Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“I don’t know,” she said. “I kind of like it, for the sex, but I don’t feel anything for him. I only feel things for you.”

“Well, Jesus. I guess I have to think about this.”

“I know it’s really bad, Joey. I should have told you as soon as it happened. But for a while it was just so nice that somebody was interested. Do you realize how many times we’ve made love since last October?”

“Yeah, I know. I’m aware.”

“Either twice or zero times, depending on whether you count when I was sick. There’s something not right there.”

“I know.”

“We love each other but we never see each other. Don’t you miss it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had sex with other people? Is that how you can stand it?”

“Yeah, I did. A couple of times. But never more than once with anybody.”

“I was pretty sure you had, but I didn’t want to ask you. I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t going to let you. And that’s not why I did it myself. I did it because I’m lonely. I’m so lonely, Joey. I’m dying of it. And the reason I’m so lonely is I love you and you’re not here. I had sex with somebody else because I love you. I know that sounds mixed up, or dishonest, but it’s the truth.”

“I believe you,” he said. And he did. But the pain he was experiencing didn’t seem to have anything to do with what he believed or didn’t believe, what she might say now or not say. The mute fact of his sweet Connie having lain down with some middle-aged pig, of her having taken off her jeans and her little underpants and opened her legs repeatedly , had embodied itself in words only long enough for her to speak them and for Joey to hear them before returning to muteness and lodging inside him, out of reach of words, like some swallowed ball of razor blades. He could see, reasonably enough, that she might care no more about her pig of a manager than he’d cared about the girls, all of them either drunk or extremely drunk, in whose overly perfumed beds he’d landed in the previous year, but reason could no more reach the pain in him than thinking Stop! could arrest an onrushing bus. The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

“Say something to me, baby,” Connie said.

“When did this start?”

“I don’t know. Three months ago.”

“Well, maybe you should just keep doing it,” he said. “Maybe you should go ahead and have his baby and see if he’ll set you up in your own house.”

It was ugly to reference Carol like this, but in reply Connie only asked him, with limpid sincerity, “Is that what you want me to do?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“It’s not at all what I want. I want to be with you.”

“Yeah, right. But not before fucking somebody else for three months.”

This ought to have made her weep and beg forgiveness, or at least lash out at him in turn, but she wasn’t an ordinary person. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right. That’s absolutely fair. I could have told you the first time it happened, and then stopped. But doing it a second time didn’t seem much worse than doing it once. And then the same thing with the third time and the fourth time. And then I wanted to go off my drug, because it seemed stupid to be having sex when I could hardly feel it. And then the counter sort of had to be reset.”

“And now you’re feeling it, and it’s great.”

“It is definitely better. You’re the person I love, but at least my nerve endings are working again.”

“So why’d you even tell me now? Why not go four months? Four’s hardly any worse than three, right?”

“Four’s actually what I was planning,” she said. “I thought I could tell you when I come out next month, and we could make a plan to be together more often, so we could start being monogamous again. That’s still what I want. But I started having bad thoughts again last night, and I thought I’d better tell you.”

“Are you getting depressed? Does your doctor know you quit the drug?”

“She knows, but Carol doesn’t. Carol seems to think the drug is going to make everything OK between her and me. She thinks it’s going to solve her problem permanently. I take a pill out of the bottle every night and put it in my sock drawer. I think she might be counting them when I’m at work.”

“You should probably be taking them,” Joey said.

“I’ll go back on them if I can’t see you anymore. If I see you, though, I want to feel everything. And I don’t think I’ll need them if I keep on seeing you. I know that sounds like a threat or something, but it’s just the truth. I’m not trying to influence you about whether to see me again or not. I understand that I did a bad thing.”

“Are you sorry about it?”

“I know I should say yes, but I don’t actually know. Are you sorry you slept with other people?”

“No. Especially not now.”

“Same with me, baby. I’m exactly like you. I just hope you can remember that, and let me see you again.”

Connie’s confession was his last, best chance to escape with his conscience clear. He could so easily have fired her for cause, if only he’d felt angry enough to do it. After he got off the phone, he hit the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he was normally disciplined enough to keep away from, and then he went out walking the humid streets of his bleak non-neighborhood, relishing the blunt-force summer heat and the collective roar of the air conditioners compounding it. In a pocket of his khakis was a handful of coins that he took out and began to fling, a few at a time, into the street. He threw them all away, the pennies of his innocence, the dimes and quarters of his self-sufficiency. He needed to rid himself, to rid himself. He had nobody to tell about his pain, least of all his parents but also not Jonathan, for fear of damaging his friend’s good opinion of Connie, and certainly not Jenna, who didn’t understand love, and not his school friends, either—they all, to a man, saw girlfriends as a senseless impediment to the pleasures they intended to spend the next ten years pursuing. He was totally alone and didn’t understand how it had happened to him. How there had come to be an ache named Connie at the center of his life. He was being driven crazy by so minutely feeling what she felt, by understanding her too well, by not being able to imagine her life without him. Every time he had a chance to get away from her, the logic of self-interest failed him: was supplanted, like a gear that his mind kept popping out of, by the logic of the two of them.

A week went by without her calling him, and then another week. He became sensible, for the first time, of her greater age. She was twenty-one now, a legal adult, a woman interesting and attractive to married men. In the grip of jealousy, he was suddenly seeing himself as the lucky one of the two of them, the mere boy on whom she’d bestowed her ardor. She assumed fantastically alluring form in his imagination. He’d sometimes dimly sensed that their connection was extraordinary, enchanted, fairy-tale-like, but only now did he appreciate how much he counted on her. For the first few days of their silence, he managed to believe that he was punishing her by not calling her, but before long he came to feel like the punished one, the person waiting to see whether she, in her ocean of feeling, might find a drop of mercy and break the silence for him.

In the meantime, his mother informed him that she would be sending him no more monthly $500 checks. “I’m afraid Dad’s put an end to that,” she said with a breeziness that annoyed him. “I hope it was at least useful while it lasted.” Joey felt a certain relief at no longer having to indulge her wish to support him and no longer owing her regular phone calls in return; he was also glad to stop lying to the Commonwealth of Virginia about his level of parental support. But he’d come to rely on the monthly infusions to make ends meet, and he was now sorry about having taken so many cabs and ordered in so many meals that summer. He couldn’t help hating his father and feeling betrayed by his mother, who, when push came to shove, despite the many complaints about her marriage that she inflicted on Joey, seemed always to end up deferring to his father.