or a hundred minutes. All regular Sunday-morning programming was suspended for the emergency, the day’s normal course so thoroughly obliterated that he couldn’t even feel nostalgia for it. As chance would have things, the spot on the floor directly in front of him had been the scene of a different kind of emergency just three nights earlier, a benign emergency, a pleasurably traumatic coupling that in hindsight now looked like a harbinger of this malignant emergency. He’d come upstairs late on Thursday evening and attacked Patty sexually. Had performed, with her surprised consent, the violent actions which, without her consent, would have been a rapist’s: had yanked off her black work pants, pushed her to the floor, and rammed his way inside her. If it had ever occurred to him to do this in the past, he wouldn’t have done it, because he couldn’t forget that she’d been raped as a girl. But the day had been so long and disorienting—his near-infidelity with Lalitha so inflaming, the roadblock in Wyoming County so infuriating, the humility in Joey’s voice on the telephone so unprecedented and gratifying—that Patty had suddenly seemed, when he walked into her room, like his object. His obstinate object, his frustrating wife. And he was sick of it, sick of all the reasoning and understanding, and so he threw her on the floor and fucked her like a brute. The look of discovery on her face then, which must have mirrored the look on his own face, made him stop almost as soon as they’d got started. Stop and pull out and straddle her chest and stick his erection, which seemed twice its usual size, into her face. To show her who he was becoming. They were both smiling like crazy. And then he was back inside her, and instead of her usual demure little sighs of encouragement she was giving forth loud screams, and this inflamed him all the more; and the next morning, when he went down to the office, he could tell from Lalitha’s chilly silence that the screaming had filled the whole large house. Something had begun on Thursday night, he hadn’t been sure what. But now her manuscript had shown him what. The end was what. She’d never really loved him. She’d wanted what his evil friend had. The whole thing now made him glad he hadn’t broken the promise he’d given Joey at dinner in Alexandria the following night, the promise that he not tell anybody, but especially not tell Patty, that he’d married Connie Monaghan. This secret, as well as several other more alarming ones that Joey had vouchsafed, had been weighing on Walter all weekend, all through the long meeting and the concert the day before. He’d been feeling bad about keeping Patty in the dark about the marriage, feeling as if he were betraying her. But now he could see that, as betrayals went, this one was laughably small. Cryably small.
“Is Richard still in the house?” she said finally, wiping her face with a bedsheet.
“No. I heard him go out before I got up. I don’t think he’s come back.”
“Well, thank goodness for small mercies.”
How he loved her voice! It murdered him to hear it now.
“Did you guys fuck last night?” he said. “I heard talking in the kitchen.”
His own voice was harsh like a crow’s, and Patty took a deep breath, as if settling in for prolonged abuse. “No,” she said. “We talked and then I went to bed. I told you, it’s over. There was a little problem years ago, but it is over.”
“Mistakes were made.”
“You have to believe me, Walter. It is really, really over.”
“Except I don’t do for you physically what my best friend does. Never did, apparently. And never will.”
“Ohhh,” she said, closing her eyes prayerfully, “please don’t quote me. Call me a whore, call me the nightmare of your life, but please try not to quote me. Have that little bit of mercy, if you can.”
“He may suck at chess, but he’s definitely winning at the other game.”
“OK,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. “You’re going to quote me. OK. Quote me. Go ahead. Do what you have to do. I know I don’t deserve mercy. Just please know that it’s the worst thing you can do.”
“Sorry. I thought you liked