That afternoon-to the surprisingly small extent that the autobiographer remembers it-was especially nice for Walter. Patty had her hands full with the kids and with her attempts to induce Molly to utter polysyllables, but Walter was able to show off all the work he was doing on the house, and the beautiful and energetic offspring he’d conceived with Patty, and to watch Richard and Molly eat the best meal of their entire tour, and, no less important, to acquire rich data from Richard about the alternative-music scene, data that Walter would put to good use in the months that followed, buying the records of every artist Richard had mentioned, playing them while he renovated, impressing male neighbors and colleagues who fancied themselves musically hip, and feeling that he had the best of both worlds. The state of their rivalry was very satisfactory to him that day. Richard was poor and subdued and too thin, and his woman was peculiar and unhappy. Walter, now unquestionably the big brother, could relax and enjoy Richard’s success as a piquant and hipness-enhancing accessory to his own.

At that point, the only thing that could have thrown Walter back into the bad ways he’d felt in college, when he’d been tormented by his sense of losing to the person he loved too much not to care about beating, would have been some bizarre pathological sequence of events. Things at home would have had to sour very badly. Walter would have had to have terrible conflicts with Joey, and fail to understand him and earn his respect, and generally find himself replicating his relationship with his own dad, and Richard’s career would have had to take an unexpected latter-day turn for the better, and Patty would have had to fall violently in love with Richard. What were the chances of all that happening?

Alas, not zero.

One hesitates to ascribe too much explanatory significance to sex, and yet the autobiographer would be derelict in her duties if she didn’t devote an uncomfortable paragraph to it. The regrettable truth is that Patty had soon come to find sex sort of boring and pointless-the same old sameness-and to do it mostly for Walter’s sake. And, yes, undoubtedly, to not do it very well. There just usually seemed to be something else she’d rather have been doing. Most often, she would rather have been sleeping. Or a distracting or mildly worrisome noise would be coming from one of the kids’ rooms. Or she would be mentally counting how many entertaining minutes of a West Coast college basketball game would still remain when she was finally allowed to turn the TV back on. But even just basic chores of gardening or cleaning or shopping could seem delicious and urgent in comparison to fucking, and once you got it in your head that you needed to relax in a hurry and be fulfilled in a hurry so you could get downstairs and plant the impatiens that were wilting in their little plastic boxes, it was all over. She tried taking shortcuts, tried preemptively doing Walter with her mouth, tried telling him she was sleepy and he should just go ahead and have his fun and not worry about her. But poor Walter was constituted to care about his own satisfaction less than hers, or at least to predicate his on hers, and she could never seem to figure out a nice way of explaining what a bad position this put her in, because, when you got right down to it, it entailed telling him she didn’t want him the way he wanted her: that craving sex with her mate was one of the things (OK, the main thing) she’d given up in exchange for all the good things in their life together. And this turned out to be a rather difficult admission to make to a man you loved. Walter tried everything he could think of to make sex better for her except the one thing that might conceivably have worked, which was to stop worrying about making it better for her and just bend her over the kitchen table some night and have at her from behind. But the Walter who could have done this wouldn’t have been Walter. He was what he was, and he wanted what he was to be what Patty wanted. He wanted things to be mutual! And so the drawback of sucking him was that he always then wanted to go down on her, which made her incredibly ticklish. Eventually, after years of resisting, she managed to get him to stop trying altogether. And felt terribly guilty but also angry and annoyed to be made to feel like such a failure. The tiredness of Richard and Molly, on the afternoon they came to visit, seemed to Patty the tiredness of people who’d been up all night fucking, and it says a lot about her state of mind at that point, about the deadness of sex to her, about the totality of her immersion in being Jessica and Joey’s mother, that she didn’t even envy them for it. Sex seemed to her a diversion for young people with nothing better to do. Certainly neither Richard nor Molly looked uplifted by it.

And then the Traumatics were gone-on to their next gig, in Madison, and then on to releasing further wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand other people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small-venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be-while Patty and Walter pursued their mostly very absorbing workaday life, in which the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida. The autobiographer does acknowledge the possible connection between this small discomfort and the large mistakes that Patty was making as a mother in those years. Where Eliza’s parents, once upon a time, had erred in being too much into each other and not enough into Eliza, Patty can probably be said to have made the opposite error with Joey. But there are so many other, non-parental errors to be related in these pages that it seems just inhumanly painful to dwell on her mistakes with Joey as well; the autobiographer fears that it would make her lie down on the floor and never get up.

What happened first was that Walter and Richard became great friends again. Walter knew a lot of people, but the voice he most wanted to come home and hear on their answering machine was Richard’s, saying things like, “Yo, Jersey City here. Wondering if you can make me feel better about the situation in Kuwait. Give me a call.” Both from the frequency of Richard’s phonings and from the less defended way he spoke to Walter now-telling him he didn’t know anybody else like him and Patty, that they were his lifeline to a world of sanity and hope-Walter finally got it through his head that Richard genuinely liked and needed him and wasn’t just passively consenting to be his friend. (This was the context in which Walter gratefully cited his mom’s advice about loyalty.) Whenever another tour brought the Traumatics through town, Richard made time to stop by the house, usually alone. He took particular interest in Jessica, whom he held to be a Genuinely Good Soul in the mold of her grandmother, and plied her with earnest questions about her favorite writers and her volunteer work at the local soup kitchen. Though Patty could have wished for a daughter who was more like her, and for whom her own wealth of experience with mistake-making would have been a comforting resource, she was mostly very proud to have a daughter so wise about the way the world worked. She enjoyed seeing Jessica through Richard’s admiring eyes, and when he and Walter then went out together, it made Patty feel secure to see the two guys getting into the car, the great guy she’d married and the sexy one she hadn’t. Richard’s affection for Walter made her feel better about Walter herself; his charisma had a way of ratifying anything it touched.

One notable shadow was Walter’s disapproval of Richard’s situation with Molly Tremain. She had a beautiful voice but was a depressed or possibly bipolar person and spent massive amounts of time alone in her Lower East Side apartment, doing freelance copyediting at night and sleeping away her days. Molly was always available when Richard wanted to come over, and Richard claimed that she was fine with being his part-time lover, but Walter couldn’t shake the suspicion that their relationship was founded on misunderstandings. Over the years, Patty extracted from Walter various disturbing things that Richard had said to him in private, including “Sometimes I think my purpose on earth is to put my penis in the vaginas of as many women as I can” and “The idea of having sex with the same person for the rest of my life feels like death to me.” Walter’s suspicion that Molly secretly believed he would outgrow these sentiments turned out to be correct. Molly was two years older than Richard, and when she suddenly decided that she wanted a baby before it was too late, Richard was compelled to explain why this was never going to happen. Things between them quickly got so awful that he dumped her altogether and she in turn quit the band.