Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over, it was stupid that the Chi Phi boys hung a banner of “support” from their house, it was stupid that the football game against Penn State was canceled, it was stupid that so many kids left Grounds to be with their families (and it was stupid that everybody at Virginia said “Grounds” instead of “campus”). The four liberal kids on Joey’s hall had endless stupid arguments with the twenty conservative kids, as if anybody cared what a bunch of eighteen-year-olds thought about the Middle East. A stupidly big fuss was made about the students who’d lost relatives or family friends in the attacks, as if the other kinds of horrible death that were constantly occurring in the world mattered less, and there was stupid applause when a vanful of upperclassmen solemnly departed for New York to give succor to the Ground Zero workers, as if there weren’t enough people in New York to do the job. Joey just wanted normal life to return as fast as possible. He felt as if he’d bumped his old Discman against a wall and knocked its laser out of a track he’d been enjoying and into a track he didn’t recognize or like and also couldn’t make stop playing. Before long, he was so lonely and isolated and hungry for familiar things that he made the rather serious mistake of giving Connie Monaghan permission to take a Greyhound bus to visit him in Charlottesville, thereby undoing a summer’s worth of spadework to prepare her for their inevitable breakup.

All summer, he’d labored to impress on Connie the importance of not getting together for at least nine months, so as to test their feelings for each other. The idea was to develop independent selves and see if these independent selves were still a good match, but to Joey this was no more a “test” than a high-school chemistry “experiment” was research. Connie would end up staying in Minnesota while he pursued a business career and met girls who were more exotic and advanced and connected. Or so he’d imagined before 9/11.

He was careful to schedule Connie’s visit while Jonathan was at home in NoVa for a Jewish holiday. She spent the entire weekend camped out on Joey’s bed with her overnight bag beside her on the floor, zipping her things back inside it as soon as she was done with them, as if trying to minimize her footprint. While Joey endeavored to read Plato for a Monday-morning class, she pored over the faces in his first-year facebook and laughed at the ones with odd expressions or unfortunate names. Bailey Bodsworth, Crampton Ott, Taylor Tuttle. By Joey’s reliable count, they had sex eight times in forty hours, stoning themselves repeatedly on the hydroponic bud she’d brought along. When it came time to take her back to the bus station, he loaded a bunch of new songs onto her MP3 player for the punishing twenty-hour return trip to Minnesota. The sorry truth was that he felt responsible for her, knew he needed to break up with her anyway, and couldn’t think how.

At the bus station, he raised the subject of her education, which she’d promised to pursue but somehow, in her obdurate way, without explanation, hadn’t.

“You need to start taking classes in January,” he told her. “Start at Inver Hills and then maybe transfer to the U. next year.”

“OK,” she said.

“You’re really smart,” he said. “You can’t just keep being a waitress.”

“OK.” She looked away desolately at the line forming by her bus. “I’ll do it for you.”

“Not for me. For you. Like you promised.”

She shook her head. “You just want me to forget about you.”

“Not true, not true at all,” Joey said, although it was fairly true.

“I’ll go to school,” she said. “But it’s not going to make me forget about you. Nothing’s going to make me forget about you.”

“Right,” he said, “but we still need to find out who we are. We both need to do some growing.”

“I already know who I am.”

“Maybe you’re wrong, though. Maybe you still need to—”

“No,” she said. “I’m not wrong. I only want to be with you. That’s all I want in my life. You’re the best person in the world. You can do anything you want, and I can be there for you. You’ll own lots of companies, and I can work for you. Or you can run for president, and I’ll work for your campaign. I’ll do the things that nobody else will do. If you need somebody to break the law, I’ll do that for you. If you want children, I’ll raise them for you.”

Joey was aware of needing his wits about him to reply to this rather alarming declaration, but he was unfortunately still somewhat stoned.

“Here’s the thing I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to get a college education. Like, for example,” he unwisely added, “if you were going to work for me, you’d need to know a lot of different stuff.”

“That’s why I said I’d go to school for you ,” Connie said. “Weren’t you listening?”

He was beginning to see, as he hadn’t in St. Paul, that things’ prices weren’t always evident at first glance: that the really big ballooning of the interest charges on his high-school pleasures might still lie ahead of him.

“We’d better get in line,” he said. “If you want a good seat.”

“OK.”

“Also,” he said, “I think we should go at least a week without calling. We need to get back to being more disciplined.”

“OK,” she said, and walked obediently toward the bus. Joey followed with her overnight bag. He at least didn’t have to worry about her making any scenes. She’d never been a compromiser of him, never an insister on sidewalk hand-holding, never a clinger, a pouter, a reproacher. She saved up all her ardor for when they were alone, she was a specialist like that. When the bus doors opened, she stabbed him with one burning look and then handed her bag to the driver and boarded. There was no bullshit about waving through the window or making kissy faces. She put earphones in her ears and slouched down out of sight.

There was no bullshit in the weeks that followed, either. Connie obediently refrained from calling him, and as the national fever began to break and autumn deepened on the Blue Ridge, lingering with hay-colored sunshine and rich smells of warm lawn and turning leaf, Joey attended blowout Cavalier football losses and worked out at the gym and gained numerous pounds of beer weight. He gravitated socially to hall mates from prosperous families who believed in carpet bombing the Islamic world until it learned to behave itself. He wasn’t right-wing himself but was comfortable with those who were. Reaming Afghanistan wasn’t exactly what his sense of dislocation demanded, but it was close enough to afford some satisfaction.

Only when enough beer had been consumed to bring a group conversation around to sex did he feel isolated. His thing with Connie was too intense and strange—too sincere ; too muddled with love—to be fungible as coin of bragging. He disdained but also envied his hall mates for their communal bravado, their porny avowals of what they wanted to do to the choicest babes in the facebook or had supposedly done, in isolated instances, while wasted, and seemingly without regret or consequence, to various wasted girls at their academies and prep schools. His hall mates’ yearnings still largely centered on the blow job, which Joey apparently was totally alone in considering little more than a glorified jerkoff, an amusement for the parking lot at lunch hour.

Masturbation itself was a demeaning dissipation whose utility he was nevertheless learning to value as he sought to wean himself from Connie. His preferred venue for release was the Handicapped bathroom in the science library at whose Reserve desk he collected $7.65 an hour for reading textbooks and the Wall Street Journal and occasionally fetching texts for science nerds. Landing a work-study job at the Reserve desk had seemed to him yet another confirmation that he was destined to be fortunate in life. He was astonished that the library still possessed printed matter of such rarity and widespread interest that it had to be guarded in separate stacks and not allowed to leave the building. There was no way it wouldn’t all be digitized within the next few years. Many of the reserved texts were written in formerly popular foreign languages and illustrated with sumptuous color plates; the nineteenth-century Germans had been especially industrious cataloguers of human knowledge. It could even dignify masturbation, a little bit, to use a century-old German sexualanatomy atlas as an auxiliary to it. He knew that sooner or later he would need to break his silence with Connie, but at the end of each evening, after employing the paddle-handled Handicapped faucets to wash his gametes and prostatic fluids down the drain, he decided to risk waiting one more day, until finally, late one evening, at the Reserve desk, on the very day he’d realized that he’d probably waited one day too long, he got a call from Connie’s mother.