Freedom [90]
“It’s incredible,” Walter said when they got home and he saw the almost-finished deck. “He’s here four months and he can’t do the last eight hours of work.”
“I think he was sick of the woods,” Patty said. “I told him he should just go back to New York. He wrote some great songs here. He was ready to go.”
Walter frowned. “He played you songs?”
“Three,” she said, turning away from him.
“And they were good?”
“Really good.” She walked down toward the lake, and Walter followed her. It wasn’t hard to keep her distance from him. Only at the very beginning had they been one of those couples who embraced and locked lips at every homecoming.
“You guys got along OK?” Walter asked.
“It was a little awkward. I was glad when he left. I had to drink a big glass of sherry the one night he was here.”
“That’s not so bad. One glass.”
Part of the deal she’d struck with herself was to tell Walter no lies, not even tiny ones; to speak no words that couldn’t narrowly be construed as truth.
“I’ve been reading a ton,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”
“I’m jealous,” Walter said.
“Ah?”
“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”
“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”
“You seem a little altered, actually.”
“Not in a bad way, I hope.”
“No. Just different.”
In bed with him that night, she took off her pajamas and was relieved to find she wanted him more, not less, for what she’d done. It was fine, having sex with him. There was nothing so wrong with it.
“We need to do this more,” she said.
“Any time. Literally any time.”
They had a sort of second honeymoon that summer, fueled by her contrition and sexual botheration. She tried hard to be a good wife, and to please her very good husband, but a full accounting of the success of her efforts must include the e-mails that she and Richard began to exchange within days of his departure, and the permission she somehow gave him, a few weeks after that, to get on a plane to Minneapolis and go up to Nameless Lake with her while Walter was hosting another V.I.P. trip in the Boundary Waters. She immediately deleted the e-mail with Richard’s flight information, as she’d deleted all the others, but not before memorizing the flight number and arrival time.
A week before the date, she repaired to the lake in solitude and gave herself entirely to her derangement. It consisted of getting stumbling drunk every evening, awakening later in panic and remorse and indecision, then sleeping through the morning, then reading novels in a suspended state of false calm, then jumping up and pacing for an hour or more in the vicinity of the telephone, trying to decide whether to call Richard and tell him not to come, and finally opening a bottle to make the whole thing go away for a few hours.
Slowly the remaining days ticked down toward zero. On the last night, she got vomiting drunk, fell asleep in the living room, and was jolted back to consciousness at a predawn hour. To get her hands and her arms to stop shaking enough to dial Richard’s number, she had to lie down on the still-ungrouted kitchen floor.
She reached his voice mail. He had found a new, smaller apartment a few blocks from his old one. All she could picture of this new place was a larger version of the black room of the apartment he’d once shared with Walter, the apartment she’d displaced him from. She dialed again, and again got his voice mail. She dialed a third time, and Richard answered.
“Don’t come,” she said. “I can’t do it.”
He said nothing,