Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“We need to talk about something else now, Jessica. If you care about my feelings, you won’t bring it up again. I don’t want to have to be afraid of answering the phone when you call.”

He sat for a long time with his face in his hands, his dinner untouched, while the house very slowly darkened, the earthly springtime world yielding to the more abstract sky world: pink stratospheric wisps, the deep chill of deep space, the first stars. This was the way his life worked now: he drove away Jessica and missed her the second she was gone. He considered returning to Minneapolis in the morning, retrieving the cat, and restoring it to the kids who missed it, but he could no sooner actually do this than he could call Jessica back and apologize to her. What was done was done. What was over was over. In Mingo County, West Virginia, on the ugliest overcast morning of his life, he’d asked Lalitha’s parents if they minded if he went to see their daughter’s body. Her parents were chilly, eccentric people, engineers, with strong accents. The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong with her jaw, some outrageously cruel and unforgivable injury, and her forehead, when he kissed it, was colder than any just universe could have allowed such a young person’s forehead to be. The coldness entered him through his lips and didn’t leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. To communicate with his wife, as Jessica was urging, would have meant letting go of his last moments with Lalitha, and he had a right not to do this. He had a right, in such an unjust universe, to be unfair to his wife, and he had a right to let the little Hoffbauers call in vain for their Bobby, because there was no point in anything.

Taking strength from his refusals—enough strength, certainly, to get him out of bed in the morning and propel him through long days in the field and long drives on roads congested by vacationers and exurbanites—he survived another summer, the most solitary of his life so far. He told Joey and Connie, with some truth (but not much), that he was too busy for a visit from them, and he gave up on battling the cats that continued to invade his woods; he couldn’t see putting himself through another drama of the sort he’d had with Bobby. In August, he received a thick envelope from his wife, some sort of manuscript presumably related to the “message” that Jessica had spoken of, and he stowed it, unopened, in the file drawer where he kept his old joint tax returns, his old joint bank-account statements, and his never-altered will. Not three weeks later, he received a padded compact-disc mailer, bearing a return address of katz in Jersey City, and this too he buried, unopened, in the same drawer. In these two mailings, as in the newspaper headlines that he couldn’t avoid reading when he went to buy groceries in Fen City—new crises at home and abroad, new right-wing crazies spewing lies, new ecological disasters unfolding in the global endgame—he could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of refusers, he had the constitution for it. There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild—they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scattered in the wind—but this only made him more determined to hold on to what little of her he still had.

Which was why, on the October morning when the world finally did arrive, in the form of a new Hyundai sedan parked halfway down his driveway, in the overgrown turnout where Mitch and Brenda had once kept their boat, he didn’t stop to see who was in it. He was hurrying to get on the road to a Conservancy meeting in Duluth, and he slowed down only enough to see that the driver’s seat was reclined, the driver perhaps sleeping. He had reason to hope that whoever was in the car would be gone by the time he returned, because why else hadn’t they knocked on his door? But the car was still there, its reflective rear plastic catching his headlights, when he turned off the county road at eight o’clock that evening.

He got out and peered through the parked car’s windows and saw that it was empty, the driver’s seat restored to its upright position. The woods were cold; the air was still and smelled capable of snow; the only sound was a faint human burble from the direction of Canterbridge Estates. He got back in his car and proceeded to the house, where a woman, Patty, was sitting on the front step in the dark. She was wearing blue jeans and a thin corduroy jacket. Her legs were drawn up to her chest for warmth, her chin resting on her knees.

He shut off his car and waited for some longish while, some twenty or thirty minutes, for her to stand up and speak to him, if that was what she’d come here for. But she refused to move, and eventually he summoned the courage to leave his car and head inside. He paused briefly on the doorstep, not more than a foot away from her, to give her a chance to speak. But her head remained bowed. His own refusal to speak to her was so childish that he couldn’t resist smiling. But this smile was a dangerous admission, and he stifled it brutally, steeling himself, and entered the house and shut the door behind him.

His strength wasn’t infinite, however. He couldn’t help waiting in the dark, by the door, for another long while, maybe an hour, and straining to hear if she was moving, straining not to miss even a very faint tapping on the door. What he heard, instead, in his imagination, was Jessica telling him that he needed to be fair: that he owed his wife at least the courtesy of telling her to go away. And yet, after six years of silence, he felt that to speak even one word would be to take back everything—would undo all of his refusal and negate everything he’d meant by it.

At length, as if waking from some half-sleeping dream, he turned on a light and drank a glass of water and found himself drawn to his file cabinet by way of compromise; he could at least take a look at what the world had to say to him. He opened first the mailer from Jersey City. There was no note inside it, just a CD in impenetrable plastic wrapping. It appeared to be a small-label Richard Katz solo effort, with a boreal landscape on the front, superimposed with the title Songs for Walter .

He heard a sharp cry of pain, his own, as if it were someone else’s. The fucker , the fucker , it wasn’t fair. He turned over the CD with shaking hands and read the track list. The first song was called “Two Kids Good, No Kids Better.”

“God, what an asshole you are,” he said, smiling and weeping. “This is so unfair, you asshole.”

After he’d cried for a while at the unfairness, and at the possibility that Richard wasn’t wholly heartless, he put the CD back into the mailer and opened the envelope from Patty. It contained a manuscript that he read only one short paragraph of before running to the front door, pulling it open, and shaking the pages at her.

“I don’t want this!” he shouted at her. “I don’t want to read you! I want you to take this and get in your car and warm up, because it’s fucking freezing out here.”

She was, indeed, shuddering with chills, but she appeared to be locked in her huddled position and didn’t look up to see what he was holding. If anything, she lowered her head further, as if he were beating on it.