Freedom

  “Bullshit.”

  “So, OK, it’s not my personal thing, but—”

  “What is your thing? You don’t have a thing. You sit around doing nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, every day, and it’s killing me. If you would actually go out and get a job, and earn an actual paycheck, or do something for another human being, instead of sitting in your room feeling sorry for yourself, you might feel less worthless, is what I’m saying.”

  “Fine, but, honey, nobody wants to pay me a hundred eighty thousand a year to save the warblers. It’s nice work if you can get it. But I can’t get it. You want me to make Frappuccinos at Starbucks? You think eight hours a day at Starbucks is going to make me feel like I’m worth something?”

  “It might! If you would ever try it! Which you never have, in your entire life!”

  “Oh, finally it comes out! Finally we’re getting somewhere!”

  “I never should have let you stay home. That was the mistake. I don’t know why your parents never made you get a job, but—”

  “I had jobs! God damn it, Walter.” She tried to kick him and only by accident missed his knee. “I worked a whole horrible summer for my dad. And then you saw me at the U., you know I can do it. I worked two solid years there. Even when I was eight months’ pregnant, I was still going in.”

  “You were hanging out with Treadwell and drinking coffee and watching game films. That’s not a job, Patty. That’s a favor from people who love you. First you worked for your dad, then you worked for your friends in the A.D.”

  “And sixteen hours a day at home for twenty years? Unpaid? Does that not count? Was that just a ‘favor,’ too? Raising your kids? Working on your house?”

  “Those were things you wanted.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “For you. I wanted them for you.”

  “Oh, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. You wanted them for you, too. You were competing with Richard the whole time, and you know it. The only reason you’re forgetting it now is that it didn’t work out so great. You’re not winning anymore.”

  “Winning has nothing to do with it.”

  “Liar! You’re just as competitive as I am, you just won’t tell the truth about it. That’s why you won’t leave me alone. That’s why I’ve got to get that precious job. Because I’m making you a loser.”

  “I can’t listen to this. This is some alternate reality.”

  “Well, whatever, don’t listen, but I’m still on your team. And, believe it or not, I still want you to win. The reason I’m helping Joey is he’s on our team, and I will help you, too. I will go out tomorrow, for your sake, and I will—”

  “Not for my sake.”

  “YES, FOR YOUR SAKE. Don’t you get it? I have no sake. I don’t believe in anything. I don’t have faith in anything. The team is all I’ve got. And so I’ll get some kind of job for your sake, and then you can just leave me the hell alone, and let me send Joey however much money I make. You won’t see so much of me anymore—you won’t have to be so disgusted.”

  “I’m not disgusted.”

  “Well, that is beyond my comprehension.”

  “And you don’t have to get a job if you don’t want to.”

  “Yes, I do! It’s pretty clear, isn’t it? You’ve made it pretty clear.”

  “No. You don’t have to do anything. Just be my Patty again. Just come back to me.”

  She cried then, torrentially, and he lay down with her. Fighting had become their portal to sex, almost the only way it ever happened anymore. While the rain lashed and the sky flashed, he tried to fill her with self-worth and desire, tried to convey how much he needed her to be the person he could bury his cares in. It never quite worked, and yet, when they were done, there came a stretch of minutes in which they lay and held each other in the quiet majesty of long marriage, forgot themselves in shared sadness and forgiveness for everything they’d inflicted on each other, and rested.

  The very next morning, Patty had gone out and looked for work. She came back in less than two hours and skipped into Walter’s office, in the mansion’s many-windowed “conservatory,” to announce that the local Republic of Health had hired her as a front-desk greeter.

  “I don’t know about this,” Walter said.

  “What? Why not?” Patty said. “It’s literally the only place in Georgetown that doesn’t embarrass me or sicken me. And they had an opening! It’s a very lucky thing.”

  “Front-desk greeter just doesn’t seem appropriate, given your talents.”

  “Appropriate to who?”

  “To people who might see you.”

  “And which people are these?”

  “I don’t know. People I might be hitting up for money, or legislative backing, or regulatory help.”

  “Oh, my God. Are you listening to yourself? Are you hearing what you just said?”

  “Look, I’m trying to be honest with you. Don’t punish me for being honest.”

  “I’m punishing you for your content, Walter, not your honesty. I mean! ‘Not appropriate.’ Wow.”

  “I’m saying you’re too smart for an entry-level gym job.”

  “No, you’re saying I’m too old. You wouldn’t have a problem with Jessica working there for the summer.”

  “Actually, I’d be disappointed if that’s all she wanted to do with her summer.”

  “Oh, good Lord, then. I truly cannot win. ‘Any job is better than no job, or, but, no, sorry, wait, the job that you actually want and are well qualified for is not better than no job.’ ”

  “OK, fine. Take it. I don’t care.”

  “Thank you for not caring!”

  “I just think you’re selling yourself way short.”

