"Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

ENOUGH ALREADY

Within days of young Zachary’s posting of their interview on his blog, Katz’s cellular voice mailbox began to fill with messages. The first was from a pesty German, Matthias Dröhner, whom Katz vaguely recalled having struggled to fend off during Walnut Surprise’s swing through the Fatherland. “Now that you are giving interviews again,” Dröhner said, “I hope you’ll be so kind as to give one to me, like you promised, Richard. You did promise!” Dröhner, in his message, didn’t say how he’d come by Katz’s cell number, but a good guess was via blogospheric leakage from the bar napkin of some chick he’d hit on while touring. He was undoubtedly now getting interview requests by e-mail as well, probably in much greater numbers, but he hadn’t had the fortitude to venture online since the previous summer. Dröhner’s message was followed by calls from an Oregonian chick named Euphrosyne; a bellowingly jovial music journalist in Melbourne, Australia; and a college radio DJ in Iowa City who sounded ten years old. All wanted the same thing. They wanted Katz to say again-but in slightly different words, so that they could post it or publish it under their own names-exactly what he’d already said to Zachary.

“That was golden, dude,” Zachary told him on the roof on White Street, a week after the posting, while they were awaiting the arrival of Zachary’s object of desire, Caitlyn. The “dude” form of address was new and irritating to Katz but entirely consonant with his experience of interviewers. As soon as he submitted to them, they dropped all pretense of awe.

“Don’t call me dude,” he said nevertheless.

“Sure, whatever,” Zachary said. He was walking a long Trex board as if it were a balance beam, his skinny arms outstretched. The afternoon was fresh and blustery. “I’m just saying my hit-counter’s going crazy. I’m getting hot-linked all over the world. Do you ever look at your fan sites?”

“No.”

“I’m right up at the very top of the best one now. I can get my computer and show you.”

“Really no need for that.”

“I think there’s a real hunger for people speaking truth to power. Like, there’s a little minority now that’s saying you sounded like an asshole and a whiner. But that’s just the player-hating fringe. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“Thanks for the reassurance,” Katz said.

When the girl Caitlyn appeared on the roof, accompanied by a pair of female sidekicks, Zachary remained perched on his balance beam, too cool to make introductions, while Katz set down his nail gun and suffered examination by the visitors. Caitlyn was clad in hippie garb, a brocade vest and a corduroy coat such as Carole King and Laura Nyro had worn, and would certainly have been worthy of pursuit had Katz not, in the week since he’d seen Walter Berglund, become preoccupied again with Patty. Meeting a choice adolescent now was like smelling strawberries when you were hungry for a steak.

“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 conversations 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?”

Katz cleared his throat, unsure where this was heading. “In theory, yes,” he said. “But life gets complicated when you’re older.”

“It doesn’t mean I have to like her, though. It doesn’t mean I have to accept her. I don’t know if you’re aware that she’s living right upstairs? She’s here all the time. She’s here more than my mom is. And I just don’t think that’s quite fair. My feeling is she needs to move out and get her own place. But I don’t think my dad wants her to.”

“And why doesn’t he want that?”

Jessica smiled at Katz tightly, in a very unhappy way. “My parents have a lot of problems. Their marriage has a lot of problems. You don’t have to be a psychic to see that. Like, my mom’s been really depressed. For years. And she can’t get out of it. But they love each other, I know they love each other, and it just really bothers me to see what’s happening here. If she would just leave-I mean, Lalitha-if she would just leave, so my mom could have a chance again…”

“You and your mom are close?”

“No. Not really.”

Katz ate in silence and waited to hear more. He seemed, luckily, to have caught Jessica in a mood to disclose things to the nearest bystander.

“I mean, she tries,” she said. “But she’s got a real gift for saying the wrong thing. She doesn’t respect my judgment. Like, that I’m a basically intelligent adult who can think for herself? My boyfriend in college, he was incredibly sweet, and she was just horrible to him. It was like she was afraid I was going to marry him, and so she constantly had to be making fun of him. He was my first real boyfriend, and I just wanted to have some time to enjoy that, but she wouldn’t leave it alone. There was this time when William and I came down for the weekend, to go to the museums and do a gay-marriage march. We were staying here, and she started asking him if he liked it when girls flashed their breasts at frat parties. She’d read some stupid article in the newspaper about boys shouting at girls to show their breasts. And I’m like, no, Mother, I’m not at Virginia. We don’t have frats at my college, that’s just some stupid Stone-Aged thing that kids do in the South, I don’t go to Florida for spring break, we’re not like the people in your stupid article. But she wouldn’t leave it alone. She kept asking William how he felt about other girls’ breasts. And kept acting surprised when he said he wasn’t interested. She knew he was being sincere, not to mention incredibly embarrassed that his girlfriend’s mother was talking about breasts, but she acted like she didn’t believe him. To her, the whole thing was a joke. She wanted me to laugh at William. Who, yes, was a little hard to take sometimes. But, like, can I have a chance to figure that out for myself?”

“So she cares about you. She didn’t want you marrying the wrong guy.”

“I wasn’t going to marry him! That’s the thing!”

Katz’s eyes were drawn to the breasts that were mostly concealed by Jessica’s tightly crossed arms. She was small-chested like her mother but less well proportioned. What he was feeling now was that his love of Patty applied by extension to her daughter, minus the wish to fuck her. He could see what Walter had meant about her being a young person who gave an older person hope about the future. Her lights all seemed definitely to be on.

“You’re going to have a good life,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve got a good head. It’s great to see you again.”

“I know, you too,” she said. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw you. Maybe in high school?”

“You were working in a soup kitchen. Your dad took me down to see you there.”

“Right, my résumé-building years. I had about seventeen extracurricular activities. I was like Mother Teresa on speed.”

Katz helped himself to more of the pasta, which had olives and some sort of salad green in it. Yes, arugula: he was back safely in the bosom of the gentry. He asked Jessica what she would do if her parents split up.

“Wow, I don’t know,” she said. “I hope they don’t. Do you think they will? Is that what Dad says to you?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be joining the crowd then. Half of my friends are from broken homes. I just never saw it happening to us. Not until Lalitha came along.”

