Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

He was so revved up that when the meeting ended, toward five o’clock, and Lalitha went back to her office to begin effectuating their plans, and Jessica disappeared upstairs, he consented to go out with Walter. He was thinking that this was the last time they would ever go out together. It happened that the suddenly hot band Bright Eyes, fronted by a gifted youngster named Conor Oberst, was playing a familiar venue in D.C. that night. The show was sold out, but Walter was keen to get backstage with Oberst and pitch Free Space to him, and Katz, flying high, made the somewhat abasing phone calls necessary to get a pair of passes at the door. Anything was better than hanging around the mansion, waiting for Patty to come home.

“I can’t believe you’re doing all these things for me,” Walter said at the Thai restaurant, near Dupont Circle, where they stopped for dinner along the way.

“No problem, man.” Katz picked up a skewer of satay, considered whether he could stomach it, and decided no. More tobacco was a very bad idea, but he took out his tin of it anyway.

“It’s like we’re finally getting around to doing the things we used to talk about in college,” Walter said. “It really means a lot to me.”

Katz’s eyes restlessly roved the restaurant, alighting on everything but his friend. He had the sense that he had run right off a cliff, was still pumping his legs, but would be crashing very soon.

“You OK?” Walter said. “You seem kind of jumpy.”

“No, I’m fine, fine.”

“You don’t seem fine. You’ve gone through a whole can of that shit today.”

“Just trying not to smoke around you.”

“Well, thank you for that.”

Walter consumed all of the satay while Katz dribbled spit into his water glass, feeling momentarily calmed, in nicotine’s false way.

“How are things with you and the girl?” he said. “I got kind of a weird vibe off you guys today.”

Walter blushed and didn’t answer.

“You sleeping with her yet?”

“Jesus, Richard! That is none of your business.”

“Whoa, is that a yes?”

“No, it’s a none-of-your-fucking-business.”

“You in love with her?”

“Jesus! Enough already.”

“See, I think that was a better name. Enough Already! With exclamation point. Free Space sounds like a Lynyrd Skynyrd song.”

“Why are you so interested in seeing me sleep with her? What’s that about?”

“I’m just going by what I see.”

“Well, we’re different, you and me. Do you get that? Do you understand that it’s possible to have values higher than getting laid?”

“Yeah, I get that. In the abstract.”

“Well, then, shut up about it, OK?”

Katz looked around impatiently for their waiter. He was in an evil mood, and everything Walter did or said was irritating him. If Walter was too pussy to make a play for Lalitha, if he wanted to keep being Mr. Righteous, it was nothing to Katz now. “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.

“How about letting my entrée get here first? You may not be hungry, but I am.”

“No, sure. Of course. My mistake.”

His spirits began to crash an hour later, in the crush of young people at the doors of the 9:30 Club. Katz hadn’t gone to a show as an actual audience member in several years, he hadn’t gone to hear a kiddie idol since he’d been a kiddie himself, and he’d become so accustomed to the older crowd at Traumatics and Walnut Surprise events that he’d forgotten how very different a kiddie scene could be. How almost religious in its collective seriousness. Unlike Walter, who, in his culturally eager way, owned the entire Bright Eyes oeuvre and had tiresomely extolled it at the Thai restaurant, Katz knew the band only by osmotic repute. He and Walter were at least twice the age of everybody else at the club, the flat-haired boys and fashionably unskinny babes. He could feel himself being looked at and recognized, here and there, as they made their way onto the intermission-emptied floor, and he thought he could hardly have made a worse decision than to appear in public and to bestow, by his mere presence, approval on a band he knew next to nothing about. He didn’t know which would be worse under these circumstances, to be outed and fawned over or to stand there in middle-aged obscurity.

“Do you want to try to get backstage?” Walter said.

“Can’t do it, buddy. Not up to it.”

“Just to make the introduction. It’ll take one minute. I can follow up later with a proper pitch.”

“Not up to it. I don’t know these people.”

The intermission mix, the choice of which was the headliner’s prerogative, was impeccably quirky. (Katz, as a headliner, had always hated the posturing and gamesmanship and didacticism of choosing the mix, the pressure to prove himself groovy in his listening tastes, and had left it to his bandmates.) Roadies were setting out a great many mikes and instruments while Walter gushed about the Conor Oberst story: how he’d started recording at twelve, how he was still based in Omaha, how his band was more like a collective or a family than an ordinary rock group. Kiddies were streaming onto the floor from every portal, Bright-Eyed (what a fucking irritating youth-congratulating name for a band, Katz thought) and bushless-tailed. His feeling of having crashed did not consist of envy, exactly, or even entirely of having outlived himself. It was more like despair about the world’s splinteredness. The nation was fighting ugly ground wars in two countries, the planet was heating up like a toaster oven, and here at the 9:30, all around him, were hundreds of kids in the mold of the banana-bread-baking Sarah, with their sweet yearnings, their innocent entitlement—to what? To emotion. To unadulterated worship of a superspecial band. To being left to themselves to ritually repudiate, for an hour or two on a Saturday night, the cynicism and anger of their elders. They seemed, as Jessica had suggested at the meeting earlier, to bear malice toward nobody. Katz could see it in their clothing, which bespoke none of the rage and disaffection of the crowds he’d been a part of as a youngster. They gathered not in anger but in celebration of their having found, as a generation, a gentler and more respectful way of being. A way, not incidentally, more in harmony with consuming. And so said to him: die.

Oberst took the stage alone, wearing a powder-blue tuxedo, strapped on an acoustic, and crooned a couple of lengthy solo numbers. He was the real deal, a boy genius, and thus all the more insufferable to Katz. His Tortured Soulful Artist shtick, his self-indulgence in pushing his songs past their natural limits of endurance, his artful crimes against pop convention: he was performing sincerity, and when the performance threatened to give sincerity the lie, he performed his sincere anguish over the difficulty of sincerity. Then the rest of the band came out, including three lovely young backup Graces in vampish dresses, and it was all in all a great show—Katz didn’t stoop to denying it. He merely felt like the one stone-sober person in a room full of drunks, the one nonbeliever at a church revival. He was pierced by a homesickness for Jersey City, its belief-killing streets. It seemed to him he had some work to do there, in his own splintered niche, before the world ended entirely.

“What did you think?” Walter asked him giddily in the taxi afterward.

“I think I’m getting old,” he said.

“I thought they were pretty great.”

“A few too many songs about adolescent soap operas.”

“They’re all about belief,” Walter said. “The new record’s this incredible kind of pantheistic effort to keep believing in something in a world full of death. Oberst works the word ‘lift’ into every song. That’s the name of the record, Lifted . It’s like religion without the bullshit of religious dogma.”