Freedom

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Freedom Page 43

by Jonathan Franzen


  And now her footsteps were coming down the hallway. Walter stopped speaking and took a deep breath, visibly bracing himself. Katz swiveled his chair toward the doorway; and there she was. The fresh-faced mom who had a dark side. She was wearing black boots and a snug red-and-black silk brocade skirt and a chic short raincoat in which she looked both great and not like herself. Katz couldn’t remember ever seeing her in anything but jeans.

  “Hi, Richard,” she said, glancing in his general direction. “Hi, everybody. How’s it going here?”

  “We’re just getting started,” Walter said.

  “Don’t let me interrupt you, then.”

  “You’re all dressed up,” Walter said.

  “Going shopping,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see you guys tonight if you’re around.”

  “Are you making dinner?” Jessica said.

  “No, I have to work till nine. I guess, if you want, I could stop for some food before I leave.”

  “That would be extremely helpful,” Jessica said, “since we’re going to be meeting all day.”

  “Well, and I would be happy to make dinner if I didn’t have to work an eight-hour shift.”

  “Oh, never mind,” Jessica said. “Just forget it. We’ll go out or something.”

  “That does sound like the easiest thing,” Patty agreed.

  “So anyway,” Walter said.

  “Right, so anyway,” she said. “I hope it’s a really fun day for everybody.”

  Having thus speedily irritated, ignored, or disappointed each of the four of them, she proceeded down the hallway and out the front door. Lalitha, who had been clicking on her BlackBerry since the moment Patty appeared, looked the most obviously unhappy.

  “Does she work seven days a week now, or what?” Jessica said.

  “No, not usually,” Walter said. “I’m not sure what this is about.”

  “It’s always about something, though, isn’t it,” Lalitha murmured as she thumbed her device.

  Jessica turned on her, instantly redirecting her pique. “Just let us know whenever you’re done with your e-mail, OK? We’ll just sit and wait until you’re ready, OK?”

  Lalitha, tight-lipped, continued to thumb.

  “Maybe you can do that later?” Walter said gently.

  She slapped the BlackBerry onto the table. “OK,” she said. “Ready!”

  As the nicotine coursed through Katz, he began to feel better. Patty had seemed defiant, and defiant was good. Nor had the fact of her dressing up escaped his attention. Dressing up for what reason? To present herself to him. And working both Friday and Saturday nights for what reason? To avoid him. Yes, to play the same hide-and-seek that he was playing with her. Now that she was gone, he could see her better, receive her signals without so much static, imagine placing his hands on that fine skirt of hers, and remember how she’d wanted him in Minnesota.

  But meanwhile the problem of too much procreation: the first concrete task, Walter said, was to think of a name for their initiative. His own working idea was Youth Against Insanity, a private homage to “Youth Against Fascism,” which he considered (and Katz agreed with him) one of the finer songs that Sonic Youth had ever recorded. But Jessica was adamant about picking a name that said yes rather than no. Something pro, not contra. “Kids my age are way more libertarian than you guys were,” she explained. “Anything that smells like elitism, or not respecting somebody else’s point of view, they’re allergic to. Your campaign can’t be about telling other people what not to do. It’s got to be about this cool positive choice that we’re all making.”

  Lalitha suggested the name The Living First, which hurt Katz’s ears, and which Jessica shot down with withering scorn. And so they brainstormed the morning away, sorely missing, in Katz’s opinion, the input of a professional P.R. consultant. They went through Lonelier Planet, Fresher Air, Rubbers Unlimited, Coalition of the Already Born, Free Space, Life Quality, Smaller Tent, and Enough Already! (which Katz rather liked but which the others said was still too negative; he filed it away as a possible future song or album title). They considered Feed the Living, Be Reasonable, Cooler Heads, A Better Way, Strength in Smaller Numbers, Less Is More, Emptier Nests, Joy of None, Kidfree Forever, No Babies on Board, Feed Yourself, Dare Not to Bear, Depopulate!, Two Cheers for People, Maybe None, Less Than Zero, Stomp the Brakes, Smash the Family, Cool Off, Elbow Room, More for Me, Bred Alone, Breather, Morespace, Love What’s Here, Barren by Choice, Childhood’s End, All Children Left Behind, Nucleus of Two, Maybe Never, and What’s the Rush? and rejected all of them. To Katz, the exercise was an illustration of the general impossibility of the enterprise and the specific rancidness of prefabricated coolness, but Walter ran the discussion with an upbeat judiciousness that bespoke long years in the artificial world of NGOs. And, somewhat incredibly, the dollars he planned to spend were real.

