Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Fuck fairness! And fuck you!”

He kicked the manuscript into a white flurry, but he was disciplined enough not to slam the door behind him as he left. Downstairs in the kitchen, Jessica was toasting herself a bagel, her overnight bag standing by the table. “Where is everybody this morning?”

“Mom and I had a little bit of a fight.”

“Sounded like it,” Jessica said with the ironic eye-widening that was her customary response to belonging to a family less even-keeled than she. “Is everything OK now?”

“We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“I was hoping to get the noon train, but I can take a later one if you want.”

Because he’d always been close to Jessica and felt he could count on her support, it didn’t occur to him that he was making a tactical error in brushing her off now and sending her on her way. He didn’t see how crucial it was to be the first to give the news to her and frame the story properly: didn’t imagine how quickly Patty, with her game-winning instincts, would move to consolidate her alliance with their daughter and fill her ears with her version of the story (Dad Dumps Mom on Flimsy Pretext, Takes Up with Young Assistant). He wasn’t thinking of anything beyond the moment, and his head was aswirl with precisely the kind of feelings that had nothing to do with fatherhood. He gave Jessica a hug and thanked her profusely for coming down to help launch Free Space, and then he went into his office to stare out the windows. The state of emergency had waned enough for him to remember all the work he needed to be doing, but not nearly enough for him to do it. He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air’s buoyancy even for an hour: the trade was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

Some otherworldly amount of time later, after he’d heard the rolling of a large suitcase and the clunk of the front door, Lalitha came tapping on his office door and stuck her head in. “Everything OK?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Come sit on my lap.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Now?”

“Yes, now. When else? My wife’s gone, right?”

“She left with a suitcase, yes.”

“Well, she’s not coming back. So come on. Why not. There’s nobody else in the house.”

And she did. She was not a hesitant person, Lalitha. But the executive chair was ill suited for lap-sitting; she had to hang on to his neck to stay aboard, and even then the chair rocked hazardously. “This is what you want?” she said.

“Actually, no. I don’t want to be in this office.”

“I agree.”

He had so much to think about, he knew he would be thinking uninterruptedly for weeks if he let himself start now. The only way not to think was to plunge forward. Up in Lalitha’s slope-ceilinged little room, the onetime maid’s quarters, which he hadn’t visited since she’d moved in, and whose floor was an obstacle course of clean clothes in stacks and dirty ones in piles, he pressed her against the side wall of the dormer and gave himself blindly to the one person who wanted him without qualification. It was another state of emergency, it was no hour of no day, it was desperate. He lifted her onto his hips and staggered around with her mouth locked to his, and then they were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal. He pulled away abruptly, toward the unmade single bed, and knocked over a pile of books and documents relating to overpopulation.

“One of us has to leave at six to pick up Eduardo at the airport,” he said. “Just want to note that.”

“What time is it now?”

He turned her very dusty alarm clock to check. “Two-seventeen,” he marveled. It was the strangest time he’d seen in his entire life.

“I apologize that the room is so messy,” Lalitha said.

“I like it. I love how you are. Are you hungry? I’m a little hungry.”

“No, Walter.” She smiled. “I’m not hungry. But I can get you something.”

“I was thinking, like, a glass of soy milk. Soy beverage.”

“I’ll get you one.”

She went downstairs, and it was strange to think that the footsteps he heard coming back up, a minute later, belonged to the person who would take Patty’s place in his life. She knelt by him and watched intently, greedily, as he drank down the soy milk. Then she unbuttoned his shirt with her nimble pale-nailed fingers. OK, then, he thought. OK. Forward. But as he undressed himself the rest of the way, the scenes of his wife’s own infidelity, which she’d narrated so exhaustively, came churning up in him, bringing with them a faint but real impulse to forgive her; and he knew he had to crush this impulse. His hatred of her and his friend was still newborn and wavering, it hadn’t hardened yet, the piteous sight and sound of her crying were still too fresh in his mind. Thankfully Lalitha had stripped down to a pair of red-polka-dotted white briefs. She was standing over him insouciantly, offering herself for inspection. Her body, in its youth, was preposterously fabulous. Unblemished, defiant of gravity, all but unbearable to look at. It was true that he’d once known a woman’s body even quite a bit younger, but he had no memory of it, he’d been too young himself to notice Patty’s youth. He reached up and pressed the heel of his hand to the hot, clothed mound between Lalitha’s legs. She gave a little cry, her knees buckled, and she sank onto him, bathing him in sweet agony.

The struggle not to compare began in earnest then, the struggle in particular to clear his head of Patty’s sentence, “There was nothing so wrong with it.” He could see, in retrospect, that his earlier plea that Lalitha go slow with him had been founded on accurate self-knowledge. But going slow, once he’d thrown Patty out of the house, was not an option. He needed the quick fix simply in order to keep functioning—to not get leveled by hatred and self-pity—and, in one way, the fix was very sweet indeed, because Lalitha really was crazy for him, almost literally dripping with desire, certainly strongly seeping with it. She stared into his eyes with love and joy, she pronounced beautiful and perfect and wonderful the manhood that Patty in her document had libeled and spat upon. What wasn’t to like? He was a man in his prime, she was adorable and young and insatiable; and this, in fact, was what wasn’t to like. His emotions couldn’t keep up with the vigor and urgency of their animal attraction, the interminability of their coupling. She needed to ride him, she needed to be crushed underneath him, she needed to have her legs on his shoulders, she needed to do the Downward Dog and be whammed from behind, she needed bending over the bed, she needed her face pressed against the wall, she needed her legs wrapped around him and her head thrown back and her very round breasts flying every which way. It all seemed intensely meaningful to her, she was a bottomless well of anguished noise, and he was up for all of it. In good cardiovascular shape, thrilled by her extravagance, attuned to her wishes, and extremely fond of her. And yet it wasn’t quite personal, and he couldn’t find his way to orgasm. And this was very odd, an entirely new and unanticipated problem, due in part, perhaps, to his unfamiliarity with condoms, and to how unbelievably wet she was. How many times, in the last two years, had he brought himself off to the thought of his assistant, each time in a matter of minutes? A hundred times. His problem now was obviously psychological. Her alarm clock showed 3:52 when they finally subsided. It wasn’t actually clear that she’d come, either, and he didn’t dare ask her. And here, in his exhaustion, the lurking Contrast seized its opportunity to obtrude, for Patty, whenever she could be persuaded to interest herself, had pretty reliably got the job done for both of them, leaving them both reasonably content, leaving him free to go to work or read a book and her to do the little Pattyish things she liked to do. Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction . . .