“It just seems logical,” she said more quietly, “since I know I don’t want children.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t… I don’t…” He wanted to say that, since Lalitha so seldom saw Jairam, her longtime boyfriend, pregnancy hardly seemed like a pressing worry, and that, if she ever did get pregnant accidentally, she could always have an abortion. But it seemed fantastically inappropriate to be discussing his assistant’s tubes. She was smiling at him with a kind of woozy shyness, as if seeking his permission or fearing his disapproval. “I guess basically,” he said, “I think Richard was right, if you remember what he said. He said people change their minds about these things. It’s probably best to leave your options open.”

“But what if I know that I’m right now, and my future self is the one I don’t trust?”

“Well, you’re not going to be your old self anymore, in the future. You’re going to be your new self. And your new self might want different things.”

“Then fuck my future self,” Lalitha said, leaning forward. “If it wants to reproduce, I already have no respect for it.”

Walter willed himself not to glance at the other diners. “Why is this even coming up now? You hardly even see Jairam anymore.”

“Because Jairam wants children, that’s why. He doesn’t believe how serious I am about not wanting them. I need to show him, so he’ll stop bothering me. I don’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.”

“I’m really not sure we should be discussing this kind of thing.”

“OK, but who else can I talk to, then? You’re the only one who understands me.”

“Oh, God, Lalitha.” Walter’s head was swimming with beer. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I feel like I’ve led you into something I never meant to lead you into. You still have your whole life ahead of you, and I… I feel like I’ve led you into something.”

This sounded all wrong. In trying to say something narrow, something specific to the problem of world population, he’d managed to sound like he was saying something broad about the two of them. Had seemed to be foreclosing a larger possibility that he wasn’t ready to foreclose yet, even though he knew it wasn’t actually a possibility.

“These are my own thoughts, not yours,” Lalitha said. “You didn’t put them in my head. I was just asking your advice.”

“Well, and I guess my advice is don’t do it.”

“OK. Then I’m going to have another drink. Or do you advise me not to?”

“I do advise you not to.”

“Please order me one anyway.”

A chasm was opening in front of Walter, available for immediate jumping into. He was shocked by how quickly such a thing could open up in front of him. The only other time-or, no, no, no, the only time-he’d fallen in love, he’d taken the better part of a year before acting on it, and even then Patty had ended up doing most of the heavy lifting for him. Now it appeared that these things could be managed in a matter of minutes. Just a few more heedless words, another slug of beer, and God only knew…

“I just meant,” he said, “that I might have led you too much into overpopulation. Into being crazy about it. With my own stupid anger, my own issues. I wasn’t trying to say anything larger than that.”

She nodded. Tiny pearls of tear were clinging to her eyelashes.

“I feel very fatherly toward you,” he babbled.

“I understand.”

But fatherly was also wrong-too foreclosing of the kind of love that it was still too painful to admit he was never going to allow himself.

“Obviously,” he said, “I’m too young to be your father, or almost too young, besides which, in any case, you have your own father. I was really just referring to your having asked me for fatherly advice. To my having, as your boss, and as a considerably older person, a certain kind of… solicitude toward you. ‘Fatherly’ in that respect. Not in some sort of taboo respect.”

This all sounded like patent nonsense even as he said it. His whole fucking problem was taboos. Lalitha, who seemed to know it, raised her lovely eyes and looked directly into his. “You don’t have to love me, Walter. I can just love you. All right? You can’t stop me from loving you.”

The chasm widened dizzyingly.

“I do love you!” he said. “I mean-in a sense. A very definite sense. I definitely do. A lot. A whole lot, actually. OK? I just don’t see where we can go with it. I mean, if we’re going to keep working together, we absolutely can’t be talking like this. This is already very, very, very, very bad.”

“Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “And you’re married.”

“Yes, exactly! Exactly. And so there we are.”

“There we are, yes.”

“Let me see about your drink.”

Love declared, disaster averted, he went looking for their waitress and ordered a third martini, heavy on the vermouth. His blush, which all his life had been a thing that constantly came and went, had now come without going. He lurched, hot-faced, into the men’s room and attempted to pee. His need was at once pressing and difficult to connect to. He stood at the urinal, taking deep breaths, and was finally at the point of getting things flowing when the door swung open and somebody came in. Walter heard the guy washing his hands and drying them while he stood with burning cheeks and waited for his bladder to overcome its shyness. He was again on the verge of success when he realized that the guy at the sinks was lingering deliberately. He gave up on peeing, wasted water with an unnecessary flush, and zipped up his pants.

“You might want to see a doctor, pal, about your urinary difficulties,” the guy at the sinks drawled sadistically. White, thirtyish, with hard living in his face, he was an exact match of Walter’s profile of the kind of driver who didn’t believe in turn signals. He stood near Walter’s shoulder while Walter hastily washed his hands and dried them.

“Like the dark meat, do you?”

“What?”

“Said I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.”

“She’s Asian,” Walter said, stepping around him. “If you’ll excuse me-”

“Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker, ain’t that right, pal?”

There was so much hatred in his voice that Walter, fearing violence, made his escape through the door without delivering a rejoinder. He hadn’t thrown a punch or absorbed one in thirty-five years, and he suspected that a punching would feel far worse at forty-seven than it had at twelve. His whole body was vibrating with unreleased violence, his head reeling with injustice, as he sat down to an iceberg-lettuce salad in the booth.

“How’s your beer?” Lalitha asked.

“It’s interesting,” he said, drinking the rest of it right down. His head felt liable to detach from his neck and drift up to the ceiling like a party balloon.

“I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m-” in love with you, too. I’m horribly in love with you. “I’m in a hard position, honey,” he said. “I mean, not ‘honey.’ Not ‘honey.’ Lalitha. Honey. I’m in a hard position.”

“Maybe you should have another beer,” she said with a sly smile.

“You see, the thing is, I also love my wife.”

“Yes of course,” she said. But she wasn’t even trying to help him out. She arched her back like a cat and stretched forward across the table, displaying the ten pale nails of her beautiful young hands on either side of his salad plate, inviting him to touch them. “I’m so drunk!” she said, smiling up at him wickedly.

He glanced around the plastic dining room to see if his bathroom tormentor might be witnessing this. The guy was not obviously in sight, nor was anybody else staring unduly. Looking down at Lalitha, who was snuggling her cheek against the plastic tabletop as if it were the softest of pillows, he recalled the words of Richard’s prophecy. The girl on her knees, head bobbing, smiling up. Oh, the cheap clarity of Richard Katz’s vision of the world. A surge of resentment cut through Walter’s buzz and steadied him. To take advantage of this girl was Richard’s way, not his.