Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Get in your car! Warm up! I didn’t ask you to come here!”

It may have just been an especially violent shudder, but she seemed to shake her head at this, a little bit.

“I promise I’ll call you,” he said. “I promise to have a conversation on the phone with you if you’ll go away now and get yourself warmed up.”

“No,” she said in a very small voice.

“Fine, then! Freeze!”

He slammed the door and ran through the house and out the back door, all the way down to the lake. He was determined to be cold himself if she was so intent on freezing. Somehow he was still clutching her manuscript. Across the lake were the blazing wasteful lights of Canterbridge Estates, the jumbo screens flashing with whatever the world believed was happening to it tonight. Everybody warm in their dens, the coal-fired Iron Range power plants pushing current through the grid, the Arctic still arctic enough to send frost down through the temperate October woods. However little he’d ever known how to live, he’d never known less than he knew now. But as the bite in the air became less bracing and more serious, more of a chill in his bones, he began to worry about Patty. Teeth chattering, he went back up the hill and around to the front step and found her tipped over, less tightly balled up, her head in the grass. She was, ominously, no longer shivering.

“Patty, OK,” he said, kneeling down. “This is not good, OK? I’ll bring you inside.”

She stirred a little, stiffly. Her muscles seemed inelastic, and no warmth was coming through the corduroy of her jacket. He tried to get her to stand up, but it didn’t work, and so he carried her inside and laid her on the sofa and piled blankets on her.

“This was so stupid,” he said, putting a teakettle on. “People die from doing these things. Patty? It doesn’t have to be below zero, you can die when it’s thirty degrees out. You’re just stupid to sit out there for so long. I mean, how many years did you live in Minnesota? Did you not learn anything ? This is so fucking stupid of you.”

He turned up the furnace and brought her a mug of hot water and made her sit up to take a drink, but she blew it right back onto the upholstery. When he tried to give her more, she shook her head and made vague noises of resistance. Her fingers were icy, her arms and shoulders dully cold.

“Fuck, Patty, this is so stupid. What were you thinking ? This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done to me.”

She fell asleep while he took off his clothes, and she woke up only a little as he peeled back the blankets and took off her jacket and struggled to remove her pants and then lay down with her, wearing only his underpants, and arranged the blankets on top of them. “OK, so stay awake, right?” he said, pressing as much of his surface as he could against her marmoreally cold skin. “What would be particularly stupid of you right now would be to lose consciousness. Right?”

“Mm-m,” she said.

He hugged her and lightly rubbed her, cursing her constantly, cursing the position she’d put him in. For a long time she didn’t get any warmer, kept falling asleep and barely waking up, but finally something clicked on inside her, and she began to shiver and clutch him. He kept rubbing and hugging, and then, all at once, her eyes were wide open and she was looking into him.

Her eyes weren’t blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after life was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they’d ever said or done, every pain they’d inflicted, every joy they’d shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind.

“It’s me,” she said. “Just me.”

“I know,” he said, and kissed her.

Near the bottom of the list of conceivable Walter-related outcomes for the residents of Canterbridge Estates had been the possibility that they’d be sorry to see him go. Nobody, least of all Linda Hoffbauer, could have foreseen the early-December Sunday afternoon when Walter’s wife, Patty, parked his Prius on Canterbridge Court and began to ring their doorbells, introducing herself briefly, noninvasively, and presenting them with Glad-wrapped plates of Christmas cookies that she’d baked. Linda was in an awkward position, meeting Patty, because there was nothing immediately unlikable about her, and because it was impossible to refuse a seasonal gift. Curiosity, if nothing else, compelled her to invite Patty inside, and before she knew it Patty was kneeling on her living-room floor, coaxing her cats to come and be stroked and inquiring about their names. She seemed to be as warm a person as her husband was a cold one. When Linda asked her how it had happened that they’d never previously met, Patty laughed trillingly and said, “Oh, well, Walter and I were taking a little breather from each other.” This was an odd and rather clever formulation, difficult to find clear moral fault with. Patty stayed long enough to admire the house and its view of the snow-covered lake, and, in leaving, she invited Linda and her family to the open house that she and Walter were hosting on New Year’s Day.

Linda was not much inclined to enter the home of Bobby’s murderer, but when she learned that every other family on Canterbridge Court (except two already in Florida) was attending the open house, she succumbed to a combination of curiosity and Christian forbearance. The fact was, Linda was having some popularity problems in the neighborhood. Although she had her own dedicated cadre of friends and allies at her church, she was also a strong believer in neighborliness, and by acquiring three new cats to replace her Bobby, who certain irresolute neighbors believed might have died of natural causes, she’d perhaps overplayed her hand; there was a feeling that she’d been somewhat vindictive. And so, although she did leave her husband and kids at home, she drove her Suburban over to the Berglund house on New Year’s and was duly flummoxed by Patty’s particular hospitality toward her. Patty introduced her to her daughter and to her son and then, not leaving her side, led her outside and down to the lake for a view of her own house from a distance. It occurred to Linda that she was being played by an expert, and that she could learn from Patty a thing or two about winning hearts and minds; already, in less than a month, Patty had succeeded in charming even those neighbors who no longer opened their doors all the way when Linda came complaining to them: who made her stand out in the cold. She took several valiant stabs at getting Patty to slip up and betray her liberal disagreeability, asking her if she was a bird-lover, too (“No, but I’m a Walter-lover, so I sort of get it,” Patty said), and whether she was interested in finding a local church to attend (“I think it’s great there are so many to choose from,” Patty said), before concluding that her new neighbor was too dangerous an adversary to be tackled head-on. As if to complete the rout, Patty had cooked up an extensive and very tasty-looking spread from which Linda, with an almost pleasant sense of defeat, loaded up a large plate.

“Linda,” Walter said, accosting her while she was taking seconds. “Thank you so much for coming over.”