Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Q: Seriously, though. There was a very strong antiwar mood at last year’s Grammys. Many of the nominees were very outspoken. Do you think successful musicians have a responsibility to be role models?

  A: Me me me, buy buy buy, party party party. Sit in your own little world, rocking, with your eyes closed. What I’ve been trying to say is that we already are perfect Republican role models.

  Q: If that’s the case, then why was there a censor at the awards last year, making sure that nobody spoke out against the war? Are you saying Sheryl Crow is a Republican?

  A: I hope so. She seems like such a nice person, I’d hate to think she was a Democrat.

  Q: She’s been very vocally antiwar.

  A: Do you think George Bush actually hates gay people? Do you think he personally gives a shit about abortion? Do you think Dick Cheney really believes Saddam Hussein engineered 9/11? Sheryl Crow is a chewing-gum manufacturer, and I say that as a longtime chewing-gum manufacturer myself. The person who cares what Sheryl Crow thinks about the war in Iraq is the same person who’s going to buy an obscenely overpriced MP3 player because Bono Vox is shilling for it.

  Q: But there’s a place for leaders in a society, too, right? Wasn’t that what corporate America was trying to suppress at the Grammys? The voices of potential leaders of an antiwar movement?

  A: You want the CEO of Chiclets to be a leader in the fight against tooth decay? Use the same advertising methods to sell gum and tell the world that gum is bad for you? I know I just made a crack about Bono, but he has more integrity than the rest of the music world combined. If you made a fortune selling Chiclets, you might as well go ahead and sell overpriced iPods, too, and get even richer, and then use your money and your status to get entrée to the White House and try to do some actual hands-on good in Africa. Like: be a man, suck it up, admit that you like being part of the ruling class, and that you believe in the ruling class, and that you’ll do whatever it takes to consolidate your position in it.

  Q: Are you saying you supported the invasion of Iraq?

  A: I’m saying, if invading Iraq had been the kind of thing that a person like me supported, it never would have happened.

  Q: Let’s get back to Richard Katz the person for a minute.

  A: No, let’s turn your little machine off. I think we’re done here.

  “That was great,” Zachary said, pointing and clicking. “That was perfect. I’m going to put this up right now and send the link to Caitlyn.”

  “You have her e-mail address?”

  “No, but I know who does.”

  “Then I’ll see you both after school tomorrow.”

  Katz made his way down Church Street toward the PATH train under a familiar cloud of post-interview remorse. He wasn’t worried about having given offense; his business was giving offense. He was worried about having sounded pathetic—too transparently the washed-up talent whose only recourse was to trash his betters. He strongly disliked the person he’d just demonstrated afresh that he unfortunately was. And this, of course, was the simplest definition of depression that he knew of: strongly disliking yourself.

  Back in Jersey City, he stopped at the gyro joint that provided three or four of his dinners every week, departed with a heavy stinking bag of lowest-grade meats and pita, and climbed the stairs to his apartment, which he’d been away from so much in the last two and a half years that it seemed to have turned against him, to no longer wish to be his place. A little bit of coke could have changed that—could have restored the apartment’s lost luster of friendliness—but only for a few hours, or at most a few days, after which it would make everything much worse. The one room he still halfway liked was the kitchen, whose harsh fluorescent lighting suited his mood. He sat down at his ancient enamel-top table to distract himself from the taste of his dinner by reading Thomas Bernhard, his new favorite writer.

  Behind him, on a counter crowded with unwashed dishes, his landline rang. The readout said walter berglund.

  “Walter, my conscience,” Katz said. “Why are you bothering me now?”

