"Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

Chapter 2: Best Friends

Based on her inability to recall her state of consciousness in her first three years at college, the autobiographer suspects she simply didn’t have a state of consciousness. She had the sensation of being awake but in fact she must have been sleepwalking. Otherwise it’s hard to understand how, to take one example, she became intense best friends with a disturbed girl who was basically her stalker.

Some of the fault-although the autobiographer hates to say it-may lie with Big Ten athletics and the artificial world it created for participating students, for boys especially, but also, even in the late 1970s, for girls. Patty went out to Minnesota in July for special jock summer camp followed by special, early, jocks-only freshman orientation, and then she lived in a jock dorm, made exclusively jock friends, ate exclusively at jock tables, cluster-danced at parties with her jock teammates, and was careful never to sign up for a class without plenty of other jocks to sit with and (time permitting) study with. Jocks didn’t absolutely have to live this way, but the majority at Minnesota did, and Patty went even more overboard with Total Jockworld than most, because she could! Because she’d finally escaped from Westchester! “You should go wherever you want,” Joyce had said to Patty, by which she’d meant: it is grotesque and repulsive to attend a mediocre state school like Minnesota when you have great offers from Vanderbilt and Northwestern (which are also more flattering to me). “This is entirely your personal decision, and we will support you in whatever you decide,” Joyce had said, by which she’d meant: don’t blame me and Daddy when you ruin your life with stupid decisions. Joyce’s transparent aversion to Minnesota, along with Minnesota’s distance from New York, was a key factor in Patty’s deciding to go there. Looking back now, the autobiographer sees her younger self as one of those miserable adolescents so angry at her parents that she needed to join a cult where she could be nicer and friendlier and more generous and subservient than she could bring herself to be at home anymore. Her cult just happened to be basketball.

The first of the nonjocks to lure her out of this cult and become important to her was the disturbed girl Eliza, who Patty, of course, initially had no idea was disturbed. Eliza was exactly half pretty. Her head started out gorgeous on top and got steadily worse-looking the lower down you looked. She had wonderfully thick and curly brown hair and amazing huge eyes, and then a cute enough little button nose, but then around her mouth her face got smooshed up and miniature in a disturbing sort of preemie way, and she had very little chin. She was always wearing baggy corduroys that slid down on her hips, and tight short-sleeved shirts that she bought in Boys departments at thrift stores and buttoned only the middle buttons of, and red Keds, and a big avocado-green shearling coat. She smelled like an ashtray but tried not to smoke around Patty unless they were outside. In an irony then invisible to Patty but now plenty visible to the autobiographer, Eliza had a lot in common with Patty’s arty little sisters. She owned a black electric guitar and a dear small amp, but the few times Patty convinced her to play it in her presence Eliza became furious with her, which almost never happened otherwise (at least not at first). She said Patty was making her feel pressured and self-conscious and this was why she kept fucking up after only a few bars of her song. She ordered Patty to not be so obviously listening, but even when Patty turned away and pretended to read a magazine it wasn’t good enough. Eliza swore that the minute Patty was out of the room again she’d be able to play her song perfectly. “But now? Forget it.”

“I’m sorry,” Patty said. “I’m sorry I do that to you.”

“I can play this song amazingly when you’re not listening.”

“I know, I know. I’m sure you can.”

“It’s just a fact. It doesn’t matter if you believe me.”

“But I do believe you!”

“I’m saying,” Eliza said, “it doesn’t matter if you believe me, because my ability to play this song amazingly when you’re not listening is simply an objective fact.”

“Maybe try a different song,” Patty pleaded.

But Eliza was already yanking the plugs out. “Stop. OK? I don’t want your reassurance.”

“Sorry, sorry, sorry,” Patty said.

She’d first seen Eliza in the only class where a jock and a poet were likely to meet, Introductory Earth Science. Patty came and went to this particular huge class with ten other freshwomen jocks, a herd of girls mostly even taller than herself, all wearing maroon Golden Gopher tracksuits or plain gray sweats, everybody’s hair at various stages of damp. There were some smart girls in the herd, including the autobiographer’s lifelong friend Cathy Schmidt who later became a public defender and was once nationally televised on Jeopardy! for two nights, but the overheated lecture hall and those tracksuits and the damp hair and the nearness of other tired jock bodies never failed to give Patty a contact dullness. A contact low.

Eliza liked to sit in the row behind the jocks, directly behind Patty but slouched down so deep in her seat that only her voluminous dark curls were visible. Her first words to Patty were spoken into her ear from behind, at the start of a class. She said, “You’re the best.”

Patty turned to see who was speaking and saw lots of hair. “I’m sorry?”

“I saw you play last night,” the hair said. “You’re brilliant and beautiful.”

“Wow, thank you so much.”

“They need to start giving you more minutes.”

“Funnily enough, ha ha, I have the exact same opinion.”

“You need to demand that they give you more minutes. OK?”

“Right, we’ve got so many great players on the team, though. It’s not my decision.”

“Yeah, but you’re the best,” the hair said.

“Wow, thank you so much for the compliment!” Patty answered brightly, to end things. At the time, she believed that it was because she was selflessly team-spirited that direct personal compliments made her so uncomfortable. The autobiographer now thinks that compliments were like a beverage she was unconsciously smart enough to deny herself even one drop of, because her thirst for them was infinite.

After the lecture ended, she enveloped herself in her fellow jocks and took care not to look back at the person with the hair. She assumed it was just a strange coincidence that an actual fan of hers had sat down right behind her in Earth Science. There were fifty thousand students at the U., but probably less than five hundred of them (not counting former players and friends or family of current players) considered women’s athletic events a viable entertainment option. If you were Eliza and you wanted to sit directly behind the Gophers’ bench (so that Patty, as she came off the court, couldn’t help seeing you and your hair as you bent over a notebook), all you had to do was show up fifteen minutes before game time. And then, after the final buzzer and the ritual low-fiving line, it was the easiest thing in the world to intercept Patty near the locker-room door and hand her a piece of notebook paper and say to her: “Did you ask for more minutes, like I told you to?”

Patty still didn’t know this person’s name, but the person obviously knew hers, because the word PATTY was written on the notebook paper about a hundred times, in crackling cartoon letters with concentric pencil outlines to make them look like shouts echoing in the gym, as if a whole wild crowd were chanting her name, which could not have been further from reality, given that the gym was usually ninety percent empty and Patty was first-year and averaging less than ten minutes a game, i.e., was not exactly a household word. The crackling penciled shouts filled up the entire sheet of paper except for a small sketch of a player dribbling. Patty could tell the player was supposed to be her, because it was wearing her number and because who else would be drawn on a page covered with the word PATTY? Like everything Eliza did (as Patty learned soon enough), the drawing was half super-skilled and half clumsy and bad. The way the player’s body was low to the ground and violently slanting as she made a sharp turn was excellent, but the face and head were like some generic female in a first-aid booklet.

Looking at the piece of paper, Patty had a preview of the falling sensation she would have a few months later after eating hash brownies with Eliza. Something very wrong and creepy but hard to defend herself against.

“Thank you for this drawing,” she said.

“Why aren’t they playing you more?” Eliza said. “You were on the bench practically the whole second half.”

“Once we got the big lead-”

“You’re brilliant and they bench you? I don’t understand that.” Eliza’s curls were thrashing like a willow tree in heavy winds; she was quite exercised.

“Dawn and Cathy and Shawna got some good minutes,” Patty said. “They did great holding the lead.”

“But you’re so much better than them!”

“I should go shower now. Thanks again for the drawing.”

“Maybe not this year, but next year, at the latest, everybody’s going to want a piece of you,” Eliza said. “You’re going to attract attention. You need to start learning how to protect yourself.”

This was so ridiculous that Patty had to stop and set her straight. “Too much attention is not a problem people have in women’s basketball.”

“What about men? Do you know how to protect yourself from men?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, do you have good judgment when it comes to men?”

“Right now I don’t have much time for anything except sports.”

“You don’t seem to understand how amazing you are. And how dangerous that is.”

“I understand I’m good at sports.”

“It’s sort of a miracle you’re not already getting taken advantage of.”

“Well, I don’t drink, which helps a lot.”

“Why don’t you drink?” Eliza pursued immediately.

“Because I can’t when I’m in training. Not even one sip.”

“You’re in training every day of the year?”

“Well, and I had a bad drinking experience in high school, so.”

“What happened-somebody rape you?”

Patty’s face burned and assumed five different expressions all at once. “Wow,” she said.

“Yes? Is that what happened?”

“I’m going to go shower.”

“You see, this is exactly what I’m talking about!” Eliza cried with great excitement. “You don’t know me at all, we’ve been talking for all of two minutes, and you basically just told me you’re a rape survivor. You’re completely unprotected!”

Patty was too alarmed and ashamed, at that moment, to spot the flaws in this logic.

“I can protect myself,” she said. “I’m doing just fine.”

“Sure. OK.” Eliza shrugged. “It’s your safety, not mine.”

The gym echoed with the thunk of heavy switches as banks of lights went out.

“Do you play sports?” Patty asked, to make up for not having been more agreeable.

Eliza looked down at herself. She was wide and blady in the pelvis and somewhat pigeon-toed, with tiny Kedded feet. “Do I look like it?”

“I don’t know. Badminton?”

“I hate gym,” Eliza said, laughing. “I hate all sports.”

Patty laughed, too, in her relief at having got the subject changed, although she was now quite confused.

“I didn’t even ‘throw like a girl’ or ‘run like a girl,’ ” Eliza said. “I refused to run or throw, period. If a ball landed in my hands, I just waited until somebody came and took it away. When I was supposed to run, like, to first base, I would stand there for a second and then maybe walk.”

“God,” Patty said.

“Yeah, I almost didn’t get my diploma because of it,” Eliza said. “The only reason I graduated was that my parents knew the school psychologist. I ended up getting credit for riding a bike every day.”

Patty nodded uncertainly. “You love basketball, though, right?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Eliza said. “Basketball is pretty fascinating.”

“Well, so, you definitely don’t hate sports. It sounds like what you really hate is gym.”

“You’re right. That’s right.”

“Well, so anyway.”

“Yeah, so anyway, are we going to be friends?”

Patty laughed. “If I say yes, I’m just proving your point about how I’m not careful enough with people I barely know.”

“That sounds like a no, then.”

“How about we just wait and see?”

“Good. That’s very careful of you-I like that.”

“You see? You see?” Patty was laughing again already. “I’m more careful than you thought!”

The autobiographer has no doubt that if Patty had been more conscious of herself and paying any halfway decent kind of attention to the world around her, she wouldn’t have been nearly as good at college basketball. Success at sports is the province of the almost empty head. Reaching a vantage point from which she could have seen Eliza for what she was (i.e., disturbed) would have messed with her game. You don’t get to be an 88-percent free-throw shooter by giving deep thought to every little thing.

Eliza turned out not to like any of Patty’s other friends and didn’t even try to hang out with them. She referred to them collectively as “your lesbians” or “the lesbians” although half of them were straight. Patty very quickly came to feel that she lived in two mutually exclusive worlds. There was Total Jockworld, where she spent the vast majority of her time and where she would rather flunk a psychology midterm than skip going to the store and assembling a care package and taking it to a teammate who’d sprained an ankle or was laid up with the flu, and then there was dark little Elizaworld, where she didn’t have to bother trying to be so good. The only point of contact between the worlds was Williams Arena, where Patty, when she sliced through a transitional defense for an easy layup or a no-look pass, experienced an extra little rush of pride and pleasure if Eliza was there watching. Even this point of contact was short-lived, because the more time Eliza spent with Patty the less she seemed to remember how interested in basketball she was.

Patty had always had friends plural, never anything intense. Her heart gladdened when she saw Eliza waiting outside the gym after practice, she knew it was going to be an instructive evening. Eliza took her to movies with subtitles and made her listen very carefully to Patti Smith recordings (“I love that you have the same name as my favorite artist,” she said, disregarding the different spelling and the fact that Patty’s actual legal name was Patrizia, which Joyce had given her to be different and Patty was embarrassed to say aloud) and loaned her books of poetry by Denise Levertov and Frank O’Hara. After the basketball team finished with a record of 8 wins and 11 losses and a first-round tournament elimination (despite Patty’s 14 points and numerous assists), Eliza also taught her to really, really like Paul Masson Chablis.

What Eliza did with the rest of her free time was somewhat hazy. There seemed to be several “men” (i.e., boys) in her life, and she sometimes referred to concerts she’d gone to, but when Patty expressed curiosity about these concerts Eliza said first Patty had to listen to all the mix tapes Eliza made her; and Patty was having some difficulty with these mix tapes. She did like Patti Smith, who seemed to understand how she’d felt in the bathroom on the morning after she was raped, but the Velvet Underground, for example, made her lonely. She once admitted to Eliza that her favorite band was the Eagles, and Eliza said, “There’s nothing wrong with that, the Eagles are great,” but you sure didn’t see any Eagles records in Eliza’s dorm room.

