We were all friends, but Zoe was my
favourite.
She could always be seen stomping the
hallways of the office in her red cape and red velvet shoes, all 5 feet,
clutching a bottle of cranberry juice. The other graduates sneered. None of them had half her character.
She had an unusual variant of the Orphans’s
Conundrum where she knew that she and her sister, rescued from a shelter for
unwanted Taiwanese babies, were utterly wanted. Her mum was edgy and cool, she
liked to rescue abandoned furniture from the streets of Wooolhara on clean up
night and restore it. Her dad was wealthy and quiet, some sort of fabulous elegant geek. I loved the parents as much as I loved Zoe.
At a bbq once, in Centennial Park, the mum
asked me what I was up to. I told her about my relationship with the Married
Partner Dude and how it had become my undoing, was destroying me. I cried and told her how lost I felt.
I don’t even remember what she said but she
gave me a hug and reassured me that these things have a way of working out.
Zoe was so wildly promiscuous that she would
send lists of all the people she was sleeping with and attach pictures, to be sent in a group email to all of her friends, so that we
could keep up and as a point of reference for conversations.
The day she added a category to the list
for their salary was awesome. I had unwittingly forwarded
it to one of my friends as a compliment, because it listed him as “handsome
banker Scott.” He found the commentary “250 base + 250 bonus, I could be a lady
who lunches” to be a turn off.
I liked almost everyone on her list except for
the lunatic young liberal who would send emails to her boss when he was angry
and was so prominently unhinged that someone wrote an article about him entitled
“Biting the hand that feeds you.” The last straw I think was when he started emailing
her boss and calling her boss's mum a deranged bingo wing clad RSL octogenarian.
How it even got to that I will never know.
He used to say to her: “Where else will I
find a Taiwanese orphan who loves Chopin” and I felt the same.
