Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Is Richard still in the house?” she said finally, wiping her face with a bedsheet.

“No. I heard him go out before I got up. I don’t think he’s come back.”

“Well, thank goodness for small mercies.”

How he loved her voice! It murdered him to hear it now.

“Did you guys fuck last night?” he said. “I heard talking in the kitchen.”

His own voice was harsh like a crow’s, and Patty took a deep breath, as if settling in for prolonged abuse. “No,” she said. “We talked and then I went to bed. I told you, it’s over. There was a little problem years ago, but it is over.”

“Mistakes were made.”

“You have to believe me, Walter. It is really, really over.”

“Except I don’t do for you physically what my best friend does. Never did, apparently. And never will.”

“Ohhh,” she said, closing her eyes prayerfully, “please don’t quote me. Call me a whore, call me the nightmare of your life, but please try not to quote me. Have that little bit of mercy, if you can.”

“He may suck at chess, but he’s definitely winning at the other game.”

“OK,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. “You’re going to quote me. OK. Quote me. Go ahead. Do what you have to do. I know I don’t deserve mercy. Just please know that it’s the worst thing you can do.”

“Sorry. I thought you liked talking about him. In fact, I thought that was the main point of interest in talking to me.”

“You’re right. It was. I won’t lie to you. It was, for about three months. But that was twenty-five years ago, before I fell in love with you and made a life with you.”

“And what a satisfying life that’s been. ‘Nothing so wrong with it,’ I believe your phrase was. Although the facts on the ground would appear to suggest otherwise.”

She grimaced, her eyes still shut. “Maybe you want to just read through the whole thing now and pick out all the worst lines. Do you want to just do that and get it over with?”

“Actually, what I want to do is stuff it down your throat. I want to see you fucking gag on it.”

“OK. You can do that. It would sort of be a relief from what I’m feeling now.”

He’d been clutching the manuscript so hard that his hand was cramped. He released it and let it slide between his legs. “I don’t actually have anything else to say,” he said. “I think we’ve pretty much covered the main points.”

She nodded. “Good.”

“Except I don’t want to see you again. I don’t want to be in the same room with you again. I don’t want to hear that person’s name again. I don’t want to have anything to do with either of you. Ever. I just want to be alone so I can contemplate having wasted my entire life loving you.”

“Yes, OK,” she said, nodding again. “But also no? No, I don’t agree to that.”

“I don’t care if you agree.”

“I know you don’t. But listen to me.” She sniffed hard, composing herself, and set her mug of coffee on the floor. Her tears had softened her eyes and reddened her lips and made her very pretty, if you cared about her prettiness, which Walter no longer did. “I never intended you to read that,” she said.

“What the fuck is it doing in my house if you didn’t intend that?”

“You can believe me or not, but it’s the truth. It was just a thing I had to write for myself, to try to get better. It was a therapy project, Walter. I gave it to Richard last night to try to explain why I stayed with you. Always stayed with you. Still want to stay with you. I know there’s stuff in there that must be horrible for you to read, I can hardly even imagine how horrible, but that’s not all there is in it. I wrote it when I was depressed, and it’s full of all the bad things I was feeling. But I’ve finally been starting to feel better. Especially after what happened the other night—I was feeling better! Like we were finally having some kind of breakthrough! Isn’t that how you felt, too?”

“I don’t know what I felt.”

“I wrote nice things about you, too, didn’t I? Many, many more nice things than not nice? If you look at it objectively? Which I know you can’t, but still, anybody else except you could see the nice things. That you’ve been kinder to me than I ever thought I deserved to have someone be. That you’re the most excellent person I’ve ever met. That you and Joey and Jessie are my whole life. That it was only one small bad part of me that ever looked anywhere else, for a little while, at a really bad point in my life.”

“You’re right,” he cawed. “I did somehow overlook all that.”

“It’s there, Walter! Maybe when you think about it, later, you’ll remember that it’s there.”

“I’m not intending to do much thinking about it.”

“Not now, but later. Even if you still don’t want to talk to me, maybe you’ll at least forgive me a little bit.”

The light in the windows dimmed suddenly, a spring cloud passing by. “You did the worst thing you could possibly do to me,” he said. “ The worst thing, and you knew very well it was the worst thing, and you did it anyway. Which part of that am I going to want to think back on?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, weeping afresh. “I’m so sorry you can’t see it the way I see it. I’m so sorry this happened.”

“It didn’t ‘happen.’ You did it. You fucked the kind of evil shit who would leave this on my desk for me to read.”

“For God’s sake, though, Walter, it was just sex.”

“You let him read things about me you never would have let me read.”

“Just stupid sex four years ago. What’s that compared to our whole life?”

“Look,” he said, standing up. “I don’t want to shout at you. Not with Jessica in the house. But you have to help me with that and not be dis ingenuous about what you did, or I’m going to shout your fucking head off.”

“I’m not being disingenuous.”

“I mean it,” he said. “I’m not going to shout at you. I’m going to leave this room, and I don’t want to see you after that. And we have a bit of a problem, because I actually have to work in this house, so it’s not very easy for me to move out.”

“I know, I know,” she said. “I know I have to go. I’ll wait until Jessie’s gone, and then I’ll get out of your sight. I totally understand how you’re feeling. But I have to tell you one thing before I go, just so you know. I want to make sure you know that it’s like being stabbed in the heart for me to leave you with your assistant. It’s like having the skin ripped off my breasts. I can’t stand it, Walter.” She looked at him imploringly. “I’m so hurt and jealous, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“You’ll get over it.”

“Maybe. Some year. A little bit. But do you see what it means that I’m feeling it now? Do you see what it means about who I love? Do you see what’s really going on here?”

The sight of her wild, pleading eyes became, at that moment, so crestingly painful and disgusting to him—produced such a paroxysm of cumulative revulsion at the pain they’d caused each other in their marriage—that he began to shout in spite of himself: “ Who drove me to it? Who was I never quite good enough for? Who always needed more time to think it over? Don’t you think twenty-six years is long enough to think it over? How much fucking more time do you need? Do you think there’s anything in your writing that surprised me? Do you think I didn’t know every fucking bit of it every fucking minute of the way? And love you anyway, because I couldn’t help it? And waste my entire life?”

“That’s not fair, oh, that’s not fair.”