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

Chapter 3: Free Markets Foster Competition

On the chance that, regarding Patty’s parents, a note of complaint or even outright blame has crept into these pages, the autobiographer here acknowledges her profound gratitude to Joyce and Ray for at least one thing, namely, their never encouraging her to be Creative in the Arts, the way they did with her sisters. Joyce and Ray’s neglect of Patty, however much it stung when she was younger, seems more and more benign when she considers her sisters, who are now in their early forties and living alone in New York, too eccentric and/or entitled-feeling to sustain a long-term relationship, and still accepting parental subsidies while struggling to achieve an artistic success that they were made to believe was their special destiny. It turns out to have been better after all to be considered dumb and dull than brilliant and extraordinary. This way, it’s a pleasant surprise that Patty is even a little bit Creative, rather than an embarrassment that she isn’t more so.

A great thing about the young Walter was how much he wanted Patty to win. Where Eliza had once mustered unsatisfying little driblets of partisanship on her behalf, Walter gave her full-bore infusions of hostility toward anybody (her parents, her siblings) who made her feel bad. And since he was so intellectually honest in other areas of life, he had excellent credibility when he criticized her family and signed on with her questionable programs of competing with it. He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.

It’s easy now to see that Patty would have been well advised to take some years to develop a career and a more solid post-athletic identity, get some experience with other kinds of men, and generally acquire more maturity before embarking on being a mother. But even though she was finished as an intercollegiate player, there was still a shot clock in her head, she was still in the buzzer’s thrall, she needed more than ever to keep winning. And the way to win-her obvious best shot at defeating her sisters and her mother-was to marry the nicest guy in Minnesota, live in a bigger and better and more interesting house than anybody else in her family, pop out the babies, and do everything as a parent that Joyce hadn’t. And Walter, despite being an avowed feminist and an annually renewing Student-level member of Zero Population Growth, embraced her entire domestic program without reservation, because she really was exactly what he wanted in a woman.

They got married three weeks after her college graduation-almost exactly a year after she’d taken the bus to Hibbing. It had fallen to Walter’s mom, Dorothy, to frown and express concern, in her soft and tentative and nevertheless quite stubborn way, about Patty’s determination to be married at the Hennepin County courthouse instead of in a proper wedding hosted by her parents in Westchester. Wouldn’t it be better, Dorothy softly wondered, to include the Emersons? She understood that Patty wasn’t close to her family, but, still, mightn’t she later come to regret excluding them from such a momentous occasion? Patty tried to paint Dorothy a picture of what a Westchester wedding would be like: two hundred or so of Joyce and Ray’s closest friends and Joyce’s biggest-ticket campaign contributors; pressure from Joyce on Patty to select her middle sister as the maid of honor and to let her other sister do an interpretive dance during the ceremony; unbridled champagne intake leading Ray to make some joke about lesbians within earshot of Patty’s basketball friends. Dorothy’s eyes welled up a little, maybe in sympathy with Patty or maybe in sadness at Patty’s coldness and harshness on the subject of her family. Wouldn’t it be possible, she softly persisted, to insist on a small private ceremony in which everything would be exactly how Patty wanted it?

Not the least of Patty’s reasons to avoid a wedding was the fact that Richard would have to be Walter’s best man. Her thinking here was partly obvious and partly had to do with her fear of what would happen if Richard ever met her middle sister. (The autobiographer will now finally man up and say the sister’s name: Abigail.) It was bad enough that Eliza had had Richard; to see him hooking up with Abigail, even for one night, would have just about finished Patty off. Needless to say, she didn’t mention this to Dorothy. She said she guessed she just wasn’t a very ceremonial person.

As a concession, she did take Walter to meet her family in the spring before she married him. It pains the autobiographer to admit that she was a tiny bit embarrassed to let her family see him, and, worse, that this may have been another reason why she didn’t want a wedding. She loved him (and does love him, does love him) for qualities that made abundant sense to her in their two-person private world but weren’t necessarily apparent to the sort of critical eye that she was sure her sisters, Abigail in particular, would train on him. His nervous giggle, his too-readily reddening face, his very niceness: these attributes were dear to her in the larger context of the man. A source of pride, even. But the unkind part of her, which exposure to her family always seemed to bring out in force, couldn’t help regretting that he wasn’t six-foot-four and very cool.

Joyce and Ray, to their credit, and perhaps in their secret relief that Patty had turned out to be heterosexual (secret because Joyce, for one, stood ready to be strenuously Welcoming to Difference), were on their very best behavior. Hearing that Walter had never been to New York, they became gracious ambassadors to the city, urging Patty to take him to museum exhibitions that Joyce herself had been too busy in Albany to have seen, and then meeting up with them for dinner at Times-approved restaurants, including one in SoHo, which was then still a dark and exciting neighborhood. Patty’s worry that her parents would make fun of Walter gave way to the worry that Walter would take their side and not see why they were unbearable to her: would begin to suspect that the real problem was Patty, and would lose that blind faith in her goodness which already, in less than a year with him, she had rather desperately come to count on.

Thankfully Abigail, who was a high-end restaurant hound and insisted on turning several of the dinners into awkward fivesomes, was in peak disagreeable form. Unable to imagine people gathering for some reason besides listening to her, she prattled about the world of New York theater (by definition an unfair world since she had made no progress in it since her understudy breakthrough); about the “sleazy slimeball” Yale professor with whom she’d had insuperable Creative differences; about some friend of hers named Tammy who’d self-financed a production of Hedda Gabler in which she (Tammy) had brilliantly starred; about hangovers and rent control and disturbing third-party sexual incidents that Ray, refilling and refilling his own wineglass, demanded every prurient detail of. Midway through the final dinner, in SoHo, Patty got so fed up with Abigail’s shanghaiing of the attention that ought to have been lavished on Walter (who had politely attended to every word of Abigail’s) that she flat-out told her sister to shut up and let other people talk. There ensued a bad interval of silent manipulation of tableware. Then Patty, making comical gestures of drawing water from a well, got Walter talking about himself. Which was a mistake, in hindsight, because Walter was passionate about public policy and, not knowing what real politicians are like, believed that a state assemblywoman would be interested in hearing his ideas.

He asked Joyce if she was familiar with the Club of Rome. Joyce confessed that she was not. Walter explained that the Club of Rome (one of whose members he’d invited to Macalester for a lecture two years earlier) was devoted to exploring the limits of growth. Mainstream economic theory, both Marxist and free-market, Walter said, took for granted that economic growth was always a positive thing. A GDP growth rate of one or two percent was considered modest, and a population growth rate of one percent was considered desirable, and yet, he said, if you compounded these rates over a hundred years, the numbers were terrible: a world population of eighteen billion and world energy consumption ten times greater than today’s. And if you went another hundred years, with steady growth, well, the numbers were simply impossible. So the Club of Rome was seeking more rational and humane ways of putting the brakes on growth than simply destroying the planet and letting everybody starve to death or kill each other.

“The Club of Rome,” Abigail said. “Is that like an Italian Playboy Club?”

“No,” Walter said quietly. “It’s a group of people who are challenging our preoccupation with growth. I mean, everybody is so obsessed with growth, but when you think about it, for a mature organism, a growth is basically a cancer, right? If you have a growth in your mouth, or a growth in your colon, it’s bad news, right? So there’s this small group of intellectuals and philanthropists who are trying to step outside our tunnel vision and influence government policy at the highest levels, both in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.”

“The Bunnies of Rome,” Abigail said.

“Nor-fock-a Virginia!” Ray said in a grotesque Italian accent.

Joyce loudly cleared her throat. En famille, when Ray became silly and dirty because of wine, she could simply retreat into her private Joycean reveries, but in her future son-in-law’s presence she had no choice but to be embarrassed. “Walter is talking about an interesting idea,” she said. “I’m not particularly familiar with this idea, or with this… club. But it’s certainly a very provocative perspective on our world situation.”

Walter, not seeing the little neck-slicing gesture that Patty was making, pressed on. “The whole reason we need something like the Club of Rome,” he said, “is that a rational conversation about growth is going to have to begin outside the ordinary political process. Obviously you know this yourself, Joyce. If you’re trying to get elected, you can’t even talk about slowing the growth rate, let alone reversing it. It’s total political poison.”

“Safe to say,” Joyce said with a dry laugh.

“But somebody has to talk about it, and try to influence policy, because otherwise we’re going to kill the planet. We’re going to choke on our own multiplication.”

“Speaking of choking, Daddy,” Abigail said, “is that your private bottle there, or can we have some, too?”

“We’ll get another,” Ray said.

“I don’t think we need another,” Joyce said.

Ray raised his Joyce-stilling hand. “Joyce-just-just-calm down. We’re fine here.”

Patty, with a frozen smile, sat looking at the glamorous and plutocratic parties at other tables in the restaurant’s lovely discreet light. There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family’s satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children. To be Patty and sitting in that SoHo restaurant was to confront a force she had not the slightest chance of competing with. Her family had claimed New York and was never going to budge. Simply never coming here again-just forgetting that restaurant scenes like this even existed-was her only option.

“You’re not a wine drinker,” Ray said to Walter.

“I’m sure I could become one if I wanted,” Walter said.

“This is a very nice amarone, if you want to try a little.”

“No, thank you.”

“You sure?” Ray waved the bottle at Walter.

“Yes he’s sure!” Patty cried. “He’s only said it every night for the last four nights! Hello? Ray? Not everybody wants to be drunk and disgusting and rude. Some people actually enjoy having an adult conversation instead of making sex jokes for two hours.”

Ray grinned as if she’d been amusing. Joyce unfolded her half-glasses to examine the dessert menu while Walter blushed and Abigail, with a spastic neck-twist and a sour frown, said, “ ‘Ray’? ‘Ray’? We call him ‘Ray’ now?”

The next morning, Joyce quaveringly told Patty: “Walter is much more-I don’t know if the right word is conservative, or what, I guess not exactly conservative, although, actually, from the standpoint of democratic process, and power flowing upward from the people, and prosperity for all, not exactly autocratic, but, in a way, yes, almost conservative-than I’d expected.”

Ray, two months later, at Patty’s graduation, with a poorly suppressed snicker, said to Patty: “Walter got so red in the face about that growth stuff, my God, I thought he was going to have a stroke.”

And Abigail, six months after that, at the only Thanksgiving that Patty and Walter were ever foolish enough to celebrate in Westchester, said to Patty: “How are things going with the Club of Rome? Have you guys joined the Club of Rome yet? Have you learned the passwords? Have you sat in the leather chairs?”

Patty, at LaGuardia Airport, sobbing, said to Walter: “I hate my family!”

And Walter valiantly replied: “We’ll make our own family!”

Poor Walter. First he’d set aside his acting and filmmaking dreams out of a sense of financial obligation to his parents, and then no sooner had his dad set him free by dying than he teamed up with Patty and set aside his planet-saving aspirations and went to work for 3M, so that Patty could have her excellent old house and stay home with the babies. The whole thing happened almost without discussion. He got excited about the plans that excited her, he threw himself into renovating the house and defending her against her family. It wasn’t until years later-after Patty had begun to Disappoint him-that he became more forgiving of the other Emersons and insisted that she was the lucky one, the only Emerson to escape the shipwreck and survive to tell the tale. He said that Abigail, who’d been left stranded to scavenge emotional meals on an island of great scarcity (Manhattan Island!), should be forgiven for monopolizing conversations in her attempt to feed herself. He said that Patty should pity her siblings, not blame them, for not having had the strength or the luck to get away: for being so hungry. But this all came much later. In the early years, he was so fired up about Patty, she could do no wrong. And very nice years they were.

Walter’s own competitiveness wasn’t family-oriented. By the time she met him, he’d already won that game. At the poker table of being a Berglund, he’d been dealt every ace except maybe looks and ease with women. (His older brother-who is currently on his third young wife, who is working hard to support him-got that particular ace.) Walter not only knew about the Club of Rome and read difficult novels and appreciated Igor Stravinsky, he could also sweat a copper pipe joint and do finish carpentry and identify birds by their songs and take good care of a problematic woman. He was so much his family’s winner that he could afford to make regular voyages back to help the others.

“I guess now you’re going to have to see where I grew up,” he’d said to Patty outside the Hibbing bus station, after she’d aborted the road trip with Richard. They were in his dad’s Crown Victoria, which they’d fogged up with their hot and heavy breathing.

“I want to see your room,” Patty said. “I want to see everything. I think you’re a wonderful person!”

Hearing this, he had to kiss her for another long while before resuming his anxiety. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I’m still embarrassed to take you home.”

“Don’t be embarrassed. You should see my home. It’s a freak show.”

“Yeah, well, this is not anything as interesting as that. This is just your basic Iron Range squalor.”

“So let’s go. I want to see it. I want to sleep with you.”

“That sounds great,” he said, “but I think my mom might be uncomfortable with it.”

“I want to sleep near you. And then I want to have breakfast with you.”

“That we can arrange.”

In truth, the scene at the Whispering Pines was sobering to Patty and touched off a moment of doubt about what she’d done by coming to Hibbing; it unsettled that self-contained state of mind in which she’d run to a guy who physically didn’t do for her what his best friend did. The motel wasn’t so bad from the outside, and there was a non-depressing number of cars in the parking lot, but the living quarters, behind the office, were indeed a long way from Westchester. They lit up a whole previously invisible universe of privilege, her own suburban privilege; she had an unexpected pang of homesickness. The floors were spongily carpeted and sloped perceptibly toward the creek in back. In the living/dining area was a hubcap-sized, extensively crenellated ceramic ashtray within easy reach of the davenport where Gene Berglund had read his fishing and hunting magazines and watched whatever programming the motel’s antenna (rigged, as she saw the next morning, to the top of a decapitated pine tree behind the septic field) was able to pull down from stations in the Twin Cities and Duluth. Walter’s little bedroom, which he’d shared with his younger brother, was at the bottom of the downslope and permanently damp with creek vapors. Running down the middle of the carpeting was a line of gummy residue from the duct tape that Walter had put down as a child to demarcate his private space. Paraphernalia from his striving childhood were still ranged along the far wall: Boy Scout handbooks and awards, a complete set of abridged presidential biographies, a partial set of World Book Encyclopedia volumes, skeletons of small animals, an empty aquarium, stamp and coin collections, a scientific thermometer/barometer with wires leading out a window. On the room’s warped door was a yellowed homemade No Smoking sign, lettered in red crayon, its N and its S unsteady but tall in their defiance.

“My first act of rebellion,” Walter said.

“How old were you?” Patty said.

“I don’t know. Maybe ten. My little brother had bad asthma.”

Outside, the rain was coming down hard. Dorothy was asleep in her room, but Walter and Patty were both still buzzing with lust. He showed her the “lounge” that his dad had operated, the impressive stuffed walleye mounted on the wall, the birch-plywood bar that he’d helped his dad build. Until recently, when he had to be hospitalized, Gene had stood smoking and drinking behind this bar in the late afternoon, waiting for his friends to get off work and give him business.

“So this is me,” Walter said. “This is where I come from.”

“I love that you come from here.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, but I’ll take it.”