Eliza’s parents were big-deal Twin Cities psychotherapists and lived out in Wayzata, where everybody was rich, and she had an older brother, a junior at Bard College, whom she described as peculiar. When Patty asked, “Peculiar in what way?” Eliza answered, “In every way.” Eliza herself had patched together a high-school education at three different local academies and was enrolled at the U. because her parents refused to subsidize her if she wasn’t in school. She was a B student in a different way than Patty was a B student, which was to get the same B in everything. Eliza got A-pluses in English and Ds in everything else. Her only known interests besides basketball were poetry and pleasure.

Eliza was determined to get Patty to try pot, but Patty was extremely protective of her lungs, and this was how the brownie thing came about. They’d driven out in Eliza’s Volkswagen Bug to the Wayzata house, which was full of African sculpture and empty of the parents, who were at a weekend conference. The idea had been to make a fancy Julia Child dinner, but they drank too much wine to succeed at this and ended up eating crackers and cheese and making the brownies and ingesting what must have been massive amounts of drug. Part of Patty was thinking, for the entire sixteen hours she was messed up, “I am never going to do this again.” She felt like she’d broken training so badly that she would never be able to make it whole again, a very desolate feeling indeed. She was also fearful about Eliza-she suddenly realized that she had some kind of weird crush on Eliza and that it was therefore of paramount importance to sit motionless and contain herself and not discover that she was bisexual. Eliza kept asking her how she was, and she kept answering, “I am just fine, thank you,” which struck them as hilarious every time. Listening to the Velvet Underground, Patty understood the group much better, they were a very dirty musical group, and their dirtiness was comfortingly similar to how she was feeling out there in Wayzata, surrounded by African masks. It was a relief to realize, as she became less stoned, that even while very stoned she’d managed to contain herself and Eliza hadn’t touched her: that nothing lesbian was ever going to happen.

Patty was curious about Eliza’s parents and wanted to stick around the house and meet them, but Eliza was adamant about this being a very bad idea. “They’re the love of each other’s lives,” she said. “They do everything together. They have matching offices in the same suite, and they coauthor all their papers and books, and they do joint presentations at conferences, and they can never ever talk about their work at home, because of patient confidentiality. They even have a tandem bicycle.”

“So?”

“So they’re strange and you’re not going to like them, and then you’re not going to like me.”

“My parents aren’t so great, either,” Patty said.

“Trust me, this is different. I know what I’m talking about.”

Driving back into the city in the Bug, with the warmthless Minnesota spring sun behind them, they had their first sort-of fight.

“You have to stay here this summer,” Eliza said. “You can’t go away.”

“That’s not very realistic,” Patty said. “I’m supposed to work in my dad’s office and be in Gettysburg in July.”

“Why can’t you stay here and go to your camp from here? We can get jobs and you can go to the gym every day.”

“I have to go home.”

“But why? You hate it there.”

“If I stay here I’ll drink wine every night.”

“No, you won’t. We’ll have strict rules. We’ll have whatever rules you like.”

“I’ll be back in the fall.”

“Can we live together then?”

“No, I already promised Cathy I’d be in her quad.”

“You can tell her your plans changed.”

“I can’t do that.”

“This is crazy! I hardly ever see you!”

“I see you more than practically anybody. I love seeing you.”

“Then why won’t you stay here this summer? Don’t you trust me?”

“Why wouldn’t I trust you?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t figure out why you’d rather work for your dad. He did not take care of you, he did not protect you, and I will. He doesn’t have your best interests at heart, and I do.”

It was true that Patty’s spirits sagged at the thought of going home, but it seemed necessary to punish herself for eating hash brownies. Her dad had also been making an effort with her, sending her actual handwritten letters (“We miss you on the tennis court”) and offering her the use of her grandmother’s old car, which he didn’t think her grandmother ought to be driving anymore. After a year away, she was feeling remorseful about having been so cold to him. Maybe she’d made a mistake? And so she went home for the summer and found that nothing had changed and she had not made a mistake. She watched TV till midnight, got up at seven every morning and ran five miles, and spent her days highlighting names in legal documents and looking forward to the day’s mail, which more often than not contained a long typewritten letter from Eliza, saying how much she missed her, and telling stories about her “lecherous” boss at the revival-house movie theater where she was working in the ticket booth, and exhorting her to write back immediately, which Patty did her best to do, using old letterhead stationery and the Selectric in her dad’s mothball-smelling office.

In one letter Eliza wrote, I think we need to make rules for each other for protection and self-improvement. Patty was skeptical about this but wrote back with three rules for her friend. No smoking before dinnertime. Get exercise every day and develop athletic ability. And Attend all lectures and do all homework for ALL classes (not just English). No doubt she should have been disturbed by how different Eliza’s rules for her turned out to be-Drink only on Saturday night and only in Eliza’s presence; No going to mixed parties except accompanied by Eliza; and Tell Eliza EVERYTHING-but something was wrong with her judgment and she instead felt excited to have such an intense best friend. Among other things, having this friend gave Patty armor and ammunition against her middle sister.

“So, how’s life in Minn-e-soooo-tah?” a typical encounter with the sister began. “Have you been eating lots of corn? Have you seen Babe the Blue Ox!? Have you been to Brainerd?”

You might think that Patty, being a trained competitor and three and a half years older than the sister (though only two years ahead of her in school), would have developed ways of handling the sister’s demeaning silliness. But there was something congenitally undefended about Patty’s heart-she never ceased to be shocked by the sister’s lack of sisterliness. The sister also really was Creative and therefore skilled at coming up with unexpected ways to render Patty speechless.

“Why do you always talk to me in that weird voice?” was Patty’s current best defense.

“I was just asking you about life in good old Minn-e-soooo-tah.”

“You cackle, is what you do. It’s like a cackle.”

This was met with a glittery-eyed silence. Then: “It’s the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes!”

“Please just go away.”

“Do you have a boyfriend out there?”

“No.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No. Although I did make a really great friend.”

“You mean the one who’s sending you all the letters? Is she a jock?”

“No. She’s a poet.”

“Wow.” The sister seemed a tiny bit interested. “What’s her name?”

“Eliza.”

“Eliza Doolittle. She sure does write an awful lot of letters. Are you positive she’s not your girlfriend?”

“She’s a writer, OK? A really interesting writer.”

“One hears whispers from the locker room, is all. The fungus that dare not speak its name.”

“You’re so disgusting,” Patty said. “She has like three different boyfriends, she’s very cool.”

“Brainerd, Minn-e-soooo-tah,” was the sister’s reply. “You have to send me a postcard of Babe the Blue Ox from Brainerd.” She went away singing “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” with much vibrato.

The following fall, back at school, Patty met the boy named Carter who became, for want of a better word, her first boyfriend. It now seems to the autobiographer anything but accidental that she met him immediately after she’d obeyed Eliza’s third rule and told her that a guy she knew from the gym, a sophomore from the wrestling team, had asked her out to dinner. Eliza had wanted to meet the wrestler first, but there were limits even to Patty’s agreeability. “He seems like a really nice guy,” she said.

“I’m sorry, but you’re still on probation guywise,” Eliza said. “You thought the person who raped you was a nice guy.”

“I’m not sure I actually formed that particular thought. I was just excited he was interested in me.”

“Well, and now here’s somebody else who’s interested in you.”

“Yes, but I’m sober.”

They’d compromised by agreeing that Patty would go to Eliza’s off-campus room (her reward from her parents for having worked a summer job) directly after dinner, and that if she wasn’t there by ten o’clock then Eliza would come looking for her. When she got to the off-campus house, around nine-thirty, after a none too scintillating dinner, she found Eliza in her top-floor room with the boy named Carter. They were at opposite ends of her sofa, with their stockinged feet sole to sole on the center cushion, and were pushing each other’s pedals in what might or might not have been a sister-and-brotherly way. The new DEVO album was playing on Eliza’s stereo.

Patty faltered in the doorway. “Maybe I should leave the two of you alone?”

“Oh God, no no no no no, we want you here,” Eliza cried. “Carter and I are ancient history, aren’t we?”

“Very ancient,” Carter said with dignity and, Patty thought later, mild irritation. He swung his feet down onto the floor.

“An extinct volcano,” Eliza said as she leaped up to make introductions. Patty had never seen her friend with a boy before, and she was struck by how altered her personality was-her face was flushed, she stumbled over words and steadily emitted somewhat artificial giggles. It seemed to have slipped her mind that Patty had come over to be debriefed about her dinner. Everything was about Carter, a friend from one of her high schools who was taking time off from college and working at a bookstore and going to shows. Carter had extremely straight and interestingly tinted dark hair (henna, it turned out), beautiful long-lashed eyes (mascara, it turned out), and no notable physical flaws except for his teeth, which were jumbled and strangely small and pointed (basic middle-class child maintenance such as orthodontia had fallen through the cracks of his parents’ bitter divorce, it turned out). Patty immediately liked that he didn’t seem self-conscious about his teeth. She was setting about making a good impression on him, trying to prove herself worthy of being Eliza’s friend, when Eliza stuck a huge goblet of wine in her face.

“No, thank you,” Patty said.

“But it’s Saturday night,” Eliza said.

Patty wanted to point out that the rules did not oblige her to drink on Saturday, but in Carter’s presence she got an objective glimpse of how odd these rules of Eliza’s were, and how odd it was, for that matter, that she had to report to Eliza on her dinner with the wrestler. And so she changed her mind and drank the wine and then another enormous gobletful and felt warm and excellent. The autobiographer is mindful of how dull it is to read about someone else’s drinking, but sometimes it’s pertinent to the story. When Carter got up to leave, around midnight, he offered Patty a ride back to her dorm, and at the door of her building he asked if he could kiss her good night (“It’s OK,” she specifically thought, “he’s a friend of Eliza’s”), and after they’d made out for a while, standing in the cold October air, he asked if he could see her the next day, and she thought, “Wow, this guy moves fast.”

To give credit where credit is due: that winter was the best athletic season of her life. She had no health issues, and Coach Treadwell, after giving her a tough lecture about being less unselfish and more of a leader, started her at guard in every single game. Patty herself was amazed at how slow-motion the bigger opposing players suddenly were, how easy it was to just reach out and steal the ball from them, and how many of her jump shots went in, game after game. Even when she was being double-teamed, which happened more and more often, she felt a special private connection with the basket, always knowing exactly where it was and always trusting that she was its favorite player on the floor, the best at feeding its circular mouth. Even off the court she existed in the zone, which felt like a kind of preoccupied pressure behind her eyebrows, an alert drowsiness or focused dumbness that persisted no matter what she was doing. She slept wonderfully that whole winter and never quite woke up. Even when she was elbowed in the head, or mobbed at the buzzer by happy teammates, she hardly felt it.

And her thing with Carter was part of this. Carter was perfectly uninterested in sports and appeared not to mind that, during peak weeks, she had no more than a few hours total for him, sometimes just enough to have sex in his apartment and run back to campus. In certain respects, even now, this seems to the autobiographer an ideal relationship, though admittedly less ideal when she allows herself a realistic guess about how many other girls Carter was having sex with during the six months Patty thought of him as her boyfriend. Those six months were the first of the two indisputably happy periods in Patty’s life, when everything just clicked. She loved Carter’s uncorrected teeth, his genuine humility, his skillful petting, his patience with her. He had many sterling qualities, Carter did! Whether he was giving her some excruciatingly gentle technical pointer about sex or confessing to his utter lack of career plans (“I’m probably best qualified to be some kind of quiet blackmailer”), his voice was always soft and swallowed and self-deprecating-poor corrupt Carter did not think well of himself as a member of the human race.

Patty herself continued to think well of him, hazardously well, until the Saturday night in April when she came back early from Chicago, where she and Coach Treadwell had flown for the all-American luncheon and award ceremony (Patty had been named second-team at guard), to surprise Carter at the party he was having for his birthday. From the street, she could see lights on in his apartment, but she had to ring his bell four times, and the voice that finally answered on the intercom was Eliza’s.

“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, [1] 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.”

“No, it’s interesting to know that.”

“She seems to be very well funded.”

“Yeah, she gets it from her parents.”

“Right, the parents.”

Walter seemed so preoccupied with Eliza’s disappearance that Patty fell silent. She was feeling morbidly competitive again. She was barely even aware yet of being interested in Richard, and still it struck her as unfair that Eliza might be using more than just herself, her native half-pretty self-that she might be using parental resources-to hold Richard’s attention and buy access to him. How dumb about life Patty was! How far behind other people! And how ugly everything on the stage looked! The naked cords, and the cold chrome of the drums, and the utilitarian mikes, and the kidnapper’s duct tape, and the cannonlike spotlights: it all looked so hard core.

“Do you go to a lot of shows?” Walter said.

“No, never. Once.”

“Did you bring some earplugs?”

“No. Do I need them?”

“Richard’s very loud. You can use mine. They’re almost new.”

From his shirt pocket he produced a baggie containing two whitish foam-rubber larvae. Patty looked down at them and did her best to smile nicely. “No, thank you,” she said.

“I’m a very clean person,” he said earnestly. “There’s no health risk.”

“But then you won’t have any for yourself.”

“I’ll tear them in half. You’ll want to have something for protection.”

Patty watched him carefully divide the earplugs. “Maybe I’ll just hold them in my hand and wait and see if I need them,” she said.

