“There’s nobody else.”

“Nobody? There’s been nobody? God, even I’ve been worse-behaved than that. In my own little marital way.”

“I didn’t say there haven’t been any. I said there isn’t one.”

She pressed her head against the window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just making me feel too old, too ugly, too stupid, too jealous. I can’t stand to hear what’s coming out of my mouth.”

“He called me this morning,” Richard said.

“Who?”

“Walter. I should have let it ring, but I picked up. He said he’d gotten up early to take you to the airport, and he was missing you. He said things have been really good with you guys. ‘Happiest in many years,’ I believe his phrase was.”

Patty said nothing.

“Said you were going out to see Jessica, Jessica secretly very happy about this, although worried that you might say something weird and embarrass her, or that you’re not going to like her new boyfriend. Walter all in all extremely happy that you’re doing this for her.”

Patty fidgeted there by the window, struggling to listen.

“Said he was feeling bad about some of the things he’d said to me last winter. Said he didn’t want me to have the wrong idea about you. Said last winter was terrible, because of Joey, but things are much better now. ‘Happiest in many years.’ I’m pretty sure that was the phrase.”

Some combination of gagging and sobbing produced a ridiculous painful burp from Patty.

“What was that?” Richard said.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“So, anyway.”

“Anyway.”

“I decided not to go.”

“Right. I understand. Of course.”

“Good, then.”

“But why don’t you just come down anyway. I mean, since I’m here. And then I can go back to my incredibly happy life, and you can go back to New Jersey.”

“I’m just telling you what he said.”

“My incredibly, incredibly happy life.”

Oh, the temptations of self-pity. So sweet to her, so irresistible to give voice to, and so ugly to him. She could hear precisely the moment she’d gone a step too far. If she’d kept her cool, she might have charmed and cajoled him into coming down to Philadelphia. Who knows? She might never have gone home again. But she fucked everything up with self-pity. She could hear him grow cooler and more distant, which made her feel even sorrier for herself, and so on, and so forth, until finally she had to get off the phone and give herself entirely to the other sweetness.

Where did the self-pity come from? The inordinate volume of it? By almost any standard, she led a luxurious life. She had all day every day to figure out some decent and satisfying way to live, and yet all she ever seemed to get for all her choices and all her freedom was more miserable. The autobiographer is almost forced to the conclusion that she pitied herself for being so free.

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.