“You know, it takes two to tango. You shouldn’t blame her too much.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ll blame Dad, too. I will definitely blame him. I can hear it in his voice, and it’s just really… confusing. Just wrong. Like, I always thought I knew him really well. But apparently I didn’t.”

“And what about your mom?”

“She’s definitely unhappy about it, too.”

“No, but what if she were the one to leave? How would you feel about that?”

Jessica’s puzzlement at the question dispelled any notion that Patty had confided in her. “I don’t think she would ever do that,” she said. “Unless Dad made her.”

“She’s happy enough?”

“Well, Joey says she isn’t. I think she’s told Joey a lot of stuff she doesn’t tell me. Or maybe Joey just makes stuff up to be unpleasant to me. I mean, she definitely makes fun of Dad, all the time, but that doesn’t mean anything. She makes fun of everybody-I’m sure including me whenever I’m not around to hear it. We’re all very amusing to her, and it definitely annoys the shit out of me. But she’s really into her family. I don’t think she can imagine changing anything.”

Katz wondered if this could be true. Patty had told him herself, four years earlier, that she wasn’t interested in leaving Walter. But the prophet in Katz’s pants was insistently maintaining otherwise, and Joey was perhaps more reliable than his sister on the subject of their mother’s happiness.

“Your mom’s a strange person, isn’t she.”

“I feel bad for her,” Jessica said, “whenever I’m not being mad at her. She’s so smart, and she never really made anything of herself except being a good mom. The one thing I know for sure is I’m never going to stay home full-time with my kids.”

“So you think you want kids. The world population crisis not withstanding.”

She widened her eyes at him and reddened. “Maybe one or two. If I ever meet the right guy. Which doesn’t seem very likely to happen in New York.”

“New York’s a tough scene.”

“God, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I have never in my life felt so smallened and invisible and totally dissed as in the last eight months. I thought New York was supposed to be this great dating scene. But the guys are all either losers, jerks, or married. It’s appalling. I mean, I know I’m not a knockout or anything, but I think I’m at least worth five minutes of polite conversation. It’s been eight months now, and I’m still waiting for those five minutes. I don’t even want to go out anymore, it’s so demoralizing.”

“It’s not you. You’re a good-looking chick. You just may be too nice for New York. It’s a pretty naked economy there.”

“But how come there are so many girls like me? And no guys? Did the good guys all decide to go somewhere else?”

Katz cast his mind over the young males of his acquaintance in greater New York, including his former Walnut Surprise mates, and could think of not one whom he would trust on a date with Jessica. “The girls all come for publishing and art and nonprofits,” he said. “The guys come for money and music. There’s a selection bias there. The girls are good and interesting, the guys are all assholes like me. You shouldn’t take it personally.”

“I would just like to have one nice date.”

He was regretting having told her she was good-looking. It had sounded faintly like a come-on, and he hoped she hadn’t taken it that way. Unfortunately, it seemed as if she had.

“Are you really an asshole?” she said. “Or were you just saying that?”

The note of flirtatious provocation was alarming and needed to be nipped in the bud. “I came down here to do your dad a favor,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like being an asshole,” she said in a teasing tone.

“Trust me. It is.” He gave her the hardest look he knew how to give a person, and he could see that it scared her a little.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m not your ally on the Indian front. I’m your enemy.”

“What? Why? What do you care?”

“I told you. I’m an asshole.”

“Jesus. OK, then.” She looked at the tabletop with highly elevated eyebrows, confused and scared and pissed off all at once.

“This pasta is excellent, by the way. Thank you for making it.”

“Sure. Take some salad, too.” She stood up from the table. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and do some reading. Let me know if you need anything else.”

He nodded, and she left the room. He felt bad for the girl, but his business in Washington was a dirty one, and there was no point in sugarcoating it. After he’d finished eating, he carefully surveyed Walter’s vast book collection and even vaster collection of CDs and LPs, and then retreated upstairs to Joey’s room. He wanted to be the person who walked into a room where Patty was, not the person waiting in a room she walked into. To be the person waiting was to be too vulnerable; it wasn’t Katzian. Although he normally eschewed earplugs, for the veritable symphony they made of his tinnitus, he inserted some in his ears now, so as not to lie cravenly listening for footsteps and voices.

The next morning, he lingered in his room until nearly nine o’clock before descending the back staircase in search of breakfast. The kitchen was empty, but somebody, presumably Jessica, had made coffee and cut up fruit and set out muffins. A light spring rain was falling on the small back yard, its daffodils and jonquils, and the shoulders of the closely neighboring town houses. Hearing voices from the front of the mansion, Katz wandered down the hallway with coffee and a muffin and found Walter and Jessica and Lalitha, all scrubbed and morning-skinned and shower-haired, waiting for him in the conference room.

“Good, you’re here,” Walter said. “We can start.”

“Didn’t realize we were meeting so early.”

“It’s nine o’clock,” Walter said. “This is a workday for us.”

He and Lalitha were seated side by side near the middle of the big table. Jessica was way down at the farthest end with her arms crossed, tensely radiating skepticism and defendedness. Katz sat down across the table from the others.

“You sleep all right?” Walter said.

“Slept fine. Where’s Patty?”

Walter shrugged. “She’s not coming to the meeting, if that’s what you mean.”

“We’re actually trying to accomplish something,” Lalitha said. “We’re not trying to spend the entire day laughing at how impossible it is to accomplish anything.”

Whuff!

Jessica’s eyes were darting from person to person, spectating. Walter, on closer inspection, had terrible circles under his eyes, and his fingers, on the tabletop, were doing something between trembling and tapping. Lalitha looked a bit wrecked herself, her face bluish with dark-skinned pallor. Observing the relation of their bodies to each other, their deliberate angling-apart, Katz wondered if chemistry might already have done its work. They looked sullen and guilty, like lovers compelled to behave themselves in public. Or, conversely, like people who hadn’t settled on terms yet and were unhappy with each other. The situation merited careful monitoring either way.

“So we’ll start with the problem,” Walter said. “The problem is that nobody dares make overpopulation part of the national conversation. And why not? Because the subject is a downer. Because it seems like old news. Because, like with global warming, we haven’t quite reached the point where the consequences become undeniable. And because we sound like elitists if we try to tell poor people and uneducated people not to have so many babies. Having large families tracks inversely with economic status, and so does the age at which girls start having babies, which is just as damaging from a numbers perspective. You can cut the growth rate in half just by doubling the average age of first-time mothers from eighteen to thirty-five. That’s one reason rats reproduce so much more than leopards do-because they reach sexual maturity so much sooner.”

