Freedom [159]
“It’s interesting,” he said, drinking the rest of it right down. His head felt liable to detach from his neck and drift up to the ceiling like a party balloon.
“I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m—” in love with you, too. I’m horribly in love with you. “I’m in a hard position, honey,” he said. “I mean, not ‘honey.’ Not ‘honey.’ Lalitha. Honey. I’m in a hard position.”
“Maybe you should have another beer,” she said with a sly smile.
“You see, the thing is, I also love my wife.”
“Yes of course,” she said. But she wasn’t even trying to help him out. She arched her back like a cat and stretched forward across the table, displaying the ten pale nails of her beautiful young hands on either side of his salad plate, inviting him to touch them. “I’m so drunk!” she said, smiling up at him wickedly.
He glanced around the plastic dining room to see if his bathroom tormentor might be witnessing this. The guy was not obviously in sight, nor was anybody else staring unduly. Looking down at Lalitha, who was snuggling her cheek against the plastic tabletop as if it were the softest of pillows, he recalled the words of Richard’s prophecy. The girl on her knees, head bobbing, smiling up. Oh, the cheap clarity of Richard Katz’s vision of the world. A surge of resentment cut through Walter’s buzz and steadied him. To take advantage of this girl was Richard’s way, not his.
“Sit up,” he said sternly.
“In a minute,” she murmured, wiggling her outstretched fingers.
“No, sit up now. We’re the public face of the Trust, and we have to be aware of that.”
“I think you might have to take me home, Walter.”
“We need to get some food in you first.”
“Mm,” she said, smiling with closed eyes.
Walter stood up and ran down their waitress and asked to have their entrées boxed for takeout. Lalitha was still slumped forward, her half-finished third martini by her elbow, when he returned to the booth. He roused her and held her firmly by the upper arm as he led her outside and installed her in the passenger seat. Going back inside for the food, he encountered, in the glassed-in vestibule, his tormentor from the bathroom.
“Fucking dark-meat lover,” the guy said. “Fucking spectacle. What the fuck you doin’ around here?”
Walter tried to step around him, but the guy blocked his way. “Asked you a question,” he said.
“Not interested,” Walter said. He tried to push past but found himself shoved hard against the plate glass, shaking the framework of the vestibule. At that moment, before anything worse could happen, the inner door opened and the restaurant’s hard-bitten hostess asked what was going on.
“This person’s bothering me,” Walter said, breathing hard.
“Fucking pervert.”
“You going to have to take this off the premises,” the hostess said.
“I ain’t going nowhere. This pervo’s the one that’s leaving.”
“Then go back to your table and sit down and don’t use that kind of language with me.”
“Can’t even eat, he makes me so sick to my stomach.”
Leaving the two of them to sort things out, Walter went inside and found himself in the crosshairs of the murderously hateful gaze emanating from a heavyset young blonde, clearly his tormentor’s woman, who was alone at a table near the door. While he waited for his food, he wondered why it was tonight, of all the nights, that he and Lalitha had provoked this kind of hatred. They’d received a few stares now and then, mostly in smaller towns, but never anything like this. In fact, he’d been agreeably surprised by the number of black-white couples he’d seen in Charleston, and by the generally low priority of racism among the state’s many ailments. Most of West Virginia was too white for race to be a fore-front issue. He was forced to the conclusion that what had attracted the young couple’s attention was the guilt, his own dirty guilt, that had radiated from his booth. They didn’t hate Lalitha, they hated him. And he deserved it. When the food finally came out, his hands were shaking so much that he could hardly sign the credit-card slip.
Back at the Days Inn, he