Freedom

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Walter was following this exchange with a facial expression as ancient as the college parties that he’d been masochistic enough to attend with Katz, an expression of wonderment and pride and love and anger and the loneliness of the invisible, none of it agreeable to Katz, not in college and even less so now.

  “It must be very strange to be you,” Walter said as they exited at 34th Street.

  “I have no other way of being to compare it to.”

  “It’s got to feel great, though. I don’t believe that at some level you don’t love it.”

  Katz considered the question honestly. “It’s more like a situation where I would hate the absence of the thing but I don’t like the thing itself, either.”

  “I think I would like it,” Walter said.

  “I think you would, too.”

  Unable to grant Walter fame, Katz walked with him all the way up to the Amtrak status board, which was showing a forty-five-minute delay for his southbound Acela.

  “I strongly believe in trains,” Walter said. “And I routinely pay the price.”

  “I’ll wait with you,” Katz said.

  “No need, no need.”

  “No, let me buy you a Coke. Or did D.C. finally make you a drinker?”

  “No, still teetotaling. Which is such a stupid word.”

  To Katz, the train’s delay was a sign that the subject of Patty was destined to be broached. When he broached it, however, in the station bar, to the nerve-grating sounds of an Alanis Morissette song, Walter’s eyes grew hard and distant. He drew breath as if to speak, but no words came out.

  “Must be a little odd for you guys,” Katz prompted. “Having the girl upstairs and your office downstairs.”

  “I don’t know what to say to you, Richard. I really don’t know what to tell you.”

  “You guys getting along? Patty doing anything interesting?”

  “She’s working at a gym in Georgetown. Does that count as interesting?” Walter shook his head grimly. “I’ve been living with a depressed person for a very long time now. I don’t know why she’s so unhappy, I don’t know why she can’t seem to get out of it. There was a little while, around the time we moved to Washington, when she seemed to be doing better. She’d seen a therapist in St. Paul who got her started on some kind of writing project. Some kind of personal history or life journal that she was very mum and secretive about. As long as she was working on that, things weren’t so bad. But for the last two years they’ve been pretty much all bad. The plan had been for her to look for a job as soon as we got to Washington, and start some kind of second career, but it’s a little tough at her age with no marketable skills. She’s very smart and very proud, and she couldn’t stand being rejected and couldn’t stand being entry-level. She tried volunteering, doing afterschool athletics with the D.C. schools, but that didn’t work out, either. I finally got her to try an antidepressant, which I think would have helped her if she’d stuck with it, but she didn’t like the way it made her feel, and she really was pretty unbearable while she was on it. It gave her kind of a crankhead personality, and she quit before they got the cocktail adjusted right. And so finally, last fall, I more or less forced her to get a job. Not for my sake—I’m way overpaid, and Jessica’s out of school now, and Joey’s not my dependent anymore. But she had so much free time, I could see that it was killing her. And the job she chose to get was working at the reception counter of a gym. I mean, it’s a perfectly nice gym—one of my board members goes there, and at least one of my bigger donors. And there she is, there’s my wife, who’s one of the smartest people I know, scanning their membership cards and telling them to have a great workout. She’s also got a pretty serious exercise addiction going. She works out at least an hour a day, minimum—she looks great. And then she comes home at eleven with takeout, and if I’m in town we eat together, and she asks me why I’m still not having sex with my assistant. Sort of like what you just did, only not as graphically. Not as directly.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t realize.”

  “How could you? Who would think? I tell her the same thing every time, which is that she’s the person I love, she’s the person I want. And then we change the subject. Like, for the last couple of weeks—I think mainly to drive me crazy—she’s been talking about getting a boob job. It makes me want to cry, Richard. I mean, there is nothing wrong with her. Nothing on the outside. It’s totally crazy. But she says she’s going to die soon and she thinks it might be interesting, before she dies, to see what it’s like to have some chest. She says it might help her to have some goal to be saving up her money for, now that . . .” Walter shook his head.

