Freedom

  The previous morning, before he’d left for the airport, Patty had appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. “Let me put it as plainly as possible,” she said. “You have my permission.”

  “Permission for what?”

  “You know what for. And I’m saying you have it.”

  He might almost have believed she meant this if the expression on her face hadn’t been so ragged, and if she hadn’t been wringing her hands so piteously as she spoke.

  “Whatever you’re talking about,” he said, “I don’t want your permission.”

  She’d looked at him beseechingly, and then despairingly, and left him alone. Half an hour later, on his way out, he’d tapped on the door of the little room where she did her writing and her e-mailing and, more and more frequently of late, her sleeping. “Sweetie,” he said through the door. “I’ll see you on Thursday night.” When she gave no answer, he knocked again and went in. She was sitting on the foldout sofa, squeezing the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other. Her face was red, wrecked, tear-tracked. He crouched at her feet and held her hands, which were aging faster than the rest of her; were bony and thin-skinned. “I love you,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

  She nodded quickly, biting her lips, appreciative but unconvinced. “OK,” she said in a whispery squeak. “You’d better go.”

  How many thousand more times, he wondered as he descended the stairs to the Trust offices, am I going to let this woman stab me in the heart?

  Poor Patty, poor competitive lost Patty, who wasn’t doing anything remotely brave or admirable in Washington, could not help noticing his admiration of Lalitha. The reason he couldn’t let himself even think of loving Lalitha, let alone do anything about it, was Patty. It wasn’t just that he respected the letter of marital law, it was also that he couldn’t bear the idea of her knowing there was someone he thought more highly of than her. Lalitha was better than Patty. This was simply a fact. But Walter felt that he would sooner die than acknowledge this obvious fact to Patty, because, however much he might turn out to love Lalitha, and however unworkable his life with Patty had become, he loved Patty in some wholly other way, some larger and more abstract but nevertheless essential way that was about a lifetime of responsibility; about being a good person. If he were to fire Lalitha, literally and/or figuratively, she would cry for some months and then move on with her life and do good things with someone else. Lalitha was young and blessed with clarity. Whereas Patty, although she was often cruel to him and lately, more and more, had been shrinking from his caresses, still needed him to think the world of her. He knew this, because why else hadn’t she left him? He knew it very, very well. There was an emptiness at Patty’s center that it was his lot in life to do his best to fill with love. A slim flicker of hope in her which he alone could safeguard. And so, although his situation was already impossible and seemed to be getting more impossible every day, he had no choice but to persist in it.

  Emerging from the motel shower, taking care not to glance at the egregious white middle-aged body in the mirror, he checked his BlackBerry and found a message from Richard Katz.

  Hey pardner, job’s done up here. Do we meet in Washington now or what? Do I stay in a hotel or sleep on your sofa? I want such perks as I am due.

  All best to your beuatiful women. RK

  Walter studied the message with an uneasiness of uncertain origin. Possibly it was just the typo’s reminder of Richard’s fundamental carelessness, but possibly also the aftertaste of their meeting in Manhattan two weeks earlier. Although Walter had been very happy to see his old friend again, he’d been haunted afterward by Richard’s insistence, in the restaurant, that Lalitha repeat the word fucking, and by his subsequent insinuations about her interest in oral sex, and by the way that he himself, at the bar in Penn Station, had proceeded to badmouth Patty, which he never let himself do with anybody else. To be forty-seven and still trying to impress his college roommate by denigrating his wife and spilling confidences better left unspilled: it was pathetic. Although Richard had seemed happy enough to see him, too, Walter couldn’t shake the old familiar feeling that Richard was trying to impose his Katzian vision of the world on him and, thereby, defeat him. When, to Walter’s surprise, before they parted, Richard had agreed to lend his name and likeness to the crusade against overpopulation, Walter had immediately called Lalitha with the great news. But only she had been able to savor it with complete enthusiasm. Walter had boarded the train to Washington wondering if he’d done the right thing.

  And why, in his e-mail, had Richard mentioned the beauty of Lalitha and Patty? Why send his best to them but not to Walter himself? Just another careless oversight? Walter didn’t think so.

  Down the road from the Days Inn was a steakhouse that was plastic to the core but equipped with a full bar. It was a ridiculous place to go, since neither Walter nor Lalitha ate cow, but the motel clerk had nothing better to recommend. In a plastic-seated booth, Walter touched the rim of his beer glass to Lalitha’s gin martini, which she proceeded to make short work of. He signaled to their waitress for another and then suffered through perusal of the menu. Between the horrors of bovine methane, the lakes of watershed-devastating excrement generated by pig and chicken farms, the catastrophic overfishing of the oceans, the ecological nightmare of farmed shrimp and salmon, the antibiotic orgy of dairy-cow factories, and the fuel squandered by the globalization of produce, there was little he could ever order in good conscience besides potatoes, beans, and freshwater-farmed tilapia.

  “Fuck it,” he said, closing the menu. “I’m going to have the rib eye.”

