“What can I do for you girls?” he said.
“We baked you some banana bread,” the pudgier sidekick said, brandishing a foil-wrapped loaf.
The other two girls rolled their eyes. “She baked you banana bread,” Caitlyn said. “We had nothing to do with it.”
“I hope you like walnuts,” the baker girl said.
“Ah, I getcha,” Katz said.
A confused silence fell. Helicopter rotors were pounding the lower Manhattan airspace, the wind doing funny things with the sound.
“We’re just big fans of Nameless Lake,” Caitlyn said. “We heard you were building a deck up here.”
“Well, as you see, your friend Zachary’s as good as his word.”
Zachary was rocking the Trex board with his orange sneakers, affecting impatience to be alone with Katz again, and thus evincing some good basic pickup skills.
“Zachary’s a great young musician,” Katz said. “I wholeheartedly endorse him. He’s a talent to watch.”
The girls turned their heads toward Zachary with a kind of sad boredom.
“Seriously,” Katz said. “You should get him to go downstairs with you and listen to him play.”
“We’re actually more into alt country,” Caitlyn said. “Not so much boy rock.”
“He’s got some great country licks,” Katz persisted.
Caitlyn squared her shoulders, aligning her posture like a dancer, and gazed at him steadily, as if to give him a chance to amend the indifference he was showing her. She clearly wasn’t used to indifference. “Why are you building a deck?” she said.
“For fresh air and exercise.”
“Why do you need exercise? You look pretty fit.”
Katz felt very, very tired. To be unable to bring himself to play for even ten seconds the game that Caitlyn was interested in playing with him was to understand the allure of death. To die would be the cleanest cutting of his connection to the thing—the girl’s idea of Richard Katz—that was burdening him. Away to the southwest of where they were standing stood the massive Eisenhower-era utility building that marred the nineteenth-century architectural vistas of almost every Tribecan loft-dweller. Once upon a time, the building had offended Katz’s urban aesthetic, but now it pleased him by offending the urban aesthetic of the millionaires who’d taken over the neighborhood. It loomed like death over the excellent lives being lived down here; it had become something of a friend of his.
“Let’s have a look at that banana bread,” he said to the pudgy girl.
“I also brought you some wintergreen Chiclets,” she said.
“Why don’t I autograph the box for you, and you can keep it.”
“That would be awesome!”
He took a Sharpie from a toolbox. “What’s your name?”
“Sarah.”
“It’s great to meet you, Sarah. I’m going to take your banana bread home and have it for dessert tonight.”
Caitlyn briefly, with something like moral outrage, observed this dissing of her pretty self. Then she walked over to Zachary, trailed by the other girl. And here, Katz thought, was a concept: instead of trying to fuck the girls he hated, why not simply snub them for real? To keep his attention on Sarah and away from the magnetic Caitlyn, he took out the tin of Skoal that he’d bought to give his lungs a break from cigarettes, and inserted a big pinch of it between gum and cheek.
“Can I try some of that?” the emboldened Sarah said.
“It’ll make you sick.”
“But, like, one shred?”
Katz shook his head and pocketed the tin, whereupon Sarah asked if she could fire the nail gun. She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she’d received: You have permission to ask for things! Just because you aren’t pretty doesn’t mean you don’t! Your offerings, if you’re bold enough to make them, will be welcomed by the world! In her own way, she was just as tiring as Caitlyn. Katz wondered if he’d been this tiring himself at eighteen, or whether, as it now seemed to him, his anger at the world—his perception of the world as a hostile adversary, worthy of his anger—had made him more interesting than these young paragons of self-esteem.
He let Sarah fire the nail gun (she shrieked at its recoil and nearly dropped it) and then sent her on her way. Caitlyn had been snubbed so effectively that she didn’t even say good-bye but simply followed Zachary downstairs. Katz wandered over to the master-bedroom skylight in hopes of glimpsing Zachary’s mother, but all he saw was the DUX bed, the Eric Fischl canvas, the flat-screen TV.
Katz’s susceptibility to women over thirty-five was a source of some embarrassment. It felt sad and a little sick in the way it seemed to reference his own lunatic and absent mother, but there was no altering the basic wiring of his brain. The kiddies were perennially enticing and perennially unsatisfying in much the same way that coke was unsatisfying: whenever he was off it, he remembered it as fantastic and unbeatable and craved it, but as soon as he was on it again he remembered that it wasn’t fantastic at all, it was sterile and empty: neuro-mechanistic, death-flavored. Nowadays especially, the young chicks were hyperactive in their screwing, hurrying through every position known to the species, doing this that and the other, their kiddie snatches too unfragrant and closely shaved to even register as human body parts. He remembered more detail from his few hours with Patty Berglund than he did from a decade’s worth of kiddies. Of course, he’d known Patty forever and been attracted to her forever; long anticipation had certainly been a factor. But there was also just something intrinsically more human about her than about the youngsters. More difficult, more involving, more worth having. And now that his prophetic dick, his divining rod, was again pointing him in her direction, he was at a loss to recall why he hadn’t taken fuller advantage of his opportunity with her. Some misguided notion of niceness, now incomprehensible to him, had prevented him from going to her hotel in Philadelphia and helping himself to more of her. Having betrayed Walter once, in the chilly middle of a northern night, he should have gone ahead and done it another hundred times and got it out of his system. The evidence of how much he’d wanted to do this was right there in the songs he’d written for Nameless Lake. He’d turned his ungratified desire into art. But now, having made that art and reaped its dubious rewards, he had no reason to keep renouncing a thing he still wanted. And if Walter were then, in turn, to feel entitled to the Indian chick, and stop being such a moralistic irritant, so much the better for all concerned.
