Jonathan Franzen - How He Came to Be Somewhere - An Interview and Three Early Stories

Danni’s old college friend Stephen, a jazz guitarist and a fixture in the downtown free-improv scene, had been living with a fabric designer named Jillian for seven years when he informed his friends that he was getting married. “Yeah, so, Jillian’s the love of my life at the moment,” he said, “and she really wants to make things official, so.” Jillian had lately grown impatient with Stephen’s poverty and his insistence on staying out until three every night and the favors he was always doing for nuns, such as giving nuns rides to family funerals in distant states or hauling around crappy nun furniture in a truck provided by his parish priest (Stephen had been schooled and intermittently raised by nuns), and it was Jillian’s notion that marriage would settle Stephen down, make him less susceptible to the wishes of nuns and more susceptible to her own wishes, and he would start cleaning his fingernails better and getting home before midnight and so on. These expectations of Jillian’s came as a surprise to Stephen once they were married. On the weekend after their little wedding, which was held on the lawn of an upstate friend in bright October sunshine, Stephen retiled the bathroom of a nun named Sister Doina and returned from a late-night gig near dawn. Jillian moved out three weeks later. When the time came for the newlyweds to use their plane tickets to Pittsburgh for Christmas, Jillian jostled her way through the US Airways concourse at LaGuardia, looking for the one seat that was maximally distant from each of the many barking airport TV screens. She knew she had finally located this seat when she found Stephen sitting in it, his fingers pressing on his special miniature deep-insertion stereo earphones, which doubled as noise-reducing earplugs. In Pittsburgh, he and Jillian received felicitations from eighty-odd party guests of Jillian’s parents, who were well-to-do and had also bought the plane tickets, and for several nights the newlyweds had trembling, furtive kiddie sex in Jillian’s childhood bed, although she had already filed New York State paperwork for a legal separation and was constantly on the phone with her new, non-Catholic, nonmusical boyfriend in Manhattan, reassuring him, every day, that she was so, so over Stephen.

A few months before Ron started introducing his friends to his new girlfriend, Lidia, his father died and left him enough money to buy the kind of West Village duplex that Ron had always wished he could afford. Ron taught philosophy at the New School. Over the years, he had confided to various friends that he feared his only purpose on the planet was to insert his penis in the vaginas of the greatest possible number of women; the roster of insertees included both former students and students actively enrolled in one or more of his classes, various junior and senior New School faculty, fellow-guests at philosophy conferences in other cities, the grown daughters of his accountant and his wine dealer, the fabric designer Jillian, the girlfriend of a former next-door neighbor, and several female staff members at the local branch of the New York Sports Clubs. Ron’s academic specialty was moral philosophy. A big reason women fell for him so hard was that he was a person of great feeling and conscience. He listened to women with patience and active sympathy; he was like the tender, respectful brother or father they’d always imagined having. And even though these were the very qualities that led women to invest their trust in him and thus advance what he feared was his sole mission in life, he genuinely was a nice man; there genuinely were good reasons that he had so many loyal friends. Which was why, as the years went by, he chastised himself so bitterly for his inability to stay faithful to any girl for longer than about sixty days. Every once in a while, he confessed his sins to his friends, who were grieved to see him suffering and beating up on himself and who hastened to reassure him that he was not a sick monster. His bad behavior caused him so much pain that you wanted to comfort him, not condemn him (although it certainly helped, in this regard, that you never got to see whatever pain his behavior might have caused the girls who trusted him). Whenever a new girl entered his life, he disappeared with her behind closed bedroom doors, as if to avoid potentially compromising interactions with his friends (in whose minds, as the years went by, his many identically slender and dark-eyed young dates and short-term girlfriends all kind of blurred together) and to minimize the fuss of dumping the girl when the time for dumping came. Finally, though, with the death of his father, and with his acquisition of a duplex on Bank Street, and with the looming of his fortieth birthday, Ron decided to put childish things behind him. Within weeks of meeting Lidia — a young Ecuadoran beauty from Jackson Heights who prosecuted