  “Well, maybe it’ll only be temporary,” Patty said. “Maybe I’ll get my realtor’s license, like every other unemployable wife around here, and start selling squalid little crooked-floored town houses for two million dollars. ‘In this very bathroom, in 1962, Hubert Humphrey had a large bowel movement, which, in recognition of this historic movement, the property has been placed on the National Registry, which explains the hundred-thousand-dollar premium its owners are demanding. There’s also a small but rather nice azalea bush behind the kitchen window.’ I can start wearing pinks and greens and a Burberry raincoat. I’ll buy a Lexus SUV with my first big commission. It’ll be much more appropriate.”

  “I said OK.”

  “Thank you, honey! Thank you for letting me take the job I want!”

  Walter watched her stride out the door and stop by Lalitha’s desk. “Hi, Lalitha,” she said. “I just got a job. I’m going to work at my gym.”

  “That’s nice,” Lalitha said. “You like that gym.”

  “Yeah, but Walter thinks it’s inappropriate. What do you think?”

  “I think any honest work can bring a human being dignity.”

  “Patty,” Walter called. “I said it was OK.”

  “See, now he’s changed his mind,” she said to Lalitha. “Before, he was saying it was inappropriate.”

  “Yes, I heard that.”

  “Right, ha-ha-ha, I’m sure you did. But it’s important to pretend otherwise, OK?”

  “Don’t leave the door open if you don’t want to be heard,” Lalitha said coldly.

  “We all have to work really hard on pretending.”

  Becoming a front-desk greeter at Republic of Health did for Patty’s spirits everything Walter had hoped a job would do. Everything and, alas, more. Her depression immediately seemed to lift, but this only showed how misleading the word “depression” was, because Walter was certain that her old unhappiness and anger and despair were all still present beneath her bright and brittle new way of being. She spent her mornings in her room, worked the p.m. shift at the gym, and didn’t get home until after ten. She began reading beauty and fitness magazines and noticeably using eye makeup. The sweatpants and baggy jeans that she’d been wearing in Washington, the sort of unconfining clothes that mental patients spend their days in, ga
ve way to closer-fitting jeans that cost actual money.

  “You look great,” Walter said one evening, trying to be nice.

  “Well, now that I have an income,” she said, “I need something to spend it on, right?”

  “You could always make charitable contributions to the Cerulean Mountain Trust instead.”

  “Ha-ha-ha!”

  “Our need is great.”

  “I’m having fun, Walter. A tiny little bit of fun.”

  But she didn’t really seem like she was having fun. She seemed like she was trying to hurt him, or spite him, or prove some kind of point. Walter began working out at Republic of Health himself, using a stack of free passes she’d given him, and he was unsettled by the intensity of the friendliness she directed at the members whose cards she scanned. She wore tiny-sleeved, provocatively sloganed Republic T-shirts (PUSH, SWEAT, LIFT) that highlighted her beautifully toned upper arms. Her eyes had a speed-freak glitter, and her laugh, which had always thrilled Walter, sounded false and ominous when he heard it echoing behind him in the Republic’s foyer. She was giving it to everybody now, giving it indiscriminately, meaninglessly, to every member who walked in off Wisconsin Avenue. And then one day he noticed a breast-augmentation brochure on her desk at home.

  “Jesus,” he said, examining it. “This is obscene.”

  “Actually, it’s a medical brochure.”

  “It’s a mental-illness brochure, Patty. It’s like a guide to how to become more mentally ill.”

  “Well, excuse me, I just thought it might be nice, for the short remainder of my comparative youth, to have a little bit of actual chest. To see what that might be like.”

  “You already have a chest. I adore your chest.”

  “Well, that’s all very nice, dear, but in fact you don’t get to make the decision, because it’s not your body. It’s mine. Isn’t that what you’ve always said? You’re the feminist in this household.”

  “Why are you doing this? I don’t understand what you’re doing with yourself.”

  “Well, maybe you should just leave if you don’t like it. Have you considered that? It would solve the whole problem, like, instantly.”

  “Well, that’s never going to happen, so—”

  “I KNOW IT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.”

  “Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  “So I might as well go ahead and buy myself some tits, to help make the years go by and give me something to save up my pennies for, is all I’m saying. I’m not talking about anything grotesquely large. You might even find you like ’em. Have you considered that?”

  Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys. Where there were really huge coal deposits, as in Wyoming County, the coal companies built processing plants right next to their mines and used water from the nearest stream to wash the coal. The polluted water was collected in big ponds of toxic sludge, and Walter had become so worried about having sludge impoundments in the middle of the Warbler Park that he’d tasked Lalitha with showing him how not to worry about it so much. This hadn’t been an easy task, since there was no way around the fact that when you dug up coal you also unearthed nasty chemicals like arsenic and cadmium that had been safely buried for millions of years. You could try dumping the poison back down into abandoned underground mines, but it had a way of seeping into the water table and ending up in drinking water. It really was a lot like the deep shit that got stirred up when a married couple fought: once certain things had been said, how could they ever be forgotten again? Lalitha was able to do enough research to reassure Walter that, if the sludge was carefully sequestered and properly contained, it eventually dried out enough that you could cover it with crushed rock and topsoil and pretend it wasn’t there. This story had become the sludge-pond gospel that he was determined to spread in West Virginia. He believed in it the same way he believed in ecological strongholds and science-based reclamation, because he had to believe in it, because of Patty. But now, as he lay and sought sleep on the hostile Days Inn mattress, between the scratchy Days Inn sheets, he wondered if any of it was true . . .

