She was sitting on the sofa in the dark, still wearing her black gym uniform, staring straight ahead, her hands clutching each other on her lap.
“Sorry,” Katz said. “Is this OK?”
“Yes,” she said, not looking at him. “But we should go downstairs.”
There was an unfamiliar tightness in his chest as he descended the back staircase again, an intensity of sexual anticipation that he didn’t think he’d felt since high school. Following him into the kitchen, Patty closed the door to the staircase behind her. She was wearing very soft-looking socks, the socks of somebody whose feet weren’t so young and well-padded anymore. Even without the boost of shoes, her height was the same agreeable surprise it had always been to him. One of his own song lyrics popped into his head, the one about her body being the body for him. It had come to this for old Katz: he was being moved by his own lyrics. And the body for him was still very nice, not actively displeasing in any way: the product, surely, of many hours of sweating at her gym. In white block letters on the front of her black T-shirt was the word lift.
“I’m going to have some chamomile tea,” she said. “Do you want some?”
“Sure. I don’t think I’ve ever had chamomile tea.”
“Ah, what a sheltered life you’ve lived.”
She went out to the office and came back with two mugs of instantly hot water with tea-bag labels dangling.
“Why didn’t you answer me when I went up the first time?” he said. “I’ve been sitting down here for two hours.”
“I guess I was lost in thought.”
“Did you think I was just going to go to bed?”
“I don’t know. I was sort of thinking without thinking, if you know what I mean. But I understood that you would want to talk to me, and I knew I had to do it. And so here I am.”
“You don’t have to do anything.”
“No, it’s good, we should talk.” She sat down across the farmer’s table from him. “Did you guys have a good time? Jessie said you went to a concert.”
“Us and about eight hundred twenty-one-year-olds.”
“Ha-ha-ha! You poor thing.”
“Walter enjoyed himself.”
“Oh, I’m sure he did. He’s quite the enthusiast about young people these days.”
Katz was encouraged by the note of discontent. “I take it you’re not?”
“Me? Safe to say no. I mean, my own children excepted. I do still like my own children. But the rest of them? Ha-ha-ha!”
Her thrilling, lifting laugh hadn’t changed. Underneath her new haircut, though, underneath her eye makeup, she was looking older. It only went in one direction, aging, and the self-protective core of him, seeing it, was telling him to run while he still could. He’d followed an instinct in coming down here, but there was a big difference, he was realizing, between an instinct and a plan.
“What don’t you like about them?” he said.
“Oh, well, where to begin?” Patty said. “How about the flipflop thing? I have some issues with their flipflops. It’s like the world is their bedroom. And they can’t even hear their own flap-flap-flapping, because they’ve all got their gadgets, they’ve all got their earbuds in. Every time I start hating my neighbors around here, I run into some G.U. kid on the sidewalk and suddenly forgive the neighbors, because at least they’re adults. At least they’re not running around in flipflops, advertising how much more laidback and reasonable they are than us adults. Than uptight me, who would prefer not to look at people’s bare feet on the subway. Because, really, who could object to seeing such beautiful toes? Such perfect toenails? Only a person who’s too unluckily middle-aged to inflict the spectacle of her own toes on the world.”
“I hadn’t particularly noticed the flipflops.”
“You really do lead a sheltered life, then.”
Her tone was somehow rote and disconnected, not teasing in a way that he could work with. Denied encouragement, his sense of anticipation was waning. He was beginning to dislike her for not being in the state he’d imagined he would find her in.
“And the credit-card thing?” she said. “Using a credit card to buy one hot dog or one pack of gum? I mean, cash is so yesterday. Right? Cash actually requires you to add and subtract. You actually have to pay attention to the person who’s giving you your change. Like, for one tiny little moment, you have to be less than one-hundred-percent cool and checked into your own little world. But not with a credit card you don’t. You just blandly hand it over and blandly take it back.”
“That’s more like what the crowd was tonight,” he said. “Nice kids, just a little self-absorbed.”
“You’d better get used to it, though, right? Jessica says you’re going to be up to your armpits in young people all summer.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“It sounded more like definitely.”
“Yeah, but I’m thinking of bailing. In fact, I already said so to Walter.”
Patty stood up to put their tea bags in the sink and remained standing, her back to him. “So this might be your only visit,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Well, then, I suppose I should be sorry I didn’t come down sooner.”
“You could always come up and see me in the city.”
“Right. If I’d ever been invited.”
“You’re invited now.”
She wheeled around with narrowed eyes. “Don’t play games with me, OK? I don’t want to see that side of you. It actually sort of makes me sick. OK?”
He held her gaze, trying to show her that he meant it—trying to feel that he meant it—but this seemed only to exasperate her. She retreated, shaking her head, to a far corner of the kitchen.
“How are you and Walter getting along?” he said unkindly.
“None of your business.”
“I keep hearing that. What does it mean?”
She blushed a little. “It means it’s none of your business.”
“Walter says not so great.”
