For the prosecution: The problem wasn’t between Walter and Joey. The problem was between Patty and Walter, and she knew it.
For the defense: She loves Walter!
For the prosecution: The evidence suggests otherwise.
For the defense: Well, in that case, Walter doesn’t love her, either. He doesn’t love the real her. He loves some wrong idea of her.
For the prosecution: That would be convenient if only it were true. Unfortunately for Patty, he didn’t marry her in spite of who she was, he married her because of it. Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.
For the defense: It isn’t fair to say she doesn’t love him!
For the prosecution: If she can’t behave herself, it doesn’t matter if she loves him.
Walter knew that Patty had cut the tires of their horrible neighbor’s horrible truck. They never talked about it, but he knew. The fact that they never talked about it was how she knew he knew. The neighbor, Blake, was building a horrible addition on the back of the house of his horrible girlfriend, Connie Monaghan’s horrible mother, and Patty that winter was finding it expedient to drink a bottle or more of wine every evening, and then waking up in a sweat of anxiety and rage in the middle of the night, and stalking the first floor of the house in pounding-hearted lunacy. There was a stupid smugness to Blake which in her sleep-deprived state she equated with the stupid smugness of the special prosecutor who’d made Bill Clinton lie about Monica Lewinsky and the stupid smugness of the congressmen who’d recently impeached him for it. Bill Clinton was the rare politician who didn’t seem sanctimonious to Patty—who didn’t pretend to be Mr. Clean—and she was one of the millions of American women who would have slept with him in a heartbeat. Flattening horrible Blake’s tires was the least of the blows she felt like striking in her president’s defense. This is in no way intended to exculpate her but simply to elucidate her state of mind.
A more direct irritant was the fact that Joey, that winter, was pretending to admire Blake. Joey was too smart to genuinely admire Blake, but he was going through an adolescent rebellion that required him to like the very things that Patty most hated, in order to drive her away. She probably deserved this, owing to the thousand mistakes she’d made in loving him too much, but, at the time, she wasn’t feeling like she deserved it. She was feeling like she was being lashed in the face with a bullwhip. And because of certain monstrously mean things she’d seen that she was capable of saying to Joey, on several occasions when he’d baited her out of her self-control and she’d lashed back at him, she was doing her best to vent her pain and anger on safer third parties, such as Blake and Walter.
She didn’t think she was an alcoholic. She wasn’t an alcoholic. She was just turning out to be like her dad, who sometimes escaped his family by drinking too much. Once upon a time, Walter had positively liked that she enjoyed drinking a glass or two of wine after the kids were in bed. He said he’d grown up being nauseated by the smell of alcohol and had learned to forgive it and love it on her breath, because he loved her breath, because her breath came from deep inside her and he loved the inside of her. This was the sort of thing he used to say to her—the sort of avowal she couldn’t reciprocate and was nevertheless intoxicated by. But once the one or two glasses turned into six or eight glasses, everything changed. Walter needed her sober at night so she could listen to all the things he thought were morally defective in their son, while she needed not to be sober so as not to have to listen. It wasn’t alcoholism, it was self-defense.
And here: here is an actual serious personal failing of Walter’s: he couldn’t accept that Joey wasn’t like him. If Joey had been shy and diffident with girls, if Joey had enjoyed playing the role of child, if Joey had wanted a dad who could teach him things, if Joey had been helplessly honest, if Joey had sided with underdogs, if Joey had loved nature, if Joey had been indifferent to money, he and Walter would have gotten along famously. But Joey, from infancy onward, was a person more in the mold of Richard Katz—effortlessly cool, ruggedly confident, totally focused on getting what he wanted, impervious to moralizing, unafraid of girls—and Walter carried all his frustration and disappointment with his son to Patty and laid it at her feet, as if she were to blame. He’d been begging her for fifteen years to back him up when he tried to discipline Joey, to help him enforce the household prohibitions on video games and excess TV and music that degraded women, but Patty couldn’t help loving Joey just the way he was. She admired and was amused by his resourcefulness in evading prohibitions: he seemed to her quite the incredible boy. An A student, a hard worker, popular at school, wonderfully entrepreneurial. Maybe, if she’d been a single mother, she would have worried more about disciplining him. But Walter had taken over that job, and she’d allowed herself to feel she had an amazing friendship with her son. She hung on his wicked impressions of teachers he didn’t like, she gave him uncensored salacious gossip from the neighborhood, she sat on his bed with her knees gathered in her arms and stopped at nothing to get him laughing; not even Walter was off-limits. She didn’t feel she was being unfaithful to Walter when she made Joey laugh at his eccentricities—his teetotaling, his insistence on bicycling to work in blizzards, his defenselessness against bores, his hatred of cats, his disapproval of paper towels, his enthusiasm for difficult theater—because these were all things she herself had learned to love in him, or at least to find quaintly amusing, and she wanted Joey to see Walter her way. Or so she rationalized it, since, if she’d been honest with herself, what she really wanted was for Joey to be delighted by her.
