That’s What Breaks My Heart by Heather Thompson-Brenner

As she transitions into adulthood, theatre-loving libertine Gretchen has a complicated relationship with troubled fabulist Phil.

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If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

- Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double

I met Phil the summer before my senior year in high school, in my friend Sadie's new kitchen. Sadie, who was a year older than me, had registered for arts classes at a local community college and rented a dilapidated house on Craigie Street. The house was in Somerville, aka Slumerville, the wayward sister of relatively uptight Cambridge where we had both had grown up. I was still living with my parents, performing comedies of manners with my mom, whereas Sadie's apartment was a stage set for gritty drama. The refrigerator was a violent shade of mustard, and the cabinets seemed crafted from varnished cardboard. Rusty linoleum covered not only the floor but the lower half of one wall; either a whimsical design choice or a clumsy attempt to hide a body.

"Tell me about your roommates," I said, sipping the beer she handed me.

My friend was maternal and organized - like her mom, who owned a bar before she died - and she'd already filled the apartment with lost boys from her college theater department. "Mark, Matt, and Phil." Sadie tilted her beer bottle at me. "You might like Phil."

"Say more."

"He's funny. Mysterious. Large vocabulary."

"So he can help me with the SATs?"

"He's a writer, actually." Sadie knew I'd been looking for a guy who could combine romance with intellectual stimulation. "I'll show you his room."

The tour was perplexing. I liked Phil's vintage record player, and the red plastic milk crates that sheltered a generous vinyl collection. I was neutral about the Union Jack - I'd never dated a punk. I was dismayed, however, by the naked dolls arrayed in one corner; at least a dozen, at various stages of dismemberment, ranging in size from a healthy toddler to a twelve-week-old fetus. One intact plastic body hung diagonally from a noose, all four limbs reaching forward. One pink-cheeked head was mounted high on a broomstick, empty holes punched in a grid where hair had been. They reminded me of trashy horror films, or those posters that pro-life protesters shove in your face.

"Did you speak to his parole officer?" I asked.

Sadie barked, a smoker's cough. "That's for a theater class," she said.

"It's both repulsive and cliché," I said, heading back to the kitchen.

Phil made his grand entrance about an hour later, holding a bicycle helmet like Hamlet with Yorick's skull. He didn't look like a guy who would decapitate dolls. He looked more like an androgynous pop star; slightly underfed, with floppy, sun-streaked hair. The neck of his white T-shirt was stretched out, and his Army-Navy satchel looked heavy. His eyes seemed to lack a layer of essential protection.

"Sadie," he said, somewhat breathless.

"Phil," Sadie said, handing him a beer. "This is Gretchen." He drank like he was thirsty.

"Your bedroom decor is interesting," I said.

"Tell me more," Phil said. He followed me upstairs, probably anticipating my second move. He lay on his bed while I harangued him.

"If it's going to be violent, it has to be creative," I said. "It's offensive because it's banal. What's the point?"

Phil propped himself on one elbow, grinning. "Theatre of Cruelty? Antonin Artaud?" He had the grace not to make me admit when I didn't know a reference. "You know, the French director, the playwright, who helped launch the avant-garde."

"Why the dolls?"

Phil gestured with his Rolling Rock and assumed a nonspecific European accent. "Theater should shock us out of our complacency. Surround us with terrifying images and overwhelming sounds, immerse us in violence, wake us up. Modern man has lost touch with a primal truth. Life is a bloody spasm, briefly wrenched from chaos."

I didn't know if I liked Artaud, but I loved Phil's pronouncement.

"I'll show you," he said. He stood up, flicked off the lights, and started the record. The sounds of machines and a harpsichord, clicking insects and sawing metal, spread in the darkness. He pointed a flashlight toward the doll corner, and giant infant shadows swallowed the wall.

My heart was beating a little faster. I turned on the lights. "Bravo. I'm wide awake."

Phil lay back on the bed. "That's what I want my writing to do, too."

"Like this?" I began my recitation. "'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue, taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.'"

Quoting Nabokov was a trick I did often, and it worked well on Phil. He hugged his pillow to his chest, like an ingenue about to burst into song. I didn't tell him that my high school theater teacher had taught us the lines as a vocal warm-up.

