Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You’re right,” he cawed. “I did somehow overlook all that.”

  “It’s there, Walter! Maybe when you think about it, later, you’ll remember that it’s there.”

  “I’m not intending to do much thinking about it.”

  “Not now, but later. Even if you still don’t want to talk to me, maybe you’ll at least forgive me a little bit.”

  The light in the windows dimmed suddenly, a spring cloud passing by. “You did the worst thing you could possibly do to me,” he said. “The worst thing, and you knew very well it was the worst thing, and you did it anyway. Which part of that am I going to want to think back on?”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said, weeping afresh. “I’m so sorry you can’t see it the way I see it. I’m so sorry this happened.”

  “It didn’t ‘happen.’ You did it. You fucked the kind of evil shit who would leave this on my desk for me to read.”

  “For God’s sake, though, Walter, it was just sex.”

  “You let him read things about me you never would have let me read.”

  “Just stupid sex four years ago. What’s that compared to our whole life?”

  “Look,” he said, standing up. “I don’t want to shout at you. Not with Jessica in the house. But you have to help me with that and not be dis ingenuous about what you did, or I’m going to shout your fucking head off.”

  “I’m not being disingenuous.”

  “I mean it,” he said. “I’m not going to shout at you. I’m going to leave this room, and I don’t want to see you after that. And we have a bit of a problem, because I actually have to work in this house, so it’s not very easy for me to move out.”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “I know I have to go. I’ll wait until Jessie’s gone, and then I’ll get out of your sight. I totally understand how you’re feeling. But I have to tell you one thing before I go, just so you know. I want to make sure you know that it’s like being stabbed in the heart for me to leave you with your assistant. It’s like having the skin ripped off my breasts. I can’t stand it, Walter.” She looked at him imploringly. “I’m so hurt and jealous, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “You’ll get over it.”

  “Maybe. Some year. A little bit. But do you see what it means that I’m feeling it now? Do you see what it means about who I love? Do you see what’s really going on here?”

  The sight of her wild, pleading eyes became, at that moment, so crestingly painful and disgusting to him—produced such a paroxysm of cumulative revulsion at the pain they’d caused each other in their marriage—that he began to shout in spite of himself: “Who drove me to it? Who was I never quite good enough for? Who always needed more time to think it over? Don’t you think twenty-six years is long enough to think it over? How much fucking more time do you need? Do you think there’s anything in your writing that surprised me? Do you think I didn’t know every fucking bit of it every fucking minute of the way? And love you anyway, because I couldn’t help it? And waste my entire life?”

  “That’s not fair, oh, that’s not fair.”

  “Fuck fairness! And fuck you!”

  He kicked the manuscript into a white flurry, but he was disciplined enough not to slam the door behind him as he left. Downstairs in the kitchen, Jessica was toasting herself a bagel, her overnight bag standing by the table. “Where is everybody this morning?”

  “Mom and I had a little bit of a fight.”

  “Sounded like it,” Jessica said with the ironic eye-widening that was her customary response to belonging to a family less even-keeled than she. “Is everything OK now?”

  “We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  “I was hoping to get the noon train, but I can take a later one if you want.”

  Because he’d always been close to Jessica and felt he could count on her support, it didn’t occur to him that he was making a tactical error in brushing her off now and sending her on her way. He didn’t see how crucial it was to be the first to give the news to her and frame the story properly: didn’t imagine how quickly Patty, with her game-winning instincts, would move to consolidate her alliance with their daughter and fill her ears with her version of the story (Dad Dumps Mom on Flimsy Pretext, Takes Up with Young Assistant). He wasn’t thinking of anything beyond the moment, and his head was aswirl with precisely the kind of feelings that had nothing to do with fatherhood. He gave Jessica a hug and thanked her profusely for coming down to help launch Free Space, and then he went into his office to stare out the windows. The state of emergency had waned enough for him to remember all the work he needed to be doing, but not nearly enough for him to do it. He watched a catbird hopping around in an azalea that was readying itself to bloom; he envied the bird for knowing nothing of what he knew; he would have swapped souls with it in a heartbeat. And then to take wing, to know the air’s buoyancy even for an hour: the trade was a no-brainer, and the catbird, with its lively indifference to him, its sureness of physical selfhood, seemed well aware of how preferable it was to be the bird.

