Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Back in Jersey City, he stopped at the gyro joint that provided three or four of his dinners every week, departed with a heavy stinking bag of lowest-grade meats and pita, and climbed the stairs to his apartment, which he’d been away from so much in the last two and a half years that it seemed to have turned against him, to no longer wish to be his place. A little bit of coke could have changed that—could have restored the apartment’s lost luster of friendliness—but only for a few hours, or at most a few days, after which it would make everything much worse. The one room he still halfway liked was the kitchen, whose harsh fluorescent lighting suited his mood. He sat down at his ancient enamel-top table to distract himself from the taste of his dinner by reading Thomas Bernhard, his new favorite writer.

Behind him, on a counter crowded with unwashed dishes, his landline rang. The readout said walter berglund.

“Walter, my conscience,” Katz said. “Why are you bothering me now?”

He was tempted, in spite of himself, to pick up, because he’d lately found himself missing Walter, but he remembered, in the nick of time, that this could just as easily be Patty calling from their home phone. He’d learned from his experience with Molly Tremain that you shouldn’t try to save a drowning woman unless you were ready to drown yourself, and so he’d stood and watched from a pier while Patty floundered and cried for help. Any way she might be feeling now was a way he didn’t want to hear about. The great benefit of touring Nameless Lake to death—toward the end, he’d been able to entertain long trains of thought while performing, able to review the band’s finances and contemplate the scoring of new drugs and experience remorse about his latest interview without losing the beat or skipping a verse—had been the emptying of all meaning from the lyrics, the permanent severing of his songs from the state of sadness (for Molly, for Patty) in which he’d written them. He’d gone so far as to believe the touring had exhausted the sadness itself. But there was no way he was going to touch the phone while it was ringing.

He did, however, check his voice mail.

Richard? It’s Walter—Berglund. I don’t know if you’re there, you’re probably not even in the country, but I’m wondering if you might be around tomorrow. I’m going up to New York on business, and I have a little proposal for you. Sorry about the late notice. I’m mostly just saying hi. Patty says hi, too. Hope everything’s OK with you!

To delete this message, press 3.

It was two years since Katz had heard from Walter. As the silence had lengthened, he’d begun to think that Patty, in a moment of stupidity or misery, had confessed to her husband what had happened at Nameless Lake. Walter, with his feminism, his infuriating reverse double standard, would quickly have forgiven Patty and left Katz alone to bear the blame for the betrayal. It was a funny thing about Walter: circumstances kept conspiring to make Katz, who otherwise feared nobody, feel lessened and intimidated by him. In renouncing Patty, sacrificing his own pleasure and brutally disappointing her in order to preserve her marriage, he’d risen momentarily to the level of Walter’s excellence, but all he’d gotten for his trouble was envy of his friend for his unexamined possession of his wife. He’d tried to pretend that he was doing the Berglunds a favor by ceasing communication with them, but mainly he just hadn’t wanted to hear that they were happy and securely married.

Katz couldn’t have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable age, before the contours of his personality were fully set. Walter had slipped into his life before he’d shut the door on the world of ordinary people and cast his lot with misfits and dropouts. Not that Walter was so ordinary himself. He was at once hopelessly naïve and very shrewd and dogged and well-informed. And then there was the complication of Patty, who, although she’d long tried hard to pretend otherwise, was even less ordinary than Walter, and then the further complication of Katz’s being no less attracted to Patty than Walter was, and arguably more attracted to Walter than Patty was. This was definitely a weird one. No other man had warmed Katz’s loins the way the sight of Walter did after long absence. These groinal heatings were no more about literal sex, no more homo, than the hard-ons he got from a long-anticipated first snort of blow, but there was definitely something deep-chemical there. Something that insisted on being called love. Katz had enjoyed seeing the Berglunds as their family grew, enjoyed knowing them, enjoyed knowing they were out there in the Midwest, having a good life that he could drop in on when he wasn’t feeling great. And then he’d wrecked it by letting himself spend a night alone in a summer house with a former basketball player who was skilled at scooting through narrow lanes of opportunity. What had been his diffusely warm world of domestic refuge had collapsed, overnight, into the hot, hungry microcosm of Patty’s cunt. Which he still couldn’t believe he’d had such cruelly fleeting access to.

Patty says hi, too .

“Yeah, fuck that,” Katz said, eating gyro. But as soon as he’d replaced his appetite with a deep gastric unease about his means of satisfying it, he returned Walter’s call. Luckily, Walter himself answered.

“What’s up,” Katz said.

“What’s up with you ?” Walter countered with giddy niceness. “It seems like you’ve been everywhere.”

“Yeah, really singing the body electric. Heady times here.”

“Tripping the light fantastic.”

“Exactly. In a Dade County jail cell.”

“Yeah, I read about that. What on earth were you doing in Florida anyway?”

“South American chick I mistook for a human being.”

“I figured it was all part of the fame thing,” Walter said. “ ‘Fame requires every sort of excess.’ I remembered we used to talk about that.”

“Well, fortunately, I’m past having to deal with it. I’ve stepped off the bus.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m building decks again.”

“Decks? Are you kidding? That’s crazy! You should be out trashing hotel rooms and recording your most repellent fuck-you songs ever.”

“Tired moves, man. I’m doing the only honorable thing I can think of.”

“But that’s such a waste!”

“Be careful what you say. You might offend me.”

“Seriously, Richard, you’re a great talent. You can’t just stop because people happened to like one of your records.”

“ ‘Great talent.’ That’s like calling somebody a genius at tic-tac-toe. We’re talking about pop music here.”

“Wow, wow, wow,” Walter said. “This is not what I expected to be hearing. I thought you’d be finishing a record and getting ready for more touring. I would have called you sooner if I’d known you were building decks. I was trying not to bother you.”

“You never have to feel that.”

“Well, I never heard from you, I figured you were busy.”

“Mea culpa,” Katz said. “How are you guys doing? Everything OK with you?”

“More or less. You know we moved to Washington, right?”

Katz closed his eyes and flogged his neurons to produce a confirming memory of this. “Yes,” he said. “I think I knew that.”

“Well, things have gotten somewhat complex here, it turns out. In fact, that’s what prompted me to call. I have a proposal for you. Do you have some time tomorrow afternoon? On the late side?”

“Late afternoon’s no good. How about morning?”

Walter explained that he was meeting Robert Kennedy Jr. at noon and had to return to Washington in the evening for a flight to Texas on Saturday morning. “We could talk on the phone now,” he said, “but my assistant really wants to meet you. She’s the one you’d be working with. I’d rather not steal her thunder by saying anything now.”