"Come closer," he waved me down with the pillow.

I sat on the edge of the mattress. Half the time I'd kiss guys first, if I got bored of waiting, but I preferred if they did. The universe seemed to rip a little, as if my desire had imposed itself on reality.

Phil balanced on his knees and leaned forward. The kiss was shockingly bad. Stiff lips and hard teeth, followed by Phil's rigid tongue, like a glottal head-butt.

I scooched my rear against the wall and put my hands on his shoulders, keeping him at a safe distance. I softened my lips, but his next foray felt as though he were trying to suck something vital from my innards.

Philip's eyes remained closed as I stood up. I excused myself to the bathroom, and instead sought out Sadie, who was hanging clothes in her closet.

"He's interesting," I said. "But isn't there something, like, disturbing about him?"

"That's part of his appeal," she said. "He's not just another high school kid slumming for attention. He's definitely seen hard shit. But I can't tell which parts of his stories are true."

I felt I had seen hard shit as well. For most of my life I'd stayed disaster-adjacent; I had friends who had been assaulted, and I cared for Sadie, awkwardly, when she lost her mom. Recently, though, I was the disaster. I got pregnant, and then too sick to hide it. My mother and my high school classmates thought I'd gotten what I deserved. The abortion was less traumatizing than the vitriol. I was most hurt, though, by my capacity to harm myself, to self-inflict such painful consequences when I'd just been fooling around. Reality imposing itself on my desire, you might say.

Phil knocked on the door and pushed his pretty face through the opening. I assumed an upright, attentive position, in the chair next to Sadie's desk, willing to pursue the linguistic flirtation. Phil perched on the amplifier she used for her sound cues.

"So where'd you guys meet?" I asked.

Sadie said, "Everyone at school knows Phil. He's going to be a famous writer."

Phil looked down. His eyelashes were long and tawny.

"Gretchen will be famous, too," Sadie said charitably, puffing out her bosom. "We just don't know what for yet. Maybe acting."

"What are you writing?" I asked Phil.

"A novel about the bubonic plague. It's a comedy. As soon as anyone mentions their backstory, they fall down dead."

Sadie rolled her eyes.

"You haven't read it," he said to her. "Nobody has read it, because it's written in a solution of bacteria on a petri dish. It's growing, in length and in virulence. I'm also writing an play about you, Sadie. It's absurd."

"I'd like to read it," she said. "You never share any of your stuff." Sadie's hair was in two braids, like a milkmaid. Her cheeks were pink under her freckles.

"It's called The Bartendress. You keep bringing everyone drinks and food, and every time you come back from the kitchen your boobs are bigger. Nobody wants to mention it, and you act like it isn't happening, but your nipples starting poking the customers in their eyes. Your breasts get so huge they drive everyone off stage."

"Har-har," Sadie said.

I wished Phil would write something about me, but nicer.

When Sadie went to the bathroom, Phil pinched the sleeve of my shirt. "Let's go back upstairs." He spoke as if someone were sleeping nearby.

I said, in a normal voice, "I'm not going to have sex with you."

"No, no," he said. "I just want to tell you a story."

Back in his room I lay on his bed and tried to imagine the doll parts as characters in a monster family TV show. They might tell a joke, or serve us tea. My threshold for casual sex was pretty low, reproductive mishaps notwithstanding, and if he'd tried again, I could have downplayed the kissing. But Phil lay down next to me at an amicable distance. He passed me a half-pint of Old Thompson's whiskey.

"It's okay that you won't sleep with me," he said. "I'm actually in love with my sister."

I took a swig. "What's her name?"

"Sheena. She's two years my senior, but she never grew past the height of a ten-year-old. Her ass grew to be the size of a mature woman's, while her waist and ankles stayed diminutive."

I sensed we had crossed into the realm of fiction. "You have a thing for exaggerated body parts," I said.

"She's quite lovely, but extremely disturbed. She only wears cut-offs that show at least fifty percent of her buttocks and a handful of pubes. When my father witnesses her sinfulness, he invokes the holy ghost." Phil assumed the ringing tone of a preacher, crossed with the falsetto, echoing sound of a spirit: "The hoo-oo-oo-ly gho-oo-oo-st!"

