Slipping Through My Fingers Part 2

After Christmas Break that year, Matlin moved out of The Hotel and got a place with Barbara. Erica McFee moved in.

Shortly after she moved in, Erica and I got drunk in the kitchen one night. She was dating David at the time, and while we were drinking she told me things about David I had absolutely no business knowing. I knew right then never to trust her. If she’d stab her lover in the back like that, she’d stab anyone in arm’s reach.

You and Erica had history. Both from the same hometown. You had known each other in high-school. Erica liked to remind me how close the two of you were. Erica liked to… play with people, and I guess she had figured out how to play with me. Erica seemed to make it her life’s work to be certain that you and I were never alone in the same room. God, I hated her.

Sometimes at night, I’d wake up, leave Jeremy’s room, and go and sit in the dark on the stairway. I’d smoke cigarettes and drink whiskey and try to reach out to you in my mind.

That night, that one night, before Thanksgiving was consuming me. In spite of everything else that was going on then.

And there serious things going on.

I became pregnant a few months later. Jeremy had his tantrum, and I had an abortion. A few weeks after that, someone broke into my apartment and tried to rape me. I remember calling The Hotel that morning. You answered the phone, and I managed to stumble an apology for waking you so early. I asked to speak to Jeremy. By the time he got to the phone I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t even talk. Half of that was that I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t been raped. I had gotten away. I couldn’t find the words to describe what had happened.

Jeremy, to his credit, arrived even before the cops did. He also started doing odd things. Sneaking up quietly behind me. Unexpectedly coming into the passenger side of my car late at night. I’d scream hysterically. And still he kept on. Jeremy’s darker side was beginning to show.

I stayed at The Hotel with Jeremy while I looked for a new apartment. You were incredibly solicitous of me. Was I alright? Did I need anything? Did I want you to walk to campus with me? To the corner store? In about two weeks, I found a new place. I moved a whole block and a half away, but it was enough. A second story apartment. A gated complex.

You started dating Jenny. It didn’t take us all long to start calling her “that little sex machine.” Yeah. Jenny was something. And before it was all said and done, most of us got to taste a little of that something.

A long time later, after Jenny had been gone for a while, we were playing cards one night. As usual, I was the only woman in the game. You were there. Jonathan. And Tom. And maybe Mark? I remember Tom mentioned that Jenny was in town. “Man, I don’t want to see her,” Jonathan said. “If I see her, I’m gonna fuck her. And I do not want to fuck her.” We all laughed in general agreement. Jenny was… well, she was that way. Oozing sex and bad, bad, news.

But I’m digressing here. It’s all such a tangled story. There are a thousand other stories weaved into it. Just as tangled as our lives all were back then. Just as tangled as my heart was. Just as tangled as my heart still is.

Time went on. You started dating Melody. It was widely rumored that your fondness for Melody had a more than a little to do with Melody’s fast car and her endless supply of cocaine. I didn’t think much of her then. “All the depth of a muffin tin,” I believe I said.

I feel bad now, that I had so little respect for Mel at the time. Over all these years, Melody has been a friend to me. She still is. Even when everyone else has pretty much faded away. I never dreamed that we would all end up so far apart from each other. I loved all those people so much. I thought it would always be like that. But we all graduated, moved, got married, scattered to the wind. And Mel remains the touchstone for us all. Mel doesn’t let people disappear from her life.

You would drop by to see me now and again. You finally got used to the fact I didn’t smoke grass, and after making one too many bongs out of old coke cans, you started keeping rolling papers at my apartment. I still have what’s left of those rolling papers. In my “box of lovers.” The remnants of a pack of Zig Zag’s. My one and only tie to you.

We would talk about nothing mostly. I would listen, rapt, waiting for you to say something real. To tell me what was in your heart. Once I tried to ask you about that night, but you turned back flips to keep me from talking about it, and I gave up.

Jeremy and I were splitting up and getting back together like the swings of a pendulum, all wedding plans shelved, if not abandoned. He dated Wanda for a while, and some other girls I guess. I never paid that much attention. I dated Tom some, started dating Jessica and then Lena. Lovely Lena, with her crown of red hair and her fondness of Janis Joplin.

Jeremy took it hard, my dating Lena. And one night, shortly after he’d graduated and moved away, he came back to town for a party I was helping to throw at the “Frat House” (which, dear reader, wasn’t a frat house at all). But before the party, he downed most of a bottle of Crown. Got so drunk that he passed out in my car. When I finally found him, I took him to my apartment and put him to bed. He didn’t sleep long. Instead, sometime on that dark, awful night, he woke up alone and half crazed. In a paranoid, drunken frenzy he decided I was at that party with Lena, instead of him. Of course, I wasn’t. I was at that party because I was obligated to be, being one of the “designated hostesses”. I was at that party fulfilling a social obligation until I could go home to him.

But that truth didn’t matter. Someone else’s truth never does. What mattered was the madness in Jeremy’s mind that night. It was always a precarious balance, his mind. And that night, it fell hard and fast off the deep end. He drove to the party, took his keys to the paint job of my car before he even walked in. I was standing on the back porch talking to a group of people and he came storming out, yelling obscenities. I led him into the back yard to try to talk some sense into him. He yelled some more, and finally, I just ask him for the key to my apartment and suggested he crash somewhere else that night. He refused. I followed him up to the porch saying emphatically, “Jeremy, give me my keys.” As he reached the door, he turned around and caught me with a left hook. I was airborne. I flew fifteen feet back to the sidewalk and landed so hard it completely knocked the wind out of me. People scattered, and then suddenly you were there.

You grabbed me, and held onto me like a wild animal until I got it into my head that going after Jeremy myself wasn’t such a good idea. Then you got Jeremy, got him out of the house, got my keys back. I’m not sure, but I think you managed this without hitting him. If anyone could have, it would have been you. He was, as I’ve said, so much in love with you.

All through the party, you kept your eyes on me and the door. Each time Jeremy came back, you got him to leave again. Then you and Melody took me home to find the shambles of my ransacked apartment. Papers were scattered all over the living room. A sketch I’d done of Lena was in shreds on the table. You and Mel stayed with me that long night after the party, turned Jeremy away from my door twice. Close to sunrise you and Melody went home, and I went to sleep.

Of course, Jeremy showed up a short time later. Finally sober. Sobbing. Contrite. And when I sent him away, we both knew it was for the last time. It was over.

And his paranoid delusions became a reality. What had been a passing crush on Lena, became something much more. And Lena, of course, had more than a passing crush on you too.

Oh the tangled, knotted threads of it all! I get lost in it! I stay lost in it! How can it be that this was 20 years ago? So much of my heart is still there, caught in all those criss-crossed threads.

So much of my heart lost somewhere in time.