Freedom

  “Sit up,” he said sternly.

  “In a minute,” she murmured, wiggling her outstretched fingers.

  “No, sit up now. We’re the public face of the Trust, and we have to be aware of that.”

  “I think you might have to take me home, Walter.”

  “We need to get some food in you first.”

  “Mm,” she said, smiling with closed eyes.

  Walter stood up and ran down their waitress and asked to have their entrées boxed for takeout. Lalitha was still slumped forward, her half-finished third martini by her elbow, when he returned to the booth. He roused her and held her firmly by the upper arm as he led her outside and installed her in the passenger seat. Going back inside for the food, he encountered, in the glassed-in vestibule, his tormentor from the bathroom.

  “Fucking dark-meat lover,” the guy said. “Fucking spectacle. What the fuck you doin’ around here?”

  Walter tried to step around him, but the guy blocked his way. “Asked you a question,” he said.

  “Not interested,” Walter said. He tried to push past but found himself shoved hard against the plate glass, shaking the framework of the vestibule. At that moment, before anything worse could happen, the inner door opened and the restaurant’s hard-bitten hostess asked what was going on.

  “This person’s bothering me,” Walter said, breathing hard.

  “Fucking pervert.”

  “You going to have to take this off the premises,” the hostess said.

  “I ain’t going nowhere. This pervo’s the one that’s leaving.”

  “Then go back to your table and sit down and don’t use that kind of language with me.”

  “Can’t even eat, he makes me so sick to my stomach.”

  Leaving the two of them to sort things out, Walter went inside and found himself in the crosshairs of the murderously hateful gaze emanating from a heavyset young blonde, clearly his tormentor’s woman, who was alone at a table near the door. While he waited for his food, he wondered why it was tonight, of all the nights, that he and Lalitha had provoked this kind of hatred. They’d received a few stares now and then, mostly in smaller towns, but never anything like this. In fact, he’d been agreeably surprised by the number of black-white couples he’d seen in Charleston, and by the generally low priority of racism among the state’s many ailments. Most of West Virginia was too white for race to be a fore-front issue. He was forced to the conclusion that what had attracted the young couple’s attention was the guilt, his own dirty guilt, that had radiated from his booth. They didn’t hate Lalitha, they hated him. And he deserved it. When the food finally came out, his hands were shaking so much that he could hardly sign the credit-card slip.

  Back at the Days Inn, he carried Lalitha in his arms through the rain and set her down outside her door. He had little doubt that she could have walked, but he wanted to indulge her earlier wish to be carried to her room. And it actually helped to have her in his arms like a child, it reminded him of his responsibilities. When she sat down on the bed and toppled over, he covered her with a bedspread the way he’d once covered Jessica and Joey.

  “I’m going to go next door and eat dinner,” he said, tenderly smoothing her hair from her forehead. “I’ll leave yours here for you.”

  “No don’t,” she said. “Stay and watch TV. I’ll sober up and we can eat together.”

  In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the NewsHour—some discussion of John Kerry’s war record whose irrelevance made him so nervous he could barely follow it. He could hardly stand to watch news of any sort anymore. Everything was moving too fast, too fast. He felt a stab of sympathy for the Kerry campaign, which now had less than seven months to turn the country’s mood around and expose three years of high-tech lying and manipulation.

  He himself had been under tremendous pressure to get the Trust’s contracts with Nardone and Blasco signed before their initial agreement with Vin Haven expired, on June 30, and became subject to renegotiation. In his rush to deal with Coyle Mathis and beat the deadline, he’d had no choice but to sign off on the body-armor deal with LBI, exorbitant and distasteful though it was. And now, before anything could be reconsidered, the coal companies were rushing to wreck the Nine Mile valley and move into the mountains with their draglines, which they were free to do because one of Walter’s few clear successes, in West Virginia, had been to get the MTR permits fast-tracked and persuade the Appalachian Environmental Law Center to remove the Nine Mile sites from its dilatory lawsuit. The deal was sealed, and Walter now needed to forget about West Virginia in any case and start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade—needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation’s most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.

  In the two and a half weeks since his meeting in Manhattan with Richard, the world population had increased by 7,000,000. A net gain of seven million human beings—the equivalent of New York City’s population—to clear-cut forests and befoul streams and pave over grasslands and throw plastic garbage into the Pacific Ocean and burn gasoline and coal and exterminate other species and obey the fucking pope and pop out families of twelve. In Walter’s view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalisms of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn’t see a church or a real men love jesus sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant that he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage. And it wasn’t just religion, and it wasn’t just the jumbo everything to which his fellow Americans seemed to feel uniquely entitled, it wasn’t just the Walmarts and the buckets of corn syrup and the high-clearance monster trucks; it was the feeling that nobody else in the country was giving even five seconds’ thought to what it meant to be packing another 13,000,000 large primates onto the world’s limited surface every month. The unclouded serenity of his countrymen’s indifference made him wild with anger.

