“You’re not a wine drinker,” Ray said to Walter.
“I’m sure I could become one if I wanted,” Walter said.
“This is a very nice amarone, if you want to try a little.”
“No, thank you.”
“You sure?” Ray waved the bottle at Walter.
“Yes he’s sure!” Patty cried. “He’s only said it every night for the last four nights! Hello? Ray? Not everybody wants to be drunk and disgusting and rude. Some people actually enjoy having an adult conversation instead of making sex jokes for two hours.”
Ray grinned as if she’d been amusing. Joyce unfolded her half-glasses to examine the dessert menu while Walter blushed and Abigail, with a spastic neck-twist and a sour frown, said, “ ‘Ray’? ‘Ray’? We call him ‘Ray’ now?”
The next morning, Joyce quaveringly told Patty: “Walter is much more—I don’t know if the right word is conservative, or what, I guess not exactly conservative, although, actually, from the standpoint of democratic process, and power flowing upward from the people, and prosperity for all, not exactly autocratic, but, in a way, yes, almost conservative—than I’d expected.”
Ray, two months later, at Patty’s graduation, with a poorly suppressed snicker, said to Patty: “Walter got so red in the face about that growth stuff, my God, I thought he was going to have a stroke.”
And Abigail, six months after that, at the only Thanksgiving that Patty and Walter were ever foolish enough to celebrate in Westchester, said to Patty: “How are things going with the Club of Rome? Have you guys joined the Club of Rome yet? Have you learned the passwords? Have you sat in the leather chairs?”
Patty, at LaGuardia Airport, sobbing, said to Walter: “I hate my family!”
And Walter valiantly replied: “We’ll make our own family!”
Poor Walter. First he’d set aside his acting and filmmaking dreams out of a sense of financial obligation to his parents, and then no sooner had his dad set him free by dying than he teamed up with Patty and set aside his planet-saving aspirations and went to work for 3M, so that Patty could have her excellent old house and stay home with the babies. The whole thing happened almost without discussion. He got excited about the plans that excited her, he threw himself into renovating the house and defending her against her family. It wasn’t until years later—after Patty had begun to Disappoint him—that he became more forgiving of the other Emersons and insisted that she was the lucky one, the only Emerson to escape the shipwreck and survive to tell the tale. He said that Abigail, who’d been left stranded to scavenge emotional meals on an island of great scarcity (Manhattan Island!), should be forgiven for monopolizing conversations in her attempt to feed herself. He said that Patty should pity her siblings, not blame them, for not having had the strength or the luck to get away: for being so hungry. But this all came much later. In the early years, he was so fired up about Patty, she could do no wrong. And very nice years they were.
Walter’s own competitiveness wasn’t family-oriented. By the time she met him, he’d already won that game. At the poker table of being a Berglund, he’d been dealt every ace except maybe looks and ease with women. (His older brother—who is currently on his third young wife, who is working hard to support him—got that particular ace.) Walter not only knew about the Club of Rome and read difficult novels and appreciated Igor Stravinsky, he could also sweat a copper pipe joint and do finish carpentry and identify birds by their songs and take good care of a problematic woman. He was so much his family’s winner that he could afford to make regular voyages back to help the others.
“I guess now you’re going to have to see where I grew up,” he’d said to Patty outside the Hibbing bus station, after she’d aborted the road trip with Richard. They were in his dad’s Crown Victoria, which they’d fogged up with their hot and heavy breathing.
“I want to see your room,” Patty said. “I want to see everything. I think you’re a wonderful person!”
Hearing this, he had to kiss her for another long while before resuming his anxiety. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I’m still embarrassed to take you home.”
“Don’t be embarrassed. You should see my home. It’s a freak show.”
“Yeah, well, this is not anything as interesting as that. This is just your basic Iron Range squalor.”
“So let’s go. I want to see it. I want to sleep with you.”
“That sounds great,” he said, “but I think my mom might be uncomfortable with it.”
“I want to sleep near you. And then I want to have breakfast with you.”
“That we can arrange.”
In truth, the scene at the Whispering Pines was sobering to Patty and touched off a moment of doubt about what she’d done by coming to Hibbing; it unsettled that self-contained state of mind in which she’d run to a guy who physically didn’t do for her what his best friend did. The motel wasn’t so bad from the outside, and there was a non-depressing number of cars in the parking lot, but the living quarters, behind the office, were indeed a long way from Westchester. They lit up a whole previously invisible universe of privilege, her own suburban privilege; she had an unexpected pang of homesickness. The floors were spongily carpeted and sloped perceptibly toward the creek in back. In the living/dining area was a hubcap-sized, extensively crenellated ceramic ashtray within easy reach of the davenport where Gene Berglund had read his fishing and hunting magazines and watched whatever programming the motel’s antenna (rigged, as she saw the next morning, to the top of a decapitated pine tree behind the septic field) was able to pull down from stations in the Twin Cities and Duluth. Walter’s little bedroom, which he’d shared with his younger brother, was at the bottom of the downslope and permanently damp with creek vapors. Running down the middle of the carpeting was a line of gummy residue from the duct tape that Walter had put down as a child to demarcate his private space. Paraphernalia from his striving childhood were still ranged along the far wall: Boy Scout handbooks and awards, a complete set of abridged presidential biographies, a partial set of World Book Encyclopedia volumes, skeletons of small animals, an empty aquarium, stamp and coin collections, a scientific thermometer/barometer with wires leading out a window. On the room’s warped door was a yellowed homemade No Smoking sign, lettered in red crayon, its N and its S unsteady but tall in their defiance.