I giggled. "Is this erotica, fable, or horror?"

"When my mom and dad adopted orphan triplets -"

"Triplets! Too much."

"Fine. When orphaned twins joined our dysfunctional family, Sheena and I made a deal that I'd provoke my father, steal his booze and cigarettes, and when he'd attack me, she'd sneak the twins away."

"Where was your mom?"

"Oh, she never stopped crying. Not ever. She filled an entire bathtub, and then washed the dishes in it. We never had to salt our food."

"Fable," I said.

"Just wait. One night I lured my father into the yard, let him get a few whacks in before I hid in the outhouse. Something scratched at the door. I was scared it was my dad, or maybe the chickens ratting me out. But it was Sheena, carrying bandages and water. She bathed everything that was bloody, and she kissed between the bruises."

I said, "That sounds suspiciously like the ending of Indiana Jones."

"Hmm. Unconscious plagiarism?" And after a second, "Did you like the ending of Indiana Jones?"

"I did," I confessed.

"Then I'm happy," he said.

We sipped in silence. I felt like I owed him something.

"You could say I'm a little in love with my brother," I said. "Nothing kinky or tragic. Just a hint of courtly romance."

"Tell me."

"He's a freshman at my high school and he hears shit about me at parties. I mean, he hears similar shit at home from our mother. At school it's from dickheads."

"What kind of gossip?"

"Suggestions I'm not a paragon of chastity."

"I'm glad to hear it," Phil said.

"So my brother invented a new form of chivalry. When some dick says, 'I slept with Gretchen, she was a great fuck,' my brother says, 'She's the best fuck, and don't you forget it.'"

"I promise I shall not," Phil said, "forget it. If I am ever so blessed."

We fell asleep side by side, like Hansel and Gretel.

---

The beginning of senior year was a slog. I planned my escape to an elite college, doing everything possible to earn my deliverance. Our academic decathlon team had no false modesty or high-minded intellectual goals; we bare-knuckle brawled those suburban bitches over math, science, literature, and a special topic of the week. On the week of the Constitution, I ripped a guy's throat out with the Ratification Clause.

I could have had a good part in the fall play as a senior, but I decided to do "peer education improv" to burnish my résumé, which meant going to urban schools and performing skits about coming out to your parents or offering a condom to your sex partner, with frequent pauses for laughter. I got a dose of more artistic theater from the shows that Sadie stage-managed, at various hard-to-find classroom-cum-theaters on her commuter campus. The lights and sound never worked perfectly, but she always pulled it off. After one such show she invited me to the cast party at Craigie Street.

"Will Phil be there?" I had hoped he'd be at the performance.

"I think so. If he isn't writing. Or screwing Angie."

Phil was dating an older woman, Angie, who looked like Sid Vicious's dead girlfriend, Nancy. Angie claimed she had been a model, and that she had a daughter in boarding school somewhere who was also a model. The father was supposedly a famous rock star, but her stories never quite added up.

When I arrived, Phil was holding court in the grungy kitchen, presiding over the keg in a white straw hat. Angie was nearby, wearing a man-sized Hüsker Dü T-shirt over a green lace bodysuit the color and texture of lichen. She opened her mouth wide to laugh at something Phil said. She looked like a person who would eventually lose some important teeth.

Angie sat down on the edge of the keg, straddling Phil. I watched with interest when they kissed. Phil didn't appear to be doing anything aggressive with his tongue.

Sadie introduced me to Matthew, a shy redhead. She patted the shoulder of his green military jumpsuit, which I recognized as an item from her closet. She urged him to tell me about their acting class, and then finished his sentences - assistance he seemed to appreciate.

I kept one eye on Angie and Phil. When Angie moved on, I took a plastic cup and approached the keg.

"Hello, Phil," I said. "Nice hat."

"Howdy, Gretchen." Phil took my cup. "I got this hat from Tom Wolfe, who got it from Ernest Hemingway, who got it from Mark Twain."

"How's the writing going?"

"Corpulent. Torpid. What're you up to?" He tilted my cup to correct the foam-to-beer ratio.

"College applications."

"Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know. Columbia, maybe. Harvard if I get in."

