Trust

The Rambler rolling along through the night...Me in the passenger seat...Ed at the wheel chanting what sounds like a Navajo pow-wow song.


"What are you doing?" I ask. "What's that?"
"Chanting. To stay awake."


On the way to his parents' home where he still lived. So it must have been night. But my memory offers up no info on where his parents put me if we stayed overnight.


I don't recall his mother feeding us, although she must have. Only that one moment stands out--which I included in my letter to her last month. Ed's sudden impulse to cut my hair ("You know how your hair should look?), setting the chair in the backyard and going to town with the scissors while his parents watched from the open sliding glass doors saying, "We hope you know what you're doing."


Thrilled. I didn't care if I ended up bald. This attention...this strange physical intimacy. Not quite the same as having a man shave your armpits, but not that different either.

Nothing else remains of that visit. Perhaps that's more than enough. Looking back, I wonder what I was doing there. Why he brought me. Was it just because he was driving my car? Or was he somehow showing off that he was "dating" a girl (even living with her)?


His mother recently answered my letter (I asked if she ever heard from Barbara and she said yes), and said that Ed and Barbara had wanted to get married but "I told them to wait until after graduation. But by then she married somebody else."


The regret.


I hope she doesn't believe marrying Barbara would have saved Ed from taking men as lovers. Although he and Barbara would have made a dynamic, complimentary couple.


One evening, late in our cohabitation that summer, Ed called to say:  "I'm at Barbara's and I'm going to spend the night." Feelings of anger and humiliation welled up in me. I retorted, "That's fine. I'm going to go out and pick someone up off the street corner to spend the night with."


"I wish you would," he said. "But you won't." My roommate Becky was there during that call and after I hung up, and she heard what he said, she yelled, "I don't know why you put up with him, Marlan!"


Becky and I met when she was a sweet virgin in her Freshman year. She was now sleeping with a much older guy who didn't interact with the rest of the house (as Ed did), but basically had sex with her and left, or she would go to his place. In my eyes, Becky's de-virginization  had made her high-strung, fidgety and dramatic. If that's what sex did to you, then I felt safe "putting up" with Ed where at least our feelings were real, if unspoken.


No drama the next day when Ed returned. I don't remember discussing it (although he was probably dying to). Barbara had a steady boyfriend. And even after making love with Ed again, she picked up the occasional guy in a bar.


"Barbara's sore," Ed told me one day, laughing. "She picked up this guy who turned out to be a hot lay and today she's complaining she can hardly walk." I laughed. He added: "I am not a 'hot lay.' I take my time."


Whatever. This attitude and talk did not make me regret not having sex with him. I was content not to be compared in bed. Comparing us out of bed would have been an exercise in futility. It would have been like comparing Elizabeth Taylor to a fly on her wall.


Then came the cats.


My roommate Barbara showed up with the four kittens she had promised, and Ed and I spent hours in bed petting them and playing with them. I got one for myself--a black one with brown tinge to the fur that she had named "Brownie." Ed changed it to "Pussilanimous Miscreant (the Cowardly Villain)." Ed drew a pastel of Brownie lying down --the view from behind. The only attempt he made at drawing while living there. It was lovely.


What happened to that drawing? My aunt might have thrown it out during her purge of my bedroom in Ft. Myers after I'd dropped out of college and left home for Boston. She threw out my dolls; the trippy lampshade Becky had painted for me; and possibly Ed's drawing. I'd left Brownie with my father and brother. A few years later, we were walking in Chicago where I now lived, and Dad said: "Oh I have to tell you something sad: Brownie ran away."


Cats do not run away. I knew Dad had disposed of her. But worse, I felt startled. I'd forgotten all about her. I had somehow misplaced her in my selfish need to get away and find myself. Bad when it happens to cats. Worse when it happens to people.


One day I was visiting Barbara and described how the kittens seemed to melt under his velvety touch (something I picked up and retain to this day), and she stretched out her hand and said: "Ed can touch."


The way she said it, I could see the two of them in that small bed, Ed taking his time with his light, soothing touch--Barbara purring under it. "Ed can touch..." as if to say, This is his true talent. His calling. Like the way a man might talk about a woman who is good in bed. Categorically. Did Barbara love the rest of Ed? How could she not? He was lovable. She said nothing to me of her feelings. Perhaps to spare me. Or was she, in fact, as confused as I was about what the future might hold with someone who is neither animal, vegetable or mineral?


The summer was drawing to a close, my classes were in finals, and I was rehearsing for the show when my roommates announced that it was unfair that Ed lived in my room when the others did not have men living with them, and that meant he was using the utilities and not sharing the expenses. Plus he was taking up space in the 4-bedroom house and therefore should pay rent.


Many many roommates later, I can look on this as standard female roommate ganging-up petty behavior. But this was my first taste. I had been spending a lot of time away from home and Ed. He interacted with them of course when I wasn't there--and what was said or inferred was unknown to me except for the Frozen Banana Incident.


Over-ripe bananas in the freezer that had caused my roomies consternation and they laughed when I came home and revealed that I was the one who had put them there. To eat later as frozen bananas in cereal.


Someone laughed and said: "Ed said, 'Well, I know it wasn't Marlan. She's far too rational.'"


Rational? Moi? But I can see that my diary entries reflect a rational girl with flashes of emotionalism and radical wild outbursts.


It occurs to me now that Becky might have campaigned to get rid of Ed--to save me from myself. Ah, if only this were fiction.


Ed felt insulted when I told him. He smoked his cigarette and mused: "I fixed the screen door...I made them dinner..." Nothing could be done to stop it. He had not found a job and now he had to go. In his absence, I fell into a depression with surges of anger. Exacerbated by my first experience of "speed." The doctor had given me diet pills a couple years earlier, but this high-wire drug was sold to me by someone in the house -- I don't recall if it was male or female. To help me stay up and cram for exams.


Speed made me feel utterly brilliant and energetic and as if it would always be thus until the horrible awful dark near-suicidal crash that was the inevitable flip side.


Nick picked up the Ed slack and started taking me to the sinks again. Still remaining an adorable perfect (naked) gentleman. But I was furious when he didn't come to my play. I don't recall how we ended up in my room--maybe he stopped by to visit one night. It was dark, I was miserable from crashing on the speed--it was doing terrible things to my face and body--and despite that, Nick began to make love to me very gently.


What did I do? I stopped him.


Okay, okay, one more damn thing I'd love to do differently, but there it is. I ended up sitting on the steps of the porch with Nick saying goodbye and essentially letting him know that I never wanted to see him again.


"I think I need to see a therapist," I said. Nick said in his calm, nice way that he thought that was a good idea.


I wasn't a prude. But just after my freshman year (before Ed), I had thrown myself into several passionate sexual situations with men I desired and sometimes even loved, but in each case I'd been badly burned, even occasionally humiliated. So I was left cautious and confused. And technically a "virgin."


Whatever the glue was that held Ed and me together in an oddly physical, affectionate friendship...it would stay strong. And whatever Barbara and Ed felt or didn't feel about each other; what words they spoke and struggles they may have engaged in...only they know. If this were fiction, I could make up the options and dialogue, the twists and turns.


What they said or didn't say, felt or didn't feel mattered little at summer's end because Ed's "nemesis" graduated and returned to her home to Miami.


That Fall when Ed returned to Tallahassee to finish his degree, he moved into Barbara's vacated studio apartment. I moved into an apartment a stone's throw away from him. And the dance continued.




Next Chapter: R-E-S-P-E-C-T