  Patty had recently suggested, as an antidote to road rage, that he distract himself with radio whenever he was driving a car, but to Walter the message of every single radio station was that nobody else in America was thinking about the planet’s ruination. The God stations and the country stations and the Limbaugh stations were all, of course, actively cheering the ruination; the classic-rock and news-network stations continually made much ado about absolutely nothing; and National Public Radio was, for Walter, even worse. Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion: literally fiddling while the planet burned! And worst of all were Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The NPR news unit, once upon a time fairly liberal, had become just another voice of center-right free-market ideology, describing even the slightest slowing of the nation’s economic growth rate as “bad news” and deliberately wasting precious minutes of airtime every morning and evening—minutes that could have been devoted to raising the alarm about overpopulation and mass extinctions—on fatuously earnest reviews of literary novels and quirky musical acts like Walnut Surprise.

  And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.

  He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way—if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn’t. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios, aware of how, in his case, the obsession was feeding on frustration with his wife and disappointment with his son. Probably, if he’d been truly alone in his anger, he couldn’t have stood it.

  But Lalitha was with him
every step of the way. She ratified his vision and shared his sense of urgency. In his initial interview with her, she’d told him about the family trip she’d taken back to West Bengal when she was fourteen. She’d been exactly the right age to be not merely saddened and horrified but disgusted by the density and suffering and squalor of human life in Calcutta. Her disgust had pushed her, on her return to the States, into vegetarianism and environmental studies, with a focus, in college, on women’s issues in developing nations. Although she’d happened to land a good job with the Nature Conservancy after college, her heart—like Walter’s own when he was young—had always been in population and sustainability issues.

  There was, to be sure, a whole other side of Lalitha, a side susceptible to strong, traditional men. Her boyfriend, Jairam, was thick-bodied and somewhat ugly but arrogant and driven, a heart surgeon in training, and Lalitha was by no means the first attractive young woman whom Walter had seen parking her charms with a Jairam type in order to avoid being hit on everywhere she went. But six years of Jairam’s escalating nonsense seemed finally to be curing her of him. The only real surprise about the question she’d asked Walter tonight, the question about sterilization, was that she’d even felt the need to ask it.

  Why, indeed, had she asked him?

  He turned off the TV and paced her room to give the matter closer thought, and the answer came to him immediately: she’d been asking whether he might want to have a kid with her. Or maybe, more precisely, she’d been warning him that even if he wanted to, she might not.

  And the sick thing was—if he was honest with himself—that he did want to have a baby with her. Not that he didn’t adore Jessica and, in a more abstract way, love Joey. But their mother was suddenly feeling very far away to him. Patty was a person who probably hadn’t even wanted very much to marry him, a person he’d first heard about from Richard, who had mentioned, one long-ago summer evening in Minneapolis, that the chick he was sleeping with was living with a basketball star who confounded his preconceptions of lady jocks. Patty had almost gone with Richard, and out of the gratifying fact that she hadn’t—that she’d succumbed to Walter’s love instead—had grown their entire life together, their marriage and their house and their kids. They’d always been a good couple but an odd couple; nowadays, more and more, they seemed simply ill matched. Whereas Lalitha was a genuine kindred spirit, a soul mate who wholeheartedly adored him. If they ever had a son, the son would be like him.

  He continued to pace her room, greatly agitated. While his attention was diverted by drink and rednecks, the chasm at his feet had been growing wider and wider. He was now thinking about having babies with his assistant! And not even pretending that he wasn’t! And this was all new within the last hour. He knew it was new because, when he’d advised her not to have her tubes tied, he truly had not been thinking of himself.

  “Walter?” Lalitha said from the bed.

  “Yeah, how are you doing?” he said, rushing to her side.

  “I was thinking I might throw up, but now I’m thinking I won’t have to.”

  “That’s good!”

  She was blinking up at him rapidly, with a tender smile. “Thank you for staying with me.”

  “Oh absolutely.”

  “How are you with your beer?”

  “I don’t even know.”

  Her lips were right there, her mouth was right there, and his heart seemed liable to crack his rib cage with its heaving. Kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her! it was telling him.

  And then his BlackBerry rang. Its ringtone was the song of the cerulean warbler.

  “Take it,” Lalitha said.

  “Um . . .”

  “No, take it. I’m happy lying here.”

  The caller was Jessica, it wasn’t urgent, they talked every day. But seeing her name on the screenlet was enough to draw Walter back from the brink. He sat down on the other bed and answered.

  “It sounds like you’re walking,” Jessica said. “Are you running somewhere?”

  “No,” he said. “Celebrating, actually.”

  “It sounds like you’re on a treadmill, the way you’re panting.”

