Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

listen.” He put the key in the ignition. “You need to fish or cut bait here. Do you understand me? It’s not fair to Walter otherwise.”

      She looked straight ahead through the windshield. “What isn’t fair?”

      “Giving him hope. Leading him on.”

      “That’s what you think I’m doing?”

      “He’s an extraordinary person. He’s very, very serious. You need to take some care with him.”

      “I know that,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

      “Well, so, what did you come over here for? It seemed to me—”

      “What? What did it seem to you?”

      “It seemed to me like I was interrupting something. But then, when I tried to get away …”

      “God, you really are a jerk.”

      Richard nodded as if he couldn’t care less what she thought of him, or as if he were tired of stupid women saying stupid things to him. “When I tried to get away,” he said, “you seemed not to want to take the hint. Which is fine, that’s your choice. I just want to make sure you know you’re kind of tearing Walter apart.”

      “I really don’t want to talk about this with you.”

      “Fine. We won’t talk about it. But you’ve been seeing a lot of him, right? Practically every day, right? For weeks and weeks.”

      “We’re friends. We hang out.”

      “Nice. And you know the situation in Hibbing.”

      “Yes. His mom needs help with the hotel.”

      Richard smiled unpleasantly. “That’s what you know?”

      “Well, and his dad’s not well, and his brothers aren’t doing anything.”

      “And that’s what he’s told you. That’s the extent of it.”

      “His dad has emphysema. His mom has disabilities.”

      “And he’s working construction twenty-five hours a week and pulling down As in law school. And there he is, every day, with all that time to hang out with you. How nice for you, that he has so much free time. But you’re a good-looking chick, you deserve it, right? Plus you’ve got your terrible injury. That and being good-looking: that earns you the right not to even ask him any questions.”

      Patty was burning with her feeling of injustice. “You know,” she said unsteadily, “he talks about what a jerk you are to women. He talks about that.”

      This seemed not to interest Richard in the slightest. “I’m just trying to understand this in the context of your being such pals with wee Eliza,” he said. “It’s making more sense to me now. It didn’t when I first saw you. You seemed like a nice suburban girl.”

      “So I’m a jerk, too. Is that what you’re saying? I’m a jerk and you’re a jerk.”

      “Sure. Whatever you like. I’m Not OK, You’re Not OK. Whatever. I’m just asking you not to be a jerk to Walter.”

      “I’m not!”

      “I’m simply telling you what I see.”

      “Well, you see wrong. I really like Walter. I really care about him.”

      “And yet you’re apparently unaware that his dad’s dying of liver disease and his older brother’s in jail for vehicular assault and his other brother’s spending his Army paychecks making payments on his vintage Corvette. And Walter’s averaging about four hours of sleep while you’re being friends and hanging out, just so you can come over here and flirt with me.”

      Patty became very quiet.

      “It’s true I didn’t know all of that,” she said after a while. “All of that information. But you shouldn’t be friends with him if you’ve got a problem with people flirting with you.”

      “Ah. So it’s my fault. I getcha.”

      “Well, I’m sorry, but it kind of is.”

      “I rest my case,” Richard said. “You need to get your thoughts straightened out.”

      “I’m aware that I need to do that,” Patty said. “But you’re still being a jerk.”

      “Look, I’ll drive you to New York, if that’s what you want. Two jerks on the road. Could be fun. But if that’s what you want, you need to do me a favor and stop stringing Walter along.”

      “Fine. Please take me home now.”

      Due perhaps to the nicotine, she spent that entire night sleeplessly replaying the evening in her head, trying to do as Richard had demanded and get her thoughts straight. But it was an odd mental kabuki, because even as she was circling around and around the question of what kind of person she was and what her life was ultimately going to look like, one fat fact sat fixed and unchanging at the center of her: she wanted to take a road trip with Richard and, what’s more, she was going to do it. The sad truth was that their talk in the car had been a tremendous excitement and relief to her—an excitement because Richard was exciting and a relief because, finally, after months of trying to be somebody she wasn’t, or wasn’t quite, she’d felt and sounded like her unpretended true self. This was why she knew she’d find a way to take the road trip. All she had to do now was surmount her guilt about Walter and her sorrow about not being the kind of person he and she both wished she were. How right he’d been to go slow with her! How smart he was about her inner dubiousness! When she considered how right and smart he was about her, she felt all the sadder and guiltier about disappointing him, and was plunged back into the roundabout of indecision.

      And then, for almost a week, she didn’t hear from him. She suspected he was keeping his distance at Richard’s suggestion—that Richard had given him a misogynistic lecture about the faithlessness of women and the need to protect his heart better. In her imagination, this was both a valuable service for Richard to perform and a terrible disillusioning thing to do to Walter. She couldn’t stop thinking of Walter carrying large plants for her on buses, the poinsettia redness of his cheeks. She thought of the nights when, in her dorm lounge, he’d been trapped by the Hall Bore, Suzanne Storrs, who combed her hair sideways over her head with the part way down one side of it, just above her ear, and how he’d listened patiently to Suzanne’s sour droning about her diet and the hardships of inflation and the overheating of her dorm room and her wide-ranging disappointment with the university’s administrators and professors, while Patty and Cathy and her other friends laughed at Fantasy Island: how Patty, ostensibly incapacitated by her knee, had declined to stand up and rescue Walter from Suzanne, for fear that Suzanne would then come over and inflict her boringness on everybody else, and how Walter, though perfectly capable of joking with Patty about Suzanne’s shortcomings, and though undoubtedly mindful of how much work he had to do and how early he had to get up in the morning, allowed himself to be trapped again on other evenings, because Suzanne had taken a shine to him and he felt sorry for her.

      Suffice it to say that Patty couldn’t quite bring herself to cut bait. They didn’t communicate again until Walter called from Hibbing to apologize for his silence and report that his dad was in a coma.

      “Oh, Walter, I miss you!” she exclaimed although this was exactly the sort of thing Richard would have urged her not to say.

      “I miss you, too!”

      She bethought herself to ask for details about his dad’s condition, even though it only made sense to be a good questioner if she was intending to proceed with him. Walter spoke of liver failure, pulmonary edema, a shitty prognosis.

      “I’m so sorry,” she said. “But listen. About the room—”

      “Oh, you don’t have to decide about that now.”

      “No, but you need an