Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Yes. His mom needs help with the hotel.”

  Richard smiled unpleasantly. “That’s what you know?”

  “Well, and his dad’s not well, and his brothers aren’t doing anything.”

  “And that’s what he’s told you. That’s the extent of it.”

  “His dad has emphysema. His mom has disabilities.”

  “And he’s working construction twenty-five hours a week and pulling down As in law school. And there he is, every day, with all that time to hang out with you. How nice for you, that he has so much free time. But you’re a good-looking chick, you deserve it, right? Plus you’ve got your terrible injury. That and being good-looking: that earns you the right not to even ask him any questions.”

  Patty was burning with her feeling of injustice. “You know,” she said unsteadily, “he talks about what a jerk you are to women. He talks about that.”

  This seemed not to interest Richard in the slightest. “I’m just trying to understand this in the context of your being such pals with wee Eliza,” he said. “It’s making more sense to me now. It didn’t when I first saw you. You seemed like a nice suburban girl.”

  “So I’m a jerk, too. Is that what you’re saying? I’m a jerk and you’re a jerk.”

  “Sure. Whatever you like. I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK. Whatever. I’m just asking you not to be a jerk to Walter.”

  “I’m not!”

  “I’m simply telling you what I see.”

  “Well, you see wrong. I really like Walter. I really care about him.”

  “And yet you’re apparently unaware that his dad’s dying of liver disease and his older brother’s in jail for vehicular assault and his other brother’s spending his Army paychecks making payments on his vintage Corvette. And Walter’s averaging about four hours of sleep while you’re being friends and hanging out, just so you can come over here and flirt with me.”

  Patty became very quiet.

  “It’s true I didn’t know all of that,” she said after a while. “All of that information. But you shouldn’t be friends with him if you’ve got a problem with people flirting with you.”

  “Ah. So it’s my fault. I getcha.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, but it kind of is.”

  “I rest my case,” Richard said. “You need to get your thoughts straightened out.”

  “I’m aware that I need to do that,” Patty said. “But you’re still being a jerk.”

  “Look, I’ll drive you to New York, if that’s what you want. Two jerks on the road. Could be fun. But if that’s what you want, you need to do me a favor and stop stringing Walter along.”

  “Fine. Please take me home now.”

  Due perhaps to the nicotine, she spent that entire night sleeplessly replaying the evening in her head, trying to do as Richard had demanded and get her thoughts straight. But it was an odd mental kabuki, because even as she was circling around and around the question of what kind of person she was and what her life was ultimately going to look like, one fat fact sat fixed and unchanging at the center of her: she wanted to take a road trip with Richard and, what’s more, she was going to do it. The sad truth was that their talk in the car had been a tremendous excitement and relief to her—an excitement because Richard was exciting and a relief because, finally, after months of trying to be somebody she wasn’t, or wasn’t quite, she’d felt and sounded like her unpretended true self. This was why she knew she’d find a way to take the road trip. All she had to do now was surmount her guilt about Walter and her sorrow about not being the kind of person he and she both wished she were. How right he’d been to go slow with her! How smart he was about her inner dubiousness! When she considered how right and smart he was about her, she felt all the sadder and guiltier about disappointing him, and was plunged back into the roundabout of indecision.

  And then, for almost a week, she didn’t hear from him. She suspected he was keeping his distance at Richard’s suggestion—that Richard had given him a misogynistic lecture about the faithlessness of women and the need to protect his heart better. In her imagination, this was both a valuable service for Richard to perform and a terrible disillusioning thing to do to Walter. She couldn’t stop thinking of Walter carrying large plants for her on buses, the poinsettia redness of his cheeks. She thought of the nights when, in her dorm lounge, he’d been trapped by the Hall Bore, Suzanne Storrs, who combed her hair sideways over her head with the part way down one side of it, just above her ear, and how he’d listened patiently to Suzanne’s sour droning about her diet and the hardships of inflation and the overheating of her dorm room and her wide-ranging disappointment with the university’s administrators and professors, while Patty and Cathy and her other friends laughed at Fantasy Island: how Patty, ostensibly incapacitated by her knee, had declined to stand up and rescue Walter from Suzanne, for fear that Suzanne would then come over and inflict her boringness on everybody else, and how Walter, though perfectly capable of joking with Patty about Suzanne’s shortcomings, and though undoubtedly mindful of how much work he had to do and how early he had to get up in the morning, allowed himself to be trapped again on other evenings, because Suzanne had taken a shine to him and he felt sorry for her.