  He was tempted, in spite of himself, to pick up, because he’d lately found himself missing Walter, but he remembered, in the nick of time, that this could just as easily be Patty calling from their home phone. He’d learned from his experience with Molly Tremain that you shouldn’t try to save a drowning woman unless you were ready to drown yourself, and so he’d stood and watched from a pier while Patty floundered and cried for help. Any way she might be feeling now was a way he didn’t want to hear about. The great benefit of touring Nameless Lake to death—toward the end, he’d been able to entertain long trains of thought while performing, able to review the band’s finances and contemplate the scoring of new drugs and experience remorse about his latest interview without losing the beat or skipping a verse—had been the emptying of all meaning from the lyrics, the permanent severing of his songs from the state of sadness (for Molly, for Patty) in which he’d written them. He’d gone so far as to believe the touring had exhausted the sadness itself. But there was no way he was going to touch the phone while it was ringing.

  He did, however, check his voice mail.

  Richard? It’s Walter—Berglund. I don’t know if you’re there, you’re probably not even in the country, but I’m wondering if you might be around tomorrow. I’m going up to New York on business, and I have a little proposal for you. Sorry about the late notice. I’m mostly just saying hi. Patty says hi, too. Hope everything’s OK with you!

  To delete this message, press 3.

  It was two years since Katz had heard from Walter. As the silence had lengthened, he’d begun to think that Patty, in a moment of stupidity or misery, had confessed to her husband what had happened at Nameless Lake. Walter, with his feminism, his infuriating reverse double standard, would quickly have forgiven Patty and left Katz alone to bear the blame for the betrayal. It was a funny thing about Walter: circumstances kept conspiring to make Katz, who otherwise feared nobody, feel lessened and intimidated by him. In renouncing Patty, sacrificing his own pleasure and brutally disappointing her in order to preserve her marriage, he’d risen momentarily to the level of Walter’s excellence, but all he’d gotten for his trouble was envy of his friend for his unexamined possession of his wife. He’d tried to pretend that he was doing the Berglunds a favor by ceasing communication with them, but mainly he just hadn’t wanted to hear that they were happy and securely married.

  Katz couldn’t have said exactly why Walter mattered to him. No doubt part of it was simply an accident of grandfathering: of forming an attachment at an impressionable age, before the contours of his personality were fully set. Walter had slipped into his life before he’d shut the door on the world of ordinary people and cast his lot with misfits and dropouts. Not that Walter was so ordinary himself. He was at once hopelessly naïve and very shrewd and dogged and well-informed. And then there was the complication of Patty, who, although she’d long tried hard to pretend otherwise, was even less ordinary than Walter, and then the further complication of Katz’s being no less attracted to Patty than Walter was, and arguably more attracted to Walter than Patty was. This was definitely a weird one. No other man had warmed Katz’s loins the way the sight of Walter did after long absence. These groinal heatings were no more about literal sex, no more homo, than the hard-ons he got from a long-anticipated first snort of blow, but there was definitely something deep-chemical there. Something that insisted on being called love. Katz had enjoyed seeing the Berglunds as their family grew, enjoyed knowing them, enjoyed knowing they were out there in the Midwest, having a good life that he could drop in on when he wasn’t feeling great. And then he’d wrecked it by letting himself spend a night alone in a summer house with a former basketball player who was skilled at scooting through narrow lanes of opportunity. What had been his diffusely warm world of domestic refuge had collapsed, overnight, into the hot, hungry microcosm of Patty’s cunt. Which he still couldn’t believe he’d had such cruelly fleeting access t
o.

  Patty says hi, too.

  “Yeah, fuck that,” Katz said, eating gyro. But as soon as he’d replaced his appetite with a deep gastric unease about his means of satisfying it, he returned Walter’s call. Luckily, Walter himself answered.

  “What’s up,” Katz said.

  “What’s up with you?” Walter countered with giddy niceness. “It seems like you’ve been everywhere.”

  “Yeah, really singing the body electric. Heady times here.”

  “Tripping the light fantastic.”

  “Exactly. In a Dade County jail cell.”

  “Yeah, I read about that. What on earth were you doing in Florida anyway?”

  “South American chick I mistook for a human being.”

  “I figured it was all part of the fame thing,” Walter said. “ ‘Fame requires every sort of excess.’ I remembered we used to talk about that.”

  “Well, fortunately, I’m past having to deal with it. I’ve stepped off the bus.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m building decks again.”

