Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  At times like this, he felt like a sick old fucker living in the woods, and he was careful to turn his phone off, lest Jessica call to check up on him. Joey he could still be himself with, because Joey was not only a man but a Berglund man, too cool and tactful to intrude, and although Connie was trickier, because there was always sex in Connie’s voice, sex and innocent flirtation, it was never too hard to get her chattering about herself and Joey, because she was so happy. The real ordeal was hearing from Jessica. Her voice sounded more than ever like Patty’s, and Walter was often perspiring by the end of their conversations, from the effort of keeping them focused on her life or, failing that, on his work. There had been a time, after the car accident that had effectively ended his life, when Jessica had descended on him and nursed him in his grief. She’d done this partly in expectation of his getting better, and when she’d realized he would not be getting better, didn’t feel like getting better, never wanted to get better, she’d become very angry with him. It had taken him several hard years to teach her, with coldness and sternness, to leave him alone and attend to her own life. Each time a silence fell between them now, he could feel her wondering whether to renew her therapeutic assault, and he found it deeply grueling to invent new conversational gambits, week after week, to prevent her from doing so.

  When he finally got home from his Minneapolis errand, after a productive three-day visit to a big Conservancy parcel in Beltrami County, he found a sheet of paper stapled to the birch tree at the head of his driveway. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? it asked. MY NAME IS BOBBY AND MY FAMILY MISSES ME. Bobby’s black face didn’t reproduce well in photocopy—his pale, hovering eyes looked spectral and lost—but Walter was now able to see, as he hadn’t before, how somebody might find such a face worthy of protection and tenderness. He didn’t regret having removed a menace from the ecosystem, and thereby saved many bird lives, but the small-animal vulnerability in Bobby’s face made him aware of a fatal defect in his own makeup, the defect of pitying even the beings he most hated. He proceeded down his driveway, trying to enjoy the momentary peace that had fallen on his property, the absence of anxiety about Bobby, the spring evening light, the white-throated sparrows singing pure sweet Canada Canada Canada, but he had the sense of having aged many years in the four nights he’d been away.

  That very evening, while frying some eggs and toasting some bread, he got a call from Jessica. And maybe she’d called him with a purpose, or maybe she heard something in his voice now, some loss of resolve, but as soon as they’d exhausted the meager news that her foregoing week had produced, he fell silent for so long that she was emboldened to renew her old assault.

  “So I saw Mom the other night,” she said. “She told me something interesting that I thought you might want to hear. Do you want to hear it?”

  “No,” he said sternly.

  “Well, do you mind if I ask why not?”

  From outdoors, in blue twilight, through the open kitchen window, came the cry of a distant child calling Bobby!

  “Look,” Walter said. “I know you and she are close, and that’s fine with me. I’d be sorry if you weren’t. I want you to have two parents. But if I were interested in hearing from her, I could call her up myself. I don’t want you in the position of carrying messages.”

  “I don’t mind being in that position.”

  “I’m saying I mind. I’m not interested in getting any messages.”

  “I don’t think this is a bad message she wants to send you.”

  “I don’t care what kind of message it is.”

  “Well then can I ask you why you don’t just get divorced? If you don’t want to have anything to do with her? Because as long as you’re not divorced, you’re sort of giving her hope.”

  A second child’s voice had now joined the first, the two of them together calling Bobbbby! Bobbbbbby! Walter closed the window and said to Jessica, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “OK, fine, Dad, but could you at least answer my question? Why you don’t get divorced?”

  “It’s just not something I want to think about right now.”

  “It’s been six years! Isn’t it time to start thinking about it? If only out of simple fairness?”

  “If she wants a divorce, she can send me a letter. She can have a lawyer send me a letter.”

  “But I’m saying, why don’t you want a divorce?”

  “I don’t want to deal with the things it would stir up. I have a right not to do something I don’t want to do.”

  “What would it stir up?”

  “Pain. I’ve had enough pain. I’m still in pain.”

  “I know you are, Dad. But Lalitha’s gone now. She’s been gone for six years.”

  Walter shook his head violently, as if he’d had ammonia thrown in his face. “I don’t want to think about it. I just want to go out every morning and see birds who have nothing to do with any of it. Birds who have their own lives, and their own struggles. And to try to do something for them. They’re the only thing that’s still lovely to me. I mean, besides you and Joey. And that’s all I want to say about it, and I want you not to ask me any more.”

  “Well, have you thought of seeing a therapist? Like, so you can start moving on with your life? You’re not that old, you know.”

  “I don’t want to change,” he said. “I have a bad few minutes every morning, and then I go and tire myself out, and if I stay up late enough I can fall asleep. You only go to a therapist if you want to change something. I wouldn’t have anything to say to a therapist.”

  “You used to love Mom, too, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t remember. I only remember what happened after she left.”

  “Well, she’s fairly lovely herself, actually. She’s fairly different from the way she used to be. She’s become sort of the perfect mom, unbelievable as that may sound.”

  “Like I said, I’m happy for you. I’m glad you have her in your life.”

