Freedom

  “Patty? Aren’t you in Chicago?”

  “I’m home early. Buzz me up.”

  There was a crackling on the intercom, followed by a silence so long that Patty rang the doorbell two more times. Finally Eliza, in Keds and shearling coat, came running down the stairs and out the door. “Hi, hi, hi, hi!” she said. “I can’t believe you’re here!”

  “Why didn’t you buzz me up?” Patty said.

  “I don’t know, I thought I’d come down and see you, things are crazy up there, I thought I’d come down so we can talk.” Eliza was bright-eyed and her hands were fidgeting wildly. “There’s a lot of drugs up there, why don’t we just go somewhere else, it’s so great to see you, I mean, hey, hi! How are you? How was Chicago? How was the luncheon?”

  Patty was frowning. “You’re saying I can’t go up and see my boyfriend?”

  “Well, no, but, no, but—boyfriend? That’s kind of a strong word, don’t you think? I thought he was just Carter. I mean, I know you like him, but—”

  “Who else is up there?”

  “Oh, you know, other people.”

  “Who?”

  “Not somebody you know. Hey, let’s go somewhere else, OK?”

  “Like who, though?”

  “He didn’t think you were coming back till tomorrow. You guys are having dinner tomorrow, right?”

  “I flew back early to see him.”

  “Oh my God, you’re not in love with him, are you? We really need to talk about protecting yourself better, I thought you guys were just having fun, I mean, you literally never used the word ‘boyfriend,’ which I ought to have known about, right? And if you don’t tell me everything, I can’t protect you. You sort of broke a rule, don’t you think?”

  “You haven’t followed my rules, either,” Patty said.

  “Because, I swear to God, this is not what you think it is. I am your friend. But there’s somebody else here who’s definitely not your friend.”

  “A girl?”

  “Look, I’ll make her go away. We’ll get rid of her and then the three of us can party.” Eliza giggled. “He got really, really, really excellent coke for his birthday.”

  “Wait a minute. It’s just the three of you? That’s the party?”

  “It’s so great, it’s so great, you’ve got to try it. Your season’s over, right? We’ll get rid of her and you can come up and party. Or we can go to my place instead, just you and me, if you’ll wait one second I’ll get some drugs and we can go to my place. You’ve got to try it. You won’t understand if you don’t try it.”

  “Leave Carter with somebody else and go do hard drugs with you. That sounds like a real plan.”

  “Oh God, Patty, I’m so sorry. It’s not what you think. He said he was having a party, but then he got the coke and he changed his plan a little bit, and then it turned out he only wanted me here because the other person wouldn’t come over if it was just the two of them.”

  “You could have left,” Patty said.

  “We were already partying, which if you’d try it you’d understand why I didn’t leave. I swear to you that’s the only reason I’m here.”

  The night did not end, as it should have, with a cooling or cessation of Patty’s friendship with Eliza but instead with Patty swearing off Carter and apologizing for not having told Eliza more about her feelings for him, and with Eliza apologizing for not having paid closer attention to her and promising to follow her own rules better and not do any more hard drugs. It’s now clear to the autobiographer that an available twosome and a white anthill of powder on the nightstand would have been exactly Carter’s notion of an outstanding birthday treat for himself. But Eliza was so frantic with remorse and worry that she told her lies with great conviction, and the very next morning, before Patty had had a waking hour to think things over and conclude that her supposed best friend had done something twisted with her supposed boyfriend, Eliza showed up all a-panting at the door of Patty’s quad, wearing her idea of running clothes (a Lena Lovich T-shirt, knee-length boxing shorts, black socks, Keds), to report that she’d just jogged three lengths around the quarter-mile track and to insist that Patty teach her some calisthenics. She was afire with a plan for them to study together every evening, afire with affection for Patty and fear of losing her; and Patty, having opened her eyes painfully to Carter’s nature, went ahead and closed them to Eliza’s.

