Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Yep,” Joey said. He had his hands in his pockets and was still dressing like a College Republican, in a blue blazer and shiny loafers. For all Walter knew, he was a College Republican.

“I didn’t come off very well, did I?”

“Nope,” Joey said. “But I think most people could see it wasn’t a fair article.”

Walter gratefully, no questions asked, accepted this reassurance from his son. He was feeling very small indeed. “So I have to go to this LBI event in West Virginia next week,” he said. “They’re opening a body-armor plant that all those displaced families are going to be working at. And so I’m not really the right person to ask about LBI, because I’m so implicated myself.”

“Why do you have to go to that?”

“I have to give a speech. I have to make grateful on behalf of the Trust.”

“But you’ve already got your Warbler Park. Why not just blow it off?”

“Because there’s this other big program Lalitha’s doing with overpopulation, and I have to stay on good terms with my boss. It’s his money we’re spending.”

“Sounds like you’d better go, then,” Joey said.

He sounded unpersuaded, and Walter hated looking so weak and small to him. As if to make himself look even weaker and smaller, he asked if he knew what was up with Jessica.

“I talked to her,” Joey said, hands in pockets, eyes on the floor. “I guess she’s a little mad at you.”

“I’ve left her like twenty phone messages!”

“You can probably stop doing that. I don’t think she’s listening to them. People don’t listen to every cellphone message anyway, they just look to see who’s called.”

“Well, did you tell her that there are two sides to this story?”

Joey shrugged. “I don’t know. Are there two sides?”

“Yes, there are! Your mother did a very bad thing to me. An incredibly painful thing.”

“I don’t really want any more information,” Joey said. “I think she probably already told me about it anyway. I don’t feel like taking sides.”

“She told you about it when ? How long ago?”

“Last week.”

So Joey knew what Richard had done—what Walter had let his best friend, his rock-star friend, do. His smallening in his son’s eyes was now complete. “I’m going to have a beer,” he said. “Since it’s my birthday.”

“Can Connie and I have one, too?”

“Yes, that’s why we asked you here early. Actually, Connie can drink whatever she wants at the restaurant, too. She’s twenty-one, right?”

“Yep.”

“And this is not nagging, this is just a request for information: did you tell Mom you’re married?”

“Dad, I’m working on it,” Joey said with a tightening of his jaw. “Let me do this my way, OK?”

Walter had always liked Connie (had even, secretly, rather liked Connie’s mother, for how she’d flirted with him). She was wearing perilously high heels and heavy eye shadow for the occasion; she was still young enough to be trying to look much older. At La Chaumière, he observed with swelling heart how tenderly attentive Joey was to her, leaning over to read her menu with her and coordinate their selections, and how Connie, since Joey wasn’t of legal age, declined Walter’s offer of a cocktail and ordered a Diet Coke for herself. They had a tacit trusting way with each other, a way that reminded Walter of his and Patty’s way when they were very young, the way of a couple united as a front against the world; his eyes misted up at the sight of their wedding bands. Lalitha, ill at ease, trying to distance herself from the young people and align herself with a man nearly twice her age, ordered a martini and proceeded to fill the conversational vacuum with talk of Free Space and the world population crisis, to which Joey and Connie listened with the exquisite courtesy of a couple secure in their two-person world. Although Lalitha avoided proprietary references to Walter, he had no doubt that Joey knew that she was more than simply his assistant. As he drank his third beer of the evening, he became more and more ashamed of what he’d done and more and more grateful to Joey for being so cool about it. Nothing had enraged him more about Joey, over the years, than his shell of coolness; and now, how glad of it he was! His son had won that war, and he was glad of it.

“So Richard’s still working with you guys?” Joey said.

“Um, yes,” Lalitha said. “Yes, he’s being very helpful. In fact, he just told me the White Stripes might help us with our big event in August.”

Joey, as he frowned and considered this, took care not to look at Walter.

“We should go to that event,” Connie said to Joey. “Is it OK if we come?” she asked Walter.

“Of course it’s OK,” he said, forcing a smile. “Should be a lot of fun.”

“I like the White Stripes a lot,” she declared happily, in her subtextless way.

“I like you a lot,” Walter said. “I’m really glad you’re part of our family. I’m really glad you’re here tonight.”

“I’m happy to be here, too.”

Joey didn’t seem to mind this sentimental talk, but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. On Richard, on his mother, on the family disaster that was unfolding. And there was nothing Walter could say to make it any easier for him.

“I can’t do it,” Walter told Lalitha when they’d returned, by themselves, to the mansion. “I can’t have that asshole involved anymore.”

“We already had this discussion,” she said, walking briskly down the corridor to the kitchen. “We already resolved this.”

“Well, we need to have it again,” he said, pursuing her.

“No, we don’t. Did you see how Connie’s face lit up when I mentioned the White Stripes? Who else can get us talent like that? We made our decision, it was a good one, and I really don’t need to hear how jealous you are of the person your wife had sex with. I’m tired, and I drank too much, and I need to go to bed now.”

“He was my best friend,” Walter murmured.

“I don’t care. I really don’t, Walter. I know you think I’m just another young person, but in fact I’m older than your children, I’m almost twenty-eight. I knew it was a mistake to fall in love with you. I knew you weren’t ready, and now I’m in love with you, and all you can still think about is her.”

“I think about you constantly. I depend on you so much.”

“You have sex with me because I want you and you can. But everybody’s world still revolves around your wife. What is so special about her, I will never understand. She spends her whole life upsetting other people. And I just need a little break from it, so I can get some sleep. So maybe you should sleep in your own bed tonight, and think about what you want to do.”

“What did I say?” he pleaded. “I thought we were having a nice birthday.”

“I’m tired. It was a tiring evening. I’ll see you in the morning.”

They parted without a kiss. On his home phone he found a message from Jessica, timed carefully while he was out to dinner, wishing him a happy birthday. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your messages,” she said, “I’ve just been really busy and not sure what I wanted to say. But I was thinking of you today, and I hope you had a nice day. Maybe we can talk sometime, although I’m not sure when I’m going to have a chance.”

Click.

It was a relief, for the next week, to sleep by himself. To be in a room still full of Patty’s clothes and books and pictures, to learn to steel himself against her. During the daytime, there was plenty of deferred office work to do: land-management structures to be organized in Colombia and West Virginia, a media counteroffensive to be launched, fresh donors to be sought. Walter had even thought it might be possible to take a break from sex with Lalitha, but their daily propinquity made it not possible—they needed and needed. He did, however, repair to his own bed for sleep.