Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Patty had recently suggested, as an antidote to road rage, that he distract himself with radio whenever he was driving a car, but to Walter the message of every single radio station was that nobody else in America was thinking about the planet’s ruination. The God stations and the country stations and the Limbaugh stations were all, of course, actively cheering the ruination; the classic-rock and news-network stations continually made much ado about absolutely nothing; and National Public Radio was, for Walter, even worse. Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion : literally fiddling while the planet burned! And worst of all were Morning Edition and All Things Considered . The NPR news unit, once upon a time fairly liberal, had become just another voice of center-right free-market ideology, describing even the slightest slowing of the nation’s economic growth rate as “bad news” and deliberately wasting precious minutes of airtime every morning and evening—minutes that could have been devoted to raising the alarm about overpopulation and mass extinctions—on fatuously earnest reviews of literary novels and quirky musical acts like Walnut Surprise.

And TV: TV was like radio, only ten times worse. The country that minutely followed every phony turn of American Idol while the world went up in flames seemed to Walter fully deserving of whatever nightmare future awaited it.

He was aware, of course, that it was wrong to feel this way—if only because, for almost twenty years, in St. Paul, he hadn’t. He was aware of the intimate connection between anger and depression, aware that it was mentally unhealthy to be so exclusively obsessed with apocalyptic scenarios, aware of how, in his case, the obsession was feeding on frustration with his wife and disappointment with his son. Probably, if he’d been truly alone in his anger, he couldn’t have stood it.

But Lalitha was with him every step of the way. She ratified his vision and shared his sense of urgency. In his initial interview with her, she’d told him about the family trip she’d taken back to West Bengal when she was fourteen. She’d been exactly the right age to be not merely saddened and horrified but disgusted by the density and suffering and squalor of human life in Calcutta. Her disgust had pushed her, on her return to the States, into vegetarianism and environmental studies, with a focus, in college, on women’s issues in developing nations. Although she’d happened to land a good job with the Nature Conservancy after college, her heart—like Walter’s own when he was young—had always been in population and sustainability issues.

There was, to be sure, a whole other side of Lalitha, a side susceptible to strong, traditional men. Her boyfriend, Jairam, was thick-bodied and somewhat ugly but arrogant and driven, a heart surgeon in training, and Lalitha was by no means the first attractive young woman whom Walter had seen parking her charms with a Jairam type in order to avoid being hit on everywhere she went. But six years of Jairam’s escalating nonsense seemed finally to be curing her of him. The only real surprise about the question she’d asked Walter tonight, the question about sterilization, was that she’d even felt the need to ask it.

Why, indeed, had she asked him?

He turned off the TV and paced her room to give the matter closer thought, and the answer came to him immediately: she’d been asking whether he might want to have a kid with her. Or maybe, more precisely, she’d been warning him that even if he wanted to, she might not.

And the sick thing was—if he was honest with himself—that he did want to have a baby with her. Not that he didn’t adore Jessica and, in a more abstract way, love Joey. But their mother was suddenly feeling very far away to him. Patty was a person who probably hadn’t even wanted very much to marry him, a person he’d first heard about from Richard , who had mentioned, one long-ago summer evening in Minneapolis, that the chick he was sleeping with was living with a basketball star who confounded his preconceptions of lady jocks. Patty had almost gone with Richard, and out of the gratifying fact that she hadn’t—that she’d succumbed to Walter’s love instead—had grown their entire life together, their marriage and their house and their kids. They’d always been a good couple but an odd couple; nowadays, more and more, they seemed simply ill matched. Whereas Lalitha was a genuine kindred spirit, a soul mate who wholeheartedly adored him. If they ever had a son, the son would be like him.

He continued to pace her room, greatly agitated. While his attention was diverted by drink and rednecks, the chasm at his feet had been growing wider and wider. He was now thinking about having babies with his assistant! And not even pretending that he wasn’t! And this was all new within the last hour . He knew it was new because, when he’d advised her not to have her tubes tied, he truly had not been thinking of himself.

“Walter?” Lalitha said from the bed.

“Yeah, how are you doing?” he said, rushing to her side.

“I was thinking I might throw up, but now I’m thinking I won’t have to.”

“That’s good!”

She was blinking up at him rapidly, with a tender smile. “Thank you for staying with me.”

“Oh absolutely.”

“How are you with your beer?”

“I don’t even know.”

Her lips were right there, her mouth was right there, and his heart seemed liable to crack his rib cage with its heaving. Kiss her! Kiss her! Kiss her! it was telling him.

And then his BlackBerry rang. Its ringtone was the song of the cerulean warbler.

“Take it,” Lalitha said.

“Um . . .”

“No, take it. I’m happy lying here.”

The caller was Jessica, it wasn’t urgent, they talked every day. But seeing her name on the screenlet was enough to draw Walter back from the brink. He sat down on the other bed and answered.

“It sounds like you’re walking,” Jessica said. “Are you running somewhere?”

“No,” he said. “Celebrating, actually.”

“It sounds like you’re on a treadmill , the way you’re panting.”

There was too little strength in his arm even to hold a phone up to his ear. He lay down on his side and told his daughter about the events of the morning and his various misgivings, which she did her best to reassure him about. He had come to appreciate the rhythm of their daily calls. Jessica was the one person in the world he allowed to ask him about himself before plying her with questions about her own life; she looked after him that way; she was the child who’d inherited his sense of responsibility. Although her ambition was still to be a writer, and she was currently working as a barely paid editorial assistant in Manhattan, she had a deep green streak and hoped to make environmental issues the focus of her future writing. Walter told her that Richard was coming down to Washington and asked her if she was still planning to join them on the weekend, to lend her valuable young intelligence to the discussions. She said she definitely was.

“And how was your day?” he said.

“Eh,” she said. “My roommates didn’t magically replace themselves with better roommates while I was at the office. I’ve got clothes piled around my door to keep the smoke out.”

“You have to not let them smoke inside. You just have to tell them that.”

“Right, I get outvoted, is the thing. They both just started. It’s still possible they’ll see how stupid it is and stop. In the meantime, I’m literally holding my breath.”

“And how’s work?”

“As usual. Simon gets ever skeazier. He’s like a sebum factory. You have to wipe everything off after he’s been around your desk. He was hanging around Emily’s desk for like an hour today, trying to get her to go to a Knicks game with him. The senior editors get all these free tickets to stuff, including sporting events, for reasons unknown to me. I guess the Knicks must be fairly desperate to fill their luxury seats at this point. And Emily’s like, how many hundred ways can I find to say no? I finally went over and started asking Simon about his wife . You know—wife? Three kids in Teaneck? Hello? Stop looking down Emily’s shirt?”