Freedom [178]
Katz’s susceptibility to women over thirty-five was a source of some embarrassment. It felt sad and a little sick in the way it seemed to reference his own lunatic and absent mother, but there was no altering the basic wiring of his brain. The kiddies were perennially enticing and perennially unsatisfying in much the same way that coke was unsatisfying: whenever he was off it, he remembered it as fantastic and unbeatable and craved it, but as soon as he was on it again he remembered that it wasn’t fantastic at all, it was sterile and empty: neuro-mechanistic, death-flavored. Nowadays especially, the young chicks were hyperactive in their screwing, hurrying through every position known to the species, doing this that and the other, their kiddie snatches too unfragrant and closely shaved to even register as human body parts. He remembered more detail from his few hours with Patty Berglund than he did from a decade’s worth of kiddies. Of course, he’d known Patty forever and been attracted to her forever; long anticipation had certainly been a factor. But there was also just something intrinsically more human about her than about the youngsters. More difficult, more involving, more worth having. And now that his prophetic dick, his divining rod, was again pointing him in her direction, he was at a loss to recall why he hadn’t taken fuller advantage of his opportunity with her. Some misguided notion of niceness, now incomprehensible to him, had prevented him from going to her hotel in Philadelphia and helping himself to more of her. Having betrayed Walter once, in the chilly middle of a northern night, he should have gone ahead and done it another hundred times and got it out of his system. The evidence of how much he’d wanted to do this was right there in the songs he’d written for Nameless Lake. He’d turned his ungratified desire into art. But now, having made that art and reaped its dubious rewards, he had no reason to keep renouncing a thing he still wanted. And if Walter were then, in turn, to feel entitled to the Indian chick, and stop being such a moralistic irritant, so much the better for all concerned.
He took a Friday-evening train to Washington from Newark. He still wasn’t able to listen to music, but his non-Apple MP3 player was loaded with a track of pink noise—white noise frequency-shifted toward the bass end and capable of neutralizing every ambient sound the world could throw at him—and by donning big cushioned headphones and angling himself toward the window and holding a Bernhard novel close to his face, he was able to achieve complete privacy until the train stopped in Philly. Here a white couple in their early twenties, wearing white T-shirts and eating white ice cream from waxed-paper cups, settled into the newly vacated seats in front of him. The extreme white of their T-shirts seemed to him the color of the Bush regime. The chick immediately reclined her seat into his space, and when she finished her ice cream, a few minutes later, she tossed the cup and spoon back under her seat, where his feet were.
With a heavy sigh, he removed his headphones, stood up, and dropped the cup on her lap.
“Jesus!” she cried with scalding disgust.
“Hey, man, what the fuck?” her resplendently white companion said.
“You dropped this on my feet,” Katz said.
“She didn’t throw it on your lap.”
“That is a pretty amazing accomplishment,” Katz said. “To sound self-righteous about your girlfriend dropping a wet ice-cream container on somebody else’s feet.”
“This is a public train,” the girl said. “You should take a private jet if you can’t deal with other people.”
“Yeah, I’ll try to remember to do that next time.”
The rest of the way to Washington, the couple kept lunging against their seat backs, attempting to push them past their limits and farther