Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Not that it mattered, but Katz really was broke. Income and outlays had more or less balanced during the band’s year and a half of touring; whenever there’d been danger of a surplus, he’d upgraded their hotels and bought drinks for bars full of fans and strangers. Though Nameless Lake and the newly kindled consumer interest in old Traumatics recordings had brought him more money than his previous twenty years of work combined, he’d managed to blow every dime of it in his quest to relocate the self he’d misplaced. The most traumatic events ever to befall the longtime front man of the Traumatics had been (1) receiving a Grammy nomination, (2) hearing his music played on National Public Radio, and (3) deducing, from December sales figures, that Nameless Lake had made the perfect little Christmas gift to leave beneath tastefully trimmed trees in several hundred thousand NPR-listening households. The Grammy nomination had been a particularly disorienting embarrassment.

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was a successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world’s general crappiness: for Katz’s Jewish paternal forebears, who’d been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother’s side, who’d labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn’t an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. Grim situations were Katz’s niche the way murky water was a carp’s. His best years with the Traumatics had coincided with Reagan I, Reagan II, and Bush I; Bill Clinton (at least pre-Lewinsky) had been something of a trial for him. Now came Bush II, the worst regime of all, and he might well have started making music again, had it not been for the accident of success. He flopped around on the ground, heavily carplike, his psychic gills straining futilely to extract dark sustenance from an atmosphere of approval and plenitude. He was at once freer than he’d been since puberty and closer than he’d ever been to suicide. In the last days of 2003, he went back to building decks.

He was lucky with his first two clients, a couple of private-equity boys who were into the Chili Peppers and didn’t know Richard Katz from Ludwig van Beethoven. He sawed and nail-gunned on their roofs in relative peace. Not until his third job, begun in February, did he have the misfortune of working for people who thought they knew who he was. The building was on White Street between Church and Broadway, and the client, an independently rich publisher of art books, owned the entire Traumatics oeuvre in vinyl and seemed hurt that Katz didn’t remember seeing his face in various sparse crowds at Maxwell’s, in Hoboken, over the years.

“There are so many faces,” Katz said. “I’m bad with faces.”

“That night when Molly fell off the stage, we all had drinks afterward. I still have her bloody napkin somewhere. You don’t remember?”

“Drawing a blank. Sorry.”

“Well, anyway, it’s been great to see you getting some of the recognition you deserve.”

“I’d rather not talk about that,” Katz said. “Let’s talk about your roof instead.”

“Basically, I want you to be creative and bill me,” the client said. “I want to have a deck built by Richard Katz. I can’t imagine you’re going to be doing this for long. I couldn’t believe it when I heard you were in business.”

“Some rough idea of square footage and preference in materials would nevertheless be useful.”

“Really anything. Just be creative. It doesn’t even matter.”

“Bear with me, though, and pretend it does,” Katz said. “Because if it really doesn’t matter, I’m not sure I—”

“Cover the roof. OK? Make it vast.” The client seemed annoyed with him. “Lucy wants to have parties up here. That’s one reason we bought this place.”

The client had a son, Zachary, a Stuy High senior and hipster-in-training and apparently something of a guitarist, who came up to the roof after school on Katz’s first day of work and, from a safe distance, as if Katz were a lion on a chain, peppered him with questions calculated to demonstrate his own knowledge of vintage guitars, which Katz considered a particularly tiresome commodity fetish. He said as much, and the kid went away annoyed with him.

On Katz’s second day of work, while he was transporting lumber and Trex boards roofward, Zachary’s mother, Lucy, waylaid him on the third-floor landing and offered, unsolicited, her opinion that the Traumatics had been the kind of adolescently posturing, angst-mongering boy group that never interested her. Then she waited, with parted lips and a saucy challenge in her eyes, to see how her presence—the drama of being her—was registering. In the way of such chicks, she seemed convinced of the originality of her provocation. Katz had encountered, practically verbatim, the same provocation a hundred times before, which put him in the ridiculous position now of feeling bad for being unable to pretend to be provoked: of pitying Lucy’s doughty little ego, its flotation on a sea of aging-female insecurity. He doubted he could get anywhere with her even if he felt like trying, but he knew that her pride would be hurt if he didn’t make at least a token effort to be disagreeable.

“I know,” he said, propping Trex against a wall. “That’s why it was such a breakthrough for me to produce a record of authentic adult feeling which women, too, could appreciate.”

“What makes you think I liked Nameless Lake ?” Lucy said.

“What makes you think I care?” Katz gamely rejoined. He’d been up and down the stairs all morning, but what really exhausted him was having to perform himself.

“I liked it OK,” she said. “It was maybe just a teeny bit overpraised.”

“I’m at a loss to disagree with you,” Katz said.

She went away annoyed with him.

In the eighties and nineties, to avoid undercutting his best selling point as a contractor—the fact that he was making unpopular music deserving of financial support—Katz had been all but required to behave unprofessionally. His bread-and-butter clientele had been Tribeca artists and movie people who’d given him food and sometimes drugs and would have questioned his artistic commitment if he’d shown up for work before midafternoon, refrained from hitting on unavailable females, or finished on schedule and within budget. Now, with Tribeca fully annexed by the financial industry, and with Lucy lingering on her DUX bed all morning, sitting cross-legged in a tank top and sheer bikini underpants while she read the Times or talked on the phone, waving up at him through the skylight whenever he passed it, her barely clothed bush and impressive thighs sustainedly observable, he became a demon of professionalism and Protestant virtue, arriving promptly at nine and working several hours past nightfall, trying to shave a day or two off the project and get the hell out of there.

He’d returned from Florida feeling equally averse to sex and to music. This sort of aversion was new to him, and he was rational enough to recognize that it had everything to do with his mental state and little or nothing to do with reality. Just as the fundamental sameness of female bodies in no way precluded unending variety, there was no rational reason to despair about the sameness of popular music’s building blocks, the major and minor power chords, the 2/4 and the 4/4, the A-B-A-B-C. Every hour of the day, somewhere in greater New York, some energetic young person was working on a song that would sound, at least for a few listenings—maybe for as many as twenty or thirty listenings—as fresh as the morning of Creation. Since receiving his walking papers from Florida Probations and taking leave of his large-titted Parks Department supervisor, Marta Molina, Katz had been unable to turn on his stereo or touch an instrument or imagine letting anybody else into his bed, ever again. Hardly a day went by without his hearing an arresting new sound leaking from somebody’s basement practice room or even (it could happen) from the street doors of a Banana Republic or a Gap, and without his seeing, on the streets of Lower Manhattan, a young chick who was going to change somebody’s life; but he’d stopped believing this somebody could be him.