by Anna Berry
We study each others’ souls.
No, really. It sounds trite, sure—two nineteen-year-old college kids bonding on a deep spiritual level without the benefit of sex. But that’s exactly what we do. I spend three or four nights a week in Todd’s room, the two of us always splitting a sausage pizza from Papa John’s that’s always delivered by the same Korean graduate student with English so poor that Todd and I invent a catchphrase for our frequent nightly soirees on Eastern philosophy and all things Beat Generation. One of us will call the other and say, “You-ah Order-ah Papah Jah-hans?” and the party is on.
It’s Todd who introduces me to the freethinking literature and wide-open spiritual writing that I’m not learning about in my dull literature survey courses. Jack Kerouac and Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder and Allan Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Denise Levertov—all these writers are the stuff of our late-night pizza talks, which we mix liberally with incense, vinyl records, and mix tapes from Todd’s vast postmodern jazz collection.
On the surface, Todd and I are a lot alike. We’re both the offspring of divorced Irish-Catholic parents. We both grew up in relatively unstable lower-middle/working-class homes; we were both dreamy and introspective “odd” kids who’d preferred books to toys since we were toddlers. We’re both foul-mouthed, sharp-tongued, cynical, and blunt to the point of being obtuse. We have the same dry sense of humor and the same love for obscure modern jazz and minor women writers like Katherine Mansfield and Margaret Fuller. We gaze into each other’s deep-set eyes and understand things we’ve never understood in anyone before.
I become Todd’s best friend, confidante, mentor, and partner-at-arms in all things. We sit together in all our classes and trade witty barbs on handwritten notes we pass back and forth for the entire lecture, notes that start out the class period as bad jokes and end up two hours later as long strings of freeform poetry. We manipulate the RA duty roster to ensure we are both on call on the same nights, and we always make our “rounds” at night (when we walk the floors of the dorm, checking fire extinguishers and busting underage keg parties) together. I help him write term papers and teach him all my secret techniques for bullshitting through essay exams on Renaissance literature for easy As. I teach him how to speed-read, how to tell the difference between postmodern and poststructuralist, how to tell the difference between Pre-Raphaelite and Romantic poetry and art. In exchange for all these arts and culture lessons, Todd teaches me how to meditate by sitting on a black cushion and measuring out my breaths two at a time, gives me inscribed copies of A Buddhist Bible and On the Road, teaches me the Heart Sutra, and loans me his CD boxed set of live Jack Kerouac poetry readings. He makes me personalized mix tapes to listen to while I write term papers. He loans me his sex manuals when I complain I’m not having orgasms with my boyfriend. He lets me cry on his shoulder.
Todd shows me the best ways to mix drinks with bong hits without getting sick; he takes me out for my birthday and gets me drunk on blowjob shots until I’m too bombed to lick the whipped cream off my cheeks and nose, so wasted that he has to help me up to my bed and tuck me in and lock my dorm-room door behind him using his RA master key.
Todd makes me into his de facto emotion-spiritual advisor. In fact, he idolizes me. Todd tells me I’m the smartest person he’s ever met, tells others that he respects me and my supposed great intellect more than anything else on campus—more than his favorite history professors. Todd even refers to me in a campus newspaper interview as “a Renaissance woman for the 90s.” He consults me on all his most personal decisions, including whether or not he should break up every other week with his on-again, off-again sorority-girl girlfriend, whom I’ll call Marcia. I always tell him he should, no matter how many times they manage to get back together. And why wouldn’t I? I have ulterior motives, after all.
I don’t understand what attracts Todd to Marcia. She’s scrawny, and she has pasty skin and firebomb-red hair that always looks and smells greasy. Her teeth are vaguely brown, probably from heavy smoking and drinking too many whiskey sours at Alpha Chi Omega, the sorority house where she lives off-campus. Marcia rarely speaks above a whisper, and in true early-90s grunge-rock fashion, she never seems to wear clean clothes or to have recently bathed. Whenever her path crosses with mine, I find her conversation and personality to resemble something between expired yogurt and a rock. While Todd is witty, sardonic, well-read, assertive, and ambitious in a New Bohemian sort of way, Marcia is dull, wooden, shy to the point of disappearing into concrete walls, spoiled, lazy, and culturally illiterate.
