Freedom полностью

“I hope you like walnuts,” the baker girl said.

“Ah, I getcha,” Katz said.

A confused silence fell. Helicopter rotors were pounding the lower Manhattan airspace, the wind doing funny things with the sound.

“We’re just big fans of Nameless Lake,” Caitlyn said. “We heard you were building a deck up here.”

“Well, as you see, your friend Zachary’s as good as his word.”

Zachary was rocking the Trex board with his orange sneakers, affecting impatience to be alone with Katz again, and thus evincing some good basic pickup skills.

“Zachary’s a great young musician,” Katz said. “I wholeheartedly endorse him. He’s a talent to watch.”

The girls turned their heads toward Zachary with a kind of sad boredom.

“Seriously,” Katz said. “You should get him to go downstairs with you and listen to him play.”

“We’re actually more into alt country,” Caitlyn said. “Not so much boy rock.”

“He’s got some great country licks,” Katz persisted.

Caitlyn squared her shoulders, aligning her posture like a dancer, and gazed at him steadily, as if to give him a chance to amend the indifference he was showing her. She clearly wasn’t used to indifference. “Why are you building a deck?” she said.

“For fresh air and exercise.”

“Why do you need exercise? You look pretty fit.”

Katz felt very, very tired. To be unable to bring himself to play for even ten seconds the game that Caitlyn was interested in playing with him was to understand the allure of death. To die would be the cleanest cutting of his connection to the thing—the girl’s idea of Richard Katz—that was burdening him. Away to the southwest of where they were standing stood the massive Eisenhower-era utility building that marred the nineteenth-century architectural vistas of almost every Tribecan loft-dweller. Once upon a time, the building had offended Katz’s urban aesthetic, but now it pleased him by offending the urban aesthetic of the millionaires who’d taken over the neighborhood. It loomed like death over the excellent lives being lived down here; it had become something of a friend of his.

“Let’s have a look at that banana bread,” he said to the pudgy girl.

“I also brought you some wintergreen Chiclets,” she said.

“Why don’t I autograph the box for you, and you can keep it.”

“That would be awesome!”

He took a Sharpie from a toolbox. “What’s your name?”

“Sarah.”

“It’s great to meet you, Sarah. I’m going to take your banana bread home and have it for dessert tonight.”

Caitlyn briefly, with something like moral outrage, observed this dissing of her pretty self. Then she walked over to Zachary, trailed by the other girl. And here, Katz thought, was a concept: instead of trying to fuck the girls he hated, why not simply snub them for real? To keep his attention on Sarah and away from the magnetic Caitlyn, he took out the tin of Skoal that he’d bought to give his lungs a break from cigarettes, and inserted a big pinch of it between gum and cheek.

“Can I try some of that?” the emboldened Sarah said.

“It’ll make you sick.”

“But, like, one shred?”

Katz shook his head and pocketed the tin, whereupon Sarah asked if she could fire the nail gun. She was like a walking advertisement of the late-model parenting she’d received: You have permission to ask for things! Just because you aren’t pretty doesn’t mean you don’t! Your offerings, if you’re bold enough to make them, will be welcomed by the world! In her own way, she was just as tiring as Caitlyn. Katz wondered if he’d been this tiring himself at eighteen, or whether, as it now seemed to him, his anger at the world—his perception of the world as a hostile adversary, worthy of his anger—had made him more interesting than these young paragons of self-esteem.

He let Sarah fire the nail gun (she shrieked at its recoil and nearly dropped it) and then sent her on her way. Caitlyn had been snubbed so effectively that she didn’t even say good-bye but simply followed Zachary downstairs. Katz wandered over to the master-bedroom skylight in hopes of glimpsing Zachary’s mother, but all he saw was the DUX bed, the Eric Fischl canvas, the flat-screen TV.