Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Richard had intended to return to the East by the end of May, but, being Richard, he was still working on the deck in mid-June when Patty went up to enjoy some weeks in the country. Walter went along for the first four days, on his way to a money-tree-shaking V.I.P. fishing trip that a major Nature Conservancy donor was hosting at his deluxe “camp” in Saskatchewan. To make up for her poor showing in the winter, Patty was a whirlwind of hospitality at the lake house, cooking up splendid meals for Walter and Richard while they hammered and sawed in the back yard. She was proudly sober the whole time. In the evening, without Joey in the house, she had no interest in TV. She sat in Dorothy’s favorite armchair, reading War and Peace at Walter’s long-standing recommendation, while the men played chess. Thankfully for all concerned, Walter was better than Richard at chess and usually won, but Richard was dogged and kept asking for another game, and Patty knew that this was hard on Walter—that he was straining very hard to win, getting himself wound up, and would need hours to fall asleep afterward.

  “More of this clotting-of-the-middle shit,” Richard said. “You’re always tying up the middle. I hate that.”

  “I’m a clotter of the middle,” Walter affirmed in a voice breathless with the suppression of competitive glee.

  “It drives me crazy.”

  “Well, because it’s effective,” Walter said.

  “It’s only effective because I don’t have enough discipline to make you pay for it.”

  “You play a very entertaining game. I never know what’s coming.”

  “Yeah, and I keep losing.”

  The days were bright and long, the nights startlingly cool. Patty loved early summer in the north, it took her back to her first days in Hibbing with Walter. The crisp air and moist earth, the conifer smells, the morning of her life. She felt she’d never been younger than she’d been at twenty-one. It was as if her Westchester childhood, though chronologically prior, had somehow taken place in a later and more fallen time. Inside the house was a faint pleasant musty smell reminiscent of Dorothy. Outside was the lake that Joey and Patty had decided to call Nameless, newly melted, dark with bark and needles, reflecting bright fair-weather clouds. In summer, deciduous trees hid the only other nearby house, which a family named Lundner used on weekends and in August. Between the Berglunds’ house and the lake was a grassy hillock with a few mature birch trees, and when the sun or a breeze discouraged mosquitoes Patty could lie on the grass with a book for hours and feel completely apart from the world, except for the rare airplane overhead and the even rarer car passing on the unpaved county road.

  The day before Walter left for Saskatchewan, her heart began to race. It was just a thing her heart was doing, this racing. The next morning, after she drove Walter to the airstrip in Grand Rapids and returned to the house, it was racing so much that an egg slipped out of her hand and fell on the floor while she was making pancake batter. She put her hands on the counter and took deep breaths before kneeling down to clean it up. The finish work in the kitchen had been left for Walter to do at some later date, but grouting the new tile floor ought to have been within Richard’s capabilities, and he hadn’t gotten to it yet. On the plus side, as he’d told them, he’d taught himself to play the banjo.

  Though the sun had been up for four hours, it was still fairly early morning when he emerged from his bedroom in jeans and a T-shirt advertising his support for Subcomandante Marcos and the liberation of Chiapas.

  “Buckwheat pancakes?” Patty said brightly.

  “Sounds great.”

  “I could fry you some eggs if you’d rather.”

  “I like a good pancake.”

  “Easy enough to do some bacon, too.”

  “I wouldn’t say no to bacon.”

  “OK! Pancakes and bacon it will be.”

  If Richard’s heart was racing also, he gave no sign of it. She stood and watched him put away two stacks of pancakes, holding his fork in the civilized grip that she happened to know Walter had taught him as a freshman at college.

  “What are your plans for the day?” he asked her with low to moderate interest.

  “Gosh. I hadn’t thought about it. Nothing! I’m on vacation. I think I’m going to do nothing this morning, and then make you some lunch.”

  He nodded and ate, and it occurred to her that she was a person who dwelt in fantasies with essentially no relation to reality. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed toilet lid, her heart racing, until she heard Richard go outside and begin handling lumber. There’s a hazardous sadness to the first sounds of someone else’s work in the morning; it’s as if stillness experiences pain in being broken. The first minute of the workday reminds you of all the other minutes that a day consists of, and it’s never a good thing to think of minutes as individuals. Only after other minutes have joined the naked, lonely first minute does the day become more safely integrated in its dayness. Patty waited for this to happen before she left the bathroom.

  She took War and Peace out to the grassy knoll, with the vague ancient motive of impressing Richard with her literacy, but she was mired in a military section and kept reading the same page over and over. A melodious bird that Walter had despaired of teaching her the proper name of, a veery or a vireo, grew accustomed to her presence and began to sing in a tree directly above her. Its song was like an idée fixe that it couldn’t get out of its little head.

