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?
