Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

One indisputable boon of her and Walter’s separation has been to bring their kids closer together. In the months after Patty left Washington, she could tell, from their both being party to information that she’d given only one of them, that they were in regular communication, and it wasn’t hard to guess that the substance of their communication was how destructive and selfish and embarrassing their parents were. Even after Jessica forgave Walter and Patty, she remained in close touch with her war buddy, having bonded with him in the trenches.

How the two siblings have negotiated the sharp contrasts between their personalities has been interesting for Patty to watch, given her own failures in this line. Joey seems to have been especially insightful regarding the duplicity of Jessica’s little drummer boy, explaining certain things to her which Patty had found it politic not to. It also definitely helps that Joey, since he had to be brilliantly successful at something, has been flourishing in a business that Jessica approves of. Not that there aren’t still things for Jessica to roll her eyes at and be competitive about. It rankles her that Walter, with his South American connections, was able to steer Joey into shade-grown coffee at exactly the moment when fortunes could be made in it, while there is nothing that either Walter or Patty can do to help Jessica in her own chosen career of literary publishing. It frustrates her to be devoted, like her father, to a declining and endangered and unprofitable enterprise while Joey gets rich almost effortlessly. Nor can she conceal her envy of Connie for getting to travel the world with Joey, getting to visit precisely those humid countries that she herself is most multiculturally enthusiastic about. But Jessica does, albeit grudgingly, admire Connie’s shrewdness in delaying having babies; she’s also been heard to admit that Connie dresses pretty well “for a midwesterner.” And there is no getting around the fact that shade-grown coffee is better for the environment, better especially for birds, and that Joey deserves credit for trumpeting this fact and marketing it astutely. Joey has Jessica pretty well beaten, in other words, and this is yet another reason why Patty works so hard to be her friend.

The autobiographer wishes she could report that all is well with her and Joey, too. Alas, all is not. Joey still presents a steel door to Patty, a door cooler and harder than ever, a door that she knows will remain closed until she can prove to him that she’s accepted Connie. And, alas, though Patty has made great strides in many areas, learning to love Connie isn’t one of them. That Connie sedulously checks every box of good daughter-in-lawship only makes things worse. Patty can feel in her bones that Connie doesn’t actually like her any more than she likes Connie. There is something about Connie’s way with Joey, something relentlessly possessive and competitive and exclusive , something not right , that makes Patty’s hair stand on end. Although she wants to become a better person in every way, she has sadly begun to realize that this ideal may very well be unattainable, and that her failure will always stand between her and Joey, and be her lasting punishment for the mistakes she made with him. Joey, needless to say, is scrupulously polite to Patty. He calls her once a week and remembers the names of her co-workers and her favorite students; he extends and sometimes accepts invitations; he tosses her such small scraps of attention as his loyalty to Connie permits. In the last two years, he’s gone so far as to repay, with interest, the money she sent to him in college—money that she needs too much, both practically and emotionally, to say no to. But his inner door is locked against her, and she can’t imagine how it will ever open again.

Or actually, to be precise, she can imagine only one way, which the autobiographer fears her reader won’t want to hear about but which she will mention anyway. She can imagine that, if she could somehow be with Walter again, and feel secure in his love again, and get up from their warm bed in the morning and go back to it at night knowing that she’s his again, she might finally forgive Connie and become sensible of the qualities that everybody else finds so appealing in her. She might enjoy sitting down at Connie’s dinner table, and her heart might be warmed by Joey’s loyalty and devotion to his wife, and Joey in turn might open the door for her a little bit, if only she could ride home from dinner afterward with Walter and rest her head on his shoulder and know she’s been forgiven. But of course this is a wildly unlikely scenario, and by no stretch of justice one that she deserves.

The autobiographer is fifty-two now and looks it. Her periods have lately been strange and irregular. Every year at tax time, it seems as if the year just past was shorter than the year before it; the years are becoming so similar to each other. She can imagine several discouraging reasons why Walter hasn’t divorced her—he might, for example, still hate her too much to put himself even minimally in contact with her—but her heart persists in taking courage from the fact that he hasn’t. She has embarrassingly inquired, of her children, whether there’s a woman in his life, and has rejoiced at hearing no. Not because she doesn’t want him to be happy, not because she has any right or even much inclination to be jealous anymore, but because it means there’s some shadow of a chance that he still thinks, as she does more than ever, that they were not just the worst thing that ever happened to each other, they were also the best thing. Having made so many mistakes in her life, she has every reason to assume she’s being unrealistic here, too: is failing to imagine some obvious fatal impediment to their getting back together. But the thought won’t leave her alone. It comes to her day after day, year after similar year, this yearning for his face and his voice and his anger and his kindness, this yearning for her mate.

And this is really all the autobiographer has to tell her reader, except to mention, in closing, what occasioned the writing of these pages. A few weeks ago, on Spring Street in Manhattan, on her way home from a bookstore reading by an earnest young novelist whom Jessica was excited to be publishing, Patty saw a tall middle-aged man striding toward her on the sidewalk and realized it was Richard Katz. His hair is short and gray now, and he wears glasses that make him weirdly distinguished , even though he still dresses like a late-seventies twenty-year-old. Seeing him in Lower Manhattan, where you can’t be as invisible as you can in deep Brooklyn, Patty was sensible of how old she herself must look now, how much like somebody’s irrelevant mother. If there’d been any way to hide, she would have hidden, to spare Richard the embarrassment of seeing her and herself the embarrassment of being his discarded sexual object. But she couldn’t hide, and Richard, with a familiar effortful decency, after some awkward hellos, offered to buy her a glass of wine.

In the bar where they alighted, Richard listened to Patty’s news of herself with the halved attention of a man who’s busy and successful. He seemed finally to have made peace with his success—he mentioned, without embarrassment or apology, that he’d done one of those avant-garde orchestral thingies for the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that his current girlfriend, who is apparently a big-deal documentary-maker, had introduced him to various young directors of the kind of art-house movies that Walter always loved, and that some scoring projects were in the works. Patty allowed herself one small pang at how relatively contented he seemed, and another small pang at the thought of his high-powered girlfriend, before turning the subject, as always, to Walter.