  How she felt: as if a ruthless and well-organized party of resistance fighters had assembled under cover of the darkness of her mind, and so it was imperative not to let the spotlight of her conscience shine anywhere near them, not even for one second. Her love of Walter and her loyalty to him, her wish to be a good person, her understanding of Walter’s lifelong competition with Richard, her sober appraisal of Richard’s character, and just the all-around shittiness of sleeping with your spouse’s best friend: these superior considerations stood ready to annihilate the resistance fighters. And so she had to keep the forces of conscience fully diverted. She couldn’t even allow herself to consider how she was dressing—she had to instantly deflect the thought of putting on a particular flattering sleeveless item before taking midmorning coffee and cookies out to Richard, she had to flick that thought right away from her—because the tiniest hint of ordinary flirting would attract the searchlight, and the spectacle it illuminated would be just too revolting and shameful and pathetic. Even if Richard wasn’t disgusted by it, she herself would be. And if he noticed it and called her out on it, the way he’d called her out on her drinking: disaster, humiliation, the worst.

  Her pulse, however, knew—and was telling her with its racing—that she would probably not have another chance like this. Not before she was fully over the hill physically. Her pulse was registering her keen covert awareness that the fishing camp in Saskatchewan could only be reached by biplane, radio, or satellite phone, and that Walter would not be calling her in the next five days unless there was an emergency.

  She left Richard’s lunch on the table and drove to the nearby tiny town of Fen City. She could see how easily she could have a traffic accident, and became so lost in imagining herself killed and Walter sobbing over her mutilated body and Richard stoically comforting him that she almost ran the only stop sign in Fen City; she dimly heard the screaming of her brakes.

  It was all in her head, it was all in her head! The only thing that gave her any hope was how well she was concealing her own inner turmoil. She’d been maybe a little abstracted and shaky in the last four days, but infinitely better behaved than she’d been in February. If she herself was managing to keep her dark forces hidden, it stood to reason that Richard might have corresponding dark forces that he was doing just as good a job of hiding. But this was a tiny sliver of hope indeed; it was the way insane people lost in fantasies reasoned.

  She stood in front of the Fen City Co-op’s meager selection of domestic beers, the Millers and the Coorses and the Budweisers, and tried to make a decision. Held a sixpack in her hand as if she might be a
ble to judge in advance, through the aluminum of the cans, how she would feel if she drank it. Richard had told her to cool it with the drinking; she’d been ugly to him drunk. She reshelved the sixpack and wrenched herself away to less compelling parts of the store, but it was hard to plan dinner when you felt like throwing up. She returned to the beer shelves like a bird repeating its song. The various beer cans had different decorations but all contained the identical weak low-end brew. It occurred to her to drive to Grand Rapids and buy some actual wine. It occurred to her to drive back to the house without buying anything at all. But then where would she be? A weariness set in as she stood and vacillated: a premonition that none of the possible impending outcomes would bring enough relief or pleasure to justify her current heart-racing wretchedness. She saw, in other words, what it meant to have become a deeply unhappy person. And yet the autobiographer now envies and pities the younger Patty standing there in the Fen City Co-op and innocently believing that she’d reached the bottom: that, one way or another, the crisis would be resolved in the next five days.

  A chubby teenage girl at the cash register had taken an interest in her paralysis. Patty gave her a lunatic smile and went and got a plastic-wrapped chicken and five ugly potatoes and some humble, limp leeks. The only thing worse than inhabiting her anxiety undrunk, she decided, would be to be drunk and still inhabiting it.

  “I’m going to roast a chicken for us,” she told Richard when she got home.

  Flecks of sawdust were resting in his hair and eyebrows and sticking to his sweaty, broad forehead. “That’s very nice of you,” he said.

  “Deck’s looking really great,” she said. “It’s a wonderful improvement. How much longer do you think it’s going to take?”

  “Couple of days, maybe.”

  “You know, Walter and I can finish it up ourselves if you want to get back to New York. I know you meant to be back there by now.”

  “It’s good to see a job finished,” he said. “It won’t be more than a couple of days. Unless you’re wanting to be alone here?”

  “Do I want to be alone here?”

  “I mean, it’s a lot of noise.”

  “Oh, no, I like construction noise. It’s very comforting somehow.”

  “Unless it’s your neighbors.”

  “Well, I hate those neighbors, so that’s different.”

  “Right.”

  “So maybe I’ll get working on that chicken.”

  She must have betrayed something in the way she said that, because Richard gave her a little frown. “You OK?”

  “No no no,” she said, “I love being up here. I love it. This is my favorite place in the world. It doesn’t solve anything, if you know what I mean. But I love getting up in the morning. I love smelling the air.”

  “I meant are you OK with my being here.”

  “Oh, totally. God. Yes. Totally. Yah! I mean, you know how Walter loves you. I feel like we’ve been friends with you for so long, but I’ve hardly ever really talked to you. It’s a nice opportunity. But you truly shouldn’t feel you have to stay, if you want to get back to New York. I’m so used to being alone up here. It’s fine.”

  This speech seemed to have taken her a very long time to get to the end of. It was followed by a brief silence between them.

