Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

She couldn’t quite gauge his tone of voice, but, fearing that it was angry, she struggled to stop laughing.

Richard sat down on the coffee table and smoked with great determination. “We have to never do this again,” he said.

Another snicker broke out of her; she couldn’t help it. “Or maybe just a couple more times and then never again.”

“Yeah, where does that get us?”

“Conceivably the itch would be scratched, and that would be that.”

“Not the way it works, in my experience.”

“Well, I guess I have to defer to your experience, don’t I? Having none myself.”

“Here’s the choice,” Richard said. “We stop now, or you leave Walter. And since the latter is not acceptable, we stop now.”

“Or, third possibility, we could not stop and I could just not tell him.”

“I don’t want to live that way. Do you?”

“It’s true that two of the three people he loves most in the world are you and me.”

“The third being Jessica.”

“It’s some consolation,” Patty said, “that she would hate me for the rest of my life and totally side with him. He would always have that.”

“That’s not what he wants, and I’m not going to do it to him.”

Patty laughed again, at the thought of Jessica. She was a very good and painfully earnest and strenuously mature young person whose exasperation with Patty and Joey—her feckless mom, her ruthless brother—was seldom so extreme as not to seem comical. Patty liked her daughter a great deal and would in fact, realistically, be devastated to forfeit her good opinion. But she still couldn’t help being amused by Jessica’s opprobrium. It was part of how the two of them got along; and Jessica was too absorbed in her own seriousness to be bothered by it.

“Hey,” she said to Richard, “do you think it’s possible you’re homosexual?”

“You ask that now?”

“I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes guys who have to screw a million women are trying to prove something. Disprove something. And it’s sounding to me like you care more about Walter’s happiness than you do about mine.”

“Trust me on this one. I have no interest in kissing Walter.”

“No, I know. I know. But there’s still something I mean by that. I mean, I’m sure you’d get tired of me very soon. You’d see me naked when I’m forty-five, and you’d be thinking, Hmm. Do I still want this? I don’t think so! Whereas Walter you never have to get tired of, because you don’t feel like kissing him. You can just be close to him forever.”

“This is D. H. Lawrence,” Richard said impatiently.

“Yet another author I need to read.”

“Or not.”

She rubbed her tired eyes and her abraded mouth. She was, all in all, very happy with the turn things had taken.

“You’re really excellent with tools,” she said with another snicker.

Richard began to pace again. “Try to be serious, OK? Try hard.”

“This is our time right now, Richard. That’s all I’m saying. We have a couple of days, and we either use them or we don’t. They’re going to be over soon either way.”

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t think it through. I should have taken off yesterday morning.”

“All but one part of me would have been glad if you did. Admittedly, that one part is a fairly important part.”

“I like seeing you,” he said. “I like being around you. It makes me happy to think of Walter being with you—you’re that kind of person. I thought it would be OK to stay a couple of extra days. But it was a mistake.”

“Welcome to Pattyland. Mistakeland.”

“It didn’t occur to me that you would sleepwalk.”

She laughed. “That was kind of a brilliant stroke, wasn’t it?”

“Jesus. Cool it, OK? You’re annoying me.”

“Yeah, but the great thing is it doesn’t even matter. What’s the worst that can happen now? You’ll be annoyed with me and leave.”

He looked at her then, and he smiled, and the room filled (metaphorically) with sunshine. He was, in her opinion, a very beautiful man.

“I do like you,” he said. “I like you a lot. I always liked you.”

“Same back at you.”

“I wanted you to have a good life. Do you understand? I thought you were a person who was actually worthy of Walter.”

“And so that’s why you went off that night in Chicago and never came back.”

“It wouldn’t have worked in New York. It would have ended badly.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

Patty nodded. “So you actually wanted to sleep with me that night.”

“Yeah. A lot. But not just sleep with you. Talk to you. Listen to you. That was the difference.”

“Well, I guess that’s nice to know. I can cross that worry off my list now, twenty years later.”

Richard lit another cigarette and they sat there for a while, separated by a cheap old Oriental rug of Dorothy’s. There was a sighing in the trees, the voice of an autumn that was never far away in northern Minnesota.

“This is potentially kind of a hard situation, then, isn’t it,” Patty finally said.

“Yes.”

“Harder than I perhaps realized.”

“Yes.”

“Arguably better of me not to have sleepwalked.”

“Yes.”

She began to cry for Walter. They had spent so few nights apart over the years that she’d never had a chance to miss him and appreciate him the way she missed him and appreciated him now. This was the beginning of a terrible confusion of the heart, a confusion that the autobiographer is still suffering from. Already, there at Nameless Lake, in the unchanging overcast light, she could see the problem very clearly. She’d fallen for the one man in the world who cared as much about Walter and felt as protective of him as she did; anybody else could have tried to turn her against him. And even worse, in a way, was the responsibility she felt toward Richard, in knowing that he had nobody else like Walter in his life, and that his loyalty to Walter was, in his own estimation, one of the few things besides music that saved him as a human being. All this, in her sleep and selfishness, she had gone and jeopardized. She’d taken advantage of a person who was messed up and susceptible but nevertheless trying hard to maintain some kind of moral order in his life. And so she was crying for Richard, too, but even more for Walter, and for her own unlucky, wrongdoing self.

“It’s good to cry,” Richard said, “although I can’t say I’ve ever tried it myself.”

“It’s kind of a bottomless pit, once you get into it,” Patty snuffled. She was feeling suddenly cold in her bathing suit, and physically unwell. She went and put her arms around Richard’s warm, broad shoulders, and lay down with him on the Oriental rug, and so the long bright gray afternoon went.

Three times, altogether. One, two, three. Once sleeping, once violently, and then once with the full orchestra. Three: pathetic little number. The autobiographer has now spent quite a bit of her mid-forties counting and recounting, but it never adds up to more than three.

There is otherwise not much to relate, and most of what remains consists of further mistakes. The first of these she committed in concert with Richard while they were still lying on the rug. They decided together—agreed—that he should leave. They decided quickly, while they were sore and spent, that he should leave now, before they got themselves in any deeper, and that they would both then give the situation careful thought and come to a sober decision, which, if it should turn out to be negative, would only be more painful if he stayed any longer.

Having made this decision, Patty sat up and was surprised to see that the trees and the deck were soaked. The rain was so fine that she hadn’t heard it on the roof, so gentle that it hadn’t trickled in the gutters. She put on Richard’s faded red T-shirt and asked if she could keep it.