  Some otherworldly amount of time later, after he’d heard the rolling of a large suitcase and the clunk of the front door, Lalitha came tapping on his office door and stuck her head in. “Everything OK?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Come sit on my lap.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Now?”

  “Yes, now. When else? My wife’s gone, right?”

  “She left with a suitcase, yes.”

  “Well, she’s not coming back. So come on. Why not. There’s nobody else in the house.”

  And she did. She was not a hesitant person, Lalitha. But the executive chair was ill suited for lap-sitting; she had to hang on to his neck to stay aboard, and even then the chair rocked hazardously. “This is what you want?” she said.

  “Actually, no. I don’t want to be in this office.”

  “I agree.”

  He had so much to think about, he knew he would be thinking uninterruptedly for weeks if he let himself start now. The only way not to think was to plunge forward. Up in Lalitha’s slope-ceilinged little room, the onetime maid’s quarters, which he hadn’t visited since she’d moved in, and whose floor was an obstacle course of clean clothes in stacks and dirty ones in piles, he pressed her against the side wall of the dormer and gave himself blindly to the one person who wanted him without qualification. It was another state of emergency, it was no hour of no day, it was desperate. He lifted her onto his hips and staggered around with her mouth locked to his, and then they were humping fiercely through their clothes, between piles of other clothes, and then one of those pauses descended, an uneasy recollection of how universal the ascending steps to sex were; how impersonal, or pre-personal. He pulled away abruptly, toward the unmade single bed, and knocked over a pile of books and documents relating to overpopulation.

  “One of us has to leave at six to pick up Eduardo at the airport,” he said. “Just want to note that.”

  “What time is it now?”

  He turned her very dusty alarm clock to check. “Two-seventeen,” he marveled. It was the strangest time he’d seen in his entire life.

  “I apologize that the room is so messy,” Lalitha said.

  “I like it. I love how you are. Are you hungry? I’m a little hungry.”

  “No, Walter.” She smiled. “I’m not hungry. But I can get you something.”

  “I was thinking, like, a glass of soy milk. Soy beverage.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  She went downstairs, and it was strange to think that the footsteps he heard coming back up, a minute later, belonged to the person who would take Patty’s place in his life. She knelt by him and watched intently, greedily, as he drank down the soy milk. Then she unbuttoned his shirt with her nimble pale-nailed fingers. OK, then, he thought. OK. Forward. But as he undressed himself the rest of the way, the scenes of his wife’s own infidelity, which she’d narrated so exhaustively, came churning up in him, bringing with them a faint but real impulse to
forgive her; and he knew he had to crush this impulse. His hatred of her and his friend was still newborn and wavering, it hadn’t hardened yet, the piteous sight and sound of her crying were still too fresh in his mind. Thankfully Lalitha had stripped down to a pair of red-polka-dotted white briefs. She was standing over him insouciantly, offering herself for inspection. Her body, in its youth, was preposterously fabulous. Unblemished, defiant of gravity, all but unbearable to look at. It was true that he’d once known a woman’s body even quite a bit younger, but he had no memory of it, he’d been too young himself to notice Patty’s youth. He reached up and pressed the heel of his hand to the hot, clothed mound between Lalitha’s legs. She gave a little cry, her knees buckled, and she sank onto him, bathing him in sweet agony.