"That would be fun. You could be town and gown." He handed me the cup. "You could live with us."

"Wanna go out for a smoke?" I asked.

Phil nodded, and we pushed our way out the back door. The porch railing wobbled when I tried to lean against it. Through the window to one bedroom, I saw two boys launch into each other and then fall to the ground, lacking the supportive ricochet of a mosh pit. Through the other window I saw Sadie and Matthew grappling on someone's bed. Phil handed me a cigarette.

"I thought Sadie was dating Mark," I said around the filter. "I almost called him the wrong name."

"Sadie hasn't told you the whole story?" I looked at him sideways, and he licked his lips.

"Mark was the other roommate. The director. Apparently, Sadie was sleeping with Mark and Matthew."

"That must have been complicated."

"It's fine with me if Sadie fucks all twelve apostles at once. But when Mark found out, he was enraged. Before he left, he wrote 'whore' on the wall in - wait, guess what substance."

"The blood of Jesus."

"His own shit. Then he poured - or scooped, I guess - the rest of it onto her duvet."

"That must have been a large shit," I said.

"He'd had a hearty meal, with lots of fiber."

"I see the vision of a great director."

Phil rested his chin on his fist, like a Rodin. "We should ask Sadie: How do you light an angry shit?"

"Spotlight. With a soundtrack of screeching violin, played with a bow made of teeth."

"And rhythmic grunts," Phil closed his eyes. "Uh, uh, uh, uh. So the audience wonders, Are those the sounds of excretion, or of love?"

We had nothing to top that. We grinned at each other.

"So we have an extra room." Phil ground out his cigarette. "If you're interested."

Sadie reappeared in the kitchen a half-hour later. I pulled her aside. "Phil told me a crazy story about your ex."

"Yeah." Sadie forced a laugh.

"He said Mark put literal shit on your bed."

"Unfortunately, that's true."

"Jesus, Sadie. That's disturbing."

"Just some Craigie Street drama," she said. "But, yeah, it was gross."

---

Phil's suggestion that I move in was theoretically possible, as I'd recently emancipated myself from my mother. In exchange for room and board I had been following her easier rules - like being polite, and getting good grades - but I would not come home when I was told, and I would have sex with whomever I wanted. One day I welcomed a visit from a male friend in the middle of the afternoon, and when my mother came to fetch my laundry, the buck-naked eyeful brought the curtain down on our mannered lifestyle. I took over my clothes-washing, and she stopped wanting me around.

I appreciated how the Craigie Street antics made my own transgressions seem innocent. But the idea of living there full-time was too much. I didn't want anyone to shit on my bed. The few times I'd woken up on their couch, with a headache and a tarry tongue, I felt soul-sick. If I lived there, I might suffer corporeal changes. My internal organs could fill with green bile, or harden into carbonized lumps. I might erupt in pimples, boils, buboes, the Black Death.

---

My first semester at Harvard was exciting. Along with the escape I had worked for, the college supplied eight hundred male freshmen arranged at convenient distances around the Yard. I was cast in Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell, which widened my sphere of influence. In place of a bra, I took to wearing a vintage black bustier fastened with dozens of tiny hooks. Many nights everything came off but the bustier. By second semester, though, I was tiring of my own act. I had not chosen a field of study, so I had signed up for a range of uninspiring requirements. I caught a case of crabs, and failed to hide the scratching from my roommate.

I missed the squalid authenticity of Craigie Street. When I called to check in, Phil answered in his customarily urgent tone, as if he'd received a telegram saying I must speak to him at the first opportunity. "How are things at Hahvahd?" he asked.

"Honestly not great. The administration is angry that I haven't declared a major - for some reason they call it a concentration here -"

"No discipline has supremacy," Phil proclaimed, "merely one's sustained attention."

"I've done two different musicals about Jesus. I'm trying out for Hair, which is basically the same thing."

"How many saviors can you fuck in a year?"

"I did my best, with the bisexual ones, anyway. My sex life even caught the attention of my dorm advisor."

"Voyeurism is the only respectable motivation for that job," Phil said.