  He must have drifted off at some point, because when the alarm rang, at 3:40, he felt cruelly yanked from oblivion. Another eighteen hours of waking dread and anger lay ahead of him. Lalitha knocked on his door at 4:00 sharp, looking fresh in casual jeans and hiking shoes. “I feel horrid!” she said. “How about you?”

  “Horrid also. At least you don’t look it, the way I do.”

  The rain had stopped in the night, giving way to a dense, south-smelling fog that was scarcely less wetting. Over breakfast, at a truck stop across the road, Walter told Lalitha about the e-mail from Dan Caperville at the Times.

  “Do you want to go home now?” she said. “Do the press conference tomorrow morning?”

  “I told Caperville I was doing it on Monday.”

  “You could tell him you changed it. Just get it out of the way, so we’ll have the weekend free.”

  But Walter was so painfully exhausted that he couldn’t imagine holding a press conference the next morning. He sat and suffered mutely while Lalitha, doing what he had lacked the courage to do the night before, read the Times article on her BlackBerry. “This is only twelve paragraphs,” she said. “Not so bad.”

  “I guess that’s why everybody else missed it and I had to hear about it from my wife.”

  “So you spoke to her last night.”

  Lalitha seemed to mean something by this, but he was too tired to figure out what. “I just wonder who did the leaking,” he said. “And how much they leaked.”

  “Maybe your wife leaked it.”

  “Right.” He laughed and then saw the hard look on Lalitha’s face. “She wouldn’t do a thing like that,” he said. “She doesn’t care enough, if nothing else.”

  “Hm.” Lalitha took a bite of pancake and looked around the diner with the same hard, unhappy expression. She, of course, had every reason to be sore at Patty, and at Walter, this morning. To feel rejected and alone. But these were the first seconds in which he’d ever experienced anything like coldness from her; and they were dreadful. What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.

  “I just want to have our weekend meeting,” he said. “If I can just have two days to work on overpopulation, I can face anything on Monday.”

  Lalitha finished her pancakes without speaking to him. Walter forced down some of his own breakfast as well, and they went out into the light-polluted dark morning. In the rental car, she adjusted the seat and mirrors, which he’d moved the night before. As she was reaching across herself to fasten her seat belt, he put an awkward hand on her neck and pulled her closer, bringing them eye to serious eye in the all-night roadside light.

  “I can’t go five minutes without you on my side,” he said. “Not five minutes. Do you understand that?”

  After a moment’s thought, she nodded. Then, letting go of the seat belt, she placed her hands on his shoulders, gave him a solemn kiss, and drew back to gauge its effect. He felt as if he’d done his utmost now and could go no further on his own. He simply waited while, with a child’s frown of concentration, she took his glasses off, set them on the dashboard, put her hands on his head, and touched her little nose to his. He was momentarily troubled by how similar her face and Patty’s looked in extreme close-up, but all he had to do was close his eyes and kiss her and she was pure Lalitha, her lips pillowy, her mouth peach-sweet, her blood-filled head warm beneath her silky hair. He struggled against how wrong it felt to kiss somebody so young. He could feel her youth as a kind of fragility in his hands, and he was relieved when she drew back again to look at him, with shining eyes. He felt that some word of acknowledgment was
called for now, but he couldn’t stop staring at her, and she seemed to take this as an invitation to clamber across the gear shift and straddle him awkwardly on the bucket seat, so that he could take her fully in his arms. The aggression with which she kissed him then, the hungry abandon, brought him a joy so extreme that it blew up the ground beneath him. He was in free fall, everything he believed in was receding into darkness, and he began to cry.

  “Oh, what is it?” she said.

  “You have to go slow with me.”

  “Slow, slow, yes,” she said, kissing his tears, wiping them with her satiny thumbs. “Walter, are you sad?”

  “No, honey, the opposite.”

  “Then let me love you.”

  “OK. You can do that.”

  “Really OK?”

  “Yes,” he said, crying. “But we should probably hit the road.”

  “In a minute.”

  She put her tongue to his lips, and he opened them to let her in. There was more desire for him in her mouth than in Patty’s entire body. Her shoulders, as he gripped them through her nylon shell, seemed to be all bone and baby fat and no muscle, all eager pliability. She straightened her back and bore down on him, pushing her hips into his chest; and he wasn’t ready for it. He was closer now but still not fully there. His resistance the night before hadn’t been simply a matter of taboo or principle, and his tears weren’t all for joy.

  Sensing this, Lalitha pulled away from him and studied his face. In response to whatever she saw in it, she climbed back into the other seat again and observed him from a greater distance. Now that he’d driven her away, he keenly wanted her again, but he had a dim recollection, from the stories he’d heard and read about men in his position, that this was the terrible thing about them: that it was known as stringing a girl along. He sat for a while in the changeless purple-toned streetlight, listening to the trucks on the interstate.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally. “I’m still trying to figure out how to live.”

  “That’s OK. You can have some time.”