Freedom [182]
“You’re going to have a good life,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“You’ve got a good head. It’s great to see you again.”
“I know, you too,” she said. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw you. Maybe in high school?”
“You were working in a soup kitchen. Your dad took me down to see you there.”
“Right, my résumé-building years. I had about seventeen extracurricular activities. I was like Mother Teresa on speed.”
Katz helped himself to more of the pasta, which had olives and some sort of salad green in it. Yes, arugula: he was back safely in the bosom of the gentry. He asked Jessica what she would do if her parents split up.
“Wow, I don’t know,” she said. “I hope they don’t. Do you think they will? Is that what Dad says to you?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be joining the crowd then. Half of my friends are from broken homes. I just never saw it happening to us. Not until Lalitha came along.”
“You know, it takes two to tango. You shouldn’t blame her too much.”
“Oh, believe me, I’ll blame Dad, too. I will definitely blame him. I can hear it in his voice, and it’s just really . . . confusing. Just wrong. Like, I always thought I knew him really well. But apparently I didn’t.”
“And what about your mom?”
“She’s definitely unhappy about it, too.”
“No, but what if she were the one to leave? How would you feel about that?”
Jessica’s puzzlement at the question dispelled any notion that Patty had confided in her. “I don’t think she would ever do that,” she said. “Unless Dad made her.”
“She’s happy enough?”
“Well, Joey says she isn’t. I think she’s told Joey a lot of stuff she doesn’t tell me. Or maybe Joey just makes stuff up to be unpleasant to me. I mean, she definitely makes fun of Dad, all the time, but that doesn’t mean anything. She makes fun of everybody—I’m sure including me whenever I’m not around to hear it. We’re all very amusing to her, and it definitely annoys the shit out of me. But she’s really into her family. I don’t think she can imagine changing anything.”
Katz wondered if this could be true. Patty had told him herself, four years earlier, that she wasn’t interested in leaving Walter. But the prophet in Katz’s pants was insistently maintaining otherwise, and Joey was perhaps more reliable than his sister on the subject of their mother’s happiness.
“Your mom’s a strange person, isn’t she.”
“I feel bad for her,” Jessica said, “whenever I’m not being mad at her. She’s so smart, and she never really made anything of herself except being a good mom. The one thing I know for sure is I’m never going to stay home full-time with my kids.”
“So you think you want kids. The world population crisis not withstanding.”
She widened her eyes at him and reddened. “Maybe one or two. If I ever meet the right guy. Which doesn’t seem very likely to happen in New York.”
“New York’s a tough scene.”
“God, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I have never in my life felt so smallened and invisible and totally dissed as in the last eight months. I thought New York was supposed to be this great dating scene. But the guys are all either losers, jerks, or married. It’s appalling. I mean, I know I’m not a knockout or anything, but I think I’m at least worth five minutes of polite conversation. It’s been eight months now, and I’m still waiting for those five minutes. I don’t even want to go out anymore, it’s so demoralizing.”
“It’s not you. You’re a good-looking chick. You just may be too nice for New York. It’s a pretty naked economy there.”
“But how come there are so many girls like me? And no guys? Did the good guys all decide to go somewhere else?”
Katz cast his mind over the young males of his acquaintance in greater