"No, I made the mistake of telling him I wanted an HIV test." The kerfuffle had upset me more that I wanted to explain. A young, female socialite in New York had recently died from AIDS, and I was - well, me. But I had told the dorm advisor almost as a form of bragging: Look at me, I'm so adult and socially conscious. Then he told the Dean of Student Life. I feared the administration might quarantine me. "What's up with you?"

"I'm taking the semester off. Classes get in the way of writing."

I didn't ask what Phil was writing. His most serious-sounding ideas were always discomfiting; perverse main characters living in rococo filth, plotting elaborate, fetishistic crimes.

Phil asked, "How's your living situation?"

"I have a roommate. Lucy."

"What's she like?"

"She looks like a bookish Janis Joplin." Lucy hated when I said that. She wasn't a huge fan of me in general.

"Bring her over for a drink."

"Are you still dating Angie?"

"I'm more like her caretaker. I stop her from relapsing when she looks at pictures from her modeling days."

My disillusionment made me more honest than usual. "Have you noticed she only has pictures cut out of magazines? And they all look like different people? Don't you think it's bullshit?"

Phil said, "Oh, Gretchen, that's what breaks my heart."

---

I was alone in our dorm suite when Phil dropped by a few weeks later. My room was the larger of two, and doubled as the living room, with a little brocade couch Lucy's mother had brought us from Philadelphia. When I answered the door, Phil was holding a stack of used books.

"Have you been to Raven's Basement?" he asked.

I grabbed a bottle of the nice red wine that Lucy hid in her room, and handed him a corkscrew. When he put the books down on our coffee table, I spotted a volume by Artaud.

"I thought you had this," I said, touching the spine.

"I lent it to a book thief," he said.

I opened the book, flipped to a page in the middle, and started reading. "'Theatre is like the plague, not because it is contagious, but because it is a revelation, urging forward a latent undercurrent of cruelty.' I guess Artaud never saw Guys and Dolls."

Phil handed me a glass. "Do you think I could sleep on your couch?" he asked.

"I'd have to ask Lucy." My roommate was particularly pissed about my frequent guests. She wasn't exactly a prude, but she'd been surprised by too many strange men coming out of our shower, too many colors of hair clogging the drain.

Phil said, "I have to air out my apartment, thanks to fucking Angie, that stupid twat."

"I take it you broke up."

"Listen to this."

I sat on the couch and tucked my feet up. My heart was making rushes of excitement, like little birds do at the edge of the ocean.

"There's this guy, Abel. You know him? He's a dope head."

"Skinny? Poor hygiene?"

He nodded. "Angie told him she was going to score some dope on Tuesday, like an idiot. I said I'd kick her out if she relapsed again, but I have Poetry Club on Tuesdays."

"Solid junkie logic." My meagre knowledge of heroin was culled from William Burroughs.

"Abel rings the bell, but nobody answers. He's drunk, but he manages to climb up the back porch to look in Angie's bedroom window. She's passed out, totally overdosed, looking dead."

I noted his callousness, but the plot was compelling.

Phil said, "She'd decided to shoot up for the first time in a year, because she didn't want the apartment to smell like smoke from that shitty black-tar heroin."

"Aha."

"So Abel, our hero, climbs in, can't wake her up, calls 9-1-1. But then he decides he's going to steal the dope, because if she survives, it could get her in trouble."

"Both rational and kind."

"He takes her works into the bathroom, but then he figures he should probably smoke it, because look what happened to Angie when she shot it up?"

"Smart!"

"But he doesn't usually smoke the stuff, and remember, he's drunk. So when he tries" - Phil could barely contain his laughter - "he lights his hair on fire!"

"Oh my God. Are they both still alive?"

"Yes!" Phil guffawed. "Because at that very moment the fire department burst in! He'd called them for Angie!"

The story was clearly a cause for celebration. We drank all of Lucy's wine, and then went out for a bottle to replace it, plus two more for us. We were tipsy, in spring, on the brick sidewalks behind Harvard Square, bumping shoulders every few steps. The whole night ahead of us - one thousand and one nights, even.

We returned to the dorm and sprawled on the couch, legs across each other's laps. Midway through the next bottle, Lucy arrived. I was too drunk to care.

"This is Phil," I said. "You know, the writer."

