Freedom [183]
“I would just like to have one nice date.”
He was regretting having told her she was good-looking. It had sounded faintly like a come-on, and he hoped she hadn’t taken it that way. Unfortunately, it seemed as if she had.
“Are you really an asshole?” she said. “Or were you just saying that?”
The note of flirtatious provocation was alarming and needed to be nipped in the bud. “I came down here to do your dad a favor,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound like being an asshole,” she said in a teasing tone.
“Trust me. It is.” He gave her the hardest look he knew how to give a person, and he could see that it scared her a little.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’m not your ally on the Indian front. I’m your enemy.”
“What? Why? What do you care?”
“I told you. I’m an asshole.”
“Jesus. OK, then.” She looked at the tabletop with highly elevated eyebrows, confused and scared and pissed off all at once.
“This pasta is excellent, by the way. Thank you for making it.”
“Sure. Take some salad, too.” She stood up from the table. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and do some reading. Let me know if you need anything else.”
He nodded, and she left the room. He felt bad for the girl, but his business in Washington was a dirty one, and there was no point in sugarcoating it. After he’d finished eating, he carefully surveyed Walter’s vast book collection and even vaster collection of CDs and LPs, and then retreated upstairs to Joey’s room. He wanted to be the person who walked into a room where Patty was, not the person waiting in a room she walked into. To be the person waiting was to be too vulnerable; it wasn’t Katzian. Although he normally eschewed earplugs, for the veritable symphony they made of his tinnitus, he inserted some in his ears now, so as not to lie cravenly listening for footsteps and voices.
The next morning, he lingered in his room until nearly nine o’clock before descending the back staircase in search of breakfast. The kitchen was empty, but somebody, presumably Jessica, had made coffee and cut up fruit and set out muffins. A light spring rain was falling on the small back yard, its daffodils and jonquils, and the shoulders of the closely neighboring town houses. Hearing voices from the front of the mansion, Katz wandered down the hallway with coffee and a muffin and found Walter and Jessica and Lalitha, all scrubbed and morning-skinned and shower-haired, waiting for him in the conference room.
“Good, you’re here,” Walter said. “We can start.”
“Didn’t realize we were meeting so early.”
“It’s nine o’clock,” Walter said. “This is a workday for us.”
He and Lalitha were seated side by side near the middle of the big table. Jessica was way down at the farthest end with her arms crossed, tensely radiating skepticism and defendedness. Katz sat down across the table from the others.
“You sleep all right?” Walter said.
“Slept fine. Where’s Patty?”
Walter shrugged. “She’s not coming to the meeting, if that’s what you mean.”
“We’re actually trying to accomplish something,” Lalitha said. “We’re not trying to spend the entire day laughing at how impossible it is to accomplish anything.”
Whuff!
Jessica’s eyes were darting from person to person, spectating. Walter, on closer inspection, had terrible circles under his eyes, and his fingers, on the tabletop, were doing something between trembling and tapping. Lalitha looked a bit wrecked herself, her face bluish with dark-skinned pallor. Observing the relation of their bodies to each other, their deliberate angling-apart, Katz wondered if chemistry might already have done its work. They looked sullen and guilty, like lovers compelled to behave themselves in public. Or, conversely, like people who hadn’t settled