Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“You can’t leave us the Cabriolet,” Jonathan said. “Joey and I are going to look like a couple of life partners in that thing.”

Jenna’s one evident defect was her voice, which was pinched and little-girly. “Yeah, right,” she said. “A couple of life partners with jeans hanging halfway down their ass.”

“I just don’t see why you can’t drive the Cabriolet to New York,” Jonathan said. “You’ve driven it there before.”

“Because Mom says I can’t. Not on a holiday weekend. The Land Cruiser is safer. I’ll bring it back on Sunday.”

“Are you kidding? The Land Cruiser is a rollover machine. It’s totally unsafe.”

“Well, you can tell that to Mom. Tell her your freshman car’s an unsafe rollover machine and that’s why I can’t take it to New York.”

“Hey.” Jonathan turned to Joey. “You want to go to New York for the weekend?”

“Sure!” Joey said.

“Just take the Cabriolet,” Jenna said. “It won’t hurt you for three days.”

“No, this is great,” Jonathan said. “We can all go to New York in the Land Cruiser and go shopping. You can help me find some pants that meet your standards.”

“Reasons that’s a nonstarter?” Jenna said. “Number one, you don’t even have any place to stay.”

“Why can’t we crash with you at Nick’s? Isn’t he, like, in Singapore?”

“Nick’s not going to want a bunch of freshman guys running around his apartment. Plus he might be back by Saturday night.”

“Two is not a bunch. This would just be me and my incredibly tidy Minnesotan roommate.”

“I am very tidy,” Joey assured her.

“No doubt,” she said with zero interest, from her pinnacle. Joey’s presence nevertheless seemed to complicate her resistance—she couldn’t be quite as dismissive to a stranger as she could to her own brother. “I really don’t care,” she said. “I’ll ask Nick. But if he says no, you can’t come.”

As soon as she went back upstairs, Jonathan presented Joey with a palm to high-five. “New York, New York,” he said. “I bet we can crash with Casey’s family if Nick ends up being as big a dick as he usually is. They’re on the Upper East Side somewhere.”

Joey was just stunned by Jenna’s beauty. He wandered into the area where she’d stood, which smelled faintly of patchouli. That he might get to spend an entire weekend in her vicinity, through the sheer happenstance of being Jonathan’s roommate, felt like some kind of miracle.

“You, too, I see,” Jonathan said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the story of my young life.”

Joey felt himself reddening. “What I don’t get is how you turned out to be so ugly.”

“Ha, you know what they say about older parents. My dad was fifty-one when I was born. There was a crucial two years of genetic deterioration. Not every boy gets to be pretty like you.”

“I didn’t realize you had these feelings.”

“What feelings? I only look for prettiness in girls, where it belongs.”

“Fuck you, rich kid.”

“Pretty boy, pretty boy.”

“Fuck you. Let me kick your ass at air hockey.”

“Just as long as kicking it is all you want to do.”

Tamara’s threat notwithstanding, there was blessedly little religious instruction, or invasive parental interaction of any kind, during Joey’s stay in McLean. He and Jonathan installed themselves in the basement home theater, which had reclining seats and an eight-foot projection screen, and stayed up until 4 a.m. watching bad TV and casting aspersions on each other’s heterosexuality. By the time they roused themselves on Thanksgiving, crowds of relatives were arriving at the house. Since Jonathan was obliged to speak to them, Joey found himself floating through the beautiful rooms like a helium molecule, devoting himself to arranging sight lines that Jenna might pass through or, better yet, alight in. The upcoming excursion to New York, which her boyfriend had surprisingly signed off on, was like money in the bank: he would have, at a minimum, two long car trips to make an impression on her. For now, he wanted only to accustom his eyes to her, to make looking less impossible. She was wearing a demure, high-necked dress, a friendly dress, and either was very adept at applying makeup or simply didn’t wear much. He took note of her good manners, manifested in her patience with bald-pated uncles and face-lifted aunts who seemed to have a lot to say to her.

Before dinner was served, he slipped away to his bedroom to call St. Paul. Calling Connie was out of the question in his current state; shame about their filthy conversations, curiously absent throughout the fall, was creeping up on him now. His parents were a different matter, however, if only because of the checks of his mother’s that he’d been cashing.

His dad answered the phone in St. Paul and spoke to him for no more than two minutes before handing him off to his mother, which Joey took as a kind of betrayal. He actually had a fair amount of respect for his dad—for the consistency of his disapproval; for the strictness of his principles—and he might have had even more if his dad hadn’t been so deferential to his mother. Joey could have used some manly backup, but instead his dad kept passing him off to his mom and washing his hands of them.

“Hello, you,” she said with a warmth that made him cringe. He immediately resolved to be hard with her, but, as happened so often, she wore him down with her humor and her cascading laugh. Before he knew it, he’d described the entire scene in McLean to her, excluding Jenna.

“A house full of Jews!” she said. “How interesting for you.”

“You’re a Jew yourself,” he said. “And that makes me a Jew, too. And Jessica, too, and Jessica’s kids if she has any.”

“No, that’s only if you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” his mother said. After three months in the East, Joey was able to hear that she had a bit of Minnesota accent. “You see,” she said, “I think, when it comes to religion, you’re only what you say you are. Nobody else can say it for you.”

“But you don’t have any religion.”

“Exactly my point. That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts. That religion is stoopid. Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished.”

“Which sister?”

“Your aunt Abigail. She’s apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are. How do I know this, you ask? Because we got a chain letter , or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah. I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey.”

“I don’t even know what the Kabbalah is,” Joey said.

“Oh, I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her. It’s very Important and Mystical—I think Madonna’s into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.”

“Madonna’s Jewish?”

“Yah, Joey, hence her name.” His mother laughed at him.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “I’m trying to keep an open mind about it. I don’t feel like rejecting something I haven’t even found out about yet.”

“That’s right. And who knows? It might even be useful to you.”

“It might,” he said coolly.

At the very long dinner table, he was seated on the same side as Jenna, which spared him a view of her and allowed him to concentrate on conversing with one of the bald uncles, who assumed that he was Jewish and regaled him with an account of his recent vacation-slash-business-trip in Israel. Joey pretended to be fluent and impressed with much that was utterly foreign to him: the Western Wall and its tunnels, the Tower of David, Masada, Yad Vashem. Delayed-action resentment of his mother, coupled with the fabulousness of the house and his fascination with Jenna and a certain unfamiliar feeling of genuine intellectual curiosity, was making him actually long to be more Jewish—to see what this kind of belonging might be like.