  “Excellent, excellent celebrating,” Lalitha said, her face already flushed. “I’m going to have the delicious grilled-cheese sandwich from the children’s menu.”

  The beer was interesting. Unexpectedly sour and undelicious, like drinkable dough. After just three or four sips, seldom-heard-from blood vessels in Walter’s brain were pulsing disturbingly.

  “Got an e-mail from Richard,” he said. “He’s willing to come down and work with us on strategy. I told him he should come down for the weekend.”

  “Ha! You see? You didn’t even think it was worth the bother of asking him.”

  “No, no. You were right about that.”

  Lalitha noticed something in his face. “Aren’t you happy about it?”

  “No, absolutely,” he said. “In theory. There’s just something I don’t . . . trust. I guess basically I don’t see why he’s doing it.”

  “Because we were extremely persuasive!”

  “Yeah, maybe. Or because you’re extremely pretty.”

  She seemed both pleased and confused by this. “He’s your very good friend, right?”

  “Used to be. But then he got famous. And now all I can see are the parts of him I don’t trust.”

  “What don’t you trust about him?”

  Walter shook his head, not wanting to say.

  “Do you not trust him with me?”

  “No, that would be very stupid, wouldn’t it? I mean, what do I care what you do? You’re an adult, you can look out for yourself.”

  Lalitha laughed at him, simply pleased now, not confused at all.

  “I think he’s very funny and charismatic,” she said. “But I mostly just felt sorry for him. You know what I mean? He seems like one of those men who have to spend all their time maintaining an attitude, because they’re weak inside. He’s nothing like the man you are. All I could see when we were talking was how much he admires you, and how he was trying not to show it too much. Couldn’t you see that?”

  The degree of pleasure it brought Walter to hear this felt dangerous to him. He wanted to believe it, but he didn’t trust it, because he knew Richard to be, in his own way, relentless.

  “Seriously, Walter. That kind of man is very primitive. All he has is dignity and self-control and attitude. He only has one little thing, while you have everything else.”

  “But the thing he has is what the world want
s,” Walter said. “You’ve read all the Nexis stuff on him, you know what I’m talking about. The world doesn’t reward ideas or emotions, it rewards integrity and coolness. And that’s why I don’t trust him. He’s got the game set up so he’s always going to win. In private, he may think he admires what we’re doing, but he’s never going to admit it in public, because he has to maintain his attitude, because that’s what the world wants, and he knows it.”

  “Yes, but that’s why it’s so great that he’ll be working with us. I don’t want you to be cool, I don’t like a cool man. I like a man like you. But Richard can help us communicate.”

  Walter was relieved when their waitress came to take their orders and terminated the pleasure of hearing why Lalitha liked him. But the danger only deepened as she drank her second martini.

  “Can I ask a personal question?” she said.

  “Ah—sure.”

  “The question is: do you think I should get my tubes tied?”

  She’d spoken loudly enough for other tables to have heard, and Walter reflexively put a finger to his lips. He felt conspicuous enough already, felt glaringly urban, sitting with a girl of a different race amid the two varieties of rural West Virginians, the overweight kind and the really skinny kind.

  “It just seems logical,” she said more quietly, “since I know I don’t want children.”

  “Well,” he said, “I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” He wanted to say that, since Lalitha so seldom saw Jairam, her longtime boyfriend, pregnancy hardly seemed like a pressing worry, and that, if she ever did get pregnant accidentally, she could always have an abortion. But it seemed fantastically inappropriate to be discussing his assistant’s tubes. She was smiling at him with a kind of woozy shyness, as if seeking his permission or fearing his disapproval. “I guess basically,” he said, “I think Richard was right, if you remember what he said. He said people change their minds about these things. It’s probably best to leave your options open.”

  “But what if I know that I’m right now, and my future self is the one I don’t trust?”

  “Well, you’re not going to be your old self anymore, in the future. You’re going to be your new self. And your new self might want different things.”

  “Then fuck my future self,” Lalitha said, leaning forward. “If it wants to reproduce, I already have no respect for it.”

  Walter willed himself not to glance at the other diners. “Why is this even coming up now? You hardly even see Jairam anymore.”

  “Because Jairam wants children, that’s why. He doesn’t believe how serious I am about not wanting them. I need to show him, so he’ll stop bothering me. I don’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.”

  “I’m really not sure we should be discussing this kind of thing.”

  “OK, but who else can I talk to, then? You’re the only one who understands me.”

  “Oh, God, Lalitha.” Walter’s head was swimming with beer. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I feel like I’ve led you into something I never meant to lead you into. You still have your whole life ahead of you, and I . . . I feel like I’ve led you into something.”

  This sounded all wrong. In trying to say something narrow, something specific to the problem of world population, he’d managed to sound like he was saying something broad about the two of them. Had seemed to be foreclosing a larger possibility that he wasn’t ready to foreclose yet, even though he knew it wasn’t actually a possibility.

