Scarborough Fair

A much longer monologue, Scarborough Fair, is spoken by Cheryl, a woman in her early twenties, recalling a short-lived love affair with the man she is speaking to, telling him what he remembers.  They each lived at the top of tower dormitories on a university campus and she describes the cooking and the music played in the basement of the dorms and the pitiful classroom situations with classes to large for their assigned rooms and the material presented through videotape.  She describes how they met in Psych class and realized they both worked in the library.  Her father, who taught at the university, had a study carrel on the top floor of the library. She says that she knew she was the girl inside his head the minute she met him.  She says their souls are burning together, that she will be burning in his head the moment he dies.  We learn that the man she is talking to is named Ben   Just when they are about to have intercourse in the library carrel, Cheryl tells Ben that if her boyfriend found out he would hurt Ben and she doesn’t want him to be hurt.  She tells Ben that she lives with this boyfriend but she doesn’t want Ben to leave her because it would make her insane again and probably kill her.  She says that sometimes she has had sex with other men, and women, when she was using drugs.  She and Ben make love in the library eventually, and in Ben’s red coach house where they would read Finnegan’s Wake in the afternoons and fall asleep   She recalls their experiences together and her appreciation of Duns Scotus.  When Ben was offered a scholarship to graduate school, he asked her if she wanted to go with him to Massachusetts.  He says he won’t go without her.  During the troubles over the Vietnam War, when the soldiers came on campus, Ben took her to his father’s house.  She says that he will leave her and forget her, finding her in other women.  She tells him that he will go to Massachusetts and never see her again but she will own him forever because he will always remember her.