“Just that I admire you so much.”

“That’s good. I guess.” He went to the front desk and looked at keys. “How does Room 21 sound to you?”

“Is it a good room?”

“It’s very much like all the other rooms.”

“I’m twenty-one years old. So it’s perfect.”

Room 21 was full of faded and abraded surfaces that, in lieu of being refurbished, had been subjected to decades of vigorous scouring. The creek-dampness was noticeable but not overwhelming. The beds were low and standard sized, not queen.

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want,” Walter said, setting her bag down. “I can take you back to the station in the morning.”

“No! This is fine. I’m not here for vacation. I’m here to see you, and to try to be useful.”

“Right. I’m just worried that I’m not actually what you want.”

“Oh, well, worry no more.”

“Well, I’m still worried.”

She made him lie down on a bed and tried to reassure him with her body. Soon enough, though, his worry boiled up again. He righted himself and asked her why she’d gone on the road trip with Richard. It was a question she’d allowed herself to hope he wouldn’t ask.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I wanted to see what a road trip was like.”

“Hm.”

“There was something I had to see about. That’s the only way I can explain it. There was something I had to find out. And I found it out, and now I’m here.”

“What did you find out?”

“I found out where I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be with.”

“Well, that was quick.”

“It was a stupid mistake,” she said. “He’s got a way of looking at a person, as I’m sure you know. It takes a while for a person to sort out what she actually wants. Please don’t blame me for that.”

“I’m just impressed that you sorted it out so quickly.”

She had an impulse to start crying, and yielded to it, and Walter for a while became his best comforting self.

“He wasn’t nice to me,” she said through tears. “And you’re the opposite of that. And I so, so, so need the opposite of that right now. Can you please be nice?”

“I can be nice,” he said, stroking her head.

“I swear you won’t be sorry.”

These were exactly her words, in the autobiographer’s sorry recollection.

Here’s something else the autobiographer vividly remembers: the violence with which Walter then grabbed her shoulders and rolled her onto her back and loomed over her, pressing himself between her legs, with an utterly unfamiliar look on his face. It was a look of rage, and it became him. It was like curtains suddenly parting on something beautiful and manly.

“This is not about you,” he said. “Do you get that? I love every bit of you. Every inch of you. Every inch. From the minute I saw you. Do you get that?”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, thank you. I kind of had that sense, but it’s really good to hear.”

He wasn’t done, though.

“Do you understand that I have a… a…” He searched for words. “A problem. With Richard. I have a problem.”

“What problem?”

“I don’t trust him. I love him, but I don’t trust him.”

“Oh, God,” Patty said, “you should definitely trust him. He obviously cares about you, too. He’s incredibly protective of you.”

“Not always.”

“Well, he was with me. Do you realize how much he admires you?”

Walter stared down at her furiously. “Then why did you go with him? Why was he in Chicago with you? What the fuck? I don’t understand!”

Hearing him say fuck, and seeing how horrified he seemed by his own anger, she began to cry again. “God, please, God, please, God, please,” she said, “I’m here. OK? I’m here for you! And nothing happened in Chicago. Truly nothing.”

She pulled him closer, pulled hard on his hips. But instead of touching her breasts or taking her jeans down, as Richard surely would have, he stood up and began pacing Room 21.

“I’m not sure this is right,” he said. “Because, you know, I’m not stupid. I have eyes and ears, I’m not stupid. I really don’t know what to do now.”

It was a relief to hear that he wasn’t stupid about Richard; but she felt she’d run out of ways to reassure him. She simply lay there on the bed, listening to the rain on the roof, aware that she could have avoided this whole scene by never getting in a car with Richard; aware that she deserved some punishment. And yet it was hard not to imagine better ways for things to have gone. It was all such a foretaste of the late-night scenes of later years: Walter’s beautiful rage going wasted while she wept and he punished her and apologized for punishing her, saying that they were both exhausted and it was very late, which indeed it was: so late that it was early.

“I’m going to take a bath,” she said finally.

He was sitting on the other bed, his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is truly not about you.”

“Actually, you know what? That is not my very favorite thing to keep hearing.”

“I’m sorry. Believe it or not, I mean something nice by it.”

“And ‘sorry’ is not really high on my list at this point, either.”

Without taking his hands from his face, he asked if she needed help with the bath.

“I’m fine,” she said, although it was something of a production to bathe with her braced and bandaged knee propped up outside the water. When she emerged from the bathroom in her pajamas, half an hour later, Walter appeared not to have moved a muscle. She stood in front of him, looking down at his fair curls and narrow shoulders. “Listen, Walter,” she said. “I can leave in the morning if you want. But I need to get some sleep now. You should go to bed, too.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry I went to Chicago with Richard. It was my idea, not his. You should blame me, not him. But right now? You’re making me feel kind of shitty.”

He nodded and stood up.

“Kiss me good night?” she said.

He did, and it was better than fighting, so much better that soon they were under the covers and turning off the lamp. Daylight was leaking in around the curtains-dawn in May came early in the north country.

“I know essentially nothing about sex,” Walter confessed.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not very complicated.”

And so began the happiest years of their life. For Walter, especially, it was a very giddy time. He took possession of the girl he wanted, the girl who could have gone with Richard but had chosen him instead, and then, three days later, at the Lutheran hospital, his lifelong struggle against his father ended with his father’s death. (To be dead is to be as beaten as a dad can get.) Patty was with Walter and Dorothy at the hospital that morning, and was moved by their tears to do some crying of her own, and it felt to her, as they drove back to the motel in near-silence, that she was already practically married.

In the motel parking lot, after Dorothy had gone inside to lie down, Patty watched Walter do a strange thing. He sprinted from one end of the lot to the other, leaping as he ran, bouncing on his toes before he turned around and ran some more. It was a glorious clear morning, with a steady strong breeze from the north, the pine trees along the creek literally whispering. At the end of one of his sprints, Walter hopped up and down and then turned away from Patty and started running down Route 73, way down around the bend and out of sight, and was gone for an hour.

That next afternoon, in Room 21, in broad daylight, with the windows open and the faded curtains billowing, they laughed and cried and fucked with a joy whose gravity and innocence it fairly wrecks the autobiographer to think back on, and cried some more and fucked some more and lay next to each other with sweating bodies and full hearts and listened to the sighing of the pines. Patty felt like she’d taken some powerful drug that wasn’t wearing off, or like she’d fallen into an incredibly vivid dream that she wasn’t waking up from, except that she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn’t a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past, a romance unlike any romance she’d imagined. Because Room 21! How could she have imagined Room 21? It was such a sweetly clean old-fashioned room, and Walter such a sweetly clean old-fashioned person. And she was 21 and could feel her 21ness in the young, clean, strong wind that was blowing down from Canada. Her little taste of eternity.

More than four hundred people came out for his dad’s funeral. On Gene’s behalf, without even having known him, Patty was proud of the huge turnout. (It helps to die early if you want a big funeral.) Gene had been a hospitable guy who liked to fish and hunt and hang out with his buddies, most of them veterans, and who’d had the misfortune of being alcoholic and poorly educated and married to a person who invested her hopes and dreams and best love in their middle son, rather than in him. Walter would never forgive Gene for having worked Dorothy so hard at the motel, but frankly, in the autobiographer’s opinion, although Dorothy was incredibly sweet, she was also definitely one of those martyr types. The after-funeral reception, in a Lutheran function hall, was Patty’s total-immersion crash course in Walter’s extended family, a festival of Bundt cake and determination to see the bright side of everything. All five of Dorothy’s living siblings were there, as was Walter’s older brother, newly released from jail, with his trampy-pretty (first) wife and their two little kids, and so was their taciturn younger brother in his Army dress uniform. The only important person missing, really, was Richard.

Walter had called him with the news, of course, though even this had been complicated, since it involved tracking down Richard’s ever-elusive bass player, Herrera, in Minneapolis. Richard had just arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey. After giving Walter his telephonic condolences, he said that he was wiped out financially and sorry he couldn’t make it to the funeral. Walter assured him this was totally fine, and then proceeded for several years to hold it against Richard that he hadn’t made the effort, which was not entirely fair, given that Walter had already secretly been mad at Richard and hadn’t even wanted him at the funeral. But Patty knew better than to be the one to point this out.

When they made their New York trip, a year later, she suggested that Walter look Richard up and spend an afternoon with him, but Walter pointed out that he had twice called Richard in recent months while Richard had not initiated any calls to him. Patty said, “But he’s your best friend,” and Walter said, “No, you’re my best friend,” and Patty said, “Well, then, he’s your best male friend, and you should look him up.” But Walter insisted it had always been like this-that he’d always felt more like the pursuer than the pursued; that there was a kind of brinksmanship between them, a competition not to be the first to blink and show need-and he was sick of it. He said this wasn’t the first time Richard had done his disappearing act. If he still wanted to be friends, Walter said, then maybe, for once, he could trouble himself to do the calling. Though Patty suspected that Richard might still be feeling sheepish about the Chicago episode and trying not to intrude on Walter’s domestic bliss, and that it might therefore behoove Walter to assure him he was still welcome, she again knew better than to push.

Where Eliza imagined a gay thing between Walter and Richard, the autobiographer now sees a sibling thing. Once Walter had outgrown being sat on and punched in the head by his older brother and sitting on his younger brother and punching his head, there was no satisfactory competition to be found in his own family. He’d needed an extra brother to love and hate and compete with. And the eternally tormenting question for Walter, as the autobiographer sees it, was whether Richard was the little brother or the big brother, the fuckup or the hero, the beloved damaged friend or the dangerous rival.

As with Patty, Walter claimed to have loved Richard at first sight. It had happened on his first night at Macalester, after his dad had dropped him off and hurried to get back to Hibbing, where Canadian Club was calling to him from the lounge. Walter had sent Richard a nice letter in the summer, using an address provided by the housing office, but Richard hadn’t written back. On one of the beds in their dorm room was a guitar case, a cardboard carton, and a duffel bag. Walter didn’t see the owner of this minimal luggage until after dinner, at a dorm hall meeting. It was a moment he later described to Patty many times: how, standing in a corner, apart from everybody else, there was a kid he couldn’t take his eyes off, a very tall acned person with a Jewfro and an Iggy Pop T-shirt who looked nothing like the other freshmen and didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile politely, at the jokey orientative spiel their R.A. was giving them. Walter himself had great compassion for people attempting to be funny, and laughed loudly to reward them for their effort, and yet he instantly knew he wanted to be friends with the tall unsmiling person. He hoped this was his roommate, and it was.

Remarkably enough, Richard liked him. It started with the accident of Walter’s having come from the town Bob Dylan grew up in. Back in their room, after the meeting, Richard plied him with questions about Hibbing, what the scene there was like, and whether Walter had personally known any Zimmermans. Walter explained about the motel being several miles outside town, but the motel itself impressed Richard, as did the fact that Walter was a full-scholarship student with an alcoholic dad. Richard said he hadn’t written back to Walter because his own dad had died of lung cancer five weeks earlier. He said that since Bob Dylan was an asshole, the beautifully pure kind of asshole who made a young musician want to be an asshole himself, he’d always imagined that Hibbing was an asshole-filled kind of place. Downy-cheeked Walter, sitting in that dorm room, eagerly listening to his new roommate and trying hard to impress him, was a vivid refutation of this theory.

Already, that first night, Richard made comments about girls which Walter never forgot. He said he was unfavorably impressed with the high percentage of overweight chicks at Macalester. He said he’d spent the afternoon walking the surrounding streets, trying to figure out where the townie chicks hung out. He said he’d been astonished by how many people had smiled and said hello to him. Even the good-looking chicks had smiled and said hi. Was it like this in Hibbing, too? He said that, at his dad’s funeral, he’d gotten to know a very hot cousin of his who was unfortunately only thirteen and was now sending him letters about her adventures in masturbation. Although Walter never needed much of a push in the direction of solicitude toward women, the autobiographer can’t help thinking about the polarizing specialization of achievement that comes with sibling rivalry, and wondering if Richard’s obsession with scoring might have given Walter an additional incentive not to compete on that particular turf.

Important fact: Richard had no relationship with his mom. She hadn’t even come to his dad’s funeral. By Richard’s own account to Patty (much later), the mom was an unstable person who eventually became a religious nut but not before making life hellish for the guy who’d got her pregnant at nineteen. Richard’s dad had been a saxophone player and bohemian in Greenwich Village. The mom was a tall, rebellious WASP girl of good family and bad self-control. After four raucous years of drinking and serial infidelity, she stuck Mr. Katz with the job of raising their son (first in the Village, later in Yonkers) while she went off to California and found Jesus and brought forth four more kids. Mr. Katz quit playing music but not, alas, drinking. He ended up working for the postal service and never remarrying, and it’s safe to say that his various young girlfriends, in the years before drink fully ruined him, did little to provide the stabilizing maternal presence that Richard needed. One of them robbed their apartment before disappearing; another relieved Richard of his virginity while babysitting him. Soon after that episode, Mr. Katz sent Richard to spend a summer with his stepfamily, but he lasted less than a week with them. On his first day in California, the entire family gathered around him and joined hands to give thanks to God for his safe arrival, and apparently things got only wackier from there.

Walter’s parents, who were merely social churchgoers, opened their home to the tall orphan. Dorothy was especially fond of Richard-may, indeed, have had a demure little Dorothyish thing for him-and encouraged him to spend his vacations in Hibbing. Richard needed little encouragement, having nowhere else to go. He delighted Gene by showing interest in shooting guns and more generally by not being the sort of “hoity-toity” person Gene had been afraid that Walter would take up with, and he impressed Dorothy by pitching in with chores. As previously noted, Richard had a strong (if highly intermittent) wish to be a good person, and he was scrupulously polite to people, like Dorothy, whom he considered Good. His manner with her, as he questioned her about some ordinary casserole she’d made, asking where she’d found the recipe and where a person learned about balanced diets, struck Walter as fake and condescending, since the chances of Richard ever actually buying groceries and making a casserole himself were nil, and since Richard reverted to his ordinary hard self as soon as Dorothy was out of the room. But Walter was in competition with him, and though Walter may not have excelled at picking up townie chicks, the province of listening to women with sincere attentiveness most definitely was his turf, and he guarded it fiercely. The autobiographer thus considers herself more reliable than Walter regarding the authenticity of Richard’s respect for goodness.

What was unquestionably admirable in Richard was his quest to better himself and fill the void created by his lack of parenting. He’d survived childhood by playing music and reading books of his own idiosyncratic choosing, and part of what attracted him to Walter was Walter’s intellect and work ethic. Richard was deeply read in certain areas (French existentialism, Latin American literature), but he had no method, no system, and was genuinely in awe of Walter’s intellectual focus. Though he paid Walter the respect of never treating him with the hyper-politeness he reserved for those he considered Good, he loved hearing Walter’s ideas and pressing him to explain his unusual political convictions.

