Freedom. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ after she heard them go out, Patty began to cry for reasons she felt too desolate to fathom. The next time she saw Eliza, thirty-six hours later, she apologized for having been such a bitch, but Eliza was in excellent spirits by then and told her not to worry about it, she was thinking about selling her guitar and was happy to take Patty to hear Richard.

      His next show was on a weeknight in September, at a poorly ventilated club called the Longhorn, where the Traumatics were opening for the Buzzcocks. Practically the first person Patty saw when she and Eliza arrived was Carter. He was standing with a headlock on a grotesquely pretty blond girl in a sequined minidress. “Oh shit,” Eliza said. Patty waved bravely to Carter, who flashed his bad teeth and ambled toward her, a picture of affability, with the sequins in tow. Eliza put her head down and pulled Patty away through a knot of cigarette-puffing male punks and up against the stage. Here they found a fair-haired boy who Patty guessed was Richard’s famous roommate even before Eliza said, in a loud monotone, “Hello Walter how are you.”

      Not knowing Walter yet, Patty had no idea how unusual it was that he returned this greeting with a cold nod rather than a friendly midwestern smile.

      “This is my best friend Patty,” Eliza said to him. “Can she stand here with you for a second while I go backstage?”

      “I think they’re about to emerge,” Walter said.

      “Just for one second,” Eliza said. “Just watch out for her. OK?”

      “Why don’t we all go back there together,” Walter said.

      “No, you need to hold my place here,” Eliza told Patty. “I’ll be right back.”

      Walter watched unhappily as she burrowed off through bodies and disappeared. He didn’t look nearly as nerdy as Eliza had led Patty to expect—he was wearing a V-necked sweater and had an overgrown curly mop of reddish blond hair and looked like what he was, i.e., a first-year law student—but he did stand out among the punks with their mutilated hair and garments, and Patty, who was suddenly self-conscious about her own clothes, which she’d always liked until one minute ago, was grateful for his ordinariness.

      “Thank you for standing here with me,” she said.

      “I think we’ll be standing here for quite a while now,” Walter said.

      “It’s nice to meet you.”

      “Nice to meet you, too. You’re the basketball star.”

      “That’s me.”

      “Richard told me about you.” He turned to her. “Do you do a lot of drugs?”

      “No! God. Why?”

      “Because your friend does.”

      Patty didn’t know what to do with her facial expression. “Not around me she doesn’t.”

      “Well, that’s what she’s going backstage for.”

      “OK.”

      “I’m sorry. I know she’s your friend.”

      “No, it’s interesting to know that.”

      “She seems to be very well funded.”

      “Yeah, she gets it from her parents.”

      “Right, the parents.”

      Walter seemed so preoccupied with Eliza’s disappearance that Patty fell silent. She was feeling morbidly competitive again. She was barely even aware yet of being interested in Richard, and still it struck her as unfair that Eliza might be using more than just herself, her native half-pretty self—that she might be using parental resources—to hold Richard’s attention and buy access to him. How dumb about life Patty was! How far behind other people! And how ugly everything on the stage looked! The naked cords, and the cold chrome of the drums, and the utilitarian mikes, and the kidnapper’s duct tape, and the cannonlike spotlights: it all looked so hard core.

      “Do you go to a lot of shows?” Walter said.

      “No, never. Once.”

      “Did you bring some earplugs?”

      “No. Do I need them?”

      “Richard’s very loud. You can use mine. They’re almost new.”

      From his shirt pocket he produced a baggie containing two whitish foam-rubber larvae. Patty looked down at them and did her best to smile nicely. “No, thank you,” she said.

      “I’m a very clean person,” he said earnestly. “There’s no health risk.”

      “But then you won’t have any for yourself.”

      “I’ll tear them in half. You’ll want to have something for protection.”

      Patty watched him carefully divide the earplugs. “Maybe I’ll just hold them in my hand and wait and see if I need them,” she said.

      They stood there for fifteen minutes. Eliza finally came slithering and wiggling back and looking radiant just as the houselights dimmed and the audience surged against the stage. The first thing Patty did was drop the earplugs. There was altogether a lot more jostling than the situation seemed to call for. A fat person in leather barged into her back and knocked 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 СКАЧАТЬ