  Suffice it to say that Patty couldn’t quite bring herself to cut bait. They didn’t communicate again until Walter called from Hibbing to apologize for his silence and report that his dad was in a coma.

  “Oh, Walter, I miss you!” she exclaimed although this was exactly the sort of thing Richard would have urged her not to say.

  “I miss you, too!”

  She bethought herself to ask for details about his dad’s condition, even though it only made sense to be a good questioner if she was intending to proceed with him. Walter spoke of liver failure, pulmonary edema, a shitty prognosis.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But listen. About the room—”

  “Oh, you don’t have to decide about that now.”

  “No, but you need an answer. If you’re going to rent it to somebody else—”

  “I’d rather rent it to you!”

  “Well, yes, and I might want it, but I have to go home next week, and I was thinking of riding to New York with Richard. Since that’s when he’s driving.”

  Any worries that Walter might not grasp the import here were dispelled by his sudden silence.

  “Don’t you already have a plane ticket?” he said finally.

  “It’s the refundable kind,” she lied.

  “Well, that’s fine,” he said. “But, you know, Richard’s not very reliable.”

  “No, I know, I know,” she said. “You’re right. I just thought I might save some money, which I could then apply to the rent.” (A compounding of the lie. Her parents had bought the ticket.) “I’ll definitely pay the rent for June no matter what.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense if you’re not going to live there.”

  “Well, I probably will, is what I’m saying. I’m just not positive yet.”

  “OK.”

  “I really want to. I’m just not positive. So if you find another renter, you should probably go with them. But definitely I’ll cover June.”

  There was another silence before Walter, in a discouraged voice, said he had to get off the phone.

  Energized by having achieved this difficult conversation, she called Richard and assured him that she’d done the necessary bait-cutting, at which point Richard mentioned that his departure date was somewhat uncertain and there were a couple of shows in Chicago that he was hoping to stop and see.

  “Just as long as I’m in New York by next Saturday,” Patty said.

  “Right, the anniversary party. Where is it?”

  “It’s at the Mohonk Mountain House, but I only need to get to Westchester.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  It’s not so fun to be on a road trip with a driver who considers you, and perhaps all women, a pain in the ass, but Patty didn’t know this until she’d tried it. The trouble st
arted with the departure date, which had to be moved up for her. Then a mechanical issue with the van delayed Herrera, and since it was Herrera’s friends in Chicago whom Richard had been planning to stay with, and since Patty had not been part of that deal in any case, there promised to be awkwardness there. Patty also wasn’t good at computing distances, and so, when Richard was three hours late in picking her up and they didn’t get away from Minneapolis until late afternoon, she didn’t understand how late they would be arriving in Chicago and how important it was to make good time on I-94. It wasn’t her fault they’d started late. She didn’t consider it excessive to ask, near Eau Claire, for a bathroom stop, and then, an hour later, near nowhere, for some dinner. This was her road trip and she intended to enjoy it! But the back seat was full of equipment that Richard didn’t dare let out of his sight, and his own basic needs were satisfied by his plug (he had a big spit can on the floor), and although he didn’t criticize how much her crutches slowed and complicated everything she did, he also didn’t tell her to relax and take her time. And all across Wisconsin, every minute of the way, in spite of his curtness and his barely suppressed irritation with her entirely reasonable human needs, she could feel the almost physical pressure of his interest in fucking, and this didn’t help the mood in the car much, either. Not that she wasn’t greatly attracted to him. But she needed a modicum of time and breathing space, and even taking into account her youth and inexperience the autobiographer is embarrassed to report that her means of buying this time and space was to bring the conversation around, perversely, to Walter.

