Freedom [158]
“I do advise you not to.”
“Please order me one anyway.”
A chasm was opening in front of Walter, available for immediate jumping into. He was shocked by how quickly such a thing could open up in front of him. The only other time—or, no, no, no, the only time—he’d fallen in love, he’d taken the better part of a year before acting on it, and even then Patty had ended up doing most of the heavy lifting for him. Now it appeared that these things could be managed in a matter of minutes. Just a few more heedless words, another slug of beer, and God only knew . . .
“I just meant,” he said, “that I might have led you too much into overpopulation. Into being crazy about it. With my own stupid anger, my own issues. I wasn’t trying to say anything larger than that.”
She nodded. Tiny pearls of tear were clinging to her eyelashes.
“I feel very fatherly toward you,” he babbled.
“I understand.”
But fatherly was also wrong—too foreclosing of the kind of love that it was still too painful to admit he was never going to allow himself.
“Obviously,” he said, “I’m too young to be your father, or almost too young, besides which, in any case, you have your own father. I was really just referring to your having asked me for fatherly advice. To my having, as your boss, and as a considerably older person, a certain kind of . . . solicitude toward you. ‘Fatherly’ in that respect. Not in some sort of taboo respect.”
This all sounded like patent nonsense even as he said it. His whole fucking problem was taboos. Lalitha, who seemed to know it, raised her lovely eyes and looked directly into his. “You don’t have to love me, Walter. I can just love you. All right? You can’t stop me from loving you.”
The chasm widened dizzyingly.
“I do love you!” he said. “I mean—in a sense. A very definite sense. I definitely do. A lot. A whole lot, actually. OK? I just don’t see where we can go with it. I mean, if we’re going to keep working together, we absolutely can’t be talking like this. This is already very, very, very, very bad.”
“Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “And you’re married.”
“Yes, exactly! Exactly. And so there we are.”
“There we are, yes.”
“Let me see about your drink.”
Love declared, disaster averted, he went looking for their waitress and ordered a third martini, heavy on the vermouth. His blush, which all his life had been a thing that constantly came and went, had now come without going. He lurched, hot-faced, into the men’s room and attempted to pee. His need was at once pressing and difficult to connect to. He stood at the urinal, taking deep breaths, and was finally at the point of getting things flowing when the door swung open and somebody came in. Walter heard the guy washing his hands and drying them while he stood with burning cheeks and waited for his bladder to overcome its shyness. He was again on the verge of success when he realized that the guy at the sinks was lingering deliberately. He gave up on peeing, wasted water with an unnecessary flush, and zipped up his pants.
“You might want to see a doctor, pal, about your urinary difficulties,” the guy at the sinks drawled sadistically. White, thirtyish, with hard living in his face, he was an exact match of Walter’s profile of the kind of driver who didn’t believe in turn signals. He stood near Walter’s shoulder while Walter hastily washed his hands and dried them.
“Like the dark meat, do you?”
“What?”
“Said I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.”
“She’s Asian,” Walter said, stepping around him. “If you’ll excuse me—”
“Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker, ain’t that right, pal?”
There was so much hatred in his voice that Walter, fearing violence, made his escape through the door without delivering a rejoinder. He hadn’t thrown a punch or absorbed one in thirty-five years, and he suspected that a punching would feel far worse at forty-seven than it had at twelve. His whole body was vibrating with unreleased violence, his head reeling with injustice, as he sat down to an iceberg-lettuce salad in the booth.
“How’s your beer?” Lalitha asked.