Freedom

“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?”