The autobiographer suspects there was also a perverse competitive advantage for Richard in befriending an uncool kid from the north country. It was a way of setting himself apart from the hipsters at Macalester who came from more privileged backgrounds. Richard disdained these hipsters (including the female ones, though this didn’t preclude fucking them when opportunities arose) with the same intensity as the hipsters themselves disdained people like Walter. The Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back was such a touchstone for both Richard and Walter that Patty eventually rented it and watched it with Walter, one night when the kids were little, so that she could see the famous scene in which Dylan outshone and humiliated the singer Donovan at a party for cool people in London, purely for the pleasure of being an asshole. Though Walter felt sorry for Donovan-and, what’s more, felt bad about himself for not wanting to be more like Dylan and less like Donovan-Patty found the scene thrilling. The breathtaking nakedness of Dylan’s competitiveness! Her feeling was: Let’s face it, victory is very sweet. The scene helped her understand why Richard had preferred to hang out with unmusical Walter, rather than the hipsters.

Intellectually, Walter was definitely the big brother and Richard his follower. And yet, for Richard, being smart, like being good, was just a sideshow to the main competitive effort. This was what Walter had in mind when he said he didn’t trust his friend. He could never shake the feeling that Richard was hiding stuff from him; that there was a dark side of him always going off in the night to pursue motives he wouldn’t admit to; that he was happy to be friends with Walter as long as it was understood that he was the top dog. Richard was especially unreliable whenever a girl entered the picture, and Walter resented these girls for being even momentarily more compelling than he was. Richard himself never saw it this way, because he tired of girls so quickly and always ended up kicking them to the curb; he always came back to Walter, whom he didn’t get tired of. But to Walter it seemed disloyal of his friend to put so much energy into pursuing people he didn’t even like. It made Walter feel weak and small to be forever available for Richard to come back to. He was tormented by the suspicion that he loved Richard more than Richard loved him, and was doing more than Richard to make the friendship work.

The first big crisis came during their senior year, two years before Patty met them, when Walter was smitten with the evil sophomore personage named Nomi. To hear Richard tell it (as Patty once did), the situation was straightforward: his sexually naïve friend was being exploited by a worthless female who wasn’t into him, and Richard finally took it upon himself to demonstrate her worthlessness. According to Richard, the girl wasn’t worth competing over, she was just a mosquito to be slapped. But Walter saw things very differently. He got so angry with Richard that he refused to speak to him for weeks. They were sharing a two-room double of the sort reserved for seniors, and every night when Richard came in through Walter’s room, on his way to his own more private room, he stopped to engage in one-sided conversations that a disinterested observer would probably have found amusing.

Richard: “Still not speaking to me. This is remarkable. How long is this going to last?”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “If you don’t want me to sit down and watch you read, just say the word.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Interesting book? You don’t seem to be turning the pages.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “You know what you’re being? You’re being like a girl. This is what girls do. This is bullshit, Walter. This is kind of pissing me off.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “If you’re waiting for me to apologize, it’s not going to happen. I’ll tell you that right now. I’m sorry you’re hurt, but my conscience is clear.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “You do understand, don’t you, that you’re the only reason I’m even still here. If you’d asked me four years ago, what are the odds of me graduating from college, I would have said small to nonexistent.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Seriously, I’m a little disappointed.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “OK. Fuck it. Be a girl. I don’t care.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Look. If I had a drug problem and you threw away my drugs, I’d be pissed off at you, but I’d also understand that you were trying to do me a favor.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “Admittedly not a perfect analogy, in that I actually, so to speak, used the drugs, instead of just throwing them away. But if you were prone to crippling addiction, whereas I was just doing something recreational, on the theory that it’s a shame to waste good drugs…”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “All right, so it’s a dumb analogy.”

Walter: silence.

Richard: “That was funny. You should be laughing at that.”

Walter: silence.

So, at any rate, the autobiographer imagines it, based on the later testimony of both parties. Walter maintained his silence until Easter vacation, when he went home alone and Dorothy managed to extract the reason he hadn’t brought Richard along with him. “You have to take people the way they are,” Dorothy told him. “Richard’s a good friend, and you should be loyal to him.” (Dorothy was big on loyalty-it lent meaning to her not so pleasant life-and Patty often heard Walter quoting her admonition; he seemed to attach almost scriptural significance to it.) He pointed out that Richard himself had been extremely disloyal in stealing a girl Walter cared about, but Dorothy, who herself perhaps had fallen under the Katzian spell, said she didn’t believe that Richard had done it deliberately to hurt him. “It’s good to have friends in life,” she said. “If you want to have friends, you have to remember that nobody’s perfect.”

An additional vexing wrinkle to the girl issue was the fact that the ones Richard attracted were almost invariably big music fans, [2] and that Walter, being Richard’s oldest and biggest fan, was in bitter competition with them. Girls who otherwise might have been friendly to a lover’s best friend, or at least tolerant of him, found it necessary to be frosty to Walter, because serious fans always need to feel uniquely connected to the object of their fandom; they jealously guard those points of connection, however tiny or imaginary, that justify the feeling of uniqueness. Girls understandably considered it impossible to be any more connected to Richard than locked in coitus with him, mingling actual fluids. Walter seemed to them merely a pestering small insect of irrelevance, even though it was Walter who had turned Richard on to Anton von Webern and Benjamin Britten, it was Walter who had given Richard a political framework for his angriest early songs, it was Walter whom Richard actually loved in a meaningful way. And it was bad enough to be treated with such consistent frostiness by sexy girls, but even worse was Walter’s suspicion-confessed to Patty in the years when they’d kept no secrets from each other-that he was at root no different than any of those girls: that he, too, was a kind of parasite on Richard, trying to feel cooler and better about himself by means of his unique connection to him. And, worst of all, his suspicion that Richard knew it, and was made all the lonelier by it, and all the more guarded.

The situation was especially toxic in the case of Eliza, who wasn’t content to ignore Walter but went out of her way to make him feel bad. How, Walter wondered, could Richard keep sleeping with a person so deliberately nasty to his best friend? Walter was grownup enough by then not to do the silence thing, but he did stop making meals for Richard, and the main reason he kept going to Richard’s gigs was to show his displeasure with Eliza, and, later, to try to shame Richard into not using the coke she was keeping him supplied with. Of course there was no shaming Richard into anything. Not then, not ever.

The particulars of their conversations about Patty are, sadly, unknown, but the autobiographer is pleased to think they were nothing like their conversations about Nomi or Eliza. It’s possible that Richard urged Walter to be more assertive with her, and that Walter replied with some guff about her having been raped or being on crutches, but there are few things harder to imagine than other people’s conversations about yourself. What Richard was privately feeling about Patty did eventually become clearer to her-the autobiographer is getting to that, albeit rather slowly. For now, it’s enough to note that he migrated to New York and stayed there, and that for a number of years Walter was so busy building his own life with Patty that he hardly even seemed to miss him.

What was happening was that Richard was becoming more Richard and Walter more Walter. Richard settled in Jersey City, decided it was finally safe to experiment with social drinking, and then, after a period he later described as “fairly dissolute,” decided, no, not so safe after all. As long as he’d lived with Walter, he’d avoided the alcohol that had ruined his dad, used coke only when other people were paying, and moved forward steadily with his music. On his own, he was a mess for quite a while. It took him and Herrera three years to get the Traumatics reconstituted, with the pretty, damaged blonde Molly Tremain sharing the vocals, and to put out their first LP, Greetings from the Bottom of the Mine Shaft, with the tiniest of labels. Walter went to see the band play at the Entry when they came through Minneapolis, but he was home again with Patty and the infant Jessica, carrying six copies of the LP, by ten-thirty in the evening. Richard had developed a day-job niche in building urban rooftop decks for the sort of Lower Manhattan gentry who got a contact cool from hanging out with artists and musicians, i.e., didn’t mind if their deck-builder’s workday began at 2 p.m. and ended a few hours later, and if it therefore took him three weeks to do a five-day job. The band’s second record, In Case You Hadn’t Noticed, attracted no more notice than the first, but its third, Reactionary Splendor, was released by a less-tiny label and got mentioned on several year-end Best Ten lists. This time, when Richard came through Minnesota, he phoned in advance and was able to spend an afternoon at Patty and Walter’s house with the polite but bored and mostly silent Molly, who either was or wasn’t his girlfriend.

That afternoon-to the surprisingly small extent that the autobiographer remembers it-was especially nice for Walter. Patty had her hands full with the kids and with her attempts to induce Molly to utter polysyllables, but Walter was able to show off all the work he was doing on the house, and the beautiful and energetic offspring he’d conceived with Patty, and to watch Richard and Molly eat the best meal of their entire tour, and, no less important, to acquire rich data from Richard about the alternative-music scene, data that Walter would put to good use in the months that followed, buying the records of every artist Richard had mentioned, playing them while he renovated, impressing male neighbors and colleagues who fancied themselves musically hip, and feeling that he had the best of both worlds. The state of their rivalry was very satisfactory to him that day. Richard was poor and subdued and too thin, and his woman was peculiar and unhappy. Walter, now unquestionably the big brother, could relax and enjoy Richard’s success as a piquant and hipness-enhancing accessory to his own.

At that point, the only thing that could have thrown Walter back into the bad ways he’d felt in college, when he’d been tormented by his sense of losing to the person he loved too much not to care about beating, would have been some bizarre pathological sequence of events. Things at home would have had to sour very badly. Walter would have had to have terrible conflicts with Joey, and fail to understand him and earn his respect, and generally find himself replicating his relationship with his own dad, and Richard’s career would have had to take an unexpected latter-day turn for the better, and Patty would have had to fall violently in love with Richard. What were the chances of all that happening?

Alas, not zero.

One hesitates to ascribe too much explanatory significance to sex, and yet the autobiographer would be derelict in her duties if she didn’t devote an uncomfortable paragraph to it. The regrettable truth is that Patty had soon come to find sex sort of boring and pointless-the same old sameness-and to do it mostly for Walter’s sake. And, yes, undoubtedly, to not do it very well. There just usually seemed to be something else she’d rather have been doing. Most often, she would rather have been sleeping. Or a distracting or mildly worrisome noise would be coming from one of the kids’ rooms. Or she would be mentally counting how many entertaining minutes of a West Coast college basketball game would still remain when she was finally allowed to turn the TV back on. But even just basic chores of gardening or cleaning or shopping could seem delicious and urgent in comparison to fucking, and once you got it in your head that you needed to relax in a hurry and be fulfilled in a hurry so you could get downstairs and plant the impatiens that were wilting in their little plastic boxes, it was all over. She tried taking shortcuts, tried preemptively doing Walter with her mouth, tried telling him she was sleepy and he should just go ahead and have his fun and not worry about her. But poor Walter was constituted to care about his own satisfaction less than hers, or at least to predicate his on hers, and she could never seem to figure out a nice way of explaining what a bad position this put her in, because, when you got right down to it, it entailed telling him she didn’t want him the way he wanted her: that craving sex with her mate was one of the things (OK, the main thing) she’d given up in exchange for all the good things in their life together. And this turned out to be a rather difficult admission to make to a man you loved. Walter tried everything he could think of to make sex better for her except the one thing that might conceivably have worked, which was to stop worrying about making it better for her and just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind. But the Walter who could have done this wouldn’t have been Walter. He was what he was, and he wanted what he was to be what Patty wanted. He wanted things to be mutual! And so the drawback of sucking him was that he always then wanted to go down on her, which made her incredibly ticklish. Eventually, after years of resisting, she managed to get him to stop trying altogether. And felt terribly guilty but also angry and annoyed to be made to feel like such a failure. The tiredness of Richard and Molly, on the afternoon they came to visit, seemed to Patty the tiredness of people who’d been up all night fucking, and it says a lot about her state of mind at that point, about the deadness of sex to her, about the totality of her immersion in being Jessica and Joey’s mother, that she didn’t even envy them for it. Sex seemed to her a diversion for young people with nothing better to do. Certainly neither Richard nor Molly looked uplifted by it.

And then the Traumatics were gone-on to their next gig, in Madison, and then on to releasing further wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand other people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small-venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be-while Patty and Walter pursued their mostly very absorbing workaday life, in which the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida. The autobiographer does acknowledge the possible connection between this small discomfort and the large mistakes that Patty was making as a mother in those years. Where Eliza’s parents, once upon a time, had erred in being too much into each other and not enough into Eliza, Patty can probably be said to have made the opposite error with Joey. But there are so many other, non-parental errors to be related in these pages that it seems just inhumanly painful to dwell on her mistakes with Joey as well; the autobiographer fears that it would make her lie down on the floor and never get up.

What happened first was that Walter and Richard became great friends again. Walter knew a lot of people, but the voice he most wanted to come home and hear on their answering machine was Richard’s, saying things like, “Yo, Jersey City here. Wondering if you can make me feel better about the situation in Kuwait. Give me a call.” Both from the frequency of Richard’s phonings and from the less defended way he spoke to Walter now-telling him he didn’t know anybody else like him and Patty, that they were his lifeline to a world of sanity and hope-Walter finally got it through his head that Richard genuinely liked and needed him and wasn’t just passively consenting to be his friend. (This was the context in which Walter gratefully cited his mom’s advice about loyalty.) Whenever another tour brought the Traumatics through town, Richard made time to stop by the house, usually alone. He took particular interest in Jessica, whom he held to be a Genuinely Good Soul in the mold of her grandmother, and plied her with earnest questions about her favorite writers and her volunteer work at the local soup kitchen. Though Patty could have wished for a daughter who was more like her, and for whom her own wealth of experience with mistake-making would have been a comforting resource, she was mostly very proud to have a daughter so wise about the way the world worked. She enjoyed seeing Jessica through Richard’s admiring eyes, and when he and Walter then went out together, it made Patty feel secure to see the two guys getting into the car, the great guy she’d married and the sexy one she hadn’t. Richard’s affection for Walter made her feel better about Walter herself; his charisma had a way of ratifying anything it touched.

One notable shadow was Walter’s disapproval of Richard’s situation with Molly Tremain. She had a beautiful voice but was a depressed or possibly bipolar person and spent massive amounts of time alone in her Lower East Side apartment, doing freelance copyediting at night and sleeping away her days. Molly was always available when Richard wanted to come over, and Richard claimed that she was fine with being his part-time lover, but Walter couldn’t shake the suspicion that their relationship was founded on misunderstandings. Over the years, Patty extracted from Walter various disturbing things that Richard had said to him in private, including “Sometimes I think my purpose on earth is to put my penis in the vaginas of as many women as I can” and “The idea of having sex with the same person for the rest of my life feels like death to me.” Walter’s suspicion that Molly secretly believed he would outgrow these sentiments turned out to be correct. Molly was two years older than Richard, and when she suddenly decided that she wanted a baby before it was too late, Richard was compelled to explain why this was never going to happen. Things between them quickly got so awful that he dumped her altogether and she in turn quit the band.