Lucy scowled. "You knew Gretchen in high school, but you never dated."

"She was illegal then," Phil said. I was surprised he knew my exact age.

Lucy said, "Do you know about her dysfunction?"

"Her complete disregard for sexual convention? Or that thing that she does, when she pulls out her eyelashes while she's reading - what's that gorgeous word again?"

"Trichotillomania," I said, again touched by his knowledge of me.

Lucy said, "No, though that's upsetting to watch. I mean how she never actually comes, despite her many dalliances."

Phil looked surprised by the character reveal. I was humiliated.

Lucy continued. "She's the most promiscuous woman I've ever met, but she doesn't climax with her partners. Why does she sleep around so much?" She glared at me, and exited stage right.

After a long silence, Phil said, "I could make you come."

"Shut up."

"Give me a chance."

"No way." I had wanted to have sex with him, maybe even that night. But the idea of him laboring to make me orgasm was reminiscent of those horrible first kisses. This time, we'd both be inept.

"Gretchen, you have to let me make you come," he half-begged, half-bossed.

"Fuck off." I stormed to the bathroom, where I smoked a cigarette and made faces in the mirror. Eventually I needed more wine.

Phil was lying on the couch, looking out the open window. I couldn't feel a breeze. Smoke was like a low, dark ceiling above our heads.

"I wrote a story about you," he said.

I found my glass.

"A beautiful woman named Alexandria knew everything in every book in the library. People came to ask her questions, and she loved to answer them."

So far, the story was calming. "And then what?"

"People started asking about things that weren't written in books," he said.

"Like what?"

"Like, why can't you figure out your shit and be with me?"

"What kind of question is that?"

"There's no answer. The library burned down."

We finished the wine, and Phil left soon after.

---

Why wouldn't I let him get closer? It's true that his problems were disturbing. Artaud might have said I was consumed with bourgeois self-striving; the motto life is a bloody spasm was inconsistent with résumé-building. Plus, I felt like a poser; I couldn't keep up the witty banter forever.

Maybe, also, because Phil truly needed saving, and that wasn't a role I wanted to play.

---

The summer after freshman year was the worst disaster yet. I'd been hired to work as a live-in nanny, but I was arrested for drunk driving the week before my start date. I lost the job and my housing along with my license.

I managed to find a last-minute position cleaning parks for the Cambridge Recreation Department, and returned to live with my parents, who looked at me with real concern. I was haunted by the memories of metal crushing metal, waking up in a jail cell, facing a judge in the same gray skirt-suit I'd worn to college interviews. Sadie was doing an internship abroad, and when she called to tell me of her adventures, I told her I had to get out of my house.

"Why don't you call Phil?" she said. "Without me and Angie he needs the rent money."

"We had a fight, sort of, in the spring."

"He just asked me about you. I think he's been sick."

Phil sounded very happy that I'd called, which was nice. Not many people were thrilled to hear from me. "Sadie said you were sick," I said. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I had to slow down on the booze, though. Start a health kick."

"Me, too! I got arrested for drunk driving."

"Oh, man." Phil sounded as though he thought the punishment was horrible and unfair.

"I'm sort of shaken up from the - from the messiness of it."

"You should live with me. I rescued an abused dog, Rosa Luxembark. We can cuddle with a Rottweiler and read books."

I needed some cuddling, maybe even a summer fling. But we had so much history, I was afraid it might mean too much. "What's the rent? I'd have to borrow it from my parents."

"You're lucky," he said, "I can't even talk to my parents. My dad's such a mean drunk."

I felt guilty I hadn't realized, earlier, that aspects of his first story might have been true.

---

Phil was touchingly eager to move me in. He emptied his old attic bedroom and laid down a carpet. As Phil and my father wrestled an air conditioner up the stairs, I noted changes in my friend. He'd lost weight on the new diet, and had to roll over the waistband of his pants. His head was shaved, like an inmate from Artaud's asylum, or Sinead O'Connor. I liked the look.

On my dad's way out he stopped by Phil's new room on the first floor. Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves, dozens of extra tomes piled atop and below his desk. I heard Phil explaining something about poetry, his voice gentle and eager, as though he'd just discovered it himself.

