Freedom [166]
“And you know this, and the newspaper doesn’t,” Patty said.
“That’s right.”
“And it’s not possible you’re wrong.”
“Not about coal versus wind or nuclear.”
“Well, maybe if you explain all this, the way you just did to me, then people will believe it and you won’t have any problems.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I don’t have all the facts.”
“But I have the facts, and I’m telling you! Why can’t you believe me? Why can’t you reassure me?”
“I thought that was Pretty Face’s job. I’m kind of out of practice since she took over. She’s so much better at it anyway.”
Walter ended the conversation before it could take an even worse turn. He turned off all the lights and got ready for bed by the parking-lot glow in the windows. Darkness was the only available relief from his state of flayed misery. He drew the blackout curtains, but light still leaked in at the base of them, and so he stripped the spare bed and used the pillows and covers to block out as much of it as he could. He put on a sleep mask and lay down with a pillow over his head, but even then, no matter how he adjusted the mask, there remained a faint suggestion of stray photons beating on his tightly shut eyelids, a less than perfect darkness.
He and his wife loved each other and brought each other daily pain. Everything else he was doing in his life, even his longing for Lalitha, amounted to little more than flight from this circumstance. He and Patty couldn’t live together and couldn’t imagine living apart. Each time he thought they’d reached the unbearable breaking point, it turned out that there was still further they could go without breaking.
One thunderstormy night in Washington, the previous summer, he’d set out to check a box on his dishearteningly long personal to-do list by setting up an online banking account, which he’d been intending to do for several years. Since moving to Washington, Patty had pulled less and less of her weight in the household, not even shopping for groceries anymore, but she did still pay the bills and balance the family checkbook. Walter had never scrutinized the checkbook entries until, after forty-five minutes of frustration with the banking software, he had the figures glowing on his computer screen. His first thought, when he saw the strange pattern of monthly $500 withdrawals, was that some hacker in Nigeria or Moscow had been stealing from him. But surely Patty would have noticed this?
He went upstairs to her little room, where she was chattering happily with one of her old basketball friends—she still showered laughter and wit on the people in her life who weren’t Walter—and gave her to understand that he wasn’t leaving until she got off the phone.
“It was cash,” she said when he showed her the printouts of account activity. “I wrote myself some checks for cash.”
“Five hundred a month? Near the end of every month?”
“That’s when I take my cash out.”
“No, you take two hundred every couple of weeks. I know what your withdrawals look like. And there’s also a fee