Katz cleared his throat, unsure where this was heading. “In theory, yes,” he said. “But life gets complicated when you’re older.”
“It doesn’t mean I have to like her, though. It doesn’t mean I have to accept her. I don’t know if you’re aware that she’s living right upstairs? She’s here all the time. She’s here more than my mom is. And I just don’t think that’s quite fair. My feeling is she needs to move out and get her own place. But I don’t think my dad wants her to.”
“And why doesn’t he want that?”
Jessica smiled at Katz tightly, in a very unhappy way. “My parents have a lot of problems. Their marriage has a lot of problems. You don’t have to be a psychic to see that. Like, my mom’s been really depressed. For years. And she can’t get out of it. But they love each other, I know they love each other, and it just really bothers me to see what’s happening here. If she would just leave—I mean, Lalitha—if she would just leave, so my mom could have a chance again . . .”
“You and your mom are close?”
“No. Not really.”
Katz ate in silence and waited to hear more. He seemed, luckily, to have caught Jessica in a mood to disclose things to the nearest bystander.
“I mean, she tries,” she said. “But she’s got a real gift for saying the wrong thing. She doesn’t respect my judgment. Like, that I’m a basically intelligent adult who can think for herself? My boyfriend in college, he was incredibly sweet, and she was just horrible to him. It was like she was afraid I was going to marry him, and so she constantly had to be making fun of him. He was my first real boyfriend, and I just wanted to have some time to enjoy that, but she wouldn’t leave it alone. There was this time when William and I came down for the weekend, to go to the museums and do a gay-marriage march. We were staying here, and she started asking him if he liked it when girls flashed their breasts at frat parties. She’d read some stupid article in the newspaper about boys shouting at girls to show their breasts. And I’m like, no, Mother, I’m not at Virginia. We don’t have frats at my college, that’s just some stupid Stone-Aged thing that kids do in the South, I don’t go to Florida for spring break, we’re not like the people in your stupid article. But she wouldn’t leave it alone. She kept asking William how he felt about other girls’ breasts. And kept acting surprised when he said he wasn’t interested. She knew he was being sincere, not to mention incredibly embarrassed that his girlfriend’s mother was talking about breasts, but she acted like she didn’t believe him. To her, the whole thing was a joke. She wanted me to laugh at William. Who, yes, was a little hard to take sometimes. But, like, can I have a chance to figure that out for myself?”
“So she cares about you. She didn’t want you marrying the wrong guy.”
“I wasn’t going to marry him! That’s the thing!”
Katz’s eyes were drawn to the breasts that were mostly concealed by Jessica’s tightly crossed arms. She was small-chested like her mother but less well proportioned. What he was feeling now was that his love of Patty applied by extension to her daughter, minus the wish to fuck her. He could see what Walter had meant about her being a young person who gave an older person hope about the future. Her lights all seemed definitely to be on.
“You’re going to have a good life,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“You’ve got a good head. It’s great to see you again.”
“I know, you too,” she said. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw you. Maybe in high school?”
“You were working in a soup kitchen. Your dad took me down to see you there.”
“Right, my résumé-building years. I had about seventeen extracurricular activities. I was like Mother Teresa on speed.”
Katz helped himself to more of the pasta, which had olives and some sort of salad green in it. Yes, arugula: he was back safely in the bosom of the gentry. He asked Jessica what she would do if her parents split up.
“Wow, I don’t know,” she said. “I hope they don’t. Do you think they will? Is that what Dad says to you?”
“I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Well, I guess I’ll be joining the crowd then. Half of my friends are from broken homes. I just never saw it happening to us. Not until Lalitha came along.”
“You know, it takes two to tango. You shouldn’t blame her too much.”
“Oh, believe me, I’ll blame Dad, too. I will definitely blame him. I can hear it in his voice, and it’s just really . . . confusing. Just wrong. Like, I always thought I knew him really well. But apparently I didn’t.”
“And what about your mom?”
“She’s definitely unhappy about it, too.”
“No, but what if she were the one to leave? How would you feel about that?”
Jessica’s puzzlement at the question dispelled any notion that Patty had confided in her. “I don’t think she would ever do that,” she said. “Unless Dad made her.”
“She’s happy enough?”
“Well, Joey says she isn’t. I think she’s told Joey a lot of stuff she doesn’t tell me. Or maybe Joey just makes stuff up to be unpleasant to me. I mean, she definitely makes fun of Dad, all the time, but that doesn’t mean anything. She makes fun of everybody—I’m sure including me whenever I’m not around to hear it. We’re all very amusing to her, and it definitely annoys the shit out of me. But she’s really into her family. I don’t think she can imagine changing anything.”
Katz wondered if this could be true. Patty had told him herself, four years earlier, that she wasn’t interested in leaving Walter. But the prophet in Katz’s pants was insistently maintaining otherwise, and Joey was perhaps more reliable than his sister on the subject of their mother’s happiness.
“Your mom’s a strange person, isn’t she.”
