Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

And then the Traumatics were gone—on to their next gig, in Madison, and then on to releasing further wryly titled records that a certain kind of critic and about five thousand other people in the world liked to listen to, and doing small-venue gigs attended by scruffy, well-educated white guys who were no longer as young as they used to be—while Patty and Walter pursued their mostly very absorbing workaday life, in which the weekly thirty minutes of sexual stress was a chronic but low-grade discomfort, like the humidity in Florida. The autobiographer does acknowledge the possible connection between this small discomfort and the large mistakes that Patty was making as a mother in those years. Where Eliza’s parents, once upon a time, had erred in being too much into each other and not enough into Eliza, Patty can probably be said to have made the opposite error with Joey. But there are so many other, non-parental errors to be related in these pages that it seems just inhumanly painful to dwell on her mistakes with Joey as well; the autobiographer fears that it would make her lie down on the floor and never get up.

What happened first was that Walter and Richard became great friends again. Walter knew a lot of people, but the voice he most wanted to come home and hear on their answering machine was Richard’s, saying things like, “Yo, Jersey City here. Wondering if you can make me feel better about the situation in Kuwait. Give me a call.” Both from the frequency of Richard’s phonings and from the less defended way he spoke to Walter now—telling him he didn’t know anybody else like him and Patty, that they were his lifeline to a world of sanity and hope—Walter finally got it through his head that Richard genuinely liked and needed him and wasn’t just passively consenting to be his friend. (This was the context in which Walter gratefully cited his mom’s advice about loyalty.) Whenever another tour brought the Traumatics through town, Richard made time to stop by the house, usually alone. He took particular interest in Jessica, whom he held to be a Genuinely Good Soul in the mold of her grandmother, and plied her with earnest questions about her favorite writers and her volunteer work at the local soup kitchen. Though Patty could have wished for a daughter who was more like her, and for whom her own wealth of experience with mistake-making would have been a comforting resource, she was mostly very proud to have a daughter so wise about the way the world worked. She enjoyed seeing Jessica through Richard’s admiring eyes, and when he and Walter then went out together, it made Patty feel secure to see the two guys getting into the car, the great guy she’d married and the sexy one she hadn’t. Richard’s affection for Walter made her feel better about Walter herself; his charisma had a way of ratifying anything it touched.

One notable shadow was Walter’s disapproval of Richard’s situation with Molly Tremain. She had a beautiful voice but was a depressed or possibly bipolar person and spent massive amounts of time alone in her Lower East Side apartment, doing freelance copyediting at night and sleeping away her days. Molly was always available when Richard wanted to come over, and Richard claimed that she was fine with being his part-time lover, but Walter couldn’t shake the suspicion that their relationship was founded on misunderstandings. Over the years, Patty extracted from Walter various disturbing things that Richard had said to him in private, including “Sometimes I think my purpose on earth is to put my penis in the vaginas of as many women as I can” and “The idea of having sex with the same person for the rest of my life feels like death to me.” Walter’s suspicion that Molly secretly believed he would outgrow these sentiments turned out to be correct. Molly was two years older than Richard, and when she suddenly decided that she wanted a baby before it was too late, Richard was compelled to explain why this was never going to happen. Things between them quickly got so awful that he dumped her altogether and she in turn quit the band.

It happened that Molly’s mother was a longtime Arts editor at the New York Times , a fact that may explain why the Traumatics, despite record sales in the low four digits and audiences in the high two digits, had received several full write-ups in the Times (“Consistently Original, Perennially Unheard Of,” “Undaunted by Indifference, the Traumatics Soldier On”) plus brief reviews of each of their records after In Case You Hadn’t Noticed. Coincidentally or not, Insanely Happy —their first record without Molly and, as it turned out, their last—was ignored not only by the Times but even by the free weekly city papers that had long been a bastion of Traumatic support. What had happened, as Richard theorized over an early supper with Walter and Patty when the band dragged itself through the Twin Cities yet again, was that he’d been buying press attention on credit all along, without realizing it, and that the press had finally concluded that familiarity with the Traumatics was never going to be necessary to anyone’s cultural literacy or street credibility, and so there was no reason to extend him further credit.

Patty, carrying earplugs, went along with Walter to the show that night. The Sick Chelseas, a foursome of assonant local girls barely older than Jessica, opened for the Traumatics, and Patty found herself trying to guess which of the four Richard had been hitting on backstage. She wasn’t feeling jealous of the girls, she was feeling sad for Richard. It was finally sinking in, with both her and Walter, that in spite of being a good musician and a good writer Richard was not having the best life: had not actually been kidding with all his self-deprecation and avowals of admiration and envy of her and Walter. After the Sick Chelseas finished playing, their late-adolescent friends seeped out of the club and left behind no more than thirty die-hard Traumatics fans—white, male, scruffy, and even less young than they used to be—to hear Richard’s deadpan banter (“We want to thank you guys for coming to this 400 Bar and not the other, more popular 400 Bar . . . We seem to have made the same mistake ourselves”) and then a rollicking rendition of their new record’s title song—

and, later, an interminable and more typically repellent song, “TCBY,” consisting mostly of guitar noise reminiscent of razor blades and broken glass, over which Richard chanted poetry—

and finally his slow, country-sounding song, “Dark Side of the Bar,” which dampened Patty’s eyes with sadness for him—

The band was good—Richard and Herrera had been playing together for almost twenty years—but it was hard to imagine any band being good enough to overcome the desolation of the too-small house. After a single encore, “I Hate Sunshine,” Richard didn’t exit to the side of the stage but simply parked his guitar on a stand, lit a cigarette, and hopped down to the floor.