today, trying to get her to go to a Knicks game with him. The senior editors get all these free tickets to stuff, including sporting events, for reasons unknown to me. I guess the Knicks must be fairly desperate to fill their luxury seats at this point. And Emily’s like, how many hundred ways can I find to say no? I finally went over and started asking Simon about his wife. You know—wife? Three kids in Teaneck? Hello? Stop looking down Emily’s shirt?”
Walter closed his eyes and tried to think of something to say.
“Dad? You there?”
“I’m here, yeah. How old is, um. Simon?”
“I don’t know. Indeterminate. Probably not more than twice Emily’s age. We speculate about whether he colors his hair. Sometimes the color seems to change a little, from week to week, but that could just be body-oil issues. I’m luckily not directly subordinate to him.”
Walter was suddenly worried that he might cry.
“Dad? You there?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“It’s just your cell goes so blank when you’re not talking.”
“Yeah, listen,” he said, “it’s terrific that you’re coming for the weekend. I think we’ll put Richard in the guest room. We’re going to do a long meeting on Saturday and then a shorter one on Sunday. Try to hammer out a concrete plan. Lalitha’s already got some great ideas.”
“No doubt,” Jessica said.
“That’s great, then. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“OK, I love you, Dad.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart.”
He let the phone slip from his hand and lay crying for a while, silently, shaking the cheap bed. He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know how to live. Each new thing he encountered in life impelled him in a direction that fully convinced him of its rightness, but then the next new thing loomed up and impelled him in the opposite direction, which also felt right. There was no controlling narrative: he seemed to himself a purely reactive pinball in a game whose only object was to stay alive for staying alive’s sake. To throw away his marriage and follow Lalitha had felt irresistible until the moment he saw himself, in the person of Jessica’s older colleague, as another overconsuming white American male who felt entitled to more and more and more: saw the romantic imperialism of his falling for someone fresh and Asian, having exhausted domestic supplies. Likewise the course he’d charted for two and a half years with the Trust, convinced of the soundness of his arguments and the rightness of his mission, only to feel, this morning, in Charleston, that he’d made nothing but horrible mistakes. And likewise the overpopulation initiative: what better way to live could there be than to throw himself into the most critical challenge of his time? A challenge that then seemed trumped-up and barren when he thought of his Lalitha with her tubes tied. How to live?
He was drying his eyes, pulling himself together, when Lalitha got up and came over and put a hand on his shoulder. She smelled of sweet respired martini. “My boss,” she said softly, stroking his shoulder. “You’re the best boss in the world. You’re such a wonderful man. We’ll get up in the morning and everything will be fine.”
He nodded and sniffled and gasped a little. “Please don’t get sterilized,” he said.
“No,” she said, stroking him. “I won’t do that tonight.”
“There’s no hurry about anything. Everything has to slow down.”
“Slow, slow, yes. Everything will be slow.”
If she’d kissed him, he would have kissed her back, but she just kept stroking his shoulder, and eventually he was able to reconstruct some semblance of a professional self. Lalitha looked wistful but not too disappointed. She yawned and stretched her arms like a sleepy child. Walter left her with her sandwich and went next door with his steak, which he devoured with guilty savagery, holding it in his hands and tearing off pieces with his teeth, covering his chin with grease. He thought again of Jessica’s oily, despoiling colleague Simon.
Sobered by this, and by the loneliness and sterility of his room, he washed his face and attended to e-mail for two hours, while Lalitha slept in her undespoiled room and dreamed of—what? He couldn’t imagine. But he did feel that, by coming so close to the brink and then drawing back so awkwardly, they had inoculated themselves against the danger of coming so close again. And this was fine with him now. It was the way he knew how to live: with discipline and self-denial. He took comfort in how long it would be before