Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“And yet we did admire them in our youth.”

“God, I love the New York subway!” Walter said as he followed Katz down to the uric uptown platform. “This is the way human beings are supposed to live. High density! High efficiency!” He cast a beneficent smile upon the weary subway riders.

It occurred to Katz to ask about Patty, but he felt too gutless to say her name. “So is this chick single, or what?” he said.

“Who, Lalitha? No. She’s had the same boyfriend since college.”

“He lives with you, too?”

“No, he’s in Nashville. He was in med school in Baltimore, and now he’s doing his internship.”

“And yet she stayed behind in Washington.”

“She’s very invested in this project,” Walter said. “And, frankly, I think the boyfriend’s on his way out. He’s very old-school Indian. He threw a huge, huge fit when she didn’t move to Nashville with him.”

“And what did you advise her?”

“I tried to get her to stand up for herself. He could have matched somewhere in Washington if he’d really wanted to. I told her she didn’t have to sacrifice everything for his career. She and I’ve got a kind of father-daughter thing. Her parents are very conservative. I think she appreciates working for somebody who believes in her and doesn’t just see her as somebody’s future wife.”

“And just so we’re clear,” Katz said, “you’re aware that she’s in love with you?”

Walter blushed. “I don’t know. Maybe a little bit. I actually think it’s more like an intellectual idealization. More father-daughter.”

“Yeah, dream on, buddy. You expect me to believe you’ve never imagined those eyes shining up at you while her head’s bobbing on your lap?”

“Jesus, no. I try not to imagine things like that. Especially not with an employee.”

“But maybe you don’t always succeed in not imagining it.”

Walter glanced around to see if anyone on the platform was listening, and lowered his voice. “Aside from everything else,” he said, “I think there’s something objectively demeaning about a woman on her knees.”

“Why don’t you try it sometime and let her be the judge of that.”

“Well, because, Richard,” Walter said, still blushing, but also laughing unpleasantly, “I happen to understand that women are wired differently than men.”

“Whatever happened to gender equality? I seem to recall that you were into that.”

“I just think, if you ever had a daughter yourself, you might see the woman’s side with a little more sympathy.”

“You’ve named my best reason for not wanting a daughter.”

“Well, if you did have one, you might let yourself recognize the actually-not-terribly-hard-to-recognize fact that very young women can get their desire and their admiration and their love for a person all mixed up, and not understand—”

“Not understand what?”

“That to the guy they’re just an object. That the guy might only be wanting to get his, you know, his, you know”—Walter’s voice dropped to a whisper—“his dick sucked by somebody young and pretty. That that might be his only interest.”

“Sorry, not computing,” Katz said. “What’s wrong with being admired? This is not computing at all.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

An A train arrived, and they crowded onto it. Almost immediately, Katz saw the light of recognition in the eyes of a college-age kid standing by the opposite doors. Katz lowered his head and turned away, but the kid had the temerity to touch him on the shoulder. “I’m so sorry,” he said, “but you’re the musician, right? You’re Richard Katz.”

“Perhaps not sorrier than I am,” Katz said.

“I’m not going to bother you. I just wanted to say I really love your stuff.”

“OK, thanks, man,” Katz said, his eyes on the floor.

“Especially the older stuff, which I’m just starting to get into. Reactionary Splendor ? Oh, my God. It is so fucking brilliant. It’s on my iPod right now. Here, I’ll show you.”

“That’s OK. I believe you.”

“Oh, sure, no, of course. Of course. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m just a huge fan.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Walter was following this exchange with a facial expression as ancient as the college parties that he’d been masochistic enough to attend with Katz, an expression of wonderment and pride and love and anger and the loneliness of the invisible, none of it agreeable to Katz, not in college and even less so now.

“It must be very strange to be you,” Walter said as they exited at 34th Street.

“I have no other way of being to compare it to.”

“It’s got to feel great, though. I don’t believe that at some level you don’t love it.”

Katz considered the question honestly. “It’s more like a situation where I would hate the absence of the thing but I don’t like the thing itself, either.”

“I think I would like it,” Walter said.

“I think you would, too.”

Unable to grant Walter fame, Katz walked with him all the way up to the Amtrak status board, which was showing a forty-five-minute delay for his southbound Acela.

“I strongly believe in trains,” Walter said. “And I routinely pay the price.”

“I’ll wait with you,” Katz said.

“No need, no need.”

“No, let me buy you a Coke. Or did D.C. finally make you a drinker?”

“No, still teetotaling. Which is such a stupid word.”

To Katz, the train’s delay was a sign that the subject of Patty was destined to be broached. When he broached it, however, in the station bar, to the nerve-grating sounds of an Alanis Morissette song, Walter’s eyes grew hard and distant. He drew breath as if to speak, but no words came out.

“Must be a little odd for you guys,” Katz prompted. “Having the girl upstairs and your office downstairs.”

“I don’t know what to say to you, Richard. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

“You guys getting along? Patty doing anything interesting?”

“She’s working at a gym in Georgetown. Does that count as interesting?” Walter shook his head grimly. “I’ve been living with a depressed person for a very long time now. I don’t know why she’s so unhappy, I don’t know why she can’t seem to get out of it. There was a little while, around the time we moved to Washington, when she seemed to be doing better. She’d seen a therapist in St. Paul who got her started on some kind of writing project. Some kind of personal history or life journal that she was very mum and secretive about. As long as she was working on that, things weren’t so bad. But for the last two years they’ve been pretty much all bad. The plan had been for her to look for a job as soon as we got to Washington, and start some kind of second career, but it’s a little tough at her age with no marketable skills. She’s very smart and very proud, and she couldn’t stand being rejected and couldn’t stand being entry-level. She tried volunteering, doing afterschool athletics with the D.C. schools, but that didn’t work out, either. I finally got her to try an antidepressant, which I think would have helped her if she’d stuck with it, but she didn’t like the way it made her feel, and she really was pretty unbearable while she was on it. It gave her kind of a crankhead personality, and she quit before they got the cocktail adjusted right. And so finally, last fall, I more or less forced her to get a job. Not for my sake—I’m way overpaid, and Jessica’s out of school now, and Joey’s not my dependent anymore. But she had so much free time, I could see that it was killing her. And the job she chose to get was working at the reception counter of a gym. I mean, it’s a perfectly nice gym—one of my board members goes there, and at least one of my bigger donors. And there she is, there’s my wife, who’s one of the smartest people I know, scanning their membership cards and telling them to have a great workout. She’s also got a pretty serious exercise addiction going. She works out at least an hour a day, minimum—she looks great. And then she comes home at eleven with takeout, and if I’m in town we eat together, and she asks me why I’m still not having sex with my assistant. Sort of like what you just did, only not as graphically. Not as directly.”