Marlene

Marlene’s relationship with Billy Milligan is a sustained effort to love and care for someone whose changing personalities she cannot see clearly. She stays through his volatility, visits him in prison, and accepts an engagement ring, yet their bond repeatedly turns on absences and misunderstandings: Billy can seem tender one moment and unreachable the next, while Marlene explains what she cannot account for as drugs, danger, or emotional distance.

Introduction and First Encounters

Marlene first meets Billy when Stanley introduces them at a gathering. Billy is then presenting as Allen, who spends nearly an hour talking with her about the people around them. Allen finds her warm and amusing, senses her attraction, and feels drawn to her himself, but Arthur’s rules prevent him from pursuing the connection. Their first encounter therefore establishes a limit that neither Marlene nor Allen can simply resolve through mutual interest.

Marlene later seeks Billy out at his apartment after contacting Barry Hart and hearing that Billy has a place of his own. On that visit, Kevin is alone. He does not recognize the conversation she recalls from the gathering, but welcomes her in; she spends the evening looking at his paintings and talking about people they know. She is glad she took the initiative and comes away feeling close to him. The scene gives the reader information Marlene does not have: what she experiences as a continuing relationship is being lived by different personalities, with uneven access to its history.

Caretaking and Misread Signals

As the relationship grows, Marlene becomes a regular presence at the apartment. She comes after work, makes dinner, and stays for part of the evening before returning to her parents’ home. When Billy works the second shift, she waits for him until around midnight and may stay most of the night, leaving before morning. Her practical care is also an attempt to understand his behavior. She is shocked at first by his foul language and bursts of rage, but grows accustomed to abrupt shifts between anger, tenderness, wit, and a helpless, childlike clumsiness. She believes drugs and the people around him are responsible, and hopes to persuade him that his associates are using him.

His warnings about other people trouble her. Billy hints that a group he calls the family may cause trouble if she is in the apartment. Marlene initially takes this for boasting about Mafia connections; when he devises a signal, she begins to believe the danger is real. Whenever she visits, he places a painting in the window to tell the others she is there and they should stay away. The painting becomes part of a private system she accepts without understanding its real source. The narrative shows her trying to make ordinary sense of Billy’s divided life, while the reader can recognize that his account of others and his changing conduct cannot be reduced to the explanation she settles on.

Intimacy offers no stable answer. Their lovemaking may begin with rough language and then become gentle, but Marlene doubts that his passion is fully genuine and suspects he never reaches a climax. She is uncertain about what she senses, yet decides that love, time, and understanding may be enough. Her hope persists alongside the signs that closeness does not reliably make Billy emotionally available.

Crisis, Engagement, and Prison

The danger becomes immediate during an argument before their first breakup. Marlene thinks Billy is behaving strangely and may be on drugs. He lies on the floor, angry, holding a gun and turning it on his finger; he points it at his own head, not at her. She is afraid for him rather than for herself. When he stares at a fish-cord lamp, jumps up, and shoots it, the lamp explodes and leaves a hole in the wall. Marlene takes the gun after he sets it down and runs to her car. Billy catches up, jumps onto the hood, and strikes the windshield with what looks like a screwdriver. She stops, gets out, and gives him the gun back; he returns inside without speaking. The episode makes the cost of her concern plain: even in a frightening confrontation, she focuses on his safety, and the crisis ends without resolving the behavior that produced it.

After Billy’s arrest in connection with the Gray Drug Store robbery, Tommy gives Marlene an engagement ring. He calls her by his pet name for her and tells her he wants her to have it in case something happens to him. The proposal is a moment she has long dreamed of, but its circumstances make it painful rather than simply joyful. She wonders whether he bought the ring because he expects trouble, tries to hide her tears, and decides she will stand by him regardless of what he has done or what may happen to him.

Their correspondence during his imprisonment also reveals how little control Marlene has over who is addressing her. In the middle of a letter written to her by Tommy, the handwriting changes and Philip writes a sexual request, asking her to wear a skirt without underwear on her next visit. The shift is presented inside the letter itself: one writer gives way to another without a change in addressee. The passage does not establish how Marlene understands the change, but it underscores the gap between her continuous attachment to Billy and the discontinuous identities shaping his contact with her.

Release and Separation

Marlene remains devoted to Billy throughout his imprisonment and does not go out with anyone else. When he is released, she is with his mother and Kathy Milligan, and Billy looks forward to spending time alone with her after their prison visits. But when they return to Lancaster, Marlene asks to be dropped at the Plaza Shopping Center because she has to go back to work. She has taken the morning off, yet cannot spend the whole day with him. Billy is dazed and hurt by the mismatch between what he expected and what she can offer; he says nothing, blinks back tears, and withdraws from consciousness.

A week later, the distance seems to lift briefly. Billy picks Marlene up after work, speaks politely, and drives with her to Clear Creek, one of their familiar destinations, before they return to Spring Street home. With Dorothy Moore and Del Moore out, they have a chance to be alone without arguing. Marlene is frightened by the long-delayed intimacy; Billy appears to sense this and pulls away. The tenderness she had waited for does not restore their former closeness.

The break comes after Billy asks Marlene to drive to Athens and spend the night with him, then pick up Kathy from school the next morning. She does not want to go. When she later tells him she cannot continue a relationship that feels empty, he agrees, saying he fears something might happen and she could be hurt again. Marlene accepts the end, grieving a relationship for which she had waited more than two years. The story leaves her devotion intact but does not reward it with a settled partnership: care and patience cannot make Billy’s changing presence dependable, and the relationship ends with separation rather than reconciliation.