“Already a problem in that analogy, of course,” Katz said.

“Exactly,” Walter said. “It’s the elitism thing again. Leopards are a ‘higher’ species than rats or bunnies. So that’s another part of the problem: we turn poor people into rodents when we call attention to their high birth rates and their low age of first reproduction.”

“I think the cigarette analogy is a good one,” Jessica said from the far end of the table. It was clear that she’d gone to an expensive college and had learned to speak her mind in seminars. “People with money can get Zoloft and Xanax. So when you tax cigarettes, and alcohol too, you’re hitting poor people the hardest. You’re making the cheap drugs more expensive.”

“Right,” Walter said. “That’s a very good point. And it applies to religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don’t have economic opportunity. If we try to pick on religion, which is our real villain, we’re picking on the economically oppressed.”

“And guns also,” Jessica said. “Hunting’s also very low-end.”

“Ha, tell that to Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said in her clipped accent. “Tell that to Dick Cheney.”

“No, actually, Jessica’s right,” Walter said.

Lalitha turned on him. “Really? I don’t see it. What does hunting have to do with population?”

Jessica rolled her eyes impatiently.

This could be a long day, Katz thought.

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. That’s what Bill Clinton figured out-that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.”

That Lalitha nodded in submissive agreement to this, rather than sulking, made the situation clearer. She was still begging and Walter still withholding. And he was in his natural element, his personal fortress, when he was allowed to speak abstractly. He hadn’t changed at all since his years at Macalester.

“The real problem, though,” Katz said, “is free-market capitalism. Right? Unless you’re talking about outlawing reproduction, your problem isn’t civil liberties. The real reason you can’t get any cultural traction with overpopulation is that talking about fewer babies means talking about limits to growth. Right? And growth isn’t some side issue in free-market ideology. It’s the entire essence. Right? In free-market economic theory, you have to leave stuff like the environment out of the equation. What was that word you used to love? ‘Externalities’?”

“That’s the word, all right,” Walter said.

“I don’t imagine the theory’s changed much since we were in school. The theory is that there isn’t any theory. Right? Capitalism can’t handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital. If you want to be heard in the capitalist media, and communicate in a capitalist culture, overpopulation can’t make any sense. It’s literally nonsense. And that’s your real problem.”

“So maybe we should just call it a day, then,” Jessica said drily. “Since there’s nothing we can do.”

“I didn’t invent the problem,” Katz said to her. “I’m just pointing it out.”

“We know about the problem,” Lalitha said. “But we’re a pragmatic organization. We’re not trying to overthrow the whole system, we’re just trying to mitigate. We’re trying to help the cultural conversation catch up with the crisis, before it’s too late. We want to do with population the same thing Gore’s doing with climate change. We have a million dollars in cash, and there are some very practical steps we can take right now.”

“I’d actually be fine with overthrowing the whole system,” Katz said. “You can go ahead and sign me up for that.”

“The reason the system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europeans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it. And that’s why I want to get back to what Jessica said about cigarettes.”

Jessica made a beckoning gesture, as if to say, Thank you!

From the hallway came the sound of somebody, Patty, moving around the kitchen in hard heels. Katz, wanting a cigarette, took Walter’s empty coffee mug and prepared a plug of chew instead.

“Positive social change works top-down,” Walter said. “The surgeon general issues his report, educated people read it, bright kids start to realize that smoking is stupid, not cool, and national smoking rates go down. Or Rosa Parks sits down on her bus, college students hear about it, they march in Washington, they take buses to the South, and suddenly there’s a national civil-rights movement. We’re now at a point where any reasonably educated person can understand the problem with population growth. So the next step is to make it cool for college kids to care about the issue.”

While Walter held forth on the subject of college kids, Katz strained to hear what Patty was doing in the kitchen. The essential pussiness of his situation was coming home to him. The Patty he wanted was the Patty who didn’t want Walter: the housewife who didn’t want to be a housewife anymore; the housewife who wanted to fuck a rocker. But instead of just calling her up and saying he wanted her, he was sitting here like some college sophomore, indulging his old friend’s intellectual fantasies. What was it about Walter that so knocked him off his game? He felt like a free-flying insect caught in a sticky web of family. He couldn’t stop trying to be nice to Walter, because he liked him; if he hadn’t liked him so much, he probably wouldn’t have wanted Patty; and if he hadn’t wanted her, he wouldn’t have been sitting here pretending. What a mess.

And now her footsteps were coming down the hallway. Walter stopped speaking and took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself. Katz swiveled his chair toward the doorway; and there she was. The fresh-faced mom who had a dark side. She was wearing black boots and a snug red-and-black silk brocade skirt and a chic short raincoat in which she looked both great and not like herself. Katz couldn’t remember ever seeing her in anything but jeans.

“Hi, Richard,” she said, glancing in his general direction. “Hi, everybody. How’s it going here?”

“We’re just getting started,” Walter said.

“Don’t let me interrupt you, then.”

“You’re all dressed up,” Walter said.

“Going shopping,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you guys tonight if you’re around.”

“Are you making dinner?” Jessica said.

“No, I have to work till nine. I guess, if you want, I could stop for some food before I leave.”

“That would be extremely helpful,” Jessica said, “since we’re going to be meeting all day.”

“Well, and I would be happy to make dinner if I didn’t have to work an eight-hour shift.”

“Oh, never mind,” Jessica said. “Just forget it. We’ll go out or something.”

“That does sound like the easiest thing,” Patty agreed.

“So anyway,” Walter said.

“Right, so anyway,” she said. “I hope it’s a really fun day for everybody.”

Having thus speedily irritated, ignored, or disappointed each of the four of them, she proceeded down the hallway and out the front door. Lalitha, who had been clicking on her BlackBerry since the moment Patty appeared, looked the most obviously unhappy.

“Does she work seven days a week now, or what?” Jessica said.

“No, not usually,” Walter said. “I’m not sure what this is about.”

“It’s always about something, though, isn’t it,” Lalitha murmured as she thumbed her device.

