Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Richard’s personal life was in scarcely better shape than Walter and Patty’s. He had lost several thousand dollars on the last Traumatics tour and had “loaned” the uninsured Herrera further thousands for medical expenses, and his domestic situation, as he described it on the phone to Walter, was collapsing. What had made his whole existence workable, for nearly twenty years, was the big ground-floor Jersey City apartment for which he paid a rent so low as to be literally nominal. Richard could never be bothered to get rid of things, and his apartment was big enough that he didn’t have to. Walter had been to it on one of his trips to New York and reported that the hall outside Richard’s door was filled with junk stereo equipment, mattresses, and surplus parts for his pickup truck, and that the rear courtyard was filling up with supplies and leftovers from his deck-building business. Best of all, there was a room in the basement directly beneath his apartment where the Traumatics had been able to practice (and, later, record) without unduly disturbing the other tenants. Richard had always taken care to remain on good terms with them, but in the wake of his breakup with Molly he’d made the dreadful mistake of going a step further and getting involved with one of them.

At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a mistake to anyone but Walter, who considered himself uniquely qualified to detect the bullshit in his friend’s dealings with women. When Richard said, on the phone, that the time had come to put childish things behind him and sustain a real relationship with a grownup woman, warning bells had gone off in Walter’s head. The woman was an Ecuadoran named Ellie Posada. She was in her late thirties and had two kids whose father, a limousine driver, had been struck and killed when his car broke down on the Pulaski Skyway. (It did not escape Patty’s attention that, although Richard poked plenty of very young girls for fun, the women he actually had longer-term relationships with were his own age or even older.) Ellie worked for an insurance agency and lived across the hall from Richard. For a nearly a year, he gave Walter upbeat reports on how unexpectedly well her kids were taking to him and he to them, and how great Ellie was to come home to, and how uninteresting women who weren’t Ellie had become to him, and how he hadn’t eaten so well or felt so healthy since he’d lived with Walter, and (this really set Walter’s alarm bell ringing) how fascinating the insurance business turned out to be. Walter told Patty that he could hear something tellingly abstracted, or theoretical, or far away, in Richard’s tone of voice during this ostensibly happy year, and it came as no surprise to him when Richard’s nature finally caught up with him. The music he’d started making with Walnut Surprise turned out to be even more fascinating than the insurance business, and the skinny chicks in his young bandmates’ orbit turned out to be not so uninteresting after all, and Ellie turned out to be a strict constructionist when it came to exclusive sexual contracts, and before long he was afraid to come home at night to his own building, because Ellie was lying in ambush for him. Soon after that, Ellie organized the building’s other tenants to complain about his egregious appropriation of their communal space, and his hitherto absent landlord sent him stern letters by certified mail, and Richard found himself homeless, at the age of forty-four, in midwinter, with maxed-out credit cards and a $300 monthly storage bill for all his crap.

Now came Walter’s finest hour as Richard’s big brother. He offered him a way to live rent-free, devote himself in solitude to songwriting, and make some good money while he got his life sorted out. Walter had inherited from Dorothy her sweet little house on a lake near Grand Rapids. He had plans for some major interior and exterior improvements which, since he’d quit 3M and joined the Nature Conservancy, he’d despaired of finding time to do himself, and he proposed that Richard come out and live in the house, get a good start on the kitchen renovation, and then, when the snow melted, put a big deck on the back of the house, overlooking the lake. Richard would get thirty dollars an hour, plus free electricity and heat, and could do the work on his own schedule. And Richard, who was in a low place, and who (as he later told Patty, with touching plainness) had come to consider the Berglunds the closest thing he had to family, took only one day to think it over before accepting the offer. For Walter, his assent was further sweet confirmation that Richard really loved him. For Patty, well, the timing was dangerous.

Richard stopped with his overloaded old Toyota pickup for a night in St. Paul on his way up north. Patty was already into a bottle by the time he arrived, at three in the afternoon, and did not acquit herself well as a hostess. Walter did the cooking while she drank for the three of them. It was as if he and she both had just been waiting to see their old friend so they could vent their conflicting versions of why Joey, instead of joining them for dinner, was playing air hockey with a right-wing dolt next door. Richard, flummoxed, kept stepping outside to smoke cigarettes and fortify himself for the next round of Berglund fraughtness.

“It’s going to be fine,” he said, coming inside again. “You guys are great parents. It’s just, you know, when a kid’s got a big personality, there can be big dramas of individuation. It takes time to work these things out.”

“ God ,” Patty said. “Where did you get so wise?”

“Richard is one of those bizarre people who actually still read books and think about things,” Walter said.

“Right, unlike me, I know.” She turned to Richard. “Every once in a while it happens that I don’t read every single book he recommends. Sometimes I decide to just—skip it. I believe that is the subtext here. My substandard intellect.”

Richard gave her a hard look. “You should cool it with the drinking,” he said.

He might as well have punched her in the sternum. Where Walter’s disapproval actively fed her misbehavior, Richard’s had the effect of catching her out in her childishness, of exposing her unattractiveness to daylight.

“Patty’s in a lot of pain,” Walter said quietly, as if to warn Richard that his loyalty still lay, however unaccountably, with her.

“You can drink all you want as far as I’m concerned,” Richard said. “I’m just saying, if you want the kid to come home, it might help to have your house in order.”

“I’m not even sure I want him home at this point,” Walter said. “I’m kind of enjoying the respite from his contempt.”

“So, let’s see, then,” Patty said. “We’ve got individuation for Joey, we’ve got relief for Walter, but then, for Patty, what? What does she get? Wine, I guess. Right? Patty gets wine.”

“Whoa,” Richard said. “Little bit of self-pity there?”

“For God’s sake,” Walter said.

It was terrible to see, through Richard’s eyes, what she’d been turning into. From twelve hundred miles away it had been easy to smile at Richard’s love troubles, his eternal adolescence, his failed resolutions to put childish things behind him, and to feel that here, in Ramsey Hill, a more adult sort of life was being led. But now she was in the kitchen with him—his height, as always, a breathtaking surprise to her, his Qaddafian features weathered and deepened, his mass of dark hair graying handsomely—and he illuminated in a flash what a self-absorbed little child she’d been able to remain by walling herself inside her lovely house. She’d run from her family’s babyishness only to be just as big a baby herself. She didn’t have a job, her kids were more grownup than she was, she hardly even had sex . She was ashamed to be seen by him. All these years, she’d treasured her memory of their little road trip, kept it locked up securely in some deep interior place, letting it age like a wine, so that, in some symbolic way, the thing that might have happened between them stayed alive and grew older with the two of them. The nature of the possibility altered as it aged in its sealed bottle, but it didn’t go bad, it remained potentially drinkable, it was a kind of reassurance: rakish Richard Katz had once invited her to move to New York with him, and she’d said no. And now she could see that this wasn’t how things worked at all. She was forty-two and drinking herself red-nosed.