“Well, that’s true enough. Mostly.” She blushed again. “But you just worry about Walter, OK? Worry about your best friend. You already made your choice. You made it very clear to me which one of us’s happiness you cared more about. You had your chance with me, and you chose him.”
Katz could feel himself beginning to lose his cool, and it was highly unpleasant. A pressure between his ears, a rising anger, a need to argue. It was like suddenly being Walter.
“You drove me away,” he said.
“Ha-ha-ha! ‘Sorry, I can’t go to Philadelphia even for one day, because of poor Walter’?”
“I said that for one minute. For thirty seconds. And you then proceeded, for the next hour—”
“To fuck it up. I know. I know I know I know. I know who fucked it all up. I know it was me! But, Richard, you knew it was harder for me. You could have thrown me a lifeline! Like, possibly, for that one minute, not talked about poor Walter and his poor tender feelings, but about me instead! That’s why I’m saying you already made your choice. You may not have even known you were doing it, but that’s what you did. So live with it now.”
“Patty.”
“I may be a fuckup, but if nothing else I’ve had some time to think in the last few years, and I’ve figured some things out. I have a little better idea of who you are, and how you work. I can imagine how hard it is for you that our little Bengali friend’s not interested in you. How terrrrribly destabilizing for you. What a topsy-turvy world this turns out to be! What a total bad trip! I guess you could still try working on Jessica, but good luck with that. If you really find yourself at a loss, your best bet may be Emily in the development office. But Walter’s not into her, so I don’t imagine she’ll be too interesting to you.”
Katz’s blood was up, he was all jittery-jangly. It was like coke cut heavily with nasty meth.
“I came down here for you,” he said.
“Ha-ha-ha! I don’t believe you. You don’t even believe it yourself. Y
ou’re such a bad liar.”
“Why else would I come down here?”
“I don’t know. Concern about biodiversity and sustainable population?”
He was remembering how unpleasant it had been to argue with her on the phone. How grossly unpleasant, how murderously trying to his patience. What he couldn’t remember was why he’d put up with it. Something about the way she’d wanted him, the way she’d come after him. A way that was missing now.
“I’ve spent so much time being mad at you,” she said. “Do you have any idea? I sent you all those e-mails that you never responded to, I had that whole humiliating one-sided conversation with you. Did you even read those e-mails?”
“Most of them.”
“Ha. I don’t know if that makes it worse or better. I guess it doesn’t even matter, since it was all in my head anyway. I’ve spent three years wanting a thing I knew would never make me happy. But that didn’t make me stop wanting it. You were like a bad drug I couldn’t stop craving. My whole life was like a kind of mourning for some evil drug I knew was bad for me. It was literally not until yesterday, when I actually saw you, that I realized I didn’t need the drug after all. It was suddenly like, ‘What was I thinking? He’s here for Walter.’ ”
“No,” he said. “For you.”
She wasn’t even listening. “I feel so old, Richard. Just because a person isn’t making good use of her life, it doesn’t stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker.”
“You don’t look old. You look great.”
“Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.”
“Come with me.”
She shook her head.
“Just come with me. We’ll go somewhere, and Walter can have his freedom.”
“No,” she said, “although it’s nice to hear you finally say that. I can apply it retroactively to the last three years and make an even better fantasy out of what might have been. It’ll enrich my already rather rich fantasy life. Now I can imagine staying home in your apartment while you do your world tour and fuck nineteen-year-olds, or going along with you and being you guys’s den mother—you know, milk and cookies at three a.m.—or being your Yoko and letting everybody blame me for how washed-up and bland you’ve gotten, and then throwing horrible scenes and letting you find out, the slow way, how bad it is to have me in your life. That should be good for months and months of daydreaming.”
“I don’t understand what it is you want.”
“Believe me, if I understood that myself, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I actually thought I did know what I wanted. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, but I thought I knew. And now you’re here, and it’s like no time at all has passed.”
“Except Walter’s falling for the girl.”
She nodded. “That’s right. And you know what? That turns out to be quite extraordinarily painful to me. Quite devastatingly painful.” Tears filled her eyes, and she turned quickly to hide the sight of them.
Katz had sat through some tearful scenes in his day, but this was the first time he’d had to watch a woman cry for love of somebody else. He didn’t like it one bit.
“So he came home from West Virginia on Thursday night,” Patty said. “I might as well tell you this, since we’re old friends, right? He came home from West Virginia on Thursday night, and he came up to my room, and what happened, Richard, was like the thing I’d always wanted. Always wanted. My entire adult life. I hardly even recognized his face! It was like he’d lost his mind. But the only reason I was getting it was that he was already gone. It was like a little farewell. A little parting gift, to show me what I was never going to have again. Because I’d made him too miserable for too long. And now he’s finally ready for something better, but he’s not going to have it with me, because I made him too miserable for too long.”
From what Katz was hearing, it sounded like he’d arrived forty-eight hours too late. Forty-eight hours. Incredible. “You can still have it,” he said. “Make him happy, be a good wife. He’ll forget the girl.”
