Freedom [81]
“Buckwheat pancakes?” Patty said brightly.
“Sounds great.”
“I could fry you some eggs if you’d rather.”
“I like a good pancake.”
“Easy enough to do some bacon, too.”
“I wouldn’t say no to bacon.”
“OK! Pancakes and bacon it will be.”
If Richard’s heart was racing also, he gave no sign of it. She stood and watched him put away two stacks of pancakes, holding his fork in the civilized grip that she happened to know Walter had taught him as a freshman at college.
“What are your plans for the day?” he asked her with low to moderate interest.
“Gosh. I hadn’t thought about it. Nothing! I’m on vacation. I think I’m going to do nothing this morning, and then make you some lunch.”
He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.
She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over. A melodious bird that Walter had despaired of teaching her the proper name of, a veery or a vireo, grew accustomed to her presence and began to sing in a tree directly above her. Its song was like an idée fixe that it couldn’t get out of its little head.
How she felt: as if a ruthless and well-organized party of resistance fighters had assembled under cover of the darkness of her mind, and so it was imperative not to let the spotlight of her conscience shine anywhere near them, not even for one second. Her love of Walter and her loyalty to him, her wish to be a good person, her understanding of Walter’s lifelong competition with Richard, her sober appraisal of Richard’s character, and just the all-around shittiness of sleeping with your spouse’s best friend: these superior considerations stood ready to annihilate the resistance fighters. And so she had to keep the forces of conscience fully diverted. She couldn’t even allow herself to consider how she was dressing—she had to instantly deflect the thought of putting on a particular flattering sleeveless item before taking midmorning coffee and cookies out to Richard, she had to flick that thought right away from her—because the tiniest hint of ordinary flirting would attract the searchlight, and the spectacle it illuminated would be just too revolting and shameful and pathetic. Even if Richard wasn’t disgusted by it, she herself would be. And if he noticed it and called her out on it, the way he’d called her out on her drinking: disaster, humiliation, the worst.
Her pulse, however, knew—and was telling her with its racing—that she would probably not have another chance like this. Not before she was fully over the hill physically. Her pulse was registering her keen covert awareness that the fishing camp in Saskatchewan could only be reached by biplane, radio, or satellite phone, and that Walter would not be calling her in the next five days unless there was an emergency.
She left Richard’s lunch on the table and drove to the nearby tiny town of Fen City. She could see how easily she could have a traffic accident, and became so lost in imagining herself killed and Walter sobbing over her mutilated body and Richard stoically comforting him that she almost ran the only stop sign in Fen City; she dimly heard the screaming of her brakes.
It was all in her head, it was all in her head! The only