Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“I can do that later,” she said. “You need it now, and I can give it to you. You can give it back to me later.”

“I could give it back to you doubled . You’d have enough to cover all four years then.”

“If you want to,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

They made a date to reunite for his twentieth birthday in New York City, the scene of their happiest weeks as a couple since he’d left St. Paul. The next morning, he called Kenny and declared himself ready to do business. The big new round of Iraq contracts wouldn’t be let until November, Kenny said, and so Joey should enjoy his fall semester and just be sure to be ready with his financing.

Feeling flush in advance, he splurged on an Acela express train to New York and bought a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne on his way to Abigail’s apartment. Her place was more cluttered than ever, and he was happy to shut the door behind him and cab out to LaGuardia to meet Connie’s plane, which he’d insisted she take instead of a bus. The whole city, its pedestrians half naked in the August heat, its bricks and bridges paled by haze, was like an aphrodisiac. Going to meet his girlfriend, who’d been sleeping with someone else but was zinging back into his life again, a magnet to a magnet, he might already have been king of the city. When he saw her coming down the concourse at the airport, jumpily dodging other travelers, as if too preoccupied to see them until the last second, he felt flush with more than money. Felt flush with importance, with life to burn, with crazy chances to take, with the story of the two of them. She caught sight of him and started nodding, agreeing with some thing he hadn’t even said yet, her face full of joy and wonder. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” she said spontaneously, dropping the pull handle of her suitcase and colliding with him. “Yeah!”

“Yeah?” he said, laughing.

“Yeah!”

Without even kissing, they ran down to the baggage level and out to the taxi stand, where, by some miracle, nobody was waiting. In the back of their taxi, she peeled off her sweaty cotton cardigan and climbed onto his lap and began to sob in a way akin to coming or a seizure. Her body seemed entirely, entirely new in his arms. Some of the change was real—she was a little less arrowy, a little more womanly—but most of it was in his head. He felt inexpressibly grateful for her infidelity. His feeling was so large that it seemed as if only asking her to marry him could accommodate it. He might even have asked her, right then and there, if he hadn’t noticed the strange marks on her inner left forearm. Running down its soft skin was a series of straight parallel cuts, each about two inches long, the ones nearest her elbow faint and fully healed, the ones approaching her wrist increasingly fresh and red.

“Yeah,” she said, wet-faced, looking at the scars with wonder. “I did that. But it’s OK.”

He asked what had happened, though he knew the answer. She kissed his forehead, kissed his cheek, kissed his lips, and peered gravely into his eyes. “Don’t be scared, baby. It was just something I had to do for penance.”

“Jesus.”

“Joey, listen. Listen to me. I was very careful to put alcohol on the blade. I just had to do one cut for every night I didn’t hear from you. I did three on the third night and then one every night after that. I stopped as soon as I heard from you.”

“And what if I hadn’t called? What were you going to do? Slit your wrist?”

“ No . I wasn’t suicidal. This is what I was doing instead of having thoughts like that. I just needed to hurt a little bit. Can you understand that?”

“Are you sure you weren’t suicidal?”

“I would never do that to you. Not ever.”

He ran his fingertips over the scars. Then he raised her unscarred wrist and pressed it to his eyes. He was glad she’d cut herself for him; he couldn’t help it. The ways she moved were mysterious but made sense to him. Somewhere in his head, Bono was singing that it was all right, all right.

“And you know what’s really incredible?” Connie said. “I stopped at fifteen, which is exactly the number of times I was unfaithful to you. You called me on exactly the right night. It was like some kind of sign. And here.” From the back pocket of her jeans she took a folded cashier’s check. It had the curve of her ass and was impregnated with her ass’s sweat. “I had fifty-one thousand in my trust account. That was almost exactly what you said you needed. It was another sign, don’t you think?”

He unfolded the check, which was payable to JOSEPH R. BERGLUND in the amount of FIFTY THOUSAND dollars. He wasn’t ordinarily superstitious, but he had to admit that these signs were impressive. They were like the signs that told deranged people, “Kill the president NOW,” or told depressed people, “Throw yourself out a window NOW.” Here the urgent irrational imperative seemed to be: “Wed your lives together NOW.”

Outbound traffic on the Grand Central was at a standstill, but the inbound side was moving briskly, the cab was sailing right along, and this, too, was a sign. That they hadn’t had to wait in line for a cab was a sign. That tomorrow was his birthday was a sign. He couldn’t remember the state he’d been in even one hour earlier, heading to the airport. There was only the present moment with Connie, and whereas, before, when they’d fallen through a cosmic fissure into their two-person world, it had happened only at night, in a bedroom or some other contained space, it was now happening in broad daylight, under a citywide haze. He held her in his arms, the cashier’s check resting on her sweaty breastbone, between the damp straps of her top. One of her hands was pressed flat against one of his breasts as if it might give milk. The grown-woman smell of her underarms intoxicated him, he wished it were much stronger, he felt there was no limit to how strongly he wanted her underarms to stink.

“Thank you for fucking somebody else,” he murmured.

“It wasn’t easy for me.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it was very easy in one way. But almost impossible in another. You know that, right?”

“I totally know it.”

“Was it hard for you, too? Whatever you did last year?”

“Actually, no.”

“That’s because you’re a guy. I know what it’s like to be you, Joey. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then everything’s going to be all right.”

And, for the next ten days, everything was. Later, of course, Joey could see that the first, hormone-soaked days after a period of long abstinence were a less than ideal time to be making huge decisions about his future. He could see that, instead of trying to offset the unbearable weight of Connie’s $50,000 gift with something as heavy as a marriage proposal, he should have written out a promissory note with a schedule for payment of interest and principal. He could see that if he’d separated himself from her for even an hour, to take a walk by himself or to talk to Jonathan, he might have achieved some useful clarity and distance. He could see that postcoital decisions were a lot more realistic than precoital ones. In the moment, though, there had been no post-, it had all been pre- upon pre- upon pre-. Their craving for each other cycled on and on through the days and nights like the compressor of Abigail’s hardworking bedroom-window air conditioner. The new dimensions of their pleasure, the sense of adult gravity conferred by their joint business venture and by Connie’s sickness and infidelity, made all their prior pleasures forgettable and childish in comparison. Their pleasure was so great, and their need for it so bottomless, that when it waned even for an hour, on their third morning in the city, Joey reached out to press the nearest button to get more of it. He said, “We should get married.”