Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Connie said. “Do you want to do it now?”

“You mean like today?”

“Yes.”

“I think there’s a waiting period. Some kind of blood test?”

“Well, let’s go do that, then. Do you want to?”

His heart was pounding blood into his loins. “Yes!”

But first they had to have the fuck about the excitement of going to have the blood tests. Then they had to have the fuck about the excitement of finding out they didn’t need to have them. Then they wandered up Sixth Avenue like a couple drunk beyond caring what anybody thought of them, like red-handed murderers, Connie braless and wanton and attracting male stares, Joey in a state of testosterone heedlessness in which, if anybody had challenged him, he would have thrown a punch for the sheer joy of it. He was taking the step that needed to be taken, the step he’d been wanting to take since the first time his parents had said no to him. The fifty-block walk uptown with Connie, in a baking welter of honking cabs and filthy sidewalks, felt as long as his entire life before it.

They went into the first deserted-looking jewelry store they came to on 47th Street and asked for two gold rings that they could take away right now. The jeweler was in full Hasidic regalia—yarmulke, forelocks, phylacteries, black vest, the works. He looked first at Joey, whose white T-shirt was spattered with mustard from a hot dog he’d bolted along the way, and then at Connie, whose face was flaming with heat and with abrasion by Joey’s face. “The two of you are getting married?”

Both of them nodded, neither quite daring to say yes aloud.

“Then mazel tov,” the jeweler said, opening drawers. “I have rings in all sizes for you.”

To Joey, from far away, through a fine tear in his otherwise tough bubble of madness, came a pang of regret about Jenna. Not as a person he wanted (the wanting would return later, when he was alone and sane again) but as the Jewish wife he was never going to have now: as the person to whom it might actually have mattered that he was Jewish. He’d long ago given up on trying to care, himself, about his Jewishness, and yet, seeing the jeweler in his well-worn Hasidic trappings, his vestments of minority religion, he had the peculiar thought that he was letting down the Jews by marrying a Gentile. Morally dubious though Jenna was in most respects, she was still a Jew, with great-great-aunts and uncles who’d died in the camps, and this humanized her, took the edge off her inhuman beauty, and made him sorry to let her down. Interestingly, he felt this only about Jenna, not Jonathan, who was already fully human to Joey and did not require Jewishness to make him any more so.

“What do you think?” Connie asked, gazing at the rings arrayed on velvet.

“I don’t know,” he said from his little cloud of regret. “They all look good.”

“Pick them up, try them on, handle them,” the jeweler said. “You can’t hurt gold.”

Connie turned to Joey and searched his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I think so. Are you?”

“Yes. If you are.”

The jeweler stepped away from the counter and found something to busy himself with. And Joey, seeing himself through Connie’s eyes, couldn’t bear the uncertainty in his own face. It enraged him murderously on her behalf. Everybody else doubted her, and she needed him not to, and so he chose not to.

“Definitely,” he said. “Let’s take a look at these.”

When they’d selected their rings, Joey tried to bargain down the price, which he knew he was supposed to do in a store like this, but the jeweler merely gave him a disappointed look, as if to say: You’re marrying this girl and you’re quibbling with me about fifty dollars?

Leaving the store, the rings in his front pocket, he almost collided on the sidewalk with his old hall mate Casey.

“Dude!” Casey said. “What are you doing here?”

He was wearing a three-piece suit and was already losing his hair. He and Joey had drifted apart, but Joey had heard he was working in his dad’s law office for the summer. Running into him at this moment seemed to Joey another important sign, although of what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. He said, “You remember Connie, right?”

“Hi, Casey,” she said with fiendishly blazing eyes.

“Yeah, sure, hi,” Casey said. “But, dude, what the fuck? I thought you were in Washington.”

“I’m taking a vacation.”

“Man, you should have called me, I had no idea. What are you guys doing on this street anyway? Buying an engagement ring?”

“Yeah, ha ha, right,” Joey said. “What are you doing here?”

Casey fished a watch on a chain from his vest pocket. “Is this cool or what? It used to be my dad’s dad’s. I had it cleaned and repaired.”

“It’s beautiful,” Connie said. She bent over to admire it, and Casey shot Joey a frown of inquiry and comic alarm. From the various acceptable guy-to-guy responses available to him, Joey chose to produce a sheepish smirk suggesting mucho excellente sex, the irrational demands of girlfriends, their need to be bought trinkets, and so forth. Casey cast a quick connoisseurial glance at Connie’s bare shoulders and nodded judiciously. The entire exchange took four seconds, and Joey was relieved by how easy it was, even at a moment like this, to seem to Casey a person like Casey: to compartmentalize. It boded well for his continuing to have an ordinary life at college.

“Dude, aren’t you hot in that suit?” he said.

“My blood is Southern,” Casey said. “We don’t sweat like you Minnesotans.”

“Sweating is wonderful,” Connie offered. “I love sweating in the summer.”

This obviously struck Casey as a too-intense thing to say. He put his watch back in its pocket and looked down the street. “Anyhow,” he said. “If you guys want to go out or something, you should give me a call.”

When they were alone again, in the five o’clock flow of workers on Sixth Avenue, Connie asked Joey if she’d said the wrong thing. “Did I embarrass you?”

“No,” he said. “He’s a total dork. It’s ninety-five degrees and he’s wearing a three-piece suit? He’s a total pompous dork, with that stupid watch. He’s already turning into his dad.”

“I open my mouth and strange things come out.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you embarrassed to be marrying me?”

“No.”

“It kind of seemed like you were. I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just don’t want to embarrass you around your friends.”

“You don’t embarrass me,” he said angrily. “It’s just that hardly any of my friends even have girlfriends. I’m just kind of in a weird position.”

He might reasonably have expected to have a little fight then, might have expected her to try to extract, via sulking or reproach, a more definitive avowal of his wish to marry her. But Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia—the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends—were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, he could never determine. The more he merged with her, the more he strangely also felt he didn’t know the first thing about her. She acknowledged only what was right in front of her. She did what she did, responded to what he said to her, and otherwise seemed wholly untroubled by things occurring outside her field of vision. He was haunted by his mother’s insistence that fights were good in a relationship. Indeed, it almost seemed to him as if he were marrying Connie to see if she would finally start fighting with him: to get to know her. But when he did marry her, the following afternoon, nothing changed at all. In the back of a cab, as they rode away from the courthouse, she wove her ringed left hand into his ringed left hand and rested her head on his shoulder with something that couldn’t quite be described as contentedness, because that would have implied that she’d been discontented before. It was more like mute submission to the deed, the crime, that had needed to be done. The next time Joey saw Casey, in Charlottesville a week later, neither of them even mentioned her.