Jessica turned on her, instantly redirecting her pique. “Just let us know whenever you’re done with your e-mail, OK? We’ll just sit and wait until you’re ready, OK?”

Lalitha, tight-lipped, continued to thumb.

“Maybe you can do that later?” Walter said gently.

She slapped the BlackBerry onto the table. “OK,” she said. “Ready!”

As the nicotine coursed through Katz, he began to feel better. Patty had seemed defiant, and defiant was good. Nor had the fact of her dressing up escaped his attention. Dressing up for what reason? To present herself to him. And working both Friday and Saturday nights for what reason? To avoid him. Yes, to play the same hide-and-seek that he was playing with her. Now that she was gone, he could see her better, receive her signals without so much static, imagine placing his hands on that fine skirt of hers, and remember how she’d wanted him in Minnesota.

But meanwhile the problem of too much procreation: the first concrete task, Walter said, was to think of a name for their initiative. His own working idea was Youth Against Insanity, a private homage to “Youth Against Fascism,” which he considered (and Katz agreed with him) one of the finer songs that Sonic Youth had ever recorded. But Jessica was adamant about picking a name that said yes rather than no. Something pro, not contra. “Kids my age are way more libertarian than you guys were,” she explained. “Anything that smells like elitism, or not respecting somebody else’s point of view, they’re allergic to. Your campaign can’t be about telling other people what not to do. It’s got to be about this cool positive choice that we’re all making.”

Lalitha suggested the name The Living First, which hurt Katz’s ears, and which Jessica shot down with withering scorn. And so they brainstormed the morning away, sorely missing, in Katz’s opinion, the input of a professional P.R. consultant. They went through Lonelier Planet, Fresher Air, Rubbers Unlimited, Coalition of the Already Born, Free Space, Life Quality, Smaller Tent, and Enough Already! (which Katz rather liked but which the others said was still too negative; he filed it away as a possible future song or album title). They considered Feed the Living, Be Reasonable, Cooler Heads, A Better Way, Strength in Smaller Numbers, Less Is More, Emptier Nests, Joy of None, Kidfree Forever, No Babies on Board, Feed Yourself, Dare Not to Bear, Depopulate!, Two Cheers for People, Maybe None, Less Than Zero, Stomp the Brakes, Smash the Family, Cool Off, Elbow Room, More for Me, Bred Alone, Breather, Morespace, Love What’s Here, Barren by Choice, Childhood’s End, All Children Left Behind, Nucleus of Two, Maybe Never, and What’s the Rush? and rejected all of them. To Katz, the exercise was an illustration of the general impossibility of the enterprise and the specific rancidness of prefabricated coolness, but Walter ran the discussion with an upbeat judiciousness that bespoke long years in the artificial world of NGOs. And, somewhat incredibly, the dollars he planned to spend were real.

“I say we go with Free Space,” he said finally. “I like how it steals the word ‘free’ from the other side, and appropriates the rhetoric of the wide-open West. If this thing takes off, it can also be the name of a whole movement, not just our group. The Free Space movement.”

“Am I the only one who’s hearing ‘free parking space’?” Jessica said.

“That’s not such a bad connotation,” Walter said. “We all know what it’s like to have trouble finding a parking space. Fewer people on the planet, better parking opportunities? It’s actually a very vivid everyday example of why overpopulation’s bad.”

“We need to see if Free Space is trademarked,” Lalitha said.

“Fuck the trademark,” Katz said. “Every phrase known to man is trademarked.”

“We could put an extra space between the words,” Walter said. “Sort of like the opposite of EarthFirst! and without the exclamation point. If we get sued on the trademark, we can build a case on the extra space. That plays, doesn’t it? The Case for Space?”

“Better not to get sued at all, I think,” Lalitha said.

In the afternoon, after sandwiches had been ordered and eaten and Patty had come home and gone out again without interacting with them (Katz caught a quick glimpse of her black gym-greeter jeans as her legs receded down the hallway), the four-member advisory board of Free Space hammered out a plan for the twenty-five summer interns whom Lalitha had already set about attracting and hiring. She’d been envisioning a late-summer music and consciousness-raising festival on a twenty-acre goat farm now owned by the Cerulean Mountain Trust on the southern edge of its warbler reserve-a vision that Jessica immediately found fault with. Did Lalitha not understand anything about young people’s new relationship with music? It wasn’t enough just to bring in some big-name talent! They had to send twenty interns out to twenty cities across the country and have them organize local festivals-“A battle of the bands,” Katz said. “Yes, exactly, twenty different local battles of the bands,” Jessica said. (She had been frosty to Katz all day but seemed grateful for his help in squashing Lalitha.) By offering cash prizes, they would attract five great bands in each of the twenty cities, all competing for the right to represent their local music scene in a weekend-long battle of the bands in West Virginia, under the aegis of Free Space, with some big names there to do the final judging and lend their aura to the cause of reversing global population growth and making it uncool to have kids.

Katz, who even by his own standards had consumed colossal amounts of caffeine and nicotine, wound up in a nearly manic state in which he agreed to everything that was asked of him: writing special Free Space songs, returning to Washington in May to meet with the Free Space interns and aid in their indoctrination, making a surprise guest appearance at the New York battle of the bands, emceeing the Free Space festival in West Virginia, endeavoring to reconstitute Walnut Surprise so that it could perform there, and pestering big names to appear with him and join him on the final panel of judges. In his mind, he was doing nothing more than writing checks on an account with nothing in it, because, despite the actual chemical substances he’d ingested, the true substance of his state was a throbbing, single-minded focus on taking Patty away from Walter: this was the rhythm track, everything else was irrelevant high-end. Smash the Family: another song title. And once the family was smashed, he would not have to make good on any of his promises.

He was so revved up that when the meeting ended, toward five o’clock, and Lalitha went back to her office to begin effectuating their plans, and Jessica disappeared upstairs, he consented to go out with Walter. He was thinking that this was the last time they would ever go out together. It happened that the suddenly hot band Bright Eyes, fronted by a gifted youngster named Conor Oberst, was playing a familiar venue in D.C. that night. The show was sold out, but Walter was keen to get backstage with Oberst and pitch Free Space to him, and Katz, flying high, made the somewhat abasing phone calls necessary to get a pair of passes at the door. Anything was better than hanging around the mansion, waiting for Patty to come home.

