Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I don’t know,” Richard said. “Feels a little weird.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Just feels weird.”

  “You’re a singer. That’s what you do. You sing.”

  “I guess I’ve never had the sense that you particularly like what I sing.”

  “Sing me ‘Dark Side of the Bar.’ I love that song.”

  He sighed and bowed his head and crossed his arms and seemed to fall asleep.

  “What?” she said.

  “I think I’m going to leave tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”

  “OK.”

  “There’s not more than two days’ work left. The deck’s already usable as is.”

  “OK.” She stood up and put the sherry glass in the sink. “Can I ask why, though? I mean, it’s really nice having you here.”

  “It’s just better if I go.”

  “OK. Whatever’s best. I think it’s another ten minutes with the chicken, if you want to set the table for us.”

  He didn’t stir from the table.

  “Molly wrote that song,” he said, after a while. “I really had no business recording it. It was a very schmucky thing of me to do. Deliberate, calculated schmuckiness on my part.”

  “It’s really sad and pretty. What were you supposed to do? Not use it?”

  “Basically, yeah. Not use it. That would have been the nice thing.”

  “I’m sorry about the two of you. You guys were together a long time.”

  “We were and we weren’t.”

  “Right, I know that, but still.”

  He sat brooding while she set the table, tossed the salad, and carved the chicken. She hadn’t thought she would have any appetite, but once she took a bite of chicken she remembered that she hadn’t eaten a thing since the evening before, and that her day had started at five in the morning. Richard also ate, silently. At a certain point, their silence became remarkable and thrilling, and then, a while after that, exhausting and discouraging. She cleared the table, put away the leftovers, washed the dishes, and saw that Richard had removed himself to the little screen porch to smoke cigarettes. The sun was finally gone, but the sky was still bright. Yes, she thought, it was better if he left. Better, better, better.

  She went out on the screen porch. “Thinking of going to bed now and doing some reading,” she said.

  Richard nodded. “Sounds good. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “The evenings are so long,” she said. “The light just doesn’t want to die.”

  “This has been a great place to be. You guys are very generous.”

  “Oh, that’s all Walter. It didn’t actually occur to me to offer it to you.”

  “He trusts you,” Richard said. “If you trust him, everything will be fine.”

  “Oh, well, maybe, maybe not.”

  “Do you not want to be with him?”

  It was a good question.

  “I don’t want to lose him,” she said, “if that’s what you mean. I don’t spend my time thinking about leaving him. I’m kind of counting the days till Joey finally gets sick of the Monaghans. He’s still got a full year of high school.”

  “Not sure exactly what the point of that is.”

  “Just that I’m still committed to my family.”

  “Good. It’s a great family.”

  “Right, so I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Patty.” He put out his cigarette in the commemorative Danish Christmas bowl of Dorothy’s that he was using as an ashtray. “I’m not going to be the person who wrecks my best friend’s marriage.”

  “No! God! Of course not!” She was nearly weeping with disappointment. “I mean, really, Richard, I’m sorry, but what did I say? I said I’m going to bed and I’ll see you in the morning. That’s all I said! I said I care about my family. That’s exactly what I said.”

  He gave her a very impatient and skeptical look.

  “Seriously!”

  “OK, sure,” he said. “I didn’t mean to presume anything. I was just trying to figure out the tension here. You may recall we had a conversation like this once before.”

  “I do recall that, yes.”

  “So I thought it was better to mention it than not mention it.”

  “That’s fine. I appreciate it. You’re a really good friend. And you shouldn’t feel you have to leave tomorrow on my account. Nothing to be afraid of here. No reason to run away.”

  “Thanks. I might leave anyway, though.”

  “That’s fine.”

  And she went inside to Dorothy’s bed, which Richard had been using until she and Walter arrived to kick him out of it. Cool air was coming out of the places where it had hidden during the long day, but blue twilight was persisting in every window. It was dream light, insane light, it refused to go away. She turned a lamp on to diminish it. The resistance fighters had been exposed! The jig was up! She lay in her flannel pajamas and replayed everything she’d said in the last hours and was appalled by nearly all of it. She heard the toilet’s tuneful resonance as Richard emptied his bladder into it, and then the flush, and the tuneful water in the pipes, and the water pump laboring briefly in a lower voice. For sheer respite from herself, she picked up War and Peace and read for a long time.

  The autobiographer wonders if things might have gone differently if she hadn’t reached the very pages in which Natasha Rostov, who was obviously meant for the goofy and good Pierre, falls in love with his great cool friend Prince Andrei. Patty had not seen this coming. Pierre’s loss unfolded, as she read it, like a catastrophe in slow motion. Things probably would not have gone any differently, but the effect those pages had on her, their pertinence, was almost psychedelic. She read past midnight, absorbed now even by the military stuff, and was relieved to see, when she turned the lamp off, that the twilight finally was gone.

  In her sleep, at some still-dark hour after that, she rose from the bed and let herself into the hall and then into Richard’s bedroom and crawled into bed with him. The room was cold and she pressed herself close to him.

  “Patty,” he said.

