Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Then his aunt Abigail called to offer him the use of her apartment in late August. For the last year and a half, he’d been on Abigail’s e-mail list for the performances she gave at bizarrely named small venues in New York, and she’d called him every few months to deliver one of her self-justifying monologues. If he clicked the Ignore button on his phone, she didn’t leave a message but simply kept calling until he clicked Answer. He had the impression that her days consisted largely of cycling through every number she knew until someone finally answered, and he hated to consider who else might be on her calling list, given the tenuousness of his own connection with her. “I’m giving myself the little gift of a beach vacation,” she told him now. “I’m afraid poor Tigger died of kitty cancer, though not before some verrrrry expensive kitty-cancer treatments, and Piglet’s all alone.” Although Joey was feeling somewhat dirty about his flirtation with Jenna, as part of a more general new queasiness about infidelity, he accepted Abigail’s offer. If he never heard from Connie, he thought, he might console himself by showing up in Jenna’s neighborhood and asking her to dinner.

And then Kenny Bartles called with the news that he was selling RISEN and its contracts to a friend of his in Florida. Had already sold them, in fact. “Mike’s going to call you in the morning,” Kenny said. “I told him he had to keep you on till August fifteen. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to replace you after that anyway. I got bigger and better fish to fry.”

“Oh yeah?” Joey said.

“Yeah, LBI’s willing to subcontract me to procure a fleet of heavy-duty trucks. Not a job for the squeamish, and a lot better bread than bread’s been, if you know what I mean. It’s easy in, easy out—none of this bullshit with quarterly reports. I show up with the trucks, they cut the check, end of story.”

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Kenny said. “I could still really use you there in D.C. I’m looking for a partner to invest with me and make up some of the shortfall I’m looking at. If you’re willing to work, you could pay yourself a little salary, too.”

“That sounds great,” Joey said. “But I have to go back to school, and I don’t have any money to invest.”

“OK. Sure. It’s your life. But how about a smaller piece of the action? The way I read the specs, the Polish Pladsky A10 is gonna do just fine. They’re not in production anymore, but there’s fleets of ’em standing around military bases in Hungary and Bulgaria. Also somewhere in South America, which doesn’t help me. But I’m gonna hire drivers in Eastern Europe, convoy the trucks across Turkey, and deliver ’em in Kirkuk. That’s going to tie me up for God knows how long, and there’s also a nine-hundred-K subcontract for spare parts. You think you could handle the spare parts as a sub sub?”

“I don’t know anything about truck parts.”

“Neither do I. But Pladsky built a good twenty thousand A10s, back in the day. There’ve gotta be tons of parts out there. All you gotta do is track ’em down, crate ’em up, ship ’em out. Put in three hundred K, take out nine hundred six months later. That’s an eminently reasonable markup, given the circumstances. My impression is that’s a low-end markup in procurement. No eyebrows will be raised. You think you can get your hands on three hundred K?”

“I can hardly get my hands on lunch money,” Joey said. “What with tuition and so forth.”

“Yeah, well, but, realistically, all you gotta do is find fifty K. With that, plus a signed contract in hand, any bank in the country’s gonna give you the rest. You can do most of this stuff on the internet in your dorm room or whatever. It sure beats working the dish belt, huh?”

Joey asked for some time to think it over. Even with all the takeout and taxis he’d indulged in, he had $10,000 saved up for the coming academic year, plus potentially another $8,000 available on his credit card, and a quick internet search turned up numerous banks willing to make high-interest loans with small collateral, as well as multiple pages of Google matches for pladsky a10 parts. He was aware that Kenny wouldn’t have offered him the parts contract if finding the parts were as straightforward as he’d made it sound, but Kenny had made good on all his RISEN promises, and Joey couldn’t stop imagining the excellence of being worth half a million dollars when he turned twenty-one, a year from now. On an impulse, because he was excited and, for once, not preoccupied with their relationship, he broke his phone silence with Connie to solicit her opinion. Much later, he would reproach himself for having had her savings in the back of his mind, along with the fact that she was now legally in control of them, but in the moment of his calling he felt quite innocent of self-interested motive.

“Oh my God, baby,” she said. “I was starting to think I’d never hear from you again.”

“It’s been a hard couple of weeks.”

“My God, I know, I know. I was starting to think I should never have told you anything. Can you forgive me?”

“Probably.”

“Oh! Oh! That’s so much better than probably not.”

“Very probably,” he said. “If you still want to come out and see me.”

“You know I do. More than anything in the world.”

She didn’t sound at all like the independent older woman he’d been imagining, and a flutter in his stomach warned him to slow down and be sure he really wanted her back. Warned him not to mistake the pain of losing her for an active desire to have her. But he was eager to change the subject, avoid miring himself in abstract emotional territory, and ask her opinion of Kenny’s offer.

“God, Joey,” she said after he’d explained it to her, “you have to do it. I’ll help you do it.”

“How?”

“I’ll give you the money,” she said as if it were silly of him to even ask. “I’ve still got more than fifty thousand dollars in my trust account.”

The mere naming of this figure sexually excited him. It took him back to their earliest days as a couple on Barrier Street, in his first fall of high school. U2’s Achtung Baby , beloved to both of them but especially to Connie, had been the soundtrack of their mutual deflowering. The opening track, in which Bono avowed that he was ready for everything, ready for the push , had been their love song to each other and to capitalism. The song had made Joey feel ready to have sex, ready to step out of childhood, ready to make some real money selling watches at Connie’s Catholic school. He and she had begun as partners in the fullest sense, he the entrepreneur and manufacturer, she his loyal mule and surprisingly gifted saleswoman. Until their operation was shut down by resentful nuns, she’d proved herself a master of the soft sell, her cool remoteness serving to madden her classmates for her and Joey’s product. Everybody on Barrier Street, including his mother, had always mistaken Connie’s quietness for dullness, for slowness. Only Joey, who had insider access, had seen the potential in her, and this now seemed like the story of their life together: his helping and encouraging her to confound the expectations of everyone, especially his mother, who underestimated the value of her hidden assets. It was central to his faith in his future as a businessman, this ability to identify value, espy opportunity, where others didn’t, and it was central to his love of Connie, too. She moved in mysterious ways! The two of them had started fucking amid the piles of twenty-dollar bills she brought home from her school.

“You need the trust-fund money to go back to college,” he said nevertheless.