Freedom полностью

“She’s working at a gym in Georgetown. Does that count as interesting?” Walter shook his head grimly. “I’ve been living with a depressed person for a very long time now. I don’t know why she’s so unhappy, I don’t know why she can’t seem to get out of it. There was a little while, around the time we moved to Washington, when she seemed to be doing better. She’d seen a therapist in St. Paul who got her started on some kind of writing project. Some kind of personal history or life journal that she was very mum and secretive about. As long as she was working on that, things weren’t so bad. But for the last two years they’ve been pretty much all bad. The plan had been for her to look for a job as soon as we got to Washington, and start some kind of second career, but it’s a little tough at her age with no marketable skills. She’s very smart and very proud, and she couldn’t stand being rejected and couldn’t stand being entry-level. She tried volunteering, doing afterschool athletics with the D.C. schools, but that didn’t work out, either. I finally got her to try an antidepressant, which I think would have helped her if she’d stuck with it, but she didn’t like the way it made her feel, and she really was pretty unbearable while she was on it. It gave her kind of a crankhead personality, and she quit before they got the cocktail adjusted right. And so finally, last fall, I more or less forced her to get a job. Not for my sake—I’m way overpaid, and Jessica’s out of school now, and Joey’s not my dependent anymore. But she had so much free time, I could see that it was killing her. And the job she chose to get was working at the reception counter of a gym. I mean, it’s a perfectly nice gym—one of my board members goes there, and at least one of my bigger donors. And there she is, there’s my wife, who’s one of the smartest people I know, scanning their membership cards and telling them to have a great workout. She’s also got a pretty serious exercise addiction going. She works out at least an hour a day, minimum—she looks great. And then she comes home at eleven with takeout, and if I’m in town we eat together, and she asks me why I’m still not having sex with my assistant. Sort of like what you just did, only not as graphically. Not as directly.”

“Sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“How could you? Who would think? I tell her the same thing every time, which is that she’s the person I love, she’s the person I want. And then we change the subject. Like, for the last couple of weeks—I think mainly to drive me crazy—she’s been talking about getting a boob job. It makes me want to cry, Richard. I mean, there is nothing wrong with her. Nothing on the outside. It’s totally crazy. But she says she’s going to die soon and she thinks it might be interesting, before she dies, to see what it’s like to have some chest. She says it might help her to have some goal to be saving up her money for, now that . . .” Walter shook his head.

“Now that what.”

“Nothing. She was doing something else with her money, before, that I thought was very bad.”

“Is she sick? Is there a medical problem?”

“No. Not physically. By dying soon I think she means in the next forty years. The way we’re all going to die soon.”

“I’m really sorry, man. I had no idea.”

A navigational beacon in Katz’s black Levi’s, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilty, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome. Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height. IT’S NOT OVER, IT’S NOT OVER. The parallels between his life and hers were really almost eerie: a brief period of creative productivity, followed by a major change that turned out to be a disappointment and a mess, followed by drugs and despair, followed by the taking of a stupid job. Katz had been assuming that his situation was simply that success had wrecked him, but it was also true, he realized, that his worst years as a songwriter had precisely coincided with his years of estrangement from the Berglunds. And, yes, he hadn’t given much thought to Patty in the last two years, but he could feel now, in his pants, that this was mainly because he’d assumed their story was over.

“How do Patty and the girl get along?”

“They don’t speak,” Walter said.

“So not buddies.”

“No, I’m saying they literally don’t speak to each other. Each of them knows when the other’s usually in the kitchen. They go out of their way to avoid each other.”

“And which one started that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“OK.”