“So you think you want kids. The world population crisis not withstanding.”

She widened her eyes at him and reddened. “Maybe one or two. If I ever meet the right guy. Which doesn’t seem very likely to happen in New York.”

“New York’s a tough scene.”

“God, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I have never in my life felt so smallened and invisible and totally dissed as in the last eight months. I thought New York was supposed to be this great dating scene. But the guys are all either losers, jerks, or married. It’s appalling. I mean, I know I’m not a knockout or anything, but I think I’m at least worth five minutes of polite conversation. It’s been eight months now, and I’m still waiting for those five minutes. I don’t even want to go out anymore, it’s so demoralizing.”

“It’s not you. You’re a good-looking chick. You just may be too nice for New York. It’s a pretty naked economy there.”

“But how come there are so many girls like me? And no guys? Did the good guys all decide to go somewhere else?”

Katz cast his mind over the young males of his acquaintance in greater New York, including his former Walnut Surprise mates, and could think of not one whom he would trust on a date with Jessica. “The girls all come for publishing and art and nonprofits,” he said. “The guys come for money and music. There’s a selection bias there. The girls are good and interesting, the guys are all assholes like me. You shouldn’t take it personally.”

“I would just like to have one nice date.”

He was regretting having told her she was good-looking. It had sounded faintly like a come-on, and he hoped she hadn’t taken it that way. Unfortunately, it seemed as if she had.

“Are you really an asshole?” she said. “Or were you just saying that?”

The note of flirtatious provocation was alarming and needed to be nipped in the bud. “I came down here to do your dad a favor,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like being an asshole,” she said in a teasing tone.

“Trust me. It is.” He gave her the hardest look he knew how to give a person, and he could see that it scared her a little.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m not your ally on the Indian front. I’m your enemy.”

“What? Why? What do you care?”

“I told you. I’m an asshole.”

“Jesus. OK, then.” She looked at the tabletop with highly elevated eyebrows, confused and scared and pissed off all at once.

“This pasta is excellent, by the way. Thank you for making it.”

“Sure. Take some salad, too.” She stood up from the table. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and do some reading. Let me know if you need anything else.”

He nodded, and she left the room. He felt bad for the girl, but his business in Washington was a dirty one, and there was no point in sugarcoating it. After he’d finished eating, he carefully surveyed Walter’s vast book collection and even vaster collection of CDs and LPs, and then retreated upstairs to Joey’s room. He wanted to be the person who walked into a room where Patty was, not the person waiting in a room she walked into. To be the person waiting was to be too vulnerable; it wasn’t Katzian. Although he normally eschewed earplugs, for the veritable symphony they made of his tinnitus, he inserted some in his ears now, so as not to lie cravenly listening for footsteps and voices.

The next morning, he lingered in his room until nearly nine o’clock before descending the back staircase in search of breakfast. The kitchen was empty, but somebody, presumably Jessica, had made coffee and cut up fruit and set out muffins. A light spring rain was falling on the small back yard, its daffodils and jonquils, and the shoulders of the closely neighboring town houses. Hearing voices from the front of the mansion, Katz wandered down the hallway with coffee and a muffin and found Walter and Jessica and Lalitha, all scrubbed and morning-skinned and shower-haired, waiting for him in the conference room.

“Good, you’re here,” Walter said. “We can start.”

“Didn’t realize we were meeting so early.”

“It’s nine o’clock,” Walter said. “This is a workday for us.”

He and Lalitha were seated side by side near the middle of the big table. Jessica was way down at the farthest end with her arms crossed, tensely radiating skepticism and defendedness. Katz sat down across the table from the others.

“You sleep all right?” Walter said.

“Slept fine. Where’s Patty?”

Walter shrugged. “She’s not coming to the meeting, if that’s what you mean.”

“We’re actually trying to accomplish something,” Lalitha said. “We’re not trying to spend the entire day laughing at how impossible it is to accomplish anything.”

Whuff!

Jessica’s eyes were darting from person to person, spectating. Walter, on closer inspection, had terrible circles under his eyes, and his fingers, on the tabletop, were doing something between trembling and tapping. Lalitha looked a bit wrecked herself, her face bluish with dark-skinned pallor. Observing the relation of their bodies to each other, their deliberate angling-apart, Katz wondered if chemistry might already have done its work. They looked sullen and guilty, like lovers compelled to behave themselves in public. Or, conversely, like people who hadn’t settled on terms yet and were unhappy with each other. The situation merited careful monitoring either way.

“So we’ll start with the problem,” Walter said. “The problem is that nobody dares make overpopulation part of the national conversation. And why not? Because the subject is a downer. Because it seems like old news. Because, like with global warming, we haven’t quite reached the point where the consequences become undeniable. And because we sound like elitists if we try to tell poor people and uneducated people not to have so many babies. Having large families tracks inversely with economic status, and so does the age at which girls start having babies, which is just as damaging from a numbers perspective. You can cut the growth rate in half just by doubling the average age of first-time mothers from eighteen to thirty-five. That’s one reason rats reproduce so much more than leopards do-because they reach sexual maturity so much sooner.”

“Already a problem in that analogy, of course,” Katz said.

“Exactly,” Walter said. “It’s the elitism thing again. Leopards are a ‘higher’ species than rats or bunnies. So that’s another part of the problem: we turn poor people into rodents when we call attention to their high birth rates and their low age of first reproduction.”

“I think the cigarette analogy is a good one,” Jessica said from the far end of the table. It was clear that she’d gone to an expensive college and had learned to speak her mind in seminars. “People with money can get Zoloft and Xanax. So when you tax cigarettes, and alcohol too, you’re hitting poor people the hardest. You’re making the cheap drugs more expensive.”

“Right,” Walter said. “That’s a very good point. And it applies to religion, too, which is another big drug for people who don’t have economic opportunity. If we try to pick on religion, which is our real villain, we’re picking on the economically oppressed.”

“And guns also,” Jessica said. “Hunting’s also very low-end.”

“Ha, tell that to Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said in her clipped accent. “Tell that to Dick Cheney.”

“No, actually, Jessica’s right,” Walter said.

Lalitha turned on him. “Really? I don’t see it. What does hunting have to do with population?”

Jessica rolled her eyes impatiently.

This could be a long day, Katz thought.

“It’s all circling around the same problem of personal liberties,” Walter said. “People came to this country for either money or freedom. If you don’t have money, you cling to your freedoms all the more angrily. Even if smoking kills you, even if you can’t afford to feed your kids, even if your kids are getting shot down by maniacs with assault rifles. You may be poor, but the one thing nobody can take away from you is the freedom to fuck up your life whatever way you want to. That’s what Bill Clinton figured out-that we can’t win elections by running against personal liberties. Especially not against guns, actually.”