“I can’t believe you’re doing all these things for me,” Walter said at the Thai restaurant, near Dupont Circle, where they stopped for dinner along the way.

“No problem, man.” Katz picked up a skewer of satay, considered whether he could stomach it, and decided no. More tobacco was a very bad idea, but he took out his tin of it anyway.

“It’s like we’re finally getting around to doing the things we used to talk about in college,” Walter said. “It really means a lot to me.”

Katz’s eyes restlessly roved the restaurant, alighting on everything but his friend. He had the sense that he had run right off a cliff, was still pumping his legs, but would be crashing very soon.

“You OK?” Walter said. “You seem kind of jumpy.”

“No, I’m fine, fine.”

“You don’t seem fine. You’ve gone through a whole can of that shit today.”

“Just trying not to smoke around you.”

“Well, thank you for that.”

Walter consumed all of the satay while Katz dribbled spit into his water glass, feeling momentarily calmed, in nicotine’s false way.

“How are things with you and the girl?” he said. “I got kind of a weird vibe off you guys today.”

Walter blushed and didn’t answer.

“You sleeping with her yet?”

“Jesus, Richard! That is none of your business.”

“Whoa, is that a yes?”

“No, it’s a none-of-your-fucking-business.”

“You in love with her?”

“Jesus! Enough already.”

“See, I think that was a better name. Enough Already! With exclamation point. Free Space sounds like a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.”

“Why are you so interested in seeing me sleep with her? What’s that about?”

“I’m just going by what I see.”

“Well, we’re different, you and me. Do you get that? Do you understand that it’s possible to have values higher than getting laid?”

“Yeah, I get that. In the abstract.”

“Well, then, shut up about it, OK?”

Katz looked around impatiently for their waiter. He was in an evil mood, and everything Walter did or said was irritating him. If Walter was too pussy to make a play for Lalitha, if he wanted to keep being Mr. Righteous, it was nothing to Katz now. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.

“How about letting my entrée get here first? You may not be hungry, but I am.”

“No, sure. Of course. My mistake.”

His spirits began to crash an hour later, in the crush of young people at the doors of the 9:30 Club. Katz hadn’t gone to a show as an actual audience member in several years, he hadn’t gone to hear a kiddie idol since he’d been a kiddie himself, and he’d become so accustomed to the older crowd at Traumatics and Walnut Surprise events that he’d forgotten how very different a kiddie scene could be. How almost religious in its collective seriousness. Unlike Walter, who, in his culturally eager way, owned the entire Bright Eyes oeuvre and had tiresomely extolled it at the Thai restaurant, Katz knew the band only by osmotic repute. He and Walter were at least twice the age of everybody else at the club, the flat-haired boys and fashionably unskinny babes. He could feel himself being looked at and recognized, here and there, as they made their way onto the intermission-emptied floor, and he thought he could hardly have made a worse decision than to appear in public and to bestow, by his mere presence, approval on a band he knew next to nothing about. He didn’t know which would be worse under these circumstances, to be outed and fawned over or to stand there in middle-aged obscurity.

“Do you want to try to get backstage?” Walter said.

“Can’t do it, buddy. Not up to it.”

“Just to make the introduction. It’ll take one minute. I can follow up later with a proper pitch.”

“Not up to it. I don’t know these people.”

The intermission mix, the choice of which was the headliner’s prerogative, was impeccably quirky. (Katz, as a headliner, had always hated the posturing and gamesmanship and didacticism of choosing the mix, the pressure to prove himself groovy in his listening tastes, and had left it to his bandmates.) Roadies were setting out a great many mikes and instruments while Walter gushed about the Conor Oberst story: how he’d started recording at twelve, how he was still based in Omaha, how his band was more like a collective or a family than an ordinary rock group. Kiddies were streaming onto the floor from every portal, Bright-Eyed (what a fucking irritating youth-congratulating name for a band, Katz thought) and bushless-tailed. His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world’s splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement-to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed, as Jessica had suggested at the meeting earlier, to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he’d been a part of as a youngster. They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. And so said to him: die.

Oberst took the stage alone, wearing a powder-blue tuxedo, strapped on an acoustic, and crooned a couple of lengthy solo numbers. He was the real deal, a boy genius, and thus all the more insufferable to Katz. His Tortured Soulful Artist shtick, his self-indulgence in pushing his songs past their natural limits of endurance, his artful crimes against pop convention: he was performing sincerity, and when the performance threatened to give sincerity the lie, he performed his sincere anguish over the difficulty of sincerity. Then the rest of the band came out, including three lovely young backup Graces in vampish dresses, and it was all in all a great show-Katz didn’t stoop to denying it. He merely felt like the one stone-sober person in a room full of drunks, the one nonbeliever at a church revival. He was pierced by a homesickness for Jersey City, its belief-killing streets. It seemed to him he had some work to do there, in his own splintered niche, before the world ended entirely.

“What did you think?” Walter asked him giddily in the taxi afterward.

“I think I’m getting old,” he said.

“I thought they were pretty great.”

“A few too many songs about adolescent soap operas.”

“They’re all about belief,” Walter said. “The new record’s this incredible kind of pantheistic effort to keep believing in something in a world full of death. Oberst works the word ‘lift’ into every song. That’s the name of the record, Lifted. It’s like religion without the bullshit of religious dogma.”

“I admire your capacity for admiring,” Katz said. And added, as the taxi crawled through traffic at a complex diagonal intersection, “I don’t think I can do this thing for you, Walter. I’m experiencing high levels of shame.”

“Just do what you can. Find your own limits. If all you want to do is come down in May for a day or two and meet the interns, maybe have sex with one of them, that’s fine with me. That would be a lot already.”

“Thinking of going back to writing songs.”

“That’s great! That’s wonderful news. I’d almost rather have you do that than work for us. Just stop building decks, for God’s sake.”

“Might need to keep building decks. Can’t be helped.”

The mansion was dark and quiet when they returned to it, a single light burning in the kitchen. Walter went straight up to bed, but Katz lingered for a while in the kitchen, thinking Patty might hear him and come down. Aside from everything else, he was now craving the company of someone with a sense of irony. He ate some cold pasta and smoked a cigarette in the back yard. Then he went up to the second floor and back to the little room of Patty’s. From the pillows and blankets he’d seen on the foldout sofa the evening before, he had the impression that she slept in it. The door was closed and no light showed around its edges.

