Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“None of your business.”

“I keep hearing that. What does it mean?”

She blushed a little. “It means it’s none of your business.”

“Walter says not so great.”

“Well, that’s true enough. Mostly.” She blushed again. “But you just worry about Walter, OK? Worry about your best friend. You already made your choice. You made it very clear to me which one of us’s happiness you cared more about. You had your chance with me, and you chose him.”

Katz could feel himself beginning to lose his cool, and it was highly unpleasant. A pressure between his ears, a rising anger, a need to argue. It was like suddenly being Walter.

“You drove me away,” he said.

“Ha-ha-ha! ‘Sorry, I can’t go to Philadelphia even for one day, because of poor Walter’?”

“I said that for one minute. For thirty seconds. And you then proceeded, for the next hour —”

“To fuck it up. I know. I know I know I know. I know who fucked it all up. I know it was me! But, Richard, you knew it was harder for me. You could have thrown me a lifeline! Like, possibly, for that one minute, not talked about poor Walter and his poor tender feelings, but about me instead! That’s why I’m saying you already made your choice. You may not have even known you were doing it, but that’s what you did. So live with it now.”

“Patty.”

“I may be a fuckup, but if nothing else I’ve had some time to think in the last few years, and I’ve figured some things out. I have a little better idea of who you are, and how you work. I can imagine how hard it is for you that our little Bengali friend’s not interested in you. How terrrrribly destabilizing for you. What a topsy-turvy world this turns out to be! What a total bad trip! I guess you could still try working on Jessica, but good luck with that. If you really find yourself at a loss, your best bet may be Emily in the development office. But Walter’s not into her, so I don’t imagine she’ll be too interesting to you.”

Katz’s blood was up, he was all jittery-jangly. It was like coke cut heavily with nasty meth.

“I came down here for you,” he said.

“Ha-ha-ha! I don’t believe you. You don’t even believe it yourself. You’re such a bad liar.”

“Why else would I come down here?”

“I don’t know. Concern about biodiversity and sustainable population?”

He was remembering how unpleasant it had been to argue with her on the phone. How grossly unpleasant, how murderously trying to his patience. What he couldn’t remember was why he’d put up with it. Something about the way she’d wanted him, the way she’d come after him. A way that was missing now.

“I’ve spent so much time being mad at you,” she said. “Do you have any idea? I sent you all those e-mails that you never responded to, I had that whole humiliating one-sided conversation with you. Did you even read those e-mails?”

“Most of them.”

“Ha. I don’t know if that makes it worse or better. I guess it doesn’t even matter, since it was all in my head anyway. I’ve spent three years wanting a thing I knew would never make me happy. But that didn’t make me stop wanting it. You were like a bad drug I couldn’t stop craving. My whole life was like a kind of mourning for some evil drug I knew was bad for me. It was literally not until yesterday, when I actually saw you, that I realized I didn’t need the drug after all. It was suddenly like, ‘What was I thinking ? He’s here for Walter.’ ”

“No,” he said. “For you.”

She wasn’t even listening. “I feel so old, Richard. Just because a person isn’t making good use of her life, it doesn’t stop her life from passing. In fact, it makes her life pass all the quicker.”

“You don’t look old. You look great.”

“Well, and that’s what really counts, isn’t it? I’ve become one of those women who put a ton of work into looking OK. If I can just go on and make a beautiful corpse, I’ll have the whole problem pretty well licked.”

“Come with me.”

She shook her head.

“Just come with me. We’ll go somewhere, and Walter can have his freedom.”

“No,” she said, “although it’s nice to hear you finally say that. I can apply it retroactively to the last three years and make an even better fantasy out of what might have been. It’ll enrich my already rather rich fantasy life. Now I can imagine staying home in your apartment while you do your world tour and fuck nineteen-year-olds, or going along with you and being you guys’s den mother—you know, milk and cookies at three a.m.—or being your Yoko and letting everybody blame me for how washed-up and bland you’ve gotten, and then throwing horrible scenes and letting you find out, the slow way, how bad it is to have me in your life. That should be good for months and months of daydreaming.”

“I don’t understand what it is you want.”

“Believe me, if I understood that myself, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I actually thought I did know what I wanted. I knew it wasn’t a good thing, but I thought I knew. And now you’re here, and it’s like no time at all has passed.”

“Except Walter’s falling for the girl.”

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.