It happened that Molly’s mother was a longtime Arts editor at the New York Times, a fact that may explain why the Traumatics, despite record sales in the low four digits and audiences in the high two digits, had received several full write-ups in the Times (“Consistently Original, Perennially Unheard Of,” “Undaunted by Indifference, the Traumatics Soldier On”) plus brief reviews of each of their records after In Case You Hadn’t Noticed. Coincidentally or not, Insanely Happy-their first record without Molly and, as it turned out, their last-was ignored not only by the Times but even by the free weekly city papers that had long been a bastion of Traumatic support. What had happened, as Richard theorized over an early supper with Walter and Patty when the band dragged itself through the Twin Cities yet again, was that he’d been buying press attention on credit all along, without realizing it, and that the press had finally concluded that familiarity with the Traumatics was never going to be necessary to anyone’s cultural literacy or street credibility, and so there was no reason to extend him further credit.

Patty, carrying earplugs, went along with Walter to the show that night. The Sick Chelseas, a foursome of assonant local girls barely older than Jessica, opened for the Traumatics, and Patty found herself trying to guess which of the four Richard had been hitting on backstage. She wasn’t feeling jealous of the girls, she was feeling sad for Richard. It was finally sinking in, with both her and Walter, that in spite of being a good musician and a good writer Richard was not having the best life: had not actually been kidding with all his self-deprecation and avowals of admiration and envy of her and Walter. After the Sick Chelseas finished playing, their late-adolescent friends seeped out of the club and left behind no more than thirty die-hard Traumatics fans-white, male, scruffy, and even less young than they used to be-to hear Richard’s deadpan banter (“We want to thank you guys for coming to this 400 Bar and not the other, more popular 400 Bar… We seem to have made the same mistake ourselves”) and then a rollicking rendition of their new record’s title song-

and, later, an interminable and more typically repellent song, “TCBY,” consisting mostly of guitar noise reminiscent of razor blades and broken glass, over which Richard chanted poetry-

and finally his slow, country-sounding song, “Dark Side of the Bar,” which dampened Patty’s eyes with sadness for him-

The band was good-Richard and Herrera had been playing together for almost twenty years-but it was hard to imagine any band being good enough to overcome the desolation of the too-small house. After a single encore, “I Hate Sunshine,” Richard didn’t exit to the side of the stage but simply parked his guitar on a stand, lit a cigarette, and hopped down to the floor.

“You guys were nice to stay,” he said to the Berglunds. “I know you’ve got to get up early.”

“It was great! You were great!” Patty said.

“Seriously, I think this is your best record yet,” Walter said. “These are terrific songs. It’s another big step forward.”

“Yeah.” Richard, distracted, was scanning the back of the club, looking to see if any of the Sick Chelseas were lingering. Sure enough, one was. Not the conventionally pretty bassist whom Patty would have put her money on, but the tall and sour and disaffected-looking drummer, which of course made more sense as soon as Patty thought about it. “There’s somebody waiting to talk to me,” Richard said. “You’re probably going to want to head right home, but we can all go out together if you want.”

“No, you go,” Walter said.

“Really wonderful to hear you play, Richard,” Patty said. She put a friendly hand on his arm and then watched him walk over to the sour drummer.

On the way home to Ramsey Hill, in the family Volvo, Walter raved about the excellences of Insanely Happy and the debased taste of an American public that turned out by the millions for the Dave Matthews Band and didn’t even know that Richard Katz existed.

“Sorry,” Patty said. “Remind me again what’s wrong with Dave Matthews?”

“Basically everything, except technical proficiency,” Walter said.

“Right.”

“But maybe especially the banality of the lyrics. ‘Gotta be free, so free, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can’t live without my freedom, yeah, yeah.’ That’s pretty much every song.”

Patty laughed. “Do you think Richard was going to go have sex with that girl?”

“I’m sure he was going to go try,” Walter said. “And, probably, succeed.”

“I didn’t think they were very good. Those girls.”

“No, they weren’t. If Richard has sex with her, it won’t be a referendum on their talent.”

At home, after checking on the kids, she put on a sleeveless top and little cotton shorts and came after Walter in bed. This was very unusual of her, but thankfully not so unheard-of as to provoke comment and examination; and Walter needed no persuading to oblige her. It wasn’t a big deal, just a little late-evening surprise, and yet in autobiographical retrospect it now looks almost like the high point of their life together. Or maybe, more accurately, the endpoint: the last time she remembers feeling safe and secure in being married. Her closeness to Walter at the 400 Bar, the recollection of the scene of their very first meeting, the ease of being with Richard, their friendly warmth as a couple, the simple pleasure of having such an old and dear friend, and then afterward the rare treat, for both of them, of her sudden intense desire to feel Walter inside her: the marriage was working. And there seemed to be no compelling reason for its not continuing to work, maybe even work better and better.

A few weeks later, Dorothy collapsed at the dress store in Grand Rapids. Patty, sounding like her own mother, expressed concern to Walter about the hospital care she was getting, and was tragically vindicated when Dorothy went into multiple organ failure and died. Walter’s grief was both over-general, encompassing not merely his loss of her but the stunted dimensions of her entire life, and somewhat muted by the fact that her death was also a relief and liberation to him-an end to his responsibility for her, a cutting of his main tether to Minnesota. Patty was surprised by the intensity of her own grief. Like Walter, Dorothy had always believed the best about her, and Patty was sorry that for someone as generous-spirited as Dorothy an exception couldn’t have been made to the rule that everybody ultimately dies alone. That Dorothy in her eternally trusting niceness had had to pass through death’s bitter door unaccompanied: it just pierced Patty’s heart.

She was pitying herself, too, of course, as people always do in pitying others for their solitary dying. She attended to the funeral arrangements in a mental state whose fragility the autobiographer hopes at least partly explains her poor handling of her discovery that an older neighbor girl, Connie Monaghan, had been preying on Joey sexually. The litany of the mistakes that Patty proceeded to make in the wake of this discovery would exceed the current length of this already long document. The autobiographer is still so ashamed of what she did to Joey that she can’t begin to make a sensible narrative out of it. When you find yourself in the alley behind your neighbor’s house at three in the morning with a box cutter in your hand, destroying the tires of your neighbor’s pickup truck, you can plead insanity as a legal defense. But is it a moral one?

For the defense: Patty had tried, at the outset, to warn Walter about the kind of person she was. She’d told him there was something wrong with her.

For the prosecution: Walter was appropriately wary. Patty was the one who tracked him down in Hibbing and threw herself at him.

For the defense: But she was trying to be good and make a good life! And then she forsook all others and worked hard to be a great mom and homemaker.

For the prosecution: Her motives were bad. She was competing with her mom and sisters. She wanted her kids to be a reproach to them.

For the defense: She loved her kids!

For the prosecution: She loved Jessica an appropriate amount, but Joey she loved way too much. She knew what she was doing and she didn’t stop, because she was mad at Walter for not being what she really wanted, and because she had bad character and felt she deserved compensation for being a star and a competitor who was trapped in a housewife’s life.

For the defense: But love just happens. It wasn’t her fault that every last thing about Joey gave her so much pleasure.

For the prosecution: It was her fault. You can’t love cookies and ice cream inordinately and then say it’s not your fault you end up weighing three hundred pounds.

For the defense: But she didn’t know that! She thought she was doing the right thing by giving her kids the attention and the love her own parents hadn’t given her.

For the prosecution: She did know it, because Walter told her, and told her, and told her.

For the defense: But Walter couldn’t be trusted. She thought she had to stick up for Joey and be the good cop because Walter was the bad cop.

For the prosecution: The problem wasn’t between Walter and Joey. The problem was between Patty and Walter, and she knew it.

For the defense: She loves Walter!

For the prosecution: The evidence suggests otherwise.

For the defense: Well, in that case, Walter doesn’t love her, either. He doesn’t love the real her. He loves some wrong idea of her.

For the prosecution: That would be convenient if only it were true. Unfortunately for Patty, he didn’t marry her in spite of who she was, he married her because of it. Nice people don’t necessarily fall in love with nice people.

For the defense: It isn’t fair to say she doesn’t love him!

For the prosecution: If she can’t behave herself, it doesn’t matter if she loves him.

Walter knew that Patty had cut the tires of their horrible neighbor’s horrible truck. They never talked about it, but he knew. The fact that they never talked about it was how she knew he knew. The neighbor, Blake, was building a horrible addition on the back of the house of his horrible girlfriend, Connie Monaghan’s horrible mother, and Patty that winter was finding it expedient to drink a bottle or more of wine every evening, and then waking up in a sweat of anxiety and rage in the middle of the night, and stalking the first floor of the house in pounding-hearted lunacy. There was a stupid smugness to Blake which in her sleep-deprived state she equated with the stupid smugness of the special prosecutor who’d made Bill Clinton lie about Monica Lewinsky and the stupid smugness of the congressmen who’d recently impeached him for it. Bill Clinton was the rare politician who didn’t seem sanctimonious to Patty-who didn’t pretend to be Mr. Clean-and she was one of the millions of American women who would have slept with him in a heartbeat. Flattening horrible Blake’s tires was the least of the blows she felt like striking in her president’s defense. This is in no way intended to exculpate her but simply to elucidate her state of mind.

A more direct irritant was the fact that Joey, that winter, was pretending to admire Blake. Joey was too smart to genuinely admire Blake, but he was going through an adolescent rebellion that required him to like the very things that Patty most hated, in order to drive her away. She probably deserved this, owing to the thousand mistakes she’d made in loving him too much, but, at the time, she wasn’t feeling like she deserved it. She was feeling like she was being lashed in the face with a bullwhip. And because of certain monstrously mean things she’d seen that she was capable of saying to Joey, on several occasions when he’d baited her out of her self-control and she’d lashed back at him, she was doing her best to vent her pain and anger on safer third parties, such as Blake and Walter.

She didn’t think she was an alcoholic. She wasn’t an alcoholic. She was just turning out to be like her dad, who sometimes escaped his family by drinking too much. Once upon a time, Walter had positively liked that she enjoyed drinking a glass or two of wine after the kids were in bed. He said he’d grown up being nauseated by the smell of alcohol and had learned to forgive it and love it on her breath, because he loved her breath, because her breath came from deep inside her and he loved the inside of her. This was the sort of thing he used to say to her-the sort of avowal she couldn’t reciprocate and was nevertheless intoxicated by. But once the one or two glasses turned into six or eight glasses, everything changed. Walter needed her sober at night so she could listen to all the things he thought were morally defective in their son, while she needed not to be sober so as not to have to listen. It wasn’t alcoholism, it was self-defense.

And here: here is an actual serious personal failing of Walter’s: he couldn’t accept that Joey wasn’t like him. If Joey had been shy and diffident with girls, if Joey had enjoyed playing the role of child, if Joey had wanted a dad who could teach him things, if Joey had been helplessly honest, if Joey had sided with underdogs, if Joey had loved nature, if Joey had been indifferent to money, he and Walter would have gotten along famously. But Joey, from infancy onward, was a person more in the mold of Richard Katz-effortlessly cool, ruggedly confident, totally focused on getting what he wanted, impervious to moralizing, unafraid of girls-and Walter carried all his frustration and disappointment with his son to Patty and laid it at her feet, as if she were to blame. He’d been begging her for fifteen years to back him up when he tried to discipline Joey, to help him enforce the household prohibitions on video games and excess TV and music that degraded women, but Patty couldn’t help loving Joey just the way he was. She admired and was amused by his resourcefulness in evading prohibitions: he seemed to her quite the incredible boy. An A student, a hard worker, popular at school, wonderfully entrepreneurial. Maybe, if she’d been a single mother, she would have worried more about disciplining him. But Walter had taken over that job, and she’d allowed herself to feel she had an amazing friendship with her son. She hung on his wicked impressions of teachers he didn’t like, she gave him uncensored salacious gossip from the neighborhood, she sat on his bed with her knees gathered in her arms and stopped at nothing to get him laughing; not even Walter was off-limits. She didn’t feel she was being unfaithful to Walter when she made Joey laugh at his eccentricities-his teetotaling, his insistence on bicycling to work in blizzards, his defenselessness against bores, his hatred of cats, his disapproval of paper towels, his enthusiasm for difficult theater-because these were all things she herself had learned to love in him, or at least to find quaintly amusing, and she wanted Joey to see Walter her way. Or so she rationalized it, since, if she’d been honest with herself, what she really wanted was for Joey to be delighted by her.

She didn’t see how he could possibly be loyal and devoted to the neighbor girl. She thought that Connie Monaghan, sneaky little competitor that she was, had managed to get some kind of filthy little momentary hold on him. She was disastrously slow to grasp the seriousness of the Monaghan menace, and in the months when she was underestimating Joey’s feelings for the girl-when she thought that she could simply freeze Connie out and make lighthearted fun of her trashy mom and her mom’s boneheaded boyfriend, and that Joey would soon enough be laughing at them, too-she managed to undo fifteen years of effort to be a good mom. She fucked it up royally, Patty did, and then proceeded to become quite unhinged. She had terrible fights with Walter in which he blamed her for making Joey ungovernable and she was unable to defend herself properly, because she wasn’t allowed to speak the sick conviction in her heart, which was that Walter had ruined her friendship with her son. By sleeping in the same bed with her, by being her husband, by claiming her for the grownup side, Walter had made Joey believe that Patty was in the enemy camp. She hated Walter for this, and resented the marriage, and Joey moved out of the house and in with the Monaghans and made everybody pay in bitter tears for their mistakes.

Though this barely scratches the surface, it’s already more than the autobiographer intended to say about those years, and she will now bravely move on.

One small benefit of having the house to herself was that Patty could listen to whatever music she wanted, especially to the country music that Joey had cried out in pain and revulsion at the merest sound of, and that Walter, with his college-radio tastes, could tolerate only a narrow and mostly vintage playlist of: Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash. Patty loved all of those singers herself, but she loved Garth Brooks and the Dixie Chicks no less. As soon as Walter left for work in the morning, she cranked up the volume to a level incompatible with thinking, and steeped herself in heartbreaks enough like her own to be comforting and enough different to be sort of funny. Patty was strictly a lyrics-and-stories gal-Walter had long ago given up on interesting her in Ligeti and Yo La Tengo -and never tired of cheating men and strong women and the indomitable human spirit.

At the very same time, Richard was forming Walnut Surprise, his new alt-country band, with three kids whose combined age wasn’t much greater than his own. Richard might have persisted with the Traumatics, and launched further records into the void, were it not for a strange accident that could only have befallen Herrera, his old friend and bassist, whose dishevelment and disorganization made Richard look like the man in the gray flannel suit in comparison. Deciding that Jersey City was too bourgeois (!) and not depressing enough, Herrera had moved up to Bridgeport, Connecticut, and settled in a slum there. One day he went to a rally in Hartford for Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates and assembled a spectacle that he called the Dopplerpus, which consisted of a rented carnival octopus ride on whose tentacles he and seven friends sat and played dirges on portable amps while the ride flung them around and distorted their sound interestingly. Herrera’s girlfriend later told Richard that the Dopplerpus had been “amazing” and a “huge hit” with the “more than a hundred” people who’d attended the rally, but afterward, when Herrera was packing up, his van started rolling down a hill, and Herrera chased after it and reached in through the window and grabbed the steering wheel, which swung the van alongside a brick wall and pancaked him. He somehow finished packing up and drove back to Bridgeport, coughing blood, and there nearly expired of a ruptured spleen, five broken ribs, a broken clavicle, and a punctured lung before his girlfriend got him to a hospital. The accident, following the disappointments of Insanely Happy, seemed like a cosmic sign to Richard, and since he couldn’t live without making music, he’d teamed up with a young fan of his who played killer pedal steel guitar, and Walnut Surprise was born.

