Freedom

“Just something to get out and enjoy Chicago.”

“We can do that tonight. Magazine’s playing. You know Magazine?”

“I don’t know anything. Isn’t that obvious?”

“You’re in a bad mood. You want to hit the road.”

“I don’t want to do anything.”

“If we get the room cleaned up, you’ll sleep better tonight.”

“I don’t care. I just don’t feel like sanding.”

The kitchen area was a nauseating, never-cleaned sty that smelled like a mental illness. Sitting on the couch where Richard had slept, Patty tried to read one of the books she’d brought along in hopes of impressing him, a Hemingway novel which the heat and the smell and her tiredness and the lump in her throat and the Magazine albums that Richard was playing made it impossible to concentrate on. When she got just intolerably hot, she went into the room where he was plastering and told him she was going for a walk.

He was shirtless, his chest hair flat and straight with running sweat. “Not a great neighborhood for that,” he said.

“Well, maybe you’ll come with me.”

“Give me another hour.”

“No, forget it,” she said, “I’ll just go by myself. Do we have a key to this place?”

“You really want to go out by yourself on crutches?”

“Yes, unless you want to come with me.”

“Which, as I just said, I would do in an hour.”

“Well, I don’t feel like waiting an hour.”

“In that case,” Richard said, “the key is on the kitchen table.”

“Why are you being so mean to me?”

He shut his eyes and seemed to count silently to ten. It was obvious how much he disliked women and the things they said.

“Why don’t you take a cold shower,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

“You know, yesterday, for a while, it seemed like you were liking me.”

“I do like you. I’m just doing some work here.”

“Fine,” she said. “Work.”

The streets in the afternoon sun were even hotter than the apartment. Patty swung herself along at a considerable clip, trying not to cry too obviously, trying to appear as if she knew where she was going. The river, when she came to it, looked more benign than it had in the night, looked merely weedy and polluted rather than evil and all-swallowing. On the other side of it were Mexican streets festooned for some imminent or recent Mexican holiday, or maybe just permanently festooned. She found an air-conditioned taqueria where she was stared at but not harassed and could sit and drink a Coke and wallow in her girlish misery. Her body so wanted Richard, but the rest of her could see that she’d made a Mistake in coming along with him: that everything she’d hoped for from him and Chicago had been a big fat fantasy in her head. Phrases familiar from high-school Spanish, lo siento and hace mucho calor and ¿qué quiere la señora?, kept surfacing in the surrounding hubbub. She summoned courage and ordered three tacos and devoured them and watched innumerable buses roll by outside the windows, each trailing a wake of shimmering filth. Time passed in a peculiar manner which the autobiographer, with her now rather abundant experience of murdered afternoons, is able to identify as depressive (at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chockfull second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour), until finally, as the workday ended, groups of young laborers came in and began to pay too much attention to her, talking about her muletas, and she had to leave.

By the time she’d retraced her steps, the sun was an orange orb at the end of the east-west streets. Her intention, as she now allowed herself to realize, had been to stay out long enough to make Richard very worried about her, and in this she seemed completely to have failed. Nobody was home at the apartment. The walls of her room were nearly finished, the floor carefully swept, the bed neatly made up for her with real sheets and pillows. On the Indian bedspread was a note from Richard, in microscopic capital letters, giving her the address of a club and directions on how to take the El there. It concluded: WORD OF WARNING: I HAD TO BRING OUR HOSTS ALONG.

Before deciding whether to go out, Patty lay down for a short nap and was awakened many hours later, in great disorientation, by the return of Herrera’s friends. She hopped, one-legged, into the main room and there learned, from the most disagreeable of them, the underpanted one from the night before, that Richard had gone off with some other people and had asked that Patty be told not to wait up for him—he’d be back in plenty of time to get her to New York.

“What time is it now?” she said.

“About one o’clock.”

“In the morning?”

Herrera’s friend leered at her. “No, there’s a total eclipse of the sun.”

“And where is Richard?”

“He went off with a couple of girls he met. He didn’t say where.”

As noted, Patty was bad at computing driving distances. To get to Westchester in time to go with her family to the Mohonk Mountain House, she and Richard would have had to leave Chicago at five o’clock that morning. She slept long past that and awoke to gray and stormy weather, a different city, a different season. Richard was still nowhere in sight. She ate stale doughnuts and turned some pages of Hemingway until it was eleven and even she could see that the math wasn’t going to work.

She bit the bullet and called her parents, collect.

“Chicago!” Joyce said. “I can’t believe this. Are you near an airport? Can you catch a plane? We thought you’d be here by now. Daddy wants to get an early start, with all the weekend traffic.”

“I messed up,” Patty said. “I’m really sorry.”

“Well, can you get there by tomorrow morning? The big dinner isn’t until tomorrow night.”

“I’ll try really hard,” Patty said.

Joyce had been in the state assembly for three years now. If she had not gone on to enumerate to Patty all the relatives and family friends converging on Mohonk for this important tribute to a marriage, and the tremendous excitement with which Patty’s three siblings were anticipating the weekend, and how greatly honored she (Joyce) felt by the outpouring of sentiment from literally all four corners of the country, it’s possible that Patty would have done what it took to get to Mohonk. As things were, though, a strange peace and certainty settled over her while she listened to her mother. Light rain had begun to fall on Chicago; good smells of quenched concrete and Lake Michigan were carried inside by the wind stirring the canvas curtains. With an unfamiliar lack of resentment, a newly cool eye, Patty looked into herself and saw that no harm or even much hurt would come to anyone if she simply skipped the anniversary. Most of the work had already been done. She saw that she was almost free, and to take the last step felt kind of terrible, but not terrible in a bad way, if that makes any sense.

She was sitting by a window, smelling the rain and watching the wind bend the weeds and bushes on the roof of a long-abandoned factory, when the call from Richard came.

“Very sorry about this,” he said. “I’ll be there within the hour.”

“You don’t have to hurry,” she said. “It’s already way too late.”

“But your party’s tomorrow night.”

“No, Richard, that was the dinner. I was supposed to be there today. Today by five o’clock.”

“Shit. Are you kidding me?”

“Did you really not remember that?”

“It’s a little mixed up in my head at this point. I’m somewhat short on sleep.”

“OK, well, anyway. There’s no hurry at all. I think I’m going to go home now.”

And go home she did. Pushed her suitcase down the stairs and followed with her crutches, flagged a gypsy cab on Halstead Street, and took one Greyhound bus to Minneapolis and another to Hibbing, where Gene Berglund was dying in a Lutheran hospital. It was about forty degrees and pouring rain on the vacant small-hour streets of downtown Hibbing. Walter’s cheeks were rosier than ever. Outside the bus station, in his father’s cigarette-reeking gas-guzzler, Patty threw her arms around his neck and took the plunge of seeing how he kissed, and was gratified to find he did it very nicely.

Chapter 3: Free Markets Foster Competition