Freedom

“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 Mi

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 Mi

“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.”

[1] Patty didn’t see a picture of Qaddafi until some years after college, and even then, though struck immediately by his resemblance to Richard Katz, she didn’t make anything special of the fact that Libya seemed to her to have the world’s cutest head of state.