Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Not going to happen,” Jonathan said. “And I’m sorry, but since when do expansion teams get to play in the Series after four seasons? I’m still trying to accept that Arizona even has a team.”

“I’m glad you’re seeing the light of reason finally.”

“Don’t get me wrong. There’s still nothing sweeter than a Yankee loss, preferably by one run, preferably on a passed ball by Jorge Posada, the chinless wonder. But this is the one year you kind of want them to win anyway. It’s a patriotic sacrifice we all have to make for New York.”

“I want them to win every year,” Joey said, although he didn’t have strong feelings about it.

“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you supposed to like the Twins?”

“It’s probably mostly because my parents hate the Yankees. My dad loves the Twins because they’ve got a tiny payroll, and naturally the Yankees are the enemy when it comes to payrolls. And my mom’s just an anti–New York maniac in general.”

Jonathan gave him an interested look. To date, Joey had disclosed very little about his parents, only enough to avoid seeming annoyingly mysterious about them. “Why does she hate New York?”

“I don’t know. I guess because it’s where she came from.”

On Jonathan’s TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over.

“Very complex mix of emotions here,” Jonathan said, turning it off.

“You know, I don’t even know my grandparents?” Joey said. “My mom’s really weird about them. My entire childhood, they came to see us once, for like forty-eight hours. The whole time, my mom was unbelievably neurotic and fake. We went to see them one other time, when we were in New York on vacation, and that was bad, too. I’d get these birthday cards three weeks late from them, and my mom would be, like, cursing them for being so late, even though it wasn’t really their fault. I mean, how are they supposed to remember the birthday of somebody they never get to see?”

Jonathan was frowning thoughtfully. “Where in New York?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in the suburbs. My grandmother’s a politician, in the state legislature or something. She’s this nice, elegant Jewish lady who my mom apparently can’t stand to be in the same room with.”

“Whoa, say that again?” Jonathan sat up straight on his bed. “Your mom is Jewish?”

“I guess in some theoretical way.”

“Dude, you’re a Jew! I had no idea!”

“Only, like, one-quarter,” Joey said. “It’s really watered down.”

“You could immigrate to Israel right now, no questions asked.”

“My lifelong dream fulfilled.”

“I’m just saying. You could be packing a Desert Eagle, or piloting one of those fighter jets, and dating a total sabra.”

To illustrate his point, Jonathan opened his laptop and navigated to a site devoted to pictures of bronzed Israeli goddesses with high-caliber bandoliers crisscrossing their naked D-cup chests.

“Not my kind of thing,” Joey said.

“I’m not that into it, either,” Jonathan said, with perhaps less than complete honesty. “I’m just saying, if it were your kind of thing.”

“Also, isn’t there a problem with illegal settlements and Palestinians not having any rights?”

“Yes, there’s a problem! The problem is being a tiny island of democracy and pro-Western government surrounded by Muslim fanatics and hostile dictators.”

“Yeah, but that just means it was a stupid place to put the island,” Joey said. “If the Jews hadn’t gone to the Middle East, and if we didn’t have to keep supporting them, maybe the Arab countries wouldn’t be so hostile to us.”

“Dude. Are you familiar with the Holocaust?”

“I know. But why didn’t they go to New York instead? We would have let them in. They could have had their synagogues here, and so forth, and we could have had some kind of normal relationship with the Arabs.”

“But the Holocaust happened in Europe, which was supposed to be civilized. When you lose half your world population to genocide, you stop trusting anybody to protect you except yourself.”

Joey was uncomfortably aware that he was displaying attitudes more his parents’ than his own, and that he was therefore about to lose an argument he didn’t even care about winning. “Fine,” he persisted nonetheless, “but why does that have to be our problem?”

“Because it’s our business to support democracy and free markets wherever they are,” Jonathan said. “That’s the problem in Saudi Arabia—too many angry people with no economic prospects. That’s how come bin Laden can recruit there. I totally agree with you about the Palestinians. That’s just a giant fucking breeding ground for terrorists. That’s why we have to try to bring freedom to all the Arab countries. But you don’t start doing that by selling out the one working democracy in the entire region.”

Joey admired Jonathan not only for his coolness but for having the confidence not to pretend to be stupid in order to maintain it. He managed the difficult trick of making it seem cool to be smart. “Hey,” Joey said, to change the subject, “am I still invited to Thanksgiving?”

“Invited? You’re doubly invited now. My family isn’t the self-hating kind of Jewish. My parents really, really dig Jews. They will roll out the red carpet for you.”

The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie about seeing a doctor, Joey found himself opening Jonathan’s computer and searching for pictures of his sister, Jenna. He didn’t consider it snooping if he went straight to family photos that Jonathan had already shown him anyway. His roommate’s excitement about his Jewishness seemed to presage a similarly warm reception on Jenna’s part, and he copied the two most fetching pictures of her onto his own hard drive, altering the file extensions to make them unfindable by anyone but him, so that he could picture some concrete alternative to Connie before he made the dreaded call to her.

The female scene at school had not proved satisfactory thus far. Compared to Connie, the really attractive girls he’d met in Virginia all seemed to have been sprayed with Teflon, encased in suspicion of his motives. Even the prettiest ones wore too much makeup and overly formal clothes and dressed for Cavaliers games as if they were the Kentucky Derby. It was true that certain second-tier girls, at parties where they’d drunk too much, had given him to understand he was a boy to whom hookups were available. But for whatever reason, whether because he was a wuss or because he hated shouting over music or because he thought too highly of himself or because he was unable to ignore how stupid and annoying too much alcohol made a girl, he’d formed an early prejudice against these parties and their hookups and decided that he much preferred hanging out with other guys.

He sat holding his phone for a long time, for maybe half an hour, while the sky in the windows grayed toward rain. He waited for so long and in such a stupor of reluctance that it was almost like Zen archery when his thumb, of its own accord, hit the speed-dial for Connie’s number and the ringing dragged him forward into action.

“Hey!” she answered in a cheerful ordinary voice, a voice he realized he’d been missing. “Where are you?”

“I’m in my room.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of gray.”

“God, it was snowing here this morning. It’s already winter.”

“Yeah, listen,” he said. “Are you OK?”

“Me?” She seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. I miss you every minute of the day, but I’m getting used to that.”