Todd and Marcia couldn’t be an odder match if they tried.
Marcia studies oboe in the Music Department, but she supposedly has tendonitis in her hands so severe that it makes playing the oboe impossible, so she’s “on leave” from her music-performance major for a few quarters until her hands heal. In the meantime, Marcia is failing music theory and has withdrawn from most of her other courses. As far as I can tell, she is majoring mostly in sorority parties and fucking Todd’s brains out.
I suppose what attracts Todd to Marcia is the sex. They only seem to spend time together on weekends (they’re always broken up or “on a break” during the week), but every Friday and Saturday night without fail, Todd and Marcia have sex loud enough to wake the thousand-years’ dead, and always just one floor below me with their windows wide open.
Todd and Marcia apparently are not the kind of couple who are into meat-and-potatoes, missionary-position sex either. As far as I can tell, they most enjoy doing the deed standing up, preferably while banging against a heavy, stationary object that crashes loudly upon each impact. I hear each and every thud, crash, shout, and sigh through the cheap dorm drywall and cinderblock. I even follow their sexual role-playing scenarios from one weekend to the next like a Hispanic telenovela—I have the pleasure of overhearing a running bedroom gag going for several weeks that involves Todd playing the role of a milkman and Marcia playing the role of a desperate housewife who relies on his “special deliveries” for sexual sustenance. Every time I hear Todd shout “SPECIAL DELIVERY” through my dorm-room window, I try to match up his nymphomaniac weekend bedroom habits with the cool, detached man I share pizza with almost every night during the week, and I come up with nothing.
There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose.
Maybe I’m so attracted to Todd because he’s like my dad in that respect. Some psychology schools of thought say that every girl wants to grow up and marry her father.[2] If I’d ever managed to marry Todd, I’d have come pretty darn close to achieving just that.
Todd’s romps with Marcia get so wild during winter quarter that the freshmen residents on his floor start coming up to my room on weekends, asking if I would mind telling Todd to either keep it down or get a motel room off-campus. “I know you’re his friend,” a shy, pimpled young woman whispers to me late one Friday evening. “Make him stop. I can’t sleep and I can’t study with all that racket. Plus, it’s kind of embarrassing.”
A pudgy young fratboy puts it a little more bluntly the following Sunday: “My parents came to visit yesterday and asked me why my RA’s room sounds like a porn film soundtrack.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I promise. But I don’t.
Up until this point, I’ve felt like I can talk to Todd about anything. We’ve touched upon plenty of sensitive subjects in our late-night private pizza parties already—like the fact that I’m not at all sexually satisfied by my current boyfriend, a chemistry major named “Bob” whom I met last year when I was a member of the university’s marching color guard, for one; the fact that I always teeter precariously on the edge of clinical depression, for another. Todd tells me the solution to managing both issues is to look inside myself—therein, I’ll find the answer. He gives me a book on walking meditation by Thich Nhat Hanh, blows pot smoke at me, and then asks with a straight face what does turn me on in bed. But no matter how hard I try to build myself up to it, I can’t confront Todd about his own wild sex life, eve
n as a favor to the timid college freshmen he’s hurting with it. I just can’t.
It’s around this time that I realize I’m in love with Todd.
I don’t know what to do. I’m already dating somebody else. And Todd is my closest friend and Platonic soulmate—I don’t want to do anything that might jeopardize our near-perfect friendship. Still, listening to him fornicate wildly really begins to bother me—and yet, I can’t bring myself to tell him how I feel. I also can’t help but notice the parallel between Todd’s exhibitionist sexual behavior and what I endured in my father’s house as a child, and that realization starts making me feel ill. I know by then that Todd is probably bad for me, but being the young woman exploring her independence for the first time that I am, that knowledge just makes me want him all the more.
Yet in a strange paradox, I find myself inhibited by my desire to please Todd, in much the same manner as I’d stifled myself around my father in childhood and adolescence. Todd idolizes and adores me as no man ever has before, and all without ever laying a finger on my body.
