Freedom [54]
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “But listen. About the room—”
“Oh, you don’t have to decide about that now.”
“No, but you need an answer. If you’re going to rent it to somebody else—”
“I’d rather rent it to you!”
“Well, yes, and I might want it, but I have to go home next week, and I was thinking of riding to New York with Richard. Since that’s when he’s driving.”
Any worries that Walter might not grasp the import here were dispelled by his sudden silence.
“Don’t you already have a plane ticket?” he said finally.
“It’s the refundable kind,” she lied.
“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “But, you know, Richard’s not very reliable.”
“No, I know, I know,” she said. “You’re right. I just thought I might save some money, which I could then apply to the rent.” (A compounding of the lie. Her parents had bought the ticket.) “I’ll definitely pay the rent for June no matter what.”
“That doesn’t make any sense if you’re not going to live there.”
“Well, I probably will, is what I’m saying. I’m just not positive yet.”
“OK.”
“I really want to. I’m just not positive. So if you find another renter, you should probably go with them. But definitely I’ll cover June.”
There was another silence before Walter, in a discouraged voice, said he had to get off the phone.
Energized by having achieved this difficult conversation, she called Richard and assured him that she’d done the necessary bait-cutting, at which point Richard mentioned that his departure date was somewhat uncertain and there were a couple of shows in Chicago that he was hoping to stop and see.
“Just as long as I’m in New York by next Saturday,” Patty said.
“Right, the anniversary party. Where is it?”
“It’s at the Mohonk Mountain House, but I only need to get to Westchester.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble started with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her. Then a mechanical issue with the van delayed Herrera, and since it was Herrera’s friends in Chicago whom Richard had been planning to stay with, and since Patty had not been part of that deal in any case, there promised to be awkwardness there. Patty also wasn’t good at computing distances, and so, when Richard was three hours late in picking her up and they didn’t get away from Minneapolis until late afternoon, she didn’t understand how late they would be arriving in Chicago and how important it was to make good time on I-94. It wasn’t her fault they’d started late. She didn’t consider it excessive to ask, near Eau Claire, for a bathroom stop, and then, an hour later, near nowhere, for some dinner. This was her road trip and she intended to enjoy it! But the back seat was full of equipment that Richard didn’t dare let out of his sight, and his own basic needs were satisfied by his plug (he had a big spit can on the floor), and although he didn’t criticize how much her crutches slowed and complicated everything she did, he also didn’t tell her to relax and take her time. And all across Wisconsin, every minute of the way, in spite of his curtness and his barely suppressed irritation with her entirely reasonable human needs, she could feel the almost physical pressure of his interest in fucking, and this didn’t help the mood in the car much, either. Not that she wasn’t greatly attracted to him. But she needed a modicum of time and breathing space, and even taking into account her youth and inexperience the autobiographer is embarrassed to report that her means of buying this time and space was to bring the conversation around, perversely, to Walter.
At first, Richard didn’t want to talk about him, but once she got him going she learned a lot about Walter’s college years. About the symposia he’d organized—on overpopulation, on electoral-college reform—that