  “Now that what.”

  “Nothing. She was doing something else with her money, before, that I thought was very bad.”

  “Is she sick? Is there a medical problem?”

  “No. Not physically. By dying soon I think she means in the next forty years. The way we’re all going to die soon.”

  “I’m really sorry, man. I had no idea.”

  A navigational beacon in Katz’s black Levi’s, a long-dormant transmitter buried by a more advanced civilization, was sparking back to life. Where he ought to have felt guilty, he instead was getting hard. Oh, the clairvoyance of the dick: it could see the future in a heartbeat, leaving the brain to play catch-up and find the necessary route from occluded present to preordained outcome. Katz could see that Patty, in the seemingly random life-meanderings that Walter had just described to him, had in fact deliberately been trampling symbols in a cornfield, spelling out a message unreadable to Walter at ground level but clear as could be to Katz at great height. IT’S NOT OVER, IT’S NOT OVER. The parallels between his life and hers were really almost eerie: a brief period of creative productivity, followed by a major change that turned out to be a disappointment and a mess, followed by drugs and despair, followed by the taking of a stupid job. Katz had been assuming that his situation was simply that success had wrecked him, but it was also true, he realized, that his worst years as a songwriter had precisely coincided with his years of estrangement from the Berglunds. And, yes, he hadn’t given much thought to Patty in the last two years, but he could feel now, in his pants, that this was mainly because he’d assumed their story was over.

  “How do Patty and the girl get along?”

  “They don’t speak,” Walter said.

  “So not buddies.”

  “No, I’m saying they literally don’t speak to each other. Each of them knows when the other’s usually in the kitchen. They go out of their way to avoid each other.”

  “And which one started that?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “OK.”

  On the station bar’s sound system, “That’s What I Like About You” was playing. It seemed to Katz the perfect soundtrack for the neon Bud Light signage, the fake leaded-glass lampshades, the durably polyurethaned crap furniture with its embedded commuter grime. He was still reasonably safe from hearing one of his own songs played in a place like this, but he knew it was a safety only of degree, not of category.

  “Patty’s decided she doesn’t like anybody under thirty,” Walter said. “She’s formed a prejudice against an entire generation. And, being Patty, she’s very funny on the subject. But it’s gotten pretty vicious and out of control.”

  “Whereas you seem quite taken with the younger generation,” Katz said.

  “All it takes to disprove a general law is one counterexample. I’ve got at least two great ones in Jessica and Lalitha.”

  “But not Joey?”

  “And if there are two,” Walter said, as if he hadn’t even heard his son’s name, “there are bound to be a lot more. That’s the premise of what I want to do this summer. Trust that young people still have brains and a social conscience, and then give them something to work with.”

  “You know, we’re very different, you and me,” Katz said. “I don’t do vision. I don’t do belief.
And I’m impatient with the kiddies. You remember that about me, right?”

  “I remember that you’re often wrong about yourself. I think you believe in a lot more than you give yourself credit for. You’ve got a whole cult following because of your integrity.”

  “Integrity’s a neutral value. Hyenas have integrity, too. They’re pure hyena.”

  “So, what, should I not have called you?” Walter said with a tremor in his voice. “Part of me didn’t want to bother you, but Lalitha talked me into it.”

  “No, it’s good you called. It’s been too long.”

  “I think I figured you’d outgrown us or something. I mean, I know I’m not a cool person. I figured you were done with us.”

  “Sorry, man. I just got really busy.”

  But Walter was becoming upset, nearly tearful. “It almost seemed like you were embarrassed by me. Which I understand, but it still doesn’t feel very good. I thought we were friends.”

  “I said I was sorry,” Katz said. He was angered both by Walter’s emotion and by the irony or injustice of needing to apologize, twice, for having tried to do him a favor. It was generally his policy never to apologize at all.