  The struggle not to compare began in earnest then, the struggle in particular to clear his head of Patty’s sentence, “There was nothing so wrong with it.” He could see, in retrospect, that his earlier plea that Lalitha go slow with him had been founded on accurate self-knowledge. But going slow, once he’d thrown Patty out of the house, was not an option. He needed the quick fix simply in order to keep functioning—to not get leveled by hatred and self-pity—and, in one way, the fix was very sweet indeed, because Lalitha really was crazy for him, almost literally dripping with desire, certainly strongly seeping with it. She stared into his eyes with love and joy, she pronounced beautiful and perfect and wonderful the manhood that Patty in her document had libeled and spat upon. What wasn’t to like? He was a man in his prime, she was adorable and young and insatiable; and this, in fact, was what wasn’t to like. His emotions couldn’t keep up with the vigor and urgency of their animal attraction, the interminability of their coupling. She needed to ride him, she needed to be crushed underneath him, she needed to have her legs on his shoulders, she needed to do the Downward Dog and be whammed from behind, she needed bending over the bed, she needed her face pressed against the wall, she needed her legs wrapped around him and her head thrown back and her very round breasts flying every which way. It all seemed intensely meaningful to her, she was a bottomless well of anguished noise, and he was up for all of it. In good cardiovascular shape, thrilled by her extravagance, attuned to her wishes, and extremely fond of her. And yet it wasn’t quite personal, and he couldn’t find his way to orgasm. And this was very odd, an entirely new and unanticipated problem, due in part, perhaps, to his unfamiliarity with condoms, and to how unbelievably wet she was. How many times, in the last two years, had he brought himself off to the thought of his assistant, each time in a matter of minutes? A hundred times. His problem now was obviously psychological. Her alarm clock showed 3:52 when they finally subsided. It wasn’t actually clear that she’d come, either, and he didn’t dare ask her. And here, in his exhaustion, the lurking Contrast seized its opportunity to obtrude, for Patty, whenever she could be persuaded to interest herself, had pretty reliably got the job done for both of them, leaving them both reasonably content, leaving him free to go to work or read a book and her to do the little Pattyish things she liked to do. Her very difficulty created friction, and friction led to satisfaction . . .

  Lalitha kissed his swollen mouth. “What are you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Lots of things.”

  “Are you sorry we did this?”

  “No, no, very happy.”

  “You don’t look quite happy.”

  “Well, I did just throw my wife out of the house after twenty-four years of marriage. That did just happen a few hours ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Walter. You can still go back. I can quit and leave the two of you be.”

  “No, that’s one thing I can promise you. I am never going back.”

  “Do you want to be with me?”

  “Yes.” He filled his hands with her black hair, which smelled of coconutty shampoo, and covered his face with it. He now had what he’d wanted, but it was making him somewhat lonely. After all his great longing, which was infinite in scope, he was in bed with a particular finite girl who was very pretty and brilliant and committed but also messy, disliked by Jessica, and no kind of cook. And she was all there was, the sole bulwark, between him and the multitude of thoughts he didn’t want to have. The thought of Patty and his friend at Nameless Lake; the very human and witty way the two of them had spoken to each other; the grownup reciprocity of their sex; their gladness that he wasn’t there. He began to cry into Lalitha’s hair, and she comforted him, brushed his tears away, and they made love again more tiredly and painfully, until he did finally come, without fanfare, in her hand.

  There ensued some difficult days. Eduardo Soquel, arriving from Colombia, was picked up at the airport and installed in “Joey’s” bedroom. The press conference on Monday morning was attended by twelve journalists and survived by Walter and Soquel, and a separate lengthy phone interview was given to Dan Caperville of the Times. Walter, having worked in public relations all his life, was able to suppress his private turmoil and stay on message and decline inflammatory journalistic bait. The Pan-American Warbler Park, he said, represented a new paradigm of science-based, privately funded wildlife conservation; the undeniable ugliness of mountaintop-removal mining was more than offset by the prospect of sustainable “green employment” (ecotourism, reforestation, certified forestry) in West Virginia and Colombia; Coyle Mathis and the other displaced mountain people had fully and laudably cooperated with the Trust and would soon be employed by a subsidiary of the Trust’s generous corporate partner LBI. Walter needed to exercise particular self-control in praising LBI, given what Joey had told him. When he got off the phone with Dan Caperville, he went out for a late dinner with Lalitha and Soquel and drank two beers, bringing to three his total lifetime consumption.

