Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

“No, it’s interesting to know that.”

  “She seems to be very well funded.”

  “Yeah, she gets it from her parents.”

  “Right, the parents.”

  Walter seemed so preoccupied with Eliza’s disappearance that Patty fell silent. She was feeling morbidly competitive again. She was barely even aware yet of being interested in Richard, and still it struck her as unfair that Eliza might be using more than just herself, her native half-pretty self—that she might be using parental resources—to hold Richard’s attention and buy access to him. How dumb about life Patty was! How far behind other people! And how ugly everything on the stage looked! The naked cords, and the cold chrome of the drums, and the utilitarian mikes, and the kidnapper’s duct tape, and the cannonlike spotlights: it all looked so hard core.

  “Do you go to a lot of shows?” Walter said.

  “No, never. Once.”

  “Did you bring some earplugs?”

  “No. Do I need them?”

  “Richard’s very loud. You can use mine. They’re almost new.”

  From his shirt pocket he produced a baggie containing two whitish foam-rubber larvae. Patty looked down at them and did her best to smile nicely. “No, thank you,” she said.

  “I’m a very clean person,” he said earnestly. “There’s no health risk.”

  “But then you won’t have any for yourself.”

  “I’ll tear them in half. You’ll want to have something for protection.”

  Patty watched him carefully divide the earplugs. “Maybe I’ll just hold them in my hand and wait and see if I need them,” she said.

  They stood there for fifteen minutes. Eliza finally came slithering and wiggling back and looking radiant just as the houselights dimmed and the audience surged against the stage. The first thing Patty did was drop the earplugs. There was altogether a lot more jostling than the situation seemed to call for. A fat person in leather barged into her back and knocked her against the stage. Eliza was already tossing her hair and hopping in anticipation, and so it fell to Walter to push the fat guy back and give Patty room to stand up straight.

  The Traumatics who came running out onto that stage consisted of Richard, his lifelong bass player Herrera, and two skinny boys who looked barely out of high school. Richard was more of a showman then than he came to be later, when it seemed clear that he was never going to be a star and so it was better to be an anti-star. He bounced on his toes, did lurching little half pirouettes with his hand on the neck of his guitar, and so forth. He informed the audience that his band was going to play every song it knew, and that this would take twenty-five minutes. Then he and the band went totally haywire, churning out a vicious assault of noise that Patty couldn’t hear any sort of beat in. The music was like food too hot to have any taste, but the lack of beat or melody didn’t stop the central knot of male punks from pogoing up and down and shoulder-checking each other and stomping at every available female ankle. Trying to stay out of their way, Patty got separated from both Walter and Eliza. The noise was just unbearable. Richard and two other Traumatics were screaming into their microphones, I hate sunshine! I hate sunshine!, and Patty, who rather liked sunshine, brought her basketball skills to bear on making an immediate escape. She drove into the crowd with her elbows high and emerged from the scrum to find herself face-to-face with Carter and his glittery girl and kept right on moving until she was standing on the sidewalk in warm and fresh September air, under a Minnesota sky that astonishingly still had twilight in it.

  She lingered at the door of the Longhorn, watching Buzzcocks fans arrive late and waiting to see if Eliza would come looking for her. But it was Walter, not Eliza, who came looking.

  “I’m fine,” she told him. “This just turned out not to be my cup of tea.”

  “Can I take you home?”

  “No, you should go back. You could tell Eliza I’m getting home by myself, so she doesn’t worry.”

  “She’s not looking very worried. Let me take you home.”

  Patty said no, Walter insisted, she insisted no, he insisted yes. Then she realized he didn’t have a car and was offering to ride the bus with her, and she insisted no all over again, and he insisted yes. He much later said that he’d already been falling for her while they stood at the bus stop, but no equivalent symphony could be heard in Patty’s head. She was feeling guilty about abandoning Eliza and regretting that she’d dropped the earplugs and hadn’t stayed to see more of Richard.

