Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  He was shirtless, his chest hair flat and straight with running sweat. “Not a great neighborhood for that,” he said.

  “Well, maybe you’ll come with me.”

  “Give me another hour.”

  “No, forget it,” she said, “I’ll just go by myself. Do we have a key to this place?”

  “You really want to go out by yourself on crutches?”

  “Yes, unless you want to come with me.”

  “Which, as I just said, I would do in an hour.”

  “Well, I don’t feel like waiting an hour.”

  “In that case,” Richard said, “the key is on the kitchen table.”

  “Why are you being so mean to me?”

  He shut his eyes and seemed to count silently to ten. It was obvious how much he disliked women and the things they said.

  “Why don’t you take a cold shower,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

  “You know, yesterday, for a while, it seemed like you were liking me.”

  “I do like you. I’m just doing some work here.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Work.”

  The streets in the afternoon sun were even hotter than the apartment. Patty swung herself along at a considerable clip, trying not to cry too obviously, trying to appear as if she knew where she was going. The river, when she came to it, looked more benign than it had in the night, looked merely weedy and polluted rather than evil and all-swallowing. On the other side of it were Mexican streets festooned for some imminent or recent Mexican holiday, or maybe just permanently festooned. She found an air-conditioned taqueria where she was stared at but not harassed and could sit and drink a Coke and wallow in her girlish misery. Her body so wanted Richard, but the rest of her could see that she’d made a Mistake in coming along with him: that everything she’d hoped for from him and Chicago had been a big fat fantasy in her head. Phrases familiar from high-school Spanish, lo siento and hace mucho calor and ¿qué quiere la señora?, kept surfacing in the surrounding hubbub. She summoned courage and ordered three tacos and devoured them and watched innumerable buses roll by outside the windows, each trailing a wake of shimmering filth. Time passed in a peculiar manner which the autobiographer, with her now rather abundant experience of murdered afternoons, is able to identify as depressive (at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chockfull second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour), until finally, as the workday ended, groups of young laborers came in and began to pay too much attention to her, talking about her muletas, and she had to leave.

  By the time she’d retraced her steps, the sun was an orange orb at the end of the east-west streets. Her intention, as she now allowed herself to realize, had been to stay out long enough to make Richard very worried about her, and in this she seemed completely to have failed. Nobody was home at the apartment. The walls of her room were nearly finished, the floor carefully swept, the bed neatly made up for her with real sheets and pillows. On the Indian bedspread was a note from Richard, in microscopic capital letters, giving her the address of a club and directions on how to take the El there. It concluded: WORD OF WARNING: I HAD TO BRING OUR HOSTS ALONG.

  Before deciding whether to go out, Patty lay down for a short nap and was awakened many hours later, in great disorientation, by the return of Herrera’s friends. She hopped, one-legged, into the main room and there learned, from the most disagreeable of them, the underpanted one from the night before, that Richard had gone off with some other people and had asked that Patty be told not to wait up for him—he’d be back in plenty of time to get her to New York.

  “What time is it now?” she said.

  “About one o’clock.”

  “In the morning?”

  Herrera’s friend leered at her. “No, there’s a total eclipse of the sun.”

  “And where is Richard?”

  “He went off with a couple of girls he met. He didn’t say where.”

  As noted, Patty was bad at computing driving distances. To get to Westchester in time to go with her family to the Mohonk Mountain House, she and Richard would have had to leave Chicago at five o’clock that morning. She slept long past that and awoke to gray and stormy weather, a different city, a different season. Richard was still nowhere in sight. She ate stale doughnuts and turned some pages of Hemingway until it was eleven and even she could see that the math wasn’t going to work.

  She bit the bullet and called her parents, collect.

  “Chicago!” Joyce said. “I can’t believe this. Are you near an airport? Can you catch a plane? We thought you’d be here by now. Daddy wants to get an early start, with all the weekend traffic.”

  “I messed up,” Patty said. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Well, can you get there by tomorrow morning? The big dinner isn’t until tomorrow night.”

