Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

The previous morning, before he’d left for the airport, Patty had appeared in the doorway of their bedroom. “Let me put it as plainly as possible,” she said. “You have my permission.”

“Permission for what?”

“You know what for. And I’m saying you have it.”

He might almost have believed she meant this if the expression on her face hadn’t been so ragged, and if she hadn’t been wringing her hands so piteously as she spoke.

“Whatever you’re talking about,” he said, “I don’t want your permission.”

She’d looked at him beseechingly, and then despairingly, and left him alone. Half an hour later, on his way out, he’d tapped on the door of the little room where she did her writing and her e-mailing and, more and more frequently of late, her sleeping. “Sweetie,” he said through the door. “I’ll see you on Thursday night.” When she gave no answer, he knocked again and went in. She was sitting on the foldout sofa, squeezing the fingers of one hand in the fist of the other. Her face was red, wrecked, tear-tracked. He crouched at her feet and held her hands, which were aging faster than the rest of her; were bony and thin-skinned. “I love you,” he said. “Do you understand that?”

She nodded quickly, biting her lips, appreciative but unconvinced. “OK,” she said in a whispery squeak. “You’d better go.”

How many thousand more times, he wondered as he descended the stairs to the Trust offices, am I going to let this woman stab me in the heart?

Poor Patty, poor competitive lost Patty, who wasn’t doing anything remotely brave or admirable in Washington, could not help noticing his admiration of Lalitha. The reason he couldn’t let himself even think of loving Lalitha, let alone do anything about it, was Patty. It wasn’t just that he respected the letter of marital law, it was also that he couldn’t bear the idea of her knowing there was someone he thought more highly of than her. Lalitha was better than Patty. This was simply a fact. But Walter felt that he would sooner die than acknowledge this obvious fact to Patty, because, however much he might turn out to love Lalitha, and however unworkable his life with Patty had become, he loved Patty in some wholly other way, some larger and more abstract but nevertheless essential way that was about a lifetime of responsibility; about being a good person. If he were to fire Lalitha, literally and/or figuratively, she would cry for some months and then move on with her life and do good things with someone else. Lalitha was young and blessed with clarity. Whereas Patty, although she was often cruel to him and lately, more and more, had been shrinking from his caresses, still needed him to think the world of her. He knew this, because why else hadn’t she left him? He knew it very, very well. There was an emptiness at Patty’s center that it was his lot in life to do his best to fill with love. A slim flicker of hope in her which he alone could safeguard. And so, although his situation was already impossible and seemed to be getting more impossible every day, he had no choice but to persist in it.

Emerging from the motel shower, taking care not to glance at the egregious white middle-aged body in the mirror, he checked his BlackBerry and found a message from Richard Katz.

Hey pardner, job’s done up here. Do we meet in Washington now or what? Do I stay in a hotel or sleep on your sofa? I want such perks as I am due.

All best to your beuatiful women. RK

Walter studied the message with an uneasiness of uncertain origin. Possibly it was just the typo’s reminder of Richard’s fundamental carelessness, but possibly also the aftertaste of their meeting in Manhattan two weeks earlier. Although Walter had been very happy to see his old friend again, he’d been haunted afterward by Richard’s insistence, in the restaurant, that Lalitha repeat the word fucking , and by his subsequent insinuations about her interest in oral sex, and by the way that he himself, at the bar in Penn Station, had proceeded to badmouth Patty, which he never let himself do with anybody else. To be forty-seven and still trying to impress his college roommate by denigrating his wife and spilling confidences better left unspilled: it was pathetic. Although Richard had seemed happy enough to see him, too, Walter couldn’t shake the old familiar feeling that Richard was trying to impose his Katzian vision of the world on him and, thereby, defeat him. When, to Walter’s surprise, before they parted, Richard had agreed to lend his name and likeness to the crusade against overpopulation, Walter had immediately called Lalitha with the great news. But only she had been able to savor it with complete enthusiasm. Walter had boarded the train to Washington wondering if he’d done the right thing.

And why, in his e-mail, had Richard mentioned the beauty of Lalitha and Patty? Why send his best to them but not to Walter himself? Just another careless oversight? Walter didn’t think so.

Down the road from the Days Inn was a steakhouse that was plastic to the core but equipped with a full bar. It was a ridiculous place to go, since neither Walter nor Lalitha ate cow, but the motel clerk had nothing better to recommend. In a plastic-seated booth, Walter touched the rim of his beer glass to Lalitha’s gin martini, which she proceeded to make short work of. He signaled to their waitress for another and then suffered through perusal of the menu. Between the horrors of bovine methane, the lakes of watershed-devastating excrement generated by pig and chicken farms, the catastrophic overfishing of the oceans, the ecological nightmare of farmed shrimp and salmon, the antibiotic orgy of dairy-cow factories, and the fuel squandered by the globalization of produce, there was little he could ever order in good conscience besides potatoes, beans, and freshwater-farmed tilapia.

“Fuck it,” he said, closing the menu. “I’m going to have the rib eye.”

“Excellent, excellent celebrating,” Lalitha said, her face already flushed. “I’m going to have the delicious grilled-cheese sandwich from the children’s menu.”

The beer was interesting. Unexpectedly sour and undelicious, like drinkable dough. After just three or four sips, seldom-heard-from blood vessels in Walter’s brain were pulsing disturbingly.

“Got an e-mail from Richard,” he said. “He’s willing to come down and work with us on strategy. I told him he should come down for the weekend.”

“Ha! You see? You didn’t even think it was worth the bother of asking him.”

“No, no. You were right about that.”

Lalitha noticed something in his face. “Aren’t you happy about it?”

“No, absolutely,” he said. “In theory. There’s just something I don’t . . . trust. I guess basically I don’t see why he’s doing it.”

“Because we were extremely persuasive!”

“Yeah, maybe. Or because you’re extremely pretty.”

She seemed both pleased and confused by this. “He’s your very good friend, right?”

“Used to be. But then he got famous. And now all I can see are the parts of him I don’t trust.”

“What don’t you trust about him?”

Walter shook his head, not wanting to say.

“Do you not trust him with me ?”

“No, that would be very stupid, wouldn’t it? I mean, what do I care what you do? You’re an adult, you can look out for yourself.”

Lalitha laughed at him, simply pleased now, not confused at all.

“I think he’s very funny and charismatic,” she said. “But I mostly just felt sorry for him. You know what I mean? He seems like one of those men who have to spend all their time maintaining an attitude, because they’re weak inside. He’s nothing like the man you are. All I could see when we were talking was how much he admires you, and how he was trying not to show it too much. Couldn’t you see that?”