  “I’m just trying to hear what you’re actually saying,” Richard said. “Whether you actually want me here or not.”

  “God,” she said, “I keep saying it, don’t I? Didn’t I just say it?”

  She could see his patience with her, his patience with a female, reach its end. He rolled his eyes and picked up a section of two-by-four. “I’m going to wrap up here and then go for a swim.”

  “It’s going to be cold.”

  “Every day a little bit less so.”

  Going back into the house, she experienced a cramp of envy of Walter, who was allowed to tell Richard that he loved him, and who wanted nothing destabilizing in return, nothing worse than to be loved himself. How easy men had it! She felt in comparison like a bloated sedentary spider, spinning her dry web year after year, waiting. She suddenly understood how the girls of years ago had felt, the girls of college who’d resented Walter’s free pass with Richard and been irritated by his pesky presence. She saw Walter, for a moment, as Eliza had seen him.

  I might have to do it, I might have to do it, I might have to do it, she said to herself while washing the chicken and assuring herself that she didn’t actually mean it. She heard a splash from the lake and watched Richard swimming out in tree shadow toward water still gilded with afternoon light. If he really hated sunshine, the way he claimed to in his old song, northern Minnesota in June was a trying place to be. The days lasted so long that you found yourself surprised the sun wasn’t running low on fuel by the end of them. Just kept burning and burning. She yielded to an impulse to grab herself between the legs, to test the waters, for the shock of it, in lieu of going for a swim herself. Am I alive? Do I possess a body?

  There were very odd angles in her cutting of the potatoes. They looked like some kind of geometric brainteaser.

  Richard, after his shower, came into the kitchen in a textless T-shirt that must have been bright red some decades earlier. His hair was momentarily subdued, a youthful shiny black.

  “You changed your look this winter,” he remarked to Patty.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean, ‘no’? Your hair’s different, you look great.”

  “Really hardly any different. Just a tiny bit different.”

  “And—possibly put on a little weight?”

  “No. Well. A little.”

  “You look good with it. You look better not so skinny.”

  “Is that a nice way of saying I’ve gotten fat?”

  He shut his eyes and grimaced as if trying to remain patient. Then he opened his eyes and said, “Where is this bullshit coming from?”

  “Ah?”

  “Do you want me to leave? Is that it? There’s this weird phony thing you’re doing that gives me the impression you’re not comfortable with me here.”

  The roasting chicken smelled like something of the sort she used to eat. She washed her hands and dried them, rummaged in the back of an unfinished cabinet, and found a bottle of cooking sherry covered with construction dust. She filled a juice glass with it and sat down at the table. “OK, frankly? I’m a little nervous around you.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “You have no reason to be.”

  This was what she hadn’t wanted to hear. “I’m having this one glass,” she said.

  “You’ve mistaken me for somebody who gives a shit how much you drink.”

  She nodded. “OK. Good. That helps to know.”

  “You’ve been wanting a drink this whole time? Jesus. Have a drink.”

  “Doing just that.”

  “You know, you’re a very strange person. I mean that as a compliment.”

  “So taken.”

  “Walter got very, very lucky.”

  “Ho, well, that’s the unfortunate thing, isn’t it. I’m not sure he sees it that way anymore.”

  “Oh, he does. Believe me, he does.”

  She shook her head. “I was going to say that I don’t think he likes the things that are strange about me. He likes the good strange all right, but he’s none too happy about the bad strange, and the bad strange is mostly what he gets these days. I was going to say that it’s ironic that you, who don’t seem to mind the bad strange, are not the person I’m married to.”

  “You wouldn’t want to be married to me.”

  “No, I’m sure it would be very bad. I’ve heard the stories.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, though not surprised.”

  “Walter tells me everything.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  Out on the lake a duck was quacking about something. Mallards nested in the reedy far corner of it.

  “Did Walter ever tell you I slash
ed Blake’s snow tires?” Patty said.

  Richard raised his eyebrows, and she told him the story.

  “That’s really fucked up,” he said admiringly, when she’d finished.

  “I know. Isn’t it?”

  “Does Walter know this?”

  “Um. Good question.”

  “I take it you don’t tell him everything.”

  “Oh, God, Richard, I don’t tell him anything.”

  “You really could, I think. You might find he knows a lot more than you think he does.”

  She took a deep breath and asked what kinds of secret things Walter knew about her.

  “He knows you’re not happy,” Richard said.

  “I really don’t think that requires great powers of discernment. What else?”

  “He knows you blame him for Joey moving out of the house.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “That I have more or less told him. That doesn’t really count.”

  “OK. So why don’t you tell me. Besides the fact that you’re a tireslasher, what does he not know about you?”

  When Patty considered this question, all she could see was the great emptiness of her life, the emptiness of her nest, the pointlessness of her existence now that the kids had flown. The sherry had made her sad. “Why don’t you sing me a song while I get dinner on the table. Will you do that?”