Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“So she cares about you. She didn’t want you marrying the wrong guy.”

“I wasn’t going to marry him! That’s the thing!”

Katz’s eyes were drawn to the breasts that were mostly concealed by Jessica’s tightly crossed arms. She was small-chested like her mother but less well proportioned. What he was feeling now was that his love of Patty applied by extension to her daughter, minus the wish to fuck her. He could see what Walter had meant about her being a young person who gave an older person hope about the future. Her lights all seemed definitely to be on.

“You’re going to have a good life,” he said.

“Thank you.”

“You’ve got a good head. It’s great to see you again.”

“I know, you too,” she said. “I don’t even remember the last time I saw you. Maybe in high school?”

“You were working in a soup kitchen. Your dad took me down to see you there.”

“Right, my résumé-building years. I had about seventeen extracurricular activities. I was like Mother Teresa on speed.”

Katz helped himself to more of the pasta, which had olives and some sort of salad green in it. Yes, arugula: he was back safely in the bosom of the gentry. He asked Jessica what she would do if her parents split up.

“Wow, I don’t know,” she said. “I hope they don’t. Do you think they will? Is that what Dad says to you?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“Well, I guess I’ll be joining the crowd then. Half of my friends are from broken homes. I just never saw it happening to us. Not until Lalitha came along.”

“You know, it takes two to tango. You shouldn’t blame her too much.”

“Oh, believe me, I’ll blame Dad, too. I will definitely blame him. I can hear it in his voice, and it’s just really . . . confusing. Just wrong . Like, I always thought I knew him really well. But apparently I didn’t.”

“And what about your mom?”

“She’s definitely unhappy about it, too.”

“No, but what if she were the one to leave? How would you feel about that?”

Jessica’s puzzlement at the question dispelled any notion that Patty had confided in her. “I don’t think she would ever do that,” she said. “Unless Dad made her.”

“She’s happy enough?”

“Well, Joey says she isn’t. I think she’s told Joey a lot of stuff she doesn’t tell me. Or maybe Joey just makes stuff up to be unpleasant to me. I mean, she definitely makes fun of Dad, all the time, but that doesn’t mean anything. She makes fun of everybody—I’m sure including me whenever I’m not around to hear it. We’re all very amusing to her, and it definitely annoys the shit out of me. But she’s really into her family. I don’t think she can imagine changing anything.”

Katz wondered if this could be true. Patty had told him herself, four years earlier, that she wasn’t interested in leaving Walter. But the prophet in Katz’s pants was insistently maintaining otherwise, and Joey was perhaps more reliable than his sister on the subject of their mother’s happiness.

“Your mom’s a strange person, isn’t she.”

“I feel bad for her,” Jessica said, “whenever I’m not being mad at her. She’s so smart, and she never really made anything of herself except being a good mom. The one thing I know for sure is I’m never going to stay home full-time with my kids.”

“So you think you want kids. The world population crisis not withstanding.”

She widened her eyes at him and reddened. “Maybe one or two. If I ever meet the right guy. Which doesn’t seem very likely to happen in New York.”

“New York’s a tough scene.”

“God, thank you. Thank you for saying that. I have never in my life felt so smallened and invisible and totally dissed as in the last eight months. I thought New York was supposed to be this great dating scene. But the guys are all either losers, jerks, or married. It’s appalling . I mean, I know I’m not a knockout or anything, but I think I’m at least worth five minutes of polite conversation. It’s been eight months now, and I’m still waiting for those five minutes. I don’t even want to go out anymore, it’s so demoralizing.”

“It’s not you. You’re a good-looking chick. You just may be too nice for New York. It’s a pretty naked economy there.”

“But how come there are so many girls like me? And no guys? Did the good guys all decide to go somewhere else?”

Katz cast his mind over the young males of his acquaintance in greater New York, including his former Walnut Surprise mates, and could think of not one whom he would trust on a date with Jessica. “The girls all come for publishing and art and nonprofits,” he said. “The guys come for money and music. There’s a selection bias there. The girls are good and interesting, the guys are all assholes like me. You shouldn’t take it personally.”

“I would just like to have one nice date.”

He was regretting having told her she was good-looking. It had sounded faintly like a come-on, and he hoped she hadn’t taken it that way. Unfortunately, it seemed as if she had.

“Are you really an asshole?” she said. “Or were you just saying that?”

The note of flirtatious provocation was alarming and needed to be nipped in the bud. “I came down here to do your dad a favor,” he said.

“That doesn’t sound like being an asshole,” she said in a teasing tone.

“Trust me. It is.” He gave her the hardest look he knew how to give a person, and he could see that it scared her a little.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“I’m not your ally on the Indian front. I’m your enemy.”

“What? Why? What do you care?”

“I told you. I’m an asshole.”

“Jesus. OK, then.” She looked at the tabletop with highly elevated eyebrows, confused and scared and pissed off all at once.

“This pasta is excellent, by the way. Thank you for making it.”

“Sure. Take some salad, too.” She stood up from the table. “I think I’m going to go upstairs and do some reading. Let me know if you need anything else.”

He nodded, and she left the room. He felt bad for the girl, but his business in Washington was a dirty one, and there was no point in sugarcoating it. After he’d finished eating, he carefully surveyed Walter’s vast book collection and even vaster collection of CDs and LPs, and then retreated upstairs to Joey’s room. He wanted to be the person who walked into a room where Patty was, not the person waiting in a room she walked into. To be the person waiting was to be too vulnerable; it wasn’t Katzian. Although he normally eschewed earplugs, for the veritable symphony they made of his tinnitus, he inserted some in his ears now, so as not to lie cravenly listening for footsteps and voices.

The next morning, he lingered in his room until nearly nine o’clock before descending the back staircase in search of breakfast. The kitchen was empty, but somebody, presumably Jessica, had made coffee and cut up fruit and set out muffins. A light spring rain was falling on the small back yard, its daffodils and jonquils, and the shoulders of the closely neighboring town houses. Hearing voices from the front of the mansion, Katz wandered down the hallway with coffee and a muffin and found Walter and Jessica and Lalitha, all scrubbed and morning-skinned and shower-haired, waiting for him in the conference room.

“Good, you’re here,” Walter said. “We can start.”

“Didn’t realize we were meeting so early.”

“It’s nine o’clock,” Walter said. “This is a workday for us.”

He and Lalitha were seated side by side near the middle of the big table. Jessica was way down at the farthest end with her arms crossed, tensely radiating skepticism and defendedness. Katz sat down across the table from the others.