Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Equally unsettling, in a different way, was the problem of LBI. Joey, at their dinner together, with moving expenditure of humility and self-reproach, had explained the sordid business deal he’d been involved with, and the key villain, as Walter saw it, was LBI. Kenny Bartles was clearly one of those daredevil clowns, a bush-league sociopath who would end up in jail or in Congress soon enough. The Cheney-Rumsfeld crowd, whatever the fetor of their motives for invading Iraq, surely still would have preferred to receive usable truck parts instead of the Paraguayan trash that Joey had delivered. And Joey himself, though he should have known better than to get involved with Bartles, had convinced Walter that he’d only followed through for Connie’s sake; his loyalty to her, his terrible remorse, and his general bravery (he was twenty years old!) were all to his credit. The responsible party, therefore—the one with both full knowledge of the scam and the authority to approve it—was LBI. Walter hadn’t heard of the vice president whom Joey had spoken to, the one who’d threatened him with a lawsuit, but the guy undoubtedly worked right down the hall from the buddy of Vin Haven who’d agreed to locate a body-armor plant in West Virginia. Joey had asked Walter, at dinner, what he thought he should do. Blow the whistle? Or just give away his profits to some charity for disabled veterans, and go back to school? Walter had promised to think about it over the weekend, but the weekend had not, to put it mildly, proved conducive to calm moral reflection. Not until he was facing the journalists on Monday morning, painting LBI as an outstanding pro-environment corporate partner, had the degree of his own implication hit him.

  He tried, now, to separate his own interests—the fact that, if the son of the Trust’s executive director took his ugly story to the media, Vin Haven might well fire him and LBI might even renege on its West Virginia agreement—from what was best for Joey. However arrogantly and greedily Joey had behaved, it seemed very harsh to ask a twenty-year-old kid with problematic parents to take full moral responsibility and endure a public smearing, maybe even prosecution. And yet Walter was aware that the advice he therefore wanted to give Joey—“Donate your profits to charity, move on with your life”—was highly beneficial to himself and to the Trust. He wanted to ask Lalitha for guidance, but he’d promised Joey not to tell a soul, and so he called Joey and said he was still thinking about it, and would he and Connie like to join him for dinner on his birthday next week?

  “Definitely,” Joey said.

  “I also need to tell you,” Walter said, “that your mother and I have separated. It’s a hard thing to tell you, but it happened on Sunday. She’s moved out for a while, and we’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

  “Yep,” Joey said.

  Yep? Walter frowned. “Did you understand what I just said?”

  “Yep. She already told me.”

  “Right. Of course. How not. And did she—”

  “Yep. She told me a lot. Too much information, as always.”

  “So you understand my—”

  “Yep.”

  “And you’re still OK with having dinner on my birthday?”

  “Yep. We’ll definitely be there.”

  “Well, thank you, Joey. I love you for that. I love you for a lot of things.”

  “Yep.”

  Walter then left a message on Jessica’s cell phone, as he’d done twice a day since the fateful Sunday, without yet hearing back from her. “Jessica, listen,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve talked to your mother, but whatever she’s saying to you, you need to call me back and listen to what I have to say. All right? Please call me back. There are very much two sides to this story, and I think you need to hear both of them.” It would have been useful to be able to add that there was nothing between him and his assistant, but, in fact, his hands and face and nose were so impregnated with the smell of her vagina that it persisted faintly even after showering.

  He was compromised and losing on every front. A further bad blow landed on the second Sunday of his freedom, in the form of a long front-page story in the Times by Dan Caperville: “Coal-Friendly Land Trust Destroys Mountains to Save Them.” The story wasn’t greatly inaccurate factually, but the Times was clearly not beguiled by Walter’s contrarian view of MTR mining. The South American unit of the Warbler Park wasn’t even mentioned in the article, and Walter’s best talking points—new paradigm, green economy, science-based reclamation—were buried near the bottom, well below Jocelyn Zorn’s description of him shouting “I own this [expletive] land!” and Coyle Mathis’s recollection, “He called me stupid to my face.” The article’s take-away, besides the fact that Walter was an extremely disagreeable person, was that the Cerulean Mountain Trust was in bed with the coal industry and the defense contractor LBI, was allowing large-scale MTR on its supposedly pristine reserve, was hated by local environmentalists, had displaced salt-of-the-earth country people from their ancestral homes, and had been founded and funded by a publicity-shy energy mogul, Vincent Haven, who, with the connivance of the Bush administration, was destroying other parts of West Virginia by drilling gas wells.

  “Not so bad, not so bad,” Vin Haven said when Walter called him at his home in Houston on Sunday afternoon. “We got our Warbler Park, nobody can take that away from us. You and your girl did good. As for the rest of it, you can see why I’ve never bothered talking to the press. It’s all downside and no upside.”

  “I talked to Caperville for two hours,” Walter said. “I really thought he was with me on the main points.”

  “Well, and your points are in there,” Vin said. “Albeit not too conspicuously. But don’t you worry about it.”

  “I am worried about it! I mean, yes, we got the park, which is great for the warbler. But the whole thing’s supposed to be a model. This thing reads like a model of how not to do things.”

