Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

He let Sarah fire the nail gun (she shrieked at its recoil and nearly dropped it) and then sent her on her way. Caitlyn had been snubbed so effectively that she didn’t even say good-bye but simply followed Zachary downstairs. Katz wandered over to the master-bedroom skylight in hopes of glimpsing Zachary’s mother, but all he saw was the DUX bed, the Eric Fischl canvas, the flat-screen TV.

Katz’s susceptibility to women over thirty-five was a source of some embarrassment. It felt sad and a little sick in the way it seemed to reference his own lunatic and absent mother, but there was no altering the basic wiring of his brain. The kiddies were perennially enticing and perennially unsatisfying in much the same way that coke was unsatisfying: whenever he was off it, he remembered it as fantastic and unbeatable and craved it, but as soon as he was on it again he remembered that it wasn’t fantastic at all, it was sterile and empty: neuro-mechanistic, death-flavored. Nowadays especially, the young chicks were hyperactive in their screwing, hurrying through every position known to the species, doing this that and the other, their kiddie snatches too unfragrant and closely shaved to even register as human body parts. He remembered more detail from his few hours with Patty Berglund than he did from a decade’s worth of kiddies. Of course, he’d known Patty forever and been attracted to her forever; long anticipation had certainly been a factor. But there was also just something intrinsically more human about her than about the youngsters. More difficult, more involving, more worth having. And now that his prophetic dick, his divining rod, was again pointing him in her direction, he was at a loss to recall why he hadn’t taken fuller advantage of his opportunity with her. Some misguided notion of niceness, now incomprehensible to him, had prevented him from going to her hotel in Philadelphia and helping himself to more of her. Having betrayed Walter once, in the chilly middle of a northern night, he should have gone ahead and done it another hundred times and got it out of his system. The evidence of how much he’d wanted to do this was right there in the songs he’d written for Nameless Lake . He’d turned his ungratified desire into art. But now, having made that art and reaped its dubious rewards, he had no reason to keep renouncing a thing he still wanted. And if Walter were then, in turn, to feel entitled to the Indian chick, and stop being such a moralistic irritant, so much the better for all concerned.

He took a Friday-evening train to Washington from Newark. He still wasn’t able to listen to music, but his non-Apple MP3 player was loaded with a track of pink noise—white noise frequency-shifted toward the bass end and capable of neutralizing every ambient sound the world could throw at him—and by donning big cushioned headphones and angling himself toward the window and holding a Bernhard novel close to his face, he was able to achieve complete privacy until the train stopped in Philly. Here a white couple in their early twenties, wearing white T-shirts and eating white ice cream from waxed-paper cups, settled into the newly vacated seats in front of him. The extreme white of their T-shirts seemed to him the color of the Bush regime. The chick immediately reclined her seat into his space, and when she finished her ice cream, a few minutes later, she tossed the cup and spoon back under her seat, where his feet were.

With a heavy sigh, he removed his headphones, stood up, and dropped the cup on her lap.

“Jesus!” she cried with scalding disgust.

“Hey, man, what the fuck?” her resplendently white companion said.

“You dropped this on my feet,” Katz said.

“She didn’t throw it on your lap .”

“That is a pretty amazing accomplishment,” Katz said. “To sound self-righteous about your girlfriend dropping a wet ice-cream container on somebody else’s feet.”

“This is a public train ,” the girl said. “You should take a private jet if you can’t deal with other people.”

“Yeah, I’ll try to remember to do that next time.”

The rest of the way to Washington, the couple kept lunging against their seat backs, attempting to push them past their limits and farther into his space. They didn’t seem to have recognized him, but, if they had, they would surely soon be blogging about what an asshole Richard Katz was.

Although he’d played D.C. often enough over the years, its horizontality and vexing diagonal avenues never ceased to freak him out. He felt like a rat in a governmental maze here. For all he could tell from the back seat of his taxi, the driver was taking him not to Georgetown but to the Israeli embassy for enhanced interrogation. The pedestrians in every neighborhood all seemed to have taken the same dowdiness pills. As if individual style were a volatile substance that evaporated in the vacuity of D.C.’s sidewalks and infernally wide squares. The whole city was a monosyllabic imperative directed at Katz in his beat-up biker jacket. Saying: die.

The mansion in Georgetown had some character, however. As Katz understood it, Walter and Patty hadn’t personally chosen this house, but it nevertheless reflected the excellent urbangentry taste he’d come to expect of them. It had a slate roof and multiple dormers and high ground-floor windows looking out on something resembling an actual small lawn. Above the doorbell was a brass plate discreetly conceding the presence of THE CERULEAN MOUNTAIN TRUST.

Jessica Berglund opened the door. Katz hadn’t seen her since she was in high school, and he smiled with pleasure at the sight of her all grown up and womanly. She seemed cross and distracted, however, and barely greeted him. “Hi, um,” she said, “just come on back to the kitchen, OK?”

She glanced over her shoulder at a long parquet-floored hallway. The Indian girl was standing at the end of it. “Hi, Richard,” she called, waving to him nervously.

“Just give me one second,” Jessica said. She stalked down the hall, and Katz followed with his overnight bag, passing a large room full of desks and file cabinets and a smaller room with a conference table. The place smelled like warm semiconductors and fresh paper products. In the kitchen was a big French farmer’s table that he recognized from St. Paul. “Excuse me for one second,” Jessica said as she pursued Lalitha into a more executive-looking suite at the back of the house.

“ I’m a young person,” he heard her say there. “OK? I’m the young person here. Do you get it?”

Lalitha: “Yes! Of course. That’s why it’s so wonderful you came down. All I’m saying is I’m not so old myself, you know.”

“You’re twenty-seven!”

“That’s not young?”

“How old were you when you got your first cell phone? When did you start going online?”

“I was in college. But, Jessica, listen—”

“There’s a big difference between college and high school. There’s an entirely different way that people communicate now. A way that people my age started learning much earlier than you did.”

“I know that. We don’t disagree about that. I really don’t see why you’re so angry at me.”

“Why I’m angry? Because you have my dad thinking you’re this great expert on young people, but you’re not the great expert, as you just totally demonstrated.”

“Jessica, I know the difference between a text and an e-mail. I misspoke because I’m tired. I hardly slept all week. It’s not fair of you to make so much of this.”

“Do you even send texts?”

“I don’t have to. We have BlackBerrys, which do the same thing, only better.”

“It is not the same thing! God . This is what I’m talking about! If you didn’t grow up with cell phones in high school, you don’t understand that your phone is very, very different from your e-mail. It’s a totally different way of being in touch with people. I have friends who hardly even check their e-mail anymore. And if you and Dad are going to be targeting kids in college, it’s really important that you understand that.”