Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

That he’d passed up this latest fine chance to free himself of Connie (who could no longer pretend that her depression was just a figment of Carol’s imagination) was somewhat related to the recent bitter news of Jenna’s “sort-of” engagement to Nick, but only somewhat. Although Joey knew enough to be afraid of hard-core mental illness, it seemed to him that if he eliminated from his pool of prospects every interesting college-age girl with some history of depression, he would be left with a very small pool indeed. And Connie had reason to be depressed: her roommate was intolerable and she’d been dying of loneliness. When Carol put her on the telephone, she used the word “sorry” a hundred times. Sorry to have let Joey down, sorry not to have been stronger, sorry to distract him from his schoolwork, sorry to have wasted her tuition money, sorry to be a burden to Carol, sorry to be a burden to everyone, sorry to be such a drag to talk to. Although (or because ) she was too low to ask anything of him—seemed finally halfway willing to let go of him—he told her he was flush with cash from his mother and would fly out to see her. The more she said he didn’t have to do this, the more he knew he did.

The week he’d then spent on Barrier Street had been the first truly adult week of his life. Sitting with Blake in the great-room, the dimensions of which were more modest than he remembered, he watched Fox News’s coverage of the assault on Baghdad and felt his long-standing resentment of 9/11 beginning to dissolve. The country was finally moving on, finally taking history in its hands again, and this was somehow of a piece with the deference and gratitude that Blake and Carol showed him. He regaled Blake with tales from the think tank, the brushes he’d had with figures in the news, the post-invasion planning he was party to. The house was small and he was big in it. He learned how to hold a baby and how to tilt a nippled bottle. Connie was pale and scarily underweight, her arms as skinny and her belly as concave as when she’d been fourteen and he’d first touched them. He lay and held her in the night and tried to excite her, labored to penetrate the thick affective rind of her distraction, enough to feel OK about having sex with her. The pills she was taking hadn’t kicked in yet, and he was almost glad of how sick she was; it gave him seriousness and a purpose. She kept repeating that she’d let him down, but he felt almost the opposite. As if a new and more grownup world of love had revealed itself: as if there were still no end of inner doors for them to open. Through one of her bedroom windows he could see the house he’d grown up in, a house now occupied by black people who Carol said were snooty and kept to themselves, with their framed PhDs on a dining-room wall. (“In the dining room,” Carol emphasized, “where everybody can see them, even from the street.”) Joey was pleased by how little the sight of his old house moved him. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted to outgrow it, and now it seemed as if he really had. He went so far, one evening, as to call his mother and own up to what was happening.

“So,” she said. “OK. I’m apparently a little bit out of the loop here. You’re saying Connie was at college in the East?”

“Yep. But she had a bad roommate and got depressed.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to inform me, now that it’s all safely in the past.”

“You didn’t exactly make it pleasant to tell you what’s going on with her.”

“No, of course, I’m the villain here. Negative old me. I’m sure that’s how it looks to you.”

“Maybe there’s a reason it looks that way. Have you considered that?”

“I was just under the impression you were free and unencumbered. You know, college doesn’t last long, Joey. I tied myself down when I was young and missed out on a lot of experiences that probably would have been good for me. Then again, maybe I just wasn’t as mature as you are.”

“Yep,” he said feeling steely and, indeed, mature. “Maybe.”

“I would only point out that you did sort of lie to me, whenever that was, two months ago, when I asked you if you’d heard from Connie. Which, lying, maybe not the most mature thing.”

“Your question wasn’t friendly.”

“Your answer wasn’t honest! Not that you necessarily owe me honesty, but let’s at least be straight about it now.”

“It was Christmas. I said I thought she was in St. Paul.”

“Well, exactly. And not to belabor this, but when a person says ‘I think,’ it tends to imply that he isn’t sure. You pretended not to know something you knew very well.”

“I said where I thought she was. But she could have been in Wisconsin or something.”

“Right, visiting one of her many close friends.”

“Jesus!” he said. “You truly have no one but yourself to blame for this.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I think it’s very admirable that you’re there with her now, and I mean that seriously. It speaks well of you. I’m proud that you want to take care of somebody who matters to you. I have some acquaintance with depression myself, and, believe me, I know it’s no picnic. Is Connie taking something for it?”

“Yeah, Celexa.”

“Well, I hope that works out for her. My own drug didn’t work out so well for me.”

“You were taking an antidepressant? When?”

“Oh, fairly recently.”

“God, I had no idea.”

“That’s because, when I say I want you to be free and unencumbered, I really mean it. I didn’t want you worrying about me.”

“Jesus, though, you could at least have told me.”

“It was only for a few months anyway. I was a less than exemplary patient.”

“You have to give those drugs some time,” he said.

“Right, so everybody said. Especially Dad, who’s kind of on the front lines with me. He was very sorry to see those good times go. But I was glad to have my head back, such as it is.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Yes, I know. If you’d told me these things about Connie three months ago, my response would have been: La-la-la! Now you have to put up with me feeling things again.”

“I meant I was sorry you’re hurting.”

“Thank you, sweetie. I do apologize for my feelings.”

Ubiquitous though depression seemed lately to have become, Joey still found it a little worrisome that the two females who loved him the most were both suffering clinically. Was it just chance? Or did he have some actively baneful effect on women’s mental health? In Connie’s case, he decided, the truth was that her depression was a facet of the same intensity he’d always so much loved in her. On his last night in St. Paul, before returning to Virginia, he sat and watched her probe her skull with her fingertips, as if she were hoping to extract excess feeling from her brain. She said that the reason she’d been weeping at seemingly random moments was that even the smallest bad thoughts were excruciating, and that only bad thoughts, no good ones, were occurring to her. She thought about how she’d lost a UVA baseball cap he’d once given her; how she’d been too preoccupied with her roommate, during his second visit to Morton, to ask him what grade he’d gotten on his big American History paper; how Carol had once remarked that boys would like her better if she smiled more; how one of her baby half sisters, Sabrina, had burst into screams the first time she’d held her; how she’d stupidly admitted to Joey’s mother that she was going to New York to see him; how she’d been bleeding disgustingly on the last night before he went away to college; how she’d written such wrong things in the postcards she’d sent Jessica, in an attempt to be friends with his sister again, that Jessica had never replied to them; and on and on. She was lost in a dark forest of regret and self-disgust in which even the smallest tree assumed monstrous proportions. Joey had never been in woods like these himself but was unaccountably drawn to them in her. It even turned him on that she began to sob while he endeavored to fuck her in farewell, at least until the sobbing turned to writhing and thrashing and self-loathing. Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous, a cousin of suicide, and he was awake for half the night then, trying to talk her out of how terrible about herself she felt for feeling too terrible about herself to give him anything he wanted. It was exhausting and circular and unbearable, and yet, the following afternoon, when he was flying back East, it occurred to him to be afraid of what the Celexa would do to her when it kicked in. He considered his mother’s remark about antidepressants killing feelings: a Connie without oceans of feeling was a Connie he didn’t know and suspected he wouldn’t want.