  “I don’t know what I expected,” Walter said. “But maybe some acknowledgment of the fact that Patty and I helped you. That you wrote all those songs in my mother’s house. That we’re your oldest friends. I’m not going to dwell on this, but I want to clear the air and let you know what I’ve been feeling, so I don’t have to feel it anymore.”

  The angry stirring of Katz’s blood was of a piece with the divinations of his dick. I’m going to do you a different kind of favor now, old friend, he thought. We’re going to finish some unfinished business, and you and the girl will thank me for it.

  “It’s good to clear the air,” he said.

  WOMANLAND

  Growing up in St. Paul, Joey Berglund had received numberless assurances that his life was destined to be a lucky one. The way star halfbacks talk about a great open-field run, the sense of cutting and weaving at full speed through a defense that moved in slow motion, the entire field of play as all-visible and instantaneously graspable as a video game at Rookie level, was the way every facet of his life had felt for his first eighteen years. The world had given unto him, and he was fine with taking. He arrived as a first-year student in Charlottesville with the ideal clothes and haircut and found that the school had paired him with a perfect roommate from NoVa (as the locals called the Virginia suburbs of D.C.). For two and a half weeks, college looked like it would be an extension of the world as he had always known it, only better. He was so convinced of this—took it so much for granted—that on the morning of September 11 he actually left his roommate, Jonathan, to monitor the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon while he hurried off to his Econ 201 lecture. Not until he reached the big auditorium and found it all but empty did he understand that a really serious glitch had occurred.

  Try as he might, in the weeks and months that followed, he could not recall what he’d been thinking as he’d crossed the semi-deserted campus. It was highly uncharacteristic of him to be so clueless, and the deep chagrin he’d then experienced, on the steps of the Chemistry Building, became the seed of his intensely personal resentment of the terrorist attacks. Later, as his troubles began to mount, it would seem to him as if his very good luck, which his childhood had taught him to consider his birthright, had been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real. He kept waiting for its wrongness, its fraudulence, to be exposed, and for the world to be set right again, so that he could have the college experience he’d expected. When this failed to happen, he was gripped by an anger whose specific object refused to come into focus. The culprit, in hindsight, seemed almost like bin Laden, but not quite. The culprit was something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in a sidewalk that trips you and lands you on your face when you’re out innocently walking.

  In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over, it was stupid that the Chi Phi boys hung a banner of “support” from their house, it was stupid that the football game against Penn State was canceled, it was stupid that so many kids left Grounds to be with their families (and it was stupid that everybody at Virginia said “Grounds” instead of “campus”). The four liberal kids on Joey’s hall had endless stupid arguments with the twenty conservative kids, as if anybody cared what a bunch of eighteen-year-olds thought about the Middle East. A stupidly big fuss was made about the students who’d lost relatives or family friends in the attacks, as if the other kinds of horrible death that were constantly occurring in the world mattered less, and there was stupid applause when a vanful of upperclassmen solemnly departed for New York to give succor to the Ground Zero workers, as if there weren’t enough people in New York to do the job. Joey just wanted normal life to return as fast as possible. He felt as if he’d bumped his old Discman against a wall and knocked its laser out of a track he’d been enjoying and into a track he didn’t recognize or like and also couldn’t make stop playing. Before long, he was so lonely and isolated and hungry for familiar things that he made the rather serious mistake of giving Connie Monaghan permission to take a Greyhound bus to visit him in Charlottesville, thereby undoing a summer’s worth of spadework to prepare her for their inevitable breakup.

  All summer, he’d labored to impress on Connie the importance of not getting together for at least nine months, so as to test their feelings for each other. The idea was to develop independent selves and see if these independent selves were still a good match, but to Joey this was no more a “test” than a high-school chemistry “experiment” was research. Connie would end up staying in Minnesota while he pursued a business career and met girls who were more exotic and advanced and connected. Or so he’d imagined before 9/11.

