Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Your assistant,” Katz said.

“Lalitha. She’s incredibly young and brilliant. She actually lives right upstairs from us. I think you’ll like her a lot.”

The brightness and excitement in Walter’s voice, the hint of guilt or thrill in the word “actually,” did not escape Katz’s notice.

“Lalitha,” he said. “What kind of name is that?”

“Indian. Bengali. She grew up in Missouri. She’s actually very pretty.”

“I see. And what’s her proposal about?”

“Saving the planet.”

“I see.”

Katz suspected that Walter was calculatedly dangling this Lalitha as bait, and it irritated him to be thought so easily manipulated. And yet—knowing Walter to be a man who didn’t call a female pretty without good reason—he was manipulated, he was intrigued.

“Let me see if I can rearrange some things tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“Fantastic,” Walter said.

What would be would be and what would not would not. In Katz’s experience, it seldom hurt to make chicks wait. He called White Street and informed Zachary that the meeting with Caitlyn would have to be postponed.

The following afternoon, at 3:15, only fifteen minutes late, he strode into Walker’s and saw Walter and the Indian chick waiting at a corner table. Before he even reached the table, he knew he had no chance with her. There were eighteen words of body language with which women signified availability and submission, and Lalitha was using a good twelve of them at once on Walter. She looked like a living illustration of the phrase hanging on his words . As Walter rose from the table to embrace Katz, the girl’s eyes remained fixed on Walter; and this was indeed a weird twist for the universe to have taken. Never before had Katz seen Walter in studly mode, turning a pretty head. He was wearing a good dark suit and had gained some middle-aged bulk. There was a new breadth to his shoulders, a new projection to his chest. “Richard, Lalitha,” he said.

“Very nice to meet you,” Lalitha said, loosely shaking his hand and adding nothing about being honored or excited, nothing about being a huge fan.

Katz sank into a chair feeling sucker-punched by a damning recognition: contrary to the lies he’d always told himself, he wanted Walter’s women not in spite of his friendship but because of it. For two years, he’d been consistently oppressed by avowals of fandom, and now suddenly he was disappointed not to receive one of these avowals from Lalitha, because of the way she was looking at Walter. She was dark-skinned and complexly round and slender. Round-eyed, round-faced, round-breasted; slender in the neck and arms. A solid B-plus that could be an A-minus if she would work for extra credit. Katz pushed a hand through his hair, brushing out bits of Trex dust. His old friend and foe was beaming with unalloyed delight at seeing him again.

“So what’s up,” he said.

“Well, a lot,” Walter said. “Where to begin?”

“That’s a nice suit, by the way. You look good.”

“Oh, you like it?” Walter looked down at himself. “Lalitha made me buy it.”

“I kept telling him his wardrobe sucked,” the girl said. “He hadn’t bought a new suit in ten years!”

She had a subtle subcontinental accent, percussive, no-nonsense, and she sounded proprietary of Walter. If her body hadn’t been speaking of such anxiousness to please, Katz might have believed she already owned him.

“You look good yourself,” Walter said.

“Thank you for lying.”

“No, it’s good, it’s kind of a Keith Richards look.”

“Ah, now we’re being honest. Keith Richards looks like a wolf dressed up in a grandmother’s bonnet. That headband?”

Walter consulted Lalitha. “Do you think Richard looks like a grandmother?”

“No,” she said with a curt, round O sound.

“So you’re in Washington,” Katz said.

“Yeah, it’s sort of a strange situation,” Walter said. “I work for a guy named Vin Haven who’s based in Houston, he’s a big oil-and-gas guy. His wife’s dad was an old-school Republican. Served under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He left her a mansion in Georgetown that they hardly ever used. When Vin set up the Trust, he put the offices on the ground floor and sold Patty and me the second and third floors at a price below market. There’s also a little maid’s apartment on the top floor where Lalitha’s been living.”

“I have the third-best commute in Washington,” Lalitha said. “Walter’s is even better than the president’s. We all share the same kitchen.”

“Sounds cozy,” Katz said, giving Walter a significant look that seemed not to register. “And what is this Trust?”

“I think I told you about it the last time we talked.”

“I was doing so many drugs there for a while, you’re going to have to tell me everything at least twice.”

“It is the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Lalitha said. “It’s a whole new approach to conservation. It’s Walter’s idea.”

“Actually, it was Vin’s idea, at least to begin with.”

“But the really original ideas are all Walter’s,” Lalitha assured Katz.

A waitress (nothing special, already known to Katz and dismissed from consideration) took orders for coffee, and Walter launched into the story of the Cerulean Mountain Trust. Vin Haven, he said, was a very un usual man. He and his wife, Kiki, were passionate bird-lovers who happened also to be personal friends of George and Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney. Vin had accumulated a nine-figure fortune by profitably losing money on oil and gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma. He was now getting on in years, and, having had no children with Kiki, he’d decided to blow more than half his total wad on the preservation of a single bird species, the cerulean warbler, which, Walter said, was not only a beautiful creature but the fastest-declining songbird in North America.

“Here’s our poster bird,” Lalitha said, taking a brochure from her briefcase.

The warbler on its cover looked nondescript to Katz. Bluish, small, unintelligent. “That’s a bird all right,” he said.

“Just wait,” Lalitha said. “It’s not about the bird. It’s much bigger than that. You have to wait and hear Walter’s vision.”

Vision! Katz was beginning to think that Walter’s real purpose in arranging this meeting had simply been to inflict on him the fact of his being adored by a rather pretty twenty-five-year-old.

The cerulean warbler, Walter said, bred exclusively in mature temperate hardwood forests, with a stronghold in the central Appalachians. There was a particularly healthy population in southern West Virginia, and Vin Haven, with his ties to the nonrenewable energy industry, had seen an opportunity to partner with coal companies to create a very large, permanent private reserve for the warbler and other threatened hardwood species. The coal companies had reason to fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains. Vin believed that they could be persuaded to help the warbler, to keep the bird off the Threatened list and garner some much-needed good press, as long as they were allowed to continue extracting coal. And this was how Walter had landed the job as executive director of the Trust. In Minnesota, working for the Nature Conservancy, he’d forged good relationships with mining interests, and he was unusually open to constructive engagement with the coal people.

“Mr. Haven interviewed half a dozen other candidates before Walter,” Lalitha said. “Some of them stood up and walked out on him, right in the middle of the interviews. They were so closed-minded and afraid of being criticized! Nobody else but Walter could see the potential for somebody who was willing to take a big risk and not care so much about conventional wisdom.”