  Eliza’s full-court press continued until Patty agreed to live in Minneapolis for the summer with her, at which point Eliza became scarcer again and lost interest in fitness. Patty spent much of that hot summer alone in a roachy sublet in Dinkytown, feeling sorry for herself and experiencing low self-esteem. She couldn’t understand why Eliza had been so hell-bent on living with her if she was going to come home most nights at 2 a.m. or not come home at all. Eliza did, it was true, keep suggesting to Patty that she try new drugs or go to shows or find a new person to sleep with, but Patty was temporarily disgusted by sex and permanently by drugs and cigarette smoke. Plus her summer job in the P.E. Department paid barely enough to cover the rent, and she refused to emulate Eliza and beg her parents for cash infusions, and so she felt more and more inadequate and lonely.

  “Why are we friends?” she finally said one night when Eliza was punking herself up for another outing.

  “Because you’re brilliant and beautiful,” Eliza said. “You’re my favorite person in the world.”

  “I’m a jock. I’m boring.”

  “No! You’re Patty Emerson, and we’re living together, and it’s great.”

  These were literally her words, the autobiographer remembers them vividly.

  “But we don’t do anything,” Patty said.

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I’m thinking of going home to my parents’ for a while.”

  “What? Are you kidding? You don’t like them! You’ve got to stay here with me.”

  “But you’re gone practically every night.”

  “Well, let’s start doing more things together.”

  “But you know I don’t want to do those kinds of things.”

  “Well, let’s go to a movie, then. We’ll go to a movie right now. What do you want to see? Do you want to see Days of Heaven?”

  And so began another of Eliza’s full-court presses which lasted just long enough to get Patty over the hump of the summer and make sure she didn’t flee. It was during this third honeymoon of double features and wine spritzers and wearing out the grooves of Blondie albums that Patty began to hear about the musician Richard Katz. “Oh my God,” Eliza said, “I think I might be in love. I think I might have to start being a good girl. He’s so big, it’s like being rolled over by a neutron star. It’s like being erased with a giant eraser.”

  The giant eraser had just graduated from Macalester College, was working demolition, and had formed a punk band called the Traumatics which Eliza was convinced were going to be huge. The only thing confounding her idealization of Katz was his choice of friends. “He lives with this nerdy hanger-on guy Walter,” she said, “this kind of straitlaced groupie, it’s weird, I don’t get it. At first I thought he was Katz’s manager or something, but he’s way too uncool for that. I come out of Katz’s room in the morning and there’s Walter at the kitchen table with this big fruit salad he’s made. He’s reading the New York Times and the first thing he asks me is whether I’ve seen any good theater lately. You know, like, plays. It’s totally Odd Couple. You’ve got to meet Katz to understand how weird it is.”

  Few circumstances have turned out to be more painful to the autobiographer, in the long run, than the dearness of Walter and Richard’s friendship. Superficially, at least, the two of them were an odder couple than even Patty and Eliza. Some genius in the Macalester College housing office had put a heartbreakingly responsible Minnesota country boy in the same freshman dorm room as a self-absorbed, addiction-prone, unreliable, street-smart guitar player from Yonkers, New York. The only thing the housing-office person could have known
for sure they had in common was being financial-aid students. Walter had fair coloration and a stalky build, and though taller than Patty he was nowhere near as tall as Richard, who was 6’4” and heavy-shouldered and as dark-complected as Walter was light. Richard bore a strong resemblance (noticed and remarked on, over the years, by many more people than just Patty) to the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi. He had the same black hair, the same tan pockmarked cheeks, the same satisfied-strongman-reviewing-the-troops-and-rocket-launchers mask of a smile,* and he looked about fifteen years older than his friend. Walter resembled the officious “student manager” that high-school teams sometimes have, the unathletic kid who assists the coaches and wears a jacket and necktie to games and gets to stand on the sideline with a clipboard. Jocks tend to tolerate this kind of manager because he’s invariably a deep student of the game, and this seemed to be one element of the Walter-Richard nexus, because Richard, irritable and unreliable though he was in most respects, was helplessly serious about his music, and Walter had the connoisseurial equipment necessary to be a fan of stuff like Richard’s. Later, as Patty got to know them better, she saw that they were maybe not so different underneath—that both were struggling, albeit in very different ways, to be good people.

