Freedom [87]
“OK, so,” she said when she was sitting on the floor with her head against the spot where her butt had been. “So, that was interesting.”
Richard had put his pants back on and was pacing around for no purpose. “I’m just going to go ahead and smoke inside your house if you don’t mind.”
“I think, under the circumstances, an exception will be granted.”
The day had turned fully overcast, with a cold breeze moving in through the screens and the screen door. All birdsong had ceased, and the lake seemed desolate. Nature waiting for the chill to pass.
“What are you wearing a bathing suit for anyway?” Richard said, lighting up.
Patty laughed. “I’d thought I might go for a swim after you left.”
“It’s freezing.”
“Well, not a long swim, obviously.”
“Just a little mortification of the flesh.”
“Exactly.”
The cold breeze and the smoke of Richard’s Camel were mixing like joy and remorse. Patty started laughing again for no reason and then found something funny to say.
“You may suck at chess,” she said, “but you’re definitely winning at the other game.”
“Shut the fuck up,” Richard said.
She couldn’t quite gauge his tone of voice, but, fearing that it was angry, she struggled to stop laughing.
Richard sat down on the coffee table and smoked with great determination. “We have to never do this again,” he said.
Another snicker broke out of her; she couldn’t help it. “Or maybe just a couple more times and then never again.”
“Yeah, where does that get us?”
“Conceivably the itch would be scratched, and that would be that.”
“Not the way it works, in my experience.”
“Well, I guess I have to defer to your experience, don’t I? Having none myself.”
“Here’s the choice,” Richard said. “We stop now, or you leave Walter. And since the latter is not acceptable, we stop now.”
“Or, third possibility, we could not stop and I could just not tell him.”
“I don’t want to live that way. Do you?”
“It’s true that two of the three people he loves most in the world are you and me.”
“The third being Jessica.”
“It’s some consolation,” Patty said, “that she would hate me for the rest of my life and totally side with him. He would always have that.”
“That’s not what he wants, and I’m not going to do it to him.”
Patty laughed again, at the thought of Jessica. She was a very good and painfully earnest and strenuously mature young person whose exasperation with Patty and Joey—her feckless mom, her ruthless brother—was seldom so extreme as not to seem comical. Patty liked her daughter a great deal and would in fact, realistically, be devastated to forfeit her good opinion. But she still couldn’t help being amused by Jessica’s opprobrium. It was part of how the two of them got along; and Jessica was too absorbed in her own seriousness to be bothered by it.
“Hey,” she said to Richard, “do you think it’s possible you’re homosexual?”
“You ask that now?”
“I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes guys who have to screw a million women are trying to prove something. Disprove something. And it’s sounding to me like you care more about Walter’s happiness than you do about mine.”
“Trust me on this one. I have no interest in kissing Walter.”
“No, I know. I know. But there’s still something I mean by that. I mean, I’m sure you’d get tired of me very soon. You’d see me naked when I’m forty-five, and you’d be thinking, Hmm. Do I still want this? I don’t think so! Whereas Walter you never have to get tired of, because you don’t feel like kissing him. You can just be close to him forever.”
“This is D. H. Lawrence,” Richard said impatiently.
“Yet another author I need to read.”
“Or not.”
She rubbed her tired eyes and her abraded mouth. She was, all in all, very happy with the turn things had taken.
“You’re really excellent with tools,” she said with another snicker.
Richard began to pace again. “Try to be serious, OK? Try hard.”
“This is our time right now, Richard. That’s all I’m saying. We have a couple of days,