“Walter. I should have let it ring, but I picked up. He said he’d gotten up early to take you to the airport, and he was missing you. He said things have been really good with you guys. ‘Happiest in many years,’ I believe his phrase was.”
Patty said nothing.
“Said you were going out to see Jessica, Jessica secretly very happy about this, although worried that you might say something weird and embarrass her, or that you’re not going to like her new boyfriend. Walter all in all extremely happy that you’re doing this for her.”
Patty fidgeted there by the window, struggling to listen.
“Said he was feeling bad about some of the things he’d said to me last winter. Said he didn’t want me to have the wrong idea about you. Said last winter was terrible, because of Joey, but things are much better now. ‘Happiest in many years.’ I’m pretty sure that was the phrase.”
Some combination of gagging and sobbing produced a ridiculous painful burp from Patty.
“What was
“Nothing. Sorry.”
“So, anyway.”
“Anyway.”
“I decided not to go.”
“Right. I understand. Of course.”
“Good, then.”
“But why don’t you just come down anyway. I mean, since I’m here. And then I can go back to my incredibly happy life, and you can go back to New Jersey.”
“I’m just telling you what he said.”
“My incredibly, incredibly happy life.”
Oh, the temptations of self-pity. So sweet to her, so irresistible to give voice to, and so ugly to him. She could hear precisely the moment she’d gone a step too far. If she’d kept her cool, she might have charmed and cajoled him into coming down to Philadelphia. Who knows? She might never have gone home again. But she fucked everything up with self-pity. She could hear him grow cooler and more distant, which made her feel even sorrier for herself, and so on, and so forth, until finally she had to get off the phone and give herself entirely to the other sweetness.
Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.
That evening in Philadelphia, there was a brief dismal episode: she went down to the hotel bar with the intention of picking somebody up. She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not. Also, the men just looked too
The next morning, she took a commuter train out to Jessica’s college in a state of neediness from which no good could come. Although she’d tried, for nineteen years, to do everything for Jessica that her own mother hadn’t done for her—had never missed a game of hers, had bathed her in approval, had familiarized herself with the intricacies of her social life, had been her partisan in every little hurt and disappointment, had involved herself deeply in the drama of her college applications—there was, as noted, an absence of true closeness. This was due partly to Jessica’s self-sufficient nature and partly to Patty’s overdoing things with Joey. It was to Joey, not Jessica, that she’d gone with her overflowing heart. But the door to Joey was closed and locked now, due to her mistakes, and she arrived on the beautiful Quaker campus not caring about Parents’ Weekend. She just wanted some private time with her daughter.
