Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Lalitha kissed his swollen mouth. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of things.”

“Are you sorry we did this?”

“No, no, very happy.”

“You don’t look quite happy.”

“Well, I did just throw my wife out of the house after twenty-four years of marriage. That did just happen a few hours ago.”

“I’m sorry, Walter. You can still go back. I can quit and leave the two of you be.”

“No, that’s one thing I can promise you. I am never going back.”

“Do you want to be with me?”

“Yes.” He filled his hands with her black hair, which smelled of coconutty shampoo, and covered his face with it. He now had what he’d wanted, but it was making him somewhat lonely. After all his great longing, which was infinite in scope, he was in bed with a particular finite girl who was very pretty and brilliant and committed but also messy, disliked by Jessica, and no kind of cook. And she was all there was, the sole bulwark, between him and the multitude of thoughts he didn’t want to have. The thought of Patty and his friend at Nameless Lake; the very human and witty way the two of them had spoken to each other; the grownup reciprocity of their sex; their gladness that he wasn’t there. He began to cry into Lalitha’s hair, and she comforted him, brushed his tears away, and they made love again more tiredly and painfully, until he did finally come, without fanfare, in her hand.

There ensued some difficult days. Eduardo Soquel, arriving from Colombia, was picked up at the airport and installed in “Joey’s” bedroom. The press conference on Monday morning was attended by twelve journalists and survived by Walter and Soquel, and a separate lengthy phone interview was given to Dan Caperville of the Times . Walter, having worked in public relations all his life, was able to suppress his private turmoil and stay on message and decline inflammatory journalistic bait. The Pan-American Warbler Park, he said, represented a new paradigm of science-based, privately funded wildlife conservation; the undeniable ugliness of mountaintop-removal mining was more than offset by the prospect of sustainable “green employment” (ecotourism, reforestation, certified forestry) in West Virginia and Colombia; Coyle Mathis and the other displaced mountain people had fully and laudably cooperated with the Trust and would soon be employed by a subsidiary of the Trust’s generous corporate partner LBI. Walter needed to exercise particular self-control in praising LBI, given what Joey had told him. When he got off the phone with Dan Caperville, he went out for a late dinner with Lalitha and Soquel and drank two beers, bringing to three his total lifetime consumption.

The next afternoon, after Soquel had returned to the airport, Lalitha locked the door of Walter’s office and knelt down between his legs to reward him for his labors.

“No, no, no,” he said, rolling the chair away from her.

She pursued him on her knees. “I just want to see you. I’m so greedy for you.”

“Lalitha, no.” He could hear his staffers going about their business at the front of the house.

“Just for a second,” she said, unzipping him. “Please, Walter.”

He thought of Clinton and Lewinsky, and then, seeing his assistant’s mouth full of his flesh and her eyes smiling up at him, he thought of his evil friend’s prophecy. It seemed to make her happy, and yet—

“No, I’m sorry,” he said, pushing her away as gently as he could.

She frowned. She was hurt. “You have to let me,” she said, “if you love me.”

“I do love you, but this is not the right time.”

“I want you to let me. I want to do everything right now.”

“I’m sorry, but no.”

He stood up and zipped himself back into his pants. Lalitha remained kneeling for a moment with her head bowed. Then she, too, stood up, smoothed her skirt on her thighs, and turned away in an attitude of unhappiness.

“There’s a problem we have to talk about first,” he said.

“All right. Let’s talk about your problem.”

“The problem is we have to fire Richard.”

The name, which he’d refused to speak until now, hung in the air. “And why do we have to do that?” Lalitha said.

“Because I hate him, because he had an affair with my wife, and I never want to hear his name again, and there’s no earthly way I’m going to work with him.”

Lalitha seemed to shrink as she heard this. Her head sank, her shoulders slumped, she became a sad little girl. “Is that why your wife left on Sunday?”

“Yes.”

“You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

“No!”

“Yes you are. That’s why you don’t want me near you now.”

“No, that’s not true. That’s totally not true.”

“Well, be that as it may,” she said, straightening herself briskly, “we still can’t fire Richard. This is my project, and I need him. I’ve already advertised him to the interns, and I need him to get our talent for August.

So you can have your problem with him, and be very sorry about your wife, but I’m not firing him.”

“Honey,” Walter said. “Lalitha. I really do love you. Everything’s going to be OK. But try to see this from my side.”

“No!” she said, wheeling toward him with spirited insurrection. “I don’t care about your side! My job is to do our population work, and I’m going to do it. If you really care about that work, and about me, you’ll let me do it my way.”

“I do care. I totally do. But—”

“But nothing, then. I won’t mention his name again. You can go out of town somewhere when he meets with the interns in May. And we’ll figure out August when we get there.”

“But he’s not going to want to do it. He was already talking on Saturday about backing out.”

“Let me talk to him,” she said. “As you may remember, I’m rather good at persuading people to do things they don’t want to do. I’m a rather effective employee of yours, and I hope you’ll be nice enough to let me do my work.”

He rushed around his desk to put his arms around her, but she escaped to the outer office.

Because he loved her spirit and commitment and was stricken by her anger, he didn’t press the issue further. But as the hours passed, and then several days, and she didn’t report that Richard was backing out of Free Space, Walter deduced that he must still be on board. Richard who didn’t believe in a fucking thing! The only imaginable explanation was that Patty had talked to him on the phone and guilted him into sticking with the program. And the idea of those two talking about anything at all, even for five minutes, and specifically talking about how to spare “poor Walter” (oh, that phrase of hers, that abominable phrase) and save his pet project, as some kind of consolation prize, made him sick with weakness and corruption and compromise and littleness. It came between him and Lalitha as well. Their lovemaking, though daily and protracted, was shadowed by his sense that she’d betrayed him with Richard, too, a little bit, and so did not become more personal in the way he’d hoped it might. Everywhere he turned, there was Richard.

Equally unsettling, in a different way, was the problem of LBI. Joey, at their dinner together, with moving expenditure of humility and self-reproach, had explained the sordid business deal he’d been involved with, and the key villain, as Walter saw it, was LBI. Kenny Bartles was clearly one of those daredevil clowns, a bush-league sociopath who would end up in jail or in Congress soon enough. The Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd, whatever the fetor of their motives for invading Iraq, surely still would have preferred to receive usable truck parts instead of the Paraguayan trash that Joey had delivered. And Joey himself, though he should have known better than to get involved with Bartles, had convinced Walter that he’d only followed through for Connie’s sake; his loyalty to her, his terrible remorse, and his general bravery (he was twenty years old!) were all to his credit. The responsible party, therefore—the one with both full knowledge of the scam and the authority to approve it—was LBI. Walter hadn’t heard of the vice president whom Joey had spoken to, the one who’d threatened him with a lawsuit, but the guy undoubtedly worked right down the hall from the buddy of Vin Haven who’d agreed to locate a body-armor plant in West Virginia. Joey had asked Walter, at dinner, what he thought he should do. Blow the whistle? Or just give away his profits to some charity for disabled veterans, and go back to school? Walter had promised to think about it over the weekend, but the weekend had not, to put it mildly, proved conducive to calm moral reflection. Not until he was facing the journalists on Monday morning, painting LBI as an outstanding pro-environment corporate partner, had the degree of his own implication hit him.