As for Walter, the resentment you feel when your favorite unknown band suddenly goes on everybody’s playlist was multiplied by a thousand. Walter was proud, of course, that the new record was named after Dorothy’s lake, and that so many of the songs had been written in that house. Richard had also mercifully crafted the lyrics of each song so that the “you” in them, who was Patty, could be mistaken for dead Molly; this was the angle that he directed interviewers to take, knowing that Walter read and saved every scrap of press his friend ever got. But Walter was mostly disappointed and hurt by Richard’s moment in the sun. He said he understood why Richard hardly ever called him anymore, he understood that Richard had a lot on his plate now, but he didn’t really understand it. The true state of their friendship was turning out to be exactly as he’d always feared. Richard, even when he seemed to be most down, was never really down. Richard always had his secret musical agenda, an agenda that did not include Walter, and was always ultimately making his case directly to his fans, and keeping his eyes on the prize. A couple of minor music journalists were diligent enough to phone Walter for interviews, and his name could be found in some out-of-the-way places, most of them online, but Richard, in the interviews that Walter read, referred to him simply as “a really good college friend,” and none of the big magazines mentioned him by name. Walter wouldn’t have minded getting a little more credit for having been so morally and intellectually and even financially supportive of Richard, but what really hurt him was how little he seemed to matter to Richard, compared to how much Richard mattered to him. And Patty of course couldn’t offer him her best proof of how much he actually did matter to Richard. When Richard managed to find time to connect with him on the phone, Walter’s hurt poisoned their conversations and made Richard that much less inclined to call again.
And so Walter became competitive. He’d been lulled into believing himself the big brother, and now Richard had set him straight yet again. Richard may have privately sucked at chess and long-term relationships and good citizenship, but he was publicly loved and admired and celebrated for his tenacity, his purity of purpose, his gorgeous new songs. It all made Walter suddenly hate the house and the yard and the small Minnesotan stakes he’d sunk so much of his life and energy into; Patty was shocked by how bitterly he belittled his own accomplishments. Within weeks of the release of
Patty gave that show a miss herself. She couldn’t bear to listen to the new record—couldn’t get past the past tense of the second song—
and so she did her best to follow Richard’s lead and relegate him to the past. There was something exciting, something almost Fiend of Athens, in Walter’s new energy, and she succeeded in hoping that the two of them might begin life afresh in Washington. She still loved the house on Nameless Lake, but she was done with the house on Barrier Street, which hadn’t been enough to hold Joey. She visited Georgetown for one afternoon, on a pretty blue fall Saturday when a Minnesotan wind was tossing the turning trees, and said, yeah, OK, I can do this. (Was she also conscious of the proximity of the University of Virginia, where Joey had just enrolled? Was her grasp of geography maybe not as bad as she’d always thought?) Incredibly, it was not until she actually arrived for good in Washington—not until she was crossing Rock Creek in a taxi with two suitcases—that she remembered how much she’d always hated politics and politicians. She walked into the house on 29th Street and saw, in a heartbeat, that she’d made yet another mistake.
*It occurred to Patty, on the bus ride from Chicago to Hibbing, that maybe the reason Richard had spurned her was that she wasn’t into his music and he was annoyed by this. Not that there was anything she could have done about it.
2004
MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL
