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-