Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

He tried, now, to separate his own interests—the fact that, if the son of the Trust’s executive director took his ugly story to the media, Vin Haven might well fire him and LBI might even renege on its West Virginia agreement—from what was best for Joey. However arrogantly and greedily Joey had behaved, it seemed very harsh to ask a twenty-year-old kid with problematic parents to take full moral responsibility and endure a public smearing, maybe even prosecution. And yet Walter was aware that the advice he therefore wanted to give Joey—“Donate your profits to charity, move on with your life”—was highly beneficial to himself and to the Trust. He wanted to ask Lalitha for guidance, but he’d promised Joey not to tell a soul, and so he called Joey and said he was still thinking about it, and would he and Connie like to join him for dinner on his birthday next week?

“Definitely,” Joey said.

“I also need to tell you,” Walter said, “that your mother and I have separated. It’s a hard thing to tell you, but it happened on Sunday. She’s moved out for a while, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

“Yep,” Joey said.

Yep? Walter frowned. “Did you understand what I just said?”

“Yep. She already told me.”

“Right. Of course. How not. And did she—”

“Yep. She told me a lot. Too much information, as always.”

“So you understand my—”

“Yep.”

“And you’re still OK with having dinner on my birthday?”

“Yep. We’ll definitely be there.”

“Well, thank you, Joey. I love you for that. I love you for a lot of things.”

“Yep.”

Walter then left a message on Jessica’s cell phone, as he’d done twice a day since the fateful Sunday, without yet hearing back from her. “Jessica, listen,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to your mother, but whatever she’s saying to you, you need to call me back and listen to what I have to say. All right? Please call me back. There are very much two sides to this story, and I think you need to hear both of them.” It would have been useful to be able to add that there was nothing between him and his assistant, but, in fact, his hands and face and nose were so impregnated with the smell of her vagina that it persisted faintly even after showering.

He was compromised and losing on every front. A further bad blow landed on the second Sunday of his freedom, in the form of a long front-page story in the Times by Dan Caperville: “Coal-Friendly Land Trust Destroys Mountains to Save Them.” The story wasn’t greatly inaccurate factually, but the Times was clearly not beguiled by Walter’s contrarian view of MTR mining. The South American unit of the Warbler Park wasn’t even mentioned in the article, and Walter’s best talking points—new paradigm, green economy, science-based reclamation—were buried near the bottom, well below Jocelyn Zorn’s description of him shouting “I own this [expletive] land!” and Coyle Mathis’s recollection, “He called me stupid to my face.” The article’s take-away, besides the fact that Walter was an extremely disagreeable person, was that the Cerulean Mountain Trust was in bed with the coal industry and the defense contractor LBI, was allowing large-scale MTR on its supposedly pristine reserve, was hated by local environmentalists, had displaced salt-of-the-earth country people from their ancestral homes, and had been founded and funded by a publicity-shy energy mogul, Vincent Haven, who, with the connivance of the Bush administration, was destroying other parts of West Virginia by drilling gas wells.

“Not so bad, not so bad,” Vin Haven said when Walter called him at his home in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “We got our Warbler Park, nobody can take that away from us. You and your girl did good. As for the rest of it, you can see why I’ve never bothered talking to the press. It’s all downside and no upside.”

“I talked to Caperville for two hours,” Walter said. “I really thought he was with me on the main points.”

“Well, and your points are in there,” Vin said. “Albeit not too conspicuously. But don’t you worry about it.”

“I am worried about it! I mean, yes, we got the park, which is great for the warbler. But the whole thing’s supposed to be a model . This thing reads like a model of how not to do things.”

“It’ll blow over. Once we get the coal out and start reclaiming, people will see you were right. This Caperville fella will be writing obits by then.”

“But that’s going to be years!”

“You got other plans? Is that what this is about? You worried about your résumé?”

“No, Vin, I’m just frustrated with the media. The birds don’t count for anything, it’s all about the human interest.”

“And that’s the way it’ll stay until the birds control the media,” Vin said. “Am I going to see you in Whitmanville next month? I told Jim Elder I’d make an appearance at the armor-plant opening, provided I don’t have to pose for any pictures. I could pick you up in the jet on the way there.”

“Thanks, we’ll fly commercial,” Walter said. “Save some fuel.”

“Try to remember I make a living selling fuel.”

“Right, ha ha, good point.”

It was nice to have Vin’s fatherly approval, but it would have been nicer had Vin been seeming less dubious as a father. The worst thing about the Times piece—leaving aside the shame of looking like an asshole in a publication read and trusted by everyone Walter knew—was his fear that the Times was, in fact, right about the Cerulean Mountain Trust. He’d dreaded being slaughtered in the media, and now that he was being slaughtered he had to attend more seriously to his reasons for dreading it.

“I heard you doing that interview,” Lalitha said. “You nailed it. The only reason the Times can’t admit we’re right is they’d have to take back all their editorials against MTR.”

“That’s what they’re doing right now with Bush and Iraq, actually.”

“Well, you’ve paid your dues. And now you and I get our little reward. Did you tell Mr. Haven we’re going ahead with Free Space?”

“I was feeling lucky not to be fired,” Walter said. “It didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him I’m planning to spend the entire discretionary fund on something that’ll probably get even worse publicity.”

“Oh, my sweetheart,” she said, embracing him, resting her head against his heart. “Nobody else understands what good things you’re doing. I’m the only one.”

“That may actually be true,” he said.

He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them. They were spending their nights now on her too-small bed, since his own rooms were still full of Patty’s traces, which she’d given him no instructions for dealing with and he couldn’t begin to deal with on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Patty hadn’t been in touch, and yet it seemed tactical of her, adversarial, that she hadn’t. For a person who, by her own admission, made nothing but mistakes, she cast a daunting shadow as she did whatever she was doing out there in the world. Walter felt cowardly to be hiding from her in Lalitha’s room, but what else could he do? He was beset from all sides.

On his birthday, while Lalitha showed Connie the Trust offices, he took Joey into the kitchen and said he still didn’t know what course of action to recommend. “I really don’t think you should blow the whistle,” he said. “But I don’t trust my motives on that. I’ve sort of lost my moral bearings lately. The thing with your mother, and the thing in the New York Times —did you see that?”