  “But you don’t want her in your life.”

  “Look, Jessica, I know that’s what you want. I know you want a happy ending. But I can’t change my feelings just because it’s something you want.”

  “And your feeling is you hate her.”

  “She made her choice. And that’s all I have to say.”

  “I’m sorry, Dad, but that is just grotesquely unfair. You were the one who made the choice. She didn’t want to go.”

  “I’m sure that’s what she tells you. You see her every week, I’m sure she’s sold you on her version, which I’m sure is very forgiving of herself. But you weren’t living with her for the last five years before she left. It was a nightmare, and I fell in love with someone else. It was never my intention to fall in love with someone else. And I know you’re very unhappy that I did. But the only reason it happened was that your mother was impossible to live with.”

  “Well then you should divorce her. Isn’t that the least you owe her after all those years of marriage? If you thought well enough of her to stay with her for all the good years, don’t you at least owe her the respect of honestly divorcing her?”

  “They weren’t such good years, Jessica. She was lying to me the whole time—I don’t think I owe her so very much for that. And, like I said, if she wants a divorce, it’s available to her.”

  “She doesn’t want a divorce! She wants to get back together with you!”

  “I can’t even imagine seeing her for one minute. All I can imagine is unbearable pain at the sight of her.”

  “Isn’t it possible, though, Dad, that the reason it would be so painful is that you still love her?”

  “We need to talk about something else now, Jessica. If you care about my feelings, you won’t bring it up again. I don’t want to have to be afraid of answering the phone when you call.”

  He sat for a long time with his face in his hands, his dinner untouched, while the house very slowly darkened, the earthly springtime world yielding to the more abstract sky world: pink stratospheric wis
ps, the deep chill of deep space, the first stars. This was the way his life worked now: he drove away Jessica and missed her the second she was gone. He considered returning to Minneapolis in the morning, retrieving the cat, and restoring it to the kids who missed it, but he could no sooner actually do this than he could call Jessica back and apologize to her. What was done was done. What was over was over. In Mingo County, West Virginia, on the ugliest overcast morning of his life, he’d asked Lalitha’s parents if they minded if he went to see their daughter’s body. Her parents were chilly, eccentric people, engineers, with strong accents. The father was dry-eyed but the mother kept erupting, loudly, unprovoked, in a keening foreign wail that was almost like song; it sounded strangely ceremonial and impersonal, like a lament for an idea. Walter went alone to the morgue, without any idea. His love was resting beneath a sheet on a gurney of an awkward height, too high to be knelt by. Her hair was as ever, silky and black and thick, as ever, but there was something wrong with her jaw, some outrageously cruel and unforgivable injury, and her forehead, when he kissed it, was colder than any just universe could have allowed such a young person’s forehead to be. The coldness entered him through his lips and didn’t leave. What was over was over. His delight in the world had died, and there was no point in anything. To communicate with his wife, as Jessica was urging, would have meant letting go of his last moments with Lalitha, and he had a right not to do this. He had a right, in such an unjust universe, to be unfair to his wife, and he had a right to let the little Hoffbauers call in vain for their Bobby, because there was no point in anything.

  Taking strength from his refusals—enough strength, certainly, to get him out of bed in the morning and propel him through long days in the field and long drives on roads congested by vacationers and exurbanites—he survived another summer, the most solitary of his life so far. He told Joey and Connie, with some truth (but not much), that he was too busy for a visit from them, and he gave up on battling the cats that continued to invade his woods; he couldn’t see putting himself through another drama of the sort he’d had with Bobby. In August, he received a thick envelope from his wife, some sort of manuscript presumably related to the “message” that Jessica had spoken of, and he stowed it, unopened, in the file drawer where he kept his old joint tax returns, his old joint bank-account statements, and his never-altered will. Not three weeks later, he received a padded compact-disc mailer, bearing a return address of katz in Jersey City, and this too he buried, unopened, in the same drawer. In these two mailings, as in the newspaper headlines that he couldn’t avoid reading when he went to buy groceries in Fen City—new crises at home and abroad, new right-wing crazies spewing lies, new ecological disasters unfolding in the global endgame—he could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of refusers, he had the constitution for it. There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild—they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scattered in the wind—but this only made him more determined to hold on to what little of her he still had.

  Which was why, on the October morning when the world finally did arrive, in the form of a new Hyundai sedan parked halfway down his driveway, in the overgrown turnout where Mitch and Brenda had once kept their boat, he didn’t stop to see who was in it. He was hurrying to get on the road to a Conservancy meeting in Duluth, and he slowed down only enough to see that the driver’s seat was reclined, the driver perhaps sleeping. He had reason to hope that whoever was in the car would be gone by the time he returned, because why else hadn’t they knocked on his door? But the car was still there, its reflective rear plastic catching his headlights, when he turned off the county road at eight o’clock that evening.