  “I’ll try really hard,” Patty said.

  Joyce had been in the state assembly for three years now. If she had not gone on to enumerate to Patty all the relatives and family friends converging on Mohonk for this important tribute to a marriage, and the tremendous excitement with which Patty’s three siblings were anticipating the weekend, and how greatly honored she (Joyce) felt by the outpouring of sentiment from literally all four corners of the country, it’s possible that Patty would have done what it took to get to Mohonk. As things were, though, a strange peace and certainty settled over her while she listened to her mother. Light rain had begun to fall on Chicago; good smells of quenched concrete and Lake Michigan were carried inside by the wind stirring the canvas curtains. With an unfamiliar lack of resentment, a newly cool eye, Patty looked into herself and saw that no harm or even much hurt would come to anyone if she simply skipped the anniversary. Most of the work had already been done. She saw that she was almost free, and to take the last step felt kind of terrible, but not terrible in a bad way, if that makes any sense.

  She was sitting by a window, smelling the rain and watching the wind bend the weeds and bushes on the roof of a long-abandoned factory, when the call from Richard came.

  “Very sorry about this,” he said. “I’ll be there within the hour.”

  “You don’t have to hurry,” she said. “It’s already way too late.”

  “But your party’s tomorrow night.”

  “No, Richard, that was the dinner. I was supposed to be there today. Today by five o’clock.”

  “Shit. Are you kidding me?”

  “Did you really not remember that?”

  “It’s a little mixed up in my head at this point. I’m somewhat short on sleep.”

  “OK, well, anyway. There’s no hurry at all. I think I’m going to go home now.”

  And go home she did. Pushed her suitcase down the stairs and followed with her crutches, flagged a gypsy cab on Halstead Street, and took one Greyhound bus to Minneapolis and another to Hibbing, where Gene Berglund was dying in a Lutheran hospital. It was about forty degrees and pouring rain on the vacant small-hour streets of downtown Hibbing. Walter’s cheeks were rosier than ever. Outside the bus station, in his father’s cigarette-reeking gas-guzzler, Patty threw her arms around his neck and took the plunge of seeing how he kissed, and was gratified to find he did it very nicely.

  *Patty didn’t see a picture of Qaddafi until some years after college, and even then, though struck immediately by his resemblance to Richard Katz, she didn’t make anything special of the fact that Libya seemed to her to have the world’s cutest head of state.

  Chapter 3: Free Markets Foster Competition

  On the chance that, regarding Patty’s parents, a note of complaint or even outright blame has crept into these pages, the autobiographer here acknowledges her profound gratitude to Joyce and Ray for at least one thing, namely, their never encouraging her to be Creative in the Arts, the way they did with her sisters. Joyce and Ray’s neglect of Patty, however much it stung when she was younger, seems more and more benign when she considers her sisters, who are now in their early forties and living alone in New York, too eccentric a
nd/or entitled-feeling to sustain a long-term relationship, and still accepting parental subsidies while struggling to achieve an artistic success that they were made to believe was their special destiny. It turns out to have been better after all to be considered dumb and dull than brilliant and extraordinary. This way, it’s a pleasant surprise that Patty is even a little bit Creative, rather than an embarrassment that she isn’t more so.

  A great thing about the young Walter was how much he wanted Patty to win. Where Eliza had once mustered unsatisfying little driblets of partisanship on her behalf, Walter gave her full-bore infusions of hostility toward anybody (her parents, her siblings) who made her feel bad. And since he was so intellectually honest in other areas of life, he had excellent credibility when he criticized her family and signed on with her questionable programs of competing with it. He may not have been exactly what she wanted in a man, but he was unsurpassable in providing the rabid fandom which, at the time, she needed even more than romance.