  Patty met the eraser on a muggy August Sunday morning when she returned from her run and found him sitting on the living-room sofa, diminishing it with his largeness, while Eliza showered in their unspeakable bathroom. Richard was wearing a black T-shirt and reading a paperback novel with a big V on the cover. His first words to Patty, uttered only after she’d filled a glass with iced tea and was standing there all sweat-soaked, drinking it, were: “And what are you.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “What are you doing here.”

  “I live here,” she said.

  “Right, I see that.” Richard looked her over carefully, piece by piece. It felt to her as if, with each new piece of her that his eyes alit on, she was being further tacked to the wall behind her, so that, when he was done looking over all of her, she had been rendered entirely two-dimensional and fastened to the wall. “Have you seen the scrapbook?” he said.

  “Um. Scrapbook?”

  “I’ll show it to you,” he said. “You’ll be interested.”

  He went into Eliza’s room, came back and handed Patty a three-ring binder, and sat down again with his novel as if he’d forgotten she was there. The binder was the old-fashioned kind with a pale-blue cloth cover, on which the word PATTY was inked in block letters. It contained, as far as Patty could tell, every picture of her ever published in the sports pages of the Minnesota Daily; every postcard she’d ever sent Eliza; every photo strip the two of them had ever squeezed into a booth for; and every flash snapshot of them being stoned on the brownie weekend. The book seemed a little weird and intense to Patty, but mostly it made her feel sad for Eliza—sad and sorry to have questioned how much she really cared about her.

  “She’s an odd little girl,” Richard remarked from the sofa.

  “Where did you find this?” Patty said. “Do you always go snooping in people’s things when you sleep over?”

  He laughed. “J’accuse!”

  “Well, do you?”

  “Cool your jets. It was right behind the bed. In plain sight, as the cops say.”

  The noise of Eliza’s showering had stopped.

  “Go put it back,” Patty said. “Please.”

  “I figured you’d be interested,” Richard said, not stirring from the sofa.

  “Please go put this back where you found it.”

  “I’m getting the sense you don’t have a corresponding scrapbook of your own.”

  “Right now, please.”

  “Very odd little girl,” Richard said, taking the binder from her. “That’s why I asked what your story was.”

  The fakeness of Eliza’s way with men, the steady leakage of giggles, the gushing and the hair-tossing, was something a friend of hers could quickly come to hate. Her desperateness to please Richard became mingled in Patty’s mind with the weirdness of the scrapbook and the extreme neediness it evidenced, and it made her, for the first time, somewhat embarrassed to be Eliza’s friend. Which was odd, since Richard seemed unembarrassed to be sleeping with her, and why should Patty have cared what he thought of their friendship anyway?

  It was almost her last day in the roachpit when she next saw Richard. He was on the sofa again, sitting with his arms folded and tapping his booted right foot heavily and wincing while Eliza stood and played her guitar the only way Patty had ever heard her play it: uncertainly. “Get in the slot,” he said. “Tap your foot.” But Eliza, who was perspiring with concentration, stopped playing altogether as soon as she realized Patty was there.

  “I can’t play in front of her.”

  “Sure you can,” Richard said.

  “Actually she can’t,” Patty said. “I make her nervous.”

  “Interesting. Why is that?”

  “I have no idea,” Patty said.

  “She’s too supportive,” Eliza said. “I can feel her willing me to succeed.”

  “That’s very bad of you,” Richard said to Patty. “You need to will her to fail.”

  “OK,” Patty said. “I want you to fail. Can you do that? You seem to be pretty good at it.”

  Eliza looked at her in surprise. Patty was surprised with herself, too. “Sorry, I’m going in my room now,” she said.

  “First let’s see her fail,” Richard said.

