Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

about coming on the weekend?”

      “He didn’t call you yesterday?”

      “Yeah, he called. I told him the spare room’s a fucking mess.”

      “Not a problem. We’re grateful. I’ve got some stuff to bring in.”

      Patty, being useless for carrying things, guarded the car while Richard slowly emptied it. The room they were given was heavy with a smell that she was too young to recognize as drywall mud, too young to find domestic and comforting. The only light was a glaring aluminum dish clamped to a mud-strafed ladder.

      “Jesus,” Richard said. “What do they have, chimpanzees doing dry-walling?”

      Underneath a dusty and mud-spattered pile of plastic drop cloths was a bare, rust-stained double mattress.

      “Not up to your usual Sheraton standards, I’m guessing,” Richard said.

      “Are there sheets?” Patty said timidly.

      He went rummaging in the main space and came back with an afghan, an Indian bedspread, and a velveteen pillow. “You sleep here,” he said. “They’ve got a couch I can use.”

      She threw him a questioning look.

      “It’s late,” he said. “You need to sleep.”

      “Are you sure? There’s plenty of room here. A couch is going to be too short for you.”

      She was bleary, but she wanted him and was carrying the necessary gear, and she had an instinct to get the deed done right away, get it irrevocably on the books, before she had time to think too much and change her mind. And it was many years, practically half a lifetime, before she learned and was duly confounded by Richard’s reason for suddenly turning so gentlemanly that night. At the time, in the mud-humid construction site, she could only assume she’d somehow been mistaken about him, or that she’d turned him off by being a pain in the ass and useless at carrying things.

      “There’s something that passes for a bathroom out there,” he said. “You might have better luck than I did finding a light switch.”

      She gave him a yearning look from which he turned away quickly, purposefully. The sting and surprise of this, the strain of the drive, the stress of arrival, the grimness of the room: she killed the light and lay down in her clothes and wept for a long time, taking care to keep it inaudible, until her disappointment dissolved in sleep.

      The next morning, awakened at six o’clock by ferocious sunlight, and rendered thoroughly cross by then waiting hours and hours for anybody else to stir in the apartment, she really did become a pain in the ass. That whole day represented something of a lifetime nadir of agreeability. Herrera’s friends were physically uncouth and made her feel one inch tall for not getting their hip cultural references. She was given three quick chances to prove herself, after which they brutally ignored her, after which, to her relief, they left the apartment with Richard, who came back alone with a box of doughnuts for breakfast.

      “I’m going to work on that room today,” he said. “Makes me sick to see the shitty work they’re doing. You feel like doing some sanding?”

      “I was thinking we could go to the lake or something. I mean, it’s so hot in here. Or maybe a museum?”

      He regarded her gravely. “You want to go to a museum.”

      “Just something to get out and enjoy Chicago.”

      “We can do that tonight. Magazine’s playing. You know Magazine?”

      “I don’t know anything. Isn’t that obvious?”

      “You’re in a bad mood. You want to hit the road.”

      “I don’t want to do anything.”

      “If we get the room cleaned up, you’ll sleep better tonight.”

      “I don’t care. I just don’t feel like sanding.”

      The kitchen area was a nauseating, never-cleaned sty that smelled like a mental illness. Sitting on the couch where Richard had slept, Patty tried to read one of the books she’d brought along in hopes of impressing him, a Hemingway novel which the heat and the smell and her tiredness and the lump in her throat and the Magazine albums that Richard was playing made it impossible to concentrate on. When she got just intolerably hot, she went into the room where he was plastering and told him she was going for a walk.

      He was shirtless, his chest hair flat and straight with running sweat. “Not a great neighborhood for that,” he said.

      “Well, maybe you’ll come with me.”

      “Give me another hour.”

      “No, forget it,” she said, “I’ll just go by myself. Do we have a key to this place?”

      “You really want to go out by yourself on crutches?”

      “Yes, unless you want to come with me.”

      “Which, as I just said, I would do in an hour.”

      “Well, I don’t feel like waiting an hour.”

      “In that case,” Richard said, “the key is on the kitchen table.”

      “Why are you being so mean to me?”

      He shut his eyes and seemed to count silently to ten. It was obvious how much he disliked women and the things they said.

      “Why don’t you take a cold shower,” he said, “and wait for me to finish.”

      “You know, yesterday, for a while, it seemed like you were liking me.”

      “I do like you. I’m just doing some work here.”

      “Fine,” she said. “Work.”

      The streets in the afternoon sun were even hotter than the apartment. Patty swung herself along at a considerable clip, trying not to cry too obviously, trying to appear as if she knew where she was going. The river, when she came to it, looked more benign than it had in the night, looked merely weedy and polluted rather than evil and all-swallowing. On the other side of it were Mexican streets festooned for some imminent or recent Mexican holiday, or maybe just permanently festooned. She found an air-conditioned taqueria where she was stared at but not harassed and could sit and drink a Coke and wallow in her girlish misery. Her body so wanted Richard, but the rest of her could see that she’d made a Mistake in coming along with him: that everything she’d hoped for from him and Chicago had been a big fat fantasy in her head. Phrases familiar from high-school Spanish, lo siento and hace mucho calor and ¿qué quiere la señora?, kept surfacing in the surrounding hubbub. She summoned courage and ordered three tacos and devoured them and watched innumerable buses roll by outside the windows, each trailing a wake of shimmering filth. Time passed in a peculiar manner which the autobiographer, with her now rather abundant experience of murdered afternoons, is able to identify as depressive (at once interminable and sickeningly swift; chockfull second-to-second, devoid of content hour-by-hour), until finally, as the workday ended, groups of young laborers came in and began to pay too much attention to her, talking about her muletas, and she had to leave.

      By the time she’d retraced her steps, the sun was an orange orb at the end of the east-west streets. Her intention, as she now allowed herself to realize, had been to stay out long enough to make Richard very worried about her, and in this she seemed completely to have failed. Nobody was home at the apartment. The walls of her room were nearly finished, the floor carefully swept, the bed neatly made up for her with real sheets and pillows. On the Indian bedspread was a note from Richard, in microscopic capital letters, giving her the address of a club and directions on how to take the El there. It concluded: WORD OF WARNING: I HAD TO BRING OUR HOSTS ALONG.

      Before deciding whether to go out, Patty lay down for a short nap and was awakened many hours later, in great disorientation, by the return of Herrera’s friends. She hopped, one-legged, into the main room and there learned, from the most disagreeable