Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Do you get drunk a lot?”

“No, I have the capacity of a flea. Nick stopped drinking, too, once he started working. He has like one Jack and Coke per week now. He’s totally focused on getting ahead. He was the first person in his family to go to a four-year college, total opposite of my family, where you’re an underachiever if you only have one PhD.”

“And he’s nice to you?”

She looked away with a shadow of something in her face. “I feel unbelievably safe with him. Like, I was thinking, if we’d been in the towers on September 11, even on a high floor, he would have found a way to get us out. He would have gotten us through, I just have that feeling.”

“There were a lot of guys like that at Cantor Fitzgerald,” Joey said. “Very tough traders. And they didn’t get out.”

“Well then they weren’t like Nick,” she said.

Seeing her close her mind like this, Joey wondered how hard he would have to make himself, and how much money he would have to earn, to even enter the running for the likes of her. His dick, in his boxers, bestirred itself again, as if to declare its upness for the challenge. But the softer parts of him, his heart and his brain, were awash in hopelessness at the enormity of it.

“I think I might go down to Wall Street and check it out today,” he said.

“Everything’s closed on Saturday.”

“I just want to see what it looks like, since I might end up working there.”

“No offense?” Jenna said, reopening her book. “You seem way too nice for that.”

Four weeks later, Joey was back in Manhattan, housesitting for his aunt Abigail. All fall, he’d been stressing about where to stay during his Christmas vacation, since his two competing homes in St. Paul disqualified each other, and since three weeks was far too long to impose on the family of a new college friend. He’d vaguely planned on staying with one of his better high-school friends, which would have positioned him to pay separate visits to his parents and the Monaghans, but it turned out that Abigail was going to Avignon for the holidays to attend an international miming workshop and was worrying, herself, when she met him on Thanksgiving weekend, about who would stay in her Charles Street apartment and see to the complex dietary requirements of her cats, Tigger and Piglet.

The meeting with his aunt had been interesting, if one-sided. Abigail, though younger than his mother, looked considerably older in all respects except her clothes, which were tarty-teenage. She smelled like cigarettes, and she had a heartrending way of eating her slice of chocolate-mousse cake, parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day. Such few questions as she asked Joey she answered for him before he could get a word in. Mostly she delivered a monologue, with ironic commentary and self-conscious interjections, that was like a train that he was permitted to hop onto and ride for a while, supplying his own context and guessing at many of the references. In her nattering, she seemed to him a sad cartoon version of his mother, a warning of what she might become if she wasn’t careful.

Apparently, to Abigail, the mere fact of Joey’s existence was a reproach that necessitated a lengthy accounting of her life. The traditional marriage-babies-house thing was not for her, she said, and neither was the shallow commercialized world of conventional theater, with its degrading rigged open calls and its casting directors who only wanted this year’s model and had not the airy-fairiest notion of originality of expression, and neither was the world of stand-up, which she’d wasted a verrrrry long time trying to break into, working up great material about the truth of American suburban childhood, before realizing it was all just testosterone and potty humor. She denigrated Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman exhaustively and then extolled the genius of several male “artists” whom Joey decided must be mimes or clowns and with whom she declared herself lucky to be in ever-increasing contact, albeit still mainly via workshops. As she talked on and on, he found himself admiring her determination to survive without success of the sort still plausibly available to him. She was so dotty and self-involved that he was spared the annoyance of feeling guilty and could go straight to compassion. He perceived that, as the representative not only of his own but of her sister’s superior good fortune, he could do his aunt no greater kindness than to let her justify herself to him, and to promise to come and see her perform at his earliest opportunity. For this she rewarded him with the housesitting offer.

His first days in the city, when he was going from store to store with his hall mate Casey, were like hyper-vivid continuations of the urban dreams he was having all night. Humanity coming at him from every direction. Andean musicians piping and drumming in Union Square. Solemn firefighters nodding to the crowd assembled by a 9/11 shrine outside a station house. A pair of fur-coated ladies ballsily appropriating a cab that Casey had hailed outside Bloomingdale’s. Très hot middle-school girls wearing jeans under their miniskirts and slouching on the subway with their legs wide open. Cornrowed ghetto kids in ominous jumbo parkas, National Guard troops patrolling Grand Central with highly advanced weapons. And the Chinese grandmother hawking DVDs of films that hadn’t even opened yet, the break-dancer who ripped a muscle or a tendon and sat rocking in pain on the floor of the 6 train, the insistent saxophone player to whom Joey gave five dollars to help him get to his gig, despite Casey’s warning that he was being conned: each encounter was like a poem he instantly memorized.

Casey’s parents lived in an apartment with an elevator that opened directly into it, a must-have feature, Joey decided, if he ever made it big in New York. He joined them for dinner on both Christmas Eve and Christmas, thereby shoring up the lies he’d told his parents about where he was staying for the holidays. Casey and his family were leaving for a ski trip in the morning, however, and Joey knew that he was wearing thin his welcome in any case. When he returned to Abigail’s stale, cluttered apartment and found that Piglet and/or Tigger had vomited in several locations, in punitive feline protest of his long day’s absence, he came up against the strangeness and dumbness of his plan to spend two entire weeks on his own.

He immediately made everything even worse by speaking to his mother and admitting that some of his plans had “fallen through” and he was housesitting for her sister “instead.”

“In Abigail’s apartment?” she said. “By yourself? Without her even speaking to me? In New York City? By yourself?”

“Yep,” Joey said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “you have to tell her that’s not acceptable. Tell her she has to call me right away. Tonight. Right away. Immediately. Non-optional.”

“It’s way too late for that. She’s in France. It’s OK, though. This is a very safe neighborhood.”

But his mother wasn’t listening. She was having words with his father, words Joey couldn’t make out but which sounded somewhat hysterical. And then his dad was on the line.

“Joey? Listen to me. Are you there?”

“Where else would I be?”

“Listen to me. If you don’t have the personal decency to come and spend a few days with your mother in a house that’s meant so much to her and that you’re never going to set foot in again, that’s fine with me. That was your own terrible decision that you can repent at your leisure. And the stuff you left in your room, which we were hoping you’d come and deal with—we’ll just give it to Goodwill, or let the garbagemen haul it away. That’s your loss, not ours. But to be on your own in a city that you’re too young to be on your own in, a city that’s repeatedly been attacked by terrorists, and not just for a night or two but for weeks , is a recipe for making your mother anxious the entire time.”