  He was careful to schedule Connie’s visit while Jonathan was at home in NoVa for a Jewish holiday. She spent the entire weekend camped out on Joey’s bed with her overnight bag beside her on the floor, zipping her things back inside it as soon as she was done with them, as if trying to minimize her footprint. While Joey endeavored to read Plato for a Monday-morning class, she pored over the faces in his first-year facebook and laughed at the ones with odd expressions or unfortunate names. Bailey Bodsworth, Crampton Ott, Taylor Tuttle. By Joey’s reliable count, they had sex eight times in forty hours, stoning themselves repeatedly on the hydroponic bud she’d brought along. When it came time to take her back to the bus station, he loaded a bunch of new songs onto her MP3 player for the punishing twenty-hour return trip to Minnesota. The sorry truth was that he felt responsible for her, knew he needed to break up with her anyway, and couldn’t think how.

  At the bus station, he raised the subject of her education, which she’d promised to pursue but somehow, in her obdurate way, without explanation, hadn’t.

  “You need to start taking classes in January,” he told her. “Start at Inver Hills and then maybe transfer to the U. next year.”

  “OK,” she said.

  “You’re really smart,” he said. “You can’t just keep being a waitress.”

  “OK.” She looked away desolately at the line forming by her bus. “I’ll do it for you.”

  “Not for me. For you. Like you promised.”

  She shook her head. “You just want me to forget about you.”

  “Not true, not true at all,” Joey said, although it was fairly true.

  “I’ll go to school,” she said. “But it’s not going to make me forget about you. Nothing’s going to make me forget about you.”

  “Right,” he said, “but we still need to find out who we are. We both need to do some growing.”

  “I already know who I am.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong, though. Maybe you still need to—”


  “No,” she said. “I’m not wrong. I only want to be with you. That’s all I want in my life. You’re the best person in the world. You can do anything you want, and I can be there for you. You’ll own lots of companies, and I can work for you. Or you can run for president, and I’ll work for your campaign. I’ll do the things that nobody else will do. If you need somebody to break the law, I’ll do that for you. If you want children, I’ll raise them for you.”

  Joey was aware of needing his wits about him to reply to this rather alarming declaration, but he was unfortunately still somewhat stoned.

  “Here’s the thing I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to get a college education. Like, for example,” he unwisely added, “if you were going to work for me, you’d need to know a lot of different stuff.”

  “That’s why I said I’d go to school for you,” Connie said. “Weren’t you listening?”

  He was beginning to see, as he hadn’t in St. Paul, that things’ prices weren’t always evident at first glance: that the really big ballooning of the interest charges on his high-school pleasures might still lie ahead of him.

  “We’d better get in line,” he said. “If you want a good seat.”

  “OK.”

  “Also,” he said, “I think we should go at least a week without calling. We need to get back to being more disciplined.”

  “OK,” she said, and walked obediently toward the bus. Joey followed with her overnight bag. He at least didn’t have to worry about her making any scenes. She’d never been a compromiser of him, never an insister on sidewalk hand-holding, never a clinger, a pouter, a reproacher. She saved up all her ardor for when they were alone, she was a specialist like that. When the bus doors opened, she stabbed him with one burning look and then handed her bag to the driver and boarded. There was no bullshit about waving through the window or making kissy faces. She put earphones in her ears and slouched down out of sight.

  There was no bullshit in the weeks that followed, either. Connie obediently refrained from calling him, and as the national fever began to break and autumn deepened on the Blue Ridge, lingering with hay-colored sunshine and rich smells of warm lawn and turning leaf, Joey attended blowout Cavalier football losses and worked out at the gym and gained numerous pounds of beer weight. He gravitated socially to hall mates from prosperous families who believed in carpet bombing the Islamic world until it learned to behave itself. He wasn’t right-wing himself but was comfortable with those who were. Reaming Afghanistan wasn’t exactly what his sense of dislocation demanded, but it was close enough to afford some satisfaction.