She nodded. “That’s right. And you know what? That turns out to be quite extraordinarily painful to me. Quite devastatingly painful.” Tears filled her eyes, and she turned quickly to hide the sight of them.

Katz had sat through some tearful scenes in his day, but this was the first time he’d had to watch a woman cry for love of somebody else. He didn’t like it one bit.

“So he came home from West Virginia on Thursday night,” Patty said. “I might as well tell you this, since we’re old friends, right? He came home from West Virginia on Thursday night, and he came up to my room, and what happened, Richard, was like the thing I’d always wanted. Always wanted. My entire adult life. I hardly even recognized his face! It was like he’d lost his mind. But the only reason I was getting it was that he was already gone. It was like a little farewell. A little parting gift, to show me what I was never going to have again. Because I’d made him too miserable for too long. And now he’s finally ready for something better, but he’s not going to have it with me, because I made him too miserable for too long.”

From what Katz was hearing, it sounded like he’d arrived forty-eight hours too late. Forty-eight hours. Incredible. “You can still have it,” he said. “Make him happy, be a good wife. He’ll forget the girl.”

“Maybe.” She touched the back of her hand to her eyes. “If I were a sane, whole person, that’s probably what I’d be trying to do. Because, you know, I used to want to win. I used to be a fighter. But I’ve developed some kind of allergy to doing the sensible thing. I spend my life jumping out of my skin with frustration at myself.”

“That’s what I love about you.”

“Oh, love now. Love. Richard Katz talking about love. This must be my signal that it’s time to go to bed.”

It was an exit line; he didn’t try to stop her. So firm was his faith in his instincts, however, that when he went upstairs himself, ten minutes later, he was still imagining that he might find her waiting in his bed. What he found instead, sitting on his pillow, was a thick, unbound manuscript with her name on the first page. Its title was “Mistakes Were Made.”

He smiled at this. Then he put a large plug of chew in his cheek and sat up reading, periodically spitting into a vase from the nightstand, until there was light in the window. He noted how much more interested he was in the pages about himself than in the other pages; it confirmed his long-standing suspicion that people ultimately only want to read about themselves. He noted further, with pleasure, that this self of his had genuinely fascinated Patty; it reminded him of why he liked her. And yet his clearest sensation, when he read the last page and let his now very watery wad plop into the vase, was of defeat. Not defeat by Patty: her writing skills were impressive, but he could hold his own in the self-expression department. The person who’d defeated him was Walter, because the document had obviously been written for Walter, as a kind of heartsick undeliverable apology to him. Walter was the star in Patty’s drama, Katz merely an interesting supporting actor.

For a moment, in what passed for his soul, a door opened wide enough for him to glimpse his pride in its pathetic woundedness, but he slammed the door shut and considered how stupid he’d been to let himself want her. Yes, he liked the way she talked, yes, he had a fatal weakness for a certain smart depressive kind of chick, but the only way he knew to interact with a chick like that was to fuck her, walk away, come back and fuck her again, walk away again, hate her again, fuck her again, and so forth. He wished he could go back in time now and congratulate the self he’d been at twenty-four, in that foul squat on the South Side of Chicago, for having recognized that a woman like Patty was meant for a man like Walter, who, whatever his other sillinesses might be, had the patience and imagination to handle her. The mistake that Katz had made since then had been to keep returning to a scene in which he was bound to feel defeated. Patty’s entire document attested to the exhausting difficulty of figuring out, in a scene like that, what was “good” and what wasn’t. He was very good at knowing what was good for him, and this was normally enough for every purpose in his life. It was only around the Berglunds that he felt that it was not enough. And he was sick of feeling that; he was ready to be done with it.

“So, my friend,” he said, “that’s the end of you and me. You won that one, old buddy.”

The light in the window was brightening. He went to the bathroom and flushed down his spit and the spent tobacco and then put the vase back where he’d found it. The clock radio showed 5:57. He packed up his things and went downstairs to Walter’s office with the document and left it in the center of his desktop. A little parting gift. Somebody had to clear the air around here, somebody had to put an end to the bullshit, and Patty obviously wasn’t up to it. And so she wanted Katz to do the dirty work? Well, fine. He was ready to be the nonpussy of the outfit. His job in life was to speak the dirty truth. To be the dick. He walked down the main hallway and out the front door, which had a spring-loaded lock. Its click, when he closed it behind him, sounded irrevocable. Good-bye to the Berglunds.

Humid air had arrived in the night, dewing the cars of Georgetown and moistening the off-kilter panels of Georgetown sidewalk. Birds were active in the budding trees; an early-departing jet was crackling across the pale spring sky. Even Katz’s tinnitus seemed muted in the morning hush. This is a good day to die! He tried to remember who had said that. Crazy Horse? Neil Young?

Shouldering his bag, he walked downhill in the direction of sighing traffic and came eventually to a long bridge leading over to the center of American world domination. He stopped near the center of the bridge, looked down at a female jogger on the creek-side path far below, and tried to evaluate, from the intensity of the photonic interaction between her ass and his retinas, how good a day to die it really was. The height was great enough to kill him if he dove, and diving was definitely the way to do it. Be a man, go headfirst. Yes. His dick was saying yes to something now, and this something was certainly not the wideish ass of the retreating jogger.

Had death, in fact, been his dick’s message in sending him to Washington? Had he simply misunderstood its prophecy? He was pretty sure that nobody would miss him much when he was dead. He could free Patty and Walter of the bother of him, free himself of the bother of being a bother. He could go wherever Molly had gone before him, and his father before her. He peered down at the spot where he was likely to land, a much-trampled patch of gravel and bare dirt, and asked himself whether this nondescript bit of land was worthy of killing him. Him the great Richard Katz! Was it worthy?

He laughed at the question and continued across the bridge.

Back in Jersey City, he took arms against the sea of junk in his apartment. Opened the windows to the warm air and did spring cleaning. Washed and dried every dish, threw out bales of useless paper, and manually deleted three thousand pieces of spam from his computer, stopping repeatedly to inhale the marsh and harbor and garbage smells of the warmer months in Jersey City. After dark, he drank a couple of beers and unpacked his banjo and guitars, ascertaining that the torque in the neck of his Strat hadn’t magically fixed itself in its months in its case. He drank a third beer and called the drummer of Walnut Surprise.

“Hello, dickhead,” Tim said. “Good to finally hear from you-not.”

“What can I say,” Katz said.

“How about, ‘I’m really sorry for being a total loser and disappearing on you and telling fifty different lies.’ Dickhead.”

“Yeah, well, regrettably, there was some stuff I had to attend to.”