They stood there for fifteen minutes. Eliza finally came slithering and wiggling back and looking radiant just as the houselights dimmed and the audience surged against the stage. The first thing Patty did was drop the earplugs. There was altogether a lot more jostling than the situation seemed to call for. A fat person in leather barged into her back and knocked her against the stage. Eliza was already tossing her hair and hopping in anticipation, and so it fell to Walter to push the fat guy back and give Patty room to stand up straight.

The Traumatics who came running out onto that stage consisted of Richard, his lifelong bass player Herrera, and two skinny boys who looked barely out of high school. Richard was more of a showman then than he came to be later, when it seemed clear that he was never going to be a star and so it was better to be an anti-star. He bounced on his toes, did lurching little half pirouettes with his hand on the neck of his guitar, and so forth. He informed the audience that his band was going to play every song it knew, and that this would take twenty-five minutes. Then he and the band went totally haywire, churning out a vicious assault of noise that Patty couldn’t hear any sort of beat in. The music was like food too hot to have any taste, but the lack of beat or melody didn’t stop the central knot of male punks from pogoing up and down and shoulder-checking each other and stomping at every available female ankle. Trying to stay out of their way, Patty got separated from both Walter and Eliza. The noise was just unbearable. Richard and two other Traumatics were screaming into their microphones, I hate sunshine! I hate sunshine!, and Patty, who rather liked sunshine, brought her basketball skills to bear on making an immediate escape. She drove into the crowd with her elbows high and emerged from the scrum to find herself face-to-face with Carter and his glittery girl and kept right on moving until she was standing on the sidewalk in warm and fresh September air, under a Minnesota sky that astonishingly still had twilight in it.

She lingered at the door of the Longhorn, watching Buzzcocks fans arrive late and waiting to see if Eliza would come looking for her. But it was Walter, not Eliza, who came looking.

“I’m fine,” she told him. “This just turned out not to be my cup of tea.”

“Can I take you home?”

“No, you should go back. You could tell Eliza I’m getting home by myself, so she doesn’t worry.”

“She’s not looking very worried. Let me take you home.”

Patty said no, Walter insisted, she insisted no, he insisted yes. Then she realized he didn’t have a car and was offering to ride the bus with her, and she insisted no all over again, and he insisted yes. He much later said that he’d already been falling for her while they stood at the bus stop, but no equivalent symphony could be heard in Patty’s head. She was feeling guilty about abandoning Eliza and regretting that she’d dropped the earplugs and hadn’t stayed to see more of Richard.

“I feel like I sort of failed a test there,” she said.

“Do you even like this kind of music?”

“I like Blondie. I like Patti Smith. I guess basically no, I don’t like this kind of music.”

“So is it permissible to ask why you came?”

“Well, Richard invited me.”

Walter nodded as if this had private meaning for him.

“Is Richard a nice person?” Patty asked.

“Extremely!” Walter said. “I mean, it all depends. You know, his mom ran away when he was little, and became a religious nut. His dad was a postal worker and a drinker who got lung cancer when Richard was in high school. Richard took care of him until he died. He’s a very loyal person, although maybe not so much with women. He’s actually not that nice to women, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Patty had already intuited this and for some reason did not feel put off by the news of it.

“And what about you?” Walter said.

“What about me?”

“Are you a nice person? You seem like it. And yet…”

“And yet?”

“I hate your friend!” he burst out. “I don’t think she’s a good person. Actually, I think she’s quite horrible. She’s a liar and she’s mean.”

“Well, she’s my best friend,” Patty said huffily. “She’s not horrible to me. Maybe you guys just got off on the wrong foot.”

“Does she always take you to places and leave you standing there while she does coke with somebody else?”

“No, as a matter of fact, that’s never happened before.”

Walter said nothing, just stood stewing in his dislike. No bus was in sight.

“Sometimes it makes me feel really, really good, how into me she is,” Patty said after a while. “A lot of the time she’s not. But when she is…”

“I can’t imagine it’s hard to find people who are into you,” Walter said.

She shook her head. “There’s something wrong with me. I love all my other friends, but I feel like there’s always a wall between us. Like they’re all one kind of person and I’m another kind of person. More competitive and selfish. Less good, basically. Somehow I always end up feeling like I’m pretending when I’m around them. I don’t have to pretend anything with Eliza. I can just be myself and still be better than her. I mean, I’m not dumb. I can see she’s a fucked-up person. But some part of me loves being around her. Do you sometimes feel like that with Richard?”

“No,” Walter said. “He’s actually very unpleasant to be around, a lot of the time. There’s just something I loved about him at very first sight, when we were freshmen. He’s totally dedicated to his music, but he’s also intellectually curious. I admire that.”

“That’s because you’re probably a genuinely nice person,” Patty said. “You love him for himself, not for how he makes you feel. That’s probably the difference between you and me.”

“But you seem like a genuinely nice person!” Walter said.

Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter’s version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn’t right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

When they finally got back to campus, that first night, Patty realized she’d been talking about herself for an hour without noticing that Walter was only asking questions, not answering them. The idea of trying to be nice in return and take an interest in him now seemed simply tiring, because she wasn’t attracted to him.

“Can I call you sometime?” he said at the door of her dorm.

She explained that she wasn’t going to be very social in the next months, due to training. “But it was incredibly sweet of you to take me home,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Do you like theater? I have some friends I go to theater with. It wouldn’t have to be a date or anything.”

“I’m just so busy.”

“This is a great city for theater,” he persisted. “I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

Oh Walter: did he know that the most intriguing thing about him, in the months when Patty was getting to know him, was that he was Richard Katz’s friend? Did he notice how, every time Patty saw him, she contrived to find nonchalant ways to lead the conversation around to Richard? Did he have any suspicion, that first night, when she agreed to let him call her, that she was thinking of Richard?

Inside, upstairs, she found a phone message from Eliza on her door. She sat in her room with her eyes watering from the smoke in her hair and clothes until Eliza called again on the hall telephone, with club noise in the background, and upbraided her for scaring the shit out of her by disappearing.

“You were the one who disappeared,” Patty said.

“I was just saying hi to Richard.”

“You were gone like half an hour.”

“What happened to Walter?” Eliza said. “Did he leave with you?”

“He took me home.”

“Ew, gross. Did he tell you how much he hates me? I think he’s really jealous of me. I think he’s got some kind of thing for Richard. Maybe a gay thing.”

Patty looked up and down the hallway to make sure nobody was listening. “Are you the one who got the drugs for Carter on his birthday?”

“What? I can’t hear you.”

“Were you the one who got that stuff that you and Carter were doing on his birthday?”

“I can’t hear you!”

“THAT COKE ON CARTER’S BIRTHDAY. DID YOU BRING HIM THAT?”

“No! God! Is that why you left? Is that what you’re upset about? Is that what Walter told you?”

Patty, jaw trembling, hung up the phone and went and showered for an hour.

There ensued yet another press from Eliza, but this one was halfhearted because she was pursuing Richard now as well. When Walter made good on his threat to call Patty, she found herself inclined to see him, both for his connection to Richard and for the frisson of being disloyal to Eliza. Walter was too tactful to bring up Eliza again, but Patty was always aware of his opinion of her friend, and some virtuous part of her enjoyed getting out and doing something cultural instead of drinking wine spritzers and listening to the same records over and over. She ended up seeing two plays and a movie with Walter that fall. Once her season started, she also saw him sitting by himself in the stands, red-faced, enjoying himself, and waving whenever she looked his way. He took to calling her the day after games to rave about her performance and display the kind of nuanced understanding of strategy which Eliza had never even bothered to try to fake. If he didn’t reach her and had to leave a message, Patty had the additional frisson of calling him back and hoping she might talk to Richard instead, but Richard, alas, seemed never to be home when Walter wasn’t.

In the tiny gaps between the blocks of time she spent answering Walter’s questions, she managed to learn that he came from Hibbing, Minnesota, and that he was helping pay for law school by working part-time as a rough carpenter for the same contractor who employed Richard as a laborer, and that he had to get up at four every morning to do his studying. He always started yawning around 9 p.m., which Patty, with her own busy schedule, appreciated when she went out with him. They were joined, as he had promised, by three female friends of his from high school and college, three intelligent and creative girls whose weight problems and wide-strapped dresses would have provoked acid commentary from Eliza had she ever met them. It was from this adoring troika that Patty began to learn how miraculously worthy Walter was.

According to his friends, Walter had grown up living in cramped quarters behind the office of a motel called the Whispering Pines, with an alcoholic father, an older brother who regularly beat him up, a younger brother who studiously copied the older brother’s ridicule of him, and a mother whose physical handicaps and low morale so impaired her performance as the motel’s housekeeper and night manager that during high season, in the summer, Walter often cleaned rooms all afternoon and then checked in late arrivals while his father was drinking with his VFW buddies and his mother slept. This was in addition to his regular family job of helping his dad maintain the physical plant, doing everything from sealing the parking lot to snaking drains to repairing the boiler. His dad depended on his help, and Walter provided it in perennial hope of winning his dad’s approval, which his friends said was impossible, however, because Walter was too sensitive and intellectual and not enough into hunting and trucks and beer (which the brothers were). Despite working what amounted to a full-time year-round unpaid job, Walter had also managed to star in school plays and musicals, inspire lifelong devotion in numerous childhood friends, learn cooking and basic sewing from his mother, pursue his interest in nature (tropical fish; ant farms; emergency care for orphaned nestlings; flower pressing), and graduate valedictorian. He got an Ivy League scholarship offer but instead went to Macalester, close enough to Hibbing to take a bus up on weekends and help his mom combat the motel’s encroaching decay (the dad apparently now had emphysema and was useless). Walter had dreamed of being a film director or even an actor but instead was studying law at the U. because, as he reportedly had put it, “Somebody in the family needs to have an actual income.”

Perversely-since she wasn’t attracted to Walter-Patty felt competitive and vaguely offended by the presence of other girls on what could have been dates, and she was gratified to notice that it was she, not they, who made his eyes glow and his unstoppable blush come out. She did like to be the star, Patty did. Under pretty much all circumstances. At the last play they saw, in December at the Guthrie, Walter arrived just before curtain time, all snow-covered, with paperback Christmas presents for the other girls and, for Patty, an enormous poinsettia that he’d carried on the bus and through slushy streets and had difficulty checking at the coat counter. It was clear to everyone, even to Patty, that giving the other girls interesting books while giving her a plant was intended as the opposite of disrespectful. The fact that Walter wasn’t investing his enthusiasm in some slimmer version of his nice, adoring friends, but rather in Patty, who applied her intelligence and creativity mainly to thinking up newly nonchalant-seeming ways of mentioning Richard Katz, was mystifying and alarming but also, undeniably, flattering. After the show, Walter carried the poinsettia all the way back to her dorm for her, on the bus and through further slush. The card attached to it, which she opened in her room, said For Patty, with great affection, from her admiring fan.

It was right around then that Richard got around to dumping Eliza. He was apparently quite the brutal dumper. Eliza was beside herself when she called Patty with the news, wailing that “the faggot” had turned Richard against her, that Richard wasn’t giving her a chance, and that Patty had to help her and arrange a meeting with him, he refused to speak to her or open the door of his apartment or-

“I’ve got finals,” Patty said coolly.

“You can go over there and I’ll go with you,” Eliza said. “I just need to see him and explain.”

“Explain what?”

“That he has to give me a chance! That I deserve a hearing!”

“Walter isn’t gay,” Patty said. “That’s just something you made up in your head.”

“Oh my God, he’s turned you against me, too!”

“No,” Patty said. “That’s not how it is.”

“I’m coming over now and we can make a plan.”

“I’ve got my history final in the morning. I need to study.”

Patty now learned that Eliza had stopped going to classes six weeks earlier, because she was so into Richard. He’d done this to her, she’d given up everything for him, and now he’d hung her out to dry and she had to keep her parents from finding out that she was failing everything, she was coming over to Patty’s dorm now and Patty had to stay right there and wait for her, so they could make a plan.

“I’m really tired,” Patty said. “I have to study and then sleep.”

“I can’t believe it! He’s turned you both against me! My two favorite people in the world!”

Patty managed to get off the phone, hurried to the library, and stayed there until it closed. She was certain that Eliza would be waiting outside her dorm, smoking cigarettes and determined to keep her awake half the night. She dreaded paying these wages of friendship but was also resigned to it, and so it was strangely disappointing to return to her dorm and see no trace of Eliza. She almost felt like calling her, but her relief and her tiredness outweighed her guilt.

Three days went by without word from Eliza. The night before Patty left for Christmas vacation, she finally called Eliza’s number to make sure everything was OK, but the phone rang and rang. She flew home to Westchester in a cloud of guilt and worry that grew thicker with each of her failed attempts, from the phone in her parents’ kitchen, to make contact with her friend. On Christmas Eve she went so far as to call the Whispering Pines Motel in Hibbing, Minnesota.

“This is a great Christmas present!” Walter said. “Hearing from you.”

“Oh, well, thank you. I’m actually calling about Eliza. She’s sort of disappeared.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Walter said. “Richard and I finally had to unplug our phone.”