  At first, Richard didn’t want to talk about him, but once she got him going she learned a lot about Walter’s college years. About the symposia he’d organized—on overpopulation, on electoral-college reform—that hardly any students had attended. About the pioneering New Wave music show he’d hosted for four years on the campus radio station. About his petition drive for better-insulated windows in Macalester’s dorms. About the editorials he’d written for the college paper regarding, for example, the food trays he processed in his job on the dish belt: how he’d calculated how many St. Paul families could be fed with a single night’s waste, and how he’d reminded his fellow students that other human beings had to deal with the gobs of peanut butter they left smeared on everything, and how he’d grappled philosophically with his fellow students’ habit of putting three times too much milk on their cold cereal and then leaving brimming bowls of soiled milk on their trays: did they somehow think milk was a free and infinite commodity like water, with no environmental strings attached? Richard recounted all this in the same protective tone he’d taken with Patty two weeks earlier, a tone of strangely tender regret on Walter’s behalf, as if he were wincing at the pain Walter brought upon himself in butting up against harsh realities.

  “Did he have girlfriends?” Patty asked.

  “He made poor choices,” Richard said. “He fell for the impossible chicks. The ones with boyfriends. The arty ones moving in a different kind of circle. There was one sophomore he didn’t get over all senior year. He gave her his Friday-night radio slot and took a Tuesday afternoon. I found out about that too late to stop it. He rewrote her papers, took her to shows. It was terrible to watch, the way she worked him. She was always turning up in our room inopportunely.”

  “How funny,” Patty said. “I wonder why that was.”

  “He never heeds my warnings. He’s very obstinate. And you wouldn’t necessarily guess it about him, but he always goes for good-looking. For pretty and well-formed. He’s ambitious that way. It didn’t lead to happy times for him in college.”

  “And this girl who kept showing up in your room. Did you like her?”

  “I didn’t like what she was doing to Walter.”

  “That’s kind of a theme of yours, isn’t it?”

  “She had shit taste and a Friday-night slot. At a certain point, there was only one way to get the message across to him. About what kind of chick he was dealing with.”

  “Oh, so you were doing him a favor. I get it.”

  “Everybody’s a moralist.”

  “No, seriously, I can see why you don’t respect us. If all you ever see, year after year, is girls who want you to betray your best friend. I can see that’s a weird situation.”

  “I respect you,” Richard said.

  “Ha-ha-ha.”

  “You’ve got a good head. I wouldn’t mind seeing you this summer, if you want to give New York a try.”

  “That doesn’t seem very workable.”

  “I’m merely saying it would be nice.”

  She had about three hours to entertain this fantasy—staring at the taillights of the traffic rushing down and down toward the great metropolis, and wondering what it would be like to be Richard’s chick, wondering if a woman he respected might succeed in changing him, imagining herself never going back to Minnesota, trying to picture the apartment they might find to live in, savoring the thought of unleashing Richard on her contemptuous middle sister, picturing her family’s consternation at how cool she’d become, and imagining her nightly erasure—before they landed in the reality of Chicago’s South Side. It was 2 a.m. and Richard couldn’t find Herrera’s friends’ building. Rail yards and a dark, haunted river kept blocking their way. The streets were deserted except for gypsy cabs and occasional Scary Black Youths of the kind one read about.

  “A map would have been helpful,” Patty said.

  “It’s a numbered street. Shouldn’t be that hard.”