Richard’s personal life was in scarcely better shape than Walter and Patty’s. He had lost several thousand dollars on the last Traumatics tour and had “loaned” the uninsured Herrera further thousands for medical expenses, and his domestic situation, as he described it on the phone to Walter, was collapsing. What had made his whole existence workable, for nearly twenty years, was the big ground-floor Jersey City apartment for which he paid a rent so low as to be literally nominal. Richard could never be bothered to get rid of things, and his apartment was big enough that he didn’t have to. Walter had been to it on one of his trips to New York and reported that the hall outside Richard’s door was filled with junk stereo equipment, mattresses, and surplus parts for his pickup truck, and that the rear courtyard was filling up with supplies and leftovers from his deck-building business. Best of all, there was a room in the basement directly beneath his apartment where the Traumatics had been able to practice (and, later, record) without unduly disturbing the other tenants. Richard had always taken care to remain on good terms with them, but in the wake of his breakup with Molly he’d made the dreadful mistake of going a step further and getting involved with one of them.

At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a mistake to anyone but Walter, who considered himself uniquely qualified to detect the bullshit in his friend’s dealings with women. When Richard said, on the phone, that the time had come to put childish things behind him and sustain a real relationship with a grownup woman, warning bells had gone off in Walter’s head. The woman was an Ecuadoran named Ellie Posada. She was in her late thirties and had two kids whose father, a limousine driver, had been struck and killed when his car broke down on the Pulaski Skyway. (It did not escape Patty’s attention that, although Richard poked plenty of very young girls for fun, the women he actually had longer-term relationships with were his own age or even older.) Ellie worked for an insurance agency and lived across the hall from Richard. For a nearly a year, he gave Walter upbeat reports on how unexpectedly well her kids were taking to him and he to them, and how great Ellie was to come home to, and how uninteresting women who weren’t Ellie had become to him, and how he hadn’t eaten so well or felt so healthy since he’d lived with Walter, and (this really set Walter’s alarm bell ringing) how fascinating the insurance business turned out to be. Walter told Patty that he could hear something tellingly abstracted, or theoretical, or far away, in Richard’s tone of voice during this ostensibly happy year, and it came as no surprise to him when Richard’s nature finally caught up with him. The music he’d started making with Walnut Surprise turned out to be even more fascinating than the insurance business, and the skinny chicks in his young bandmates’ orbit turned out to be not so uninteresting after all, and Ellie turned out to be a strict constructionist when it came to exclusive sexual contracts, and before long he was afraid to come home at night to his own building, because Ellie was lying in ambush for him. Soon after that, Ellie organized the building’s other tenants to complain about his egregious appropriation of their communal space, and his hitherto absent landlord sent him stern letters by certified mail, and Richard found himself homeless, at the age of forty-four, in midwinter, with maxed-out credit cards and a $300 monthly storage bill for all his crap.

Now came Walter’s finest hour as Richard’s big brother. He offered him a way to live rent-free, devote himself in solitude to songwriting, and make some good money while he got his life sorted out. Walter had inherited from Dorothy her sweet little house on a lake near Grand Rapids. He had plans for some major interior and exterior improvements which, since he’d quit 3M and joined the Nature Conservancy, he’d despaired of finding time to do himself, and he proposed that Richard come out and live in the house, get a good start on the kitchen renovation, and then, when the snow melted, put a big deck on the back of the house, overlooking the lake. Richard would get thirty dollars an hour, plus free electricity and heat, and could do the work on his own schedule. And Richard, who was in a low place, and who (as he later told Patty, with touching plainness) had come to consider the Berglunds the closest thing he had to family, took only one day to think it over before accepting the offer. For Walter, his assent was further sweet confirmation that Richard really loved him. For Patty, well, the timing was dangerous.

Richard stopped with his overloaded old Toyota pickup for a night in St. Paul on his way up north. Patty was already into a bottle by the time he arrived, at three in the afternoon, and did not acquit herself well as a hostess. Walter did the cooking while she drank for the three of them. It was as if he and she both had just been waiting to see their old friend so they could vent their conflicting versions of why Joey, instead of joining them for dinner, was playing air hockey with a right-wing dolt next door. Richard, flummoxed, kept stepping outside to smoke cigarettes and fortify himself for the next round of Berglund fraughtness.

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, coming inside again. “You guys are great parents. It’s just, you know, when a kid’s got a big personality, there can be big dramas of individuation. It takes time to work these things out.”

“God,” Patty said. “Where did you get so wise?”

“Richard is one of those bizarre people who actually still read books and think about things,” Walter said.

“Right, unlike me, I know.” She turned to Richard. “Every once in a while it happens that I don’t read every single book he recommends. Sometimes I decide to just-skip it. I believe that is the subtext here. My substandard intellect.”

Richard gave her a hard look. “You should cool it with the drinking,” he said.

He might as well have punched her in the sternum. Where Walter’s disapproval actively fed her misbehavior, Richard’s had the effect of catching her out in her childishness, of exposing her unattractiveness to daylight.

“Patty’s in a lot of pain,” Walter said quietly, as if to warn Richard that his loyalty still lay, however unaccountably, with her.

“You can drink all you want as far as I’m concerned,” Richard said. “I’m just saying, if you want the kid to come home, it might help to have your house in order.”

“I’m not even sure I want him home at this point,” Walter said. “I’m kind of enjoying the respite from his contempt.”

“So, let’s see, then,” Patty said. “We’ve got individuation for Joey, we’ve got relief for Walter, but then, for Patty, what? What does she get? Wine, I guess. Right? Patty gets wine.”

“Whoa,” Richard said. “Little bit of self-pity there?”

“For God’s sake,” Walter said.

It was terrible to see, through Richard’s eyes, what she’d been turning into. From twelve hundred miles away it had been easy to smile at Richard’s love troubles, his eternal adolescence, his failed resolutions to put childish things behind him, and to feel that here, in Ramsey Hill, a more adult sort of life was being led. But now she was in the kitchen with him-his height, as always, a breathtaking surprise to her, his Qaddafian features weathered and deepened, his mass of dark hair graying handsomely-and he illuminated in a flash what a self-absorbed little child she’d been able to remain by walling herself inside her lovely house. She’d run from her family’s babyishness only to be just as big a baby herself. She didn’t have a job, her kids were more grownup than she was, she hardly even had sex. She was ashamed to be seen by him. All these years, she’d treasured her memory of their little road trip, kept it locked up securely in some deep interior place, letting it age like a wine, so that, in some symbolic way, the thing that might have happened between them stayed alive and grew older with the two of them. The nature of the possibility altered as it aged in its sealed bottle, but it didn’t go bad, it remained potentially drinkable, it was a kind of reassurance: rakish Richard Katz had once invited her to move to New York with him, and she’d said no. And now she could see that this wasn’t how things worked at all. She was forty-two and drinking herself red-nosed.

She stood up carefully, trying not to wobble, and poured a half-dead bottle down the drain. She set her empty glass in the sink and said that she was going upstairs to lie down for a while, and that the men should go ahead and eat.

“Patty,” Walter said.

“I’m fine. I’m really fine. I just had too much to drink. I might come down again later. I’m sorry, Richard. It’s so wonderful to see you. I’m just in a bit of a state.”

Though she loved their house on the lake, and had been retreating there for weeks at a time by herself, she didn’t go there once during the spring Richard spent working on it. Walter found time to go up for several long weekends and help out, but Patty was too embarrassed. She stayed home and got herself in shape: took Richard’s advice about the drinking, started running and eating again, gained enough weight to fill in the most haggard of the lines that had been forming in her face, and generally acknowledged realities about her physical appearance which she’d been ignoring in her fantasy world. One reason she’d resisted any kind of makeover was that her hateful neighbor Carol Monaghan had undergone one when her hateful boy-toy Blake appeared on the scene. Anything Carol did was definitionally anathema to Patty, but she humbled herself and followed Carol’s example. Lost the ponytail, saw a colorist, got an age-appropriate haircut. She was making an effort to see more of her old basketball friends, and they rewarded her by telling her how much better she looked.

Richard had intended to return to the East by the end of May, but, being Richard, he was still working on the deck in mid-June when Patty went up to enjoy some weeks in the country. Walter went along for the first four days, on his way to a money-tree-shaking V.I.P. fishing trip that a major Nature Conservancy donor was hosting at his deluxe “camp” in Saskatchewan. To make up for her poor showing in the winter, Patty was a whirlwind of hospitality at the lake house, cooking up splendid meals for Walter and Richard while they hammered and sawed in the back yard. She was proudly sober the whole time. In the evening, without Joey in the house, she had no interest in TV. She sat in Dorothy’s favorite armchair, reading War and Peace at Walter’s long-standing recommendation, while the men played chess. Thankfully for all concerned, Walter was better than Richard at chess and usually won, but Richard was dogged and kept asking for another game, and Patty knew that this was hard on Walter-that he was straining very hard to win, getting himself wound up, and would need hours to fall asleep afterward.

“More of this clotting-of-the-middle shit,” Richard said. “You’re always tying up the middle. I hate that.”

“I’m a clotter of the middle,” Walter affirmed in a voice breathless with the suppression of competitive glee.

“It drives me crazy.”

“Well, because it’s effective,” Walter said.

“It’s only effective because I don’t have enough discipline to make you pay for it.”

“You play a very entertaining game. I never know what’s coming.”

“Yeah, and I keep losing.”

The days were bright and long, the nights startlingly cool. Patty loved early summer in the north, it took her back to her first days in Hibbing with Walter. The crisp air and moist earth, the conifer smells, the morning of her life. She felt she’d never been younger than she’d been at twenty-one. It was as if her Westchester childhood, though chronologically prior, had somehow taken place in a later and more fallen time. Inside the house was a faint pleasant musty smell reminiscent of Dorothy. Outside was the lake that Joey and Patty had decided to call Nameless, newly melted, dark with bark and needles, reflecting bright fair-weather clouds. In summer, deciduous trees hid the only other nearby house, which a family named Lundner used on weekends and in August. Between the Berglunds’ house and the lake was a grassy hillock with a few mature birch trees, and when the sun or a breeze discouraged mosquitoes Patty could lie on the grass with a book for hours and feel completely apart from the world, except for the rare airplane overhead and the even rarer car passing on the unpaved county road.

The day before Walter left for Saskatchewan, her heart began to race. It was just a thing her heart was doing, this racing. The next morning, after she drove Walter to the airstrip in Grand Rapids and returned to the house, it was racing so much that an egg slipped out of her hand and fell on the floor while she was making pancake batter. She put her hands on the counter and took deep breaths before kneeling down to clean it up. The finish work in the kitchen had been left for Walter to do at some later date, but grouting the new tile floor ought to have been within Richard’s capabilities, and he hadn’t gotten to it yet. On the plus side, as he’d told them, he’d taught himself to play the banjo.

Though the sun had been up for four hours, it was still fairly early morning when he emerged from his bedroom in jeans and a T-shirt advertising his support for Subcomandante Marcos and the liberation of Chiapas.

“Buckwheat pancakes?” Patty said brightly.

“Sounds great.”

“I could fry you some eggs if you’d rather.”

“I like a good pancake.”

“Easy enough to do some bacon, too.”

“I wouldn’t say no to bacon.”

“OK! Pancakes and bacon it will be.”

If Richard’s heart was racing also, he gave no sign of it. She stood and watched him put away two stacks of pancakes, holding his fork in the civilized grip that she happened to know Walter had taught him as a freshman at college.

“What are your plans for the day?” he asked her with low to moderate interest.

“Gosh. I hadn’t thought about it. Nothing! I’m on vacation. I think I’m going to do nothing this morning, and then make you some lunch.”

He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.

She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over. A melodious bird that Walter had despaired of teaching her the proper name of, a veery or a vireo, grew accustomed to her presence and began to sing in a tree directly above her. Its song was like an idée fixe that it couldn’t get out of its little head.

How she felt: as if a ruthless and well-organized party of resistance fighters had assembled under cover of the darkness of her mind, and so it was imperative not to let the spotlight of her conscience shine anywhere near them, not even for one second. Her love of Walter and her loyalty to him, her wish to be a good person, her understanding of Walter’s lifelong competition with Richard, her sober appraisal of Richard’s character, and just the all-around shittiness of sleeping with your spouse’s best friend: these superior considerations stood ready to annihilate the resistance fighters. And so she had to keep the forces of conscience fully diverted. She couldn’t even allow herself to consider how she was dressing-she had to instantly deflect the thought of putting on a particular flattering sleeveless item before taking midmorning coffee and cookies out to Richard, she had to flick that thought right away from her-because the tiniest hint of ordinary flirting would attract the searchlight, and the spectacle it illuminated would be just too revolting and shameful and pathetic. Even if Richard wasn’t disgusted by it, she herself would be. And if he noticed it and called her out on it, the way he’d called her out on her drinking: disaster, humiliation, the worst.

Her pulse, however, knew-and was telling her with its racing-that she would probably not have another chance like this. Not before she was fully over the hill physically. Her pulse was registering her keen covert awareness that the fishing camp in Saskatchewan could only be reached by biplane, radio, or satellite phone, and that Walter would not be calling her in the next five days unless there was an emergency.

She left Richard’s lunch on the table and drove to the nearby tiny town of Fen City. She could see how easily she could have a traffic accident, and became so lost in imagining herself killed and Walter sobbing over her mutilated body and Richard stoically comforting him that she almost ran the only stop sign in Fen City; she dimly heard the screaming of her brakes.

It was all in her head, it was all in her head! The only thing that gave her any hope was how well she was concealing her own inner turmoil. She’d been maybe a little abstracted and shaky in the last four days, but infinitely better behaved than she’d been in February. If she herself was managing to keep her dark forces hidden, it stood to reason that Richard might have corresponding dark forces that he was doing just as good a job of hiding. But this was a tiny sliver of hope indeed; it was the way insane people lost in fantasies reasoned.

She stood in front of the Fen City Co-op’s meager selection of domestic beers, the Millers and the Coorses and the Budweisers, and tried to make a decision. Held a sixpack in her hand as if she might be able to judge in advance, through the aluminum of the cans, how she would feel if she drank it. Richard had told her to cool it with the drinking; she’d been ugly to him drunk. She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. And yet the autobiographer now envies and pities the younger Patty standing there in the Fen City Co-op and innocently believing that she’d reached the bottom: that, one way or another, the crisis would be resolved in the next five days.

A chubby teenage girl at the cash register had taken an interest in her paralysis. Patty gave her a lunatic smile and went and got a plastic-wrapped chicken and five ugly potatoes and some humble, limp leeks. The only thing worse than inhabiting her anxiety undrunk, she decided, would be to be drunk and still inhabiting it.

“I’m going to roast a chicken for us,” she told Richard when she got home.

