Freedom

“It’s the refundable kind,” she lied.

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “But, you know, Richard’s not very reliable.”

“No, I know, I know,” she said. “You’re right. I just thought I might save some money, which I could then apply to the rent.” (A compounding of the lie. Her parents had bought the ticket.) “I’ll definitely pay the rent for June no matter what.”

“That doesn’t make any sense if you’re not going to live there.”

“Well, I probably will, is what I’m saying. I’m just not positive yet.”

“OK.”

“I really want to. I’m just not positive. So if you find another renter, you should probably go with them. But definitely I’ll cover June.”

There was another silence before Walter, in a discouraged voice, said he had to get off the phone.

Energized by having achieved this difficult conversation, she called Richard and assured him that she’d done the necessary bait-cutting, at which point Richard mentioned that his departure date was somewhat uncertain and there were a couple of shows in Chicago that he was hoping to stop and see.

“Just as long as I’m in New York by next Saturday,” Patty said.

“Right, the a

“It’s at the Mohonk Mountain House, but I only need to get to Westchester.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble started with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her. Then a mechanical issue with the van delayed Herrera, and since it was Herrera’s friends in Chicago whom Richard had been pla

At first, Richard didn’t want to talk about him, but once she got him going she learned a lot about Walter’s college years. About the symposia he’d organized-on overpopulation, on electoral-college reform-that hardly any students had attended. About the pioneering New Wave music show he’d hosted for four years on the campus radio station. About his petition drive for better-insulated windows in Macalester’s dorms. About the editorials he’d written for the college paper regarding, for example, the food trays he processed in his job on the dish belt: how he’d calculated how many St. Paul families could be fed with a single night’s waste, and how he’d reminded his fellow students that other human beings had to deal with the gobs of peanut butter they left smeared on everything, and how he’d grappled philosophically with his fellow students’ habit of putting three times too much milk on their cold cereal and then leaving brimming bowls of soiled milk on their trays: did they somehow think milk was a free and infinite commodity like water, with no environmental strings attached? Richard recounted all this in the same protective tone he’d taken with Patty two weeks earlier, a tone of strangely tender regret on Walter’s behalf, as if he were wincing at the pain Walter brought upon himself in butting up against harsh realities.

“Did he have girlfriends?” Patty asked.

“He made poor choices,” Richard said. “He fell for the impossible chicks. The ones with boyfriends. The arty ones moving in a different kind of circle. There was one sophomore he didn’t get over all senior year. He gave her his Friday-night radio slot and took a Tuesday afternoon. I found out about that too late to stop it. He rewrote her papers, took her to shows. It was terrible to watch, the way she worked him. She was always turning up in our room inopportunely.”

“How fu

“He never heeds my warnings. He’s very obstinate. And you wouldn’t necessarily guess it about him, but he always goes for good-looking. For pretty and well-formed. He’s ambitious that way. It didn’t lead to happy times for him in college.”

“And this girl who kept showing up in your room. Did you like her?”

“I didn’t like what she was doing to Walter.”

“That’s kind of a theme of yours, isn’t it?”

“She had shit taste and a Friday-night slot. At a certain point, there was only one way to get the message across to him. About what kind of chick he was dealing with.”

“Oh, so you were doing him a favor. I get it.”

“Everybody’s a moralist.”

“No, seriously, I can see why you don’t respect us. If all you ever see, year after year, is girls who want you to betray your best friend. I can see that’s a weird situation.”

“I respect you,” Richard said.

“Ha-ha-ha.”

“You’ve got a good head. I wouldn’t mind seeing you this summer, if you want to give New York a try.”

“That doesn’t seem very workable.”

“I’m merely saying it would be nice.”

She had about three hours to entertain this fantasy-staring at the taillights of the traffic rushing down and down toward the great metropolis, and wondering what it would be like to be Richard’s chick, wondering if a woman he respected might succeed in changing him, imagining herself never going back to Mi

“A map would have been helpful,” Patty said.

“It’s a numbered street. Shouldn’t be that hard.”

Herrera’s friends were artists. Their building, which Richard finally located with a cab driver’s help, looked uninhabited. It had a doorbell dangling from two wires that unexpectedly were functional. Somebody moved aside a piece of canvas covering a front window and then came down to air grievances with Richard.

“Sorry, man,” Richard said. “We got held up unavoidably. We just need to crash for a couple of nights.”

The artist was wearing cheap, saggy underpants. “We just started taping that room today,” he said. “It’s pretty wet. Herrera said something about coming on the weekend?”

“He didn’t call you yesterday?”

“Yeah, he called. I told him the spare room’s a fucking mess.”

“Not a problem. We’re grateful. I’ve got some stuff to bring in.”