Freedom [88]
“I made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t think it through. I should have taken off yesterday morning.”
“All but one part of me would have been glad if you did. Admittedly, that one part is a fairly important part.”
“I like seeing you,” he said. “I like being around you. It makes me happy to think of Walter being with you—you’re that kind of person. I thought it would be OK to stay a couple of extra days. But it was a mistake.”
“Welcome to Pattyland. Mistakeland.”
“It didn’t occur to me that you would sleepwalk.”
She laughed. “That was kind of a brilliant stroke, wasn’t it?”
“Jesus. Cool it, OK? You’re annoying me.”
“Yeah, but the great thing is it doesn’t even matter. What’s the worst that can happen now? You’ll be annoyed with me and leave.”
He looked at her then, and he smiled, and the room filled (metaphorically) with sunshine. He was, in her opinion, a very beautiful man.
“I do like you,” he said. “I like you a lot. I always liked you.”
“Same back at you.”
“I wanted you to have a good life. Do you understand? I thought you were a person who was actually worthy of Walter.”
“And so that’s why you went off that night in Chicago and never came back.”
“It wouldn’t have worked in New York. It would have ended badly.”
“If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
Patty nodded. “So you actually wanted to sleep with me that night.”
“Yeah. A lot. But not just sleep with you. Talk to you. Listen to you. That was the difference.”
“Well, I guess that’s nice to know. I can cross that worry off my list now, twenty years later.”
Richard lit another cigarette and they sat there for a while, separated by a cheap old Oriental rug of Dorothy’s. There was a sighing in the trees, the voice of an autumn that was never far away in northern Minnesota.
“This is potentially kind of a hard situation, then, isn’t it,” Patty finally said.
“Yes.”
“Harder than I perhaps realized.”
“Yes.”
“Arguably better of me not to have sleepwalked.”
“Yes.”
She began to cry for Walter. They had spent so few nights apart over the years that she’d never had a chance to miss him and appreciate him the way she missed him and appreciated him now. This was the beginning of a terrible confusion of the heart, a confusion that the autobiographer is still suffering from. Already, there at Nameless Lake, in the unchanging overcast light, she could see the problem very clearly. She’d fallen for the one man in the world who cared as much about Walter and felt as protective of him as she did; anybody else could have tried to turn her against him. And even worse, in a way, was the responsibility she felt toward Richard, in knowing that he had nobody else like Walter in his life, and that his loyalty to Walter was, in his own estimation, one of the few things besides music that saved him as a human being. All this, in her sleep and selfishness, she had gone and jeopardized. She’d taken advantage of a person who was messed up and susceptible but nevertheless trying hard to maintain some kind of moral order in his life. And so she was crying for Richard, too, but even more for Walter, and for her own unlucky, wrongdoing self.
“It’s good to cry,” Richard said, “although I can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself.”
“It’s kind of a bottomless pit, once you get into it,” Patty snuffled. She was feeling suddenly cold in her bathing suit, and physically unwell. She went and put her arms around Richard’s warm, broad shoulders, and lay down with him on the Oriental rug, and so the long bright gray afternoon went.
Three times, altogether. One, two, three. Once sleeping, once violently, and then once with the full orchestra. Three: pathetic little number. The autobiographer has now spent quite a bit of her mid-forties counting and recounting, but it never adds up to more than three.
There is otherwise not much to relate, and most of what remains consists of further mistakes. The first of these she committed in concert with Richard while they were still lying on the rug. They decided together—agreed—that