Lalitha seemed to mean something by this, but he was too tired to figure out what. “I just wonder who did the leaking,” he said. “And how much they leaked.”
“Maybe your wife leaked it.”
“Right.” He laughed and then saw the hard look on Lalitha’s face. “She wouldn’t do a thing like that,” he said. “She doesn’t care enough, if nothing else.”
“Hm.” Lalitha took a bite of pancake and looked around the diner with the same hard, unhappy expression. She, of course, had every reason to be sore at Patty, and at Walter, this morning. To feel rejected and alone. But these were the first seconds in which he’d ever experienced anything like coldness from her; and they were dreadful. What he’d never understood about men in his position, in all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen about them, was clearer to him now: you couldn’t keep expecting wholehearted love without, at some point, requiting it. There was no credit to be earned for simply being good.
“I just want to have our weekend meeting,” he said. “If I can just have two days to work on overpopulation, I can face anything on Monday.”
Lalitha finished her pancakes without speaking to him. Walter forced down some of his own breakfast as well, and they went out into the light-polluted dark morning. In the rental car, she adjusted the seat and mirrors, which he’d moved the night before. As she was reaching across herself to fasten her seat belt, he put an awkward hand on her neck and pulled her closer, bringing them eye to serious eye in the all-night roadside light.
“I can’t go five minutes without you on my side,” he said. “Not five minutes. Do you understand that?”
After a moment’s thought, she nodded. Then, letting go of the seat belt, she placed her hands on his shoulders, gave him a solemn kiss, and drew back to gauge its effect. He felt as if he’d done his utmost now and could go no further on his own. He simply waited while, with a child’s frown of concentration, she took his glasses off, set them on the dashboard, put her hands on his head, and touched her little nose to his. He was momentarily troubled by how similar her face and Patty’s looked in extreme close-up, but all he had to do was close his eyes and kiss her and she was pure Lalitha, her lips pillowy, her mouth peach-sweet, her blood-filled head warm beneath her silky hair. He struggled against how wrong it felt to kiss somebody so young. He could feel her youth as a kind of fragility in his hands, and he was relieved when she drew back again to look at him, with shining eyes. He felt that some word of acknowledgment was called for now, but he couldn’t stop staring at her, and she seemed to take this as an invitation to clamber across the gear shift and straddle him awkwardly on the bucket seat, so that he could take her fully in his arms. The aggression with which she kissed him then, the hungry abandon, brought him a joy so extreme that it blew up the ground beneath him. He was in free fall, everything he believed in was receding into darkness, and he began to cry.
“Oh, what is it?” she said.
“You have to go slow with me.”
“Slow, slow, yes,” she said, kissing his tears, wiping them with her satiny thumbs. “Walter, are you sad?”
“No, honey, the opposite.”
“Then let me love you.”
“OK. You can do that.”
“Really OK?”
“Yes,” he said, crying. “But we should probably hit the road.”
“In a minute.”
She put her tongue to his lips, and he opened them to let her in. There was more desire for him in her mouth than in Patty’s entire body. Her shoulders, as he gripped them through her nylon shell, seemed to be all bone and baby fat and no muscle, all eager pliability. She straightened her back and bore down on him, pushing her hips into his chest; and he wasn’t ready for it. He was closer now but still not fully there. His resistance the night before hadn’t been simply a matter of taboo or principle, and his tears weren’t all for joy.
Sensing this, Lalitha pulled away from him and studied his face. In response to whatever she saw in it, she climbed back into the other seat again and observed him from a greater distance.