Todd has given me the gift of true emotional intimacy for the first time in my life. And yet, I’m incapable of appreciating that intimacy as long as it exists without sex, without love—I think (erroneously, of course) that the two things are interchangeable. Do I dare risk spoiling the cozy relationship we share by telling him the truth?
In the short term, the answer is no.
I stuff my growing physical attraction to Todd into a tiny, compact area just underneath my spleen, where it slowly festers. I break up with my boyfriend Bob, who takes it so badly he begins stalking me. Todd tries to be supportive, but he’s getting distracted by his constant weekday fights with Marcia, which he tempers by sleeping around with some of his floor residents—including a deranged, plump self-mutilator named Lisa who comes to Todd’s dorm room seeking peer counseling and gets herself some good-old-fashioned sexual healing instead. I start having trouble with my accelerated French class, and my grades threaten to slip below straight As for the first time ever. And probably worst of all, our dorm inherits a pyromaniac “problem” resident who’s already been kicked out of two other dorms for setting fire to pizza boxes stuffed in trash chutes. So for the second half of winter quarter, twice-nightly fire alarms and hours-long evacuations into the frigid night air so firefighters can clear the smoke-choked hallways mean nobody in our dorm sleeps more than two hours a night for several weeks. Our residence hall director puts his foot down a week before spring break and kicks the pyro out himself, but by then I’m crashing and burning into a major stress-induced depression.
The stress and mood disorders that are keeping me up nights, killing my appetite, and making me lose focus in class are a bigger threat to me than just making me feel bad or sorry for myself too—I’m attending college on a full academic scholarship, which I’ll lose if I don’t maintain at least a 3.5 grade-point average. My dad is now on his third marriage and has two new babies at home, so it’s not like I can move back in with him, and my mom lives on welfare in a one-room apartment miles off-campus. I don’t have a car, and all my money goes to pay for school. I’ve lost track of what my brother is doing now entirely—the last I heard he was living in a rented house full of other college dropouts like himself. I know I should probably go seek therapy, but I don’t. I use my part-time job and full course-load as an excuse, telling myself I just don’t have the time required to spend two or three hours a week meeting with a therapist. But the truth is, I just don’t want to face the truth. It’s the same choice millions upon millions of other people with mental illness make—if you just ignore the symptoms, if you hope and pray and deny it enough, maybe it will just go away.[3] Besides, seeking help will publicly brand you with the scarlet letter of being crazy, and no nineteen-year-old girl wants that. I certainly don’t.
Todd notices my melancholy mood the weekend before spring break. He’s broken up with Marcia that week, so we go out for dinner and a movie—The Remains of the Day with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins—with our friend and boss Regina LaChance,[4] a graduate student who works part-time supervising the dorm’s RA staff. The film’s plotline centers on the tragedy of unrequited love, and it affects me tremendously. So tremendously, in fact, I can’t get up from my seat to follow Todd and Regina out of the old Esquire Theater when the credits roll. I’ve struggled so hard to bottle up sobs in the second half of the film that the entire lower half of my body is temporarily paralyzed.
Todd and Regina have both left the theater already, and in the clutch of departing people they don’t notice I’ve remained behind. When the theater is empty I manage to release a couple of choking sobs that come out more like whimpered coughs, and that’s enough to unlock my frozen legs and waist. I put on my sunglasses to hide my red eyes and tearstained cheeks, make it out onto the street, and find Todd and Regina waiting for me on the sidewalk. They don’t seem alarmed at all to have lost track of me; they probably both think I just went to the bathroom or something.
Todd and Regina want to go to a nearby street cafe for after-dinner drinks. It’s a laid-back place that never cards underage drinkers, so Todd and I are sure to get served. I shrug and follow Todd and Regina down the block to an empty cafe table. I feel as if my whole body is under pins and needles—like the heavy, tingly feeling you have when coming out from under anesthesia. I walk along the sidewalk and sink into a wicker cafe chair as if moving slowly through Jell-O.