  But she was sleeping and shook her head, resisting awakening, and there was no holding out against her, she was very determined in her sleep. She spread herself over and around him, trying to maximize their contact, feeling big enough to cover him entirely, pressing her face into his head.

  “Patty.”

  “Mm.”

  “If you’re sleeping, you need to wake up.”

  “No, I’m asleep . . . I’m sleeping. Don’t wake me up.”

  His penis was struggling to escape his shorts. She rubbed her belly against it.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, squirming beneath her. “You have to wake up.”

  “No, don’t wake me up. Just fuck me.”

  “Oh, Jesus.” He tried to get away from her, but she followed him amoebically. He grabbed her wrists to keep her at bay. “People who aren’t conscious: believe it or not, I draw the line there.”

  “Mm,” she said, unbuttoning her pajamas. “We’re both asleep. We’re both having really great dreams.”

  “Yes, but people wake up in the morning, and they remember their dreams.”

  “But if they’re only dreams . . . I’m having a dream. I’m going back to sleep. You go to sleep, too. You fall asleep. We’ll both be asleep . . . and then I’ll be gone.”

  That she could say all this, and not only say it but remember it very clearly afterward, does admittedly cast doubt on the authenticity of her sleep state. But the autobiographer is adamant in her insistence that she was not awake at the moment of betraying Walter and feeling his friend split her open. Maybe it was the way she was emulating the fabled ostrich and keeping her eyes firmly shut, or maybe the fact that she afterward retained no memory of specific pleasure, only an abstract awareness of the deed that had been done, but if she performs a thought experiment and imagines a phone ringing in the middle of the deed, the state she imagines being shocked into is one o
f awakeness, from which it logically follows that, in the absence of any ringing phone, the state she was in was a sleeping one.

  Only after the deed was done did she wake up, in some alarm, and bethink herself, and betake herself quickly back to her own bed. The next thing she knew, there was light in the windows. She heard Richard getting up and peeing in the bathroom. She strained to decipher the sounds he then made—whether he was packing up his truck or going back to work. It sounded like he was going back to work! When she finally summoned the courage to come out of hiding, she found him kneeling behind the house, sorting a pile of scrap lumber. There was sun but it was a dim disk in thin clouds. A change in the weather was ruffling the surface of the lake. Without all the dazzle and dapple, the woods looked sparser and emptier.

  “Hey, good morning,” Patty said.

  “Morning,” Richard said, not looking up at her.

  “Have you had breakfast? How about some breakfast? Can I make you some eggs?”

  “I had some coffee, thanks.”

  “I’ll make you some eggs”

  He stood up and put his hands on his hips and surveyed the lumber, still not looking at her. “I’m straightening this up for Walter, so he knows what we’ve got here.”

  “OK.”

  “It’s going to take me a couple hours to pack up. You should just go about your day.”

  “OK. Do you need any help?”

  He shook his head.

  “And you’re sure no breakfast?”

  To this he made no response of any sort.

  There came to her, with curious vividness, a kind of PowerPoint list of names in descending order of their owners’ goodness, topped naturally by Walter’s, which was followed closely by Jessica’s and more distantly by Joey’s and Richard’s, and then, way down in the cellar, in lonely last place, her own ugly name.

  She took coffee to her room and sat listening to the sounds of Richard’s organizing, the rattle of nails being boxed, the rumble of tool chests. Late in the morning she ventured forth to ask if he might at least stay and have some lunch before he left. He assented, though not in a friendly way. She was too frightened to feel like crying, so she went and boiled some eggs for egg salad. Her plan or hope or fantasy, to the extent that she’d allowed herself to be conscious of having one, had been that Richard would forget his intention to leave that day, and that she would sleepwalk again the next night, and that everything would be pleasant and unspoken again the next day, and then more sleepwalking, and then another pleasant day, and then Richard would load up his truck and go back to New York, and much later in life she would recall the amazing intense dreams she’d had for a couple of nights at Nameless Lake, and safely wonder if anything had happened. This old plan (or hope, or fantasy) was now in tatters. Her new plan called for her to try very hard to forget the night before and pretend it hadn’t happened.

  One thing the new plan can safely be said not to have included was leaving lunch half-eaten on the table and then finding her jeans on the floor and the crotch of her bathing suit wedged painfully to one side while he banged her into ecstasy against the innocently papered wall of Dorothy’s old living room, in full daylight and as wide awake as a human being could be. No mark was left on the wall there, and yet the spot remained clear and distinct forever after. It was a little coordinate of the universe permanently charged and altered by its history. It became, that spot, a quiet third presence in the room with her and Walter on the weekends they later spent alone here. This seemed to her, in any case, the first time in her life she’d properly had sex. A real eye-opener, as it were. She was henceforth done for, though it took some time to know this.

  “OK, so,” she said when she was sitting on the floor with her head against the spot where her butt had been. “So, that was interesting.”

  Richard had put his pants back on and was pacing around for no purpose. “I’m just going to go ahead and smoke inside your house if you don’t mind.”

  “I think, under the circumstances, an exception will be granted.”

