“I don’t know about this,” Walter said.

“What? Why not?” Patty said. “It’s literally the only place in Georgetown that doesn’t embarrass me or sicken me. And they had an opening! It’s a very lucky thing.”

“Front-desk greeter just doesn’t seem appropriate, given your talents.”

“Appropriate to who?”

“To people who might see you.”

“And which people are these?”

“I don’t know. People I might be hitting up for money, or legislative backing, or regulatory help.”

“Oh, my God. Are you listening to yourself? Are you hearing what you just said?”

“Look, I’m trying to be honest with you. Don’t punish me for being honest.”

“I’m punishing you for your content, Walter, not your honesty. I mean! ‘Not appropriate.’ Wow.”

“I’m saying you’re too smart for an entry-level gym job.”

“No, you’re saying I’m too old. You wouldn’t have a problem with Jessica working there for the summer.”

“Actually, I’d be disappointed if that’s all she wanted to do with her summer.”

“Oh, good Lord, then. I truly cannot win. ‘Any job is better than no job, or, but, no, sorry, wait, the job that you actually want and are well qualified for is not better than no job.’ ”

“OK, fine. Take it. I don’t care.”

“Thank you for not caring!”

“I just think you’re selling yourself way short.”

“Well, maybe it’ll only be temporary,” Patty said. “Maybe I’ll get my realtor’s license, like every other unemployable wife around here, and start selling squalid little crooked-floored town houses for two million dollars. ‘In this very bathroom, in 1962, Hubert Humphrey had a large bowel movement, which, in recognition of this historic movement, the property has been placed on the National Registry, which explains the hundred-thousand-dollar premium its owners are demanding. There’s also a small but rather nice azalea bush behind the kitchen window.’ I can start wearing pinks and greens and a Burberry raincoat. I’ll buy a Lexus SUV with my first big commission. It’ll be much more appropriate.”

“I said OK.”

“Thank you, honey! Thank you for letting me take the job I want!”

Walter watched her stride out the door and stop by Lalitha’s desk. “Hi, Lalitha,” she said. “I just got a job. I’m going to work at my gym.”

“That’s nice,” Lalitha said. “You like that gym.”

“Yeah, but Walter thinks it’s inappropriate. What do you think?”

“I think any honest work can bring a human being dignity.”

“Patty,” Walter called. “I said it was OK.”

“See, now he’s changed his mind,” she said to Lalitha. “Before, he was saying it was inappropriate.”

“Yes, I heard that.”

“Right, ha-ha-ha, I’m sure you did. But it’s important to pretend otherwise, OK?”

“Don’t leave the door open if you don’t want to be heard,” Lalitha said coldly.

“We all have to work really hard on pretending.”

Becoming a front-desk greeter at Republic of Health did for Patty’s spirits everything Walter had hoped a job would do. Everything and, alas, more. Her depression immediately seemed to lift, but this only showed how misleading the word “depression” was, because Walter was certain that her old unhappiness and anger and despair were all still present beneath her bright and brittle new way of being. She spent her mornings in her room, worked the p.m. shift at the gym, and didn’t get home until after ten. She began reading beauty and fitness magazines and noticeably using eye makeup. The sweatpants and baggy jeans that she’d been wearing in Washington, the sort of unconfining clothes that mental patients spend their days in, gave way to closer-fitting jeans that cost actual money.

“You look great,” Walter said one evening, trying to be nice.

“Well, now that I have an income,” she said, “I need something to spend it on, right?”

“You could always make charitable contributions to the Cerulean Mountain Trust instead.”

“Ha-ha-ha!”

“Our need is great.”

“I’m having fun, Walter. A tiny little bit of fun.”

But she didn’t really seem like she was having fun. She seemed like she was trying to hurt him, or spite him, or prove some kind of point. Walter began working out at Republic of Health himself, using a stack of free passes she’d given him, and he was unsettled by the intensity of the friendliness she directed at the members whose cards she scanned. She wore tiny-sleeved, provocatively sloganed Republic T-shirts (PUSH, SWEAT, LIFT) that highlighted her beautifully toned upper arms. Her eyes had a speed-freak glitter, and her laugh, which had always thrilled Walter, sounded false and ominous when he heard it echoing behind him in the Republic’s foyer. She was giving it to everybody now, giving it indiscriminately, meaninglessly, to every member who walked in off Wisconsin Avenue. And then one day he noticed a breast-augmentation brochure on her desk at home.

“Jesus,” he said, examining it. “This is obscene.”

“Actually, it’s a medical brochure.”

“It’s a mental-illness brochure, Patty. It’s like a guide to how to become more mentally ill.”

“Well, excuse me, I just thought it might be nice, for the short remainder of my comparative youth, to have a little bit of actual chest. To see what that might be like.”

“You already have a chest. I adore your chest.”

“Well, that’s all very nice, dear, but in fact you don’t get to make the decision, because it’s not your body. It’s mine. Isn’t that what you’ve always said? You’re the feminist in this household.”

“Why are you doing this? I don’t understand what you’re doing with yourself.”

“Well, maybe you should just leave if you don’t like it. Have you considered that? It would solve the whole problem, like, instantly.”

“Well, that’s never going to happen, so-”

“I KNOW IT’S NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN.”

“Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!”

“So I might as well go ahead and buy myself some tits, to help make the years go by and give me something to save up my pennies for, is all I’m saying. I’m not talking about anything grotesquely large. You might even find you like ’em. Have you considered that?”

Walter was frightened by the long-term toxicity they were creating with their fights. He could feel it pooling in their marriage like the coal-sludge ponds in Appalachian valleys. Where there were really huge coal deposits, as in Wyoming County, the coal companies built processing plants right next to their mines and used water from the nearest stream to wash the coal. The polluted water was collected in big ponds of toxic sludge, and Walter had become so worried about having sludge impoundments in the middle of the Warbler Park that he’d tasked Lalitha with showing him how not to worry about it so much. This hadn’t been an easy task, since there was no way around the fact that when you dug up coal you also unearthed nasty chemicals like arsenic and cadmium that had been safely buried for millions of years. You could try dumping the poison back down into abandoned underground mines, but it had a way of seeping into the water table and ending up in drinking water. It really was a lot like the deep shit that got stirred up when a married couple fought: once certain things had been said, how could they ever be forgotten again? Lalitha was able to do enough research to reassure Walter that, if the sludge was carefully sequestered and properly contained, it eventually dried out enough that you could cover it with crushed rock and topsoil and pretend it wasn’t there. This story had become the sludge-pond gospel that he was determined to spread in West Virginia. He believed in it the same way he believed in ecological strongholds and science-based reclamation, because he had to believe in it, because of Patty. But now, as he lay and sought sleep on the hostile Days Inn mattress, between the scratchy Days Inn sheets, he wondered if any of it was true…

He must have drifted off at some point, because when the alarm rang, at 3:40, he felt cruelly yanked from oblivion. Another eighteen hours of waking dread and anger lay ahead of him. Lalitha knocked on his door at 4:00 sharp, looking fresh in casual jeans and hiking shoes. “I feel horrid!” she said. “How about you?”