  “Decks? Are you kidding? That’s crazy! You should be out trashing hotel rooms and recording your most repellent fuck-you songs ever.”

  “Tired moves, man. I’m doing the only honorable thing I can think of.”

  “But that’s such a waste!”

  “Be careful what you say. You might offend me.”

  “Seriously, Richard, you’re a great talent. You can’t just stop because people happened to like one of your records.”

  “ ‘Great talent.’ That’s like calling somebody a genius at tic-tac-toe. We’re talking about pop music here.”

  “Wow, wow, wow,” Walter said. “This is not what I expected to be hearing. I thought you’d be finishing a record and getting ready for more touring. I would have called you sooner if I’d known you were building decks. I was trying not to bother you.”

  “You never have to feel that.”

  “Well, I never heard from you, I figured you were busy.”

  “Mea culpa,” Katz said. “How are you guys doing? Everything OK with you?”

  “More or less. You know we moved to Washington, right?”

  Katz closed his eyes and flogged his neurons to produce a confirming memory of this. “Yes,” he said. “I think I knew that.”

  “Well, things have gotten somewhat complex here, it turns out. In fact, that’s what prompted me to call. I have a proposal for you. Do you have some time tomorrow afternoon? On the late side?”

  “Late afternoon’s no good. How about morning?”

  Walter explained that he was meeting Robert Kennedy Jr. at noon and had to return to Washington in the evening for a flight to Texas on Saturday morning. “We could talk on the phone now,” he said, “but my assistant really wants to meet you. She’s the one you’d be working with. I’d rather not steal her thunder by saying anything now.”

  “Your assistant,” Katz said.

  “Lalitha. She’s incredibly young and brilliant. She actually lives right upstairs from us. I think you’ll like her a lot.”

  The brightness and excitement in Walter’s voice, the hint of guilt or thrill in the word “actually,” did not escape Katz’s notice.

  “Lalitha,” he said. “What kind of name is that?”

  “Indian. Bengali. She grew up in Missouri. She’s actually very pretty.”

  “I see. And what’s her proposal about?”

  “Saving the planet.”

  “I see.”

  Katz suspected that Walter was calculatedly dangling this Lalitha as bait, and it irritated him to be thought so easily manipulated. And yet—knowing Walter to be a man who didn’t call a female pretty without good reason—he was manipulated, he was intrigued.

  “Let me see if I can rearrange some things tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

  “Fantastic,” Walter said.

  What would be would be and what would not would not. In Katz’s experience, it seldom hurt to make chicks wait. He called White Street and informed Zachary that the meeting with Caitlyn would have to be postponed.

  The following afternoon, at 3:15, only fifteen minutes late, he strode into Walker’s and saw Walter and the Indian chick waiting at a corner table. Before he even reached the table, he knew he had no chance with her. There were eighteen words of body language with which women signified availability and submission, and Lalitha was using a good twelve of them at once on Walter. She looked like a living illustration of the phrase hanging on his words. As Walter rose from the table to embrace Katz, the girl’s eyes remained fixed on Walter; and this was indeed a weird twist for the universe to have taken. Never before had Katz seen Walter in studly mode, turning a pretty head. He was wearing a good dark suit and had gained some middle-aged bulk. There was a new breadth to his shoulders, a new projection to his chest. “Richard, Lalitha,” he said.

  “Very nice to meet you,” Lalitha said, loosely shaking his hand and adding nothing about being honored or excited, nothing about being a huge fan.

  Katz sank into a chair feeling sucker-punched by a damning recognition: contrary to the lies he’d always told himself, he wanted Walter’s women not in spite of his friendship but because of it. For two years, he’d been consistently oppressed by avowals of fandom, and now suddenly he was disappointed not to receive one of these avowals from Lalitha, because of the way she was looking at Walter. She was dark-skinned and complexly round and slender. Round-eyed, round-faced, round-breasted; slender in the neck and arms. A solid B-plus that could be an A-minus if she would work for extra credit. Katz pushed a hand through his hair, brushing out bits of Trex dust. His old friend and foe was beaming with unalloyed delight at seeing him again.