“Patty,” he said in a voice she could have heard if she’d been awake.

He listened carefully, enveloped in tinnitus.

“Patty,” he said again.

His dick didn’t believe for one second that she was sleeping, but it was possible that the door was closed on an empty room, and he had a curious reluctance to open it and see. He needed some small breath of encouragement or confirmation of his instincts. He went back down to the kitchen, finished the pasta, and read the Post and the Times. At two o’clock, still buzzing with nicotine, and beginning to be pissed off with her, he went back to her room, tapped on the door, and opened it.

She was sitting on the sofa in the dark, still wearing her black gym uniform, staring straight ahead, her hands clutching each other on her lap.

“Sorry,” Katz said. “Is this OK?”

“Yes,” she said, not looking at him. “But we should go downstairs.”

There was an unfamiliar tightness in his chest as he descended the back staircase again, an intensity of sexual anticipation that he didn’t think he’d felt since high school. Following him into the kitchen, Patty closed the door to the staircase behind her. She was wearing very soft-looking socks, the socks of somebody whose feet weren’t so young and well-padded anymore. Even without the boost of shoes, her height was the same agreeable surprise it had always been to him. One of his own song lyrics popped into his head, the one about her body being the body for him. It had come to this for old Katz: he was being moved by his own lyrics. And the body for him was still very nice, not actively displeasing in any way: the product, surely, of many hours of sweating at her gym. In white block letters on the front of her black T-shirt was the word lift.

“I’m going to have some chamomile tea,” she said. “Do you want some?”

“Sure. I don’t think I’ve ever had chamomile tea.”

“Ah, what a sheltered life you’ve lived.”

She went out to the office and came back with two mugs of instantly hot water with tea-bag labels dangling.

“Why didn’t you answer me when I went up the first time?” he said. “I’ve been sitting down here for two hours.”

“I guess I was lost in thought.”

“Did you think I was just going to go to bed?”

“I don’t know. I was sort of thinking without thinking, if you know what I mean. But I understood that you would want to talk to me, and I knew I had to do it. And so here I am.”

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“No, it’s good, we should talk.” She sat down across the farmer’s table from him. “Did you guys have a good time? Jessie said you went to a concert.”

“Us and about eight hundred twenty-one-year-olds.”

“Ha-ha-ha! You poor thing.”

“Walter enjoyed himself.”

“Oh, I’m sure he did. He’s quite the enthusiast about young people these days.”

Katz was encouraged by the note of discontent. “I take it you’re not?”

“Me? Safe to say no. I mean, my own children excepted. I do still like my own children. But the rest of them? Ha-ha-ha!”

Her thrilling, lifting laugh hadn’t changed. Underneath her new haircut, though, underneath her eye makeup, she was looking older. It only went in one direction, aging, and the self-protective core of him, seeing it, was telling him to run while he still could. He’d followed an instinct in coming down here, but there was a big difference, he was realizing, between an instinct and a plan.

“What don’t you like about them?” he said.

“Oh, well, where to begin?” Patty said. “How about the flipflop thing? I have some issues with their flipflops. It’s like the world is their bedroom. And they can’t even hear their own flap-flap-flapping, because they’ve all got their gadgets, they’ve all got their earbuds in. Every time I start hating my neighbors around here, I run into some G.U. kid on the sidewalk and suddenly forgive the neighbors, because at least they’re adults. At least they’re not running around in flipflops, advertising how much more laidback and reasonable they are than us adults. Than uptight me, who would prefer not to look at people’s bare feet on the subway. Because, really, who could object to seeing such beautiful toes? Such perfect toenails? Only a person who’s too unluckily middle-aged to inflict the spectacle of her own toes on the world.”

“I hadn’t particularly noticed the flipflops.”

“You really do lead a sheltered life, then.”

Her tone was somehow rote and disconnected, not teasing in a way that he could work with. Denied encouragement, his sense of anticipation was waning. He was beginning to dislike her for not being in the state he’d imagined he would find her in.

“And the credit-card thing?” she said. “Using a credit card to buy one hot dog or one pack of gum? I mean, cash is so yesterday. Right? Cash actually requires you to add and subtract. You actually have to pay attention to the person who’s giving you your change. Like, for one tiny little moment, you have to be less than one-hundred-percent cool and checked into your own little world. But not with a credit card you don’t. You just blandly hand it over and blandly take it back.”

“That’s more like what the crowd was tonight,” he said. “Nice kids, just a little self-absorbed.”

“You’d better get used to it, though, right? Jessica says you’re going to be up to your armpits in young people all summer.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“It sounded more like definitely.”

“Yeah, but I’m thinking of bailing. In fact, I already said so to Walter.”

Patty stood up to put their tea bags in the sink and remained standing, her back to him. “So this might be your only visit,” she said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, then, I suppose I should be sorry I didn’t come down sooner.”

“You could always come up and see me in the city.”

“Right. If I’d ever been invited.”

“You’re invited now.”

She wheeled around with narrowed eyes. “Don’t play games with me, OK? I don’t want to see that side of you. It actually sort of makes me sick. OK?”

He held her gaze, trying to show her that he meant it-trying to feel that he meant it-but this seemed only to exasperate her. She retreated, shaking her head, to a far corner of the kitchen.

“How are you and Walter getting along?” he said unkindly.

“None of your business.”

“I keep hearing that. What does it mean?”

She blushed a little. “It means it’s none of your business.”

“Walter says not so great.”

“Well, that’s true enough. Mostly.” She blushed again. “But you just worry about Walter, OK? Worry about your best friend. You already made your choice. You made it very clear to me which one of us’s happiness you cared more about. You had your chance with me, and you chose him.”

Katz could feel himself beginning to lose his cool, and it was highly unpleasant. A pressure between his ears, a rising anger, a need to argue. It was like suddenly being Walter.

“You drove me away,” he said.

“Ha-ha-ha! ‘Sorry, I can’t go to Philadelphia even for one day, because of poor Walter’?”