  “It’ll blow over. Once we get the coal out and start reclaiming, people will see you were right. This Caperville fella will be writing obits by then.”

  “But that’s going to be years!”

  “You got other plans? Is that what this is about? You worried about your résumé?”

  “No, Vin, I’m just frustrated with the media. The birds don’t count for anything, it’s all about the human interest.”

  “And that’s the way it’ll stay until the birds control the media,” Vin said. “Am I going to see you in Whitmanville next month? I told Jim Elder I’d make an appearance at the armor-plant opening, provided I don’t have to pose for any pictures. I could pick you up in the jet on the way there.”

  “Thanks, we’ll fly commercial,” Walter said. “Save some fuel.”

  “Try to remember I make a living selling fuel.”

  “Right, ha ha, good point.”

  It was nice to have Vin’s fatherly approval, but it would have been nicer had Vin been seeming less dubious as a father. The worst thing about the Times piece—leaving aside the shame of looking like an asshole in a publication read and trusted by everyone Walter knew—was his fear that the Times was, in fact, right about the Cerulean Mountain Trust. He’d dreaded being slaughtered in the media, and now that he was being slaughtered he had to attend more seriously to his reasons for dreading it.

  “I heard you doing that interview,” Lalitha said. “You nailed it. The only reason the Times can’t admit we’re right is they’d have to take back all their editorials against MTR.”

  “That’s what they’re doing right now with Bush and Iraq, actually.”

  “Well, you’ve paid your dues. And now you and I get our little reward. Did you tell Mr. Haven we’re going ahead with Free Space?”

  “I was feeling lucky not to be fired,” Walter said. “It didn’t seem like the right moment to tell him I’m planning to spend the entire discretionary fund on something that’ll probably get even worse publicity.”

  “Oh, my sweetheart,” she said, embracing him, resting her head against his heart. “Nobody else understands what good things you’re doing. I’m the only one.”

  “T
hat may actually be true,” he said.

  He would have liked to just be held by her for a while, but her body had other ideas, and his own body agreed with them. They were spending their nights now on her too-small bed, since his own rooms were still full of Patty’s traces, which she’d given him no instructions for dealing with and he couldn’t begin to deal with on his own. It didn’t surprise him that Patty hadn’t been in touch, and yet it seemed tactical of her, adversarial, that she hadn’t. For a person who, by her own admission, made nothing but mistakes, she cast a daunting shadow as she did whatever she was doing out there in the world. Walter felt cowardly to be hiding from her in Lalitha’s room, but what else could he do? He was beset from all sides.

  On his birthday, while Lalitha showed Connie the Trust offices, he took Joey into the kitchen and said he still didn’t know what course of action to recommend. “I really don’t think you should blow the whistle,” he said. “But I don’t trust my motives on that. I’ve sort of lost my moral bearings lately. The thing with your mother, and the thing in the New York Times—did you see that?”

  “Yep,” Joey said. He had his hands in his pockets and was still dressing like a College Republican, in a blue blazer and shiny loafers. For all Walter knew, he was a College Republican.

  “I didn’t come off very well, did I?”

  “Nope,” Joey said. “But I think most people could see it wasn’t a fair article.”

  Walter gratefully, no questions asked, accepted this reassurance from his son. He was feeling very small indeed. “So I have to go to this LBI event in West Virginia next week,” he said. “They’re opening a body-armor plant that all those displaced families are going to be working at. And so I’m not really the right person to ask about LBI, because I’m so implicated myself.”

  “Why do you have to go to that?”

  “I have to give a speech. I have to make grateful on behalf of the Trust.”

  “But you’ve already got your Warbler Park. Why not just blow it off?”

  “Because there’s this other big program Lalitha’s doing with overpopulation, and I have to stay on good terms with my boss. It’s his money we’re spending.”

  “Sounds like you’d better go, then,” Joey said.

  He sounded unpersuaded, and Walter hated looking so weak and small to him. As if to make himself look even weaker and smaller, he asked if he knew what was up with Jessica.

  “I talked to her,” Joey said, hands in pockets, eyes on the floor. “I guess she’s a little mad at you.”

  “I’ve left her like twenty phone messages!”

  “You can probably stop doing that. I don’t think she’s listening to them. People don’t listen to every cellphone message anyway, they just look to see who’s called.”

  “Well, did you tell her that there are two sides to this story?”

  Joey shrugged. “I don’t know. Are there two sides?”

  “Yes, there are! Your mother did a very bad thing to me. An incredibly painful thing.”

  “I don’t really want any more information,” Joey said. “I think she probably already told me about it anyway. I don’t feel like taking sides.”

  “She told you about it when? How long ago?”

  “Last week.”

  So Joey knew what Richard had done—what Walter had let his best friend, his rock-star friend, do. His smallening in his son’s eyes was now complete. “I’m going to have a beer,” he said. “Since it’s my birthday.”

  “Can Connie and I have one, too?”

  “Yes, that’s why we asked you here early. Actually, Connie can drink whatever she wants at the restaurant, too. She’s twenty-one, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “And this is not nagging, this is just a request for information: did you tell Mom you’re married?”

