Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

her against the stage. Eliza was already tossing her hair and hopping in anticipation, and so it fell to Walter to push the fat guy back and give Patty room to stand up straight.

      The Traumatics who came running out onto that stage consisted of Richard, his lifelong bass player Herrera, and two skinny boys who looked barely out of high school. Richard was more of a showman then than he came to be later, when it seemed clear that he was never going to be a star and so it was better to be an anti-star. He bounced on his toes, did lurching little half pirouettes with his hand on the neck of his guitar, and so forth. He informed the audience that his band was going to play every song it knew, and that this would take twenty-five minutes. Then he and the band went totally haywire, churning out a vicious assault of noise that Patty couldn’t hear any sort of beat in. The music was like food too hot to have any taste, but the lack of beat or melody didn’t stop the central knot of male punks from pogoing up and down and shoulder-checking each other and stomping at every available female ankle. Trying to stay out of their way, Patty got separated from both Walter and Eliza. The noise was just unbearable. Richard and two other Traumatics were screaming into their microphones, I hate sunshine! I hate sunshine!, and Patty, who rather liked sunshine, brought her basketball skills to bear on making an immediate escape. She drove into the crowd with her elbows high and emerged from the scrum to find herself face-to-face with Carter and his glittery girl and kept right on moving until she was standing on the sidewalk in warm and fresh September air, under a Minnesota sky that astonishingly still had twilight in it.

      She lingered at the door of the Longhorn, watching Buzzcocks fans arrive late and waiting to see if Eliza would come looking for her. But it was Walter, not Eliza, who came looking.

      “I’m fine,” she told him. “This just turned out not to be my cup of tea.”

      “Can I take you home?”

      “No, you should go back. You could tell Eliza I’m getting home by myself, so she doesn’t worry.”

      “She’s not looking very worried. Let me take you home.”

      Patty said no, Walter insisted, she insisted no, he insisted yes. Then she realized he didn’t have a car and was offering to ride the bus with her, and she insisted no all over again, and he insisted yes. He much later said that he’d already been falling for her while they stood at the bus stop, but no equivalent symphony could be heard in Patty’s head. She was feeling guilty about abandoning Eliza and regretting that she’d dropped the earplugs and hadn’t stayed to see more of Richard.

      “I feel like I sort of failed a test there,” she said.

      “Do you even like this kind of music?”

      “I like Blondie. I like Patti Smith. I guess basically no, I don’t like this kind of music.”

      “So is it permissible to ask why you came?”

      “Well, Richard invited me.”

      Walter nodded as if this had private meaning for him.

      “Is Richard a nice person?” Patty asked.

      “Extremely!” Walter said. “I mean, it all depends. You know, his mom ran away when he was little, and became a religious nut. His dad was a postal worker and a drinker who got lung cancer when Richard was in high school. Richard took care of him until he died. He’s a very loyal person, although maybe not so much with women. He’s actually not that nice to women, if that’s what you’re asking.”

      Patty had already intuited this and for some reason did not feel put off by the news of it.

      “And what about you?” Walter said.

      “What about me?”

      “Are you a nice person? You seem like it. And yet …”

      “And yet?”

      “I hate your friend!” he burst out. “I don’t think she’s a good person. Actually, I think she’s quite horrible. She’s a liar and she’s mean.”

      “Well, she’s my best friend,” Patty said huffily. “She’s not horrible to me. Maybe you guys just got off on the wrong foot.”

      “Does she always take you to places and leave you standing there while she does coke with somebody else?”

      “No, as a matter of fact, that’s never happened before.”

      Walter said nothing, just stood stewing in his dislike. No bus was in sight.

      “Sometimes it makes me feel really, really good, how into me she is,” Patty said after a while. “A lot of the time she’s not. But when she is …”

      “I can’t imagine it’s hard to find people who are into you,” Walter said.

      She shook her head. “There’s something wrong with me. I love all my other friends, but I feel like there’s always a wall between us. Like they’re all one kind of person and I’m another kind of person. More competitive and selfish. Less good, basically. Somehow I always end up feeling like I’m pretending when I’m around them. I don’t have to pretend anything with Eliza. I can just be myself and still be better than her. I mean, I’m not dumb. I can see she’s a fucked-up person. But some part of me loves being around her. Do you sometimes feel like that with Richard?”

      “No,” Walter said. “He’s actually very unpleasant to be around, a lot of the time. There’s just something I loved about him at very first sight, when we were freshmen. He’s totally dedicated to his music, but he’s also intellectually curious. I admire that.”

      “That’s because you’re probably a genuinely nice person,” Patty said. “You love him for himself, not for how he makes you feel. That’s probably the difference between you and me.”

      “But you seem like a genuinely nice person!” Walter said.

      Patty knew, in her heart, that he was wrong in his impression of her. And the mistake she went on to make, the really big life mistake, was to go along with Walter’s version of her in spite of knowing that it wasn’t right. He seemed so certain of her goodness that eventually he wore her down.

      When they finally got back to campus, that first night, Patty realized she’d been talking about herself for an hour without noticing that Walter was only asking questions, not answering them. The idea of trying to be nice in return and take an interest in him now seemed simply tiring, because she wasn’t attracted to him.

      “Can I call you sometime?” he said at the door of her dorm.

      She explained that she wasn’t going to be very social in the next months, due to training. “But it was incredibly sweet of you to take me home,” she said. “I really appreciate it.”

      “Do you like theater? I have some friends I go to theater with. It wouldn’t have to be a date or anything.”

      “I’m just so busy.”

      “This is a great city for theater,” he persisted. “I bet you’d really enjoy it.”

      Oh Walter: did he know that the most intriguing thing about him, in the months when Patty was getting to know him, was that he was Richard Katz’s friend? Did he notice how, every time Patty saw him, she contrived to find nonchalant ways to lead the conversation around to Richard? Did he have any suspicion, that first night, when she agreed to let him call her, that she was thinking of Richard?

      Inside, upstairs, she found a phone message from Eliza on her door. She sat in her room with her eyes watering from the smoke in her hair and clothes until Eliza called again on the hall telephone, with club noise in the background, and upbraided her for scaring the shit out of her by disappearing.

      “You were the one who disappeared,” Patty said.

      “I was just saying hi to Richard.”

      “You were gone like half an hour.”

      “What happened to Walter?” Eliza said. “Did he leave with you?”