“When was that?”

“Two days ago.”

“Oh, well, that’s a relief.”

Patty stayed talking to Walter, answering his many questions, describing her siblings’ mad Yuletide acquisitiveness, and her family’s annual humiliating reminders of how amusingly old she’d been before she stopped believing in Santa Claus, and her father’s bizarro sexual and scatological repartee with her middle sister, and the middle sister’s “complaints” about how unchallenging her freshman course work at Yale was, and her mother’s second-guessing of her decision, twenty years earlier, to stop celebrating Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays. “And how are things with you?” Patty asked Walter after half an hour.

“Fine,” he said. “My mom and I are baking. Richard’s playing checkers with my dad.”

“That sounds nice. I wish I were there.”

“I wish you were, too. We could go snowshoeing.”

“That sounds really nice.”

It genuinely did, and Patty could no longer tell whether it was Richard’s presence that made Walter appealing or whether he might be appealing for his own sake-for his ability to make whatever place he was in seem like a homey place to be.

The dreadful call from Eliza came on Christmas night. Patty answered it on the extension in the basement, where she was watching an NBA game by herself. Before she could even apologize, Eliza herself apologized for her silence and said that she’d been busy seeing doctors. “They say I have leukemia,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m starting treatments after New Year’s. My parents are the only other ones who know, and you can’t tell anyone. You especially can’t tell Richard. Will you swear you won’t tell anyone?”

Patty’s cloud of guilt and worry now condensed into a storm of sentiment. She wept and wept and asked Eliza if she was sure, if the doctors were sure. Eliza explained that she’d been feeling increasingly draggy as the fall went on, but she hadn’t wanted to tell anyone, because she was afraid Richard would dump her if it turned out she had mono, but finally she’d felt so crappy that she went to see a doctor, and the verdict had come back two days earlier: leukemia.

“Is it the bad kind?”

“They’re all bad.”

“But the kind you can get better from?”

“There’s a good chance the treatments will help,” Eliza said. “I’ll know more in a week.”

“I’ll come back early. I can stay with you.”

But Eliza, oddly enough, no longer wanted Patty staying with her.

Regarding the Santa Claus business: the autobiographer has no sympathy with lying parents, and yet there are degrees to this. There are lies you tell a person who’s being given a surprise party, lies told in a spirit of fun, and then there are lies you tell a person to make them look foolish for believing them. One Christmas, as a teenager, Patty became so upset about being teased for her unnaturally long-lived childhood belief in Santa (which had persisted even after two younger siblings lost it) that she refused to leave her room for Christmas dinner. Her dad, coming in to plead with her, for once stopped smiling and told her seriously that the family had preserved her illusions because her innocence was beautiful and they specially loved her for it. This was both a welcome thing to hear and obvious bullshit belied by the pleasure everybody took in teasing her. Patty believed that parents have a duty to teach their children how to recognize reality when they see it.

Suffice it to say that Patty, in her many winter weeks of playing Florence Nightingale to Eliza-trudging through a blizzard to bring her soup, cleaning her kitchen and bathroom, staying up late with her and watching TV when she should have been sleeping before games, sometimes falling asleep with her arms around her emaciated friend, submitting to extreme endearments (“You’re my darling angel,” “Seeing your face is like being in heaven,” etc., etc.), and refusing, all the while, to return Walter’s phone calls and explain why she didn’t have time to hang out with him anymore-failed to notice any number of red flags. No, Eliza said, this particular chemotherapy wasn’t the kind that made people’s hair fall out. And, no, it wasn’t possible to schedule treatments at times when Patty was available to take her home from the clinic. And, no, she didn’t want to give up her apartment and stay with her parents, and, yes, the parents came to visit all the time, it was just coincidence that Patty never saw them, and, no, it was not unusual for cancer patients to give themselves anti-emetics with a hypodermic needle such as the one Patty noticed on the floor underneath Eliza’s nightstand.

Arguably the biggest red flag was the way she, Patty, avoided Walter. She saw him at two games in January and spoke to him briefly, but he missed a bunch of games after that, and her conscious reason for not returning his many later phone messages was that she was embarrassed to admit how much of Eliza she was seeing. But why should it have been embarrassing to be caring for a friend stricken with cancer? And likewise: how hard would it have been, when she was in fifth grade, to open her ears to her schoolmates’ cynicism regarding Santa Claus, if she’d had the least bit of interest in learning the truth? She threw away the big poinsettia plant even though it still had life in it.

Walter finally caught up with her at the end of February, late on the snowy day of the Gophers’ big game against UCLA, its highest-ranked opponent of the season. Patty was already ill-disposed toward the world that day, owing to a morning phone conversation with her mother, whose birthday it was. Patty had resolved not to babble about her own life and discover yet again that Joyce wasn’t listening and didn’t give a shit about the ranking of her team’s opponent, but she hadn’t even had a chance to exercise this self-restraint, because Joyce was so excited about Patty’s middle sister, who had tried out for the lead role in an Off Broadway revival of The Member of the Wedding at her Yale professor’s special urging and had landed the part of understudy, which was apparently a huge deal that might result in the sister’s taking time off from Yale and living at home and pursuing drama full-time; and Joyce had been in raptures.

When Patty glimpsed Walter rounding the bleak brick corner of Wilson Library, she turned and hurried away, but he came running after her. Snow had collected on his big fur hat; his face was as red as a navigational beacon. Although he tried to smile and be friendly, his voice was shaking when he asked Patty whether she’d gotten any of his phone messages.

“I’ve just been so busy,” she said. “I’m really sorry I didn’t call you back.”

“Is it something I said? Did I somehow offend you?”

He was hurt and angry and she hated it.

“No, no, not at all,” she said.

“I would have called even more except I didn’t want to keep bothering you.”

“Just really, really busy,” she murmured as the snow fell.

“The person who answers your phone started sounding really annoyed with me, because I kept leaving the same message.”

“Well, her room’s right next to the phone, so. You can understand that. She takes a lot of messages.”

“I don’t understand,” Walter said, nearly crying. “Do you want me to leave you alone? Is that it?”

She hated scenes like this, she hated them.

“I’m truly just very busy,” she said. “And I actually have a big game tonight, so.”

“No,” Walter said, “there’s something wrong. What is it? You look so unhappy!”

She didn’t want to mention the conversation with her mother, because she was trying to get her head into a game zone and it was best not to dwell on these things. But Walter so desperately insisted on an explanation-insisted in a way that went beyond his own feelings, insisted almost for the sake of justice-that she felt she had to say something.

“Look,” she said, “you have to swear not to tell Richard,” although she realized, even as she said it, that she’d never quite understood this prohibition, “but Eliza has leukemia. It’s really terrible.”

To her surprise, Walter laughed. “That doesn’t seem likely.”

“Well, it’s true,” she said. “Whether or not it seems likely to you.”

“OK. And is she still doing heroin?”

A fact she’d seldom paid attention to before-that he was two years older than she was-suddenly made its presence felt.

“She has leukemia,” Patty said. “I don’t know anything about heroin.”

“Even Richard knows enough not to do that stuff. Which, believe me, is saying something.”

“I don’t know anything about it.”

Walter nodded and smiled. “Then you really are a sweet person.”

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “But I’ve got to go eat now and get ready for the game.”

“I can’t see you play tonight,” he said as she was turning to leave. “I wanted to, but Harry Blackmun’s speaking. I have to go to that.”

She turned back to him in irritation. “Not a problem.”

“He’s on the Supreme Court. He wrote Roe v. Wade.”

“I know that,” she said. “My mom practically has a shrine to him that she burns incense at. You don’t have to tell me who Harry Blackmun is.”

“Right. Sorry.”

The snow swirled between them.

“Right, so, I won’t bother you anymore,” Walter said. “I’m sorry about Eliza. I hope she’s OK.”

The autobiographer blames nobody but herself-not Eliza, not Joyce, not Walter-for what happened next. Like every player, she had suffered through plenty of cold shooting streaks and played her share of subpar games, but even on her worst nights she’d felt ensconced in something larger-in the team, in sportsmanship, in the idea that athletics mattered-and had drawn true comfort from the encouraging cries of her teammate sisters and their jinx-breaking raillery at halftime, the variations on themes of bricks and butterfingers, the stock phrases that she herself had yelled a thousand times before. She had always wanted the ball, because the ball had always saved her, the ball was what she knew for sure she had in life, the ball had been her loyal companion in her endless girlhood summers. And all the repetitious activities that people do in church which seem vapid or phony to nonbelievers-the low fives after every single basket, the lovecluster after every drained free throw, the high fives for every teammate coming off the court, the endless shriekings of “Way to go SHAWNA!” and “Way to play smart CATHY!” and “SWISH, WOO HOO, WOO HOO!”-had become such second nature to her and made such perfect sense, as necessary aids to unthinking high performance, that it would no sooner have occurred to her to be embarrassed by them than by the fact that running up and down the court made her sweat a lot. Female athletics was not all sweetness and light, of course. Underneath the hugs were festering rivalries and moral judgments and severe impatience, Shawna blaming Patty for feeding too many outlet passes to Cathy and not enough to her, Patty seething when the slow-witted reserve center Abbie Smith turned yet another possession into a jump ball that she then could not control, Mary Jane Rorabacker nursing an eternal grudge against Cathy for not inviting her to room with her and Patty and Shawna in sophomore year despite their having starred together at St. Paul Central, every starter feeling guiltily relieved when a promising recruit and potential rival underperformed under pressure, etc., etc., etc. But competitive sports was founded on a trick of devotion, a method of credence, and once it was fully drummed into you, in middle school or high school at the latest, you didn’t have to wonder about anything important when you headed to the gym and suited up, you knew the Answer to the Question, the Answer was the Team, and any venial personal concerns were set aside.

It’s possible that Patty, in her agitation following her encounter with Walter, forgot to eat enough. Definitely something was wrong from the minute she arrived at Williams Arena. The UCLA team was huge and physical, with three starters six feet or bigger, and Coach Treadwell’s game plan was to wear them out on transition and let her smaller players, Patty especially, scurry and strike before the Bruins could get their defense set. On D the plan was to be extra aggressive and try to draw the Bruins’ two big scorers into early foul trouble. The Gophers weren’t expected to win, but if they did win they could move up into the top twenty in the unofficial national rankings-higher than they’d ever been during Patty’s tenure. And so it was a very bad night for her to lose her religion.

She experienced a peculiar weakness at her core. She had her usual range of movement in her stretches, but her muscles felt somehow inelastic. Her teammates’ loud pep grated on her nerves, and a tightness in her chest, a self-consciousness, inhibited her from shouting back at them. She succeeded in boxing out all thoughts about Eliza, but instead she found herself considering how, although her own career would be forever over after another season and a half, her middle sister could go on and be a famous actress all her life, and what a dubious investment of her own time and resources athletics had therefore been, and how blithely she’d ignored her mother’s years of hinting to this effect. None of this, it’s safe to say, was recommended as a way to be thinking before a big game.

“Just be yourself, be great,” Coach Treadwell told her. “Who’s our leader?”

“I’m our leader.”

“Louder.”

“I’m our leader.”

“Louder!”

“I’M our leader.”

If you’ve ever played team sports, you’ll know that Patty immediately felt stronger and more centered and leaderly for saying this. Funny how the trick works-the transfusion of confidence through simple words. She was fine doing warm-ups and fine shaking hands with the Bruins’ captains and feeling their appraising eyes on her, knowing they’d been told she was a big scoring threat and the Gophers’ director on offense; she stepped into her rep for success as if it were a suit of armor. Once you’re in the game, though, and you start hemorrhaging confidence, transfusion from the sidelines isn’t possible. Patty scored one basket on an easy fast-break layup, and that was basically the end of her night. As early as the second minute, she could tell from the lump in her throat that she was going to suck as she had never sucked before. Her Bruin counterpart had two inches and thirty pounds and ungodly amounts of vertical leap on her, but the problem wasn’t only physical or even mainly physical. The problem was the defeat in her heart. Instead of burning competitively with the injustice of the Bruins’ size advantage, and relentlessly pursuing the ball, as Coach had told her to do, she felt defeated by injustice: felt sorry for herself. The Bruins tried out a full-court press and discovered that it worked spectacularly. Shawna rebounded and passed Patty the ball, but she got trapped in the corner and gave it up. She got the ball again and fell out of bounds. She got the ball again and faked it directly into the hands of a defender, as if making a little present. Coach called a time-out and told her to station herself farther up the court on transition; but Bruins were waiting for her there. A long pass went off her hands and into the seats. Fighting the lump in her throat, trying to get mad, she got a foul for charging. She had no spring in her jump shot. She turned the ball over twice in the paint, and Coach took her out to have a word.

“Where’s my girl? Where’s my leader?”

“I don’t have it tonight.”

“You absolutely have it, you just have to find it. It’s in there. Find it.”

“OK.”

“Scream at me. Let it out.”

Patty shook her head. “I don’t want to let it out.”

Coach, crouching, peered up into her face, and Patty, with great effort of will, forced herself to meet her eyes.

“Who’s our leader?”

“I am.”

“Shout it.”

“I can’t.”