  The next afternoon, after Soquel had returned to the airport, Lalitha locked the door of Walter’s office and knelt down between his legs to reward him for his labors.

  “No, no, no,” he said, rolling the chair away from her.

  She pursued him on her knees. “I just want to see you. I’m so greedy for you.”

  “Lalitha, no.” He could hear his staffers going about their business at the front of the house.

  “Just for a second,” she said, unzipping him. “Please, Walter.”

  He thought of Clinton and Lewinsky, and then, seeing his assistant’s mouth full of his flesh and her eyes smiling up at him, he thought of his evil friend’s prophecy. It seemed to make her happy, and yet—

  “No, I’m sorry,” he said, pushing her away as gently as he could.

  She frowned. She was hurt. “You have to let me,” she said, “if you love me.”

  “I do love you, but this is not the right time.”

  “I want you to let me. I want to do everything right now.”

  “I’m sorry, but no.”

  He stood up and zipped himself back into his pants. Lalitha remained kneeling for a moment with her head bowed. Then she, too, stood up, smoothed her skirt on her thighs, and turned away in an attitude of unhappiness.

  “There’s a problem we have to talk about first,” he said.

  “All right. Let’s talk about your problem.”

  “The problem is we have to fire Richard.”

  The name, which he’d refused to speak until now, hung in the air. “And why do we have to do that?” Lalitha said.

  “Because I hate him, because he had an affair with my wife, and I never want to hear his name again, and there’s no earthly way I’m going to work with him.”

  Lalitha seemed to shrink as she heard this. Her head sank, her shoulders slumped, she became a sad little girl. “Is that why your wife left on Sunday?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”

  “No!”

  “Yes you are. That’s why you don’t want me near you now.”

  “No, that’s not true. That’s totally not true.”

  “Well, be that as it may,” she said, straightening herself briskly
, “we still can’t fire Richard. This is my project, and I need him. I’ve already advertised him to the interns, and I need him to get our talent for August.

  So you can have your problem with him, and be very sorry about your wife, but I’m not firing him.”

  “Honey,” Walter said. “Lalitha. I really do love you. Everything’s going to be OK. But try to see this from my side.”

  “No!” she said, wheeling toward him with spirited insurrection. “I don’t care about your side! My job is to do our population work, and I’m going to do it. If you really care about that work, and about me, you’ll let me do it my way.”

  “I do care. I totally do. But—”

  “But nothing, then. I won’t mention his name again. You can go out of town somewhere when he meets with the interns in May. And we’ll figure out August when we get there.”

  “But he’s not going to want to do it. He was already talking on Saturday about backing out.”

  “Let me talk to him,” she said. “As you may remember, I’m rather good at persuading people to do things they don’t want to do. I’m a rather effective employee of yours, and I hope you’ll be nice enough to let me do my work.”

  He rushed around his desk to put his arms around her, but she escaped to the outer office.

  Because he loved her spirit and commitment and was stricken by her anger, he didn’t press the issue further. But as the hours passed, and then several days, and she didn’t report that Richard was backing out of Free Space, Walter deduced that he must still be on board. Richard who didn’t believe in a fucking thing! The only imaginable explanation was that Patty had talked to him on the phone and guilted him into sticking with the program. And the idea of those two talking about anything at all, even for five minutes, and specifically talking about how to spare “poor Walter” (oh, that phrase of hers, that abominable phrase) and save his pet project, as some kind of consolation prize, made him sick with weakness and corruption and compromise and littleness. It came between him and Lalitha as well. Their lovemaking, though daily and protracted, was shadowed by his sense that she’d betrayed him with Richard, too, a little bit, and so did not become more personal in the way he’d hoped it might. Everywhere he turned, there was Richard.