was a ridiculous place to go, since neither Walter nor Lalitha ate cow, but the motel clerk had nothing better to recommend. In a plastic-seated booth, Walter touched the rim of his beer glass to Lalitha’s gin martini, which she proceeded to make short work of. He signaled to their waitress for another and then suffered through perusal of the menu. Between the horrors of bovine methane, the lakes of watershed-devastating excrement generated by pig and chicken farms, the catastrophic overfishing of the oceans, the ecological nightmare of farmed shrimp and salmon, the antibiotic orgy of dairy-cow factories, and the fuel squandered by the globalization of produce, there was little he could ever order in good conscience besides potatoes, beans, and freshwater-farmed tilapia.
“Fuck it,” he said, closing the menu. “I’m going to have the rib eye.”
“Excellent, excellent celebrating,” Lalitha said, her face already flushed. “I’m going to have the delicious grilled-cheese sandwich from the children’s menu.”
The beer was interesting. Unexpectedly sour and undelicious, like drinkable dough. After just three or four sips, seldom-heard-from blood vessels in Walter’s brain were pulsing disturbingly.
“Got an e-mail from Richard,” he said. “He’s willing to come down and work with us on strategy. I told him he should come down for the weekend.”
“Ha! You see? You didn’t even think it was worth the bother of asking him.”
“No, no. You were right about that.”
Lalitha noticed something in his face. “Aren’t you happy about it?”
“No, absolutely,” he said. “In theory. There’s just something I don’t . . . trust. I guess basically I don’t see why he’s doing it.”
“Because we were extremely persuasive!”
“Yeah, maybe. Or because you’re extremely pretty.”
She seemed both pleased and confused by this. “He’s your very good friend, right?”
“Used to be. But then he got famous. And now all I can see are the parts of him I don’t trust.”
“What don’t you trust about him?”
Walter shook his head, not wanting to say.
“Do you not trust him with me?”
“No, that would be very stupid, wouldn’t it? I mean, what do I care what you do? You’re an adult, you can look out for yourself.”
Lalitha laughed at him, simply pleased now, not confused at all.
“I think he’s very funny and charismatic,” she said. “But I mostly just felt sorry for him. You know what I mean? He seems like one of those men who have to spend all their time maintaining an attitude, because they’re weak inside. He’s nothing like the man you are. All I could see when we were talking was how much he admires you, and how he was trying not to show it too much. Couldn’t you see that?”
The degree of pleasure it brought Walter to hear this felt dangerous to him. He wanted to believe it, but he didn’t trust it, because he knew Richard to be, in his own way, relentless.
“Seriously, Walter. That kind of man is very primitive. All he has is dignity and self-control and attitude. He only has one little thing, while you have everything else.”
“But the thing he has is what the world wants,” Walter said. “You’ve read all the Nexis stuff on him, you know what I’m talking about. The world doesn’t reward ideas or emotions, it rewards integrity and coolness. And that’s why I don’t trust him. He’s got the game set up so he’s always going to win. In private, he may think he admires what we’re doing, but he’s never going to admit it in public, because he has to maintain his attitude, because that’s what the world wants, and he knows it.”
“Yes, but that’s why it’s so great that he’ll be working with us. I don’t want you to be cool, I don’t like a cool man. I like a man like you. But Richard can help us communicate.”
Walter was relieved when their waitress came to take their orders and terminated the pleasure of hearing why Lalitha liked him. But the danger only deepened as she drank her second martini.
“Can I ask a personal question?” she said.
“Ah—sure.”
“The question is: do you think I should get my tubes tied?”
She’d spoken loudly enough for other tables to have heard, and Walter reflexively put a finger to his lips. He felt conspicuous enough already, felt glaringly urban, sitting with a girl of a different race amid the two varieties of rural West Virginians, the overweight kind and the really skinny kind.
“It just seems logical,” she said more quietly, “since I know I don’t want children.”