Freedom [192]
Katz’s blood was up, he was all jittery-jangly. It was like coke cut heavily with nasty meth.
“I came down here for you,” he said.
“Ha-ha-ha! I don’t believe you. You don’t even believe it yourself. You’re such a bad liar.”
“Why else would I come down here?”
“I don’t know. Concern about biodiversity and sustainable population?”
He was remembering how unpleasant it had been to argue with her on the phone. How grossly unpleasant, how murderously trying to his patience. What he couldn’t remember was why he’d put up with it. Something about the way she’d wanted him, the way she’d come after him. A way that was missing now.
“I’ve spent so much time being mad at you,” she said. “Do you have any idea? I sent you all those e-mails that you never responded to, I had that whole humiliating one-sided conversation with you. Did you even read those e-mails?”
“Most of them.”
“Ha. I don’t know if that makes it worse or better. I guess it doesn’t even matter, since it was all in my head anyway. I’ve spent three years wanting a thing I knew would never make me happy. But that didn’t make me stop wanting it. You were like a bad drug I couldn’t stop craving. My whole life was like a kind of mourning for some evil drug I knew was bad for me. It was literally not until yesterday, when I actually saw you, that I realized I didn’t need the drug after all. It was suddenly like, ‘What was I thinking? He’s here for Walter.’ ”
“No,” he said. “For you.”
She wasn’t even listening. “I feel so old, Richard. Just because a person isn’t making good use of her life, it doesn’t stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker.”
“You don’t look old. You look great.”
“Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.”
“Come with me.”
She shook her head.
“Just come with me. We’ll go somewhere, and Walter can have his freedom.”
“No,” she said, “although it’s nice to hear you finally say that. I can apply it retroactively to the last three years and make an even better fantasy out of what might have been. It’ll enrich my already rather rich fantasy life. Now I can imagine staying home in your apartment while you do your world tour and fuck nineteen-year-olds, or going along with you and being you guys’s den mother—you know, milk and cookies at three a.m.—or being your Yoko and letting everybody blame me for how washed-up and bland you’ve gotten, and then throwing horrible scenes and letting you find out, the slow way, how bad it is to have me in your life. That should be good for months and months of daydreaming.”
“I don’t understand what it is you want.”
“Believe me, if I understood that myself, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I actually thought I did know what I wanted. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, but I thought I knew. And now you’re here, and it’s like no time at all has passed.”
“Except Walter’s falling for the girl.”
She nodded. “That’s right. And you know what? That turns out to be quite extraordinarily painful to me. Quite devastatingly painful.” Tears filled her eyes, and she turned quickly to hide the sight of them.
Katz had sat through some tearful scenes in his day, but this was the first time he’d had to watch a woman cry for love of somebody else. He didn’t like it one bit.
“So he came home from West Virginia on Thursday night,” Patty said. “I might as well tell you this, since we’re old friends, right? He came home from West Virginia on Thursday night, and he came up to my room, and what happened, Richard, was like the thing I’d always wanted. Always wanted. My entire adult life. I hardly even recognized his face! It was like he’d lost his mind. But the only reason I was getting it was that he was already gone. It was like a little farewell. A little parting gift, to show me what I was never going to have again. Because I’d made him too miserable for too long. And now he’s finally ready for something better, but he