“You want me to bench you? Is that what you want?”

“No!”

“Then get out there. We need you. Whatever it is, we can talk about it later. OK?”

“OK.”

This new transfusion poured straight into the hemorrhage without circulating even once through Patty’s body. For the sake of her teammates, she stayed in the game, but she reverted to her old habit of being selfless, of following plays instead of leading them, of passing instead of shooting, and then to her even older habit of lingering around the perimeter and taking long jumpers, some of which might have fallen on another night, but not that night. How hard it is to hide on a basketball court! Patty got beaten on defense again and again, and each defeat seemed to make the next one more likely. What she was feeling became a lot more familiar to her later in her life, when she made the acquaintance of serious depression, but on that February night it was a hideous novelty to feel the game swirling around her, totally out of her control, and to intuit that the significance of everything that happened, every approach and retreat of the ball, every heavy thud of her feet on the floor, every new moment of trying to guard a fully focused and determined Bruin, every teammate’s hearty halftime whap on the shoulder, was her own badness and the emptiness of her future and the futility of struggle.

Coach finally sat her down for good midway through the second half, with the Gophers trailing by 25. She revived a little as soon as she was safely benched. She found her voice and exhorted her teammates and high-fived them like an eager rookie, reveling in the abasement of being reduced to a cheerleader in a game she should have starred in, embracing the shame of being too-delicately consoled by her pitying teammates. She felt she fully deserved to be abased and shamed like this, after how she’d stunk. Wallowing in this shit was the best she’d felt all day.

Afterward, in the locker room, she endured Coach’s sermon with closed ears and then sat on a bench and sobbed for half an hour. Her friends were considerate enough to let her just do this.

In her down parka and her Gophers stocking cap, she went to Northrop Auditorium, hoping the Blackmun lecture might somehow still be going on there, but the building was dark and locked. She thought of returning to her hall and calling Walter, but she realized that what she really wanted now was to break training and get trashed on wine. She walked through snowy streets to Eliza’s apartment, and here she realized that what she really wanted was to scream abusive things at her friend.

Eliza, on the intercom, objected that it was late and she was tired.

“No, you have to let me up,” Patty said. “This is non-optional.”

Eliza let her in and then lay down on her sofa. She was wearing pajamas and listening to some kind of throbbing jazz. The air was thick with lethargy and old smoke. Patty stood by the sofa, bundled in her parka, snow melting off her sneakers, and watched how slowly Eliza was breathing and how long it took for the impulse to speak to be effectuated-various random facial muscle movements gradually becoming a little less random and finally gathering into a murmured question: “How was your game.”

Patty didn’t answer. After a while, it became apparent that Eliza had forgotten about her.

There didn’t seem to be much point in screaming abusive things at her right now, so Patty ransacked the apartment instead. The drug stuff came to light immediately, right on the floor at the head of the sofa-Eliza had simply dropped a throw pillow over it. At the bottom of a nest of poetry journals and music magazines on Eliza’s desk was the blue three-ring binder. As far as Patty could tell, nothing had been added to it since the summer. She sifted through Eliza’s papers and bills, looking for something medical, but didn’t find anything. The jazz record was playing on repeat. Patty turned it off and sat down on the coffee table with the scrapbook and the drug stuff on the floor in front of her. “Wake up,” she said.

Eliza squeezed her eyes shut tighter.

Patty shoved her leg. “Wake up.”

“I need a cigarette. The chemo really knocked me out.”

Patty pulled her upright by the shoulder.

“Hey,” Eliza said, with a murky smile. “Nice to see you.”

“I don’t want to be your friend anymore,” Patty said. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

Eliza closed her eyes and shook her head. “I need you to help me,” she said. “I’ve been taking drugs because of the pain. Because of the cancer. I wanted to tell you. But I was too embarrassed.” She tilted sideways and lay back down.

“You don’t have cancer,” Patty said. “That’s just a lie you made up because you have some crazy idea about me.”

“No, I have leukemia. I definitely have leukemia.”

“I came over to tell you in person, as a courtesy. But now I’m going to leave.”

“No. You have to stay. I have a drug problem you have to help me with.”

“I can’t help you. You’ll have to go to your parents.”

There was a long silence. “Get me a cigarette,” Eliza said.

“I hate your cigarettes.”

“I thought you understood about parents,” Eliza said. “About not being the person they wanted.”

“I don’t understand anything about you.”

There was another silence. Then Eliza said, “You know what’s going to happen if you leave, don’t you? I’m going to kill myself.”

“Oh, that’s a great reason to stay and be friends,” Patty said. “That sounds like a lot of fun for both of us.”

“I’m just saying that’s probably what I’ll do. You’re the only thing I have that’s beautiful and real.”

“I’m not a thing,” Patty said righteously.

“Have you ever seen somebody shoot up? I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

Patty took the syringe and the drugs and put them in the pocket of her parka. “What’s your parents’ telephone number?”

“Don’t call them.”

“I’m going to call them. It’s non-optional.”

“Will you stay with me? Will you come visit me?”

“Yes,” Patty lied. “Just tell me their number.”

“They ask about you all the time. They think you’re a good influence on my life. Will you stay with me?”

“Yes,” Patty lied again. “What’s their number?”

When the parents arrived, after midnight, they wore the grim looks of people interrupted in their enjoyment of a long respite from dealing with exactly this sort of thing. Patty was fascinated to finally meet them, but this feeling was evidently not reciprocated. The father had a full beard and deep-set dark eyes, the mother was petite and wearing high-heeled leather boots, and together they gave off a strong sexual vibe that reminded Patty of French movies and of Eliza’s comments about their being the love of each other’s life. Patty wouldn’t have minded receiving a few words of apology for unleashing their disturbed daughter on unsuspecting third parties such as herself, or a few words of gratitude for taking their daughter off their hands these past two years, or a few words of acknowledgment of whose money had subsidized the latest crisis. But as soon as the little nuclear family was together in the living room, there unfolded a weird diagnostic drama in which there seemed to be no role at all for Patty.

“So which drugs,” the father said.

“Um, smack,” Eliza said.

“Smack, cigarettes, booze. What else? Anything else?”

“A little coke sometimes. Not so much now.”

“Anything else?”

“No, that’s all.”

“And what about your friend? Is she using, too?”

“No, she’s a huge basketball star,” Eliza said. “I told you. She’s totally straight and great. She’s amazing.”

“Did she know you were using?”

“No, I told her I had cancer. She didn’t know anything.”

“How long did that go on?”

“Since Christmas.”

“So she believed you. You created an elaborate lie that she believed.”

Eliza giggled.

“Yes, I believed her,” Patty said.

The father didn’t even glance her way. “And what’s this,” he said, holding up the blue binder.

“That’s my Patty Book,” Eliza said.

“Appears to be some sort of obsessional scrapbook,” the father said to the mother.

“So she said she was going to leave you,” the mother said, “and then you said you were going to kill yourself.”

“Something like that,” Eliza admitted.

“This is quite obsessional,” the father commented, flipping pages.

“Are you actually suicidal?” the mother said. “Or was that just a threat to keep your friend from leaving?”

“Mostly a threat,” Eliza said.

“Mostly?”

“OK, I’m not actually suicidal.”

“And yet you’re aware that we have to take it seriously now,” the mother said. “We have no choice.”

“You know, I think I’m going to go now,” Patty said. “I’ve got class in the morning, so.”

“What kind of cancer did you pretend to have?” the father said. “Where in the body was it situated?”

“I said it was leukemia.”

“In the blood, then. A fictitious cancer in your blood.”

Patty put the drug stuff on the cushion of an armchair. “I’ll just leave this right here,” she said. “I really do have to be going.”

The parents looked at her, looked at each other, and nodded.

Eliza stood up from the sofa. “When will I see you? Will I see you tomorrow?”

“No,” Patty said. “I don’t think so.”

“Wait!” Eliza ran over and seized Patty by the hand. “I fucked everything up, but I’ll get better, and then we can see each other again. OK?”

“Yes, OK,” Patty lied as the parents moved in to pry their daughter off her.

Outside, the sky had cleared and the temperature had fallen to near zero. Patty drove breath after breath of cleanness down deep into her lungs. She was free! She was free! And, oh, how she wished she could go back now and play the game against UCLA again. Even at one in the morning, even with nothing in her stomach, she felt ready to excel. She sprinted down Eliza’s street in sheer exhilaration at her freedom, hearing Coach’s words in her ears for the first time, three hours after they’d been spoken, hearing her say how it was just one game, how everybody had bad games, how she’d be herself again tomorrow. She felt ready to dedicate herself more intensely than ever to staying fit and improving her skills, ready to see more theater with Walter, ready to say to her mother, “That’s really great news about The Member of the Wedding!” Ready to be an all-around better person. In her exhilaration, she ran so blindly that she didn’t see the black ice on the sidewalk until her left leg had slipped gruesomely out sideways behind her right leg and she’d ripped the shit out of her knee and was lying on the ground.

There’s not a lot to say about the six weeks that followed. She had two surgeries, the second one following an infection from the first, and became an ace crutch-user. Her mother flew out for the first operation and treated the hospital staff as if they were midwestern yokels of questionable intelligence, causing Patty to apologize for her and be especially agreeable whenever she was out of the room. When it turned out that Joyce might have been right not to trust the doctors, Patty felt so chagrined that she didn’t even tell her about the second operation until the day before it happened. She assured Joyce that there was no need to fly out again-she had tons of friends to look after her.

Walter Berglund had learned from his own mother how to be attentive to women with ailments, and he took advantage of Patty’s extended incapacitation to reinsert himself into her life. On the day after her first surgery, he appeared with a four-foot-tall Norfolk pine and suggested that she might prefer a living plant to cut flowers that wouldn’t last. After that, he managed to see Patty almost every day except on weekends, when he was up in Hibbing helping his parents, and he quickly endeared himself to her jock friends with his niceness. Her homelier friends appreciated how much more intently he listened to them than all the guys who couldn’t see past their looks, and Cathy Schmidt, her brightest friend, declared Walter smart enough to be on the Supreme Court. It was a novelty in Female Jockworld to have a guy in their midst who everybody felt so natural and relaxed around, a guy who could hang out in the lounge during study breaks and be one of the girls. And everybody could see that he was crazy about Patty, and everybody but Cathy Schmidt agreed that this was a most excellent thing.

Cathy, as noted, was sharper than the rest. “You’re not really into him, are you,” she said.

“I sort of am,” Patty said. “But also sort of not.”

“So… the two of you are not…”

“No! Nothing. I probably never should have told him I was raped. He got all squirrelly when I told him that. All… tender and… nursey and… upset. And now it’s like he’s waiting for written permission, or for me to make the move. Which, the crutches probably aren’t helping there, either. But it’s like I’m being followed around by a really nice, well-trained dog.”

“That’s not so great,” Cathy said.

“No. It’s not. But I can’t get rid of him, either, because he’s incredibly nice to me, and I really do love talking to him.”

“You’re sort of into him.”

“Exactly. Maybe even somewhat more than sort of. But-”

“But not wildly more.”

“Exactly.”

Walter was interested in everything. He read every word of the newspaper and Time magazine, and in April, once Patty was semi-ambulatory again, he began inviting her to lectures and art films and documentaries that she otherwise would not have dreamed of going to. Whether it was because of his love or because of the void in her schedule created by her injury, this was the first time that a person had ever looked through her jock exterior and seen lights on inside. Although she felt inferior to Walter in pretty much every category of human knowledge except sports, she was grateful to him for illuminating that she actually had opinions and that her opinions could differ from his. (This was a refreshing contrast to Eliza, who, if you’d asked her who the current U.S. president was, would have laughed and claimed to have no idea and put another record on her stereo.) Walter burned with all sorts of earnest and peculiar views-he hated the pope and the Catholic Church but approved of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which he hoped would lead to better energy conservation in the United States; he liked China’s new population-control policies and thought the U.S. should adopt something similar; he cared less about the Three Mile Island nuclear mishap than about the low price of gasoline and the need for high-speed rail systems that would render the passenger car obsolete; etc., etc.-and Patty found a role in obstinately approving of things he disapproved of. She especially enjoyed disagreeing with him about the Subjugation of Women. One afternoon near the end of the semester, over coffee at the Student Union, the two of them had a memorable talk about Patty’s Primitive Art professor, whose lectures she approvingly described to Walter by way of giving him a subtle hint about what she found lacking in his personality.

“Yuck,” Walter said. “This sounds like one of those middle-aged profs who can’t stop talking about sex.”

“Well, but he’s talking about fertility figures,” Patty said. “It’s not his fault if the only sculpture we have from fifty thousand years ago is about sex. Plus he’s got a white beard, and that’s enough to make me feel sorry for him. I mean, think about it. He’s up there, and he’s got all these dirty things he wants to say about ‘young ladies today,’ you know, and our ‘scrawny thighs,’ and all, and he knows he’s making us uncomfortable, and he knows he has this beard and he’s middle-aged and we’re all, you know, younger. But he can’t help saying things anyway. I think that would be so hard. Not being able to help humiliating yourself.”

“But it’s so offensive!”