Flecks of sawdust were resting in his hair and eyebrows and sticking to his sweaty, broad forehead. “That’s very nice of you,” he said.

“Deck’s looking really great,” she said. “It’s a wonderful improvement. How much longer do you think it’s going to take?”

“Couple of days, maybe.”

“You know, Walter and I can finish it up ourselves if you want to get back to New York. I know you meant to be back there by now.”

“It’s good to see a job finished,” he said. “It won’t be more than a couple of days. Unless you’re wanting to be alone here?”

“Do I want to be alone here?”

“I mean, it’s a lot of noise.”

“Oh, no, I like construction noise. It’s very comforting somehow.”

“Unless it’s your neighbors.”

“Well, I hate those neighbors, so that’s different.”

“Right.”

“So maybe I’ll get working on that chicken.”

She must have betrayed something in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. “You OK?”

“No no no,” she said, “I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn’t solve anything, if you know what I mean. But I love getting up in the morning. I love smelling the air.”

“I meant are you OK with my being here.”

“Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we’ve been friends with you for so long, but I’ve hardly ever really talked to you. It’s a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn’t feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I’m so used to being alone up here. It’s fine.”

This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.

“I’m just trying to hear what you’re actually saying,” Richard said. “Whether you actually want me here or not.”

“God,” she said, “I keep saying it, don’t I? Didn’t I just say it?”

She could see his patience with her, his patience with a female, reach its end. He rolled his eyes and picked up a section of two-by-four. “I’m going to wrap up here and then go for a swim.”

“It’s going to be cold.”

“Every day a little bit less so.”

Going back into the house, she experienced a cramp of envy of Walter, who was allowed to tell Richard that he loved him, and who wanted nothing destabilizing in return, nothing worse than to be loved himself. How easy men had it! She felt in comparison like a bloated sedentary spider, spinning her dry web year after year, waiting. She suddenly understood how the girls of years ago had felt, the girls of college who’d resented Walter’s free pass with Richard and been irritated by his pesky presence. She saw Walter, for a moment, as Eliza had seen him.

I might have to do it, I might have to do it, I might have to do it, she said to herself while washing the chicken and assuring herself that she didn’t actually mean it. She heard a splash from the lake and watched Richard swimming out in tree shadow toward water still gilded with afternoon light. If he really hated sunshine, the way he claimed to in his old song, northern Minnesota in June was a trying place to be. The days lasted so long that you found yourself surprised the sun wasn’t running low on fuel by the end of them. Just kept burning and burning. She yielded to an impulse to grab herself between the legs, to test the waters, for the shock of it, in lieu of going for a swim herself. Am I alive? Do I possess a body?

There were very odd angles in her cutting of the potatoes. They looked like some kind of geometric brainteaser.

Richard, after his shower, came into the kitchen in a textless T-shirt that must have been bright red some decades earlier. His hair was momentarily subdued, a youthful shiny black.

“You changed your look this winter,” he remarked to Patty.

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? Your hair’s different, you look great.”

“Really hardly any different. Just a tiny bit different.”

“And-possibly put on a little weight?”

“No. Well. A little.”

“You look good with it. You look better not so skinny.”

“Is that a nice way of saying I’ve gotten fat?”

He shut his eyes and grimaced as if trying to remain patient. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Where is this bullshit coming from?”

“Ah?”

“Do you want me to leave? Is that it? There’s this weird phony thing you’re doing that gives me the impression you’re not comfortable with me here.”

The roasting chicken smelled like something of the sort she used to eat. She washed her hands and dried them, rummaged in the back of an unfinished cabinet, and found a bottle of cooking sherry covered with construction dust. She filled a juice glass with it and sat down at the table. “OK, frankly? I’m a little nervous around you.”

“Don’t be.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You have no reason to be.”

This was what she hadn’t wanted to hear. “I’m having this one glass,” she said.

“You’ve mistaken me for somebody who gives a shit how much you drink.”

She nodded. “OK. Good. That helps to know.”

“You’ve been wanting a drink this whole time? Jesus. Have a drink.”

“Doing just that.”

“You know, you’re a very strange person. I mean that as a compliment.”

“So taken.”

“Walter got very, very lucky.”

“Ho, well, that’s the unfortunate thing, isn’t it. I’m not sure he sees it that way anymore.”

“Oh, he does. Believe me, he does.”

She shook her head. “I was going to say that I don’t think he likes the things that are strange about me. He likes the good strange all right, but he’s none too happy about the bad strange, and the bad strange is mostly what he gets these days. I was going to say that it’s ironic that you, who don’t seem to mind the bad strange, are not the person I’m married to.”

“You wouldn’t want to be married to me.”

“No, I’m sure it would be very bad. I’ve heard the stories.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, though not surprised.”

“Walter tells me everything.”

“I’m sure he does.”

Out on the lake a duck was quacking about something. Mallards nested in the reedy far corner of it.

“Did Walter ever tell you I slashed Blake’s snow tires?” Patty said.

Richard raised his eyebrows, and she told him the story.

“That’s really fucked up,” he said admiringly, when she’d finished.

“I know. Isn’t it?”

“Does Walter know this?”

“Um. Good question.”

“I take it you don’t tell him everything.”

“Oh, God, Richard, I don’t tell him anything.”

“You really could, I think. You might find he knows a lot more than you think he does.”

She took a deep breath and asked what kinds of secret things Walter knew about her.

“He knows you’re not happy,” Richard said.

“I really don’t think that requires great powers of discernment. What else?”

“He knows you blame him for Joey moving out of the house.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “That I have more or less told him. That doesn’t really count.”

“OK. So why don’t you tell me. Besides the fact that you’re a tireslasher, what does he not know about you?”

When Patty considered this question, all she could see was the great emptiness of her life, the emptiness of her nest, the pointlessness of her existence now that the kids had flown. The sherry had made her sad. “Why don’t you sing me a song while I get dinner on the table. Will you do that?”

“I don’t know,” Richard said. “Feels a little weird.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Just feels weird.”

“You’re a singer. That’s what you do. You sing.”

“I guess I’ve never had the sense that you particularly like what I sing.”

“Sing me ‘Dark Side of the Bar.’ I love that song.”

He sighed and bowed his head and crossed his arms and seemed to fall asleep.

“What?” she said.

“I think I’m going to leave tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”

“OK.”

“There’s not more than two days’ work left. The deck’s already usable as is.”

“OK.” She stood up and put the sherry glass in the sink. “Can I ask why, though? I mean, it’s really nice having you here.”

“It’s just better if I go.”

“OK. Whatever’s best. I think it’s another ten minutes with the chicken, if you want to set the table for us.”

He didn’t stir from the table.

“Molly wrote that song,” he said, after a while. “I really had no business recording it. It was a very schmucky thing of me to do. Deliberate, calculated schmuckiness on my part.”

“It’s really sad and pretty. What were you supposed to do? Not use it?”

“Basically, yeah. Not use it. That would have been the nice thing.”

“I’m sorry about the two of you. You guys were together a long time.”

“We were and we weren’t.”

“Right, I know that, but still.”

He sat brooding while she set the table, tossed the salad, and carved the chicken. She hadn’t thought she would have any appetite, but once she took a bite of chicken she remembered that she hadn’t eaten a thing since the evening before, and that her day had started at five in the morning. Richard also ate, silently. At a certain point, their silence became remarkable and thrilling, and then, a while after that, exhausting and discouraging. She cleared the table, put away the leftovers, washed the dishes, and saw that Richard had removed himself to the little screen porch to smoke cigarettes. The sun was finally gone, but the sky was still bright. Yes, she thought, it was better if he left. Better, better, better.

She went out on the screen porch. “Thinking of going to bed now and doing some reading,” she said.

Richard nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“The evenings are so long,” she said. “The light just doesn’t want to die.”

“This has been a great place to be. You guys are very generous.”

“Oh, that’s all Walter. It didn’t actually occur to me to offer it to you.”

“He trusts you,” Richard said. “If you trust him, everything will be fine.”

“Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.”

“Do you not want to be with him?”

It was a good question.

“I don’t want to lose him,” she said, “if that’s what you mean. I don’t spend my time thinking about leaving him. I’m kind of counting the days till Joey finally gets sick of the Monaghans. He’s still got a full year of high school.”

“Not sure exactly what the point of that is.”

“Just that I’m still committed to my family.”

“Good. It’s a great family.”

“Right, so I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Patty.” He put out his cigarette in the commemorative Danish Christmas bowl of Dorothy’s that he was using as an ashtray. “I’m not going to be the person who wrecks my best friend’s marriage.”

“No! God! Of course not!” She was nearly weeping with disappointment. “I mean, really, Richard, I’m sorry, but what did I say? I said I’m going to bed and I’ll see you in the morning. That’s all I said! I said I care about my family. That’s exactly what I said.”

He gave her a very impatient and skeptical look.

“Seriously!”

“OK, sure,” he said. “I didn’t mean to presume anything. I was just trying to figure out the tension here. You may recall we had a conversation like this once before.”

“I do recall that, yes.”

“So I thought it was better to mention it than not mention it.”

“That’s fine. I appreciate it. You’re a really good friend. And you shouldn’t feel you have to leave tomorrow on my account. Nothing to be afraid of here. No reason to run away.”

“Thanks. I might leave anyway, though.”

“That’s fine.”

And she went inside to Dorothy’s bed, which Richard had been using until she and Walter arrived to kick him out of it. Cool air was coming out of the places where it had hidden during the long day, but blue twilight was persisting in every window. It was dream light, insane light, it refused to go away. She turned a lamp on to diminish it. The resistance fighters had been exposed! The jig was up! She lay in her flannel pajamas and replayed everything she’d said in the last hours and was appalled by nearly all of it. She heard the toilet’s tuneful resonance as Richard emptied his bladder into it, and then the flush, and the tuneful water in the pipes, and the water pump laboring briefly in a lower voice. For sheer respite from herself, she picked up War and Peace and read for a long time.

The autobiographer wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn’t reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov, who was obviously meant for the goofy and good Pierre, falls in love with his great cool friend Prince Andrei. Patty had not seen this coming. Pierre’s loss unfolded, as she read it, like a catastrophe in slow motion. Things probably would not have gone any differently, but the effect those pages had on her, their pertinence, was almost psychedelic. She read past midnight, absorbed now even by the military stuff, and was relieved to see, when she turned the lamp off, that the twilight finally was gone.

In her sleep, at some still-dark hour after that, she rose from the bed and let herself into the hall and then into Richard’s bedroom and crawled into bed with him. The room was cold and she pressed herself close to him.

“Patty,” he said.

But she was sleeping and shook her head, resisting awakening, and there was no holding out against her, she was very determined in her sleep. She spread herself over and around him, trying to maximize their contact, feeling big enough to cover him entirely, pressing her face into his head.

“Patty.”

“Mm.”

“If you’re sleeping, you need to wake up.”

“No, I’m asleep… I’m sleeping. Don’t wake me up.”

His penis was struggling to escape his shorts. She rubbed her belly against it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, squirming beneath her. “You have to wake up.”

“No, don’t wake me up. Just fuck me.”

“Oh, Jesus.” He tried to get away from her, but she followed him amoebically. He grabbed her wrists to keep her at bay. “People who aren’t conscious: believe it or not, I draw the line there.”

“Mm,” she said, unbuttoning her pajamas. “We’re both asleep. We’re both having really great dreams.”

“Yes, but people wake up in the morning, and they remember their dreams.”

“But if they’re only dreams… I’m having a dream. I’m going back to sleep. You go to sleep, too. You fall asleep. We’ll both be asleep… and then I’ll be gone.”

That she could say all this, and not only say it but remember it very clearly afterward, does admittedly cast doubt on the authenticity of her sleep state. But the autobiographer is adamant in her insistence that she was not awake at the moment of betraying Walter and feeling his friend split her open. Maybe it was the way she was emulating the fabled ostrich and keeping her eyes firmly shut, or maybe the fact that she afterward retained no memory of specific pleasure, only an abstract awareness of the deed that had been done, but if she performs a thought experiment and imagines a phone ringing in the middle of the deed, the state she imagines being shocked into is one of awakeness, from which it logically follows that, in the absence of any ringing phone, the state she was in was a sleeping one.

Only after the deed was done did she wake up, in some alarm, and bethink herself, and betake herself quickly back to her own bed. The next thing she knew, there was light in the windows. She heard Richard getting up and peeing in the bathroom. She strained to decipher the sounds he then made-whether he was packing up his truck or going back to work. It sounded like he was going back to work! When she finally summoned the courage to come out of hiding, she found him kneeling behind the house, sorting a pile of scrap lumber. There was sun but it was a dim disk in thin clouds. A change in the weather was ruffling the surface of the lake. Without all the dazzle and dapple, the woods looked sparser and emptier.

“Hey, good morning,” Patty said.

“Morning,” Richard said, not looking up at her.

“Have you had breakfast? How about some breakfast? Can I make you some eggs?”

“I had some coffee, thanks.”

“I’ll make you some eggs”

He stood up and put his hands on his hips and surveyed the lumber, still not looking at her. “I’m straightening this up for Walter, so he knows what we’ve got here.”

“OK.”

“It’s going to take me a couple hours to pack up. You should just go about your day.”

“OK. Do you need any help?”

He shook his head.

“And you’re sure no breakfast?”

To this he made no response of any sort.

There came to her, with curious vividness, a kind of PowerPoint list of names in descending order of their owners’ goodness, topped naturally by Walter’s, which was followed closely by Jessica’s and more distantly by Joey’s and Richard’s, and then, way down in the cellar, in lonely last place, her own ugly name.

She took coffee to her room and sat listening to the sounds of Richard’s organizing, the rattle of nails being boxed, the rumble of tool chests. Late in the morning she ventured forth to ask if he might at least stay and have some lunch before he left. He assented, though not in a friendly way. She was too frightened to feel like crying, so she went and boiled some eggs for egg salad. Her plan or hope or fantasy, to the extent that she’d allowed herself to be conscious of having one, had been that Richard would forget his intention to leave that day, and that she would sleepwalk again the next night, and that everything would be pleasant and unspoken again the next day, and then more sleepwalking, and then another pleasant day, and then Richard would load up his truck and go back to New York, and much later in life she would recall the amazing intense dreams she’d had for a couple of nights at Nameless Lake, and safely wonder if anything had happened. This old plan (or hope, or fantasy) was now in tatters. Her new plan called for her to try very hard to forget the night before and pretend it hadn’t happened.

One thing the new plan can safely be said not to have included was leaving lunch half-eaten on the table and then finding her jeans on the floor and the crotch of her bathing suit wedged painfully to one side while he banged her into ecstasy against the innocently papered wall of Dorothy’s old living room, in full daylight and as wide awake as a human being could be. No mark was left on the wall there, and yet the spot remained clear and distinct forever after. It was a little coordinate of the universe permanently charged and altered by its history. It became, that spot, a quiet third presence in the room with her and Walter on the weekends they later spent alone here. This seemed to her, in any case, the first time in her life she’d properly had sex. A real eye-opener, as it were. She was henceforth done for, though it took some time to know this.

“OK, so,” she said when she was sitting on the floor with her head against the spot where her butt had been. “So, that was interesting.”

