Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Dad, it’s a totally safe neighborhood. It’s Greenwich Village.”

“Well, you’ve ruined her holiday. And you’re going to ruin her last days in this house. I don’t know why I keep expecting more of you at this point, but you are being brutally selfish to a person who loves you more than you can even know.”

“Why can’t she say it herself, then?” Joey said. “Why do you have to say it? How do I even know it’s true?”

“If you had one speck of imagination, you’d know it’s true.”

“Not if she never says it herself! If you’ve got a problem with me, why don’t you tell me what your problem is, instead of always talking about her problems?”

“Because, frankly, I’m not as worried as she is,” his father said. “I don’t think you’re as smart as you think you are, I don’t think you’re aware of all the dangers in the world. But I do think you’re pretty smart and know how to take care of yourself. If you ever did get into trouble, I would hope we’d be the first people you’d call. Otherwise, you’ve made your choice in life, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Well—thanks,” Joey said with only partial sarcasm.

“Don’t thank me. I have very little respect for what you’re doing. I’m just recognizing that you’re eighteen years old and free to do what you want. What I’m talking about is my personal disappointment that a child of ours can’t find it in his heart to be kinder to his mother.”

“ Why don’t you ask her why not? ” Joey countered savagely. “ She knows why not! She fucking knows , Dad. Since you’re so wonderfully concerned about her happiness, and all, why don’t you ask her , instead of bothering me ?”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“Well then don’t talk to me that way.”

“All right, then, I won’t.”

His father seemed glad to let the subject drop, and Joey was also glad. He relished feeling cool and in control of his life, and it was disturbing to discover that there was this other thing in him, this reservoir of rage, this complex of family feelings that could suddenly explode and take control of him. The angry words he’d spoken to his father had felt pre-formed, as if there were an aggrieved second self inside him 24/7, ordinarily invisible but clearly fully sentient and ready to vent itself, at a moment’s notice, in the form of sentences independent of his volition. It made him wonder who his real self was; and this was very disturbing.

“If you change your mind,” his father said when they’d exhausted their limited supplies of Christmas chitchat, “I’m more than happy to buy you a plane ticket so you can come out here for a few days. It would mean the world to your mother. And to me, too. I would like that myself.”

“Thanks,” Joey said, “but, you know, I can’t. I’ve got the cats.”

“You can put them in a kennel, your aunt will be none the wiser. I’ll pay for that, too.”

“OK, maybe. Probably not, but maybe.”

“All right, then, Merry Christmas,” his father said. “Mom says Merry Christmas, too.”

Joey heard her calling it in the background. Why , exactly, did she not get back on the line and say it to him directly? It seemed pretty damning of her. Another useless admission of her guilt.

Though Abigail’s apartment wasn’t tiny, there wasn’t one square inch of it unoccupied by Abigail. The cats patrolled it like her plenipotentiaries, depositing hair everywhere. Her bedroom closet was densely packed with pants and sweaters in messy stacks that bunched up the hanging coats and dresses, and her drawers were unopenably stuffed. Her CDs were all unlistenable chanteuses and New Age burble, shelved in double rows and wedged sideways into every chink. Even her books were occupied with Abigail, covering topics like Flow, creative visualization, and the conquering of self-doubt. There was also all manner of mystical accessories, not just Judaica but Eastern incense burners and elephant-headed statuettes. The one thing there wasn’t much in the way of was food. It was now occurring to Joey, as he paced the kitchen, that unless he wanted to eat pizza three times a day he would actually have to go to a grocery store and shop and cook for himself. Abigail’s own food supplies consisted of rice cakes, forty-seven forms of chocolate and cocoa, and instant ramen noodles of the sort that satisfied him for ten minutes and then left him hungry in a new, gnawing way.

He thought of the spacious house on Barrier Street, he thought of his mother’s outstanding cooking, he thought of caving in and accepting his father’s offer of a plane ticket, but he was determined not to give his hidden self more opportunities to vent itself, and his only option for not continuing to think about St. Paul was to go to Abigail’s brass bed and jerk off, and then to jerk off again while the cats yowled reproachfully outside the bedroom door, and then, still not satisfied, to boot up his aunt’s computer, since he couldn’t get internet on his own computer here, and seek out porn to jerk off to some more. In the way of such things, each free site he happened upon was linked to an even raunchier and more compelling one. Eventually one of these better sites started generating pop-up windows like some Sorcerer’s Apprentice nightmare; it got so bad that he had to shut down the computer. Rebooting impatiently, his abused and sticky dick going limp in his hand, he found the system commandeered by hard-drive-overloading, keyboard-freezing alien software. Never mind that he’d infected his aunt’s computer. Right now he couldn’t get the one thing in the world he wanted, which was to see one more pretty female face distended with ecstasy, so that he could come for a fifth time and try to get a little sleep. He shut his eyes and stroked himself, struggling to summon up enough remembered images to get the job done, but the meowing of the cats was too distracting. He went to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle of brandy that he hoped wouldn’t be too expensive to replace.

Awakening hungover late the next morning, he smelled what he hoped was just cat shit but proved, when he ventured into the cramped and infernally overheated bathroom, to be raw sewage. He called the super, Mr. Jiménez, who arrived two hours later with a wheeled grocery basket filled with plumbing tools.

“This ol’ building gotta lotta problems,” Mr. Jiménez said, shaking his head fatalistically. He told Joey to be sure to lower the bathtub drain stopper and firmly plug the sinks when he wasn’t using them. These instructions were in fact on Abigail’s list, along with complicated protocols of cat nourishment, but Joey, the day before, in his rush to escape the place and get to Casey’s, had forgotten to follow them.

“Lotta, lotta problems,” Mr. Jiménez said, using a plunger to nudge West Village waste back down the drain.

As soon as Joey was alone again and confronting afresh the specter of two weeks of solitude and brandy abuse and/or masturbation, he called Connie and told her he would pay for her bus ticket if she would come out and stay with him. She instantly agreed, except for the part about his paying; and his vacation was saved.

He hired a geek to fix his aunt’s computer and reconfigure his own, he spent sixty dollars on prepared foods at Dean & DeLuca, and when he went to Port Authority and met Connie at her gate he didn’t think he’d ever been happier to see her. In the previous month, mentally comparing her to the incomparable Jenna, he’d lost sight of how fine she was herself, in her slender, economical, ardent way. She was wearing an unfamiliar peacoat and walked right up to him and put her face against his face and her wide-open eyes against his eyes, as if pressing herself into a mirror. Some drastic all-organ melting occurred inside him. He was about to get laid about forty times, but it was more than that. It was as if the bus station and all the low-income travelers flowing around the two of them were equipped with Brightness and Color controls that were radically lowered by the mere presence of this girl he’d known forever. Everything seemed faint and far away as he led her through passages and halls that he’d seen in living color not thirty minutes earlier.