  He got out and peered through the parked car’s windows and saw that it was empty, the driver’s seat restored to its upright position. The woods were cold; the air was still and smelled capable of snow; the only sound was a faint human burble from the direction of Canterbridge Estates. He got back in his car and proceeded to the house, where a woman, Patty, was sitting on the front step in the dark. She was wearing blue jeans and a thin corduroy jacket. Her legs were drawn up to her chest for warmth, her chin resting on her knees.

  He shut off his car and waited for some longish while, some twenty or thirty minutes, for her to stand up and speak to him, if that was what she’d come here for. But she refused to move, and eventually he summoned the courage to leave his car and head inside. He paused briefly on the doorstep, not more than a foot away from her, to give her a chance to speak. But her head remained bowed. His own refusal to speak to her was so childish that he couldn’t resist smiling. But this smile was a dangerous admission, and he stifled it brutally, steeling himself, and entered the house and shut the door behind him.

  His strength wasn’t infinite, however. He couldn’t help waiting in the dark, by the door, for another long while, maybe an hour, and straining to hear if she was moving, straining not to miss even a very faint tapping on the door. What he heard, instead, in his imagination, was Jessica telling him that he needed to be fair: that he owed his wife at least the courtesy of telling her to go away. And yet, after six years of silence, he felt that to speak even one word would be to take back everything—would undo all of his refusal and negate everything he’d meant by it.

  At length, as if waking from some half-sleeping dream, he turned on a light and drank a glass of water and found himself drawn to his file cabinet by way of compromise; he could at least take a look at what the world had to say to him. He opened first the mailer from Jersey City. There was no note inside it, just a CD in impenetrable plastic wrapping. It appeared to be a small-label Richard Katz solo effort, with a boreal landscape on the front, superimposed with the title Songs for Walter.

  He heard a sharp cry of pain, his own, as if it were someone else’s. The fucker, the fucker, it wasn’t fair. He turned over the CD with shaking hands and read the track list. The first song was called “Two Kids Good, No Kids Better.”

  “God, what an asshole you are,” he said, smiling and weeping. “This is so unfair, you asshole.”

  After he’d cried for a while at the unfairness, and at the possibility that Richard wasn’t wholly heartless, he put the CD back into the mailer and opened the envelope from Patty. It contained a manuscript that he read only one short paragraph of before running to the front door, pulling it open, and shaking the pages at her.

  “I don’t want this!” he shouted at her. “I don’t want to read you! I want you to take this and get in your car and warm up, because it’s fucking freezing out here.”

  She was, indeed, shuddering with chills, but she appeared to be locked in her huddled position and didn’t look up to see what he was holding. If anything, she lowered her head further, as if he were beating on it.

  “Get in your car! Warm up! I didn’t ask you to come here!”

  It may have just been an especially violent shudder, but she seemed to shake her head at this, a little bit.

  “I promise I’ll call you,” he said. “I promise to have a conversation on the phone with you if you’ll go away now and get yourself warmed up.”

  “No,” she said in a very small voice.

  “Fine, then! Freeze!”

  He slammed the door and ran through the house and out the back door, all the way down to the lake. He was determined to be cold himself if she was so intent on freezing. Somehow he was still clutching her manuscript. Across the lake were the blazing wasteful lights of Canterbridge Estates, the jumbo screens flashing with whatever the world believed was happening to it tonight. Everybody warm in their dens, the coal-fired Iron Range power plants pushing current through the grid, the Arctic still arctic enough to send frost down through the temperate October woods.
However little he’d ever known how to live, he’d never known less than he knew now. But as the bite in the air became less bracing and more serious, more of a chill in his bones, he began to worry about Patty. Teeth chattering, he went back up the hill and around to the front step and found her tipped over, less tightly balled up, her head in the grass. She was, ominously, no longer shivering.

  “Patty, OK,” he said, kneeling down. “This is not good, OK? I’ll bring you inside.”

  She stirred a little, stiffly. Her muscles seemed inelastic, and no warmth was coming through the corduroy of her jacket. He tried to get her to stand up, but it didn’t work, and so he carried her inside and laid her on the sofa and piled blankets on her.

  “This was so stupid,” he said, putting a teakettle on. “People die from doing these things. Patty? It doesn’t have to be below zero, you can die when it’s thirty degrees out. You’re just stupid to sit out there for so long. I mean, how many years did you live in Minnesota? Did you not learn anything? This is so fucking stupid of you.”

  He turned up the furnace and brought her a mug of hot water and made her sit up to take a drink, but she blew it right back onto the upholstery. When he tried to give her more, she shook her head and made vague noises of resistance. Her fingers were icy, her arms and shoulders dully cold.

  “Fuck, Patty, this is so stupid. What were you thinking? This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done to me.”

  She fell asleep while he took off his clothes, and she woke up only a little as he peeled back the blankets and took off her jacket and struggled to remove her pants and then lay down with her, wearing only his underpants, and arranged the blankets on top of them. “OK, so stay awake, right?” he said, pressing as much of his surface as he could against her marmoreally cold skin. “What would be particularly stupid of you right now would be to lose consciousness. Right?”