  “I feel like I sort of failed a test there,” she said.

  “Do you even like this kind of music?”

  “I like Blondie. I like Patti Smith. I guess basically no, I don’t like this kind of music.”

  “So is it permissible to ask why you came?”

  “Well, Richard invited me.”

  Walter nodded as if this had private meaning for him.

  “Is Richard a nice person?” Patty asked.

  “Extremely!” Walter said. “I mean, it all depends. You know, his mom ran away when he was little, and became a religious nut. His dad was a postal worker and a drinker who got lung cancer when Richard was in high school. Richard took care of him until he died. He’s a very loyal person, although maybe not so much with women. He’s actually not that nice to women, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Patty had already intuited this and for some reason did not feel put off by the news of it.

  “And what about you?” Walter said.

  “What about me?”

  “Are you a nice person? You seem like it. And yet . . .”

  “And yet?”

  “I hate your friend!” he burst out. “I don’t think she’s a good person. Actually, I think she’s quite horrible. She’s a liar and she’s mean.”

  “Well, she’s my best friend,” Patty said huffily. “She’s not horrible to me. Maybe you guys just got off on the wrong foot.”

  “Does she always take you to places and leave you standing there while she does coke with somebody else?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, that’s never happened before.”

  Walter said nothing, just stood stewing in his dislike. No bus was in sight.

  “Sometimes it makes me feel really, really good, how into me she is,” Patty said after a while. “A lot of the time she’s not. But when she is . . .”

  “I can’t imagine it’s hard to find people who are into you,” Walter said.

  She shook her head. “There’s something wrong with me. I love all my other friends, but I feel like there’s always a wall between us. Like they’re all one kind of person and I’m another kind of person. More competitive and selfish. Less good, basically. Somehow I always end up feeling like I’m pretending when I’m around them. I don’t have to pretend anything with Eliza. I can just be myself and still be better than her. I mean, I’m not dumb. I can see she’s a fucked-up person. But some part of me loves being around her. Do you sometimes feel like that with Richard?”

  “No,” Walter said. “He’s actually very unpleasant to be around, a lot of the time. There’s just something I loved about him at very first sight, when we were freshmen. He’s totally dedicated to his music, but he’s also intellectually curious. I admire that.”

  “That’s because you’re probably a genuinely nice person,” Patty said. “You love him for himself, not for how he makes you feel. That’s probably the difference between you and me.”

  “But you seem like a genuinely nice person!” Walter said.

  Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter’s version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn’t right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

  When they finally got back to campus, that first night, Patty realized she’d been talking about herself for an hour without noticing that Walter was only asking questions, not answering them. The idea of trying to be nice in return and take an
interest in him now seemed simply tiring, because she wasn’t attracted to him.

  “Can I call you sometime?” he said at the door of her dorm.

  She explained that she wasn’t going to be very social in the next months, due to training. “But it was incredibly sweet of you to take me home,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

  “Do you like theater? I have some friends I go to theater with. It wouldn’t have to be a date or anything.”

  “I’m just so busy.”

  “This is a great city for theater,” he persisted. “I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

  Oh Walter: did he know that the most intriguing thing about him, in the months when Patty was getting to know him, was that he was Richard Katz’s friend? Did he notice how, every time Patty saw him, she contrived to find nonchalant ways to lead the conversation around to Richard? Did he have any suspicion, that first night, when she agreed to let him call her, that she was thinking of Richard?

  Inside, upstairs, she found a phone message from Eliza on her door. She sat in her room with her eyes watering from the smoke in her hair and clothes until Eliza called again on the hall telephone, with club noise in the background, and upbraided her for scaring the shit out of her by disappearing.

  “You were the one who disappeared,” Patty said.

  “I was just saying hi to Richard.”

  “You were gone like half an hour.”

  “What happened to Walter?” Eliza said. “Did he leave with you?”