“Maybe.” She touched the back of her hand to her eyes. “If I were a sane, whole person, that’s probably what I’d be trying to do. Because, you know, I used to want to win. I used to be a fighter. But I’ve developed some kind of allergy to doing the sensible thing. I spend my life jumping out of my skin with frustration at myself.”
“That’s what I love about you.”
“Oh, love now. Love. Richard Katz talking about love. This must be my signal that it’s time to go to bed.”
It was an exit line; he didn’t try to stop her. So firm was his faith in his instincts, however, that when he went upstairs himself, ten minutes later, he was still imagining that he might find her waiting in his bed. What he found instead, sitting on his pillow, was a thick, unbound manuscript with her name on the first page. Its title was “Mistakes Were Made.”
He smiled at this. Then he put a large plug of chew in his cheek and sat up reading, periodically spitting into a vase from the nightstand, until there was light in the window. He noted how much more interested he was in the pages about himself than in the other pages; it confirmed his long-standing suspicion that people ultimately only want to read about themselves. He noted further, with pleasure, that this self of his had genuinely fascinated Patty; it reminded him of why he liked her. And yet his clearest sensation, when he read the last page and let his now very watery wad plop into the vase, was of defeat. Not defeat by Patty: her writing skills were impressive, but he could hold his own in the self-expression department. The person who’d defeated him was Walter, because the document had obviously been written for Walter, as a kind of heartsick undeliverable apology to him. Walter was the star in Patty’s drama, Katz merely an interesting supporting actor.
For a moment, in what passed for his soul, a door opened wide enough for him to glimpse his pride in its pathetic woundedness, but he slammed the door shut and considered how stupid he’d been to let himself want her. Yes, he liked the way she talked, yes, he had a fatal weakness for a certain smart depressive kind of chick, but the only way he knew to interact with a chick like that was to fuck her, walk away, come back and fuck her again, walk away again, hate her again, fuck her again, and so forth. He wished he could go back in time now and congratulate the self he’d been at twenty-four, in that foul squat on the South Side of Chicago, for having recognized that a woman like Patty was meant for a man like Walter, who, whatever his other sillinesses might be, had the patience and imagination to handle her. The mistake that Katz had made since then had been to keep returning to a scene in which he was bound to feel defeated. Patty’s entire document attested to the exhausting difficulty of figuring out, in a scene like that, what was “good” and what wasn’t. He was very good at knowing what was good for him, and this was normally enough for every purpose in his life. It was only around the Berglunds that he felt that it was not enough. And he was sick of feeling that; he was ready to be done with it.
“So, my friend,” he said, “that’s the end of you and me. You won that one, old buddy.”
The light in the window was brightening. He went to the bathroom and flushed down his spit and the spent tobacco and then put the vase back where he’d found it. The clock radio showed 5:57. He packed up his things and went downstairs to Walter’s office with the document and left it in the center of his desktop. A little parting gift. Somebody had to clear the air around here, somebody had to put an end to the bullshit, and Patty obviously wasn’t up to it. And so she wanted Katz to do the dirty work? Well, fine. He was ready to be the nonpussy of the outfit. His job in life was to speak the dirty truth. To be the dick. He walked down the main hallway and out the front door, which had a spring-loaded lock. Its click, when he closed it behind him, sounded irrevocable. Good-bye to the Berglunds.
H
umid air had arrived in the night, dewing the cars of Georgetown and moistening the off-kilter panels of Georgetown sidewalk. Birds were active in the budding trees; an early-departing jet was crackling across the pale spring sky. Even Katz’s tinnitus seemed muted in the morning hush. This is a good day to die! He tried to remember who had said that. Crazy Horse? Neil Young?
Shouldering his bag, he walked downhill in the direction of sighing traffic and came eventually to a long bridge leading over to the center of American world domination. He stopped near the center of the bridge, looked down at a female jogger on the creek-side path far below, and tried to evaluate, from the intensity of the photonic interaction between her ass and his retinas, how good a day to die it really was. The height was great enough to kill him if he dove, and diving was definitely the way to do it. Be a man, go headfirst. Yes. His dick was saying yes to something now, and this something was certainly not the wideish ass of the retreating jogger.
Had death, in fact, been his dick’s message in sending him to Washington? Had he simply misunderstood its prophecy? He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother. He could go wherever Molly had gone before him, and his father before her. He peered down at the spot where he was likely to land, a much-trampled patch of gravel and bare dirt, and asked himself whether this nondescript bit of land was worthy of killing him. Him the great Richard Katz! Was it worthy?
He laughed at the question and continued across the bridge.
Back in Jersey City, he took arms against the sea of junk in his apartment. Opened the windows to the warm air and did spring cleaning. Washed and dried every dish, threw out bales of useless paper, and manually deleted three thousand pieces of spam from his computer, stopping repeatedly to inhale the marsh and harbor and garbage smells of the warmer months in Jersey City. After dark, he drank a couple of beers and unpacked his banjo and guitars, ascertaining that the torque in the neck of his Strat hadn’t magically fixed itself in its months in its case. He drank a third beer and called the drummer of Walnut Surprise.