Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Like the dark meat, do you?”

“What?”

“Said I seen what you doing with that nigger girl.”

“She’s Asian ,” Walter said, stepping around him. “If you’ll excuse me—”

“Candy’s dandy but liquor’s quicker, ain’t that right, pal?”

There was so much hatred in his voice that Walter, fearing violence, made his escape through the door without delivering a rejoinder. He hadn’t thrown a punch or absorbed one in thirty-five years, and he suspected that a punching would feel far worse at forty-seven than it had at twelve. His whole body was vibrating with unreleased violence, his head reeling with injustice, as he sat down to an iceberg-lettuce salad in the booth.

“How’s your beer?” Lalitha asked.

“It’s interesting,” he said, drinking the rest of it right down. His head felt liable to detach from his neck and drift up to the ceiling like a party balloon.

“I’m sorry if I said things I shouldn’t have.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m—” in love with you, too. I’m horribly in love with you. “I’m in a hard position, honey,” he said. “I mean, not ‘honey.’ Not ‘honey.’ Lalitha. Honey. I’m in a hard position.”

“Maybe you should have another beer,” she said with a sly smile.

“You see, the thing is, I also love my wife.”

“Yes of course,” she said. But she wasn’t even trying to help him out. She arched her back like a cat and stretched forward across the table, displaying the ten pale nails of her beautiful young hands on either side of his salad plate, inviting him to touch them. “I’m so drunk!” she said, smiling up at him wickedly.

He glanced around the plastic dining room to see if his bathroom tormentor might be witnessing this. The guy was not obviously in sight, nor was anybody else staring unduly. Looking down at Lalitha, who was snuggling her cheek against the plastic tabletop as if it were the softest of pillows, he recalled the words of Richard’s prophecy. The girl on her knees, head bobbing, smiling up. Oh, the cheap clarity of Richard Katz’s vision of the world. A surge of resentment cut through Walter’s buzz and steadied him. To take advantage of this girl was Richard’s way, not his.

“Sit up,” he said sternly.

“In a minute,” she murmured, wiggling her outstretched fingers.

“No, sit up now. We’re the public face of the Trust, and we have to be aware of that.”

“I think you might have to take me home, Walter.”

“We need to get some food in you first.”

“Mm,” she said, smiling with closed eyes.

Walter stood up and ran down their waitress and asked to have their entrées boxed for takeout. Lalitha was still slumped forward, her half-finished third martini by her elbow, when he returned to the booth. He roused her and held her firmly by the upper arm as he led her outside and installed her in the passenger seat. Going back inside for the food, he encountered, in the glassed-in vestibule, his tormentor from the bathroom.

“Fucking dark-meat lover,” the guy said. “Fucking spectacle. What the fuck you doin’ around here?”

Walter tried to step around him, but the guy blocked his way. “Asked you a question,” he said.

“Not interested,” Walter said. He tried to push past but found himself shoved hard against the plate glass, shaking the framework of the vestibule. At that moment, before anything worse could happen, the inner door opened and the restaurant’s hard-bitten hostess asked what was going on.

“This person’s bothering me,” Walter said, breathing hard.

“Fucking pervert.”

“You going to have to take this off the premises,” the hostess said.

“I ain’t going nowhere. This pervo’s the one that’s leaving.”

“Then go back to your table and sit down and don’t use that kind of language with me.”

“Can’t even eat, he makes me so sick to my stomach.”

Leaving the two of them to sort things out, Walter went inside and found himself in the crosshairs of the murderously hateful gaze emanating from a heavyset young blonde, clearly his tormentor’s woman, who was alone at a table near the door. While he waited for his food, he wondered why it was tonight, of all the nights, that he and Lalitha had provoked this kind of hatred. They’d received a few stares now and then, mostly in smaller towns, but never anything like this. In fact, he’d been agreeably surprised by the number of black-white couples he’d seen in Charleston, and by the generally low priority of racism among the state’s many ailments. Most of West Virginia was too white for race to be a fore-front issue. He was forced to the conclusion that what had attracted the young couple’s attention was the guilt, his own dirty guilt, that had radiated from his booth. They didn’t hate Lalitha, they hated him . And he deserved it. When the food finally came out, his hands were shaking so much that he could hardly sign the credit-card slip.

Back at the Days Inn, he carried Lalitha in his arms through the rain and set her down outside her door. He had little doubt that she could have walked, but he wanted to indulge her earlier wish to be carried to her room. And it actually helped to have her in his arms like a child, it reminded him of his responsibilities. When she sat down on the bed and toppled over, he covered her with a bedspread the way he’d once covered Jessica and Joey.

“I’m going to go next door and eat dinner,” he said, tenderly smoothing her hair from her forehead. “I’ll leave yours here for you.”

“No don’t,” she said. “Stay and watch TV. I’ll sober up and we can eat together.”

In this, too, he indulged her, locating PBS on cable and watching the tail end of the NewsHour —some discussion of John Kerry’s war record whose irrelevance made him so nervous he could barely follow it. He could hardly stand to watch news of any sort anymore. Everything was moving too fast, too fast. He felt a stab of sympathy for the Kerry campaign, which now had less than seven months to turn the country’s mood around and expose three years of high-tech lying and manipulation.

He himself had been under tremendous pressure to get the Trust’s contracts with Nardone and Blasco signed before their initial agreement with Vin Haven expired, on June 30, and became subject to renegotiation. In his rush to deal with Coyle Mathis and beat the deadline, he’d had no choice but to sign off on the body-armor deal with LBI, exorbitant and distasteful though it was. And now, before anything could be reconsidered, the coal companies were rushing to wreck the Nine Mile valley and move into the mountains with their draglines, which they were free to do because one of Walter’s few clear successes, in West Virginia, had been to get the MTR permits fast-tracked and persuade the Appalachian Environmental Law Center to remove the Nine Mile sites from its dilatory lawsuit. The deal was sealed, and Walter now needed to forget about West Virginia in any case and start work in earnest on his anti-population crusade—needed to get the intern program up and running before the nation’s most liberal college kids all finalized their summer plans and went to work for the Kerry campaign instead.

In the two and a half weeks since his meeting in Manhattan with Richard, the world population had increased by 7,000,000. A net gain of seven million human beings—the equivalent of New York City’s population—to clear-cut forests and befoul streams and pave over grasslands and throw plastic garbage into the Pacific Ocean and burn gasoline and coal and exterminate other species and obey the fucking pope and pop out families of twelve. In Walter’s view, there was no greater force for evil in the world, no more compelling cause for despair about humanity and the amazing planet it had been given, than the Catholic Church, although, admittedly, the Siamese-twin fundamentalisms of Bush and bin Laden were running a close second these days. He couldn’t see a church or a real men love jesus sign or a fish symbol on a car without his chest tightening with anger. In a place like West Virginia, this meant that he got angry pretty much every time he ventured into daylight, which no doubt contributed to his road rage. And it wasn’t just religion, and it wasn’t just the jumbo everything to which his fellow Americans seemed to feel uniquely entitled, it wasn’t just the Walmarts and the buckets of corn syrup and the high-clearance monster trucks; it was the feeling that nobody else in the country was giving even five seconds’ thought to what it meant to be packing another 13,000,000 large primates onto the world’s limited surface every month. The unclouded serenity of his countrymen’s indifference made him wild with anger.