Richard had put his pants back on and was pacing around for no purpose. “I’m just going to go ahead and smoke inside your house if you don’t mind.”

“I think, under the circumstances, an exception will be granted.”

The day had turned fully overcast, with a cold breeze moving in through the screens and the screen door. All birdsong had ceased, and the lake seemed desolate. Nature waiting for the chill to pass.

“What are you wearing a bathing suit for anyway?” Richard said, lighting up.

Patty laughed. “I’d thought I might go for a swim after you left.”

“It’s freezing.”

“Well, not a long swim, obviously.”

“Just a little mortification of the flesh.”

“Exactly.”

The cold breeze and the smoke of Richard’s Camel were mixing like joy and remorse. Patty started laughing again for no reason and then found something funny to say.

“You may suck at chess,” she said, “but you’re definitely winning at the other game.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Richard said.

She couldn’t quite gauge his tone of voice, but, fearing that it was angry, she struggled to stop laughing.

Richard sat down on the coffee table and smoked with great determination. “We have to never do this again,” he said.

Another snicker broke out of her; she couldn’t help it. “Or maybe just a couple more times and then never again.”

“Yeah, where does that get us?”

“Conceivably the itch would be scratched, and that would be that.”

“Not the way it works, in my experience.”

“Well, I guess I have to defer to your experience, don’t I? Having none myself.”

“Here’s the choice,” Richard said. “We stop now, or you leave Walter. And since the latter is not acceptable, we stop now.”

“Or, third possibility, we could not stop and I could just not tell him.”

“I don’t want to live that way. Do you?”

“It’s true that two of the three people he loves most in the world are you and me.”

“The third being Jessica.”

“It’s some consolation,” Patty said, “that she would hate me for the rest of my life and totally side with him. He would always have that.”

“That’s not what he wants, and I’m not going to do it to him.”

Patty laughed again, at the thought of Jessica. She was a very good and painfully earnest and strenuously mature young person whose exasperation with Patty and Joey-her feckless mom, her ruthless brother-was seldom so extreme as not to seem comical. Patty liked her daughter a great deal and would in fact, realistically, be devastated to forfeit her good opinion. But she still couldn’t help being amused by Jessica’s opprobrium. It was part of how the two of them got along; and Jessica was too absorbed in her own seriousness to be bothered by it.

“Hey,” she said to Richard, “do you think it’s possible you’re homosexual?”

“You ask that now?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes guys who have to screw a million women are trying to prove something. Disprove something. And it’s sounding to me like you care more about Walter’s happiness than you do about mine.”

“Trust me on this one. I have no interest in kissing Walter.”

“No, I know. I know. But there’s still something I mean by that. I mean, I’m sure you’d get tired of me very soon. You’d see me naked when I’m forty-five, and you’d be thinking, Hmm. Do I still want this? I don’t think so! Whereas Walter you never have to get tired of, because you don’t feel like kissing him. You can just be close to him forever.”

“This is D. H. Lawrence,” Richard said impatiently.

“Yet another author I need to read.”

“Or not.”

She rubbed her tired eyes and her abraded mouth. She was, all in all, very happy with the turn things had taken.

“You’re really excellent with tools,” she said with another snicker.

Richard began to pace again. “Try to be serious, OK? Try hard.”

“This is our time right now, Richard. That’s all I’m saying. We have a couple of days, and we either use them or we don’t. They’re going to be over soon either way.”

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t think it through. I should have taken off yesterday morning.”

“All but one part of me would have been glad if you did. Admittedly, that one part is a fairly important part.”

“I like seeing you,” he said. “I like being around you. It makes me happy to think of Walter being with you-you’re that kind of person. I thought it would be OK to stay a couple of extra days. But it was a mistake.”

“Welcome to Pattyland. Mistakeland.”

“It didn’t occur to me that you would sleepwalk.”

She laughed. “That was kind of a brilliant stroke, wasn’t it?”

“Jesus. Cool it, OK? You’re annoying me.”

“Yeah, but the great thing is it doesn’t even matter. What’s the worst that can happen now? You’ll be annoyed with me and leave.”

He looked at her then, and he smiled, and the room filled (metaphorically) with sunshine. He was, in her opinion, a very beautiful man.

“I do like you,” he said. “I like you a lot. I always liked you.”

“Same back at you.”

“I wanted you to have a good life. Do you understand? I thought you were a person who was actually worthy of Walter.”

“And so that’s why you went off that night in Chicago and never came back.”

“It wouldn’t have worked in New York. It would have ended badly.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

Patty nodded. “So you actually wanted to sleep with me that night.”

“Yeah. A lot. But not just sleep with you. Talk to you. Listen to you. That was the difference.”

“Well, I guess that’s nice to know. I can cross that worry off my list now, twenty years later.”

Richard lit another cigarette and they sat there for a while, separated by a cheap old Oriental rug of Dorothy’s. There was a sighing in the trees, the voice of an autumn that was never far away in northern Minnesota.

“This is potentially kind of a hard situation, then, isn’t it,” Patty finally said.

“Yes.”

“Harder than I perhaps realized.”

“Yes.”

“Arguably better of me not to have sleepwalked.”

“Yes.”

She began to cry for Walter. They had spent so few nights apart over the years that she’d never had a chance to miss him and appreciate him the way she missed him and appreciated him now. This was the beginning of a terrible confusion of the heart, a confusion that the autobiographer is still suffering from. Already, there at Nameless Lake, in the unchanging overcast light, she could see the problem very clearly. She’d fallen for the one man in the world who cared as much about Walter and felt as protective of him as she did; anybody else could have tried to turn her against him. And even worse, in a way, was the responsibility she felt toward Richard, in knowing that he had nobody else like Walter in his life, and that his loyalty to Walter was, in his own estimation, one of the few things besides music that saved him as a human being. All this, in her sleep and selfishness, she had gone and jeopardized. She’d taken advantage of a person who was messed up and susceptible but nevertheless trying hard to maintain some kind of moral order in his life. And so she was crying for Richard, too, but even more for Walter, and for her own unlucky, wrongdoing self.

“It’s good to cry,” Richard said, “although I can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself.”

“It’s kind of a bottomless pit, once you get into it,” Patty snuffled. She was feeling suddenly cold in her bathing suit, and physically unwell. She went and put her arms around Richard’s warm, broad shoulders, and lay down with him on the Oriental rug, and so the long bright gray afternoon went.

Three times, altogether. One, two, three. Once sleeping, once violently, and then once with the full orchestra. Three: pathetic little number. The autobiographer has now spent quite a bit of her mid-forties counting and recounting, but it never adds up to more than three.

There is otherwise not much to relate, and most of what remains consists of further mistakes. The first of these she committed in concert with Richard while they were still lying on the rug. They decided together-agreed-that he should leave. They decided quickly, while they were sore and spent, that he should leave now, before they got themselves in any deeper, and that they would both then give the situation careful thought and come to a sober decision, which, if it should turn out to be negative, would only be more painful if he stayed any longer.

Having made this decision, Patty sat up and was surprised to see that the trees and the deck were soaked. The rain was so fine that she hadn’t heard it on the roof, so gentle that it hadn’t trickled in the gutters. She put on Richard’s faded red T-shirt and asked if she could keep it.

“Why do you want my shirt?”

“It smells like you.”

“That’s not considered a plus in most quarters.”

“I just want one thing that’s yours.”

“All right. Let’s hope it turns out to be the only thing.”

“I’m forty-two,” she said. “It would cost me twenty thousand dollars to get pregnant. Not to burst your bubble or anything.”

“I’m very proud of my zero batting average. Try not to wreck it, OK?”

“And what about me?” she said. “Should I be worried that I’ve brought some disease into the house?”

“I’ve had all my shots, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m usually paranoically careful.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

And so on. It was all very chummy and chatty, and in the lightness of the moment she told him that he had no excuse now not to sing her a song, before he left. He unpacked his banjo and plucked away while she made sandwiches and wrapped them in foil.

“Maybe you should spend the night and get an early start in the morning,” she called to him.

He smiled as if refusing to dignify this with an answer.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s raining, it’s going to get dark.”

“No chance,” he said. “Sorry. You will never be trusted again. It’s something you’re just going to have to live with.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” she said. “Why aren’t you singing? I want to hear your voice.”

To be nice to her, he sang “Shady Grove.” He had become, over the years, in defiance of initial expectations, a skilled and fairly nuanced vocalist, and he was so big-chested that he could really blow your house down.

“OK, I’m seeing your point,” she said when he finished. “This isn’t making things any easier for me.”

Once you get musicians going, though, they hate to stop. Richard tuned his guitar and sang three country songs that Walnut Surprise later recorded for Nameless Lake. Some of the lyrics were barely more than nonsense syllables, to be discarded and replaced with vastly better ones, but Patty was still so affected and excited by his singing, in a country mode she recognized and loved, that she began to shout in the middle of the third song, “STOP! OK! ENOUGH! STOP! ENOUGH! OK!” But he wouldn’t stop, and his absorption in his music made her feel so lonely and abandoned that she began to cry raggedly and finally to become so hysterical that he had no choice but to stop singing-though he was still unmistakably pissed off by the interruption!-and try, unsuccessfully, to calm her.

“Here are your sandwiches,” she said, dumping them into his arms, “and there’s the door. We said you were leaving, and so you’re leaving. OK? Now! I mean it! Now. I’m sorry I asked you to sing, MY FAULT AGAIN, but let’s try to learn from our mistakes, OK?”

He took a deep breath and drew himself up as if to deliver some pronouncement, but his shoulders slumped and he let the big statement escape from his lungs unspoken.

“You’re right,” he said, irritably. “I don’t need this.”

“We made a good decision, don’t you think?”

“Probably we did, yeah.”

“So go.”

And he went.

And she became a better reader. At first in desperate escapism, later in search of help. By the time Walter returned from Saskatchewan, she’d dispatched the remainder of War and Peace in three marathon reading days. Natasha had promised herself to Andrei but was then corrupted by the wicked Anatole, and Andrei went off in despair to get himself mortally wounded in battle, surviving only long enough to be nursed by Natasha and forgive her, whereupon excellent old Pierre, who had done some growing up and deep thinking as a prisoner of war, stepped forward to present himself as Natasha’s consolation prize; and lots of babies followed. Patty felt she’d lived an entire compressed lifetime in those three days, and when her own Pierre returned from the wilderness, badly sunburned despite religious slatherings of maximum-strength sunblock, she was ready to try to love him again. She picked him up in Duluth and debriefed him on his days with nature-loving millionaires, who had apparently opened their wallets wide for him.

“It’s incredible,” Walter said when they got home and he saw the almost-finished deck. “He’s here four months and he can’t do the last eight hours of work.”

“I think he was sick of the woods,” Patty said. “I told him he should just go back to New York. He wrote some great songs here. He was ready to go.”

Walter frowned. “He played you songs?”

“Three,” she said, turning away from him.

“And they were good?”

“Really good.” She walked down toward the lake, and Walter followed her. It wasn’t hard to keep her distance from him. Only at the very beginning had they been one of those couples who embraced and locked lips at every homecoming.

“You guys got along OK?” Walter asked.

“It was a little awkward. I was glad when he left. I had to drink a big glass of sherry the one night he was here.”

“That’s not so bad. One glass.”

Part of the deal she’d struck with herself was to tell Walter no lies, not even tiny ones; to speak no words that couldn’t narrowly be construed as truth.

“I’ve been reading a ton,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

“I’m jealous,” Walter said.

“Ah?”

“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

“You seem a little altered, actually.”

“Not in a bad way, I hope.”

“No. Just different.”

In bed with him that night, she took off her pajamas and was relieved to find she wanted him more, not less, for what she’d done. It was fine, having sex with him. There was nothing so wrong with it.

“We need to do this more,” she said.

“Any time. Literally any time.”

They had a sort of second honeymoon that summer, fueled by her contrition and sexual botheration. She tried hard to be a good wife, and to please her very good husband, but a full accounting of the success of her efforts must include the e-mails that she and Richard began to exchange within days of his departure, and the permission she somehow gave him, a few weeks after that, to get on a plane to Minneapolis and go up to Nameless Lake with her while Walter was hosting another V.I.P. trip in the Boundary Waters. She immediately deleted the e-mail with Richard’s flight information, as she’d deleted all the others, but not before memorizing the flight number and arrival time.

A week before the date, she repaired to the lake in solitude and gave herself entirely to her derangement. It consisted of getting stumbling drunk every evening, awakening later in panic and remorse and indecision, then sleeping through the morning, then reading novels in a suspended state of false calm, then jumping up and pacing for an hour or more in the vicinity of the telephone, trying to decide whether to call Richard and tell him not to come, and finally opening a bottle to make the whole thing go away for a few hours.

Slowly the remaining days ticked down toward zero. On the last night, she got vomiting drunk, fell asleep in the living room, and was jolted back to consciousness at a predawn hour. To get her hands and her arms to stop shaking enough to dial Richard’s number, she had to lie down on the still-ungrouted kitchen floor.

She reached his voice mail. He had found a new, smaller apartment a few blocks from his old one. All she could picture of this new place was a larger version of the black room of the apartment he’d once shared with Walter, the apartment she’d displaced him from. She dialed again, and again got his voice mail. She dialed a third time, and Richard answered.

“Don’t come,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

He said nothing, but she could hear him breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why don’t you call me again in a couple of hours. See how you feel in the morning.”

“I’ve been throwing up. Been vomiting.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Please don’t come. I promise I’ll stop bothering you. I think I just needed to push it to the limit before I could see that I can’t do it.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“It’s the right thing, isn’t it?”

“Probably. Yeah. It probably is.”

“I can’t do it to him.”

“Then good. I won’t come.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you to come. I’m just asking you not to.”

“I will do what you want.”

“No, God, listen to me. I’m asking you to do what I don’t want.”

Possibly, in Jersey City, New Jersey, he was rolling his eyes at this. But she knew that he wanted to see her, he was ready to take a plane in the morning, and the only way they could agree definitively that he shouldn’t come was to prolong the conversation for two hours, going around and around, performing the unresolvable conflict, until they both felt so dirtied and exhausted and sick of themselves and sick of each other that the prospect of getting together became genuinely unappetizing.

Not least among the ingredients of Patty’s misery, when they finally hung up, was her sense of wasting Richard’s love. She knew him to be a man supremely irritated by female bullshit, and the fact that he’d put up with two nonstop hours of hers, which was about 119 minutes more than he was constituted to put up with, filled her with gratitude and sorrow about the waste, the waste. The waste of his love.

Which led her-it almost goes without saying-to call him again twenty minutes later and drag him through a somewhat shorter but even more wretched version of the first call. It was a small preview of what she later did in a more extended way with Walter in Washington: the harder she worked to exhaust his patience, the more patience he showed, and the more patience he showed, the harder it was to let go of him. Fortunately Richard’s patience with her, unlike Walter’s, was nowhere close to infinite. He finally just hung up on her, and he didn’t answer when she called yet again, an hour later, shortly before the time she figured he had to leave for Newark Airport to catch his flight.

