Freedom

And then, for almost a week, she didn’t hear from him. She suspected he was keeping his distance at Richard’s suggestion—that Richard had given him a misogynistic lecture about the faithlessness of women and the need to protect his heart better. In her imagination, this was both a valuable service for Richard to perform and a terrible disillusioning thing to do to Walter. She couldn’t stop thinking of Walter carrying large plants for her on buses, the poinsettia redness of his cheeks. She thought of the nights when, in her dorm lounge, he’d been trapped by the Hall Bore, Suzanne Storrs, who combed her hair sideways over her head with the part way down one side of it, just above her ear, and how he’d listened patiently to Suzanne’s sour droning about her diet and the hardships of inflation and the overheating of her dorm room and her wide-ranging disappointment with the university’s administrators and professors, while Patty and Cathy and her other friends laughed at Fantasy Island: how Patty, ostensibly incapacitated by her knee, had declined to stand up and rescue Walter from Suzanne, for fear that Suzanne would then come over and inflict her boringness on everybody else, and how Walter, though perfectly capable of joking with Patty about Suzanne’s shortcomings, and though undoubtedly mindful of how much work he had to do and how early he had to get up in the morning, allowed himself to be trapped again on other evenings, because Suzanne had taken a shine to him and he felt sorry for her.

Suffice it to say that Patty couldn’t quite bring herself to cut bait. They didn’t communicate again until Walter called from Hibbing to apologize for his silence and report that his dad was in a coma.

“Oh, Walter, I miss you!” she exclaimed although this was exactly the sort of thing Richard would have urged her not to say.

“I miss you, too!”

She bethought herself to ask for details about his dad’s condition, even though it only made sense to be a good questioner if she was intending to proceed with him. Walter spoke of liver failure, pulmonary edema, a shitty prognosis.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “But listen. About the room—”

“Oh, you don’t have to decide about that now.”

“No, but you need an answer. If you’re going to rent it to somebody else—”

“I’d rather rent it to you!”

“Well, yes, and I might want it, but I have to go home next week, and I was thinking of riding to New York with Richard. Since that’s when he’s driving.”

Any worries that Walter might not grasp the import here were dispelled by his sudden silence.

“Don’t you already have a plane ticket?” he said finally.

“It’s the refundable kind,” she lied.

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “But, you know, Richard’s not very reliable.”

“No, I know, I know,” she said. “You’re right. I just thought I might save some money, which I could then apply to the rent.” (A compounding of the lie. Her parents had bought the ticket.) “I’ll definitely pay the rent for June no matter what.”

“That doesn’t make any sense if you’re not going to live there.”

“Well, I probably will, is what I’m saying. I’m just not positive yet.”

“OK.”

“I really want to. I’m just not positive. So if you find another renter, you should probably go with them. But definitely I’ll cover June.”

There was another silence before Walter, in a discouraged voice, said he had to get off the phone.

Energized by having achieved this difficult conversation, she called Richard and assured him that she’d done the necessary bait-cutting, at which point Richard mentioned that his departure date was somewhat uncertain and there were a couple of shows in Chicago that he was hoping to stop and see.

“Just as long as I’m in New York by next Saturday,” Patty said.

“Right, the anniversary party. Where is it?”

“It’s at the Mohonk Mountain House, but I only need to get to Westchester.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”