  “I say we go with Free Space,” he said finally. “I like how it steals the word ‘free’ from the other side, and appropriates the rhetoric of the wide-open West. If this thing takes off, it can also be the name of a whole movement, not just our group. The Free Space movement.”

  “Am I the only one who’s hearing ‘free parking space’?” Jessica said.

  “That’s not such a bad connotation,” Walter said. “We all know what it’s like to have trouble finding a parking space. Fewer people on the planet, better parking opportunities? It’s actually a very vivid everyday example of why overpopulation’s bad.”

  “We need to see if Free Space is trademarked,” Lalitha said.

  “Fuck the trademark,” Katz said. “Every phrase known to man is trademarked.”

  “We could put an extra space between the words,” Walter said. “Sort of like the opposite of EarthFirst! and without the exclamation point. If we get sued on the trademark, we can build a case on the extra space. That plays, doesn’t it? The Case for Space?”

  “Better not to get sued at all, I think,” Lalitha said.

  In the afternoon, after sandwiches had been ordered and eaten and Patty had come home and gone out again without interacting with them (Katz caught a quick glimpse of her black gym-greeter jeans as her legs receded down the hallway), the four-member advisory board of Free Space hammered out a plan for the twenty-five summer interns whom Lalitha had already set about attracting and hiring. She’d been envisioning a late-summer music and consciousness-raising festival on a twenty-acre goat farm now owned by the Cerulean Mountain Trust on the southern edge of its warbler reserve—a vision that Jessica immediately found fault with. Did Lalitha not understand anything about young people’s new relationship with music? It wasn’t enough just to bring in some big-name talent! They had to send twenty interns out to twenty cities across the country and have them organize local festivals—“A battle of the bands,” Katz said. “Yes, exactly, twenty different local battles of the bands,” Jessica said. (She had been frosty to Katz all day but seemed grateful for his help in squashing Lalitha.) By offering cash prizes, they would attract five great bands in each of the twenty cities, all competing for the right to represent their local music scene in a weekend-long battle of the bands in West Virginia, under the aegis of Free Space, with some big names there to do the final judging and lend their aura to the cause of reversing global population growth and making it uncool to have kids.

  Katz, who even by his own standards had consumed colossal amounts of caffeine and nicotine, wound up in a nearly manic state in which he agreed to everything that was asked of him: writing special Free Space songs, returning to Washington in May to meet with the Free Space interns and aid in their indoctrination, making a surprise guest appearance at the New York battle of the bands, emceeing the Free Space festival in West Virginia, endeavoring to reconstitute Walnut Surprise so that it could perform there, and pestering big names to appear with him and join him on the final panel of judges. In his mind, he was doing nothing more than writing checks on an account with nothing in it, because, despite the actual chemical substances he’d
ingested, the true substance of his state was a throbbing, single-minded focus on taking Patty away from Walter: this was the rhythm track, everything else was irrelevant high-end. Smash the Family: another song title. And once the family was smashed, he would not have to make good on any of his promises.

  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.”

  “I admire your capacity for
admiring,” Katz said. And added, as the taxi crawled through traffic at a complex diagonal intersection, “I don’t think I can do this thing for you, Walter. I’m experiencing high levels of shame.”

  “Just do what you can. Find your own limits. If all you want to do is come down in May for a day or two and meet the interns, maybe have sex with one of them, that’s fine with me. That would be a lot already.”

  “Thinking of going back to writing songs.”

  “That’s great! That’s wonderful news. I’d almost rather have you do that than work for us. Just stop building decks, for God’s sake.”

  “Might need to keep building decks. Can’t be helped.”

  The mansion was dark and quiet when they returned to it, a single light burning in the kitchen. Walter went straight up to bed, but Katz lingered for a while in the kitchen, thinking Patty might hear him and come down. Aside from everything else, he was now craving the company of someone with a sense of irony. He ate some cold pasta and smoked a cigarette in the back yard. Then he went up to the second floor and back to the little room of Patty’s. From the pillows and blankets he’d seen on the foldout sofa the evening before, he had the impression that she slept in it. The door was closed and no light showed around its edges.

  “Patty,” he said in a voice she could have heard if she’d been awake.

  He listened carefully, enveloped in tinnitus.

  “Patty,” he said again.

  His dick didn’t believe for one second that she was sleeping, but it was possible that the door was closed on an empty room, and he had a curious reluctance to open it and see. He needed some small breath of encouragement or confirmation of his instincts. He went back down to the kitchen, finished the pasta, and read the Post and the Times. At two o’clock, still buzzing with nicotine, and beginning to be pissed off with her, he went back to her room, tapped on the door, and opened it.

 

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