He took a Friday-evening train to Washington from Newark. He still wasn’t able to listen to music, but his non-Apple MP3 player was loaded with a track of pink noise—white noise frequency-shifted toward the bass end and capable of neutralizing every ambient sound the world could throw at him—and by donning big cushioned headphones and angling himself toward the window and holding a Bernhard novel close to his face, he was able to achieve complete privacy until the train stopped in Philly. Here a white couple in their early twenties, wearing white T-shirts and eating white ice cream from waxed-paper cups, settled into the newly vacated seats in front of him. The extreme white of their T-shirts seemed to him the color of the Bush regime. The chick immediately reclined her seat into his space, and when she finished her ice cream, a few minutes later, she tossed the cup and spoon back under her seat, where his feet were.
With a heavy sigh, he removed his headphones, stood up, and dropped the cup on her lap.
“Jesus!” she cried with scalding disgust.
“Hey, man, what the fuck?” her resplendently white companion said.
“You dropped this on my feet,” Katz said.
“She didn’t throw it on your lap.”
“That is a pretty amazing accomplishment,” Katz said. “To sound self-righteous about your girlfriend dropping a wet ice-cream container on somebody else’s feet.”
“This is a public train,” the girl said. “You should take a private jet if you can’t deal with other people.”
“Yeah, I’ll try to remember to
do that next time.”
The rest of the way to Washington, the couple kept lunging against their seat backs, attempting to push them past their limits and farther into his space. They didn’t seem to have recognized him, but, if they had, they would surely soon be blogging about what an asshole Richard Katz was.
Although he’d played D.C. often enough over the years, its horizontality and vexing diagonal avenues never ceased to freak him out. He felt like a rat in a governmental maze here. For all he could tell from the back seat of his taxi, the driver was taking him not to Georgetown but to the Israeli embassy for enhanced interrogation. The pedestrians in every neighborhood all seemed to have taken the same dowdiness pills. As if individual style were a volatile substance that evaporated in the vacuity of D.C.’s sidewalks and infernally wide squares. The whole city was a monosyllabic imperative directed at Katz in his beat-up biker jacket. Saying: die.
The mansion in Georgetown had some character, however. As Katz understood it, Walter and Patty hadn’t personally chosen this house, but it nevertheless reflected the excellent urbangentry taste he’d come to expect of them. It had a slate roof and multiple dormers and high ground-floor windows looking out on something resembling an actual small lawn. Above the doorbell was a brass plate discreetly conceding the presence of THE CERULEAN MOUNTAIN TRUST.
Jessica Berglund opened the door. Katz hadn’t seen her since she was in high school, and he smiled with pleasure at the sight of her all grown up and womanly. She seemed cross and distracted, however, and barely greeted him. “Hi, um,” she said, “just come on back to the kitchen, OK?”
She glanced over her shoulder at a long parquet-floored hallway. The Indian girl was standing at the end of it. “Hi, Richard,” she called, waving to him nervously.
“Just give me one second,” Jessica said. She stalked down the hall, and Katz followed with his overnight bag, passing a large room full of desks and file cabinets and a smaller room with a conference table. The place smelled like warm semiconductors and fresh paper products. In the kitchen was a big French farmer’s table that he recognized from St. Paul. “Excuse me for one second,” Jessica said as she pursued Lalitha into a more executive-looking suite at the back of the house.
“I’m a young person,” he heard her say there. “OK? I’m the young person here. Do you get it?”
Lalitha: “Yes! Of course. That’s why it’s so wonderful you came down. All I’m saying is I’m not so old myself, you know.”
“You’re twenty-seven!”
“That’s not young?”
“How old were you when you got your first cell phone? When did you start going online?”
“I was in college. But, Jessica, listen—”
“There’s a big difference between college and high school. There’s an entirely different way that people communicate now. A way that people my age started learning much earlier than you did.”
“I know that. We don’t disagree about that. I really don’t see why you’re so angry at me.”
“Why I’m angry? Because you have my dad thinking you’re this great expert on young people, but you’re not the great expert, as you just totally demonstrated.”
“Jessica, I know the difference between a text and an e-mail. I misspoke because I’m tired. I hardly slept all week. It’s not fair of you to make so much of this.”
“Do you even send texts?”
“I don’t have to. We have BlackBerrys, which do the same thing, only better.”
