Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

It was, as Connie had said, only sex. The permission she’d given him to pursue it elsewhere was very much on Joey’s mind as he rode with Jonathan to NoVa for Thanksgiving. They were in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser, which he’d received as a high-school graduation present and now parked off campus in open defiance of the first-year no-cars rule. It was Joey’s impression, from movies and books, that much could happen quickly when college students were let loose at Thanksgiving. All fall, he’d taken care not to ask Jonathan any questions about his sister, Jenna, figuring that he had nothing to gain by arousing Jonathan’s suspicions prematurely. But as soon as he mentioned Jenna in the Land Cruiser he saw that all his care had been for naught. Jonathan gave him a knowing look and said, “She’s got a very serious boyfriend.”

“No doubt.”

“Or, no, sorry, I misspoke. I should have said that she is very serious about a boyfriend who in fact is ridiculous and a class-A jackass. I won’t insult my own intelligence by asking why you’re asking about her.”

“I was just being polite,” Joey said.

“Ha-ha. It was interesting, when she finally went away to college, I found out who my real friends were and which ones were only interested in coming over to my house as long as she was there. It turned out to be about fifty percent of them.”

“I had the same problem, but not with my sister,” Joey said, smiling at the thought of Jessica. “For me it was Foosball and air hockey and a beer keg.” He proceeded, in the freedom of being on the road, to divulge to Jonathan the circumstances of his last two years of high school. Jonathan listened attentively enough but seemed interested in only one part of the story, the part about his living with his girlfriend.

“And where is this person now?” he asked.

“In St. Paul. She’s still at home.”

“No shit,” Jonathan said, very impressed. “But wait a minute. That girl Casey saw going into our room on Yom Kippur—that wasn’t her , was it?”

“Actually, yes,” Joey said. “We broke up, but we sort of had one little backslide.”

“You fucking little liar! You told me that was just some hookup.”

“No. All I said was I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“You gave me to believe it was a hookup. I can’t believe you deliberately brought her out here when I was gone.”

“Like I said, we had one backslide. We’re broken up now.”

“For real? You don’t talk to her on the phone?”

“Just a tiny little bit. She’s really depressed.”

“I am impressed with what a sneaky little liar you turn out to be.”

“I’m not a liar,” Joey said.

“Said the liar. Do you have a picture of her on your computer?”

“No,” Joey lied.

“Joey the secret stud,” Jonathan said. “Joey the runaway. God damn. You’re making more sense to me now.”

“Right, but I’m still Jewish, so you still have to like me.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like you. I said you’re making more sense. I could care less if you’ve got a girlfriend—I’m not going to tell Jenna. I’ll just warn you right now that you’re lacking the key to her heart.”

“And what’s that?”

“A job at Goldman Sachs. That’s what her boyfriend has. His stated ambition is to be worth a hundred million at age thirty.”

“Is he going to be at your parents’?”

“No, he’s in Singapore. He just graduated last year, and they’re already flying him to fucking Singapore for some billion-dollar round-the-clock something. She’ll be pining alone at home, bro.”

Jonathan’s father was the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer, especially for America and Israel. Hardly a week had passed, in October and November, without Jonathan pointing out to Joey an opinion piece in the Times or the Journal in which his father expounded on the menace of radical Islam. They’d also watched him on the NewsHour and Fox News. He had a mouth full of exceptionally white teeth that he flashed every time he started speaking, and he looked almost old enough to be Jonathan’s grandfather. Besides Jonathan and Jenna, he had three much older children from earlier marriages, plus two former wives.

The house of his third marriage was in McLean, Virginia, on a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where Joey wanted to live as soon as he got rich. Inside the house, whose floors were of fine-grained oak, there seemed to be no end of rooms looking out on a wooded ravine in which woodpeckers swooped among the mostly bare trees. Despite having grown up in a house he’d considered book-filled and tasteful, Joey was staggered by the quantity of hardcover books and by the obviously top quality of the multicultural swag that Jonathan’s father had collected during distinguished foreign residencies. Just as Jonathan had been surprised to learn of Joey’s adventures in high school, Joey was now surprised to see what high-class luxury his messy and somewhat crude-mannered roommate came from. The only real off note was the tackily ornate Judaica parked in various nooks and corners. Seeing Joey smirk at a notably monstrous silver-painted menorah, Jonathan assured him it was extremely old and rare and valuable.

Jonathan’s mother, Tamara, who’d clearly once been a total babe and was still quite a bit of one, showed Joey the luxurious bedroom and bathroom that would be solely his. “Jonathan tells me you’re Jewish,” she said.

“Yes, apparently I am,” Joey said.

“But not observant?”

“Not even conscious, actually, until a month ago.”

Tamara shook her head. “I don’t understand that,” she said. “I know it’s very common, but I will never understand it.”

“It wasn’t like I was Christian or anything, either,” Joey said by way of excuse. “It was all part of the same nonissue.”

“Well, you’re very welcome with us. I think you might find it interesting to learn a little bit about your heritage. You’ll find that Howard and I aren’t particularly conservative. We just think it’s important to be aware and always be remembering.”

“They’ll whip you right into shape,” Jonathan said.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be a very gentle whipping,” Tamara said with a milfy smile.

“That’s great,” Joey said. “I’m definitely up for anything.”

As soon as they could, the two boys escaped to the basement rec room, whose amenities shamed even those in Blake and Carol’s great-room. Tennis could practically have been played on the blue felt expanses of the mahogany pool table. Jonathan introduced Joey to a complicated, interminable, and frustrating game called Cowboy Pool that required a table without a central ball-collection mechanism. Joey was on the verge of suggesting a switch to air hockey, at which he was annihilatingly skilled, when the sister, Jenna, came downstairs. She acknowledged Joey, barely, from the pinnacle of her two-year age advantage, and began to speak of urgent family matters with her brother.

Joey suddenly understood, as never before, what people meant by “breathtaking.” Jenna had the unsettling kind of beauty that relegated everything around her, even a beholder’s basic organ functions, to afterthought status. Her figure and complexion and bone structure made the features that he’d so admired in other “pretty” girls now seem like crude approximations of beauty; even the pictures of her hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was thick and shining and strawberry blonde, and she was wearing an oversized Duke athletic jersey and flannel pajama bottoms, which, far from concealing her body’s perfection, demonstrated its power to overcome the baggiest of clothes. Everything else that Joey rested his eyes on in the rec room was notable only for not being her—was all the same second-class blah. And yet, when he did steal a glance at her, his brain was too unsettled to even see much. The whole thing was weirdly tiring. There seemed to be no way to arrange his face that wasn’t false and self-conscious. He was painfully aware of smirking stupidly at the floor while she and her amazingly unawed sibling bickered about the New York City shopping expedition she intended to make on Friday.