  It’s easy now to see that Patty would have been well advised to take some years to develop a career and a more solid post-athletic identity, get some experience with other kinds of men, and generally acquire more maturity before embarking on being a mother. But even though she was finished as an intercollegiate player, there was still a shot clock in her head, she was still in the buzzer’s thrall, she needed more than ever to keep winning. And the way to win—her obvious best shot at defeating her sisters and her mother—was to marry the nicest guy in Minnesota, live in a bigger and better and more interesting house than anybody else in her family, pop out the babies, and do everything as a parent that Joyce hadn’t. And Walter, despite being an avowed feminist and an annually renewing Student-level member of Zero Population Growth, embraced her entire domestic program without reservation, because she really was exactly what he wanted in a woman.

  They got married three weeks after her college graduation—almost exactly a year after she’d taken the bus to Hibbing. It had fallen to Walter’s mom, Dorothy, to frown and express concern, in her soft and tentative and nevertheless quite stubborn way, about Patty’s determination to be married at the Hennepin County courthouse instead of in a proper wedding hosted by her parents in Westchester. Wouldn’t it be better, Dorothy softly wondered, to include the Emersons? She understood that Patty wasn’t close to her family, but, still, mightn’t she later come to regret excluding them from such a momentous occasion? Patty tried to paint Dorothy a picture of what a Westchester wedding would be like: two hundred or so of Joyce and Ray’s closest friends and Joyce’s biggest-ticket campaign contributors; pressure from Joyce on Patty to select her middle sister as the maid of honor and to let her other sister do an interpretive dance during the ceremony; unbridled champagne intake leading Ray to make some joke about lesbians within earshot of Patty’s basketball friends. Dorothy’s eyes welled up a little, maybe in sympathy with Patty or maybe in sadness at Patty’s coldness and harshness on the subject of her family. Wouldn’t it be possible, she softly persisted, to insist on a small private ceremony in which everything would be exactly how Patty wanted it?

  Not the least of Patty’s reasons to avoid a wedding was the fact that Richard would have to be Walter’s best man. Her thinking here was partly obvious and partly had to do with her fear of what would happen if Richard ever met her middle sister. (The autobiographer will now finally man up and say the sister’s name: Abigail.) It was bad enough that Eliza had had Richard; to see him hooking up with Abigail, even for one night, would have just about finished Patty off. Needless to say, she didn’t mention this to Dorothy. She said she guessed she just wasn’t a very ceremonial person.

  As a concession, she did take Walter to meet her family in the spring before she married him. It pains the autobiographer to admit that she was a tiny bit embarrassed to let her family see him, and, worse, that this may have been another reason why she didn’t want a wedding. She loved him (and does love him, does love him) for qualities that made abundant sense to her in their two-person private world but weren’t necessarily apparent to the sort of critical eye that she was sure her sisters, Abigail in particular, would train on him. His nervous giggle, his too-readily reddening face, his very niceness: these attributes were dear to her in the larger context of the man. A source of pride, even. But the unkind part of her, which exposure to her family always seemed to bring out in force, couldn’t help regretting that he wasn’t six-foot-four and very cool.

  Joyce and Ray, to their credit, and perhaps in their secret relief that Patty had turned out to be heterosexual (secret because Joyce, for one, stood ready to be strenuously Welcoming to Difference), were on their very best behavior. Hearing that Walter had never been to New York, they became gracious ambassadors to the city, urging Patty to take him to museum exhibitions that Joyce herself had been too busy in Albany to have seen, and then meeting up with them for dinner at Times-approved restaurants, including one in SoHo, which was then still a dark and exciting neighborhood. Patty’s worry that her parents would make fun of Walter gave way to the worry that Walter would take their side and not see why they were unbearable to her: would begin to suspect that the real problem was Patty, and would lose that blind faith in her goodness which already, in less than a year with him, she had rather desperately come to count on.