“And also,” Patty said, “I think he’s actually really into thunder thighs. I think that’s what it’s really about: he’s into the Stone Aged thing. You know: fat. Which is sweet and kind of heartbreaking, that he’s so into ancient art.”

“But aren’t you offended, as a feminist?”

“I don’t really think of myself as a feminist.”

“That’s unbelievable!” Walter said, reddening. “You don’t support the ERA?”

“Well, I’m not very political.”

“But the whole reason you’re here in Minnesota is you got an athletic scholarship, which couldn’t even have happened five years ago. You’re here because of feminist federal legislation. You’re here because of Title Nine.”

“But Title Nine’s just basic fairness,” Patty said. “If half your students are female, they should be getting half the athletic money.”

“That’s feminism!”

“No, it’s basic fairness. Because, like, Ann Meyers? Have you heard of her? She was a big star at UCLA and she just signed a contract with the NBA, which is ridiculous. She’s like five-six and a girl. She’s never going to play. Men are just better athletes than women and always will be. That’s why a hundred times more people go to see men’s basketball than women’s basketball-there’s so much more that men can do athletically. It’s just dumb to deny it.”

“But what if you want to be a doctor, and they don’t let you into medical school because they’d rather have male students?”

“That would be unfair, too, although I don’t want to be a doctor.”

“So what do you want?”

Sort of by default, because her mother was so relentless in promoting impressive careers for her daughters, and also because her mother had been, in Patty’s opinion, a substandard parent, Patty was inclined to want to be a homemaker and an outstanding mother. “I want to live in a beautiful old house and have two children,” she told Walter. “I want to be a really, really great mom.”

“Do you want a career, too?”

“Raising children would be my career.”

He frowned and nodded.

“You see,” she said, “I’m not very interesting. I’m not nearly as interesting as your other friends.”

“That’s so untrue,” he said. “You’re incredibly interesting.”

“Well, that’s very nice of you to say, but I don’t think it makes much sense.”

“I think there’s so much more inside you than you give yourself credit for.”

“I’m afraid you’re not very realistic about me,” Patty said. “I bet you can’t actually name one interesting thing about me.”

“Well, your athletic ability, for starters,” Walter said.

“Dribble dribble. That’s real interesting.”

“And the way you think,” he said. “The fact that you think that that hideous prof is sweet and heartbreaking.”

“But you disagree with me about that!”

“And the way you talk about your family. The way you tell stories about them. The fact that you’re so far away from them and having your own life here. That’s all incredibly interesting.”

Patty had never been around a man so obviously in love with her. What he and she were secretly talking about, of course, was Walter’s desire to put his hands on her. And yet the more time she spent with him, the more she was coming to feel that even though she wasn’t nice-or maybe because she wasn’t nice; because she was morbidly competitive and attracted to unhealthy things-she was, in fact, a fairly interesting person. And Walter, by insisting so fervently on her interestingness, was definitely making progress toward making himself interesting to her in turn.

“If you’re so feminist,” she said, “why are you best friends with Richard? Isn’t he kind of disrespectful?”

Walter’s face clouded. “Definitely, if I had a sister, I’d make sure she never met him.”

“Why?” Patty said. “Because he’d treat her badly? Is he bad to women?”

“He doesn’t mean to be. He likes women. He just goes through them pretty quickly.”

“Because we’re interchangeable? Because we’re just objects?”

“It’s not political,” Walter said. “He’s in favor of equal rights. It’s more like this is his addiction, or one of them. You know, his dad was such a drunk, and Richard doesn’t drink. But it’s the same thing as emptying your whole liquor cabinet down the drain, after a binge. That’s the way he is with a girl he’s done with.”

“That sounds horrible.”

“Yeah, I don’t particularly like it in him.”

“But you’re still friends with him, even though you’re a feminist.”

“You don’t stop being loyal to a friend just because they’re not perfect.”

“No, but you try to help them be a better person. You explain why what they’re doing is wrong.”

“Is that what you did with Eliza?”

“OK, you have a point there.”

The next time she spoke to Walter, he finally asked her out on an actual movie-and-a-dinner date. The movie (this was very Walter) turned out to be a free one, a black-and-white Greek-language thing called The Fiend of Athens. While they sat in the Art Department cinema, surrounded by empty seats, waiting for the movie to start, Patty described her plan for the summer, which was to stay with Cathy Schmidt at her parents’ house in the suburbs, continue physical therapy, and prepare for a comeback next season. Out of the blue, in the empty cinema, Walter asked her if she might instead want to live in the room being vacated by Richard, who was moving to New York City.

“Richard’s leaving?”

“Yeah,” Walter said, “New York is where all the interesting music is happening. He and Herrera want to reconstitute the band and try to make it there. And I’ve still got three months on the lease.”

“Wow.” Patty composed her face carefully. “And I would live in his room.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be his room anymore,” Walter said. “It would be yours. It’s an easy walk to the gym. I’m thinking it would be a lot easier than commuting all the way from Edina.”

“And so you’re asking me to live with you.”

Walter blushed and avoided her eyes. “You’d have your own room, obviously. But, yes, if you ever wanted to have dinner and hang out, that would be great, too. I think I’m somebody you can trust to be respectful of your space but also be there if you wanted company.”

Patty peered into his face, struggling to understand. She felt a combination of (a) offended, and (b) very sorry to hear that Richard was leaving. She almost suggested to Walter that he had better kiss her first, if he was going to be asking her to live with him, but she was so offended that she didn’t feel like being kissed at that moment. And then the cinema lights went down.

As the autobiographer remembers it, the plot of The Fiend of Athens concerned a mild-mannered Athenian accountant with horn-rimmed glasses who is walking to work one morning when he sees his own picture on the front page of a newspaper, with the headline FIEND OF ATHENS STILL AT LARGE. Athenians in the street immediately start pointing at him and chasing him, and he’s on the brink of being apprehended when he’s rescued by a gang of terrorists or criminals who mistake him for their fiendish leader. The gang has a bold plan to do something like blow up the Parthenon, and the hero keeps trying to explain to them that he’s just a mild-mannered accountant, not the Fiend, but the gang is so counting on his help, and the rest of the city is so intent on killing him, that there finally comes an amazing moment when he whips off his glasses and becomes their fearless leader-the Fiend of Athens! He says, “OK, men, this is how the plan is going to work.”

Patty watched the movie seeing Walter in the accountant and imagining him whipping his glasses off like that. Afterward, over dinner at Vescio’s, Walter interpreted the movie as a parable of Communism in postwar Greece and explained to Patty how the United States, in need of NATO partners in southeast Europe, had long sponsored political repression over there. The accountant, he said, was an Everyman figure who comes to accept his responsibility to join in the violent struggle against right-wing repression.

Patty was drinking wine. “I don’t agree with that at all,” she said. “I think it’s about how the main character never had a real life, because he was so responsible and timid, and he had no idea what he was actually capable of. He never really got to be alive until he was mistaken for the Fiend. Even though he only lived a few days after that, it was OK for him to die because he’d finally really done something with his life, and realized his potential.”

Walter seemed astonished by this. “That was a totally pointless way to die, though,” he said. “He didn’t accomplish anything.”

“But then why did he do it?”

“Because he felt solidarity with the gang that saved his life. He realized that he had a responsibility to them. They were the underdogs, and they needed him, and he was loyal to them. He died for his loyalty.”

“God,” Patty marveled. “You really are quite amazingly worthy.”

“That’s not how it feels,” Walter said. “I feel like the stupidest person on earth sometimes. I wish I could cheat. I wish I could be totally self-focused like Richard, and try to be some kind of artist. And it’s not because I’m worthy that I can’t. I just don’t have the constitution for it.”

“But the accountant didn’t think he had the constitution for it, either. He surprised himself!”

“Yes, but it wasn’t a realistic movie. The picture in the newspaper didn’t just look like the actor, it was him. And if he’d just given himself up to the authorities, he could have straightened everything out eventually. The mistake he made was to start running. That’s why I’m saying it was a parable. It wasn’t a realistic story.”

It felt strange to Patty to be drinking wine with Walter, since he was a teetotaler, but she was in a fiendish mood and had quickly put away quite a lot. “Take your glasses off,” she said.

“No,” he said. “I won’t be able to see you.”

“That’s OK. It’s just me. Just Patty. Take them off.”

“But I love seeing you! I love looking at you!”

Their eyes met.

“Is that why you want me to live with you?” Patty said.

He blushed. “Yes.”

“Well, so, maybe we should go look at your apartment, so I can decide.”

“Tonight?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not tired?”

“No. I’m not tired.”

“How’s your knee feeling?”

“My knee is feeling just fine, thank you.”

For once, she was thinking of Walter only. If you’d asked her, as she crutched her way down 4th Street through the soft and conducive May air, whether she was half-hoping to run into Richard at the apartment, she would have answered no. She wanted sex now, and if Walter had had one ounce of sense he would have turned away from the door of his apartment as soon as he heard TV noise on the other side of it-would have taken her somewhere else, anywhere else, back to her own room, anywhere. But Walter believed in true love and was apparently fearful of laying a hand on Patty before he was sure his was reciprocated. He led her right on into the apartment, where Richard was sitting in the living room with his bare feet up on the coffee table, a guitar across his lap, and a spiral notebook beside him on the sofa. He was watching a war movie and working on a jumbo Pepsi and spitting tobacco juice into a 28-ounce tomato can. The room was otherwise neat and uncluttered.

“I thought you were at a show,” Walter said.

“Show sucked,” Richard said.

“You remember Patty, right?”

Patty shyly crutched herself into better view. “Hi, Richard.”

“Patty who is not considered tall,” Richard said.

“That’s me.”

“And yet you are quite tall. I’m glad to see Walter finally lured you over here. I was beginning to fear it would never happen.”

“Patty’s thinking of living here this summer,” Walter said.

Richard raised his eyebrows. “Really.”

He was thinner and younger and sexier than she remembered. It was terrible how suddenly she wanted to deny that she’d been thinking of living here with Walter or expecting to go to bed with him that night. But there was no denying the evidence of her standing there. “I’m looking for someplace convenient to the gym,” she said.

“Of course. Makes sense.”

“She was hoping to see your room,” Walter said.

“Room’s a bit of a mess right now.”

“You say that as if there were times when it’s not a mess,” Walter said with a happy laugh.

“There are periods of relative unmessiness,” Richard said. He extinguished the TV with an extended toe. “How’s your little friend Eliza?” he asked Patty.

“She’s not my friend anymore.”

“I told you that,” Walter said.

“I wanted it from the horse’s mouth. She’s a fucked-up little chick, isn’t she? The extent of it wasn’t immediately apparent, but, man. It became apparent.”

“I made the same mistake,” Patty said.

“Only Walter saw the truth from day one. The Truth About Eliza. That’s not a bad title.”

“I had the advantage of her hating me at first sight,” Walter said. “I could see her more clearly.”

Richard closed his notebook and spat brown saliva into his can. “I will leave you kids alone.”

“What are you working on?” Patty asked.

“The usual unlistenable shit. I was trying to do something with this chick Margaret Thatcher. The new prime minister of England?”

“Chick is a far-fetched word for Margaret Thatcher,” Walter said. “Dowager is more like it.”

“How do you feel about the word ‘chick’?” Richard asked Patty.

“Oh, I’m not a picky person.”

“Walter says I shouldn’t use it. He says it’s demeaning, although, in my experience, the chicks themselves don’t seem to mind.”

“It makes you sound like you’re from the sixties,” Patty said.

“It makes him sound Neanderthal,” Walter said.

“The Neanderthals reportedly had very large craniums,” Richard said.

“So do oxen,” Walter said. “And other cud-chewing animals.”

Richard laughed.

“I didn’t think anybody but baseball players chewed tobacco anymore,” Patty said. “What’s it like?”

“You’re free to try some, if you’re in the mood to vomit,” Richard said, standing up. “I’m going to head back out. Leave you guys alone.”

“Wait, I want to try it,” Patty said.

“Really not a good idea,” Richard said.

“No, I definitely want to try it.”

The mood she’d been in with Walter was irreparably broken, and now she was curious to see if she had the power to make Richard stay. She’d finally found her opportunity to demonstrate what she’d been trying to explain to Walter since the night they first met-that she wasn’t a good enough person for him. It was also, of course, an opportunity for Walter to whip off his glasses and behave fiendishly and drive away his rival. But Walter, then as ever, only wanted Patty to have what she wanted.

“Let her try it,” he said.

She gave him a grateful smile. “Thank you, Walter.”

The chew was mint-flavored and burned her gums shockingly. Walter brought her a coffee mug to spit in, and she sat on the sofa like an experimental subject, waiting for the nicotine to take effect, enjoying the attention. But Walter was paying attention to Richard, too, and as her heart began to race she flashed on Eliza’s contention that Walter had a thing for his friend; she remembered Eliza’s jealousy.

“Richard’s excited about Margaret Thatcher,” Walter said. “He thinks she represents the excesses of capitalism that will inevitably lead to its self-destruction. I’m guessing he’s writing a love song.”

“You know me well,” Richard said. “A love song to the lady with the hair.”

“We disagree about the likelihood of a Marxist Revolution,” Walter explained to Patty.