Despite having hardly slept, and despite having thrown up what little she’d eaten the day before, she felt immediately fresher and clearer and more energetic. She cleaned the house, read half of a Joseph Conrad novel Walter had recommended, and didn’t buy any more wine. When Walter came back from the Boundary Waters, she cooked a beautiful dinner and threw her arms around his neck and-a rarity-made him actually squirm a little with the intensity of her affection.

What she should have done then was find a job or go back to school or become a volunteer. But there always seemed to be something in the way. There was the possibility that Joey would relent and move back home for his senior year. There was the house and garden she’d neglected in her year of drunkenness and depression. There was her cherished freedom to go up to Nameless Lake for weeks at a time whenever she felt like it. There was a more general freedom that she could see was killing her but she was nonetheless unable to let go of. There was Parents’ Weekend at Jessica’s college in Philadelphia, which Walter couldn’t attend but was delighted that Patty showed an interest in attending, since he sometimes worried that she and Jessica weren’t close enough. And then there were the weeks leading up to that Parents’ Weekend, weeks of e-mails to and from Richard, weeks of imagining the Philadelphia hotel room in which they were going to spend one day and one night off the radar. And then there were the months of serious depression after Parents’ Weekend.

She’d flown to Philadelphia on a Thursday, in order to spend, as she carefully told Walter, an actual day on her own as a tourist. Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.

Unbelievable as it may sound, she had not been alone at a hotel since her time in Room 21, and she was very impressed with her plushly mod room at the Sofitel. She examined all the amenities carefully while she waited for Richard to arrive, and then examined them again as the appointed hour came and went. She tried to watch television but could not. She was a pile of nervous pulp by the time the phone finally rang.

“Something’s come up,” Richard said.

“All right. OK. Something’s come up. OK.” She went to the window and looked at Philadelphia. “What was it? Somebody’s skirt?”

“Cute,” Richard said.

“Oh, just give me a little time,” she said, “and I’ll give you every cliché in the book. We haven’t even started on jealousy yet. This is, like, Minute One of jealousy.”

“There’s nobody else.”

“Nobody? There’s been nobody? God, even I’ve been worse-behaved than that. In my own little marital way.”

“I didn’t say there haven’t been any. I said there isn’t one.”

She pressed her head against the window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just making me feel too old, too ugly, too stupid, too jealous. I can’t stand to hear what’s coming out of my mouth.”

“He called me this morning,” Richard said.

“Who?”

“Walter. I should have let it ring, but I picked up. He said he’d gotten up early to take you to the airport, and he was missing you. He said things have been really good with you guys. ‘Happiest in many years,’ I believe his phrase was.”

Patty said nothing.

“Said you were going out to see Jessica, Jessica secretly very happy about this, although worried that you might say something weird and embarrass her, or that you’re not going to like her new boyfriend. Walter all in all extremely happy that you’re doing this for her.”

Patty fidgeted there by the window, struggling to listen.

“Said he was feeling bad about some of the things he’d said to me last winter. Said he didn’t want me to have the wrong idea about you. Said last winter was terrible, because of Joey, but things are much better now. ‘Happiest in many years.’ I’m pretty sure that was the phrase.”

Some combination of gagging and sobbing produced a ridiculous painful burp from Patty.

“What was that?” Richard said.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“So, anyway.”

“Anyway.”

“I decided not to go.”

“Right. I understand. Of course.”

“Good, then.”

“But why don’t you just come down anyway. I mean, since I’m here. And then I can go back to my incredibly happy life, and you can go back to New Jersey.”

“I’m just telling you what he said.”

“My incredibly, incredibly happy life.”

Oh, the temptations of self-pity. So sweet to her, so irresistible to give voice to, and so ugly to him. She could hear precisely the moment she’d gone a step too far. If she’d kept her cool, she might have charmed and cajoled him into coming down to Philadelphia. Who knows? She might never have gone home again. But she fucked everything up with self-pity. She could hear him grow cooler and more distant, which made her feel even sorrier for herself, and so on, and so forth, until finally she had to get off the phone and give herself entirely to the other sweetness.

Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.

That evening in Philadelphia, there was a brief dismal episode: she went down to the hotel bar with the intention of picking somebody up. She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not. Also, the men just looked too stupid, and for the first time in a long while she started thinking about how it felt to be drunk and raped, and went back up to her mod room to enjoy further paroxysms of self-pity.

The next morning, she took a commuter train out to Jessica’s college in a state of neediness from which no good could come. Although she’d tried, for nineteen years, to do everything for Jessica that her own mother hadn’t done for her-had never missed a game of hers, had bathed her in approval, had familiarized herself with the intricacies of her social life, had been her partisan in every little hurt and disappointment, had involved herself deeply in the drama of her college applications-there was, as noted, an absence of true closeness. This was due partly to Jessica’s self-sufficient nature and partly to Patty’s overdoing things with Joey. It was to Joey, not Jessica, that she’d gone with her overflowing heart. But the door to Joey was closed and locked now, due to her mistakes, and she arrived on the beautiful Quaker campus not caring about Parents’ Weekend. She just wanted some private time with her daughter.

Unfortunately, Jessica’s new boyfriend, William, couldn’t take a hint. William was a good-natured blond Californian soccer player whose own parents weren’t visiting. He followed Patty and Jessica to lunch, to Jessica’s afternoon art-history lecture, and to Jessica’s dorm room, and when Patty then pointedly offered to take Jessica to dinner in the city, Jessica replied that she’d already made a local dinner reservation for three. At the restaurant, Patty listened stoically while Jessica prodded William to describe the charitable organization he’d founded while still in high school-some grotesquely worthy program wherein poor Malawian girls had their educations sponsored by soccer clubs in San Francisco. Patty had little choice but to keep drinking wine. Midway through her fourth glass, she decided that William needed to know that she herself had once excelled at intercollegiate sports. Since Jessica declined to supply the fact that she’d been second-team all-American, she was obliged to supply it herself, and since this sounded like bragging she felt she had to undercut it by telling the story of her groupie, which led to Eliza’s drug habits and lies about leukemia, and to the wrecking of her knee. She was speaking loudly and, she thought, entertainingly, but William, instead of laughing, kept glancing nervously at Jessica, who was sitting with her arms crossed and looking morose.

“And the point is what?” she said finally.

“Nothing,” Patty said. “I’m just telling you what things were like when I was in college. I didn’t realize you weren’t interested.”

“I’m interested,” William was kind enough to say.

“What’s interesting to me,” Jessica said, “is that I’d never heard any of this.”

“I’ve never told you about Eliza?”

“No. That must have been Joey.”

“I’m sure I’ve talked about it.”

“No, Mom. Sorry. You haven’t.”

“Well, anyway, now I’m talking about it, although maybe I’ve said enough.”

“Maybe!”

Patty knew she was behaving badly, but she couldn’t help it. Seeing Jessica and William’s tenderness with each other, she thought of herself at nineteen, thought of her mediocre schooling and her sick relationships with Carter and Eliza, and regretted her life, and pitied herself. She was falling into a depression that deepened precipitously the following day, when she returned to the college and endured a tour of its sumptuous grounds, a luncheon on the lawn of the president’s house, and an afternoon colloquium (“Performing Identity in a Multivalent World”) attended by scores of other parents. Everyone looked radiantly better-adjusted than she was feeling. The students all seemed cheerfully competent at everything, no doubt including sitting comfortably in a bar chair, and all the other parents seemed so proud of them, so thrilled to be their friends, and the college itself seemed immensely proud of its wealth and its altruistic mission. Patty really had been a good parent; she’d succeeded in preparing her daughter for a happier and easier life than her own; but it was clear from the other families’ very body language that she hadn’t been a great mom in the ways that counted most. While the other mothers and daughters walked shoulder to shoulder on the paved pathways, laughing or comparing cell phones, Jessica walked on the grass one or two steps ahead of Patty. The only role she offered Patty that weekend was to be impressed with her fabulous school. Patty did her utmost to play this role, but finally, in an access of depression, she sat down on one of the Adirondack chairs that dotted the main lawn and begged Jessica to come to dinner with her in the city without William, who, mercifully, had had a game that afternoon.

Jessica stood at some distance and regarded her guardedly. “William and I need to study tonight,” she said. “Normally I would have been studying all yesterday and today.”

“I’m sorry I kept you from that,” Patty said with depressive sincerity.

“No, it’s fine,” Jessica said. “I really wanted you to be here. I really wanted you to see where I’m spending four years of my life. It’s just that the workload’s pretty intense.”

“No, of course. It’s great. It’s great that you can handle that. I’m so proud of you. I really am, Jessica. I think the world of you.”

“Well, thank you.”

“It’s just-how about if we go to my hotel room? It’s a really fun room. We can order room service and watch movies and drink from the minibar. I mean, you can drink from the minibar, I’m not going to drink tonight. But just to have a girls’ night, just the two of us, for one night. You can study the whole rest of the fall.”

She kept her eyes on the ground, awaiting Jessica’s judgment. She was painfully aware of proposing something new for them.

“I really think I’d better work,” Jessica said. “I already promised William.”

“Oh, please, though, Jessie. One night’s not going to kill you. It would mean a lot to me.”

When Jessica did not reply to this, Patty forced herself to look up. Her daughter was gazing with desolate self-control at the main college building, on an outside wall of which Patty had noticed a stone graven with words of wisdom from the Class of 1920: USE WELL THY FREEDOM.

“Please?” she said.

“No,” Jessica said, not looking at her. “No! I don’t feel like it.”

“I’m sorry I drank too much and said those stupid things last night. I wish you’d let me make it up to you.”

“I’m not trying to punish you,” Jessica said. “It’s just, you obviously don’t like my school, you obviously don’t like my boyfriend-”

“No, he’s fine, he’s nice, I do like him. It’s just that I came here to see you, not him.”

“Mom, I make your life so easy for you. Do you have any idea how easy? I don’t do drugs, I don’t do any of the shit that Joey does, I don’t embarrass you, I don’t create scenes, I never did any of that-”

“I know! And I am truly grateful for it.”

“OK, but then don’t complain if I have my own life and my own friends and don’t feel like suddenly rearranging everything for you. You get all the benefits of me taking care of myself, the least you can do is not make me feel guilty about it.”

“Jessie, though, we’re talking about one night. It’s silly to make such a big deal of it.”

“Then don’t make a big deal of it.”

Jessica’s self-control and coolness toward her seemed to Patty a just punishment for how rule-bound and cold to her mother she herself had been at nineteen. She was feeling so bad about herself, indeed, that almost any punishment would have seemed appropriate to her. Saving her tears for later-feeling as if she didn’t deserve whatever emotional advantage she might have gained by crying, or by running off in a sulk to the train station-she exercised her own self-control and ate an early dining-hall dinner with Jessica and her roommate. She behaved like a grownup even though she felt that Jessica was the real grownup of the two of them.

Back in St. Paul, she continued her plunge down the mental-health mine shaft, and there were no more e-mails from Richard. The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty didn’t send him any e-mails, either, but it should be clear by now that her capacity for error, agonizing, and self-humiliation is boundless. The one message she feels OK about sending was written after Walter gave her the news that Molly Tremain had killed herself with sleeping pills in her Lower East Side apartment. Patty was her best self in that e-mail and hopes that it’s how Richard remembers her.

The rest of the story of what Richard was doing that winter and spring has been told elsewhere, notably in People and Spin and Entertainment Weekly after the release of Nameless Lake and the emergence of a “cult” of Richard Katz. Michael Stipe and Jeff Tweedy were among the worthies who came forward to endorse Walnut Surprise and confess to having been longtime closet Traumatics listeners. Richard’s scruffy, well-educated white male fans may not have been so young anymore, but quite a few of them were now influential senior Arts editors.

As for Walter, the resentment you feel when your favorite unknown band suddenly goes on everybody’s playlist was multiplied by a thousand. Walter was proud, of course, that the new record was named after Dorothy’s lake, and that so many of the songs had been written in that house. Richard had also mercifully crafted the lyrics of each song so that the “you” in them, who was Patty, could be mistaken for dead Molly; this was the angle that he directed interviewers to take, knowing that Walter read and saved every scrap of press his friend ever got. But Walter was mostly disappointed and hurt by Richard’s moment in the sun. He said he understood why Richard hardly ever called him anymore, he understood that Richard had a lot on his plate now, but he didn’t really understand it. The true state of their friendship was turning out to be exactly as he’d always feared. Richard, even when he seemed to be most down, was never really down. Richard always had his secret musical agenda, an agenda that did not include Walter, and was always ultimately making his case directly to his fans, and keeping his eyes on the prize. A couple of minor music journalists were diligent enough to phone Walter for interviews, and his name could be found in some out-of-the-way places, most of them online, but Richard, in the interviews that Walter read, referred to him simply as “a really good college friend,” and none of the big magazines mentioned him by name. Walter wouldn’t have minded getting a little more credit for having been so morally and intellectually and even financially supportive of Richard, but what really hurt him was how little he seemed to matter to Richard, compared to how much Richard mattered to him. And Patty of course couldn’t offer him her best proof of how much he actually did matter to Richard. When Richard managed to find time to connect with him on the phone, Walter’s hurt poisoned their conversations and made Richard that much less inclined to call again.

And so Walter became competitive. He’d been lulled into believing himself the big brother, and now Richard had set him straight yet again. Richard may have privately sucked at chess and long-term relationships and good citizenship, but he was publicly loved and admired and celebrated for his tenacity, his purity of purpose, his gorgeous new songs. It all made Walter suddenly hate the house and the yard and the small Minnesotan stakes he’d sunk so much of his life and energy into; Patty was shocked by how bitterly he belittled his own accomplishments. Within weeks of the release of Nameless Lake, he was flying to Houston for his first interview with the megamillionaire Vin Haven, and a month after that he began to spend his work weeks in Washington, D.C. It was obvious to Patty, if not to Walter himself, that his resolve to go to Washington and create the Cerulean Mountain Trust and become a more ambitious international player was fueled by competition. In December, when Walnut Surprise played with Wilco at the Orpheum on a Friday night, he didn’t even fly back to St. Paul in time to see them.

Patty gave that show a miss herself. She couldn’t bear to listen to the new record-couldn’t get past the past tense of the second song-

and so she did her best to follow Richard’s lead and relegate him to the past. There was something exciting, something almost Fiend of Athens, in Walter’s new energy, and she succeeded in hoping that the two of them might begin life afresh in Washington. She still loved the house on Nameless Lake, but she was done with the house on Barrier Street, which hadn’t been enough to hold Joey. She visited Georgetown for one afternoon, on a pretty blue fall Saturday when a Minnesotan wind was tossing the turning trees, and said, yeah, OK, I can do this. (Was she also conscious of the proximity of the University of Virginia, where Joey had just enrolled? Was her grasp of geography maybe not as bad as she’d always thought?) Incredibly, it was not until she actually arrived for good in Washington-not until she was crossing Rock Creek in a taxi with two suitcases-that she remembered how much she’d always hated politics and politicians. She walked into the house on 29th Street and saw, in a heartbeat, that she’d made yet another mistake.