Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Do something new to me,” she said into his ear.

“That TV is really bothering me.”

“Do the thing we talked about, baby. We can both listen to the same music. I want to feel you in my ass.”

He forgot about the TV, the blood in his head drowned it out as he did what she had asked for. After the new threshold had been crossed, its resistances negotiated, its distinctive satisfactions noted, he went and washed himself in Abigail’s bathroom and fed the cats and lingered in the living room, feeling the need to establish some distance, however feebly and belatedly. He roused his computer from its sleep, but there was only one new e-mail. It was from an unfamiliar address at duke.eduand had the subject header in town? Not until he’d opened it and begun reading did he fully comprehend that it had come from Jenna. Had been typed, character by character, by Jenna’s privileged fingers.

hello mr bergland. jonathan tells me you’re in the big city, as am i. who knew how many football games there are to watch and how much money young bankers bet on them? not i, said the fly. you may still be doing christmas-y things like your blond protestant progenitors, but nick says to come over if you have questions about wall st, he’s willing to answer them. i suggest you act now while his generous mood (and vacation!) lasts. apparently even goldman shuts down this time of year, who knew. your friend, jenna.

He read the message five times before it began to lose its savor. It seemed to him as clean and fresh as he was feeling dirty and red-eyed. Jenna was being either exceptionally thoughtful or, if she was trying to rub his nose in her tightness with Nick, exceptionally mean. Either way, he could see that he’d succeeded in making an impression on her.

Pot smoke came slipping from the bedroom, followed by Connie, as nude and light-footed as the cats. Joey closed the computer and took a hit from the joint that she held up to his face, and then another hit, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another.

Late on a dismal afternoon in March, in cold and greasy drizzle, Walter rode with his assistant, Lalitha, up from Charleston into the mountains of southern West Virginia. Although Lalitha was a fast and somewhat reckless driver, Walter had come to prefer the anxiety of being her passenger to the judgmental anger that consumed him when he was at the wheel—the seemingly inescapable sense that, of all the drivers on the road, only he was traveling at exactly the right speed, only he was striking an appropriate balance between too punctiliously obeying traffic rules and too dangerously flouting them. In the last two years, he’d spent a lot of angry hours on the roads of West Virginia, tailgating the idiotic slowpokes and then slowing down himself to punish the rude tailgaters, ruthlessly defending the inner lane of interstates from assholes trying to pass him on the right, passing on the right himself when some fool or cellphone yakker or sanctimonious speed-limit enforcer clogged the inner lane, obsessively profiling and psychoanalyzing the drivers who refused to use their turn signals (almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity, the compromised state of which was already manifest in the compensatory gigantism of their pickups and SUVs), experiencing murderous hatred of the lane-violating coal-truck drivers who caused fatal accidents literally once a week in West Virginia, impotently blaming the corrupt state legislators who refused to lower the coal-truck weight limit below 110,000 pounds despite bounteous evidence of the havoc they wreaked, muttering “Unbelievable! Unbelievable!” when a driver ahead of him braked for a green light and then accelerated through yellow and left him stranded at red, boiling while he waited a full minute at intersections with no cross traffic visible for miles , and painfully swallowing, for Lalitha’s sake, the invective he yearned to vent when stymied by a driver refusing to make a legal right turn on red: “Hello? Get a clue? The world consists of more than just you! Other people have reality! Learn to drive! Hello!” Better the adrenaline rush of Lalitha’s flooring the gas to pass uphill-struggling trucks than the stress on his cerebral arteries of taking the wheel himself and remaining stuck behind those trucks. This way, he could look out at the gray matchstick Appalachian woods and the mining-ravaged ridges and direct his anger at problems more worthy of it.

Lalitha was in buoyant spirits as they sailed in their rental car up the big fifteen-mile grade on I-64, a phenomenally expensive piece of federal pork brought home by Senator Byrd. “I am so ready to celebrate,” she said. “Will you take me celebrating tonight?”

“We’ll see if there’s a decent restaurant in Beckley,” Walter said, “although I’m afraid it’s not likely.”

“Let’s get drunk! We can go to the best place in town and have martinis.”

“Absolutely. I will buy you one giant-assed martini. More than one, if you want.”

“No but you, too, though,” she said. “Just once. Make one exception, for the occasion.”

“I think a martini might honestly kill me at this point in my life.”

“One light beer, then. I’ll have three martinis, and you can carry me to my room.”

Walter didn’t like it when she said things like this. She didn’t know what she was saying, she was just a high-spirited young woman—just, actually, the brightest ray of light in his entire life these days—and didn’t see that physical contact between employer and employee shouldn’t be a joking matter.

“Three martinis would certainly give new meaning to the word ‘headache ball’ tomorrow morning,” he said in lame reference to the demolition they were driving up to Wyoming County to witness.

“When was the last time you had a drink?” Lalitha said.

“Never. I’ve never had a drink.”

“Not even in high school?”

“Never.”

“Walter, that’s incredible! You have to try it! It’s so fun to drink sometimes. One beer won’t make you an alcoholic.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about,” he said, wondering, as he spoke, if this was true. His father and his older brother, who together had been the bane of his youth, were alcoholics, and his wife, who was fast becoming the bane of his middle age, had alcoholic proclivities. He’d always understood his own strict sobriety in terms of opposition to them—first, of wanting to be as unlike his dad and brother as possible, and then later of wanting to be as unfailingly kind to Patty as she, drunk, could be unkind to him. It was one of the ways that he and Patty had learned to get along: he always sober, she sometimes drunk, neither of them ever suggesting that the other change.

“What are you worried about, then?” Lalitha said.

“I guess I’m worried about changing something that’s worked perfectly well for me for forty-seven years. If it’s not broke, why fix it?”

“Because it’s fun!” She jerked the wheel of the rental car to pass a semi wallowing in its own spray. “I’m going to order you a beer and make you take at least one sip to celebrate.”

The northern hardwood forest south of Charleston was even now, on the eve of the equinox, a dour tapestry of grays and blacks. In another week or two, warm air from the south would arrive to green these woods, and a month after that those songbirds hardy enough to migrate from the tropics would fill them with their song, but gray winter seemed to Walter the northern forest’s true native state. Summer merely an accident of grace that annually befell it.

In Charleston, earlier in the day, he and Lalitha and their local attorneys had formally presented the Cerulean Mountain Trust’s industry partners, Nardone and Blasco, with the documents they needed to commence demolition of Forster Hollow and open up fourteen thousand acres of future warbler preserve for mountaintop removal. Representatives of Nardone and Blasco had then signed the towers of paper that Trust attorneys had been preparing for the last two years, officially committing the coal companies to a package of reclamation agreements and rights transfers that, taken together, would ensure that the mined-out land remain forever “wild.” Vin Haven, the Trust’s board chairman, had been “present” via teleconferencing and later called Walter directly on his cell to congratulate him. But Walter was feeling the opposite of celebratory. He’d finally succeeded in enabling the obliteration of dozens of sweet wooded hilltops and scores of miles of clear-running, biotically rich Class III, IV, and V streams. To achieve even this, Vin Haven had had to sell off $20 million in mineral rights, elsewhere in the state, to gas drillers poised to rape the land, and then hand over the proceeds to further parties whom Walter didn’t like. And all for what? For an endangered-species “strong-hold” that you could cover with a postage stamp on a road-atlas map of West Virginia.