  There was too little strength in his arm even to hold a phone up to his ear. He lay down on his side and told his daughter about the events of the morning and his various misgivings, which she did her best to reassure him about. He had come to appreciate the rhythm of their daily calls. Jessica was the one person in the world he allowed to ask him about himself before plying her with questions about her own life; she looked after him that way; she was the child who’d inherited his sense of responsibility. Although her ambition was still to be a writer, and she was currently working as a barely paid editorial assistant in Manhattan, she had a deep green streak and hoped to make environmental issues the focus of her future writing. Walter told her that Richard was coming down to Washington and asked her if she was still planning to join them on the weekend, to lend her valuable young intelligence to the discussions. She said she definitely was.

  “And how was your day?” he said.

  “Eh,” she said. “My roommates didn’t magically replace themselves with better roommates while I was at the office. I’ve got clothes piled around my door to keep the smoke out.”

  “You have to not let them smoke inside. You just have to tell them that.”

  “Right, I get outvoted, is the thing. They both just started. It’s still possible they’ll see how stupid it is and stop. In the meantime, I’m literally holding my breath.”

  “And how’s work?”

  “As usual. Simon gets ever skeazier. He’s like a sebum factory. You have to wipe everything off after he’s been around your desk. He was hanging around Emily’s desk for like an hour today, trying to get her to go to a Knicks game with him. The senior editors get all these free tickets to stuff, including sporting events, for reasons unknown to me. I guess the Knicks must be fairly desperate to fill their luxury seats at this point. And Emily’s like, how many hundred ways can I find to say no? I finally went over and started asking Simon about his wife. You know—wife? Three kids in Teaneck? Hello? Stop looking down Emily’s shirt?”

  Walter closed his eyes and tried to think of something to say.

  “Dad? You there?”

  “I’m here, yeah. How old is, um. Simon?”

  “I don’t know. Indeterminate. Probably not more than twice Emily’s age. We speculate about whether he colors his hair. Sometimes the color seems to change a little, from week to week, but that could just be body-oil issues. I’m luckily not directly subordinate to him.”

  Walter was suddenly worried that he might cry.

  “Dad? You there?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “It’s just your cell goes so blank when you’re not talking.”

  “Yeah, listen,” he said, “it’s terrific that you’re coming for the weekend. I think we’ll put Richard in the guest room. We’re going to do a long meeting on Saturday and then a shorter one on Sunday. Try to hammer out a concrete plan. Lalitha’s already got some great ideas.”

  “No doubt,” Jessica said.

  “That’s great, then. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “OK, I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you, too, sweetheart.”

  He let the phone slip from his hand and lay crying for a while, silently, shaking the cheap bed. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake. To throw away his marriage and follow Lalitha had felt irresistible until the moment he saw himself, in the person of Jessica’s older colleague, as another overconsuming white American male who felt entitled to more and more and more: saw the romantic imperialism of his falling for someone f
resh and Asian, having exhausted domestic supplies. Likewise the course he’d charted for two and a half years with the Trust, convinced of the soundness of his arguments and the rightness of his mission, only to feel, this morning, in Charleston, that he’d made nothing but horrible mistakes. And likewise the overpopulation initiative: what better way to live could there be than to throw himself into the most critical challenge of his time? A challenge that then seemed trumped-up and barren when he thought of his Lalitha with her tubes tied. How to live?

  He was drying his eyes, pulling himself together, when Lalitha got up and came over and put a hand on his shoulder. She smelled of sweet respired martini. “My boss,” she said softly, stroking his shoulder. “You’re the best boss in the world. You’re such a wonderful man. We’ll get up in the morning and everything will be fine.”

  He nodded and sniffled and gasped a little. “Please don’t get sterilized,” he said.

  “No,” she said, stroking him. “I won’t do that tonight.”

  “There’s no hurry about anything. Everything has to slow down.”

  “Slow, slow, yes. Everything will be slow.”

  If she’d kissed him, he would have kissed her back, but she just kept stroking his shoulder, and eventually he was able to reconstruct some semblance of a professional self. Lalitha looked wistful but not too disappointed. She yawned and stretched her arms like a sleepy child. Walter left her with her sandwich and went next door with his steak, which he devoured with guilty savagery, holding it in his hands and tearing off pieces with his teeth, covering his chin with grease. He thought again of Jessica’s oily, despoiling colleague Simon.

  Sobered by this, and by the loneliness and sterility of his room, he washed his face and attended to e-mail for two hours, while Lalitha slept in her undespoiled room and dreamed of—what? He couldn’t imagine. But he did feel that, by coming so close to the brink and then drawing back so awkwardly, they had inoculated themselves against the danger of coming so close again. And this was fine with him now. It was the way he knew how to live: with discipline and self-denial. He took comfort in how long it would be before they traveled together again.