Freedom

  “Yes.”

  “Harder than I perhaps realized.”

  “Yes.”

  “Arguably better of me not to have sleepwalked.”

  “Yes.”

  She began to cry for Walter. They had spent so few nights apart over the years that she’d never had a chance to miss him and appreciate him the way she missed him and appreciated him now. This was the beginning of a terrible confusion of the heart, a confusion that the autobiographer is still suffering from. Already, there at Nameless Lake, in the unchanging overcast light, she could see the problem very clearly. She’d fallen for the one man in the world who cared as much about Walter and felt as protective of him as she did; anybody else could have tried to turn her against him. And even worse, in a way, was the responsibility she felt toward Richard, in knowing that he had nobody else like Walter in his life, and that his loyalty to Walter was, in his own estimation, one of the few things besides music that saved him as a human being. All this, in her sleep and selfishness, she had gone and jeopardized. She’d taken advantage of a person who was messed up and susceptible but nevertheless trying hard to maintain some kind of moral order in his life. And so she was crying for Richard, too, but even more for Walter, and for her own unlucky, wrongdoing self.

  “It’s good to cry,” Richard said, “although I can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself.”

  “It’s kind of a bottomless pit, once you get into it,” Patty snuffled. She was feeling suddenly cold in her bathing suit, and physically unwell. She went and put her arms around Richard’s warm, broad shoulders, and lay down with him on the Oriental rug, and so the long bright gray afternoon went.

  Three times, altogether. One, two, three. Once sleeping, once violently, and then once with the full orchestra. Three: pathetic little number. The autobiographer has now spent quite a bit of her mid-forties counting and recounting, but it never adds up to more than three.

  There is otherwise not much to relate, and most of what remains consists of further mistakes. The first of these she committed in concert with Richard while they were still lying on the rug. They decided together—agreed—that he should leave. They decided quickly, while they were sore and spent, that he should leave now, before they got themselves in any deeper, and that they would both then give the situation careful thought and come to a sober decision, which, if it should turn out to be negative, would only be more painful if he stayed any longer.

  Having made this decision, Patty sat up and was surprised to see that the trees and the deck were soaked. The rain was so fine that she hadn’t heard it on the roof, so gentle that it hadn’t trickled in the gutters. She put on Richard’s faded red T-shirt and asked if she could keep it.

  “Why do you want my shirt?”

  “It smells like you.”

  “That’s not considered a plus in most quarters.”

  “I just want one thing that’s yours.”

  “All right. Let’s hope it turns out to be the only thing.”

  “I’m forty-two,” she said. “It would cost me twenty thousand dollars to get pregnant. Not to burst your bubble or anything.”

  “I’m very proud of my zero batting average. Try not to wreck it, OK?”

  “And what about me?” she said. “Should I be worried that I’ve brought some disease into the house?”

  “I’ve had all my shots, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m usually paranoically careful.”

  “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

  And so on. It was all very chummy and chatty, and in the lightness of the moment she told him that he had no excuse now not to sing her a song, before he left. He unpacked his banjo and plucked away while she made sandwiches and wrapped them in foil.

  “Maybe you should spend the night and get an early start in the morning,” she called to him.

  He smiled as if refusing to dignify this with an answer.

  “Seriously,” she said. “It’s raining, it’s going to get dark.”

  “No chance,” he said. “Sorry. You will never be trusted again. It’s something you’re just going to have to live with.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” she said. “Why aren’t you singing? I want to hear your voice.”

  To be nice to her, he sang “Shady Grove.” He had become, over the years, in defiance of initial expectations, a skilled and fairly nuanced vocalist, and he was so big-chested that he could really blow your house down.

  “OK, I’m seeing your point,” she said when he finished. “This isn’t making things any easier for me.”

  Once you get musicians going, though, they hate to stop. Richard tuned his guitar and sang three country songs that Walnut Surprise later recorded for Nameless Lake. Some of the lyrics were barely more than nonsense syllables, to be discarded and replaced with vastly better ones, but Patty was still so affected and excited by his singing, in a country mode she recognized and loved, that she began to shout in the middle of the third song, “STOP! OK! ENOUGH! STOP! ENOUGH! OK!” But he wouldn’t stop, and his absorption in his music made her feel so lonely and abandoned that she began to cry raggedly and finally to become so hysterical that he had no choice but to stop singing—though he was still unmistakably pissed off by the interruption!—and try, unsuccessfully, to calm her.

  “Here are your sandwiches,” she said, dumping them into his arms, “and there’s the door. We said you were leaving, and so you’re leaving. OK? Now! I mean it! Now. I’m sorry I asked you to sing, MY FAULT AGAIN, but let’s try to learn from our mistakes, OK?”

  He took a deep breath and drew himself up as if to deliver some pronouncement, but his shoulders slumped and he let the big statement escape from his lungs unspoken.

  “You’re right,” he said, irritably. “I don’t need this.”

  “We made a good decision, don’t you think?”