  “So what’s up,” he said.

  “Well, a lot,” Walter said. “Where to begin?”

  “That’s a nice suit, by the way. You look good.”

  “Oh, you like it?” Walter looked down at himself. “Lalitha made me buy it.”

  “I kept telling him his wardrobe sucked,” the girl said. “He hadn’t bought a new suit in ten years!”

  She had a subtle subcontinental accent, percussive, no-nonsense, and she sounded proprietary of Walter. If her body hadn’t been speaking of such anxiousness to please, Katz might have believed she already owned him.

  “You look good yourself,” Walter said.

  “Thank you for lying.”

  “No, it’s good, it’s kind of a Keith Richards look.”

  “Ah, now we’re being honest. Keith Richards looks like a wolf dressed up in a grandmother’s bonnet. That headband?”

  Walter consulted Lalitha. “Do you think Richard looks like a grandmother?”

  “No,” she said with a curt, round O sound.

  “So you’re in Washington,” Katz said.

  “Yeah, it’s sort of a strange situation,” Walter said. “I work for a guy named Vin Haven who’s based in Houston, he’s a big oil-and-gas guy. His wife’s dad was an old-school Republican. Served under Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. He left her a mansion in Georgetown that they hardly ever used. When Vin set up the Trust, he put the offices on the ground floor and sold Patty and me the second and third floors at a price below market. There’s also a little maid’s apartment on the top floor where Lalitha’s been living.”

  “I have the third-best commute in Washington,” Lalitha said. “Walter’s is even better than the president’s. We all share the same kitchen.”

  “Sounds cozy,” Katz said, giving Walter a significant look that seemed not to register. “And what is this Trust?”

  “I think I told you about it the last time we talked.”

  “I was doing so many drugs there for a while, you’re going to have to tell me everything at least twice.”

  “It is the Cerulean Mountain Trust,” Lalitha said. “It’s a whole new approach to conservation. It’s Walter’s idea.”

  “Actually, it was Vin’s idea, at least to begin with.”

  “But the really or
iginal ideas are all Walter’s,” Lalitha assured Katz.

  A waitress (nothing special, already known to Katz and dismissed from consideration) took orders for coffee, and Walter launched into the story of the Cerulean Mountain Trust. Vin Haven, he said, was a very un usual man. He and his wife, Kiki, were passionate bird-lovers who happened also to be personal friends of George and Laura Bush and Dick and Lynne Cheney. Vin had accumulated a nine-figure fortune by profitably losing money on oil and gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma. He was now getting on in years, and, having had no children with Kiki, he’d decided to blow more than half his total wad on the preservation of a single bird species, the cerulean warbler, which, Walter said, was not only a beautiful creature but the fastest-declining songbird in North America.

  “Here’s our poster bird,” Lalitha said, taking a brochure from her briefcase.

  The warbler on its cover looked nondescript to Katz. Bluish, small, unintelligent. “That’s a bird all right,” he said.

  “Just wait,” Lalitha said. “It’s not about the bird. It’s much bigger than that. You have to wait and hear Walter’s vision.”

  Vision! Katz was beginning to think that Walter’s real purpose in arranging this meeting had simply been to inflict on him the fact of his being adored by a rather pretty twenty-five-year-old.

  The cerulean warbler, Walter said, bred exclusively in mature temperate hardwood forests, with a stronghold in the central Appalachians. There was a particularly healthy population in southern West Virginia, and Vin Haven, with his ties to the nonrenewable energy industry, had seen an opportunity to partner with coal companies to create a very large, permanent private reserve for the warbler and other threatened hardwood species. The coal companies had reason to fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains. Vin believed that they could be persuaded to help the warbler, to keep the bird off the Threatened list and garner some much-needed good press, as long as they were allowed to continue extracting coal. And this was how Walter had landed the job as executive director of the Trust. In Minnesota, working for the Nature Conservancy, he’d forged good relationships with mining interests, and he was unusually open to constructive engagement with the coal people.