Freedom [193]
From what Katz was hearing, it sounded like he’d arrived forty-eight hours too late. Forty-eight hours. Incredible. “You can still have it,” he said. “Make him happy, be a good wife. He’ll forget the girl.”
“Maybe.” She touched the back of her hand to her eyes. “If I were a sane, whole person, that’s probably what I’d be trying to do. Because, you know, I used to want to win. I used to be a fighter. But I’ve developed some kind of allergy to doing the sensible thing. I spend my life jumping out of my skin with frustration at myself.”
“That’s what I love about you.”
“Oh, love now. Love. Richard Katz talking about love. This must be my signal that it’s time to go to bed.”
It was an exit line; he didn’t try to stop her. So firm was his faith in his instincts, however, that when he went upstairs himself, ten minutes later, he was still imagining that he might find her waiting in his bed. What he found instead, sitting on his pillow, was a thick, unbound manuscript with her name on the first page. Its title was “Mistakes Were Made.”
He smiled at this. Then he put a large plug of chew in his cheek and sat up reading, periodically spitting into a vase from the nightstand, until there was light in the window. He noted how much more interested he was in the pages about himself than in the other pages; it confirmed his long-standing suspicion that people ultimately only want to read about themselves. He noted further, with pleasure, that this self of his had genuinely fascinated Patty; it reminded him of why he liked her. And yet his clearest sensation, when he read the last page and let his now very watery wad plop into the vase, was of defeat. Not defeat by Patty: her writing skills were impressive, but he could hold his own in the self-expression department. The person who’d defeated him was Walter, because the document had obviously been written for Walter, as a kind of heartsick undeliverable apology to him. Walter was the star in Patty’s drama, Katz merely an interesting supporting actor.
For a moment, in what passed for his soul, a door opened wide enough for him to glimpse his pride in its pathetic woundedness, but he slammed the door shut and considered how stupid he’d been to let himself want her. Yes, he liked the way she talked, yes, he had a fatal weakness for a certain smart depressive kind of chick, but the only way he knew to interact with a chick like that was to fuck her, walk away, come back and fuck her again, walk away again, hate her again, fuck her again, and so forth. He wished he could go back in time now and congratulate the self he’d been at twenty-four, in that foul squat on the South Side of Chicago, for having recognized that a woman like Patty was meant for a man like Walter, who, whatever his other sillinesses might be, had the patience and imagination to handle her. The mistake that Katz had made since then had been to keep returning to a scene in which he was bound to feel defeated. Patty’s entire document attested to the exhausting difficulty of figuring out, in a scene like that, what was “good” and what wasn’t. He was very good at knowing what was good for him, and this was normally enough for every purpose in his life. It was only around the Berglunds that he felt that it was not enough. And he was sick of feeling that; he was ready to be done with it.
“So, my friend,” he said, “that’s the end of you and me. You won that one, old buddy.”
The light in the window was brightening. He went to the bathroom and flushed down his spit and the spent tobacco and then put the vase back where he’d found it. The clock radio showed 5:57. He packed up his things and went downstairs to Walter’s office with the document and left it in the center of his desktop. A little parting gift. Somebody had to clear the air around here, somebody had to put an end to the bullshit, and Patty obviously wasn’t up to it. And so she wanted Katz to do the dirty work? Well, fine. He was ready to be the nonpussy of the outfit. His job in life