  Herrera’s friends were artists. Their building, which Richard finally located with a cab driver’s help, looked uninhabited. It had a doorbell dangling from two wires that unexpectedly were functional. Somebody moved aside a piece of canvas covering a front window and then came down to air grievances with Richard.

  “Sorry, man,” Richard said. “We got held up unavoidably. We just need to crash for a couple of nights.”

  The artist was wearing cheap, saggy underpants. “We just started taping that room today,” he said. “It’s pretty wet. Herrera said something about coming on the weekend?”

  “He didn’t call you yesterday?”

  “Yeah, he called. I told him the spare room’s a fucking mess.”

  “Not a problem. We’re grateful. I’ve got some stuff to bring in.”

  Patty, being useless for carrying things, guarded the car while Richard slowly emptied it. The room they were given was heavy with a smell that she was too young to recognize as drywall mud, too young to find domestic and comforting. The only light was a glaring aluminum dish clamped to a mud-strafed ladder.

  “Jesus,” Richard said. “What do they have, chimpanzees doing drywalling?”

  Underneath a dusty and mud-spattered pile of plastic drop cloths was a bare, rust-stained double mattress.

  “Not up to your usual Sheraton standards, I’m guessing,” Richard said.

  “Are there sheets?” Patty said timidly.

  He went rummaging in the main space and came back with an afghan, an Indian bedspread, and a velveteen pillow. “You sleep here,” he said. “They’ve got a couch I can use.”

  She threw him a questioning look.

  “It’s late,” he said. “You need to sleep.”

  “Are you sure? There’s plenty of room here. A couch is going to be too short for you.”

  She was bleary, but she wanted him and was carrying the necessary gear, and she had an instinct to get the deed done right away, get it irrevocably on the books, before she had time to think too much and change her mind. And it was many years, practically half a lifetime, before she learned and was duly confounded by Richard’s reason for suddenly turning so gentlemanly that night. At the time, in the mud-humid construction site, she could only assume she’d somehow been mistaken about him, or that she’d turned him off by being a pain in the ass and useless at carrying things.

  “There’s something that passes for a bathroom out there,” he said. “You might have better luck than I did finding
a light switch.”

  She gave him a yearning look from which he turned away quickly, purposefully. The sting and surprise of this, the strain of the drive, the stress of arrival, the grimness of the room: she killed the light and lay down in her clothes and wept for a long time, taking care to keep it inaudible, until her disappointment dissolved in sleep.

  The next morning, awakened at six o’clock by ferocious sunlight, and rendered thoroughly cross by then waiting hours and hours for anybody else to stir in the apartment, she really did become a pain in the ass. That whole day represented something of a lifetime nadir of agreeability. Herrera’s friends were physically uncouth and made her feel one inch tall for not getting their hip cultural references. She was given three quick chances to prove herself, after which they brutally ignored her, after which, to her relief, they left the apartment with Richard, who came back alone with a box of doughnuts for breakfast.

  “I’m going to work on that room today,” he said. “Makes me sick to see the shitty work they’re doing. You feel like doing some sanding?”

  “I was thinking we could go to the lake or something. I mean, it’s so hot in here. Or maybe a museum?”

  He regarded her gravely. “You want to go to a museum.”

  “Just something to get out and enjoy Chicago.”

  “We can do that tonight. Magazine’s playing. You know Magazine?”

  “I don’t know anything. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “You’re in a bad mood. You want to hit the road.”

  “I don’t want to do anything.”

  “If we get the room cleaned up, you’ll sleep better tonight.”

  “I don’t care. I just don’t feel like sanding.”

  The kitchen area was a nauseating, never-cleaned sty that smelled like a mental illness. Sitting on the couch where Richard had slept, Patty tried to read one of the books she’d brought along in hopes of impressing him, a Hemingway novel which the heat and the smell and her tiredness and the lump in her throat and the Magazine albums that Richard was playing made it impossible to concentrate on. When she got just intolerably hot, she went into the room where he was plastering and told him she was going for a walk.