She didn’t see how he could possibly be loyal and devoted to the neighbor girl. She thought that Connie Monaghan, sneaky little competitor that she was, had managed to get some kind of filthy little momentary hold on him. She was disastrously slow to grasp the seriousness of the Monaghan menace, and in the months when she was underestimating Joey’s feelings for the girl—when she thought that she could simply freeze Connie out and make lighthearted fun of her trashy mom and her mom’s boneheaded boyfriend, and that Joey would soon enough be laughing at them, too—she managed to undo fifteen years of effort to be a good mom. She fucked it up royally, Patty did, and then proceeded to become quite unhinged. She had terrible fights with Walter in which he blamed her for making Joey ungovernable and she was unable to defend herself properly, because she wasn’t allowed to speak the sick conviction in her heart, which was that Walter had ruined her friendship with her son. By sleeping in the same bed with her, by being her husband, by claiming her for the grownup side, Walter had made Joey believe that Patty was in the enemy camp. She hated Walter for this, and resented the marriage, and Joey moved out of the house and in with the Monaghans and made everybody pay in bitter tears for their mistakes.
Though this barely scratches the surface, it’s already more than the autobiographer intended to say about those years, and she will now bravely move on.
One small benefit of having the house to herself was that Patty could listen to whatever music she wanted, especially to the country music that Joey had cried out in pain and revulsion at the merest sound of, and that Walter, with his college-radio tastes, could tolerate only a narrow and mostly vintage playlist of: Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash. Patty loved all of those singers herself, but she loved Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks no less. As soon as Walter left for work in the morning, she cranked up the volume to a level incompatible with thinking, and steeped herself in heartbreaks enough like her own to be comforting and enough different to be sort of funny. Patty was strictly a lyrics-and-stories gal—Walter had long ago given up on interesting her in Ligeti and Yo La Tengo—and never tired of cheating men and strong women and the indomitable human spirit.
At the very same time, Richard was forming Walnut Surprise, his new alt-country band, with three kids whose combined age wasn’t much greater than his own. Richard might have persisted with the Traumatics, and launched further records into the void, were it not for a s
trange accident that could only have befallen Herrera, his old friend and bassist, whose dishevelment and disorganization made Richard look like the man in the gray flannel suit in comparison. Deciding that Jersey City was too bourgeois (!) and not depressing enough, Herrera had moved up to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and settled in a slum there. One day he went to a rally in Hartford for Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates and assembled a spectacle that he called the Dopplerpus, which consisted of a rented carnival octopus ride on whose tentacles he and seven friends sat and played dirges on portable amps while the ride flung them around and distorted their sound interestingly. Herrera’s girlfriend later told Richard that the Dopplerpus had been “amazing” and a “huge hit” with the “more than a hundred” people who’d attended the rally, but afterward, when Herrera was packing up, his van started rolling down a hill, and Herrera chased after it and reached in through the window and grabbed the steering wheel, which swung the van alongside a brick wall and pancaked him. He somehow finished packing up and drove back to Bridgeport, coughing blood, and there nearly expired of a ruptured spleen, five broken ribs, a broken clavicle, and a punctured lung before his girlfriend got him to a hospital. The accident, following the disappointments of Insanely Happy, seemed like a cosmic sign to Richard, and since he couldn’t live without making music, he’d teamed up with a young fan of his who played killer pedal steel guitar, and Walnut Surprise was born.
