Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Sorry. I didn’t realize.”

“How could you? Who would think? I tell her the same thing every time, which is that she’s the person I love, she’s the person I want. And then we change the subject. Like, for the last couple of weeks—I think mainly to drive me crazy—she’s been talking about getting a boob job. It makes me want to cry, Richard. I mean, there is nothing wrong with her. Nothing on the outside. It’s totally crazy. But she says she’s going to die soon and she thinks it might be interesting, before she dies, to see what it’s like to have some chest. She says it might help her to have some goal to be saving up her money for, now that . . .” Walter shook his head.

“Now that what.”

“Nothing. She was doing something else with her money, before, that I thought was very bad.”

“Is she sick? Is there a medical problem?”

“No. Not physically. By dying soon I think she means in the next forty years. The way we’re all going to die soon.”

“I’m really sorry, man. I had no idea.”

A navigational beacon in Katz’s black Levi’s, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilty, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome. Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height. IT’S NOT OVER, IT’S NOT OVER. The parallels between his life and hers were really almost eerie: a brief period of creative productivity, followed by a major change that turned out to be a disappointment and a mess, followed by drugs and despair, followed by the taking of a stupid job. Katz had been assuming that his situation was simply that success had wrecked him, but it was also true, he realized, that his worst years as a songwriter had precisely coincided with his years of estrangement from the Berglunds. And, yes, he hadn’t given much thought to Patty in the last two years, but he could feel now, in his pants, that this was mainly because he’d assumed their story was over.

“How do Patty and the girl get along?”

“They don’t speak,” Walter said.

“So not buddies.”

“No, I’m saying they literally don’t speak to each other. Each of them knows when the other’s usually in the kitchen. They go out of their way to avoid each other.”

“And which one started that?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“OK.”

On the station bar’s sound system, “That’s What I Like About You” was playing. It seemed to Katz the perfect soundtrack for the neon Bud Light signage, the fake leaded-glass lampshades, the durably polyurethaned crap furniture with its embedded commuter grime. He was still reasonably safe from hearing one of his own songs played in a place like this, but he knew it was a safety only of degree, not of category.

“Patty’s decided she doesn’t like anybody under thirty,” Walter said. “She’s formed a prejudice against an entire generation. And, being Patty, she’s very funny on the subject. But it’s gotten pretty vicious and out of control.”

“Whereas you seem quite taken with the younger generation,” Katz said.

“All it takes to disprove a general law is one counterexample. I’ve got at least two great ones in Jessica and Lalitha.”

“But not Joey?”

“And if there are two,” Walter said, as if he hadn’t even heard his son’s name, “there are bound to be a lot more. That’s the premise of what I want to do this summer. Trust that young people still have brains and a social conscience, and then give them something to work with.”

“You know, we’re very different, you and me,” Katz said. “I don’t do vision. I don’t do belief. And I’m impatient with the kiddies. You remember that about me, right?”

“I remember that you’re often wrong about yourself. I think you believe in a lot more than you give yourself credit for. You’ve got a whole cult following because of your integrity.”

“Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.”

“So, what, should I not have called you?” Walter said with a tremor in his voice. “Part of me didn’t want to bother you, but Lalitha talked me into it.”

“No, it’s good you called. It’s been too long.”

“I think I figured you’d outgrown us or something. I mean, I know I’m not a cool person. I figured you were done with us.”

“Sorry, man. I just got really busy.”

But Walter was becoming upset, nearly tearful. “It almost seemed like you were embarrassed by me. Which I understand, but it still doesn’t feel very good. I thought we were friends.”

“I said I was sorry,” Katz said. He was angered both by Walter’s emotion and by the irony or injustice of needing to apologize, twice , for having tried to do him a favor. It was generally his policy never to apologize at all.

“I don’t know what I expected,” Walter said. “But maybe some acknowledgment of the fact that Patty and I helped you. That you wrote all those songs in my mother’s house. That we’re your oldest friends. I’m not going to dwell on this, but I want to clear the air and let you know what I’ve been feeling, so I don’t have to feel it anymore.”

The angry stirring of Katz’s blood was of a piece with the divinations of his dick. I’m going to do you a different kind of favor now, old friend, he thought. We’re going to finish some unfinished business, and you and the girl will thank me for it.

“It’s good to clear the air,” he said.

Growing up in St. Paul, Joey Berglund had received numberless assurances that his life was destined to be a lucky one. The way star halfbacks talk about a great open-field run, the sense of cutting and weaving at full speed through a defense that moved in slow motion, the entire field of play as all-visible and instantaneously graspable as a video game at Rookie level, was the way every facet of his life had felt for his first eighteen years. The world had given unto him, and he was fine with taking. He arrived as a first-year student in Charlottesville with the ideal clothes and haircut and found that the school had paired him with a perfect roommate from NoVa (as the locals called the Virginia suburbs of D.C.). For two and a half weeks, college looked like it would be an extension of the world as he had always known it, only better. He was so convinced of this—took it so much for granted—that on the morning of September 11 he actually left his roommate, Jonathan, to monitor the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon while he hurried off to his Econ 201 lecture. Not until he reached the big auditorium and found it all but empty did he understand that a really serious glitch had occurred.

Try as he might, in the weeks and months that followed, he could not recall what he’d been thinking as he’d crossed the semi-deserted campus. It was highly uncharacteristic of him to be so clueless, and the deep chagrin he’d then experienced, on the steps of the Chemistry Building, became the seed of his intensely personal resentment of the terrorist attacks. Later, as his troubles began to mount, it would seem to him as if his very good luck, which his childhood had taught him to consider his birthright, had been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real. He kept waiting for its wrongness, its fraudulence, to be exposed, and for the world to be set right again, so that he could have the college experience he’d expected. When this failed to happen, he was gripped by an anger whose specific object refused to come into focus. The culprit, in hindsight, seemed almost like bin Laden, but not quite. The culprit was something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in a sidewalk that trips you and lands you on your face when you’re out innocently walking.