Freedom

“So this is me,” Walter said. “This is where I come from.”

“I love that you come from here.”

“I’m not sure what you mean by that, but I’ll take it.”

“Just that I admire you so much.”

“That’s good. I guess.” He went to the front desk and looked at keys. “How does Room 21 sound to you?”

“Is it a good room?”

“It’s very much like all the other rooms.”

“I’m twenty-one years old. So it’s perfect.”

Room 21 was full of faded and abraded surfaces that, in lieu of being refurbished, had been subjected to decades of vigorous scouring. The creek-dampness was noticeable but not overwhelming. The beds were low and standard sized, not queen.

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want,” Walter said, setting her bag down. “I can take you back to the station in the morning.”

“No! This is fine. I’m not here for vacation. I’m here to see you, and to try to be useful.”

“Right. I’m just worried that I’m not actually what you want.”

“Oh, well, worry no more.”

“Well, I’m still worried.”

She made him lie down on a bed and tried to reassure him with her body. Soon enough, though, his worry boiled up again. He righted himself and asked her why she’d gone on the road trip with Richard. It was a question she’d allowed herself to hope he wouldn’t ask.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I wanted to see what a road trip was like.”

“Hm.”

“There was something I had to see about. That’s the only way I can explain it. There was something I had to find out. And I found it out, and now I’m here.”

“What did you find out?”

“I found out where I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be with.”

“Well, that was quick.”

“It was a stupid mistake,” she said. “He’s got a way of looking at a person, as I’m sure you know. It takes a while for a person to sort out what she actually wants. Please don’t blame me for that.”

“I’m just impressed that you sorted it out so quickly.”

She had an impulse to start crying, and yielded to it, and Walter for a while became his best comforting self.

“He wasn’t nice to me,” she said through tears. “And you’re the opposite of that. And I so, so, so need the opposite of that right now. Can you please be nice?”

“I can be nice,” he said, stroking her head.

“I swear you won’t be sorry.”

These were exactly her words, in the autobiographer’s sorry recollection.

Here’s something else the autobiographer vividly remembers: the violence with which Walter then grabbed her shoulders and rolled her onto her back and loomed over her, pressing himself between her legs, with an utterly unfamiliar look on his face. It was a look of rage, and it became him. It was like curtains suddenly parting on something beautiful and manly.

“This is not about you,” he said. “Do you get that? I love every bit of you. Every inch of you. Every inch. From the minute I saw you. Do you get that?”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, thank you. I kind of had that sense, but it’s really good to hear.”

He wasn’t done, though.

“Do you understand that I have a … a …” He searched for words. “A problem. With Richard. I have a problem.”

“What problem?”

“I don’t trust him. I love him, but I don’t trust him.”

“Oh, God,” Patty said, “you should definitely trust him. He obviously cares about you, too. He’s incredibly protective of you.”

“Not always.”

“Well, he was with me. Do you realize how much he admires you?”

Walter stared down at her furiously. “Then why did you go with him? Why was he in Chicago with you? What the fuck? I don’t understand!”

Hearing him say fuck, and seeing how horrified he seemed by his own anger, she began to cry again. “God, please, God, please, God, please,” she said, “I’m here. OK? I’m here for you! And nothing happened in Chicago. Truly nothing.”

She pulled him closer, pulled hard on his hips. But instead of touching her breasts or taking her jeans down, as Richard surely would have, he stood up and began pacing Room 21.

“I’m not sure this is right,” he said. “Because, you know, I’m not stupid. I have eyes and ears, I’m not stupid. I really don’t know what to do now.”

It was a relief to hear that he wasn’t stupid about Richard; but she felt she’d run out of ways to reassure him. She simply lay there on the bed, listening to the rain on the roof, aware that she could have avoided this whole scene by never getting in a car with Richard; aware that she deserved some punishment. And yet it was hard not to imagine better ways for things to have gone. It was all such a foretaste of the late-night scenes of later years: Walter’s beautiful rage going wasted while she wept and he punished her and apologized for punishing her, saying that they were both exhausted and it was very late, which indeed it was: so late that it was early.

“I’m going to take a bath,” she said finally.

He was sitting on the other bed, his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is truly not about you.”

“Actually, you know what? That is not my very favorite thing to keep hearing.”

“I’m sorry. Believe it or not, I mean something nice by it.”

“And ‘sorry’ is not really high on my list at this point, either.”

Without taking his hands from his face, he asked if she needed help with the bath.

“I’m fine,” she said, although it was something of a production to bathe with her braced and bandaged knee propped up outside the water. When she emerged from the bathroom in her pajamas, half an hour later, Walter appeared not to have moved a muscle. She stood in front of him, looking down at his fair curls and narrow shoulders. “Listen, Walter,” she said. “I can leave in the morning if you want. But I need to get some sleep now. You should go to bed, too.”