“Mm,” she said, spitting.

“Walter thinks the liberal state can self-correct,” Richard said. “He thinks the American bourgeoisie will voluntarily accept increasing restrictions on its personal freedoms.”

“I have all these great ideas for songs that Richard inexplicably keeps rejecting.”

“The fuel-efficiency song. The public-transportation song. The nationalized-health-care song. The baby-tax song.”

“It’s pretty much virgin territory, in terms of rock-song content,” Walter said.

“Two Kids Good, Four Kids Bad.”

“Two Kids Good-No Kids Better.”

“I can already see the masses taking to the streets.”

“You just have to become unbelievably famous,” Walter said. “Then people will listen.”

“I’ll make a note to do that.” Richard turned to Patty. “How you doing there?”

“Mm!” she said, ejecting the wad into the coffee mug. “I see what you mean about the vomiting.”

“Try not to do it on the couch.”

“Are you all right?” Walter said.

The room was swimming and pulsing. “I can’t believe you enjoy this,” Patty said to Richard.

“And yet I do.”

“Are you all right?” Walter asked her again.

“I’m fine. Just need to sit very still.”

She in fact felt quite sick. There was nothing to be done but stay on the sofa and listen to Walter and Richard banter and joust about politics and music. Walter, with great enthusiasm, showed her the Traumatics’ seven-inch single and compelled Richard to play both sides of it on the stereo. The first song was “I Hate Sunshine,” which she’d heard at the club in the fall, and which now seemed to her the sonic equivalent of absorbing too much nicotine. Even at low volume (Walter, needless to say, was pathologically considerate of his neighbors), it gave her a sick, dready sensation. She could feel Richard’s eyes on her while she listened to his dire baritone singing voice, and she knew she hadn’t been mistaken about the way he’d looked at her the other times she’d seen him.

Around eleven o’clock, Walter began to yawn uncontrollably.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I have to take you home now.”

“I’m fine walking by myself. I’ve got my crutches for self-defense.”

“No,” he said. “We’ll take Richard’s car.”

“No, you need to go to sleep, you poor thing. Maybe Richard can drive me. Can you do that for me?” she asked him.

Walter closed his eyes and sighed miserably, as if he’d been pushed past his limits.

“Sure,” Richard said. “I’ll drive you.”

“She needs to see your room first,” Walter said, his eyes still closed.

“Be my guest,” Richard said. “Its condition speaks for itself.”

“No, I want the guided tour,” Patty said, giving him a pointed look.

The walls and ceiling of his room were painted black, and the punk disorder that Walter’s influence had suppressed in the living room here vented itself with a vengeance. There were LPs and LP sleeves everywhere, along with several cans of spit, another guitar, overloaded bookshelves, a mayhem of socks and underwear, and tangled dark bedsheets that it was interesting and somehow not unpleasant to think that Eliza had been vigorously erased in.

“Nice cheerful color!” Patty said.

Walter yawned again. “Obviously I’ll be repainting it.”

“Unless Patty prefers black,” Richard said from the doorway.

“I’d never thought of black,” she said. “Black is interesting.”

“Very restful color, I find,” Richard said.

“So you’re moving to New York,” she said.

“I am.”

“That’s exciting. When?”

“Two weeks.”

“Oh, that’s when I’m going out there, too. It’s my parents’ twenty-fifth anniversary. Some sort of horrible Event is planned.”

“You’re from New York?”

“Westchester County.”

“Same as me. Though presumably a different part of Westchester.”

“Well, the suburbs.”

“Definitely a different part than Yonkers.”

“I’ve seen Yonkers from the train a bunch of times.”

“Exactly my point.”

“So are you driving to New York?” Patty said.

“Why?” Richard said. “You need a ride?”

“Well, maybe! Are you offering one?”

He shook his head. “Have to think about it.”

Poor Walter’s eyes were falling shut, he literally was not seeing this negotiation. Patty herself was breathless with the guilt and confusion of it and crutched herself speedily toward the front door, where, at a distance, she called out a thank-you to him for the evening.

“I’m sorry I got so tired,” he said. “Are you sure I can’t drive you home?”

“I’ll do it,” Richard said. “You go to bed.”

Walter definitely looked miserable, but it might only have been his exhaustion. Out on the street, in the conducive air, Patty and Richard walked in silence until they got to his rusty Impala. Richard seemed to take care not to touch her while she got herself seated and handed him her crutches.

“I would have thought you’d have a van,” she said when he was sitting beside her. “I thought all bands had vans.”

“Herrera has the van. This is my personal conveyance.”

“This is what I’d be riding to New York in.”

“Yeah, listen.” He put the key in the ignition. “You need to fish or cut bait here. Do you understand me? It’s not fair to Walter otherwise.”

She looked straight ahead through the windshield. “What isn’t fair?”

“Giving him hope. Leading him on.”

“That’s what you think I’m doing?”

“He’s an extraordinary person. He’s very, very serious. You need to take some care with him.”

“I know that,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Well, so, what did you come over here for? It seemed to me-”

“What? What did it seem to you?”

“It seemed to me like I was interrupting something. But then, when I tried to get away…”

“God, you really are a jerk.”

Richard nodded as if he couldn’t care less what she thought of him, or as if he were tired of stupid women saying stupid things to him. “When I tried to get away,” he said, “you seemed not to want to take the hint. Which is fine, that’s your choice. I just want to make sure you know you’re kind of tearing Walter apart.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this with you.”

“Fine. We won’t talk about it. But you’ve been seeing a lot of him, right? Practically every day, right? For weeks and weeks.”

“We’re friends. We hang out.”

“Nice. And you know the situation in Hibbing.”

“Yes. His mom needs help with the hotel.”

Richard smiled unpleasantly. “That’s what you know?”

“Well, and his dad’s not well, and his brothers aren’t doing anything.”

“And that’s what he’s told you. That’s the extent of it.”

“His dad has emphysema. His mom has disabilities.”

“And he’s working construction twenty-five hours a week and pulling down As in law school. And there he is, every day, with all that time to hang out with you. How nice for you, that he has so much free time. But you’re a good-looking chick, you deserve it, right? Plus you’ve got your terrible injury. That and being good-looking: that earns you the right not to even ask him any questions.”

Patty was burning with her feeling of injustice. “You know,” she said unsteadily, “he talks about what a jerk you are to women. He talks about that.”

This seemed not to interest Richard in the slightest. “I’m just trying to understand this in the context of your being such pals with wee Eliza,” he said. “It’s making more sense to me now. It didn’t when I first saw you. You seemed like a nice suburban girl.”

“So I’m a jerk, too. Is that what you’re saying? I’m a jerk and you’re a jerk.”

“Sure. Whatever you like. I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK. Whatever. I’m just asking you not to be a jerk to Walter.”

“I’m not!”

“I’m simply telling you what I see.”

“Well, you see wrong. I really like Walter. I really care about him.”

“And yet you’re apparently unaware that his dad’s dying of liver disease and his older brother’s in jail for vehicular assault and his other brother’s spending his Army paychecks making payments on his vintage Corvette. And Walter’s averaging about four hours of sleep while you’re being friends and hanging out, just so you can come over here and flirt with me.”

Patty became very quiet.

“It’s true I didn’t know all of that,” she said after a while. “All of that information. But you shouldn’t be friends with him if you’ve got a problem with people flirting with you.”

“Ah. So it’s my fault. I getcha.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but it kind of is.”

“I rest my case,” Richard said. “You need to get your thoughts straightened out.”

“I’m aware that I need to do that,” Patty said. “But you’re still being a jerk.”

“Look, I’ll drive you to New York, if that’s what you want. Two jerks on the road. Could be fun. But if that’s what you want, you need to do me a favor and stop stringing Walter along.”

“Fine. Please take me home now.”

Due perhaps to the nicotine, she spent that entire night sleeplessly replaying the evening in her head, trying to do as Richard had demanded and get her thoughts straight. But it was an odd mental kabuki, because even as she was circling around and around the question of what kind of person she was and what her life was ultimately going to look like, one fat fact sat fixed and unchanging at the center of her: she wanted to take a road trip with Richard and, what’s more, she was going to do it. The sad truth was that their talk in the car had been a tremendous excitement and relief to her-an excitement because Richard was exciting and a relief because, finally, after months of trying to be somebody she wasn’t, or wasn’t quite, she’d felt and sounded like her unpretended true self. This was why she knew she’d find a way to take the road trip. All she had to do now was surmount her guilt about Walter and her sorrow about not being the kind of person he and she both wished she were. How right he’d been to go slow with her! How smart he was about her inner dubiousness! When she considered how right and smart he was about her, she felt all the sadder and guiltier about disappointing him, and was plunged back into the roundabout of indecision.

And then, for almost a week, she didn’t hear from him. She suspected he was keeping his distance at Richard’s suggestion-that Richard had given him a misogynistic lecture about the faithlessness of women and the need to protect his heart better. In her imagination, this was both a valuable service for Richard to perform and a terrible disillusioning thing to do to Walter. She couldn’t stop thinking of Walter carrying large plants for her on buses, the poinsettia redness of his cheeks. She thought of the nights when, in her dorm lounge, he’d been trapped by the Hall Bore, Suzanne Storrs, who combed her hair sideways over her head with the part way down one side of it, just above her ear, and how he’d listened patiently to Suzanne’s sour droning about her diet and the hardships of inflation and the overheating of her dorm room and her wide-ranging disappointment with the university’s administrators and professors, while Patty and Cathy and her other friends laughed at Fantasy Island: how Patty, ostensibly incapacitated by her knee, had declined to stand up and rescue Walter from Suzanne, for fear that Suzanne would then come over and inflict her boringness on everybody else, and how Walter, though perfectly capable of joking with Patty about Suzanne’s shortcomings, and though undoubtedly mindful of how much work he had to do and how early he had to get up in the morning, allowed himself to be trapped again on other evenings, because Suzanne had taken a shine to him and he felt sorry for her.

Suffice it to say that Patty couldn’t quite bring herself to cut bait. They didn’t communicate again until Walter called from Hibbing to apologize for his silence and report that his dad was in a coma.

“Oh, Walter, I miss you!” she exclaimed although this was exactly the sort of thing Richard would have urged her not to say.

“I miss you, too!”

She bethought herself to ask for details about his dad’s condition, even though it only made sense to be a good questioner if she was intending to proceed with him. Walter spoke of liver failure, pulmonary edema, a shitty prognosis.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “But listen. About the room-”

“Oh, you don’t have to decide about that now.”

“No, but you need an answer. If you’re going to rent it to somebody else-”

“I’d rather rent it to you!”

“Well, yes, and I might want it, but I have to go home next week, and I was thinking of riding to New York with Richard. Since that’s when he’s driving.”

Any worries that Walter might not grasp the import here were dispelled by his sudden silence.

“Don’t you already have a plane ticket?” he said finally.

“It’s the refundable kind,” she lied.

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “But, you know, Richard’s not very reliable.”

“No, I know, I know,” she said. “You’re right. I just thought I might save some money, which I could then apply to the rent.” (A compounding of the lie. Her parents had bought the ticket.) “I’ll definitely pay the rent for June no matter what.”

“That doesn’t make any sense if you’re not going to live there.”

“Well, I probably will, is what I’m saying. I’m just not positive yet.”

“OK.”

“I really want to. I’m just not positive. So if you find another renter, you should probably go with them. But definitely I’ll cover June.”

There was another silence before Walter, in a discouraged voice, said he had to get off the phone.

Energized by having achieved this difficult conversation, she called Richard and assured him that she’d done the necessary bait-cutting, at which point Richard mentioned that his departure date was somewhat uncertain and there were a couple of shows in Chicago that he was hoping to stop and see.

“Just as long as I’m in New York by next Saturday,” Patty said.

“Right, the anniversary party. Where is it?”

“It’s at the Mohonk Mountain House, but I only need to get to Westchester.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble started with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her. Then a mechanical issue with the van delayed Herrera, and since it was Herrera’s friends in Chicago whom Richard had been planning to stay with, and since Patty had not been part of that deal in any case, there promised to be awkwardness there. Patty also wasn’t good at computing distances, and so, when Richard was three hours late in picking her up and they didn’t get away from Minneapolis until late afternoon, she didn’t understand how late they would be arriving in Chicago and how important it was to make good time on I-94. It wasn’t her fault they’d started late. She didn’t consider it excessive to ask, near Eau Claire, for a bathroom stop, and then, an hour later, near nowhere, for some dinner. This was her road trip and she intended to enjoy it! But the back seat was full of equipment that Richard didn’t dare let out of his sight, and his own basic needs were satisfied by his plug (he had a big spit can on the floor), and although he didn’t criticize how much her crutches slowed and complicated everything she did, he also didn’t tell her to relax and take her time. And all across Wisconsin, every minute of the way, in spite of his curtness and his barely suppressed irritation with her entirely reasonable human needs, she could feel the almost physical pressure of his interest in fucking, and this didn’t help the mood in the car much, either. Not that she wasn’t greatly attracted to him. But she needed a modicum of time and breathing space, and even taking into account her youth and inexperience the autobiographer is embarrassed to report that her means of buying this time and space was to bring the conversation around, perversely, to Walter.

