That evening in Philadelphia, there was a brief dismal episode: she went down to the hotel bar with the intention of picking somebody up. She quickly discovered that the world is divided into people who know how to be comfortable by themselves on a bar chair and people who do not. Also, the men just looked too stupid, and for the first time in a long while she started thinking about how it felt to be drunk and raped, and went back up to her mod room to enjoy further paroxysms of self-pity.
The next morning, she took a commuter train out to Jessica’s college in a state of neediness from which no good could come. Although she’d tried, for nineteen years, to do everything for Jessica that her own mother hadn’t done for her—had never missed a game of hers, had bathed her in approval, had familiarized herself with the intricacies of her social life, had been her partisan in every little hurt and disappointment, had involved herself deeply in the drama of her college applications—there was, as noted, an absence of true closeness. This was due partly to Jessica’s self-sufficient nature and partly to Patty’s overdoing things with Joey. It was to Joey, not Jessica, that she’d gone with her overflowing heart. But the door to Joey was closed and locked now, due to her mistakes, and she arrived on the beautiful Quaker campus not caring about Parents’ Weekend. She just wanted some private time with her daughter.
Unfortunately, Jessica’s new boyfriend, William, couldn’t take a hint. William was a good-natured blond Californian soccer player whose own parents weren’t visiting. He followed Patty and Jessica to lunch, to Jessica’s afternoon art-history lecture, and to Jessica’s dorm room, and when Patty then pointedly offered to take Jessica to dinner in the city, Jessica replied that she’d already made a local dinner reservation for three. At the restaurant, Patty listened stoically while Jessica prodded William to describe the charitable organization he’d founded while still in high school—some grotesquely worthy program wherein poor Malawian girls had their educations sponsored by soccer clubs in San Francisco. Patty had little choice but to keep drinking wine. Midway through her fourth glass, she decided that William needed to know that she herself had once excelled at intercollegiate sports. Since Jessica declined to supply the fact that she’d been second-team all-American, she was obliged to supply it herself, and since this sounded like bragging she felt she had to undercut it by telling the story of her groupie, which led to Eliza’s drug habits and lies about leukemia, and to the wrecking of her knee. She was speaking loudly and, she thought, entertainingly, but William, instead of laughing, kept glancing nervously at Jessica, who was sitting with her arms crossed and looking morose.
“And the point is what?” she said finally.
“Nothing,” Patty said. “I’m just telling you what things were like when I was in college. I didn’t realize you weren’t interested.”
“I’m interested,” William was kind enough to say.
“What’s interesting to me,” Jessica said, “is that I’d never heard any of this.”
“I’ve never told you about Eliza?”
“No. That must have been Joey.”
“I’m sure I’ve talked about it.”
“No, Mom. Sorry. You haven’t.”
“Well, anyway, now I’m talking about it, although maybe I’ve said enough.”
“Maybe!”
Patty knew she was behaving badly, but she couldn’t help it. Seeing Jessica and William’s tenderness with each other, she thought of herself at nineteen, thought of her mediocre schooling and her sick relationships with Carter and Eliza, and regretted her life, and pitied herself. She was falling into a depression that deepened precipitously the following day, when she returned to the college and endured a tour of its sumptuous grounds, a luncheon on the lawn of the president’s house, and an afternoon colloquium (“Performing Identity in a Multivalent World”) attended by scores of other parents. Everyone looked radiantly better-adjusted than she was feeling. The students all seemed cheerfully competent at everything, no doubt including sitting comfortably in a bar chair, and all the other parents seemed so proud of them, so thrilled to be their friends, and the college itself seemed immensely proud of its wealth and its altruistic mission. Patty really had been a good parent; she’d succeeded in preparing her daughter for a happier and easier life than her own; but it was clear from the other families’ very body language that she hadn’t been a great mom in the ways that counted most. While the other mothers and daughters walked shoulder to shoulder on the paved pathways, laughing or comparing cell phones, Jessica walked on the grass one or two steps ahead of Patty. The only role she offered Patty that weekend was to be impressed with her fabulous school. Patty did her utmost to play this role, but finally, in an access of depression, she sat down on one of the Adirondack chairs that dotted the main lawn and begged Jessica to come to dinner with her in the city without William, who, mercifully, had had a game that afternoon.
Jessica stood at some distance and regarded her guardedly. “William and I need to study tonight,” she said. “Normally I would have been studying all yesterday and today.”
“I’m sorry I kept you from that,” Patty said with depressive sincerity.
“No, it’s fine,” Jessica said. “I really wanted you to be here. I really wanted you to see where I’m spending four years of my life. It’s just that the workload’s pretty intense.”
“No, of course. It’s great. It’s great that you can handle that. I’m so proud of you. I really am, Jessica. I think the world of you.”
“Well, thank you.”