  “He took me home.”

  “Ew, gross. Did he tell you how much he hates me? I think he’s really jealous of me. I think he’s got some kind of thing for Richard. Maybe a gay thing.”

  Patty looked up and down the hallway to make sure nobody was listening. “Are you the one who got the drugs for Carter on his birthday?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  “Were you the one who got that stuff that you and Carter were doing on his birthday?”

  “I can’t hear you!”

  “THAT COKE ON CARTER’S BIRTHDAY. DID YOU BRING HIM THAT?”

  “No! God! Is that why you left? Is that what you’re upset about? Is that what Walter told you?”

  Patty, jaw trembling, hung up the phone and went and showered for an hour.

  There ensued yet another press from Eliza, but this one was halfhearted because she was pursuing Richard now as well. When Walter made good on his threat to call Patty, she found herself inclined to see him, both for his connection to Richard and for the frisson of being disloyal to Eliza. Walter was too tactful to bring up Eliza again, but Patty was always aware of his opinion of her friend, and some virtuous part of her enjoyed getting out and doing something cultural instead of drinking wine spritzers and listening to the same records over and over. She ended up seeing two plays and a movie with Walter that fall. Once her season started, she also saw him sitting by himself in the stands, red-faced, enjoying himself, and waving whenever she looked his way. He took to calling her the day after games to rave about her performance and display the kind of nuanced understanding of strategy which Eliza had never even bothered to try to fake. If he didn’t reach her and had to leave a message, Patty had the additional frisson of calling him back and hoping she might talk to Richard instead, but Richard, alas, seemed never to be home when Walter wasn’t.

  In the tiny gaps between the blocks of time she spent answering Walter’s questions, she managed to learn that he came from Hibbing, Minnesota, and that he was helping pay for law school by working part-time as a rough carpenter for the same contractor who employed Richard as a laborer, and that he had to get up at four every morning to do his studying. He always started yawning around 9 p.m., which Patty, with her own busy schedule, appreciated when she went out with him. They were joined, as he had promised, by three female friends of his from high school and college, three intelligent and creative girls whose weight problems and wide-strapped dresses would have provoked acid commentary from Eliza had she ever met them. It was from this adoring troika that Patty began to learn how miraculously worthy Walter was.

  According to his friends, Walter had grown up living in cramped quarters behind the office of a motel called the Whispering Pines, with an alcoholic father, an older brother who regularly beat him up, a younger brother who studiously copied the older brother’s ridicule of him, and a mother whose physical handicaps and low morale so impaired her performance as the motel’s housekeeper and night manager that during high season, in the summer, Walter often cleaned rooms all afternoon and then checked in late arrivals while his father was drinking with his VFW buddies and his mother slept. This was in addition to his regular family job of helping his dad maintain the physical plant, doing everything from sealing the parking lot to snaking drains to repairing the boiler. His dad depended on his help, and Walter provided it in perennial hope of winning his dad’s approval, which his friends said was impossible, however, because Walter was too sensitive and intellectual and not enough into hunting and trucks and beer (which the brothers were). Despite working what amounted to a full-time year-round unpaid job, Walter had also managed to star in school plays and musicals, inspire lifelong devotion in numerous childhood friends, learn cooking and basic sewing from his mother, pursue his interest in nature (tropical fish; ant farms; emergency care for orphaned nestlings; flower pressing), and graduate valedictorian. He got an Ivy League scholarship offer but instead went to Macalester, close enough to Hibbing to take a bus up on weekends and help his mom combat the motel’s encroaching decay (the dad apparently now had emphysema and was useless). Walter had dreamed of being a film director or even an actor but instead was studying law at the U. because, as he reportedly had put it, “Somebody in the family needs to have an actual income.”