  “Probably we did, yeah.”

  “So go.”

  And he went.

  And she became a better reader. At first in desperate escapism, later in search of help. By the time Walter returned from Saskatchewan, she’d dispatched the remainder of War and Peace in three marathon reading days. Natasha had promised herself to Andrei but was then corrupted by the wicked Anatole, and Andrei went off in despair to get himself mortally wounded in battle, surviving only long enough to be nursed by Natasha and forgive her, whereupon excellent old Pierre, who had done some growing up and deep thinking as a prisoner of war, stepped forward to present himself as Natasha’s consolation prize; and lots of babies followed. Patty felt she’d lived an entire compressed lifetime in those three days, and when her own Pierre returned from the wilderness, badly sunburned despite religious slatherings of maximum-strength sunblock, she was ready to try to love him again. She picked him up in Duluth and debriefed him on his days with nature-loving millionaires, who had apparently opened their wallets wide for him.

  “It’s incredible,” Walter said when they got home and he saw the almost-finished deck. “He’s here four months and he can’t do the last eight hours of work.”

  “I think he was sick of the woods,” Patty said. “I told him he should just go back to New York. He wrote some great songs here. He was ready to go.”

  Walter frowned. “He played you songs?”

  “Three,” she said, turning away from him.

  “And they were good?”

  “Really good.” She walked down toward the lake, and Walter followed her. It wasn’t hard to keep her distance from him. Only at the very beginning had they been one of those couples who embraced and locked lips at every homecoming.

  “You guys got along OK?” Walter asked.

  “It was a little awkward. I was glad when he left. I had to drink a big glass of sherry the one night he was here.”

  “That’s not so bad. One glass.”

  Part of the deal she’d struck with herself was to tell Walter no lies, not even tiny ones; to speak no words that couldn’t narrowly be construed as truth.

  “I’ve been reading a ton,” s
he said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

  “I’m jealous,” Walter said.

  “Ah?”

  “Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

  “It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

  “You seem a little altered, actually.”

  “Not in a bad way, I hope.”

  “No. Just different.”

  In bed with him that night, she took off her pajamas and was relieved to find she wanted him more, not less, for what she’d done. It was fine, having sex with him. There was nothing so wrong with it.

  “We need to do this more,” she said.

  “Any time. Literally any time.”

  They had a sort of second honeymoon that summer, fueled by her contrition and sexual botheration. She tried hard to be a good wife, and to please her very good husband, but a full accounting of the success of her efforts must include the e-mails that she and Richard began to exchange within days of his departure, and the permission she somehow gave him, a few weeks after that, to get on a plane to Minneapolis and go up to Nameless Lake with her while Walter was hosting another V.I.P. trip in the Boundary Waters. She immediately deleted the e-mail with Richard’s flight information, as she’d deleted all the others, but not before memorizing the flight number and arrival time.

  A week before the date, she repaired to the lake in solitude and gave herself entirely to her derangement. It consisted of getting stumbling drunk every evening, awakening later in panic and remorse and indecision, then sleeping through the morning, then reading novels in a suspended state of false calm, then jumping up and pacing for an hour or more in the vicinity of the telephone, trying to decide whether to call Richard and tell him not to come, and finally opening a bottle to make the whole thing go away for a few hours.

  Slowly the remaining days ticked down toward zero. On the last night, she got vomiting drunk, fell asleep in the living room, and was jolted back to consciousness at a predawn hour. To get her hands and her arms to stop shaking enough to dial Richard’s number, she had to lie down on the still-ungrouted kitchen floor.

  She reached his voice mail. He had found a new, smaller apartment a few blocks from his old one. All she could picture of this new place was a larger version of the black room of the apartment he’d once shared with Walter, the apartment she’d displaced him from. She dialed again, and again got his voice mail. She dialed a third time, and Richard answered.

  “Don’t come,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

  He said nothing, but she could hear him breathing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Why don’t you call me again in a couple of hours. See how you feel in the morning.”

  “I’ve been throwing up. Been vomiting.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Please don’t come. I promise I’ll stop bothering you. I think I just needed to push it to the limit before I could see that I can’t do it.”

  “I guess that makes sense.”

  “It’s the right thing, isn’t it?”

  “Probably. Yeah. It probably is.”

  “I can’t do it to him.”

  “Then good. I won’t come.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want you to come. I’m just asking you not to.”

  “I will do what you want.”

  “No, God, listen to me. I’m asking you to do what I don’t want.”

  Possibly, in Jersey City, New Jersey, he was rolling his eyes at this. But she knew that he wanted to see her, he was ready to take a plane in the morning, and the only way they could agree definitively that he shouldn’t come was to prolong the conversation for two hours, going around and around, performing the unresolvable conflict, until they both felt so dirtied and exhausted and sick of themselves and sick of each other that the prospect of getting together became genuinely unappetizing.

