Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Her pulse, however, knew—and was telling her with its racing—that she would probably not have another chance like this. Not before she was fully over the hill physically. Her pulse was registering her keen covert awareness that the fishing camp in Saskatchewan could only be reached by biplane, radio, or satellite phone, and that Walter would not be calling her in the next five days unless there was an emergency.

She left Richard’s lunch on the table and drove to the nearby tiny town of Fen City. She could see how easily she could have a traffic accident, and became so lost in imagining herself killed and Walter sobbing over her mutilated body and Richard stoically comforting him that she almost ran the only stop sign in Fen City; she dimly heard the screaming of her brakes.

It was all in her head, it was all in her head! The only thing that gave her any hope was how well she was concealing her own inner turmoil. She’d been maybe a little abstracted and shaky in the last four days, but infinitely better behaved than she’d been in February. If she herself was managing to keep her dark forces hidden, it stood to reason that Richard might have corresponding dark forces that he was doing just as good a job of hiding. But this was a tiny sliver of hope indeed; it was the way insane people lost in fantasies reasoned.

She stood in front of the Fen City Co-op’s meager selection of domestic beers, the Millers and the Coorses and the Budweisers, and tried to make a decision. Held a sixpack in her hand as if she might be able to judge in advance, through the aluminum of the cans, how she would feel if she drank it. Richard had told her to cool it with the drinking; she’d been ugly to him drunk. She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. And yet the autobiographer now envies and pities the younger Patty standing there in the Fen City Co-op and innocently believing that she’d reached the bottom: that, one way or another, the crisis would be resolved in the next five days.

A chubby teenage girl at the cash register had taken an interest in her paralysis. Patty gave her a lunatic smile and went and got a plastic-wrapped chicken and five ugly potatoes and some humble, limp leeks. The only thing worse than inhabiting her anxiety undrunk, she decided, would be to be drunk and still inhabiting it.

“I’m going to roast a chicken for us,” she told Richard when she got home.

Flecks of sawdust were resting in his hair and eyebrows and sticking to his sweaty, broad forehead. “That’s very nice of you,” he said.

“Deck’s looking really great,” she said. “It’s a wonderful improvement. How much longer do you think it’s going to take?”

“Couple of days, maybe.”

“You know, Walter and I can finish it up ourselves if you want to get back to New York. I know you meant to be back there by now.”

“It’s good to see a job finished,” he said. “It won’t be more than a couple of days. Unless you’re wanting to be alone here?”

“Do I want to be alone here?”

“I mean, it’s a lot of noise.”

“Oh, no, I like construction noise. It’s very comforting somehow.”

“Unless it’s your neighbors.”

“Well, I hate those neighbors, so that’s different.”

“Right.”

“So maybe I’ll get working on that chicken.”

She must have betrayed something in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. “You OK?”

“No no no,” she said, “I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn’t solve anything, if you know what I mean. But I love getting up in the morning. I love smelling the air.”

“I meant are you OK with my being here.”

“Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we’ve been friends with you for so long, but I’ve hardly ever really talked to you. It’s a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn’t feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I’m so used to being alone up here. It’s fine.”

This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.

“I’m just trying to hear what you’re actually saying,” Richard said. “Whether you actually want me here or not.”

“God,” she said, “I keep saying it, don’t I? Didn’t I just say it?”

She could see his patience with her, his patience with a female, reach its end. He rolled his eyes and picked up a section of two-by-four. “I’m going to wrap up here and then go for a swim.”

“It’s going to be cold.”

“Every day a little bit less so.”

Going back into the house, she experienced a cramp of envy of Walter, who was allowed to tell Richard that he loved him, and who wanted nothing destabilizing in return, nothing worse than to be loved himself. How easy men had it! She felt in comparison like a bloated sedentary spider, spinning her dry web year after year, waiting. She suddenly understood how the girls of years ago had felt, the girls of college who’d resented Walter’s free pass with Richard and been irritated by his pesky presence. She saw Walter, for a moment, as Eliza had seen him.

I might have to do it, I might have to do it, I might have to do it, she said to herself while washing the chicken and assuring herself that she didn’t actually mean it. She heard a splash from the lake and watched Richard swimming out in tree shadow toward water still gilded with afternoon light. If he really hated sunshine, the way he claimed to in his old song, northern Minnesota in June was a trying place to be. The days lasted so long that you found yourself surprised the sun wasn’t running low on fuel by the end of them. Just kept burning and burning. She yielded to an impulse to grab herself between the legs, to test the waters, for the shock of it, in lieu of going for a swim herself. Am I alive? Do I possess a body?

There were very odd angles in her cutting of the potatoes. They looked like some kind of geometric brainteaser.

Richard, after his shower, came into the kitchen in a textless T-shirt that must have been bright red some decades earlier. His hair was momentarily subdued, a youthful shiny black.

“You changed your look this winter,” he remarked to Patty.

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’? Your hair’s different, you look great.”

“Really hardly any different. Just a tiny bit different.”

“And—possibly put on a little weight?”

“No. Well. A little.”

“You look good with it. You look better not so skinny.”

“Is that a nice way of saying I’ve gotten fat?”

He shut his eyes and grimaced as if trying to remain patient. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Where is this bullshit coming from?”

“Ah?”

“Do you want me to leave? Is that it? There’s this weird phony thing you’re doing that gives me the impression you’re not comfortable with me here.”

The roasting chicken smelled like something of the sort she used to eat. She washed her hands and dried them, rummaged in the back of an unfinished cabinet, and found a bottle of cooking sherry covered with construction dust. She filled a juice glass with it and sat down at the table. “OK, frankly? I’m a little nervous around you.”