eyes on the floor.
“Especially the older stuff, which I’m just starting to get into. Reactionary Splendor? Oh, my God. It is so fucking brilliant. It’s on my iPod right now. Here, I’ll show you.”
“That’s OK. I believe you.”
“Oh, sure, no, of course. Of course. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m just a huge fan.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Walter was following this exchange with a facial expression as ancient as the college parties that he’d been masochistic enough to attend with Katz, an expression of wonderment and pride and love and anger and the loneliness of the invisible, none of it agreeable to Katz, not in college and even less so now.
“It must be very strange to be you,” Walter said as they exited at 34th Street.
“I have no other way of being to compare it to.”
“It’s got to feel great, though. I don’t believe that at some level you don’t love it.”
Katz considered the question honestly. “It’s more like a situation where I would hate the absence of the thing but I don’t like the thing itself, either.”
“I think I would like it,” Walter said.
“I think you would, too.”
Unable to grant Walter fame, Katz walked with him all the way up to the Amtrak status board, which was showing a forty-five-minute delay for his southbound Acela.
“I strongly believe in trains,” Walter said. “And I routinely pay the price.”
“I’ll wait with you,” Katz said.
“No need, no need.”
“No, let me buy you a Coke. Or did D.C. finally make you a drinker?”
“No, still teetotaling. Which is such a stupid word.”
To Katz, the train’s delay was a sign that the subject of Patty was destined to be broached. When he broached it, however, in the station bar, to the nerve-grating sounds of an Alanis Morissette song, Walter’s eyes grew hard and distant. He drew breath as if to speak, but no words came out.
“Must be a little odd for you guys,” Katz prompted. “Having the girl upstairs and your office downstairs.”
“I don’t know what to say to you, Richard. I really don’t know what to tell you.”
“You guys getting along? Patty doing anything interesting?”
“She’s working at a gym in Georgetown. Does that count as interesting?” Walter shook his head grimly. “I’ve been living with a depressed person for a very long time now. I don’t know why she’s so unhappy, I don’t know why she can’t seem to get out of it. There was a little while, around the time we moved to Washington, when she seemed to be doing better. She’d seen a therapist in St. Paul who got her started on some kind of writing project. Some kind of personal history or life journal that she was very mum and secretive about. As long as she was working on that, things weren’t so bad. But for the last two years they’ve been pretty much all bad. The plan had been for her to look for a job as soon as we got to Washington, and start some kind of second career, but it’s a little tough at her age with no marketable skills. She’s very smart and very proud, and she couldn’t stand being rejected and couldn’t stand being entry-level. She tried volunteering, doing afterschool athletics with the D.C. schools, but that didn’t work out, either. I finally got her to try an antidepressant, which I think would have helped her if she’d stuck with it, but she didn’t like the way it made her feel, and she really was pretty unbearable while she was on it. It gave her kind of a crankhead personality, and she quit before they got the cocktail adjusted right. And so finally, last fall, I more or less forced her to get a job. Not for my sake—I’m way overpaid, and Jessica’s out of school now, and Joey’s not my dependent anymore. But she had so much free time, I could see that it was killing her. And the job she chose to get was working at the reception counter of a gym. I mean, it’s a perfectly nice gym—one of my board members goes there, and at least one of my bigger donors. And there she is, there’s my wife, who’s one of the smartest people I know, scanning their membership cards and telling them to have a great workout. She’s also got a pretty serious exercise addiction going. She works out at least an hour a day, minimum—she looks great. And then she comes home at eleven with takeout, and if I’m in town