“My first act of rebellion,” Walter said.
“How old were you?” Patty said.
“I don’t know. Maybe ten. My little brother had bad asthma.”
Outside, the rain was coming down hard. Dorothy was asleep in her room, but Walter and Patty were both still buzzing with lust. He showed her the “lounge” that his dad had operated, the impressive stuffed walleye mounted on the wall, the birch-plywood bar that he’d helped his dad build. Until recently, when he had to be hospitalized, Gene had stood smoking and drinking behind this bar in the late afternoon, waiting for his friends to get off work and give him business.
“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.”
He nodded.
“I’m sorry I went to Chicago with Richard. It was my idea, not his. You should blame me, not him. But right now? You’re making me feel kind of shitty.”
He nodded and stood up.
“Kiss me good night?” she said.
He did, and it was better than fighting, so much better that soon they were under the covers and turning off the lamp. Daylight was leaking in around the curtains—dawn in May came early in the north country.
“I know essentially nothing about sex,” Walter confessed.
“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not very complicated.”
And so began the happiest years of their life. For Walter, especially, it was a very giddy time. He took possession of the girl he wanted, the girl who could have gone with Richard but had chosen him instead, and then, three days later, at the Lutheran hospital, his lifelong struggle against his father ended with his father’s death. (To be dead is to be as beaten as a dad can get.) Patty was with Walter and Dorothy at the hospital that morning, and was moved by their tears to do some crying of her own, and it felt to her, as they drove back to the motel in near-silence, that she was already practically married.
In the motel parking lot, after Dorothy had gone inside to lie down, Patty watched Walter do a strange thing. He sprinted from one end of the lot to the other, leaping as he ran, bouncing on his toes before he turned around and ran some more. It was a glorious clear morning, with a steady strong breeze from the north, the pine trees along the creek literally whispering. At the end of one of his sprints, Walter hopped up and down and then turned away from Patty and started running down Route 73, way down around the bend and out of sight, and was gone for an hour.
That next afternoon, in Room 21, in broad daylight, with the windows open and the faded curtains billowing, they laughed and cried and fucked with a joy whose gravity and innocence it fairly wrecks the autobiographer to think back on, and cried some more and fucked some more and lay next to each other with sweating bodies and full hearts and listened to the sighing of the pines. Patty felt like she’d taken some powerful drug that wasn’t wearing off, or like she’d fallen into an incredibly vivid dream that she wasn’t waking up from, except that she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn’t a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past, a romance unlike any romance she’d imagined. Because Room 21! How could she have imagined Room 21? It was such a sweetly clean old-fashioned room, and Walter such a sweetly clean old-fashioned person. And she was 21 and could feel her 21ness in the young, clean, strong wind that was blowing down from Canada. Her little taste of eternity.
More than four hundred people came out for his dad’s funeral. On Gene’s behalf, without even having known him, Patty was proud of the huge turnout. (It helps to die early if you want a big funeral.) Gene had been a hospitable guy who liked to fish and hunt and hang out with his buddies, most of the
m veterans, and who’d had the misfortune of being alcoholic and poorly educated and married to a person who invested her hopes and dreams and best love in their middle son, rather than in him. Walter would never forgive Gene for having worked Dorothy so hard at the motel, but frankly, in the autobiographer’s opinion, although Dorothy was incredibly sweet, she was also definitely one of those martyr types. The after-funeral reception, in a Lutheran function hall, was Patty’s total-immersion crash course in Walter’s extended family, a festival of Bundt cake and determination to see the bright side of everything. All five of Dorothy’s living siblings were there, as was Walter’s older brother, newly released from jail, with his trampy-pretty (first) wife and their two little kids, and so was their taciturn younger brother in his Army dress uniform. The only important person missing, really, was Richard.
Walter had called him with the news, of course, though even this had been complicated, since it involved tracking down Richard’s ever-elusive bass player, Herrera, in Minneapolis. Richard had just arrived in Hoboken, New Jersey. After giving Walter his telephonic condolences, he said that he was wiped out financially and sorry he couldn’t make it to the funeral. Walter assured him this was totally fine, and then proceeded for several years to hold it against Richard that he hadn’t made the effort, which was not entirely fair, given that Walter had already secretly been mad at Richard and hadn’t even wanted him at the funeral. But Patty knew better than to be the one to point this out.
When they made their New York trip, a year later, she suggested that Walter look Richard up and spend an afternoon with him, but Walter pointed out that he had twice called Richard in recent months while Richard had not initiated any calls to him. Patty said, “But he’s your best friend,” and Walter said, “No, you’re my best friend,” and Patty said, “Well, then, he’s your best male friend, and you should look him up.” But Walter insisted it had always been like this—that he’d always felt more like the pursuer than the pursued; that there was a kind of brinksmanship between them, a competition not to be the first to blink and show need—and he was sick of it. He said this wasn’t the first time Richard had done his disappearing act. If he still wanted to be friends, Walter said, then maybe, for once, he could trouble himself to do the calling. Though Patty suspected that Richard might still be feeling sheepish about the Chicago episode and trying not to intrude on Walter’s domestic bliss, and that it might therefore behoove Walter to assure him he was still welcome, she again knew better than to push.
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