism bit, the part that necessitated the presence of the actual Friends for Life books. He’d borrowed several from the library, and he placed pens across the pages of each to hold them open.
    The first sentence of chapter two was always something like “It seemed the club had been together forever, thought Candy [or Molly, or Melissa] gazing at the faces of her five friends.” Doug started with, “They had so many memories together, these six friends, and as Melissa looked into