  But Eliza was unstrapping and unplugging.

  “You need to practice with a metronome,” Richard told her. “Do you have a metronome?”

  “This was a really bad idea,” Eliza said.

  “Why don’t you play something?” Patty said to Richard.

  “Some other time,” he said.

  But Patty was recalling the embarrassment she’d felt when he produced the scrapbook. “One song,” she said. “One chord. Play one chord. Eliza says you’re amazing.”

  He shook his head. “Come to a show sometime.”

  “Patty doesn’t go to shows,” Eliza said. “She doesn’t like the smoke.”

  “I’m an athlete,” Patty said.

  “Right, so we’ve seen,” Richard said, giving her a significant look. “Basketball star. What are you—forward? Guard? I have no idea what constitutes tall in a chick.”

  “I’m not considered tall.”

  “And yet you are quite tall.”

  “Yes.”

  “We were just about to leave,” Eliza said, standing up.

  “You look like you could have played basketball,” Patty told Richard.

  “Good way to break a finger.”

  “That’s actually not true,” she said. “It hardly ever happens.”

  This was not an interesting or plot-advancing thing to have said, she sensed it immediately, how Richard didn’t actually give a shit about her playing basketball.

  “Maybe I’ll go to one of your shows,” she said. “When’s the next one?”

  “You can’t go, it’s too smoky for you,” Eliza said unpleasantly.

  “It’s not going to be a problem,” Patty said.

  “Really? That’s news.”

  “Bring earplugs,” Richard said.

  In her room, after she heard them go out, Patty began to cry for reasons she felt too desolate to fathom. The next time she saw Eliza, thirty-six hours later, she apologized for having been such a bitch, but Eliza was in excellent spirits by then and told her not to worry about it, she was thinking about selling her guitar and was happy to take Patty to hear Richard.

  His next show was on a weeknight in September, at a poorly ventilated club called the Longhorn, where the Traumatics were opening for the Buzzcocks. Practically the first person Patty saw when she and Eliza arrived was Carter. He was standing with a headlock on a grotesquely pretty blond girl in a sequined minidress. “Oh shit,” Eliza said. Patty waved bravely to Carter, who flashed his bad teeth and ambled toward her,
a picture of affability, with the sequins in tow. Eliza put her head down and pulled Patty away through a knot of cigarette-puffing male punks and up against the stage. Here they found a fair-haired boy who Patty guessed was Richard’s famous roommate even before Eliza said, in a loud monotone, “Hello Walter how are you.”

  Not knowing Walter yet, Patty had no idea how unusual it was that he returned this greeting with a cold nod rather than a friendly midwestern smile.

  “This is my best friend Patty,” Eliza said to him. “Can she stand here with you for a second while I go backstage?”

  “I think they’re about to emerge,” Walter said.

  “Just for one second,” Eliza said. “Just watch out for her. OK?”

  “Why don’t we all go back there together,” Walter said.

  “No, you need to hold my place here,” Eliza told Patty. “I’ll be right back.”

  Walter watched unhappily as she burrowed off through bodies and disappeared. He didn’t look nearly as nerdy as Eliza had led Patty to expect—he was wearing a V-necked sweater and had an overgrown curly mop of reddish blond hair and looked like what he was, i.e., a first-year law student—but he did stand out among the punks with their mutilated hair and garments, and Patty, who was suddenly self-conscious about her own clothes, which she’d always liked until one minute ago, was grateful for his ordinariness.

  “Thank you for standing here with me,” she said.

  “I think we’ll be standing here for quite a while now,” Walter said.

  “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Nice to meet you, too. You’re the basketball star.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Richard told me about you.” He turned to her. “Do you do a lot of drugs?”

  “No! God. Why?”

  “Because your friend does.”

  Patty didn’t know what to do with her facial expression. “Not around me she doesn’t.”

  “Well, that’s what she’s going backstage for.”

  “OK.”

  “I’m sorry. I know she’s your friend.”