  Not least among the ingredients of Patty’s misery, when they finally hung up, was her sense of wasting Richard’s love. She knew him to be a man supremely irritated by female bullshit, and the fact that he’d put up with two nonstop hours of hers, which was about 119 minutes more than he was constituted to put up with, filled her with gratitude and sorrow about the waste, the waste. The waste of his love.

  Which led her—it almost goes without saying—to call him again twenty minutes later and drag him through a somewhat shorter but even more wretched version of the first call. It was a small preview of what she later did in a more extended way with Walter in Washington: the harder she worked to exhaust his patience, the more patience he showed, and the more patience he showed, the harder it was to let go of him. Fortunately Richard’s patience with her, unlike Walter’s, was nowhere close to infinite. He finally just hung up on her, and he didn’t answer when she called yet again, an hour later, shortly before the time she figured he had to leave for Newark Airport to catch his flight.

  Despite having hardly slept, and despite having thrown up what little she’d eaten the day before, she felt immediately fresher and clearer and more energetic. She cleaned the house, read half of a Joseph Conrad novel Walter had recommended, and didn’t buy any more wine. When Walter came back from the Boundary Waters, she cooked a beautiful dinner and threw her arms around his neck and—a rarity—made him actually squirm a little with the intensity of her affection.

  What she should have done then was find a job or go back to school or become a volunteer. But there always seemed to be something in the way. There was the possibility that Joey would relent and move back home for his senior year. There was the house and garden she’d neglected in her year of drunkenness and depression. There was her cherished freedom to go up to Nameless Lake for weeks at a time whenever she felt like it. There was a more general freedom that she could see was killing her but she was nonetheless unable to let go of. There was Parents’ Weekend at Jessica’s college in Philadelphia, which Walter couldn’t attend but was delighted that Patty showed an interest in attending, since he sometimes worried that she and Jessica weren’t close enough. And then there were the weeks leading up to that Parents’ Weekend, weeks of e-mails to and from Richard, weeks of imagining the Philadelphia hotel room in which they were going to spend one day and one night off the radar. And then there were the months of serious depression after Parents’ Weekend.

  She’d flown to Philadelphia on a Thursday, in order to spend, as she carefully told Walter, an actual day on her own as a tourist. Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.

  Unbelievable as it may sound, she had not been alone at a hotel since her time in Room 21, and she was very impressed with her plushly mod room at the Sofitel. She examined all the amenities carefully while she waited for Richard to arrive, and then examined them again as the appointed hour came and went. She tried to watch television but could not. She was a pile of nervous pulp by the time the phone finally rang.

  “Something’s come up,” Richard said.

  “All right. OK. Something’s come up. OK.” She went to the window and looked at Philadelphia. “What was it? Somebody’s skirt?”

  “Cute,” Richard said.

  “Oh, just give me a little time,” she said, “and I’ll give you every cliché in the book. We haven’t even started on jealousy yet. This is, like, Minute One of jealousy.”

  “There’s nobody else.”

  “Nobody? There’s been nobody? God, even I’ve been worse-behaved than that. In my own little marital way.”

  “I didn’t say there haven’t been any. I said there isn’t one.”

  She pressed her head against the window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just making me feel too old, too ugly, too stupid, too jealous. I can’t stand to hear what’s coming out of my mouth.”

&nbsp
; “He called me this morning,” Richard said.

  “Who?”

  “Walter. I should have let it ring, but I picked up. He said he’d gotten up early to take you to the airport, and he was missing you. He said things have been really good with you guys. ‘Happiest in many years,’ I believe his phrase was.”

  Patty said nothing.

  “Said you were going out to see Jessica, Jessica secretly very happy about this, although worried that you might say something weird and embarrass her, or that you’re not going to like her new boyfriend. Walter all in all extremely happy that you’re doing this for her.”

  Patty fidgeted there by the window, struggling to listen.

  “Said he was feeling bad about some of the things he’d said to me last winter. Said he didn’t want me to have the wrong idea about you. Said last winter was terrible, because of Joey, but things are much better now. ‘Happiest in many years.’ I’m pretty sure that was the phrase.”

  Some combination of gagging and sobbing produced a ridiculous painful burp from Patty.

  “What was that?” Richard said.

  “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “So, anyway.”

  “Anyway.”

  “I decided not to go.”

  “Right. I understand. Of course.”

  “Good, then.”

  “But why don’t you just come down anyway. I mean, since I’m here. And then I can go back to my incredibly happy life, and you can go back to New Jersey.”

  “I’m just telling you what he said.”

  “My incredibly, incredibly happy life.”

  Oh, the temptations of self-pity. So sweet to her, so irresistible to give voice to, and so ugly to him. She could hear precisely the moment she’d gone a step too far. If she’d kept her cool, she might have charmed and cajoled him into coming down to Philadelphia. Who knows? She might never have gone home again. But she fucked everything up with self-pity. She could hear him grow cooler and more distant, which made her feel even sorrier for herself, and so on, and so forth, until finally she had to get off the phone and give herself entirely to the other sweetness.

  Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.