Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

The degree of pleasure it brought Walter to hear this felt dangerous to him. He wanted to believe it, but he didn’t trust it, because he knew Richard to be, in his own way, relentless.

“Seriously, Walter. That kind of man is very primitive . All he has is dignity and self-control and attitude. He only has one little thing, while you have everything else.”

“But the thing he has is what the world wants,” Walter said. “You’ve read all the Nexis stuff on him, you know what I’m talking about. The world doesn’t reward ideas or emotions, it rewards integrity and coolness. And that’s why I don’t trust him. He’s got the game set up so he’s always going to win. In private, he may think he admires what we’re doing, but he’s never going to admit it in public, because he has to maintain his attitude, because that’s what the world wants, and he knows it.”

“Yes, but that’s why it’s so great that he’ll be working with us. I don’t want you to be cool, I don’t like a cool man. I like a man like you. But Richard can help us communicate.”

Walter was relieved when their waitress came to take their orders and terminated the pleasure of hearing why Lalitha liked him. But the danger only deepened as she drank her second martini.

“Can I ask a personal question?” she said.

“Ah—sure.”

“The question is: do you think I should get my tubes tied?”

She’d spoken loudly enough for other tables to have heard, and Walter reflexively put a finger to his lips. He felt conspicuous enough already, felt glaringly urban, sitting with a girl of a different race amid the two varieties of rural West Virginians, the overweight kind and the really skinny kind.

“It just seems logical,” she said more quietly, “since I know I don’t want children.”

“Well,” he said, “I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” He wanted to say that, since Lalitha so seldom saw Jairam, her longtime boyfriend, pregnancy hardly seemed like a pressing worry, and that, if she ever did get pregnant accidentally, she could always have an abortion. But it seemed fantastically inappropriate to be discussing his assistant’s tubes. She was smiling at him with a kind of woozy shyness, as if seeking his permission or fearing his disapproval. “I guess basically,” he said, “I think Richard was right, if you remember what he said. He said people change their minds about these things. It’s probably best to leave your options open.”

“But what if I know that I’m right now, and my future self is the one I don’t trust?”

“Well, you’re not going to be your old self anymore, in the future. You’re going to be your new self. And your new self might want different things.”

“Then fuck my future self,” Lalitha said, leaning forward. “If it wants to reproduce, I already have no respect for it.”

Walter willed himself not to glance at the other diners. “Why is this even coming up now? You hardly even see Jairam anymore.”

“Because Jairam wants children, that’s why. He doesn’t believe how serious I am about not wanting them. I need to show him, so he’ll stop bothering me. I don’t want to be his girlfriend anymore.”

“I’m really not sure we should be discussing this kind of thing.”

“OK, but who else can I talk to, then? You’re the only one who understands me.”

“Oh, God, Lalitha.” Walter’s head was swimming with beer. “I am so sorry. I am so sorry. I feel like I’ve led you into something I never meant to lead you into. You still have your whole life ahead of you, and I . . . I feel like I’ve led you into something.”

This sounded all wrong. In trying to say something narrow, something specific to the problem of world population, he’d managed to sound like he was saying something broad about the two of them. Had seemed to be foreclosing a larger possibility that he wasn’t ready to foreclose yet, even though he knew it wasn’t actually a possibility.

“These are my own thoughts, not yours,” Lalitha said. “You didn’t put them in my head. I was just asking your advice.”

“Well, and I guess my advice is don’t do it.”

“OK. Then I’m going to have another drink. Or do you advise me not to?”

“I do advise you not to.”

“Please order me one anyway.”

A chasm was opening in front of Walter, available for immediate jumping into. He was shocked by how quickly such a thing could open up in front of him. The only other time—or, no, no, no, the only time—he’d fallen in love, he’d taken the better part of a year before acting on it, and even then Patty had ended up doing most of the heavy lifting for him. Now it appeared that these things could be managed in a matter of minutes . Just a few more heedless words, another slug of beer, and God only knew . . .

“I just meant,” he said, “that I might have led you too much into overpopulation. Into being crazy about it. With my own stupid anger, my own issues. I wasn’t trying to say anything larger than that.”

She nodded. Tiny pearls of tear were clinging to her eyelashes.

“I feel very fatherly toward you,” he babbled.

“I understand.”

But fatherly was also wrong—too foreclosing of the kind of love that it was still too painful to admit he was never going to allow himself.

“Obviously,” he said, “I’m too young to be your father, or almost too young, besides which, in any case, you have your own father. I was really just referring to your having asked me for fatherly advice. To my having, as your boss, and as a considerably older person, a certain kind of . . . solicitude toward you. ‘Fatherly’ in that respect. Not in some sort of taboo respect.”

This all sounded like patent nonsense even as he said it. His whole fucking problem was taboos. Lalitha, who seemed to know it, raised her lovely eyes and looked directly into his. “You don’t have to love me, Walter. I can just love you. All right? You can’t stop me from loving you.”

The chasm widened dizzyingly.

“I do love you!” he said. “I mean—in a sense. A very definite sense. I definitely do. A lot. A whole lot, actually. OK? I just don’t see where we can go with it. I mean, if we’re going to keep working together, we absolutely can’t be talking like this. This is already very, very, very, very bad.”

“Yes, I know.” She lowered her eyes. “And you’re married.”

“Yes, exactly! Exactly . And so there we are.”

“There we are, yes.”

“Let me see about your drink.”

Love declared, disaster averted, he went looking for their waitress and ordered a third martini, heavy on the vermouth. His blush, which all his life had been a thing that constantly came and went, had now come without going. He lurched, hot-faced, into the men’s room and attempted to pee. His need was at once pressing and difficult to connect to. He stood at the urinal, taking deep breaths, and was finally at the point of getting things flowing when the door swung open and somebody came in. Walter heard the guy washing his hands and drying them while he stood with burning cheeks and waited for his bladder to overcome its shyness. He was again on the verge of success when he realized that the guy at the sinks was lingering deliberately. He gave up on peeing, wasted water with an unnecessary flush, and zipped up his pants.

“You might want to see a doctor, pal, about your urinary difficulties,” the guy at the sinks drawled sadistically. White, thirtyish, with hard living in his face, he was an exact match of Walter’s profile of the kind of driver who didn’t believe in turn signals. He stood near Walter’s shoulder while Walter hastily washed his hands and dried them.