  “Dad, I’m working on it,” Joey said with a tightening of his jaw. “Let me do this my way, OK?”

  Walter had always liked Connie (had even, secretly, rather liked Connie’s mother, for how she’d flirted with him). She was wearing perilously high heels and heavy eye shadow for the occasion; she was still young enough to be trying to look much older. At La Chaumière, he observed with swelling heart how tenderly attentive Joey was to her, leaning over to read her menu with her and coordinate their selections, and how Connie, since Joey wasn’t of legal age, declined Walter’s offer of a cocktail and ordered a Diet Coke for herself. They had a tacit trusting way with each other, a way that reminded Walter of his and Patty’s way when they were very young, the way of a couple united as a front against the world; his eyes misted up at the sight of their wedding bands. Lalitha, ill at ease, trying to distance herself from the young people and align herself with a man nearly twice her age, ordered a martini and proceeded to fill the conversational vacuum with talk of Free Space and the world population crisis, to which Joey and Connie listened with the exquisite courtesy of a couple secure in their two-person world. Although Lalitha avoided proprietary references to Walter, he had no doubt that Joey knew that she was more than simply his assistant. As he drank his third beer of the evening, he became more and more ashamed of what he’d done and more and more grateful to Joey for being so cool about it. Nothing had enraged him more about Joey, over the years, than his shell of coolness; and now, how glad of it he was! His son had won that war, and he was glad of it.

  “So Richard’s still working with you guys?” Joey said.

  “Um, yes,” Lalitha said. “Yes, he’s being very helpful. In fact, he just told me the White Stripes might help us with our big event in August.”

  Joey, as he frowned and considered this, took care not to look at Walter.

  “We should go to that event,” Connie said to Joey. “Is it OK if we come?” she asked Walter.

  “Of course it’s OK,” he said, forcing a smile. “Should be a lot of fun.”

  “I like the White Stripes a lot,” she declared happily, in her subtextless way.

  “I like you a lot,” Walter said. “I’m really glad you’re part of our family. I’m really glad you’re here tonight.”

  “I’m happy to be here, too.”

  Joey didn’t seem to mind this sentimental talk, but his thoughts were clearly elsewhere. On Richard, on his mother, on the family disaster that was unfolding. And there was nothing Walter could say to make it any easier for him.

  “I can’t do it,” Walter told Lalitha when they’d returned, by themselves, to the mansion. “I can’t have that asshole involved anymore.”

  “We already had this discussion,” she said, walking briskly down the corridor to the kitchen. “We already resolved this.”

  “Well, we need to have it again,” he said, pursuing her.

  “No, we don’t. Did you see how Connie’s face lit up when I mentioned the White Stripes? Who else can get us talent like that? We made our decision, it was a good one, and I really don’t need to hear how jealous you are of the person your wife had sex with. I’m tired, and I drank too much, and I need to go to bed now.”

  “He was my best friend,” Walter murmured.

  “I don’t care. I really don’t, Walter. I know you think I’m just another young person, but in fact I’m older than your children, I’m almost twenty-eight. I knew it was a mistake to fall in love with you. I knew you weren’t ready, and now I’m in love with you, and all you can still think about is her.”

  “I think about you constantly. I depend on you so much.”

  “You have sex with me because I want you and you can. But everybody’s world still revolves around your wife. What is so special about her, I will never understand. She spends her whole life upsetting other people. And I just need a little break from it, so I can get some sleep. So maybe you should sleep in your own bed tonight, and think about what you want to do.”

  “What did I say?” he pleaded. “I thought we were having a nice birthday.”

  “I’m tired. It was a tiring evening. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  They pa
rted without a kiss. On his home phone he found a message from Jessica, timed carefully while he was out to dinner, wishing him a happy birthday. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your messages,” she said, “I’ve just been really busy and not sure what I wanted to say. But I was thinking of you today, and I hope you had a nice day. Maybe we can talk sometime, although I’m not sure when I’m going to have a chance.”

  Click.

  It was a relief, for the next week, to sleep by himself. To be in a room still full of Patty’s clothes and books and pictures, to learn to steel himself against her. During the daytime, there was plenty of deferred office work to do: land-management structures to be organized in Colombia and West Virginia, a media counteroffensive to be launched, fresh donors to be sought. Walter had even thought it might be possible to take a break from sex with Lalitha, but their daily propinquity made it not possible—they needed and needed. He did, however, repair to his own bed for sleep.

  The night before they flew to West Virginia, he was packing his overnight bag and got a call from Joey, who reported that he’d decided not to blow the whistle on LBI and Kenny Bartles. “They’re disgusting,” he said. “But my friend Jonathan keeps saying I’d only be hurting myself if I went public. So I’m thinking I’ll just give the extra money away. It’ll spare me a lot of taxes at least. But I wanted to make sure you still think it’s OK.”

  “It’s fine, Joey,” Walter said. “It’s fine with me. I know how ambitious you are, I know how hard it must be to give away all that money. That’s a lot to do right there.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m behind on the deal. I’m just not ahead. And now Connie can go back to school, so that’s good. I’m thinking of taking a year off to work and let her catch up with me.”