Freedom полностью

“Obviously,” he said, “I’m too young to be your father, or almost too young, besides which, in any case, you have your own father. I was really just referring to your having asked me for fatherly advice. To my having, as your boss, and as a considerably older person, a certain kind of . . . solicitude toward you. ‘Fatherly’ in that respect. Not in some sort of taboo respect.”

This all sounded like patent nonsense even as he said it. His whole fucking problem was taboos. Lalitha, who seemed to know it, raised her lovely eyes and looked directly into his. “You don’t have to love me, Walter. I can just love you. All right? You can’t stop me from loving you.”

The chasm widened dizzyingly.

“I do love you!” he said. “I mean—in a sense. A very definite sense. I definitely do. A lot. A whole lot, actually. OK? I just don’t see where we can go with it. I mean, if we’re going to keep working together, we absolutely can’t be talking like this. This is already very, very, very, very bad.”

“Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “And you’re married.”

“Yes, exactly! Exactly. And so there we are.”

“There we are, yes.”

“Let me see about your drink.”

Love declared, disaster averted, he went looking for their waitress and ordered a third martini, heavy on the vermouth. His blush, which all his life had been a thing that constantly came and went, had now come without going. He lurched, hot-faced, into the men’s room and attempted to pee. His need was at once pressing and difficult to connect to. He stood at the urinal, taking deep breaths, and was finally at the point of getting things flowing when the door swung open and somebody came in. Walter heard the guy washing his hands and drying them while he stood with burning cheeks and waited for his bladder to overcome its shyness. He was again on the verge of success when he realized that the guy at the sinks was lingering deliberately. He gave up on peeing, wasted water with an unnecessary flush, and zipped up his pants.

“You might want to see a doctor, pal, about your urinary difficulties,” the guy at the sinks drawled sadistically. White, thirtyish, with hard living in his face, he was an exact match of Walter’s profile of the kind of driver who didn’t believe in turn signals. He stood near Walter’s shoulder while Walter hastily washed his hands and dried them.

“Like the dark meat, do you?”

“What?”

“Said I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.”

“She’s Asian,” Walter said, stepping around him. “If you’ll excuse me—”

“Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker, ain’t that right, pal?”

There was so much hatred in his voice that Walter, fearing violence, made his escape through the door without delivering a rejoinder. He hadn’t thrown a punch or absorbed one in thirty-five years, and he suspected that a punching would feel far worse at forty-seven than it had at twelve. His whole body was vibrating with unreleased violence, his head reeling with injustice, as he sat down to an iceberg-lettuce salad in the booth.

“How’s your beer?” Lalitha asked.

“It’s interesting,” he said, drinking the rest of it right down. His head felt liable to detach from his neck and drift up to the ceiling like a party balloon.

“I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m—” in love with you, too. I’m horribly in love with you. “I’m in a hard position, honey,” he said. “I mean, not ‘honey.’ Not ‘honey.’ Lalitha. Honey. I’m in a hard position.”

“Maybe you should have another beer,” she said with a sly smile.

“You see, the thing is, I also love my wife.”

“Yes of course,” she said. But she wasn’t even trying to help him out. She arched her back like a cat and stretched forward across the table, displaying the ten pale nails of her beautiful young hands on either side of his salad plate, inviting him to touch them. “I’m so drunk!” she said, smiling up at him wickedly.

He glanced around the plastic dining room to see if his bathroom tormentor might be witnessing this. The guy was not obviously in sight, nor was anybody else staring unduly. Looking down at Lalitha, who was snuggling her cheek against the plastic tabletop as if it were the softest of pillows, he recalled the words of Richard’s prophecy. The girl on her knees, head bobbing, smiling up. Oh, the cheap clarity of Richard Katz’s vision of the world. A surge of resentment cut through Walter’s buzz and steadied him. To take advantage of this girl was Richard’s way, not his.

“Sit up,” he said sternly.

“In a minute,” she murmured, wiggling her outstretched fingers.

“No, sit up now. We’re the public face of the Trust, and we have to be aware of that.”

“I think you might have to take me home, Walter.”

“We need to get some food in you first.”

“Mm,” she said, smiling with closed eyes.