Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Why do you want my shirt?”

“It smells like you.”

“That’s not considered a plus in most quarters.”

“I just want one thing that’s yours.”

“All right. Let’s hope it turns out to be the only thing.”

“I’m forty-two,” she said. “It would cost me twenty thousand dollars to get pregnant. Not to burst your bubble or anything.”

“I’m very proud of my zero batting average. Try not to wreck it, OK?”

“And what about me?” she said. “Should I be worried that I’ve brought some disease into the house?”

“I’ve had all my shots, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m usually paranoically careful.”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.”

And so on. It was all very chummy and chatty, and in the lightness of the moment she told him that he had no excuse now not to sing her a song, before he left. He unpacked his banjo and plucked away while she made sandwiches and wrapped them in foil.

“Maybe you should spend the night and get an early start in the morning,” she called to him.

He smiled as if refusing to dignify this with an answer.

“Seriously,” she said. “It’s raining, it’s going to get dark.”

“No chance,” he said. “Sorry. You will never be trusted again. It’s something you’re just going to have to live with.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” she said. “Why aren’t you singing? I want to hear your voice.”

To be nice to her, he sang “Shady Grove.” He had become, over the years, in defiance of initial expectations, a skilled and fairly nuanced vocalist, and he was so big-chested that he could really blow your house down.

“OK, I’m seeing your point,” she said when he finished. “This isn’t making things any easier for me.”

Once you get musicians going, though, they hate to stop. Richard tuned his guitar and sang three country songs that Walnut Surprise later recorded for Nameless Lake . Some of the lyrics were barely more than nonsense syllables, to be discarded and replaced with vastly better ones, but Patty was still so affected and excited by his singing, in a country mode she recognized and loved, that she began to shout in the middle of the third song, “STOP! OK! ENOUGH! STOP! ENOUGH! OK!” But he wouldn’t stop, and his absorption in his music made her feel so lonely and abandoned that she began to cry raggedly and finally to become so hysterical that he had no choice but to stop singing—though he was still unmistakably pissed off by the interruption!—and try, unsuccessfully, to calm her.

“Here are your sandwiches,” she said, dumping them into his arms, “and there’s the door. We said you were leaving, and so you’re leaving. OK? Now! I mean it! Now . I’m sorry I asked you to sing, MY FAULT AGAIN, but let’s try to learn from our mistakes, OK?”

He took a deep breath and drew himself up as if to deliver some pronouncement, but his shoulders slumped and he let the big statement escape from his lungs unspoken.

“You’re right,” he said, irritably. “I don’t need this.”

“We made a good decision, don’t you think?”

“Probably we did, yeah.”

“So go.”

And he went.

And she became a better reader. At first in desperate escapism, later in search of help. By the time Walter returned from Saskatchewan, she’d dispatched the remainder of War and Peace in three marathon reading days. Natasha had promised herself to Andrei but was then corrupted by the wicked Anatole, and Andrei went off in despair to get himself mortally wounded in battle, surviving only long enough to be nursed by Natasha and forgive her, whereupon excellent old Pierre, who had done some growing up and deep thinking as a prisoner of war, stepped forward to present himself as Natasha’s consolation prize; and lots of babies followed. Patty felt she’d lived an entire compressed lifetime in those three days, and when her own Pierre returned from the wilderness, badly sunburned despite religious slatherings of maximum-strength sunblock, she was ready to try to love him again. She picked him up in Duluth and debriefed him on his days with nature-loving millionaires, who had apparently opened their wallets wide for him.

“It’s incredible,” Walter said when they got home and he saw the almost-finished deck. “He’s here four months and he can’t do the last eight hours of work.”

“I think he was sick of the woods,” Patty said. “I told him he should just go back to New York. He wrote some great songs here. He was ready to go.”

Walter frowned. “He played you songs?”

“Three,” she said, turning away from him.

“And they were good?”

“Really good.” She walked down toward the lake, and Walter followed her. It wasn’t hard to keep her distance from him. Only at the very beginning had they been one of those couples who embraced and locked lips at every homecoming.

“You guys got along OK?” Walter asked.

“It was a little awkward. I was glad when he left. I had to drink a big glass of sherry the one night he was here.”

“That’s not so bad. One glass.”

Part of the deal she’d struck with herself was to tell Walter no lies, not even tiny ones; to speak no words that couldn’t narrowly be construed as truth.

“I’ve been reading a ton ,” she said. “I think War and Peace is actually the best book I’ve ever read.”

“I’m jealous,” Walter said.

“Ah?”

“Getting to read that book for the first time. Having whole days to do it.”

“It was great. I feel kind of altered by it.”

“You seem a little altered, actually.”

“Not in a bad way, I hope.”

“No. Just different.”

In bed with him that night, she took off her pajamas and was relieved to find she wanted him more, not less, for what she’d done. It was fine, having sex with him. There was nothing so wrong with it.

“We need to do this more,” she said.

“Any time. Literally any time.”

They had a sort of second honeymoon that summer, fueled by her contrition and sexual botheration. She tried hard to be a good wife, and to please her very good husband, but a full accounting of the success of her efforts must include the e-mails that she and Richard began to exchange within days of his departure, and the permission she somehow gave him, a few weeks after that, to get on a plane to Minneapolis and go up to Nameless Lake with her while Walter was hosting another V.I.P. trip in the Boundary Waters. She immediately deleted the e-mail with Richard’s flight information, as she’d deleted all the others, but not before memorizing the flight number and arrival time.

A week before the date, she repaired to the lake in solitude and gave herself entirely to her derangement. It consisted of getting stumbling drunk every evening, awakening later in panic and remorse and indecision, then sleeping through the morning, then reading novels in a suspended state of false calm, then jumping up and pacing for an hour or more in the vicinity of the telephone, trying to decide whether to call Richard and tell him not to come, and finally opening a bottle to make the whole thing go away for a few hours.

Slowly the remaining days ticked down toward zero. On the last night, she got vomiting drunk, fell asleep in the living room, and was jolted back to consciousness at a predawn hour. To get her hands and her arms to stop shaking enough to dial Richard’s number, she had to lie down on the still-ungrouted kitchen floor.

She reached his voice mail. He had found a new, smaller apartment a few blocks from his old one. All she could picture of this new place was a larger version of the black room of the apartment he’d once shared with Walter, the apartment she’d displaced him from. She dialed again, and again got his voice mail. She dialed a third time, and Richard answered.