“I feel bad for her,” Jessica said, “whenever I’m not being mad at her. She’s so smart, and she never really made anything of herself except being a good mom. The one thing I know for sure is I’m never going to stay home full-time with my kids.”
“So you think you want kids. The world population crisis not withstanding.”
She widened her eyes at him and reddened. “Maybe one or two. If I ever meet the right guy. Which doesn’t seem very likely to happen in New York.”
“New York’s a tough scene.”
“God, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I have never in my life felt so smallened and invisible and totally dissed as in the last eight months. I thought New York was supposed to be this great dating scene. But the guys are all either losers, jerks, or married. It’s appalling. I mean, I know I’m not a knockout or anything, but I think I’m at least worth five minutes of polite conversation. It’s been eight months now, and I’m still waiting for those five minutes. I don’t even want to go out anymore, it’s so demoralizing.”
“It’s not you. You’re a good-looking chick. You just may be too nice for New York. It’s a pretty naked economy there.”
“But how come there are so many girls like me? And no guys? Did the good guys all decide to go somewhere else?”
Katz cast his mind over the young males of his acquaintance in greater New York, including his former Walnut Surprise mates, and could think of not one whom he would trust on a date with Jessica. “The girls all come for publishing and art and nonprofits,” he said. “The guys come for money and music. There’s a selection bias there. The girls are good and interesting, the guys are all assholes like me. You shouldn’t take it personally.”
“I would just like to have one nice date.”
He was regretting having told her she was good-looking. It had sounded faintly like a come-on, and he hoped she hadn’t taken it that way. Unfortunately, it seemed as if she had.
“Are you really an asshole?” she said. “Or were you just saying that?”
The note of flirtatious provocation was alarming and needed to be nipped in the bud. “I came down here to do your dad a favor,” he said.
“That doesn’t sound
like being an asshole,” she said in a teasing tone.
“Trust me. It is.” He gave her the hardest look he knew how to give a person, and he could see that it scared her a little.
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“I’m not your ally on the Indian front. I’m your enemy.”
“What? Why? What do you care?”
“I told you. I’m an asshole.”
“Jesus. OK, then.” She looked at the tabletop with highly elevated eyebrows, confused and scared and pissed off all at once.
“This pasta is excellent, by the way. Thank you for making it.”
“Sure. Take some salad, too.” She stood up from the table. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and do some reading. Let me know if you need anything else.”
He nodded, and she left the room. He felt bad for the girl, but his business in Washington was a dirty one, and there was no point in sugarcoating it. After he’d finished eating, he carefully surveyed Walter’s vast book collection and even vaster collection of CDs and LPs, and then retreated upstairs to Joey’s room. He wanted to be the person who walked into a room where Patty was, not the person waiting in a room she walked into. To be the person waiting was to be too vulnerable; it wasn’t Katzian. Although he normally eschewed earplugs, for the veritable symphony they made of his tinnitus, he inserted some in his ears now, so as not to lie cravenly listening for footsteps and voices.
The next morning, he lingered in his room until nearly nine o’clock before descending the back staircase in search of breakfast. The kitchen was empty, but somebody, presumably Jessica, had made coffee and cut up fruit and set out muffins. A light spring rain was falling on the small back yard, its daffodils and jonquils, and the shoulders of the closely neighboring town houses. Hearing voices from the front of the mansion, Katz wandered down the hallway with coffee and a muffin and found Walter and Jessica and Lalitha, all scrubbed and morning-skinned and shower-haired, waiting for him in the conference room.
“Good, you’re here,” Walter said. “We can start.”
“Didn’t realize we were meeting so early.”
“It’s nine o’clock,” Walter said. “This is a workday for us.”
He and Lalitha were seated side by side near the middle of the big table. Jessica was way down at the farthest end with her arms crossed, tensely radiating skepticism and defendedness. Katz sat down across the table from the others.
“You sleep all right?” Walter said.
“Slept fine. Where’s Patty?”
Walter shrugged. “She’s not coming to the meeting, if that’s what you mean.”
“We’re actually trying to accomplish something,” Lalitha said. “We’re not trying to spend the entire day laughing at how impossible it is to accomplish anything.”
Whuff!
Jessica’s eyes were darting from person to person, spectating. Walter, on closer inspection, had terrible circles under his eyes, and his fingers, on the tabletop, were doing something between trembling and tapping. Lalitha looked a bit wrecked herself, her face bluish with dark-skinned pallor. Observing the relation of their bodies to each other, their deliberate angling-apart, Katz wondered if chemistry might already have done its work. They looked sullen and guilty, like lovers compelled to behave themselves in public. Or, conversely, like people who hadn’t settled on terms yet and were unhappy with each other. The situation merited careful monitoring either way.
“So we’ll start with the problem,” Walter said. “The problem is that nobody dares make overpopulation part of the national conversation. And why not? Because the subject is a downer. Because it seems like old news. Because, like with global warming, we haven’t quite reached the point where the consequences become undeniable. And because we sound like elitists if we try to tell poor people and uneducated people not to have so many babies. Having large families tracks inversely with economic status, and so does the age at which girls start having babies, which is just as damaging from a numbers perspective. You can cut the growth rate in half just by doubling the average age of first-time mothers from eighteen to thirty-five. That’s one reason rats reproduce so much more than leopards do—because they reach sexual maturity so much sooner.”