Richard’s personal life was in scarcely better shape than Walter and Patty’s. He had lost several thousand dollars on the last Traumatics tour and had “loaned” the uninsured Herrera further thousands for medical expenses, and his domestic situation, as he described it on the phone to Walter, was collapsing. What had made his whole existence workable, for nearly twenty years, was the big ground-floor Jersey City apartment for which he paid a rent so low as to be literally nominal. Richard could never be bothered to get rid of things, and his apartment was big enough that he didn’t have to. Walter had been to it on one of his trips to New York and reported that the hall outside Richard’s door was filled with junk stereo equipment, mattresses, and surplus parts for his pickup truck, and that the rear courtyard was filling up with supplies and leftovers from his deck-building business. Best of all, there was a room in the basement directly beneath his apartment where the Traumatics had been able to practice (and, later, record) without unduly disturbing the other tenants. Richard had always taken care to remain on good terms with them, but in the wake of his breakup with Molly he’d made the dreadful mistake of going a step further and getting involved with one of them.
At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a mistake to anyone but Walter, who considered himself uniquely qualified to detect the bullshit in his friend’s dealings with women. When Richard said, on the phone, that the time had come to put childish things behind him and sustain a real relationship with a grownup woman, warning bells had gone off in Walter’s head. The woman was an Ecuadoran named Ellie Posada. She was in her late thirties and had two kids whose father, a limousine driver, had been struck and killed when his car broke down on the Pulaski Skyway. (It did not escape Patty’s attention that, although Richard poked plenty of very young girls for fun, the women he actually had longer-term relationships with were his own age or even older.) Ellie worked for an insurance agency and lived across the hall from Richard. For a nearly a year, he gave Walter upbeat reports on how unexpectedly well her kids were taking to him and he to them, and how great Ellie was to come home to, and how uninteresting women who weren’t Ellie had become to him, and how he hadn’t eaten so well or felt so healthy since he’d lived with Walter, and (this really set Walter’s alarm bell ringing) how fascinating the insurance business turned out to be. Walter told Patty that he could hear something tellingly abstracted, or theoretical, or far away, in Richard’s tone of voice during this ostensibly happy year, and it came as no surprise to him when Richard’s nature finally caught up with him. The music he’d started making with Walnut Surprise turned out to be even more fascinating than the insurance business, and the skinny chicks in his young bandmates’ orbit turned out to be not so uninteresting after all, and Ellie turned out to be a strict constructionist when it came to exclusive sexual contracts, and before long he was afraid to come home at night to his own building, because Ellie was lying in ambush for him. Soon after that, Ellie organized the building’s other tenants to complain about his egregious appropriation of their communal space, and his hitherto absent landlord sent him stern letters by certified mail, and Richard found himself homeless, at the age of forty-four, in midwinter, with maxed-out credit cards and a $300 monthly storage bill for all his crap.
Now came Walter’s finest hour as Richard’s big brother. He offered him a way to live rent-free, devote himself in solitude to songwriting, and make some good money while he got his life sorted out. Walter had inherited from Dorothy her sweet little house on a lake near Grand Rapids. He had plans for some major interior and exterior improvements which, since he’d quit 3M and joined the Nature Conservancy, he’d despaired of finding time to do himself, and he proposed that Richard come out and live in the house, get a good start on the kitchen renovation, and then, when the snow melted, put a big deck on the back of the house, overlooking the lake. Richard would get thirty dollars an hour, plus free electricity and heat, and could do the work on his own schedule. And Richard, who was in a low place, and who (as he later told Patty, with touching plainness) had come to consider the Berglunds the closest thing he had to family, took only one day to think it over before accepting the offer. For Walter, his assent was further sweet confirmation that Richard really loved him. For Patty, well, the timing was dangerous.
Richard stopped with his overloaded old Toyota pickup for a night in St. Paul on his way up north. Patty was already into a bottle by the time he arrived, at three in the afternoon, and did not acquit herself well as a hostess. Walter did the cooking while she drank for the three of them. It was as if he and she both had just been waiting to see their old friend so they could vent their conflicting versions of why Joey, instead of joining them for dinner, was playing air hockey with a right-wing dolt next door. Richard, flummoxed, kept stepping outside to smoke cigarettes and fortify himself for the next round of Berglund fraughtness.