At first, Richard didn’t want to talk about him, but once she got him going she learned a lot about Walter’s college years. About the symposia he’d organized-on overpopulation, on electoral-college reform-that hardly any students had attended. About the pioneering New Wave music show he’d hosted for four years on the campus radio station. About his petition drive for better-insulated windows in Macalester’s dorms. About the editorials he’d written for the college paper regarding, for example, the food trays he processed in his job on the dish belt: how he’d calculated how many St. Paul families could be fed with a single night’s waste, and how he’d reminded his fellow students that other human beings had to deal with the gobs of peanut butter they left smeared on everything, and how he’d grappled philosophically with his fellow students’ habit of putting three times too much milk on their cold cereal and then leaving brimming bowls of soiled milk on their trays: did they somehow think milk was a free and infinite commodity like water, with no environmental strings attached? Richard recounted all this in the same protective tone he’d taken with Patty two weeks earlier, a tone of strangely tender regret on Walter’s behalf, as if he were wincing at the pain Walter brought upon himself in butting up against harsh realities.

“Did he have girlfriends?” Patty asked.

“He made poor choices,” Richard said. “He fell for the impossible chicks. The ones with boyfriends. The arty ones moving in a different kind of circle. There was one sophomore he didn’t get over all senior year. He gave her his Friday-night radio slot and took a Tuesday afternoon. I found out about that too late to stop it. He rewrote her papers, took her to shows. It was terrible to watch, the way she worked him. She was always turning up in our room inopportunely.”

“How funny,” Patty said. “I wonder why that was.”

“He never heeds my warnings. He’s very obstinate. And you wouldn’t necessarily guess it about him, but he always goes for good-looking. For pretty and well-formed. He’s ambitious that way. It didn’t lead to happy times for him in college.”

“And this girl who kept showing up in your room. Did you like her?”

“I didn’t like what she was doing to Walter.”

“That’s kind of a theme of yours, isn’t it?”

“She had shit taste and a Friday-night slot. At a certain point, there was only one way to get the message across to him. About what kind of chick he was dealing with.”

“Oh, so you were doing him a favor. I get it.”

“Everybody’s a moralist.”

“No, seriously, I can see why you don’t respect us. If all you ever see, year after year, is girls who want you to betray your best friend. I can see that’s a weird situation.”

“I respect you,” Richard said.

“Ha-ha-ha.”

“You’ve got a good head. I wouldn’t mind seeing you this summer, if you want to give New York a try.”

“That doesn’t seem very workable.”

“I’m merely saying it would be nice.”

She had about three hours to entertain this fantasy-staring at the taillights of the traffic rushing down and down toward the great metropolis, and wondering what it would be like to be Richard’s chick, wondering if a woman he respected might succeed in changing him, imagining herself never going back to Minnesota, trying to picture the apartment they might find to live in, savoring the thought of unleashing Richard on her contemptuous middle sister, picturing her family’s consternation at how cool she’d become, and imagining her nightly erasure-before they landed in the reality of Chicago’s South Side. It was 2 a.m. and Richard couldn’t find Herrera’s friends’ building. Rail yards and a dark, haunted river kept blocking their way. The streets were deserted except for gypsy cabs and occasional Scary Black Youths of the kind one read about.

“A map would have been helpful,” Patty said.

“It’s a numbered street. Shouldn’t be that hard.”

Herrera’s friends were artists. Their building, which Richard finally located with a cab driver’s help, looked uninhabited. It had a doorbell dangling from two wires that unexpectedly were functional. Somebody moved aside a piece of canvas covering a front window and then came down to air grievances with Richard.

“Sorry, man,” Richard said. “We got held up unavoidably. We just need to crash for a couple of nights.”

The artist was wearing cheap, saggy underpants. “We just started taping that room today,” he said. “It’s pretty wet. Herrera said something about coming on the weekend?”

“He didn’t call you yesterday?”

“Yeah, he called. I told him the spare room’s a fucking mess.”

“Not a problem. We’re grateful. I’ve got some stuff to bring in.”

Patty, being useless for carrying things, guarded the car while Richard slowly emptied it. The room they were given was heavy with a smell that she was too young to recognize as drywall mud, too young to find domestic and comforting. The only light was a glaring aluminum dish clamped to a mud-strafed ladder.

“Jesus,” Richard said. “What do they have, chimpanzees doing drywalling?”

Underneath a dusty and mud-spattered pile of plastic drop cloths was a bare, rust-stained double mattress.

“Not up to your usual Sheraton standards, I’m guessing,” Richard said.

“Are there sheets?” Patty said timidly.

He went rummaging in the main space and came back with an afghan, an Indian bedspread, and a velveteen pillow. “You sleep here,” he said. “They’ve got a couch I can use.”

She threw him a questioning look.

“It’s late,” he said. “You need to sleep.”

“Are you sure? There’s plenty of room here. A couch is going to be too short for you.”

She was bleary, but she wanted him and was carrying the necessary gear, and she had an instinct to get the deed done right away, get it irrevocably on the books, before she had time to think too much and change her mind. And it was many years, practically half a lifetime, before she learned and was duly confounded by Richard’s reason for suddenly turning so gentlemanly that night. At the time, in the mud-humid construction site, she could only assume she’d somehow been mistaken about him, or that she’d turned him off by being a pain in the ass and useless at carrying things.

“There’s something that passes for a bathroom out there,” he said. “You might have better luck than I did finding a light switch.”

She gave him a yearning look from which he turned away quickly, purposefully. The sting and surprise of this, the strain of the drive, the stress of arrival, the grimness of the room: she killed the light and lay down in her clothes and wept for a long time, taking care to keep it inaudible, until her disappointment dissolved in sleep.

The next morning, awakened at six o’clock by ferocious sunlight, and rendered thoroughly cross by then waiting hours and hours for anybody else to stir in the apartment, she really did become a pain in the ass. That whole day represented something of a lifetime nadir of agreeability. Herrera’s friends were physically uncouth and made her feel one inch tall for not getting their hip cultural references. She was given three quick chances to prove herself, after which they brutally ignored her, after which, to her relief, they left the apartment with Richard, who came back alone with a box of doughnuts for breakfast.

“I’m going to work on that room today,” he said. “Makes me sick to see the shitty work they’re doing. You feel like doing some sanding?”

“I was thinking we could go to the lake or something. I mean, it’s so hot in here. Or maybe a museum?”

He regarded her gravely. “You want to go to a museum.”

“Just something to get out and enjoy Chicago.”

“We can do that tonight. Magazine’s playing. You know Magazine?”

“I don’t know anything. Isn’t that obvious?”

“You’re in a bad mood. You want to hit the road.”

“I don’t want to do anything.”

“If we get the room cleaned up, you’ll sleep better tonight.”

“I don’t care. I just don’t feel like sanding.”

The kitchen area was a nauseating, never-cleaned sty that smelled like a mental illness. Sitting on the couch where Richard had slept, Patty tried to read one of the books she’d brought along in hopes of impressing him, a Hemingway novel which the heat and the smell and her tiredness and the lump in her throat and the Magazine albums that Richard was playing made it impossible to concentrate on. When she got just intolerably hot, she went into the room where he was plastering and told him she was going for a walk.

He was shirtless, his chest hair flat and straight with running sweat. “Not a great neighborhood for that,” he said.

“Well, maybe you’ll come with me.”

“Give me another hour.”

“No, forget it,” she said, “I’ll just go by myself. Do we have a key to this place?”

“You really want to go out by yourself on crutches?”

“Yes, unless you want to come with me.”

“Which, as I just said, I would do in an hour.”

“Well, I don’t feel like waiting an hour.”

“In that case,” Richard said, “the key is on the kitchen table.”

“Why are you being so mean to me?”

He shut his eyes and seemed to count silently to ten. It was obvious how much he disliked women and the things they said.

“Why don’t you take a cold shower,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

“You know, yesterday, for a while, it seemed like you were liking me.”

“I do like you. I’m just doing some work here.”

“Fine,” she said. “Work.”

The streets in the afternoon sun were even hotter than the apartment. Patty swung herself along at a considerable clip, trying not to cry too obviously, trying to appear as if she knew where she was going. The river, when she came to it, looked more benign than it had in the night, looked merely weedy and polluted rather than evil and all-swallowing. On the other side of it were Mexican streets festooned for some imminent or recent Mexican holiday, or maybe just permanently festooned. She found an air-conditioned taqueria where she was stared at but not harassed and could sit and drink a Coke and wallow in her girlish misery. Her body so wanted Richard, but the rest of her could see that she’d made a Mistake in coming along with him: that everything she’d hoped for from him and Chicago had been a big fat fantasy in her head. Phrases familiar from high-school Spanish, lo siento and hace mucho calor and ¿qué quiere la señora?, kept surfacing in the surrounding hubbub. She summoned courage and ordered three tacos and devoured them and watched innumerable buses roll by outside the windows, each trailing a wake of shimmering filth. Time passed in a peculiar manner which the autobiographer, with her now rather abundant experience of murdered afternoons, is able to identify as depressive (at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chockfull second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour), until finally, as the workday ended, groups of young laborers came in and began to pay too much attention to her, talking about her muletas, and she had to leave.

By the time she’d retraced her steps, the sun was an orange orb at the end of the east-west streets. Her intention, as she now allowed herself to realize, had been to stay out long enough to make Richard very worried about her, and in this she seemed completely to have failed. Nobody was home at the apartment. The walls of her room were nearly finished, the floor carefully swept, the bed neatly made up for her with real sheets and pillows. On the Indian bedspread was a note from Richard, in microscopic capital letters, giving her the address of a club and directions on how to take the El there. It concluded: WORD OF WARNING: I HAD TO BRING OUR HOSTS ALONG.

Before deciding whether to go out, Patty lay down for a short nap and was awakened many hours later, in great disorientation, by the return of Herrera’s friends. She hopped, one-legged, into the main room and there learned, from the most disagreeable of them, the underpanted one from the night before, that Richard had gone off with some other people and had asked that Patty be told not to wait up for him-he’d be back in plenty of time to get her to New York.

“What time is it now?” she said.

“About one o’clock.”

“In the morning?”

Herrera’s friend leered at her. “No, there’s a total eclipse of the sun.”

“And where is Richard?”

“He went off with a couple of girls he met. He didn’t say where.”

As noted, Patty was bad at computing driving distances. To get to Westchester in time to go with her family to the Mohonk Mountain House, she and Richard would have had to leave Chicago at five o’clock that morning. She slept long past that and awoke to gray and stormy weather, a different city, a different season. Richard was still nowhere in sight. She ate stale doughnuts and turned some pages of Hemingway until it was eleven and even she could see that the math wasn’t going to work.

She bit the bullet and called her parents, collect.

“Chicago!” Joyce said. “I can’t believe this. Are you near an airport? Can you catch a plane? We thought you’d be here by now. Daddy wants to get an early start, with all the weekend traffic.”

“I messed up,” Patty said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, can you get there by tomorrow morning? The big dinner isn’t until tomorrow night.”

“I’ll try really hard,” Patty said.

Joyce had been in the state assembly for three years now. If she had not gone on to enumerate to Patty all the relatives and family friends converging on Mohonk for this important tribute to a marriage, and the tremendous excitement with which Patty’s three siblings were anticipating the weekend, and how greatly honored she (Joyce) felt by the outpouring of sentiment from literally all four corners of the country, it’s possible that Patty would have done what it took to get to Mohonk. As things were, though, a strange peace and certainty settled over her while she listened to her mother. Light rain had begun to fall on Chicago; good smells of quenched concrete and Lake Michigan were carried inside by the wind stirring the canvas curtains. With an unfamiliar lack of resentment, a newly cool eye, Patty looked into herself and saw that no harm or even much hurt would come to anyone if she simply skipped the anniversary. Most of the work had already been done. She saw that she was almost free, and to take the last step felt kind of terrible, but not terrible in a bad way, if that makes any sense.

She was sitting by a window, smelling the rain and watching the wind bend the weeds and bushes on the roof of a long-abandoned factory, when the call from Richard came.

“Very sorry about this,” he said. “I’ll be there within the hour.”

“You don’t have to hurry,” she said. “It’s already way too late.”

“But your party’s tomorrow night.”

“No, Richard, that was the dinner. I was supposed to be there today. Today by five o’clock.”

“Shit. Are you kidding me?”

“Did you really not remember that?”

“It’s a little mixed up in my head at this point. I’m somewhat short on sleep.”

“OK, well, anyway. There’s no hurry at all. I think I’m going to go home now.”

And go home she did. Pushed her suitcase down the stairs and followed with her crutches, flagged a gypsy cab on Halstead Street, and took one Greyhound bus to Minneapolis and another to Hibbing, where Gene Berglund was dying in a Lutheran hospital. It was about forty degrees and pouring rain on the vacant small-hour streets of downtown Hibbing. Walter’s cheeks were rosier than ever. Outside the bus station, in his father’s cigarette-reeking gas-guzzler, Patty threw her arms around his neck and took the plunge of seeing how he kissed, and was gratified to find he did it very nicely.