“Already a problem in that analogy, of course,” Katz said.
“Exactly,” Walter said. “It’s the elitism thing again. Leopards are a ‘higher’ species than rats or bunnies. So that’s another part of the problem: we turn poor people into rodents when we call attention to their high birth rates and their low age of first reproduction.”
“I think the cigarette analogy is a good one,” Jessica said from the far end of the table. It was clear that she’d gone to an expensive college and had learned to speak her mind in seminars. “People with money can get Zoloft and Xanax. So when you tax cigarettes, and alcohol too, you’re hitting poor people the hardest. You’re making the cheap drugs more expensive.”
“Right,” Walter said. “That’s a very good point. And it applies to religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don’t have economic opportunity. If we try to pick on religion, which is our real villain, we’re picking on the economically oppressed.”
“And guns also,” Jessica said. “Hunting’s also very low-end.”
“Ha, tell that to Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said in her clipped accent. “Tell that to Dick Cheney.”
“No, actually, Jessica’s right,” Walter said.
Lalitha turned on him. “Really? I don’t see it. What does hunting have to do with population?”
Jessica rolled her eyes impatiently.
This could be a long day, Katz thought.
“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. That’s what Bill Clinton figured out—that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.”
That Lalitha nodded in submissive agreement to this, rather than sulking, made the situation clearer. She was still begging and Walter still withholding. And he was in his natural element, his personal fortress, when he was allowed to speak abstractly. He hadn’t changed at all since his years at Macalester.
“The real problem, though,” Katz said, “is free-market capitalism. Right? Unless you’re talking about outlawing reproduction, your problem isn’t civil liberties. The real reason you can’t get any cultural traction with overpopulation is that talking about fewer babies means talking about limits to growth. Right? And growth isn’t some side issue in free-market ideology. It’s the entire essence. Right? In free-market economic theory, you have to leave stuff like the environment out of the equation. What was that word you used to love? ‘Externalities’?”
“That’s the word, all right,” Walter said.
“I don’t imagine the theory’s changed much since we were in school. The theory is that there isn’t any theory. Right? Capitalism can’t handle talking about limits, because the whole point of capitalism is the restless growth of capital. If you want to be heard in the capitalist media, and communicate in a capitalist culture, overpopulation can’t make any sense. It’s literally nonsense. And that’s your real problem.”
“So maybe we should just call it a day, then,” Jessica said drily. “Since there’s nothing we can do.”
“I didn’t invent the problem,” Katz said to her. “I’m just pointing it out.”
“We know about the problem,” Lalitha said. “But we’re a pragmatic organization. We’re not trying to overthrow the whole system, we’re just trying to mitigate. We’re trying to help the cultural conversation catch up with the crisis, before it’s too late. We want to
do with population the same thing Gore’s doing with climate change. We have a million dollars in cash, and there are some very practical steps we can take right now.”
“I’d actually be fine with overthrowing the whole system,” Katz said. “You can go ahead and sign me up for that.”
“The reason the system can’t be overthrown in this country,” Walter said, “is all about freedom. The reason the free market in Europe is tempered by socialism is that they’re not so hung up on personal liberties there. They also have lower population growth rates, despite comparable income levels. The Europeans are all-around more rational, basically. And the conversation about rights in this country isn’t rational. It’s taking place on the level of emotion, and class resentments, which is why the right is so good at exploiting it. And that’s why I want to get back to what Jessica said about cigarettes.”
Jessica made a beckoning gesture, as if to say, Thank you!
From the hallway came the sound of somebody, Patty, moving around the kitchen in hard heels. Katz, wanting a cigarette, took Walter’s empty coffee mug and prepared a plug of chew instead.
“Positive social change works top-down,” Walter said. “The surgeon general issues his report, educated people read it, bright kids start to realize that smoking is stupid, not cool, and national smoking rates go down. Or Rosa Parks sits down on her bus, college students hear about it, they march in Washington, they take buses to the South, and suddenly there’s a national civil-rights movement. We’re now at a point where any reasonably educated person can understand the problem with population growth. So the next step is to make it cool for college kids to care about the issue.”
While Walter held forth on the subject of college kids, Katz strained to hear what Patty was doing in the kitchen. The essential pussiness of his situation was coming home to him. The Patty he wanted was the Patty who didn’t want Walter: the housewife who didn’t want to be a housewife anymore; the housewife who wanted to fuck a rocker. But instead of just calling her up and saying he wanted her, he was sitting here like some college sophomore, indulging his old friend’s intellectual fantasies. What was it about Walter that so knocked him off his game? He felt like a free-flying insect caught in a sticky web of family. He couldn’t stop trying to be nice to Walter, because he liked him; if he hadn’t liked him so much, he probably wouldn’t have wanted Patty; and if he hadn’t wanted her, he wouldn’t have been sitting here pretending. What a mess.
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