Freedom

Then came the terrible news of Lalitha’s death, and Patty felt many things at once: great sorrow and compassion for Walter, great guilt about the many times she’d wished Lalitha dead, sudden fear of her own death, a momentary flicker of selfish hope that Walter might take her back now, and then great sickening regret for having gone to Richard and thereby ensured that Walter would never take her back. As long as Lalitha was alive, there’d been a chance that Walter would tire of her, but once she died there was no hope at all for Patty. Having hated the girl and made no secret of it, she had no right to console Walter now, and she knew it could only seem monstrous of her to use such a sad occasion to try to worm her way back into his life. She tried for many days to compose a condolence note worthy of his grief, but the chasm between the purity of his feelings and the impurity of her own was unbridgeable. The best she could do was convey her sorrow secondhand, through Jessica, and hope that Walter would believe that the yearning to comfort him was there in her, and that he might see how, having sent no condolence, she could then never communicate about anything else. Hence, from her side, these six years of silence.

The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty left Richard immediately after Lalitha died, but in fact she stayed another three months. (Nobody will ever mistake her for a pillar of resolve and dignity.) She knew, for one thing, that it would be a long time, possibly forever, before somebody she really liked would want to sleep with her again. And Richard, in his stalwart if unconvincing way, was doing his best to be a

Good Man now that she’d lost Walter. She didn’t love Richard a lot, but she did somewhat love him for this effort (although even here, let the record show, she was actually loving Walter, because it was Walter who’d put the idea of being a Good Man into Richard’s head). He manfully sat down to the meals she made him, he forced himself to stay home and watch videos with her, he weathered her frequent downpours of emotion, but she was forever aware of how inconveniently her arrival had coincided with his reawakening commitment to music—his need to be out all night with his bandmates, or alone in his bedroom, or in numerous other girls’ bedrooms—and although she respected these needs in the abstract, she couldn’t help having her own needs, such as the need not to smell some other girl on him. To absent herself and earn some money, she worked evenings as a barista, making exactly those coffee drinks she’d once ridiculed the idea of making. At home, she struggled hard to be funny and agreeable and not a pain in the ass, but before long her situation became rather hellish, and the autobiographer, who has probably already said far more about these matters than her reader cares to hear, will spare him the scenes of petty jealousy and mutual recrimination and open disappointment that led to her parting with Richard on not very good terms. The autobiographer is reminded of her country’s attempts to extricate itself from Vietnam, which ended with our Vietnamese friends being thrown off the top of the embassy building and shoved away from the departing helicopters and left behind for massacre or brutal internment. But that is truly all she’s going to say about Richard, except for one further small note toward the end of this document.

For the last five years, Patty has been living in Brooklyn and working as a teacher’s aide in a private school, helping first-graders with their language skills and coaching softball and basketball in the middle school. How she found her way to this wretchedly paid but otherwise nearly ideal job was as follows.