  Perversely—since she wasn’t attracted to Walter—Patty felt competitive and vaguely offended by the presence of other girls on what could have been dates, and she was gratified to notice that it was she, not they, who made his eyes glow and his unstoppable blush come out. She did like to be the star, Patty did. Under pretty much all circumstances. At the last play they saw, in December at the Guthrie, Walter arrived just before curtain time, all snow-covered, with paperback Christmas presents for the other girls and, for Patty, an enormous poinsettia that he’d carried on the bus and through slushy streets and had difficulty checking at the coat counter. It was clear to everyone, even to Patty, that giving the other girls interesting books while giving her a plant was intended as the opposite of disrespectful. The fact that Walter wasn’t investing his enthusiasm in some slimmer version of his nice, adoring friends, but rather in Patty, who applied her intelligence and creativity mainly to thinking up newly nonchalant-seeming ways of mentioning Richard Katz, was mystifying and alarming but also, undeniably, flattering. After the show, Walter carried the poinsettia all the way back to her dorm for her, on the bus and through further slush. The card attached to it, which she opened in her room, said For Patty, with great affection, from her admiring fan.

  It was right around then that Richard got around to dumping Eliza. He was apparently quite the brutal dumper. Eliza was beside herself when she called Patty with the news, wailing that “the faggot” had turned Richard against her, that Richard wasn’t giving her a chance, and that Patty had to help her and arrange a meeting with him, he refused to speak to her or open the door of his apartment or—

  “I’ve got finals,” Patty said coolly.

  “You can go over there and I’ll go with you,” Eliza said. “I just need to see him and explain.”

  “Explain what?”

  “That he has to give me a chance! That I deserve a hearing!”

  “Walter isn’t gay,” Patty said. “That’s just something you made up in your head.”

  “Oh my God, he’s turned you against me, too!”

  “No,” Patty said. “That’s not how it is.”

  “I’m coming over now and we can make a plan.”

  “I’ve got my history final i
n the morning. I need to study.”

  Patty now learned that Eliza had stopped going to classes six weeks earlier, because she was so into Richard. He’d done this to her, she’d given up everything for him, and now he’d hung her out to dry and she had to keep her parents from finding out that she was failing everything, she was coming over to Patty’s dorm now and Patty had to stay right there and wait for her, so they could make a plan.

  “I’m really tired,” Patty said. “I have to study and then sleep.”

  “I can’t believe it! He’s turned you both against me! My two favorite people in the world!”

  Patty managed to get off the phone, hurried to the library, and stayed there until it closed. She was certain that Eliza would be waiting outside her dorm, smoking cigarettes and determined to keep her awake half the night. She dreaded paying these wages of friendship but was also resigned to it, and so it was strangely disappointing to return to her dorm and see no trace of Eliza. She almost felt like calling her, but her relief and her tiredness outweighed her guilt.

  Three days went by without word from Eliza. The night before Patty left for Christmas vacation, she finally called Eliza’s number to make sure everything was OK, but the phone rang and rang. She flew home to Westchester in a cloud of guilt and worry that grew thicker with each of her failed attempts, from the phone in her parents’ kitchen, to make contact with her friend. On Christmas Eve she went so far as to call the Whispering Pines Motel in Hibbing, Minnesota.

  “This is a great Christmas present!” Walter said. “Hearing from you.”

  “Oh, well, thank you. I’m actually calling about Eliza. She’s sort of disappeared.”

  “Count yourself lucky,” Walter said. “Richard and I finally had to unplug our phone.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a relief.”

  Patty stayed talking to Walter, answering his many questions, describing her siblings’ mad Yuletide acquisitiveness, and her family’s annual humiliating reminders of how amusingly old she’d been before she stopped believing in Santa Claus, and her father’s bizarro sexual and scatological repartee with her middle sister, and the middle sister’s “complaints” about how unchallenging her freshman course work at Yale was, and her mother’s second-guessing of her decision, twenty years earlier, to stop celebrating Hanukkah and other Jewish holidays. “And how are things with you?” Patty asked Walter after half an hour.