Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“I’m sorry I went so long without calling.”

“That’s OK. I love talking to you, but I understand why we need to be more disciplined. I was just working on my Inver Hills application. I also signed up to take the SAT in December, like you suggested.”

“Did I suggest that?”

“If I’m going to go to real school in the fall, like you said, it’s what I need to do. I bought a book on how to study for it. I’m going to study three hours every day.”

“So you’re really OK.”

“Yes! How are you?”

Joey struggled to reconcile Carol’s account of Connie with how clear and collected she was sounding. “I talked to your mom last night,” he said.

“I know. She told me.”

“She said she’s pregnant?”

“Yes, a blessed event is coming our way. I think it’s going to be twins.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just my sense. That it’s going to be especially horrible in some way.”

“The whole conversation was actually pretty weird.”

“She’s been spoken to now,” Connie said. “She won’t be calling you again. If she does, let me know, and I’ll make it stop.”

“She said you were very depressed,” Joey blurted out.

This brought a sudden silence, total in the black-hole way that only Connie could make a silence.

“She said you’re sleeping all day and not eating enough,” Joey said. “She sounded really worried about you.”

After another silence, Connie said, “I was a little bit depressed for a while. But it was none of Carol’s business. And now I’m doing better.”

“But maybe you need an antidepressant or something?”

“No. I’m doing much better.”

“Well, that’s great,” Joey said, although he felt that it was somehow not great at all—that morbid weakness and clinginess on her part might have provided him with a viable escape route.

“So have you been sleeping with other people?” Connie said. “I thought that might be why you weren’t calling.”

“No! No. Not at all.”

“It’s OK with me if you do. I meant to tell you that last month. You’re a guy, you have needs. I don’t expect you to be a monk. It’s just sex, who cares?”

“Well, the same goes for you,” he said gratefully, sensing another possible escape route here.

“Except it’s not going to happen with me,” Connie said. “Nobody else sees me the way you do. I’m invisible to men.”

“I don’t believe that at all.”

“No, it’s true. Sometimes I try to be friendly, or even flirty, at the restaurant. But it’s like I’m invisible. I don’t really care anyway. I just want you. I think people sense that.”

“I want you, too,” he found himself murmuring, in contravention of certain safety guidelines he’d established for himself.

“I know,” she said. “But guys are different, is all I’m saying. You should feel free.”

“I’ve actually been jerking off a lot.”

“Yeah, me, too. For hours and hours. Some days it’s the only thing I feel like doing. That’s probably why Carol thinks I’m depressed.”

“But maybe you are depressed.”

“No, I just like to come a lot. I think about you, and I come. I think about you some more, and then I come some more. That’s all it is.”

Very quickly the conversation devolved into phone sex, which they hadn’t had since the earliest days, when they were sneaking around and whispering on phones in their respective bedrooms. It had become a lot more interesting in the meantime, because they knew how to talk to each other now. At the same time, it was as if they’d never had sex before—was cataclysmic that way.

“I wish I could lick it off your fingers,” Connie said when they were finished.

“I’m licking it for you,” Joey said.

“That’s good. Lick it up for me. Does it taste good?”

“Yes.”

“I swear I can taste it in my mouth.”

“I can taste you, too.”

“Oh, baby.”

Which led immediately to further phone sex, a more nervous rendition, since Jonathan’s afternoon class was ending and he might return soon.

“My baby,” Connie said. “Oh, my baby. My baby, my baby, my baby.”

Joey, as he climaxed again, believed that he was with Connie in her bedroom on Barrier Street, his arching back her arching back, his little breasts her little breasts. They lay breathing as one into their cell phones. He’d been wrong, the night before, when he’d told Carol that she, not he, was responsible for the way Connie was. He could feel now in his body how they’d made each other who they were.

“Your mom wants me to spend Thanksgiving with you guys,” he said after a while.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “We agreed we were going to try to wait nine months.”

“Well, she was kind of a bitch about it.”

“That’s her way. She’s a bitch. But she’s been spoken to, and it won’t happen again.”

“So you don’t care either way?”

“You know what I want. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with it.”

He had been hoping, for paradoxically opposing reasons, that Connie would join Carol in urging him to come back for the holiday. He was keen, on the one hand, to see her and to sleep with her, and, on the other hand, to find fault with her, so that he would have something to resist and break away from. What she was doing instead, with her cool clarity, was resetting a hook that for a while, in recent weeks, he’d managed to work halfway free of. Resetting it deeper than ever.

“I should probably get off the phone now,” he said. “Jonathan’s coming back.”

“OK,” Connie said, and let him go.

Their conversation had diverged so wildly from his expectations that he couldn’t even remember now what he’d expected. He got up from his bed as if surfacing through a wormhole in the fabric of reality, his heart thudding, his vision altered, and paced around the room under the collective gaze of Tupac and Natalie Portman. He’d always liked Connie a lot. Always. And so why now, of all the inopportune moments, was he being gripped, as if for the first time, by such a titanic undertow of really liking her ? How could it be, after years of having sex with her, years of feeling tender and protective of her, that he was only now getting sucked into such heavy waters of affection? Feeling connected to her in such a scarily consequential way? Why now?

It was wrong, it was wrong, he knew it was wrong. He sat down at his computer to view the pictures of Jonathan’s sister and try to reestablish some order. Luckily, before he was able to get the file extensions changed back to JPG and be caught red-handed, Jonathan himself walked in.

“My man, my Jewish brother,” he said, falling to his bed like a shooting victim. “ ’Sup?”

“ ’Sup,” Joey said, hastily closing a graphical window.

“Whoa, Jesus, a little bit of chlorine in the air here? You been to the pool, or what?”

Joey almost, right then, told his roommate everything, the whole story of him and Connie right up to the present moment. But the dream world he’d been in, the nethery place of sexually merged identities, was receding quickly in the face of Jonathan’s male presence.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with a smile.

“Crack a window, for God’s sake. I mean, I like you and all, but I’m not ready to go all the way yet.”

Taking Jonathan’s complaint to heart, Joey did, after that, open the windows. He called Connie again the very next day, and again two days after that. He quietly shelved his sound arguments against too-frequent calling and fell gratefully on phone sex as a replacement for his solitary science-library masturbation, which now seemed to him a squalid aberration, embarrassing to recall. He succeeded in persuading himself that, as long as they avoided ordinary newsy chitchat and spoke only of sex, it was OK to exploit this loophole in his otherwise strict embargo on excess contact. As they continued to exploit it, however, and October became November and the days grew shorter, he realized that it was making their contact all the deeper and realer to hear Connie finally naming the things they’d done and the things she imagined them doing in the future. This deepening was somewhat strange, since all they were doing was getting each other off. But in hindsight it seemed to him as if, in St. Paul, Connie’s silence had formed a kind of protective barrier: had given their couplings what politicians called deniability. To discover, now, that sex had been fully registering in her as language—as words that she could speak out loud—made her much realer to him as a person. The two of them could no longer pretend that they were just mute youthful animals mindlessly doing their thing. Words made everything less safe, words had no limits, words made their own world. One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate. As long as her words were in his ear, urging him on, he wasn’t ashamed of anything. He returned to the wormhole three or four or even five times a week, disappeared into the world the two of them created, and later reemerged and shut the windows and went out to the dining hall or down to his dormitory lounge and effortlessly performed the shallow affability that college life required of him.