As sober people who lived together, our next moves felt uncertain. Conversations were stilted. The Craigie Street apartment was oddly clean and quiet. In the kitchen, unfamiliar dishtowels hung on hooks, and real, metal cutlery lay in plastic inserts in the drawers. Rosa Luxembark seemed suspicious of me.

Late at night, I listened to water running through the old pipes, and imagined Phil bathing his thin limbs. When he washed the dishes, I watched his hands move through the warm water.

By Friday I couldn't stand it anymore. I brought home a bottle of Old Thompson's and a pack of Camels and set them on the table like a dare.

"Let's have an old-school night," I said. "It'll be good for us."

Phil slowly took two glasses from the cabinet. I filled them.

"How's the writing going?" I asked.

"I'm more interested in living," he said.

"I thought writing was living. It wakes you up from your life-in-death."

"Why don't you start writing?"

"Nobody gets into Creative Writing at Harvard. I'm studying psychology, psychoanalysis - all that sex and aggression."

Phil swirled his drink. "Psychoanalytic theory is all in your head."

I drank my dram and poured another. "Sex isn't only in your head."

Phil took a sip. "Are you still worried about AIDS?"

I thought he was vetting me as a partner. "Of course I am, we all should be. But I got tested." I lit a cigarette. "I'm clear. Permission to proceed with my campaign of promiscuity."

"Why do you sleep around so much?"

I had to work to strike the right, playful tone. "I'm still looking for that one special guy, to cure me of my problems."

"Have you ever thought about therapy?"

"Is this an interrogation?" I took a deep breath. "I've been in therapy."

"What did you figure out?"

I was not in the mood to talk about my mother. "You want me to say I'm insecure and need attention? Or that I was abused? That's what stupid people think about slutty women."

"No. I'm really curious."

"I want to face the dark things. The carnal stuff."

"Do you really, though?"

It was a good question. "Enough words," I said, and yanked my chair toward him.

Phil looked at me with those green eyes, like a drowning child peering up from underwater. I leaned forward. The kiss was nothing like the fevered tussle from a year earlier. His lips were warm and soft. I tasted whiskey and ashes, and something like love. It took my breath away, the surprise of it.

"Let's go to my room," I said.

Phil said, "No."

"Why not?"

"I just can't, Gretchen."

The brutality of the rejection, after the tenderness of the embrace, was too much. I stormed off, with the bottle and the cigarettes, and avoided him for the rest of the weekend.

---

The following Monday, while I was picking up trash on the Cambridge Common, Rosa Luxembark pissed all over my bedroom carpet. Phil didn't answer when I banged on his door. I performed a complicated ritual to remove the smell, involving Lysol, seltzer water, and Phil's towel. I left him a note - the wording of which I'm grateful not to recall - and wedged a chair under the doorknob the next morning. Rosa knocked it aside and fouled my rug again.

Phil was asleep when I shoved his door open. The dog stood up from beside him on his futon and barked. The sound thudded in the hot, stuffy room.

"Phil! Your damn dog keeps pissing on my carpet. What the fuck?"

He rolled over. "I'm sorry. She was neglected. Abused."

"That's bullshit. You have to fucking walk her."

"I will." He sounded very tired. "I'm sorry."

The piss on the floor was just the start. Dishes accumulated in the sink, and then drew flies. I figured Phil must have been trying to impress me the first week - but if not as a seduction, what for? I knocked the plates aside, loudly, when I made my morning coffee. Rosa watched me with her bad-cop eyes.

When I returned for work after one particularly long day, in the middle of my bed lay a heaping, stinking pile of dog shit.

I screamed my way down to Phil's room and slammed open the door.

A black blur wrenched open the space between me and the pale figure on the bed. Rosa's big, black head struck the middle of my chest, the force as inevitable as an avalanche taking down a tree. I landed a yard away, hard, on my hip, and cowered. All of me was alive and throbbing, waiting for her teeth to close.

Nothing happened.

Peering out from under my hands, I saw Phil struggling to drag Rosa away.

"She's a monster," I said.

Phil's eyes flicked toward his bedside table, a jumble of paraphernalia - vials, needles, a blood-stained cloth. The penny dropped. He was nothing but a junkie, with a vicious dog for company.