“I said that for one minute. For thirty seconds. And you then proceeded, for the next hour-”

“To fuck it up. I know. I know I know I know. I know who fucked it all up. I know it was me! But, Richard, you knew it was harder for me. You could have thrown me a lifeline! Like, possibly, for that one minute, not talked about poor Walter and his poor tender feelings, but about me instead! That’s why I’m saying you already made your choice. You may not have even known you were doing it, but that’s what you did. So live with it now.”

“Patty.”

“I may be a fuckup, but if nothing else I’ve had some time to think in the last few years, and I’ve figured some things out. I have a little better idea of who you are, and how you work. I can imagine how hard it is for you that our little Bengali friend’s not interested in you. How terrrrribly destabilizing for you. What a topsy-turvy world this turns out to be! What a total bad trip! I guess you could still try working on Jessica, but good luck with that. If you really find yourself at a loss, your best bet may be Emily in the development office. But Walter’s not into her, so I don’t imagine she’ll be too interesting to you.”

Katz’s blood was up, he was all jittery-jangly. It was like coke cut heavily with nasty meth.

“I came down here for you,” he said.

“Ha-ha-ha! I don’t believe you. You don’t even believe it yourself. You’re such a bad liar.”

“Why else would I come down here?”

“I don’t know. Concern about biodiversity and sustainable population?”

He was remembering how unpleasant it had been to argue with her on the phone. How grossly unpleasant, how murderously trying to his patience. What he couldn’t remember was why he’d put up with it. Something about the way she’d wanted him, the way she’d come after him. A way that was missing now.

“I’ve spent so much time being mad at you,” she said. “Do you have any idea? I sent you all those e-mails that you never responded to, I had that whole humiliating one-sided conversation with you. Did you even read those e-mails?”

“Most of them.”

“Ha. I don’t know if that makes it worse or better. I guess it doesn’t even matter, since it was all in my head anyway. I’ve spent three years wanting a thing I knew would never make me happy. But that didn’t make me stop wanting it. You were like a bad drug I couldn’t stop craving. My whole life was like a kind of mourning for some evil drug I knew was bad for me. It was literally not until yesterday, when I actually saw you, that I realized I didn’t need the drug after all. It was suddenly like, ‘What was I thinking? He’s here for Walter.’ ”

“No,” he said. “For you.”

She wasn’t even listening. “I feel so old, Richard. Just because a person isn’t making good use of her life, it doesn’t stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker.”

“You don’t look old. You look great.”

“Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.”

“Come with me.”

She shook her head.

“Just come with me. We’ll go somewhere, and Walter can have his freedom.”

“No,” she said, “although it’s nice to hear you finally say that. I can apply it retroactively to the last three years and make an even better fantasy out of what might have been. It’ll enrich my already rather rich fantasy life. Now I can imagine staying home in your apartment while you do your world tour and fuck nineteen-year-olds, or going along with you and being you guys’s den mother-you know, milk and cookies at three a.m.-or being your Yoko and letting everybody blame me for how washed-up and bland you’ve gotten, and then throwing horrible scenes and letting you find out, the slow way, how bad it is to have me in your life. That should be good for months and months of daydreaming.”

“I don’t understand what it is you want.”

“Believe me, if I understood that myself, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I actually thought I did know what I wanted. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, but I thought I knew. And now you’re here, and it’s like no time at all has passed.”

“Except Walter’s falling for the girl.”

She nodded. “That’s right. And you know what? That turns out to be quite extraordinarily painful to me. Quite devastatingly painful.” Tears filled her eyes, and she turned quickly to hide the sight of them.

Katz had sat through some tearful scenes in his day, but this was the first time he’d had to watch a woman cry for love of somebody else. He didn’t like it one bit.

“So he came home from West Virginia on Thursday night,” Patty said. “I might as well tell you this, since we’re old friends, right? He came home from West Virginia on Thursday night, and he came up to my room, and what happened, Richard, was like the thing I’d always wanted. Always wanted. My entire adult life. I hardly even recognized his face! It was like he’d lost his mind. But the only reason I was getting it was that he was already gone. It was like a little farewell. A little parting gift, to show me what I was never going to have again. Because I’d made him too miserable for too long. And now he’s finally ready for something better, but he’s not going to have it with me, because I made him too miserable for too long.”

From what Katz was hearing, it sounded like he’d arrived forty-eight hours too late. Forty-eight hours. Incredible. “You can still have it,” he said. “Make him happy, be a good wife. He’ll forget the girl.”

“Maybe.” She touched the back of her hand to her eyes. “If I were a sane, whole person, that’s probably what I’d be trying to do. Because, you know, I used to want to win. I used to be a fighter. But I’ve developed some kind of allergy to doing the sensible thing. I spend my life jumping out of my skin with frustration at myself.”

“That’s what I love about you.”

“Oh, love now. Love. Richard Katz talking about love. This must be my signal that it’s time to go to bed.”

It was an exit line; he didn’t try to stop her. So firm was his faith in his instincts, however, that when he went upstairs himself, ten minutes later, he was still imagining that he might find her waiting in his bed. What he found instead, sitting on his pillow, was a thick, unbound manuscript with her name on the first page. Its title was “Mistakes Were Made.”

He smiled at this. Then he put a large plug of chew in his cheek and sat up reading, periodically spitting into a vase from the nightstand, until there was light in the window. He noted how much more interested he was in the pages about himself than in the other pages; it confirmed his long-standing suspicion that people ultimately only want to read about themselves. He noted further, with pleasure, that this self of his had genuinely fascinated Patty; it reminded him of why he liked her. And yet his clearest sensation, when he read the last page and let his now very watery wad plop into the vase, was of defeat. Not defeat by Patty: her writing skills were impressive, but he could hold his own in the self-expression department. The person who’d defeated him was Walter, because the document had obviously been written for Walter, as a kind of heartsick undeliverable apology to him. Walter was the star in Patty’s drama, Katz merely an interesting supporting actor.

