Freedom [103]
He did, however, check his voice mail.
Richard? It’s Walter—Berglund. I don’t know if you’re there, you’re probably not even in the country, but I’m wondering if you might be around tomorrow. I’m going up to New York on business, and I have a little proposal for you. Sorry about the late notice. I’m mostly just saying hi. Patty says hi, too. Hope everything’s OK with you!
To delete this message, press 3.
It was two years since Katz had heard from Walter. As the silence had lengthened, he’d begun to think that Patty, in a moment of stupidity or misery, had confessed to her husband what had happened at Nameless Lake. Walter, with his feminism, his infuriating reverse double standard, would quickly have forgiven Patty and left Katz alone to bear the blame for the betrayal. It was a funny thing about Walter: circumstances kept conspiring to make Katz, who otherwise feared nobody, feel lessened and intimidated by him. In renouncing Patty, sacrificing his own pleasure and brutally disappointing her in order to preserve her marriage, he’d risen momentarily to the level of Walter’s excellence, but all he’d gotten for his trouble was envy of his friend for his unexamined possession of his wife. He’d tried to pretend that he was doing the Berglunds a favor by ceasing communication with them, but mainly he just hadn’t wanted to hear that they were happy and securely married.
Katz couldn’t have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable age, before the contours of his personality were fully set. Walter had slipped into his life before he’d shut the door on the world of ordinary people and cast his lot with misfits and dropouts. Not that Walter was so ordinary himself. He was at once hopelessly naïve and very shrewd and dogged and well-informed. And then there was the complication of Patty, who, although she’d long tried hard to pretend otherwise, was even less ordinary than Walter, and then the further complication of Katz’s being no less attracted to Patty than Walter was, and arguably more attracted to Walter than Patty was. This was definitely a weird one. No other man had warmed Katz’s loins the way the sight of Walter did after long absence. These groinal heatings were no more about literal sex, no more homo, than the hard-ons he got from a long-anticipated first snort of blow, but there was definitely something deep-chemical there. Something that insisted on being called love. Katz had enjoyed seeing the Berglunds as their family grew, enjoyed knowing them, enjoyed knowing they were out there in the Midwest, having a good life that he could drop in on when he wasn’t feeling great. And then he’d wrecked it by letting himself spend a night alone in a summer house with a former basketball player who was skilled at scooting through narrow lanes of opportunity. What had been his diffusely warm world of domestic refuge had collapsed, overnight, into the hot, hungry microcosm of Patty’s cunt. Which he still couldn’t believe he’d had such cruelly fleeting access to.
Patty says hi, too.
“Yeah, fuck that,” Katz said, eating gyro. But as soon as he’d replaced his appetite with a