How had I not seen it? I used my measly earnings to hire movers, and left for good.

---

Things picked up at Harvard in my sophomore and junior years. My advanced seminars were interesting. I starred in Grease as Rizzo, the hard-ass fifties version of my high school self, who turns out not to be pregnant after all. I settled down with a tall history major who liked Gilbert & Sullivan - my first relationship without a dark side.

Sadie had transferred to McGill, in Canada. When she called, she mentioned Phil had moved to New York City. She said his apartment was next to a poultry abattoir. She thought the word was funny, but I thought it sounded hellish. I told her about the summer.

"He's a junkie?" Sadie sounded surprised.

"Apparently. Does heroin make you impotent?"

"I don't know. I think methadone can."

"Do you inject methadone?"

The answers were beyond our collective knowledge.

---

Phil called me in the fall of my senior year, but I didn't answer. I was busy writing a paper on the gender-related stigma of borderline personality, and starting to consider graduate school. I was planning to visit the history major, who was on a scholarship in England. I was starting to think I could be a normal person. Phil's message - left in his urgent, breathless voice - conveyed he was "having a crisis," and I "must call him." Reluctantly, I did.

"I have colon cancer," he said immediately. "I'm working freelance and I don't have insurance. The health care system in America is contemptible. Calamitous."

He was speaking so fast I could barely understand him. I scanned my new diagnostic knowledge. Amphetamine toxicity? Psychotic mania? "That's horrible," I said.

"Yeah, I got fucked in the ass. My life is in the toilet. Hardee-har-har."

The humor was so off. "What are you going to do?" I asked.

"I'm thinking about going to Mexico for treatment. There are black market meds down there. And it'll be easier to find a place that will take Rosa."

"Huh," I said. "So she's still in your life."

"Actually I have a friend who lives south of Cancun, in a bungalow on the beach. Coconuts and mangos just fall all around."

It sounded like another story, not a medical intervention. "Sounds great," I said.

I could hear Phil take a drag of a cigarette, blow it out. "But listen to this. I thought my parents should know about the cancer, so I called. First time in ten years. My dad, that evil drunk, he just raged at me. He's completely psychotic. He said it was my fault, because I had to prostitute myself when I was homeless."

Whatever part of that might have been true, I didn't want to know.

Phil tried again. "The fascist won't let me talk to my mother, who actually also has cancer, or to the triplets."

I interrupted. "The triplets?"

"Yeah. He probably has them locked in the basement. What should I do?"

My voice was calm when I responded. "Mexico seems like a good option."

He was silent for a second. "I gotta go," he said. "My mom is calling me back right now."

I called Sadie right away. "He's lying. And he's crazy." I said.

"Something terrible is happening," she said.

---

It was AIDS, of course. Sadie heard that Angie had it first. The virus could make you crazy. And it explained, more than drugs, what went wrong that second summer.

I should have called him. But I didn't know what to say.

---

A few weeks later Phil collapsed on a sidewalk in Queens while walking his dog. A passerby called an ambulance, but it took the hospital a week to identify him, and another few days for the news to reach his friends. Sadie and the others he'd stayed in touch with talked to each other every day. Sadie said he'd suffered head trauma when he fell, and was in a coma, in a closed ICU. He didn't have cancer. The doctors were having trouble figuring out causal cascade, the contributions of diseases and injuries, substances and withdrawals. His friends had the same questions, and they took on life-or-death importance. What exactly was wrong? In what order had the terrible things occurred? It seemed like the answers might save him.

---

A week later, Phil was failing. Sadie heard the hospital was allowing visitors and went right away. I had final exams. She said his entire body was somehow emaciated and swollen at the same time, unrecognizable except for his face. I thought about writing something that she could read to him. But there was no time, none at all.

---

Sadie helped clean out his apartment. She went through all of Phil's things, but couldn't find anything he had written. No manuscripts, no computer files, no notebooks - nothing.

---

Was he ever really a writer? How much of what he said was true?

I never read anything he wrote. Someone remembered some dirty limericks in an old college lit mag, but no one could find a copy.

But does it really matter?

Does it matter when you know life is a bloody spasm, briefly wrenched from chaos?