Freedom полностью

Jessica smiled at Katz tightly, in a very unhappy way. “My parents have a lot of problems. Their marriage has a lot of problems. You don’t have to be a psychic to see that. Like, my mom’s been really depressed. For years. And she can’t get out of it. But they love each other, I know they love each other, and it just really bothers me to see what’s happening here. If she would just leave—I mean, Lalitha—if she would just leave, so my mom could have a chance again . . .”

“You and your mom are close?”

“No. Not really.”

Katz ate in silence and waited to hear more. He seemed, luckily, to have caught Jessica in a mood to disclose things to the nearest bystander.

“I mean, she tries,” she said. “But she’s got a real gift for saying the wrong thing. She doesn’t respect my judgment. Like, that I’m a basically intelligent adult who can think for herself? My boyfriend in college, he was incredibly sweet, and she was just horrible to him. It was like she was afraid I was going to marry him, and so she constantly had to be making fun of him. He was my first real boyfriend, and I just wanted to have some time to enjoy that, but she wouldn’t leave it alone. There was this time when William and I came down for the weekend, to go to the museums and do a gay-marriage march. We were staying here, and she started asking him if he liked it when girls flashed their breasts at frat parties. She’d read some stupid article in the newspaper about boys shouting at girls to show their breasts. And I’m like, no, Mother, I’m not at Virginia. We don’t have frats at my college, that’s just some stupid Stone-Aged thing that kids do in the South, I don’t go to Florida for spring break, we’re not like the people in your stupid article. But she wouldn’t leave it alone. She kept asking William how he felt about other girls’ breasts. And kept acting surprised when he said he wasn’t interested. She knew he was being sincere, not to mention incredibly embarrassed that his girlfriend’s mother was talking about breasts, but she acted like she didn’t believe him. To her, the whole thing was a joke. She wanted me to laugh at William. Who, yes, was a little hard to take sometimes. But, like, can I have a chance to figure that out for myself?”

“So she cares about you. She didn’t want you marrying the wrong guy.”

“I wasn’t going to marry him! That’s the thing!”

Katz’s eyes were drawn to the breasts that were mostly concealed by Jessica’s tightly crossed arms. She was small-chested like her mother but less well proportioned. What he was feeling now was that his love of Patty applied by extension to her daughter, minus the wish to fuck her. He could see what Walter had meant about her being a young person who gave an older person hope about the future. Her lights all seemed definitely to be on.

“You’re going to have a good life,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve got a good head. It’s great to see you again.”

“I know, you too,” she said. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw you. Maybe in high school?”

“You were working in a soup kitchen. Your dad took me down to see you there.”

“Right, my résumé-building years. I had about seventeen extracurricular activities. I was like Mother Teresa on speed.”

Katz helped himself to more of the pasta, which had olives and some sort of salad green in it. Yes, arugula: he was back safely in the bosom of the gentry. He asked Jessica what she would do if her parents split up.

“Wow, I don’t know,” she said. “I hope they don’t. Do you think they will? Is that what Dad says to you?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be joining the crowd then. Half of my friends are from broken homes. I just never saw it happening to us. Not until Lalitha came along.”

“You know, it takes two to tango. You shouldn’t blame her too much.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ll blame Dad, too. I will definitely blame him. I can hear it in his voice, and it’s just really . . . confusing. Just wrong. Like, I always thought I knew him really well. But apparently I didn’t.”

“And what about your mom?”

“She’s definitely unhappy about it, too.”

“No, but what if she were the one to leave? How would you feel about that?”

Jessica’s puzzlement at the question dispelled any notion that Patty had confided in her. “I don’t think she would ever do that,” she said. “Unless Dad made her.”

“She’s happy enough?”

“Well, Joey says she isn’t. I think she’s told Joey a lot of stuff she doesn’t tell me. Or maybe Joey just makes stuff up to be unpleasant to me. I mean, she definitely makes fun of Dad, all the time, but that doesn’t mean anything. She makes fun of everybody—I’m sure including me whenever I’m not around to hear it. We’re all very amusing to her, and it definitely annoys the shit out of me. But she’s really into her family. I don’t think she can imagine changing anything.”