Freedom [161]
And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.
He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way—if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn’t. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios, aware of how, in his case, the obsession was feeding on frustration with his wife and disappointment with his son. Probably, if he’d been truly alone in his anger, he couldn’t have stood it.
But Lalitha was with him every step of the way. She ratified his vision and shared his sense of urgency. In his initial interview with her, she’d told him about the family trip she’d taken back to West Bengal when she was fourteen. She’d been exactly the right age to be not merely saddened and horrified but disgusted by the density and suffering and squalor of human life in Calcutta. Her disgust had pushed her, on her return to the States, into vegetarianism and environmental studies, with a focus, in college, on women’s issues in developing nations. Although she’d happened to land a good job with the Nature Conservancy after college, her heart—like Walter’s own when he was young—had always been in population and sustainability issues.
There was, to be sure, a whole other side of Lalitha, a side susceptible to strong, traditional men. Her boyfriend, Jairam, was thick-bodied and somewhat ugly but arrogant and driven, a heart surgeon in training, and Lalitha was by no means the first attractive young woman whom Walter had seen parking her charms with a Jairam type in order to avoid being hit on everywhere she went. But six years of Jairam’s escalating nonsense seemed finally to be curing her of him. The only real surprise about the question she’d asked Walter tonight, the question about sterilization, was that she’d even felt the need to ask it.
Why, indeed, had she asked him?
He turned off the TV and paced her room to give the matter closer thought, and the answer came to him immediately: she’d been asking whether he might want to have a kid with her. Or maybe, more precisely, she’d been warning him that even if he wanted to, she might not.
And the sick thing was—if he was honest with himself—that he did want to have a baby with her. Not that he didn’t adore Jessica and, in a more abstract way, love Joey. But their mother was suddenly feeling very far away to him. Patty was a person who probably hadn’t even wanted very much to marry him, a person he’d first heard about from Richard, who had mentioned, one long-ago summer evening in Minneapolis, that the chick he was sleeping with was living with a basketball star who confounded his preconceptions of lady jocks. Patty had almost gone with Richard, and out of the gratifying fact that she hadn’t—that she’d succumbed to Walter’s love instead—had grown their entire life together, their marriage and their house and their kids. They’d always been a good couple but an odd couple; nowadays, more and more, they seemed simply ill matched. Whereas Lalitha was a genuine