  “These are my own thoughts, not yours,” Lalitha said. “You didn’t put them in my head. I was just asking your advice.”

  “Well, and I guess my advice is don’t do it.”

  “OK. Then I’m going to have another drink. Or do you advise me not to?”

  “I do advise you not to.”

  “Please order me one anyway.”

  A chasm was opening in front of Walter, available for immediate jumping into. He was shocked by how quickly such a thing could open up in front of him. The only other time—or, no, no, no, the only time—he’d fallen in love, he’d taken the better part of a year before acting on it, and even then Patty had ended up doing most of the heavy lifting for him. Now it appeared that these things could be managed in a matter of minutes. Just a few more heedless words, another slug of beer, and God only knew . . .

  “I just meant,” he said, “that I might have led you too much into overpopulation. Into being crazy about it. With my own stupid anger, my own issues. I wasn’t trying to say anything larger than that.”

  She nodded. Tiny pearls of tear were clinging to her eyelashes.

  “I feel very fatherly toward you,” he babbled.

  “I understand.”

  But fatherly was also wrong—too foreclosing of the kind of love that it was still too painful to admit he was never going to allow himself.

  “Obviously,” he said, “I’m too young to be your father, or almost too young, besides which, in any case, you have your own father. I was really just referring to your having asked me for fatherly advice. To my having, as your boss, and as a considerably older person, a certain kind of . . . solicitude toward you. ‘Fatherly’ in that respect. Not in some sort of taboo respect.”

  This all sounded like patent nonsense even as he said it. His whole fucking problem was taboos. Lalitha, who seemed to know it, raised her lovely eyes and looked directly into his. “You don’t have to love me, Walter. I can just love you. All right? You can’t stop me from loving you.”

  The chasm widened dizzyingly.

  “I do love you!” he said. “I mean—in a sense. A very definite sense. I definitely do. A lot. A whole lot, actually. OK? I just don’t see where we can go with it. I mean, if we’re going to keep working together, we absolutely can’t be talking like this. This is already very, very, very, very bad.”

  “Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “And you’re married.”

  “Yes, exactly! Exactly. And so there we are.”

  “There we are, yes.”

  “Let me see about your drink.”

  Love declared, disaster averted, he went looking for their waitress and ordered a third martini, heavy on the vermouth. His blush, which all his life had been a thing that constantly came and went, had now come without going. He lurched, hot-faced, into the men’s room and attempted to pee. His need was at once pressing and difficult to connect to. He stood at the urinal, taking deep breaths, and was finally at the point of getting things flowing when the door swung open and somebody came in. Walter heard the guy washing his hands and drying them while he stood with burning cheeks and waited for his bladder to overcome its shyness. He was again on the verge of success when he realized that the guy at the sinks was lingering deliberately. He gave up on peeing, wasted water with an unnecessary flush, and zipped up his pants.

  “You might want to see a doctor, pal, about your urinary difficulties,” the guy at the sinks drawled sadistically. White, thirtyish, with hard living in his face, he was an exact match of Walter’s profile of the kind of driver who didn’t believe in turn signals. He stood near Walter’s shoulder while Walter hastily washed his hands and dried them.

  “Like the dark meat, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Said I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.”

  “She’s Asian,” Walter said, stepping around him. “If you’ll excuse me—”

  “Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker, ain’t that right, pal?”

  There was so much hatred in his voice that Walter, fearing violence, made his escape through the door without delivering a rejoinder. He hadn’t thrown a punch or absorbed one in thirty-five years, and he suspected that a punching would feel far worse at forty-seven than it had at twelve. His whole body was vibrating with unreleased violence, his head reeling with injustice, as he sat down to an iceberg-lettuce salad in the booth.

  “How’s your beer?” Lalitha asked.

  “It’s interesting,” he said, drinking the rest of it right down. His head felt liable to detach
from his neck and drift up to the ceiling like a party balloon.

  “I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m—” in love with you, too. I’m horribly in love with you. “I’m in a hard position, honey,” he said. “I mean, not ‘honey.’ Not ‘honey.’ Lalitha. Honey. I’m in a hard position.”

  “Maybe you should have another beer,” she said with a sly smile.

  “You see, the thing is, I also love my wife.”

  “Yes of course,” she said. But she wasn’t even trying to help him out. She arched her back like a cat and stretched forward across the table, displaying the ten pale nails of her beautiful young hands on either side of his salad plate, inviting him to touch them. “I’m so drunk!” she said, smiling up at him wickedly.

  He glanced around the plastic dining room to see if his bathroom tormentor might be witnessing this. The guy was not obviously in sight, nor was anybody else staring unduly. Looking down at Lalitha, who was snuggling her cheek against the plastic tabletop as if it were the softest of pillows, he recalled the words of Richard’s prophecy. The girl on her knees, head bobbing, smiling up. Oh, the cheap clarity of Richard Katz’s vision of the world. A surge of resentment cut through Walter’s buzz and steadied him. To take advantage of this girl was Richard’s way, not his.