“It is not the same thing! God. This is what I’m talking about! If you didn’t grow up with cell phones in high school, you don’t understand that your phone is very, very different from your e-mail. It’s a totally different way of being in touch with people. I have friends who hardly even check their e-mail anymore. And if you and Dad are going to be targeting kids in college, it’s really important that you understand that.”
“OK, then. Be mad at me. Go ahead and be mad. But I still have work to do tonight, and you need to leave me alone now.”
Jessica returned to the kitchen, shaking her head, her jaw set. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You probably want to take a shower and have some dinner. There’s a dining room upstairs that I think it’s nice to actually use now and then. I got a, um.” She looked around in great distraction. “I made a big dinner salad and some pasta I’ll reheat. I also got some nice bread, the proverbial loaf of bread that my mother is apparently incapable of buying when a house full of people is coming for the weekend.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Katz said. “I’ve still got part of a sandwich in my bag.”
“No, I’ll come up and sit with you. It’s just that things are a little disorganized around here. This house is just . . . just . . . just . . .” She clenched her fingers and shook her hands. “Unnhh! This house!”
“Calm down,” Katz said. “It’s great to see you.”
“How do they even live when I’m not here? That’s what I don’t understand. How the whole thing even functions at the basic level of taking the trash out.” Jessica shut the kitchen door and lowered her voice. “God only knows what she eats. Apparently, from what my mom says, she subsists on Cheerios, milk, and cheese sandwiches. And bananas. But where are these foods? There’s not even any milk in the fridge.”
Katz made a vague gesture with his hands, to suggest that he could not be held responsible.
“And, you know, as it happens,” Jessica said, “I know quite a bit about Indian regional cooking. Because a lot of my friends in college were Indian? And years ago, when I first came down here, I asked her if she could teach me how to do some regional cooking, like from Bengal, where she was born. I’m very respectful of people’s traditions, and I thought we could make this nice big meal together, her and me, and actually sit down at the dining-room table like a family. I thought that might be cool, since she’s Indian and I’m interested in food. And she laughed at me and said she couldn’t even cook an egg. Apparently both her parents were engineers and never made a real meal in their lives. So there went that plan.”
Katz was smiling at her, enjoying the seamless way that she combined and blended, in her compact unitary person, the personalities of her parents. She sounded like Patty and was outraged like Walter, and yet she was entirely herself. Her blond hair was pulled back and tied with a severity that seemed to stretch her eyebrows into the raised position, contributing to her expression of appalled surprise and irony. He wasn’t the least bit attracted to her, and he liked her all the more for this.
“So where is everybody?” he said.
“Mom is at the gym, ‘working.’ And Dad, I don’t actually know. Some meeting in Virginia. He told me to tell you he’ll see you in the morning—he’d meant to be here tonight, but something came up.”
“When’s your mom getting home?”
“Late, I’m sure. You know, it’s not at all obvious now, but she was actually a fairly great mom when I was growing up. You know, like, cooked? Made people feel welcome? Put flowers in a vase by the bed? Apparently that’s all a thing of the past now.”
In her capacity as emergency hostess, Jessica led Katz up a narrow rear staircase and showed him the big second-floor bedrooms that had been converted to living and dining and family rooms, the small room in which Patty had a computer and a foldout sofa, and then, on the third floor, the equally small room where he would sleep. “This is officially my brother’s room,” she said, “but I bet he hasn’t spent ten nights in it since they moved here.”
There was, indeed, no trace of Joey, just more of Walter and Patty’s very tasteful furniture.
“How are things with Joey anyway?”
Jessica shrugged. “I’m the wrong person to ask.”
“You guys don’t talk?”
She looked up at Katz with her amusedly wide-open and somewhat protuberant eyes. “We talk sometimes, now and then.”
“And what, then? What’s the situation?”
“Well, he’s become a Republican, so the co
nversations don’t tend to be very pleasant.”
“Ah.”
“I put some towels out for you. Do you need a washcloth, too?”
“Never been a washcloth user, no.”
When he went back downstairs, half an hour later, showered and wearing a clean T-shirt, he found dinner waiting for him on the dining table. Jessica sat down on the far side of it with her arms tightly folded—she was altogether a very tightly wound girl—and watched him eat. “Congratulations, by the way,” she said, “on everything that’s happened. It was very weird to suddenly start hearing you everywhere, and see you on everybody’s playlist.”
“What about you? What do you like to listen to?”
“I’m more into world music, especially African and South American. But I liked your record. I certainly recognized the lake.”
It was possible that she meant something by this, also possible that she didn’t. Could Patty have told her what had happened at the lake? Her and not Walter?
“So what’s going on?” he said. “It sounded like you had a little problem with Lalitha.”
Again the amused or ironical widening of her eyes.
“What?” he said.
“Oh, nothing. I’m just a little impatient with my family lately.”
“I get the sense she’s something of a problem for your parents.”
“Mm.”
“She seems great. Smart, energetic, committed.”
“Mm.”
“Is there something you want to tell me?”
“No! I just think she’s kind of got her eyes on my dad. And it’s kind of killing my mom. To watch that happening. I kind of feel like, when a person is married, you leave them alone, right? They’re off-limits if they’re married. Right?”