Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“You don’t have to stay if you don’t want,” Walter said, setting her bag down. “I can take you back to the station in the morning.”

“No! This is fine. I’m not here for vacation. I’m here to see you, and to try to be useful.”

“Right. I’m just worried that I’m not actually what you want.”

“Oh, well, worry no more.”

“Well, I’m still worried.”

She made him lie down on a bed and tried to reassure him with her body. Soon enough, though, his worry boiled up again. He righted himself and asked her why she’d gone on the road trip with Richard. It was a question she’d allowed herself to hope he wouldn’t ask.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess I wanted to see what a road trip was like.”

“Hm.”

“There was something I had to see about. That’s the only way I can explain it. There was something I had to find out. And I found it out, and now I’m here.”

“What did you find out?”

“I found out where I wanted to be, and who I wanted to be with.”

“Well, that was quick.”

“It was a stupid mistake,” she said. “He’s got a way of looking at a person, as I’m sure you know. It takes a while for a person to sort out what she actually wants. Please don’t blame me for that.”

“I’m just impressed that you sorted it out so quickly.”

She had an impulse to start crying, and yielded to it, and Walter for a while became his best comforting self.

“He wasn’t nice to me,” she said through tears. “And you’re the opposite of that. And I so, so, so need the opposite of that right now. Can you please be nice?”

“I can be nice,” he said, stroking her head.

“I swear you won’t be sorry.”

These were exactly her words, in the autobiographer’s sorry recollection.

Here’s something else the autobiographer vividly remembers: the violence with which Walter then grabbed her shoulders and rolled her onto her back and loomed over her, pressing himself between her legs, with an utterly unfamiliar look on his face. It was a look of rage, and it became him. It was like curtains suddenly parting on something beautiful and manly.

“ This is not about you ,” he said. “Do you get that? I love every bit of you. Every inch of you. Every inch . From the minute I saw you. Do you get that?”

“Yes,” she said. “I mean, thank you. I kind of had that sense, but it’s really good to hear.”

He wasn’t done, though.

“Do you understand that I have a . . . a . . .” He searched for words. “A problem. With Richard. I have a problem .”

“What problem?”

“I don’t trust him. I love him, but I don’t trust him.”

“Oh, God,” Patty said, “you should definitely trust him. He obviously cares about you, too. He’s incredibly protective of you.”

“Not always.”

“Well, he was with me. Do you realize how much he admires you?”

Walter stared down at her furiously. “Then why did you go with him? Why was he in Chicago with you? What the fuck ? I don’t understand!”

Hearing him say fuck, and seeing how horrified he seemed by his own anger, she began to cry again. “God, please, God, please, God, please,” she said, “I’m here. OK? I’m here for you! And nothing happened in Chicago. Truly nothing.”

She pulled him closer, pulled hard on his hips. But instead of touching her breasts or taking her jeans down, as Richard surely would have, he stood up and began pacing Room 21.

“I’m not sure this is right,” he said. “Because, you know, I’m not stupid. I have eyes and ears, I’m not stupid . I really don’t know what to do now.”

It was a relief to hear that he wasn’t stupid about Richard; but she felt she’d run out of ways to reassure him. She simply lay there on the bed, listening to the rain on the roof, aware that she could have avoided this whole scene by never getting in a car with Richard; aware that she deserved some punishment. And yet it was hard not to imagine better ways for things to have gone. It was all such a foretaste of the late-night scenes of later years: Walter’s beautiful rage going wasted while she wept and he punished her and apologized for punishing her, saying that they were both exhausted and it was very late, which indeed it was: so late that it was early.

“I’m going to take a bath,” she said finally.

He was sitting on the other bed, his face in his hands. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is truly not about you.”

“Actually, you know what? That is not my very favorite thing to keep hearing.”

“I’m sorry. Believe it or not, I mean something nice by it.”

“And ‘sorry’ is not really high on my list at this point, either.”

Without taking his hands from his face, he asked if she needed help with the bath.

“I’m fine,” she said, although it was something of a production to bathe with her braced and bandaged knee propped up outside the water. When she emerged from the bathroom in her pajamas, half an hour later, Walter appeared not to have moved a muscle. She stood in front of him, looking down at his fair curls and narrow shoulders. “Listen, Walter,” she said. “I can leave in the morning if you want. But I need to get some sleep now. You should go to bed, too.”

He nodded.

“I’m sorry I went to Chicago with Richard. It was my idea, not his. You should blame me, not him. But right now? You’re making me feel kind of shitty.”

He nodded and stood up.

“Kiss me good night?” she said.

He did, and it was better than fighting, so much better that soon they were under the covers and turning off the lamp. Daylight was leaking in around the curtains—dawn in May came early in the north country.

“I know essentially nothing about sex,” Walter confessed.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not very complicated.”

And so began the happiest years of their life. For Walter, especially, it was a very giddy time. He took possession of the girl he wanted, the girl who could have gone with Richard but had chosen him instead, and then, three days later, at the Lutheran hospital, his lifelong struggle against his father ended with his father’s death. (To be dead is to be as beaten as a dad can get.) Patty was with Walter and Dorothy at the hospital that morning, and was moved by their tears to do some crying of her own, and it felt to her, as they drove back to the motel in near-silence, that she was already practically married.

In the motel parking lot, after Dorothy had gone inside to lie down, Patty watched Walter do a strange thing. He sprinted from one end of the lot to the other, leaping as he ran, bouncing on his toes before he turned around and ran some more. It was a glorious clear morning, with a steady strong breeze from the north, the pine trees along the creek literally whispering. At the end of one of his sprints, Walter hopped up and down and then turned away from Patty and started running down Route 73, way down around the bend and out of sight, and was gone for an hour.

That next afternoon, in Room 21, in broad daylight, with the windows open and the faded curtains billowing, they laughed and cried and fucked with a joy whose gravity and innocence it fairly wrecks the autobiographer to think back on, and cried some more and fucked some more and lay next to each other with sweating bodies and full hearts and listened to the sighing of the pines. Patty felt like she’d taken some powerful drug that wasn’t wearing off, or like she’d fallen into an incredibly vivid dream that she wasn’t waking up from, except that she was fully aware, from second to second to second, that it wasn’t a drug or a dream but just life happening to her, a life with only a present and no past, a romance unlike any romance she’d imagined. Because Room 21! How could she have imagined Room 21? It was such a sweetly clean old-fashioned room, and Walter such a sweetly clean old-fashioned person. And she was 21 and could feel her 21ness in the young, clean, strong wind that was blowing down from Canada. Her little taste of eternity.