A Quarter-Century of Friendship

An expansion of a piece on how we got together, from 2011, and in another throwback, accidentally published by MrsDarwin under Darwin's byline.

Twenty-five years ago yesterday, I went to a freshman mixer dance on Friday night in the courtyard between Marian and Trinity dorms, wearing a borrowed bowler hat and tie. A friend from California introduced me to another freshman from California, a fellow with glasses and dark hair that flipped in a perfect curtain over his forehead. "This is Brendan," she said. "You'll get along, you're both in Honors."

Reader, we got along. I tend to like people I like at first meeting, and in the same way to be instantly wary of red flags, and take them quite seriously. Brendan was one green flag after another. He was fascinating and quick-witted and well-read, traits not manifested by my vestigial boyfriend at home, a nice enough guy with whom I shared a few unhappy family circumstances and no life of the mind. Absence, in this case, instead of making the heart grow fonder, underscored that we had nothing to talk about. I'd had no impetus to make a terminating move -- he was, as I say, a nice guy -- but we hadn't communicated much. Writing was not his strong suit, and in 1997, phone cards were too expensive for a college student to use except on weekends. He would, in all honesty, have gone unmentioned at this first meeting, when there were so many other interesting connections to explore, except that the one person on campus who knew him happened to pass by and pointedly asked after him. Left to myself, I probably would have taken rapid steps to be instantly available, but now that Brendan knew I had a boyfriend, I felt I had to make a last good-faith effort to see if there was any true relationship to salvage.

That was Friday. On Monday, I sat pondering both Brendan and homework. I had been assigned, for Acting class, to Take a Risk and write about it in a journal. This made less than no sense to me -- for one thing, the professor had been less than clear about what a Risk was, and so I had a hazy sense that I was supposed to set the cafeteria on fire or moon my roommate. While kicking around these uninspiring options, I pushed around the papers on my desk, saw the index card on which Brendan had written his phone extension and box number, and thought, "Maybe I should call him and see if he wants to go for a walk." Almost instantly my heart started racing and I broke out into a cold sweat, which I considered positive indicators that I'd found my Risk. For several moments I planned and scripted and jotted in my Acting journal and made sure that my voice wasn't too breathy, and then I seized the phone and dialed. He, of course, wasn't in. I left a message in studied tones and jotted in my journal that the stupid Risk had been pretty anticlimactic. Upon the instant the phone rang -- Brendan calling back to say that he'd meet me in five minutes. Five hours later, I returned to my room, upgraded my Risk assessment, and collapsed in bed.

My professor scribed an approving check on my journal entry and noted in the margins, "Take more risks."

The next week consisted of fitting in classes between all the time we spent together, talking and ever talking. The amount of free time in the schedule of the college freshmen four weeks into the semester is astounding, and Brendan consumed all of mine. We exulted over mutual interests, aligned our mental libraries, developed in-jokes, and began to sync up culturally and personally. Among other topics, we bonded over unlikely romantic prospects: he had been paying mild attention to an inoffensive girl who was revealing decidedly unintellectual tendencies, and I of course had the vestigial boyfriend of the same bent. How did one relate to these mundanes? One day in the cafeteria, the girl headed toward our table, and as Brendan waved her over, I thought, "He doesn't smile at me like that." And then I knew I was in trouble, and in love.

This nice young lady was no match for my wiles. One afternoon, a large group of us gathered to watch Much Ado About Nothing. In the disinterested pursuit of sparing a friend from an unsuitable connection, I answered her many questions about the plot and the language with such patient kindness that by the end of the evening I knew Brendan would never seriously consider her as a romantic prospect. Still, he wasn't actually in a relationship, and I was. The next Saturday, determinedly turning my back on the high of a week of Brendan's company, I resolved to be fair. The boyfriend and I had subsisted in person mostly on a diet of mutual sympathy and physical attraction, but we ought to be able to go beyond that. Surely we had something else in common.

"Tell me about the books you like," I said.

"I don't know," he said. "I don't really like to read."

"What about theater?" I asked in desperation.

"I guess I would try to like it for your sake."

This was a devastating answer, because Brendan had given me, a few days after we met, Brideshead Revisited, a book which had (perhaps unrealistically) colored his impression of the charm of the undergraduate education. And I loved it for its own sake, not for his, and not just because he gave it to me. I read it because he gave it to me; I loved it because it was good. But still, I did not break up at this moment. It takes a certain amount of energy to end a relationship, even one that needs ending, and at the moment I felt defeated. I would end it next weekend.

In homage to Sebastian's teddy bear, Brendan took up the affectation of going about campus in the company of a stuffed ferret named Ignatius. You must remember that we were freshmen and by definition foolish, but it is a fact that Ignatius was wildly popular with the ladies and spent the night in the rooms of several females. On the Tuesday evening a week and a half after the freshman mixer, Ignatius accompanied us as we moved from place to place, trying to find a quiet spot to talk on a campus that did not allow mixed-sex visiting in dorm rooms on weekdays. 

"Why are you here?" I asked Brendan.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"You're smart enough to have gone to a much more challenging school. Why did you pick Steubenville?"

"Because it was the only place I knew of that seemed really Catholic," he said. "I knew that if I went to a school where I was constantly being defensive about my faith, I'd turn into a bitter and unpleasant person. And my parents and all their friends met through college connections, so it seemed like if I wanted to meet Catholic people, I needed to go where they were. Why are you here?"

"It was the only Catholic school I looked at with a theater program," I said. "And I didn't know if I could get in anywhere else."

"You're smarter than that," he said.

By this time we'd shut down both the dorm common rooms (closing time: 1 am) and the student center (2 am), and were outside my building, putting off saying good night. Ignatius the ferret was in Brendan's backpack, as usual. As I was lingering halfway through the door, almost about to leave, Brendan said (in jest, he swears), "Ignatius wants to know if he can kiss you goodnight."

I packed a lifetime of analysis into three seconds: the vestigial boyfriend, my acting professor expounding upon the Taking of Risks, complex variations and analysis of the scene before me and whether or not I could save face if I made the wrong gamble. Then, I declined Ignatius's kind offer.

"I don't care for furry lips," I said. "But you can kiss me good night, if you want to."

Twenty-five years later, he's still kissing me good night.