Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

For a while, the only shadows on his satisfaction were Jenna’s postponements of her trip to Washington. A recurrent theme of their conversations was her worry that she’d sown insufficient wild oats before committing herself to Nick. (“I’m not sure that having been a slut for a year at Duke really counts,” she said.) Joey could hear in her worry the whispering of opportunity, and he was confounded when, despite the increasingly raw flirtation of their phone calls, she twice canceled plans to come down and see him, and even more confounded when he learned from Jonathan that she’d been to her parents’ in McLean without letting him know.

Then, on the Fourth of July, during a family visit he was making only to be nice, he vouchsafed to his father the details of his work at RISEN, hoping to impress him with the size of his salary and the scope of his responsibilities; and his father all but disowned him on the spot. Until now, all his life, their relationship had essentially been a standoff, a stalemate of wills. But now his dad was no longer content to send him on his way with a lecture about his coldness and his arrogance. Now he was shouting that Joey made him sick , that it physically disgusted him to have raised a son so selfish and unthinking that he was willing to connive with monsters trashing the country for their personal enrichment. His mother, instead of defending him, ran for her life: upstairs, to her little room. He knew she would be calling him the next morning, trying to smooth things over, feeding him crap about how his dad was only angry because he loved him. But she was too cowardly to stick around, and there was nothing he could do himself but cross his arms tightly and make his face a mask and shake his head and tell his dad, over and over, not to criticize things he didn’t understand.

“What’s not to understand?” his father said. “This is a war for politics and profit. Period!”

“Just because you don’t like people’s politics,” Joey said, “it doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong. You’re pretending that everything they do is bad, you’re hoping they’re going to fail at everything, because you hate their politics. You don’t even want to hear about the good things that are happening.”

“ There are no good things happening. ”

“Oh, right. It’s a black-and-white world. We’re all bad and you’re all good.”

“You think the way the world works is that Middle Eastern kids the same age as you are getting their heads and their legs blown off so you can make a ton of money? That’s the perfect world you live in?”

“Obviously not, Dad. Would you stop being stupid for a second? People are getting killed over there because their economy is fucked up. We’re trying to fix their economy, OK?”

“You shouldn’t be making eight thousand dollars a month,” his dad said. “I know you think you’re very smart, but there is something wrong with a world where an unskilled nineteen-year-old can do that. Your situation stinks of corruption. You smell really bad to me.”

“Jesus, Dad. Whatever.”

“I don’t even want to know what you’re doing anymore. It makes me too sick. You can tell it to your mother, but do me a favor and leave me out.”

Joey smiled fiercely to keep himself from crying. He was experiencing a hurt that felt structural, as if he and his dad had each chosen their politics for the sole purpose of hating the other, and the only way out of it was disengagement. Not telling his dad anything, not seeing him again unless he absolutely had to, sounded good to him, too. He wasn’t even angry, he just wanted to leave the hurt behind. He taxied home to his furnished studio apartment, which his mom had helped him rent, and sent messages to both Connie and Jenna. Connie must have gone to bed early, but Jenna called him back at midnight. She wasn’t the world’s best listener, but she got enough of the gist of his rotten Fourth to assure him that the world wasn’t fair and was never going to be fair, that there would always be big winners and big losers, and that she personally, in the tragically finite life that she’d been given, preferred to be a winner and to surround herself with winners. When he then confronted her with not having called him from McLean, she said she hadn’t thought it would be “safe” to see him for dinner.

“Why wouldn’t it have been safe?”

“You’re kind of a bad habit of mine,” she said. “I need to keep it in check. Need to keep my eyes on the prize.”

“It doesn’t sound like you and the prize are having much fun together.”

“The prize is extremely busy trying to take his boss’s job. That’s what they do in that world, they try to eat each other alive. It’s surprisingly un-frowned upon. But also apparently hugely time-consuming. A girl likes to be taken out now and then, especially in her first summer after college.”

“That’s why you need to come down here,” he said. “I’ll definitely take you out.”

“No doubt. But my boss has got wall-to-wall jobs in the Hamptons for the next three weeks. My services as a clipboard-holder are required. Too bad you have to work so hard yourself, or I could try to sneak you into something.”

He’d lost count of the half dates and half promises she’d made since he’d known her. None of the fun things she suggested ever quite came to pass, and he could never quite figure out why she bothered to keep suggesting them. Sometimes he thought it had to do with her competing with her brother. Or maybe it was because Joey was Jewish and pleasing to her father, who was the one person she never snarked. Or maybe she was fascinated by his relationship with Connie and took a queenly relish in the nuggets of private info that he laid at her feet. Or maybe she was genuinely into him and wanted to see what he was like when he was older and how much money he could make. Or maybe all of the above. Jonathan had no insights to offer except that his sister was bad news, a freak from Planet Spoiled, with the ethical consciousness of sea sponge, but Joey thought he could glimpse deeper things in her. He refused to believe that someone disposing of the power of so much beauty could be devoid of interesting ideas of how to use it.

The next day, when he told Connie about his fight with his father, she didn’t get into the merits of their respective arguments but went straight to his hurt and told him how sorry she was. She’d gone back to work as a waitress and seemed willing to wait all summer to see him again. Kenny Bartles had promised him the last two weeks of August as a paid vacation if he agreed to work every weekend before then, and he didn’t want Connie around to complicate things if Jenna came down to Washington; he didn’t see how he’d be able to slip away for an evening or two or three without telling Connie the kind of arrant lie that he was trying to keep to a minimum.

The equanimity with which she’d accepted the delay he attributed to Celexa. But then one night, during a routine telephone check-in, while he was drinking beer in his apartment, she fell into an especially protracted silence that ended with her saying, “Baby, there are a few things I need to tell you.” The first thing was that she’d stopped taking her medication. The second thing was that the reason she’d stopped taking it was that she’d been sleeping with her restaurant manager and was tired of not coming. She confessed this with curious detachment, as if speaking of some girl who wasn’t her, a girl whose doings were regrettable but understandable. The manager, she said, was married and had two teenage kids and lived on Hamline Avenue. “I thought I’d better tell you,” she said. “I can stop it if you want me to.”

Joey was shivering. Shuddering almost. A draft was coming through a mental door that he’d assumed was shut and locked but in fact was standing open wide; a door that he could flee through. “Do you want it to stop?” he said.