“It’s just—how about if we go to my hotel room? It’s a really fun room. We can order room service and watch movies and drink from the minibar. I mean, you can drink from the minibar, I’m not going to drink tonight. But just to have a girls’ night, just the two of us, for one night. You can study the whole rest of the fall.”
She kept her eyes on the ground, awaiting Jessica’s judgment. She was painfully aware of proposing something new for them.
“I really think I’d better work,” Jessica said. “I already promised William.”
“Oh, please, though, Jessie. One night’s not going to kill you. It would mean a lot to me.”
When Jessica did not reply to this, Patty forced herself to look up. Her daughter was gazing with desolate self-control at the main college building, on an outside wall of which Patty had noticed a stone graven with words of wisdom from the Class of 1920: USE WELL THY FREEDOM.
“Please?” she said.
“No,” Jessica said, not looking at her. “No! I don’t feel like it.”
“I’m sorry I drank too much and said those stupid things last night. I wish you’d let me make it up to you.”
“I’m not trying to punish you,” Jessica said. “It’s just, you obviously don’t like my school, you obviously don’t like my boyfriend—”
“No, he’s fine, he’s nice, I do like him. It’s just that I came here to see you, not him.”
“Mom, I make your life so easy for you. Do you have any idea how easy? I don’t do drugs, I don’t do any of the shit that Joey does, I don’t embarrass you, I don’t create scenes, I never did any of that—”
“I know! And I am truly grateful for it.”
“OK, but then don’t complain if I have my own life and my own friends and don’t feel like suddenly rearranging everything for you. You get all the benefits of me taking care of myself, the least you can do is not make me feel guilty about it.”
“Jessie, though, we’re talking about one night. It’s silly to make such a big deal of it.”
“Then don’t make a big deal of it.”
Jessica’s self-control and coolness toward her seemed to Patty a just punishment for how rule-bound and cold to her mother she herself had been at nineteen. She was feeling so bad about herself, indeed, that almost any punishment would have seemed appropriate to her. Saving her tears for later—feeling as if she didn’t deserve whatever emotional advantage she might have gained by crying, or by running off in a sulk to the
train station—she exercised her own self-control and ate an early dining-hall dinner with Jessica and her roommate. She behaved like a grownup even though she felt that Jessica was the real grownup of the two of them.
Back in St. Paul, she continued her plunge down the mental-health mine shaft, and there were no more e-mails from Richard. The autobiographer wishes she could report that Patty didn’t send him any e-mails, either, but it should be clear by now that her capacity for error, agonizing, and self-humiliation is boundless. The one message she feels OK about sending was written after Walter gave her the news that Molly Tremain had killed herself with sleeping pills in her Lower East Side apartment. Patty was her best self in that e-mail and hopes that it’s how Richard remembers her.
The rest of the story of what Richard was doing that winter and spring has been told elsewhere, notably in People and Spin and Entertainment Weekly after the release of Nameless Lake and the emergence of a “cult” of Richard Katz. Michael Stipe and Jeff Tweedy were among the worthies who came forward to endorse Walnut Surprise and confess to having been longtime closet Traumatics listeners. Richard’s scruffy, well-educated white male fans may not have been so young anymore, but quite a few of them were now influential senior Arts editors.
As for Walter, the resentment you feel when your favorite unknown band suddenly goes on everybody’s playlist was multiplied by a thousand. Walter was proud, of course, that the new record was named after Dorothy’s lake, and that so many of the songs had been written in that house. Richard had also mercifully crafted the lyrics of each song so that the “you” in them, who was Patty, could be mistaken for dead Molly; this was the angle that he directed interviewers to take, knowing that Walter read and saved every scrap of press his friend ever got. But Walter was mostly disappointed and hurt by Richard’s moment in the sun. He said he understood why Richard hardly ever called him anymore, he understood that Richard had a lot on his plate now, but he didn’t really understand it. The true state of their friendship was turning out to be exactly as he’d always feared. Richard, even when he seemed to be most down, was never really down. Richard always had his secret musical agenda, an agenda that did not include Walter, and was always ultimately making his case directly to his fans, and keeping his eyes on the prize. A couple of minor music journalists were diligent enough to phone Walter for interviews, and his name could be found in some out-of-the-way places, most of them online, but Richard, in the interviews that Walter read, referred to him simply as “a really good college friend,” and none of the big magazines mentioned him by name. Walter wouldn’t have minded getting a little more credit for having been so morally and intellectually and even financially supportive of Richard, but what really hurt him was how little he seemed to matter to Richard, compared to how much Richard mattered to him. And Patty of course couldn’t offer him her best proof of how much he actually did matter to Richard. When Richard managed to find time to connect with him on the phone, Walter’s hurt poisoned their conversations and made Richard that much less inclined to call again.
