Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Don’t come,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

He said nothing, but she could hear him breathing.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Why don’t you call me again in a couple of hours. See how you feel in the morning.”

“I’ve been throwing up. Been vomiting.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Please don’t come. I promise I’ll stop bothering you. I think I just needed to push it to the limit before I could see that I can’t do it.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“It’s the right thing, isn’t it?”

“Probably. Yeah. It probably is.”

“I can’t do it to him.”

“Then good. I won’t come.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you to come. I’m just asking you not to.”

“I will do what you want.”

“No, God, listen to me. I’m asking you to do what I don’t want.”

Possibly, in Jersey City, New Jersey, he was rolling his eyes at this. But she knew that he wanted to see her, he was ready to take a plane in the morning, and the only way they could agree definitively that he shouldn’t come was to prolong the conversation for two hours, going around and around, performing the unresolvable conflict, until they both felt so dirtied and exhausted and sick of themselves and sick of each other that the prospect of getting together became genuinely unappetizing.

Not least among the ingredients of Patty’s misery, when they finally hung up, was her sense of wasting Richard’s love. She knew him to be a man supremely irritated by female bullshit, and the fact that he’d put up with two nonstop hours of hers, which was about 119 minutes more than he was constituted to put up with, filled her with gratitude and sorrow about the waste , the waste . The waste of his love.

Which led her—it almost goes without saying—to call him again twenty minutes later and drag him through a somewhat shorter but even more wretched version of the first call. It was a small preview of what she later did in a more extended way with Walter in Washington: the harder she worked to exhaust his patience, the more patience he showed, and the more patience he showed, the harder it was to let go of him. Fortunately Richard’s patience with her, unlike Walter’s, was nowhere close to infinite. He finally just hung up on her, and he didn’t answer when she called yet again, an hour later, shortly before the time she figured he had to leave for Newark Airport to catch his flight.

Despite having hardly slept, and despite having thrown up what little she’d eaten the day before, she felt immediately fresher and clearer and more energetic. She cleaned the house, read half of a Joseph Conrad novel Walter had recommended, and didn’t buy any more wine. When Walter came back from the Boundary Waters, she cooked a beautiful dinner and threw her arms around his neck and—a rarity—made him actually squirm a little with the intensity of her affection.

What she should have done then was find a job or go back to school or become a volunteer. But there always seemed to be something in the way. There was the possibility that Joey would relent and move back home for his senior year. There was the house and garden she’d neglected in her year of drunkenness and depression. There was her cherished freedom to go up to Nameless Lake for weeks at a time whenever she felt like it. There was a more general freedom that she could see was killing her but she was nonetheless unable to let go of. There was Parents’ Weekend at Jessica’s college in Philadelphia, which Walter couldn’t attend but was delighted that Patty showed an interest in attending, since he sometimes worried that she and Jessica weren’t close enough. And then there were the weeks leading up to that Parents’ Weekend, weeks of e-mails to and from Richard, weeks of imagining the Philadelphia hotel room in which they were going to spend one day and one night off the radar. And then there were the months of serious depression after Parents’ Weekend.

She’d flown to Philadelphia on a Thursday, in order to spend, as she carefully told Walter, an actual day on her own as a tourist. Taking a cab to the city center, she was pierced unexpectedly by regret for not doing exactly that: not walking the streets as an independent adult woman, not cultivating an independent life, not being a sensible and curious tourist instead of a love-chasing madwoman.

Unbelievable as it may sound, she had not been alone at a hotel since her time in Room 21, and she was very impressed with her plushly mod room at the Sofitel. She examined all the amenities carefully while she waited for Richard to arrive, and then examined them again as the appointed hour came and went. She tried to watch television but could not. She was a pile of nervous pulp by the time the phone finally rang.

“Something’s come up,” Richard said.

“All right. OK. Something’s come up. OK.” She went to the window and looked at Philadelphia. “What was it? Somebody’s skirt?”

“Cute,” Richard said.

“Oh, just give me a little time,” she said, “and I’ll give you every cliché in the book. We haven’t even started on jealousy yet. This is, like, Minute One of jealousy.”

“There’s nobody else.”

“ Nobody? There’s been nobody ? God, even I’ve been worse-behaved than that. In my own little marital way.”

“I didn’t say there haven’t been any. I said there isn’t one.”

She pressed her head against the window. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is just making me feel too old, too ugly, too stupid, too jealous. I can’t stand to hear what’s coming out of my mouth.”

“He called me this morning,” Richard said.

“Who?”

“Walter. I should have let it ring, but I picked up. He said he’d gotten up early to take you to the airport, and he was missing you. He said things have been really good with you guys. ‘Happiest in many years,’ I believe his phrase was.”

Patty said nothing.

“Said you were going out to see Jessica, Jessica secretly very happy about this, although worried that you might say something weird and embarrass her, or that you’re not going to like her new boyfriend. Walter all in all extremely happy that you’re doing this for her.”

Patty fidgeted there by the window, struggling to listen.

“Said he was feeling bad about some of the things he’d said to me last winter. Said he didn’t want me to have the wrong idea about you. Said last winter was terrible, because of Joey, but things are much better now. ‘Happiest in many years.’ I’m pretty sure that was the phrase.”

Some combination of gagging and sobbing produced a ridiculous painful burp from Patty.

“What was that ?” Richard said.

“Nothing. Sorry.”

“So, anyway.”

“Anyway.”

“I decided not to go.”

“Right. I understand. Of course.”

“Good, then.”

“But why don’t you just come down anyway. I mean, since I’m here. And then I can go back to my incredibly happy life, and you can go back to New Jersey.”

“I’m just telling you what he said.”

“My incredibly, incredibly happy life.”

Oh, the temptations of self-pity. So sweet to her, so irresistible to give voice to, and so ugly to him. She could hear precisely the moment she’d gone a step too far. If she’d kept her cool, she might have charmed and cajoled him into coming down to Philadelphia. Who knows? She might never have gone home again. But she fucked everything up with self-pity. She could hear him grow cooler and more distant, which made her feel even sorrier for herself, and so on, and so forth, until finally she had to get off the phone and give herself entirely to the other sweetness.