Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

The night before they flew to West Virginia, he was packing his overnight bag and got a call from Joey, who reported that he’d decided not to blow the whistle on LBI and Kenny Bartles. “They’re disgusting,” he said. “But my friend Jonathan keeps saying I’d only be hurting myself if I went public. So I’m thinking I’ll just give the extra money away. It’ll spare me a lot of taxes at least. But I wanted to make sure you still think it’s OK.”

“It’s fine, Joey,” Walter said. “It’s fine with me. I know how ambitious you are, I know how hard it must be to give away all that money. That’s a lot to do right there.”

“Well, it’s not like I’m behind on the deal. I’m just not ahead. And now Connie can go back to school, so that’s good. I’m thinking of taking a year off to work and let her catch up with me.”

“That’s great. It’s great to see the two of you taking care of each other like that. Was there anything else?”

“Well, only that I saw Mom.”

Walter was still holding two neckties, a red one and a green one, that he’d been trying to choose between. The choice, he realized, was not particularly consequential. “You did?” he said, choosing the green one. “Where? In Alexandria?”

“No, in New York.”

“So she’s in New York.”

“Well, actually, Jersey City,” Joey said.

Walter’s chest tightened and stayed tightened.

“Yeah, Connie and I wanted to tell her in person. You know, about being married. And it wasn’t so bad actually. She was actually fairly nice to Connie. You know, still patronizing, and sort of fake, the way she kept laughing, but not mean. I guess she’s distracted with a lot of other things. Anyway, we thought it went pretty well. At least Connie thought so. I thought it was kind of ehhnh. But I wanted you to know she knows, so, I don’t know, if you ever talk to her, you don’t have to keep it secret anymore.”

Walter looked at his left hand, which had turned white and looked very bare without its wedding ring. “She’s staying with Richard,” he managed to say.

“Um, yeah, I guess, for the moment,” Joey said. “Was I not supposed to say that?”

“Was he there? When you were there?”

“Yeah, actually. He was. And it was fun for Connie, because she’s fairly into his music. He let her see his guitars and everything. I don’t know if I told you she’s thinking of learning guitar. She’s got a really pretty singing voice.”

Where exactly Walter had thought Patty was staying he couldn’t have said. With her friend Cathy Schmidt, with one of her other old teammates, maybe with Jessica, conceivably even with her parents. But having heard her proclaim so righteously that everything was over between her and Richard, he hadn’t imagined for one second that she might be in Jersey City.

“Dad?”

“What.”

“Well, I know it’s weird, OK? The whole thing is very weird. But you’ve got a girlfriend, too, right? So, like, that’s it, right? Things are different now, and we should all just start dealing with it. Don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Walter said. “You’re right. We need to deal with it.”

As soon as he was off the phone, he pulled open a dresser drawer, took his wedding ring from the cuff-link box in which he’d left it, and flushed it down the toilet. With a sweep of his arm, he knocked all of Patty’s pictures from the top of her dresser—Joey and Jessica as innocents, team photos of girl basketball players in heartbreakingly seventies-style uniforms, her favorite and most flattering pictures of him—and crushed and ground the frames and glass with his feet until he lost interest and had to beat his head against the wall. Hearing that she’d gone back to Richard ought to have liberated him, ought to have freed him to enjoy Lalitha with the cleanest of consciences. But it didn’t feel like a liberation, it felt like a death. He could see now (as Lalitha herself had seen all along) that the last three weeks had merely been a kind of payback, a treat he was due in recompense for Patty’s betrayal. Despite his avowals that the marriage was over, he hadn’t believed it one tiny bit. He threw himself onto the bed and sobbed in a state to which all previous states of existence seemed infinitely preferable. The world was moving ahead, the world was full of winners, LBI and Kenny Bartles cashing in, Connie going back to school, Joey doing the right thing, Patty living with a rock star, Lalitha fighting her good fight, Richard going back to his music, Richard getting great press for being far more offensive than Walter, Richard charming Connie, Richard bringing in the White Stripes . . . while Walter was left behind with the dead and dying and forgotten, the endangered species of the world, the nonadaptive . . .

Around two in the morning, he staggered into the bathroom and found an old bottle of Patty’s trazodones eighteen months past their expiration date. He took three of them, unsure if they were still effective, but apparently they were: he was awakened at seven o’clock by Lalitha’s very determined shoving. He was still in yesterday’s clothes, the lights were all burning, the room had been trashed, his throat was raw from his presumably violent snoring, and his head ached for any number of good reasons.

“We need to be in a cab right now,” Lalitha said, pulling on his arm. “I thought you were ready.”

“Can’t go,” he said.

“Come on, we’re already late.”

He righted himself and tried to make his eyes stay open. “I should really take a shower.”

“There’s no time.”

He fell asleep in the cab and woke up still in the cab, on the parkway, in traffic stalled by an accident. Lalitha was on her phone with the airline. “We have to go through Cincinnati now,” she told him. “We missed our flight.”

“Why don’t we just bag it,” he said. “I’m tired of being Mr. Good.”

“We’ll skip the lunch and go straight to the factory.”

“What if I were Mr. Bad? Would you still like me?”

She gave him a worried frown. “Walter, did you take some kind of pill?”

“Seriously. Would you still like me?”

Her frown intensified, and she didn’t answer. He fell asleep in the gate area at National; on the plane to Cincinnati; in Cincinnati; on the plane to Charleston; and in the rental car that Lalitha piloted at high speeds to Whitmanville, where he awoke feeling better, suddenly hungry, to an overcast April sky and a biotically desolate countryscape of the sort that America had come to specialize in. Vinyl-sided megachurches, a Walmart, a Wendy’s, capacious left-turn lanes, white automotive fortresses. Nothing for a wild bird to like around here unless the bird was a starling or a crow. The body-armor plant (ARDEE ENTERPRISES, AN LBI FAMILY OF COMPANIES COMPANY) was in a large cinder-block structure whose freshly rolled asphalt parking lot was ragged at the edges, crumbling into weeds. The lot was filling up with large passenger vehicles, including a black Navigator from which Vin Haven and some suits were emerging just as Lalitha screeched the rental car to a halt.

“Sorry we missed the lunch,” she said to Vin.

“I think dinner’s going to be the better meal,” Vin said. “Got to hope so, after what we saw for lunch.”

Inside the plant were pleasant strong smells of paint, plastics, and new machinery. Walter noted the absence of windows, the reliance on electric lighting. Folding chairs and a podium had been set up against a backdrop of towering shrink-wrapped oblongs of raw material. A hundred or so West Virginians were milling about, among them Coyle Mathis, who was wearing a baggy sweatshirt and even baggier jeans that looked so new he might have bought them at Walmart on his way over. Two local TV crews had cameras trained on the podium and the banner that hung above it: JOBS + NATIONAL SECURITY = JOB SECURITY.