drug cases for the Manhattan district attorney — he made a point of introducing her to all his friends. Sitting beside Lidia in various restaurant booths, he averred to his friends that he had finally met his intellectual match. While Lidia was in the bathroom, he further disclosed that his relationship with her was “basically a done deal,” that there was “no backing out now,” that he and she were so definitely “on track to get married” that he was preparing to adopt her three-year-old daughter from her short-lived first marriage, and that, although it would obviously require titanic effort on his part, he was determined to stay faithful to Lidia for the rest of his life, because he was in awe of her intellect and she had such a great sense of humor. Ron delivered this huge news in a curiously abstract tone of voice, without meeting his friends’ eyes. When Lidia returned from the bathroom, having darkened her lipstick and mascara, Ron’s friends couldn’t help noticing that he sat facing away from her, leaving twelve or fifteen inches of space between them, and that she said “expresso” and “eck cetera” and “between you and I,” all of which famously grated on Ron’s ears. You almost got the sense that Ron wasn’t even listening to Lidia. While she spoke of their upcoming camping trip to British Columbia, glancing eagerly at Ron to reassure herself of his approval, he gazed off into the distance like a man trying to empty his mind while a phlebotomist took blood from his arm. Now and then he came back into focus, leaned over and put his arm around Lidia, and instructed her, for example, to tell his friends about the word she’d played in Scrabble the other night for eighty-seven points. Lidia lowered her eyes to her napkin. The word, she said, was “plenary”—not even that great a word. But Ron insisted that he had never seen this word before, that her vocabulary was much larger than his, and, absurdly, that he had never in his life scored eighty-seven points in one Scrabble play. “I’m happy,” he said simply, his body angled toward the restaurant’s front door. “I feel like I could be content to play Scrabble with Lidia for the rest of my life.” A few months later, during summer vacation, when some of his friends asked him how things were with Lidia, Ron sounded distracted and impatient, as if his feelings were well known by now and he found it weird even to be asked about them. He said that he and Lidia had recently passed their six-month mark and might as well be married — it was pretty much a done deal; he couldn’t back out now — and, yeah, O.K., sometimes it was hard to imagine having sex with the same one person for the rest of his life, but he was forty years old, and it was time to grow up, and he was committed to making this relationship work, and so, basically, yeah, things were really, really, really good between the two of them. A few weeks later, he dropped out of all voice, e-mail, and face-to-face contact. When he surfaced again, toward the end of August, it was to send his friends terse e-mails with a new postal address and phone number. Pressed for an explanation, Ron replied in an irritated tone that he’d rented a two-room box on East Twenty-eighth Street and was working on his Heidegger book. Lidia he preferred not to talk about at all, though he did refer to a summer-school student named Kristin several times, and under close questioning he admitted that taking moral responsibility for his many broken promises to Lidia had been costly to him financially. Lidia was devastated, he said, when his involvement with Kristin came to light — an involvement that he didn’t insult his friends’ intelligence by pretending was going to last past Labor Day — and, since there was no conceivable excuse for his misbehavior, he’d made amends as well as he could by providing a thirty-per-cent down payment on a comfortable West End Avenue apartment, a classic six suitable for a single professional woman and her three-and-a-half-year-old daughter, which had necessitated putting the Bank Street duplex on the market and pricing it to sell, which was why he was now living in an anonymous box in Murray Hill. Ron was probably the world’s leading authority on Heidegger’s moral philosophy; he was renowned for his extemporaneous and wittily annotated classroom translations of knotty Greek and German texts; and so his friends, even his very smart friends, were simply too intimidated intellectually to question his cash payment of several hundred thousand dollars for the sin of cheating on his girlfriend of six months. That his real-estate transactions must already have been in motion even as he was assuring his friends that he and Lidia were practically married — that the entire private drama of exposure and shame and penance couldn’t possibly have been jammed into the three and a half weeks that he’d dropped out of sight — became just another of the never-again-referred-to mysteries that were the price you paid for the pleasure of Ron’s company.