For a moment, in what passed for his soul, a door opened wide enough for him to glimpse his pride in its pathetic woundedness, but he slammed the door shut and considered how stupid he’d been to let himself want her. Yes, he liked the way she talked, yes, he had a fatal weakness for a certain smart depressive kind of chick, but the only way he knew to interact with a chick like that was to fuck her, walk away, come back and fuck her again, walk away again, hate her again, fuck her again, and so forth. He wished he could go back in time now and congratulate the self he’d been at twenty-four, in that foul squat on the South Side of Chicago, for having recognized that a woman like Patty was meant for a man like Walter, who, whatever his other sillinesses might be, had the patience and imagination to handle her. The mistake that Katz had made since then had been to keep returning to a scene in which he was bound to feel defeated. Patty’s entire document attested to the exhausting difficulty of figuring out, in a scene like that, what was “good” and what wasn’t. He was very good at knowing what was good for him, and this was normally enough for every purpose in his life. It was only around the Berglunds that he felt that it was not enough. And he was sick of feeling that; he was ready to be done with it.

“So, my friend,” he said, “that’s the end of you and me. You won that one, old buddy.”

The light in the window was brightening. He went to the bathroom and flushed down his spit and the spent tobacco and then put the vase back where he’d found it. The clock radio showed 5:57. He packed up his things and went downstairs to Walter’s office with the document and left it in the center of his desktop. A little parting gift. Somebody had to clear the air around here, somebody had to put an end to the bullshit, and Patty obviously wasn’t up to it. And so she wanted Katz to do the dirty work? Well, fine. He was ready to be the nonpussy of the outfit. His job in life was to speak the dirty truth. To be the dick. He walked down the main hallway and out the front door, which had a spring-loaded lock. Its click, when he closed it behind him, sounded irrevocable. Good-bye to the Berglunds.

Humid air had arrived in the night, dewing the cars of Georgetown and moistening the off-kilter panels of Georgetown sidewalk. Birds were active in the budding trees; an early-departing jet was crackling across the pale spring sky. Even Katz’s tinnitus seemed muted in the morning hush. This is a good day to die! He tried to remember who had said that. Crazy Horse? Neil Young?

Shouldering his bag, he walked downhill in the direction of sighing traffic and came eventually to a long bridge leading over to the center of American world domination. He stopped near the center of the bridge, looked down at a female jogger on the creek-side path far below, and tried to evaluate, from the intensity of the photonic interaction between her ass and his retinas, how good a day to die it really was. The height was great enough to kill him if he dove, and diving was definitely the way to do it. Be a man, go headfirst. Yes. His dick was saying yes to something now, and this something was certainly not the wideish ass of the retreating jogger.

Had death, in fact, been his dick’s message in sending him to Washington? Had he simply misunderstood its prophecy? He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother. He could go wherever Molly had gone before him, and his father before her. He peered down at the spot where he was likely to land, a much-trampled patch of gravel and bare dirt, and asked himself whether this nondescript bit of land was worthy of killing him. Him the great Richard Katz! Was it worthy?

He laughed at the question and continued across the bridge.

Back in Jersey City, he took arms against the sea of junk in his apartment. Opened the windows to the warm air and did spring cleaning. Washed and dried every dish, threw out bales of useless paper, and manually deleted three thousand pieces of spam from his computer, stopping repeatedly to inhale the marsh and harbor and garbage smells of the warmer months in Jersey City. After dark, he drank a couple of beers and unpacked his banjo and guitars, ascertaining that the torque in the neck of his Strat hadn’t magically fixed itself in its months in its case. He drank a third beer and called the drummer of Walnut Surprise.

“Hello, dickhead,” Tim said. “Good to finally hear from you-not.”

“What can I say,” Katz said.

“How about, ‘I’m really sorry for being a total loser and disappearing on you and telling fifty different lies.’ Dickhead.”

“Yeah, well, regrettably, there was some stuff I had to attend to.”

“Right, being a dickhead is really time-consuming. What the fuck are you even calling me for?”

“Wondered how things are going with you.”

“You mean, apart from you being a total loser and fucking us over in fifty different ways and lying to us constantly?”

Katz smiled. “Maybe you can write out your grievances and present them to me in written form, so we can talk about something else now.”

“I already did that, asshole. Have you checked your e-mail in the last year?”

“Well, just give me a call then, if you feel like it, later. My phone’s operative again.”

“Your phone is operative again! That’s a good one, Richard. How’s your computer? Is that operative again, too?”

“Just saying I’m around if you want to call.”

“And just go fuck yourself is all I’m saying.”

Katz set down his phone feeling good about the conversation. He thought it unlikely that Tim would have bothered abusing him if he had something better than Walnut Surprise in the works. He drank one last beer, ate one of the killer mirtazapines that a script-happy doctor in Berlin had given him, and slept for thirteen hours.

He woke to a blazing hot afternoon and took a walk in his neighborhood, checking out females dressed in this year’s style of skimpy clothes, and bought some actual groceries-peanut butter, bananas, bread. Later on, he drove into Hoboken to leave his Strat with his guitar man there and yielded to an impulse to dine at Maxwell’s and catch whatever act was playing. The staff at Maxwell’s treated him like a General MacArthur returning from Korea in defiant disgrace. Chicks kept leaning over him with their tits falling out of their little tops, some guy he didn’t know or had once known but long since forgotten kept him supplied with beer, and the local band that was playing, Tutsi Picnic, did not repel him. On the whole, he felt that his decision not to dive from the bridge in Washington had been a good one. Being free of the Berglunds was proving to be a milder and not at all unpleasant sort of death, a death without sting, a state of merely partial nonexistence in which he was able to go back to the apartment of a fortyish book editor (“huge, huge fan”) who’d cozied up to him while Tutsi Picnic played, wet his dick in her a few times, and then, in the morning, buy himself some crullers on his way back down Washington Street to move his truck before parking-meter hours commenced.

There was a message from Tim on his home phone and none from the Berglunds. He rewarded himself by playing guitar for four hours. The day was gloriously hot and loud with street life awakening from a long winter’s dormancy. His left fingertips, bare of calluses, were near the point of bleeding, but the underlying nerves, killed several decades earlier, were still helpfully dead. He drank a beer and went around the corner to his favorite gyro place, intending to have a snack and play some more. When he returned to his building, carrying meat, he found Patty sitting on the front steps.

She was wearing a linen skirt and a sleeveless blue blouse with sweat circles reaching nearly to her waist. Beside her was a large suitcase and a small pile of outer garments.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“I’ve been evicted,” she said with a sad, meek smile. “Thanks to you.”

His dick, if no other part of him, was pleased with this ratification of its divining powers.