“It’s going to be fine,” he said, coming inside again. “You guys are great parents. It’s just, you know, when a kid’s got a big personality, there can be big dramas of individuation. It takes time to work these things out.”
“God,” Patty said. “Where did you get so wise?”
“Richard is one of those bizarre people who actually still read books and think about things,” Walter said.
“Right, unlike me, I know.” She turned to Richard. “Every once in a while it happens that I don’t read every single book he recommends. Sometimes I decide to just—skip it. I believe that is the subtext here. My substandard intellect.”
Richard gave her a hard look. “You should cool it with the drinking,” he said.
He might as well have punched her in the sternum. Where Walter’s disapproval actively fed her misbehavior, Richard’s had the effect of catching her out in her childishness, of exposing her unattractiveness to daylight.
“Patty’s in a lot of pain,” Walter said quietly, as if to warn Richard that his loyalty still lay, however unaccountably, with her.
“You can drink all you want as far as I’m concerned,” Richard said. “I’m just saying, if you want the kid to come home, it might help to have your house in order.”
“I’m not even sure I want him home at this point,” Walter said. “I’m kind of enjoying the respite from his contempt.”
“So, let’s see, then,” Patty said. “We’ve got individuation for Joey, we’ve got relief for Walter, but then, for Patty, what? What does she get? Wine, I guess. Right? Patty gets wine.”
“Whoa,” Richard said. “Little bit of self-pity there?”
“For God’s sake,” Walter said.
&nb
sp; It was terrible to see, through Richard’s eyes, what she’d been turning into. From twelve hundred miles away it had been easy to smile at Richard’s love troubles, his eternal adolescence, his failed resolutions to put childish things behind him, and to feel that here, in Ramsey Hill, a more adult sort of life was being led. But now she was in the kitchen with him—his height, as always, a breathtaking surprise to her, his Qaddafian features weathered and deepened, his mass of dark hair graying handsomely—and he illuminated in a flash what a self-absorbed little child she’d been able to remain by walling herself inside her lovely house. She’d run from her family’s babyishness only to be just as big a baby herself. She didn’t have a job, her kids were more grownup than she was, she hardly even had sex. She was ashamed to be seen by him. All these years, she’d treasured her memory of their little road trip, kept it locked up securely in some deep interior place, letting it age like a wine, so that, in some symbolic way, the thing that might have happened between them stayed alive and grew older with the two of them. The nature of the possibility altered as it aged in its sealed bottle, but it didn’t go bad, it remained potentially drinkable, it was a kind of reassurance: rakish Richard Katz had once invited her to move to New York with him, and she’d said no. And now she could see that this wasn’t how things worked at all. She was forty-two and drinking herself red-nosed.
She stood up carefully, trying not to wobble, and poured a half-dead bottle down the drain. She set her empty glass in the sink and said that she was going upstairs to lie down for a while, and that the men should go ahead and eat.
“Patty,” Walter said.
“I’m fine. I’m really fine. I just had too much to drink. I might come down again later. I’m sorry, Richard. It’s so wonderful to see you. I’m just in a bit of a state.”
Though she loved their house on the lake, and had been retreating there for weeks at a time by herself, she didn’t go there once during the spring Richard spent working on it. Walter found time to go up for several long weekends and help out, but Patty was too embarrassed. She stayed home and got herself in shape: took Richard’s advice about the drinking, started running and eating again, gained enough weight to fill in the most haggard of the lines that had been forming in her face, and generally acknowledged realities about her physical appearance which she’d been ignoring in her fantasy world. One reason she’d resisted any kind of makeover was that her hateful neighbor Carol Monaghan had undergone one when her hateful boy-toy Blake appeared on the scene. Anything Carol did was definitionally anathema to Patty, but she humbled herself and followed Carol’s example. Lost the ponytail, saw a colorist, got an age-appropriate haircut. She was making an effort to see more of her old basketball friends, and they rewarded her by telling her how much better she looked.