Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“So where are you getting your money?” Walter said. “Are you working?”

Mitch leaned over somewhat unsteadily and opened a tackle box in which there was a small pile of paper money and maybe fifty dollars in coins. “My bank,” he said. “I got enough to last through the warm weather. I had a night-watchman job in Aitkin last winter.”

“And what are you going to do when this runs out?”

“I’ll find something. I take pretty good care of myself.”

“You worry about your kids?”

“Yeah, I worry, sometimes. But they’ve got good mothers that know how to take care of them. I’m no help at that. I finally figured that out. I’m only good at taking care of me.”

“You’re a free man.”

“That I am.”

They fell silent. A small breeze had kicked up, casting a million diamonds across the surface of Peter Lake. On the far side, a few fishermen were lazing in aluminum rowboats. Somewhere closer, a raven was croaking, another camper was chopping wood. Walter had been spending his days outdoors all summer, many of them in far more remote and unsettled places than this, but at no point had he felt farther from the things that constituted his life than he was feeling now. His children, his work, his ideas, the women he loved. He knew his brother wasn’t interested in this life—was beyond being interested in anything—and he had no desire to speak of it. To inflict that on him. But at the very moment his telephone rang, showing an unfamiliar West Virginia number, he was thinking how lucky and blessed his life had been.

The autobiographer, mindful of her reader and the loss he suffered, and mindful that a certain kind of voice would do well to fall silent in the face of life’s increasing somberness, has been trying very hard to write these pages in first and second person. But she seems doomed, alas, as a writer, to be one of those jocks who refer to themselves in third person. Although she believes herself to be genuinely changed, and doing infinitely better than in the old days, and therefore worthy of a fresh hearing, she still can’t bring herself to let go of a voice she found when she had nothing else to hold on to, even if it means that her reader throws this document straight into his old Macalester College wastebasket.

The autobiographer begins by acknowledging that six years is a lot of silence. At the very beginning, when she first left Washington, Patty felt that shutting up was the kindest thing she could do both for herself and for Walter. She knew that he’d be furious to learn that she’d gone to stay with Richard. She knew that he’d conclude she had no regard for his feelings and must have been lying or deceiving herself when she’d insisted she loved him and not his friend. But let it be noted: before going up to Jersey City, she did spend one night alone in a D.C. Marriott, counting the heavy-duty sleeping pills she’d brought along with her, and examining the little plastic bag that hotel guests are supposed to line their ice buckets with. And it’s easy to say, “Yes, but she didn’t actually kill herself, did she?” and figure she was just being self-dramatizing and self-pitying and self-deceiving and other noxious self-things. The autobiographer nevertheless maintains that Patty was in a very low place that night, the lowest ever, and had to keep forcing herself to think of her children. Her pain levels, though perhaps no greater than Walter’s, were great indeed. And Richard was the person who’d put her in this situation. Richard was the only person who could understand it, the only person she didn’t think she’d die of shame to see, the only person she was sure still wanted her. There was nothing she could do now about having wrecked Walter’s life, and so, she thought, she might as well try to save her own.

But also, to be honest, she was furious with Walter. However painful it had been for him to read certain pages of her autobiography, she still believed he’d committed an injustice in throwing her out of the house. She thought he’d overreacted and wronged her and was lying to himself about how much he’d wanted to be rid of her and go to his girl. And Patty’s anger was compounded by jealousy, because the girl really did love Walter, whereas Richard isn’t the sort of person who can really love anyone (except, to a touching degree, Walter). Although Walter undoubtedly didn’t see things this way himself, Patty felt justified in going to Jersey City for such consolation and payback and self-esteem bolstering as sleeping with a selfish musician could provide.

The autobiographer will skim over the particulars of Patty’s months in Jersey City, admitting only that her scratching of her ancient itch was not without its intense if short-lived pleasures, and noting that she wished she’d scratched it when she was 21 and Richard was moving to New York, and had then gone back to Minnesota at summer’s end and seen if Walter might still want her. Because let it also be noted: she didn’t have sex one single time in Jersey City without thinking of the last time she and her husband had done it, on the floor of her room in Georgetown. Though Walter no doubt imagined Patty and Richard as monsters of indifference to his feelings, in fact they could never escape his presence. Regarding, for example, whether Richard should make good on his commitment to help Walter with his anti-population initiative, they simply took it for granted that Richard had to do it. And not out of guilt but out of love and admiration. Which, given how much it cost Richard to pretend to more famous musicians that he cared about world overpopulation, ought to have told Walter something. The truth is that nothing between Patty and Richard was ever going to last, because they couldn’t help being disappointments to each other, because neither was as lovable to the other as Walter was to both of them. Every time Patty lay by herself after sex, she sank down into sadness and loneliness, because Richard was always going to be Richard, whereas, with Walter, there had always been the possibility, however faint, and however slow in its realization, that their story would change and deepen. When Patty heard from her kids about the crazy speech he’d made in West Virginia, she despaired altogether. It seemed as if Walter had needed only to get rid of her to become a freer person. Their old theory—that he loved and needed her more than she loved and needed him—had been exactly backwards. And now she’d lost the love of her life.

Then came the terrible news of Lalitha’s death, and Patty felt many things at once: great sorrow and compassion for Walter, great guilt about the many times she’d wished Lalitha dead, sudden fear of her own death, a momentary flicker of selfish hope that Walter might take her back now, and then great sickening regret for having gone to Richard and thereby ensured that Walter would never take her back. As long as Lalitha was alive, there’d been a chance that Walter would tire of her, but once she died there was no hope at all for Patty. Having hated the girl and made no secret of it, she had no right to console Walter now, and she knew it could only seem monstrous of her to use such a sad occasion to try to worm her way back into his life. She tried for many days to compose a condolence note worthy of his grief, but the chasm between the purity of his feelings and the impurity of her own was unbridgeable. The best she could do was convey her sorrow secondhand, through Jessica, and hope that Walter would believe that the yearning to comfort him was there in her, and that he might see how, having sent no condolence, she could then never communicate about anything else. Hence, from her side, these six years of silence.