Todd and Regina talk between themselves for awhile without noticing me much. I’ve suspected for some time that Todd might be sleeping with Regina too—which if true, means he has at least three different sexual relationships going at once—but my perception could certainly be distorted by my growing depression. To me, any attractive woman I run across is my potential competition. It’s no secret that Todd sleeps around on Marcia, but why won’t he choose to sleep around on her with me? If I’m good enough to be his best friend, why am I not good enough to be his booty call? That unanswered question tortures me without end. I’m pretty enough to get plenty of date offers from other guys—all of which I turn down—because Todd is the only one I want, and he doesn’t want me. And still, he sends me mixed signals all the time, flirting with me, talking to me frankly about sex, asking what my hopes and dreams are. I don’t know what he wants from me anymore, except to make me feel awful about myself. And yet, his behavior is pretty typical for most guys his age. He’s immature and self-centered, sure—but so is just about every other nineteen-year-old college kid. That doesn’t make him special at all, even if I think he is.
My moods blacken and my grades slip. I anger easily, and I lose a couple of friends over it. Regina LaChance takes me aside after the weekly RA staff meeting and tells me I need to work on controlling my temper. I try to run for president of the university women’s choir and lose to a bubbly airhead who’d joined only a couple of weeks before the election, and the grapevine says I lost because I’m “too bitchy.” But I don’t believe any of it, and I swear my problems are someone else’s fault, not mine. I’ve just had a string of bad luck, that’s all. I don’t even want to consider the possibility of what’s really going on.
I can no longer see the forest for the trees. After all, almost everything my eyes see this spring just get twisted into yet another reminder of how I am not a woman Todd finds worthy of his sexual attention. Nothing else matters to me, not even sleeping or eating. Small wonder that I fall apart.
Back on Ludlow Street after the movie, I tune out Todd and Regina’s lively conversation and stare out into space—for how long, I don’t know.
I return to earth when I feel Todd jab me in the shoulder. He looks genuinely concerned—scared, even. “Anna? Anna, are you okay?”
I run my finger around and around the rim of a highball drink I don’t remember ordering. “Yeah,” I sigh. “I’m fine.”
“You sure? You seem really . . . well, distant.”
I shrug my shoulders. The pins and needles take over my b
ody again. I feel as if I’m soaking up ether from some invisible source. My field of vision goes wavy, then black clouds sink in and obliterate it. I think for a moment that I’ve passed out, but this feeling of sinking into nothingness is simply the raging beast of my chronic illness returning from hibernation to poison me, paralyze me with its toxic venom, capture me and drag me forcibly back to its lair to be consumed and swallowed whole. I don’t know what to call it yet—back in high school my high-school guidance counselor and a child psychologist I saw for five sessions said I suffered from “mood swings,” but they never gave me a diagnosis. They might have given an official one to my dad, my legal guardian at the time—but he never shared it with me. And I’m still too frightened to seek help on my own. All I know now is that my mind is filled with a dark poison that makes me feel tired, nauseous, disembodied.
Somehow I manage to gather my senses enough to mumble to an increasingly wary Todd and Regina that I’m not feeling well and need to go home.
Once safely back at the dorm, I know what I have to do.
I sit down at my desk, take out a pad of paper and a sharp new pencil, and write Todd a letter. It covers nine pages, front and back, in my slanted, looping feminine script. The letter gives each and every angst-ridden, sappy, hormone-drenched detail of the kind of love only a nineteen-year-old woman can feel for a man who obviously doesn’t love her back—at least, not physically. I write and write without reading over what words my pencil forms, I write while tears fall on the page, smearing those words before they’re finished. The act of writing that letter becomes almost a sexual act in and of itself; when I finally set my pencil down, I am sweaty and spent as if I’ve just had an orgasm. I’m wildly euphoric too, as if I’ve just snorted six lines of cocaine off a Manhattan toilet seat. In the warped parallel universe of my illness, I think that the letter I’ve just written will solve everything—in that respect, it’s just another delusion, not to mention a passive-aggressive cry for help. It’s sexually explicit and asks that he do things to me that I’m embarrassed to admit now. I offer to do plenty of things to him too—things I think any red-blooded nineteen-year-old boy would love to have done to him, but I am wrong. With that letter, I cross lines that should never be crossed.