a thousand furnished rooms

Seeing Marnie

By Bill Trippe

She was impossibly pretty.

So much so that I spent hours around her without looking directly at her. This is not as hard as you might think. In the rules of nonverbal communication, it's polite to maintain eye contact when the other person is speaking. When you are talking, it is ok to let your gaze wander. So to keep from looking at her much, I simply kept talking.

At 21, I had two things going for me. First, I could talk with the best of them. I combined a high IQ, hyperactivity, my mother's Irish love of storytelling, and my father's Italian determination to have each situation play out as a grand opera. The talking simply never stopped.

The other thing I had going for me was that we worked together, in a small office, all day, where absolutely nothing ever happened. I am only exaggerating a little. We were legislative interns for a summer when the State House was out of session. This is like being a waiter in a restaurant with no food to serve. Except for the occasional customer who blunders in only to have to be told that there's nothing to eat, you have nothing to keep you busy.

We would split the handful of constituent calls that came in on a given day. A broken streetlight could kill an hour. You would call the public works department for them, report the outage, and then write an impressive sounding letter to the constituent, explaining the action you had taken and when the light would be fixed. Then you might take an early lunch, or read the paper, or wander the halls of the State House, pausing for a ridiculously long time before each portrait of some long dead and easily forgotten state secretary.

You could also, if you cared to, take up the cause of some long-neglected project that mattered terribly to a few constituents but didn't have the slightest chance of becoming real. This was sort of the legislative equivalent of a police department's cold case file. But instead of an ancient murder that has never been solved, you were resurrecting an ancient project that would never be finished. Aside from the few people directly affected, these were universally viewed thankless tasks. That summer, I dove into a languishing mosquito control project that had been studied to death with nothing tangible ever being done to a single mosquito. The 14 constituents who had the sorry fortune of abutting that swamp would simply have to keep buying plenty of "Off." In the meantime, though, I could fill a few afternoons boning up on it.

This kind of drudgery was anathema to my beautiful officemate. Marnie was going places where broken streetlights and mosquito control would not take her. She may have been 19 and only a year through college, but the world was clearly her oyster. It was simply a matter of who would come along and open it for her.

She had a boyfriend of course. Someone as pretty as Marnie, I reasoned, had an active boyfriend, dozens of exes, and a long waiting list of men in waiting. At first blush, I knew I didn't even have the Marnie application fee. She was blonde, blue-eyed, and startlingly curvy. And she had the pretty rich girl's gift of dressing properly but in outfits that were beyond inviting. No matter whether she was standing or sitting, in action or in repose, every gesture and posture was both beautiful and erotic. Each time I looked in her direction, I was struck blind.

And me? I was still growing into my body. I was 6'2, and only recently had bulked up to 160 pounds. My teenage acne still hadn't completely cleared up, and my wardrobe and hair were a bizarre clash of 60s hippy meets 70s disco meets college prep. I was some weird amalgam of Richie Cunningham, Vinnie Barbarino, and Maynard G. Krebs to her freaking Miss America.

Yet I had the verbal thing going for me, which she tolerated and even seemed to enjoy sometimes. She would laugh at certain comments, and say something like, "You know, you're pretty smart." She would say this with no small measure of surprise each time she said it--sort of like the child who is talked into tasting a homely dish and realizes it is actually edible. And I had a girlfriend who I actually liked and was vaguely serious about. The confirmed existence of a living, breathing girlfriend separated me from the vast armies of losers who were somehow not members of the same species as Marnie.

My girlfriend at the time was pretty, though safe to say not nearly as pretty as Marnie. More importantly to Marnie, I think, was that Ellen was also rich. Marnie seemed to size that up about Ellen, even though Ellen was sort of art school bohemian and Marnie was at Harvard and determined to crush the world. After Ellen stopped by the office the first time, Marnie asked exactly one question about her. "Where is she from?" When I answered Concord, which even I knew to be the toniest suburb of them all, something seemed to immediately register in Marnie's assessment of me. Even I sensed some change in the plasma between us, and I wondered for a moment if maybe I could afford the Marnie application fee.

I was also a little older, past my junior year. And even though Marnie was Harvard and I was Boston University, she had only completed her freshman year. And though I kept this thought to myself, while I lacked Marnie's ambition, I knew one thing about myself. As a lower-middle-class kid, I was hungrier. I worked hard in school, and studied seriously. I was going to do well in my chosen field, and Marnie seemed to recognize this about me.

Finally, and not least important, there was, as the saying goes, trouble in paradise. Marnie and her boyfriend Brad were at something of a crossroads, with Brad about to spend his junior year abroad and Marnie clearly unsure if she wanted to spend a year on the shelf.

I learned all this in the few odd minutes here and there when I allowed her to speak. Somehow, with me having a girlfriend, me being older and wiser, Marnie decided she could confide in me about how things were going with Brad. This was, of course, a mixed blessing. Having a pretty girl tell you her man troubles meant you were "safe," "brotherly," "a friend"--in other words a freaking gelding.

On the other hand, gelding or no gelding, it meant--at least for the moment--that the pretty girl was still talking to you...

To be continued