  Thankfully Abigail, who was a high-end restaurant hound and insisted on turning several of the dinners into awkward fivesomes, was in peak disagreeable form. Unable to imagine people gathering for some reason besides listening to her, she prattled about the world of New York theater (by definition an unfair world since she had made no progress in it since her understudy breakthrough); about the “sleazy slimeball” Yale professor with whom she’d had insuperable Creative differences; about some friend of hers named Tammy who’d self-financed a production of Hedda Gabler in which she (Tammy) had brilliantly starred; about hangovers and rent control and disturbing third-party sexual incidents that Ray, refilling and refilling his own wineglass, demanded every prurient detail of. Midway through the final dinner, in SoHo, Patty got so fed up with Abigail’s shanghaiing of the attention that ought to have been lavished on Walter (who had politely attended to every word of Abigail’s) that she flat-out told her sister to shut up and let other people talk. There ensued a bad interval of silent manipulation of tableware. Then Patty, making comical gestures of drawing water from a well, got Walter talking about himself. Which was a mistake, in hindsight, because Walter was passionate about public policy and, not knowing what real politicians are like, believed that a state assemblywoman would be interested in hearing his ideas.

  He asked Joyce if she was familiar with the Club of Rome. Joyce confessed that she was not. Walter explained that the Club of Rome (one of whose members he’d invited to Macalester for a lecture two years earlier) was devoted to exploring the limits of growth. Mainstream economic theory, both Marxist and free-market, Walter said, took for granted that economic growth was always a positive thing. A GDP growth rate of one or two percent was considered modest, and a population growth rate of one percent was considered desirable, and yet, he said, if you compounded these rates over a hundred years, the numbers were terrible: a world population of eighteen billion and world energy consumption ten times greater than today’s. And if you went another hundred years, with steady growth, well, the numbers were simply impossible. So the Club of Rome was seeking more rational and humane ways of putting the brakes on growth than simply destroying the planet and letting everybody starve to death or kill each other.

  “The Club of Rome,” Abigail said. “Is that like an Italian Playboy Club?”

  “No,” Walter said quietly. “It’s a group of people who are challenging our preoccupation with growth. I mean, everybody is so obsessed with growth, but when you think about it, for a mature organism, a growth is basically a cancer, right? If you have a growth in your mouth, or a growth in your colon, it’s bad news, right? So there’s this small group of intellectuals and philanthropists who are
trying to step outside our tunnel vision and influence government policy at the highest levels, both in Europe and the Western Hemisphere.”

  “The Bunnies of Rome,” Abigail said.

  “Nor-fock-a Virginia!” Ray said in a grotesque Italian accent.

  Joyce loudly cleared her throat. En famille, when Ray became silly and dirty because of wine, she could simply retreat into her private Joycean reveries, but in her future son-in-law’s presence she had no choice but to be embarrassed. “Walter is talking about an interesting idea,” she said. “I’m not particularly familiar with this idea, or with this . . . club. But it’s certainly a very provocative perspective on our world situation.”

  Walter, not seeing the little neck-slicing gesture that Patty was making, pressed on. “The whole reason we need something like the Club of Rome,” he said, “is that a rational conversation about growth is going to have to begin outside the ordinary political process. Obviously you know this yourself, Joyce. If you’re trying to get elected, you can’t even talk about slowing the growth rate, let alone reversing it. It’s total political poison.”

  “Safe to say,” Joyce said with a dry laugh.

  “But somebody has to talk about it, and try to influence policy, because otherwise we’re going to kill the planet. We’re going to choke on our own multiplication.”

  “Speaking of choking, Daddy,” Abigail said, “is that your private bottle there, or can we have some, too?”

  “We’ll get another,” Ray said.

  “I don’t think we need another,” Joyce said.

  Ray raised his Joyce-stilling hand. “Joyce—just—just—calm down. We’re fine here.”

  Patty, with a frozen smile, sat looking at the glamorous and plutocratic parties at other tables in the restaurant’s lovely discreet light. There was, of course, nowhere better in the world to be than New York City. This fact was the foundation of her family’s satisfaction with itself, the platform from which all else could be ridiculed, the collateral of adult sophistication that bought them the right to behave like children. To be Patty and sitting in that SoHo restaurant was to confront a force she had not the slightest chance of competing with. Her family had claimed New York and was never going to budge. Simply never coming here again—just forgetting that restaurant scenes like this even existed—was her only option.