Freedom [60]
Joyce and Ray, to their credit, and perhaps in their secret relief that Patty had turned out to be heterosexual (secret because Joyce, for one, stood ready to be strenuously Welcoming to Difference), were on their very best behavior. Hearing that Walter had never been to New York, they became gracious ambassadors to the city, urging Patty to take him to museum exhibitions that Joyce herself had been too busy in Albany to have seen, and then meeting up with them for dinner at Times-approved restaurants, including one in SoHo, which was then still a dark and exciting neighborhood. Patty’s worry that her parents would make fun of Walter gave way to the worry that Walter would take their side and not see why they were unbearable to her: would begin to suspect that the real problem was Patty, and would lose that blind faith in her goodness which already, in less than a year with him, she had rather desperately come to count on.
Thankfully Abigail, who was a high-end restaurant hound and insisted on turning several of the dinners into awkward fivesomes, was in peak disagreeable form. Unable to imagine people gathering for some reason besides listening to her, she prattled about the world of New York theater (by definition an unfair world since she had made no progress in it since her understudy breakthrough); about the “sleazy slimeball” Yale professor with whom she’d had insuperable Creative differences; about some friend of hers named Tammy who’d self-financed a production of Hedda Gabler in which she (Tammy) had brilliantly starred; about hangovers and rent control and disturbing third-party sexual incidents that Ray, refilling and refilling his own wineglass, demanded every prurient detail of. Midway through the final dinner, in SoHo, Patty got so fed up with Abigail’s shanghaiing of the attention that ought to have been lavished on Walter (who had politely attended to every word of Abigail’s) that she flat-out told her sister to shut up and let other people talk. There ensued a bad interval of silent manipulation of tableware. Then Patty, making comical gestures of drawing water from a well, got Walter talking about himself. Which was a mistake, in hindsight, because Walter was passionate about public policy and, not knowing what real politicians are like, believed that a state assemblywoman would be interested in hearing his ideas.
He asked Joyce if she was familiar with the Club of Rome. Joyce confessed that she was not. Walter explained that the Club of Rome (one of whose members he’d invited to Macalester for a lecture two years earlier) was devoted to exploring the limits of growth. Mainstream economic theory, both Marxist and free-market, Walter said, took for granted that economic growth was always a positive thing. A GDP growth rate of one or two percent was considered modest, and a population growth rate of one percent was considered desirable, and yet, he said, if you compounded these rates over a hundred years, the numbers were terrible: a world population of eighteen billion and world energy consumption ten times greater than today’s. And if you went another hundred years, with steady growth, well, the numbers were simply impossible. So the Club of Rome was seeking more rational and humane ways of putting the brakes on growth than simply destroying the planet and letting everybody starve to death or kill each other.
“The Club of Rome,” Abigail said. “Is that like an Italian Playboy Club?”
“No,” Walter said quietly. “It’s a group