And so Walter became competitive. He’d been lulled into believing himself the big brother, and now Richard had set him straight yet again. Richard may have privately sucked at chess and long-term relationships and good citizenship, but he was publicly loved and admired and celebrated for his tenacity, his purity of purpose, his gorgeous new songs. It all made Walter suddenly hate the house and the yard and the small Minnesotan stakes he’d sunk so much of his life and energy into; Patty was shocked by how bitterly he belittled his own accomplishments. Within weeks of the release of Nameless Lake, he was flying to Houston for his first interview with the megamillionaire Vin Haven, and a month after that he began to spend his work weeks in Washington, D.C. It was obvious to Patty, if not to Walter himself, that his resolve to go to Washington and create the Cerulean Mountain Trust and become a more ambitious international player was fueled by competition. In December, when Walnut Surprise played with Wilco at the Orpheum on a Friday night, he didn’t even fly back to St. Paul in time to see them.
Patty gave that show a miss herself. She couldn’t bear to listen to the new record—couldn’t get past the past tense of the second song—
There was nobody like you
For me. Nobody
I live with nobody. Love
Nobody. You were that body
That nobody was like
You were that body
That body for me
There was nobody like you
and so she did her best to follow Richard’s lead and relegate him to the past. There was something exciting, something almost Fiend of Athens, in Walter’s new energy, and she succeeded in hoping that the two of them might begin life afresh in Washington. She still loved the house on Nameless Lake, but she was done with the house on Barrier Street, which hadn’t been enough to hold Joey. She visited Georgetown for one afternoon, on a pretty blue fall Saturday when a Minnesotan wind was tossing the turning trees, and said, yeah, OK, I can do this. (Was she also conscious of the proximity of the University of Virginia, where Joey had just enrolled? Was her grasp of geography maybe not as bad as she’d always thought?) Incredibly, it was not until she actually arrived for good in Washington—not until she was crossing Rock Creek in a taxi with two suitcases—that she remembered how much she’d always hated politics and politicians. She walked into the house on 29th Street and saw, in a heartbeat, that she’d made yet another mistake.
*It occurred to Patty, on the bus ride from Chicago to Hibbing, that maybe the reason Richard had spurned her was that she wasn’t into his music and he was annoyed by this. Not that there was anything she could have done about it.
2004
MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL
When it became unavoidable that Richard Katz return to the studio with his eager young bandmates and start recording a second Walnut Surprise album—when he’d exhausted all modes of procrastination and flight, first playing every receptive city in America and then touring progressively more remote foreign countries, until his bandmates rebelled at adding Cyprus to their Turkish trip, and then breaking his left index finger while fielding a paperback copy of Samantha Power’s seminal survey of world genocide flung too violently by the band’s drummer, Tim, across a hotel room in Ankara, and then retreating solo to a cabin in the Adirondacks to score a Danish art film and, in his utter boredom with the project, seeking out a coke dealer in Plattsburgh and taking 5,000 euros of Danish government arts funding up his nose, and then going AWOL for a stretch of costly dissipation in New York and Florida which didn’t end until he was busted in Miami for DWI and possession, and then checking himself into the Gubser Clinic in Tallahassee for six weeks of detox and snide resistance to the gospel of recovery, and then recuperating from the shingles he’d taken insufficient care to avoid contracting during a chicken-pox outbreak at the Gubser, and then performing 250 hours of a greeably mindless community service at a Dade County park, and then simply refusing to answer his phone or check his e-mail while he read books in his apartment on the pretext of shoring up his defenses against the chicks and drugs that his bandmates all seemed able to enjoy without too seriously overdoing it—he sent Tim a postcard and told him to tell the others that he was dead broke and going back to building rooftop decks full-time; and the rest of Walnut Surprise began to feel like idiots for having waited.
Not that it mattered, but Katz really was broke. Income and outlays had more or less balanced during the band’s year and a half of touring; whenever there’d been danger of a surplus, he’d upgraded their hotels and bought drinks for bars full of fans and strangers. Though Nameless Lake and the newly kindled consumer interest in old Traumatics recordings had brought him more money than his previous twenty years of work combined, he’d managed to blow every dime of it in his quest to relocate the self he’d misplaced. The most traumatic events ever to befall the longtime front man of the Traumatics had been (1) receiving a Grammy nomination, (2) hearing his music played on National Public R
adio, and (3) deducing, from December sales figures, that Nameless Lake had made the perfect little Christmas gift to leave beneath tastefully trimmed trees in several hundred thousand NPR-listening households. The Grammy nomination had been a particularly disorienting embarrassment.
Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world’s general crappiness: for Katz’s Jewish paternal forebears, who’d been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother’s side, who’d labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn’t an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. Grim situations were Katz’s niche the way murky water was a carp’s. His best years with the Traumatics had coincided with Reagan I, Reagan II, and Bush I; Bill Clinton (at least pre-Lewinsky) had been something of a trial for him. Now came Bush II, the worst regime of all, and he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. He was at once freer than he’d been since puberty and closer than he’d ever been to suicide. In the last days of 2003, he went back to building decks.
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