  The day had turned fully overcast, with a cold breeze moving in through the screens and the screen door. All birdsong had ceased, and the lake seemed desolate. Nature waiting for the chill to pass.

  “What are you wearing a bathing suit for anyway?” Richard said, lighting up.

  Patty laughed. “I’d thought I might go for a swim after you left.”

  “It’s freezing.”

  “Well, not a long swim, obviously.”

  “Just a little mortification of the flesh.”

  “Exactly.”

  The cold breeze and the smoke of Richard’s Camel were mixing like joy and remorse. Patty started laughing again for no reason and then found something funny to say.

  “You may suck at chess,” she said, “but you’re definitely winning at the other game.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Richard said.

  She couldn’t quite gauge his tone of voice, but, fearing that it was angry, she struggled to stop laughing.

  Richard sat down on the coffee table and smoked with great determination. “We have to never do this again,” he said.

  Another snicker broke out of her; she couldn’t help it. “Or maybe just a couple more times and then never again.”

  “Yeah, where does that get us?”

  “Conceivably the itch would be scratched, and that would be that.”

  “Not the way it works, in my experience.”

  “Well, I guess I have to defer to your experience, don’t I? Having none myself.”

  “Here’s the choice,” Richard said. “We stop now, or you leave Walter. And since the latter is not acceptable, we stop now.”

  “Or, third possibility, we could not stop and I could just not tell him.”

  “I don’t want to live that way. Do you?”

  “It’s true that two of the three people he loves most in the world are you and me.”

  “The third being Jessica.”

  “It’s some consolation,” Patty said, “that she would hate me for the rest of my life and totally side with him. He would always have that.”

  “That’s not what he wants, and I’m not going to do it to him.”

  Patty laughed again, at the thought of Jessica. She was a very good and painfully earnest and strenuously mature young person whose exasperation with Patty and Joey—her feckless mom, her ruthless brother—was seldom so extreme as not to seem comical. Patty liked her daughter a great deal and would in fact, realistically, be devastated to forfeit her good opinion. But she still couldn’t help being amused by Jessica’s opprobrium. It was part of how the two of them got along; and Jessica was too absorbed in her own seriousness to be bothered by it.

  “Hey,” she said to Richard, “do you think it’s possible you’re homosexual?”

  “You ask that now?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just that sometimes guys who have to screw a million women are trying to prove something. Disprove something. And it’s sounding to me like you care more about Walter’s happiness than you do about mine.”

  “Trust me on this one. I have no interest in kissing Walter.”

  “No, I know. I know. But there’s still something I mean by that. I mean, I’m sure you’d get tired of me very soon. You’d see me naked when I’m forty-five, and you’d be thinking, Hmm. Do I still want this? I don’t think so! Whereas Walter you never have to get tired of, because you don’t feel like kissing him. You can just be close to him forever.”

  “This is D. H. Lawrence,” Richard said impatiently.

  “Yet another author I need to read.”

  “Or not.”

  She rubbed her tired eyes and her abraded mouth. She was, all in all, very happy with the turn things had taken.

  “You’re really excellent with tools,” she said with another snicker.

  Richard began to pace again. “Try to be serious, OK? Try hard.”

  “This is our time right now, Richard. That’s all I’m saying. We ha
ve a couple of days, and we either use them or we don’t. They’re going to be over soon either way.”

  “I made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t think it through. I should have taken off yesterday morning.”

  “All but one part of me would have been glad if you did. Admittedly, that one part is a fairly important part.”

  “I like seeing you,” he said. “I like being around you. It makes me happy to think of Walter being with you—you’re that kind of person. I thought it would be OK to stay a couple of extra days. But it was a mistake.”

  “Welcome to Pattyland. Mistakeland.”

  “It didn’t occur to me that you would sleepwalk.”

  She laughed. “That was kind of a brilliant stroke, wasn’t it?”

  “Jesus. Cool it, OK? You’re annoying me.”

  “Yeah, but the great thing is it doesn’t even matter. What’s the worst that can happen now? You’ll be annoyed with me and leave.”

  He looked at her then, and he smiled, and the room filled (metaphorically) with sunshine. He was, in her opinion, a very beautiful man.

  “I do like you,” he said. “I like you a lot. I always liked you.”

  “Same back at you.”

  “I wanted you to have a good life. Do you understand? I thought you were a person who was actually worthy of Walter.”

  “And so that’s why you went off that night in Chicago and never came back.”

  “It wouldn’t have worked in New York. It would have ended badly.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do say so.”

  Patty nodded. “So you actually wanted to sleep with me that night.”

  “Yeah. A lot. But not just sleep with you. Talk to you. Listen to you. That was the difference.”

  “Well, I guess that’s nice to know. I can cross that worry off my list now, twenty years later.”

  Richard lit another cigarette and they sat there for a while, separated by a cheap old Oriental rug of Dorothy’s. There was a sighing in the trees, the voice of an autumn that was never far away in northern Minnesota.

  “This is potentially kind of a hard situation, then, isn’t it,” Patty finally said.