Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

In the hours that followed, Connie made several somewhat alarming disclosures. The first came while they were riding the subway down to Charles Street and he asked her how she’d managed to get so much time off at the restaurant—whether she’d found people to cover her shifts.

“No, I just quit,” she said.

“You quit ? Isn’t this sort of a bad time of year to do that to them?”

She shrugged. “You needed me here. I told you all you ever have to do is call me.”

His alarm at this disclosure restored the brightness and color of the subway car. It was like the way his brain on pot would jolt back to present awareness after being lost in a deep stoned reverie: he could see that the other subway riders were leading their lives, pursuing their goals, and that he needed to take care to do this, too. Not get sucked too far into something he couldn’t control.

Mindful of one of their crazier phone-sex episodes, in which the lips of her vagina had opened so fantastically wide that they covered his entire face, and his tongue was so long that its tip could reach her vagina’s inscrutable inner end, he had shaved very carefully before leaving for Port Authority. Now that the two of them were together in the flesh, however, these fantasies revealed their absurdity and were disagreeable to recall. In the apartment, instead of taking Connie straight to bed, as he’d done on the weekend in Virginia, he turned on the TV and checked the score of a college bowl game that meant nothing to him. It then seemed a matter of great urgency to check his e-mail and see if any of his friends had written in the last three hours. Connie sat with the cats on the sofa and waited patiently while his computer powered up.

“By the way,” she said, “your mom says to say hi.”

“ What? ”

“Your mom says hi. She was out chipping ice when I was leaving. She saw me with my bag and asked where I was going.”

“And you told her?”

Connie’s surprise was innocent. “Was I not supposed to? She told me to have a good time and to say hi to you.”

“Sarcastically?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was, come to think of it. I was just happy she spoke to me at all. I know she hates me. But then I thought maybe she’s finally starting to get used to me.”

“I doubt it.”

“I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. You know I’d never say the wrong thing if I knew it was wrong. You know that, don’t you?”

Joey stood up from his computer, trying not to be angry. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Or only a little bit your fault.”

“Baby, are you ashamed of me?”

“No.”

“Are you ashamed of the stuff we said on the phone? Is that what this is?”

“No.”

“I actually am, a little bit. Some of it was pretty sick. I’m not sure I need to do that anymore.”

“You were the one who started it!”

“I know. I know, I know. But you can’t blame me for everything. You can only blame me for half of it.”

As if to acknowledge the truth of this, he ran to where she was sitting on the sofa and knelt down at her feet, bowing his head and resting his hands on her legs. Up close to her jeans like this, her best tight jeans, he thought of the long hours she’d sat on a Greyhound bus while he was watching second-rate college bowl games and talking on the phone with friends. He was in trouble, he was falling into some unanticipated fissure in the ordinary world, and he couldn’t bear to look up at her face. She rested her hands on his head and offered no resistance when, by and by, he pushed forward and pressed his face into her denim-sheathed zipper. “It’s OK,” she knew to say, stroking his hair. “It’s going to be OK, baby. Everything’s going to be OK.”

In his gratitude, he peeled down her jeans and rested his closed eyes against her underpants, and then these, too, he pulled down so he could press his shaved lip and chin into her scratchy hair, which he noticed that she’d trimmed for him. He could feel one of the cats clambering onto his feet, seeking attention. Pussy, pussy.

“I just want to stay here for about three hours,” he said, breathing her smell.

“You can stay there all night,” she said. “I have no plans.”

But then his telephone rang in his pants pocket. Taking it out to shut it off, he saw his old St. Paul number and felt like smashing the phone in his anger at his mother. He spread Connie’s legs and attacked her with his tongue, delving and delving, trying to fill himself with her.

The third and most alarming of her disclosures came during a postcoital interlude at some later evening hour. Hitherto absent neighbors were tromping on the floor above the bed; the cats were yowling bitterly outside the door. Connie was telling him about the SAT, which he’d forgotten she was even going to take, and about her surprise at how much easier the real questions had been than the practice questions in her study books. She was feeling emboldened to apply to schools within a few hours of Charlottesville, including Morton College, which wanted midwestern students for geographical diversity and which she now thought she could get into.

This seemed all wrong to Joey. “I thought you were going to go to the U.,” he said.

“I still might,” she said. “But then I started thinking how much nicer it would be to be closer to you, so we could see each other on weekends. I mean, assuming everything goes well and we still want to. Don’t you think that would be nice?”

Joey untangled his legs from hers, trying to get some clarity. “Definitely maybe,” he said. “But, you know, private schools are incredibly expensive.”

This was true, Connie said. But Morton offered financial aid, and she’d spoken to Carol about her educational trust fund, and Carol had admitted that there was still a lot of money in it.

“Like how much?” Joey said.

“Like a lot. Like seventy-five thousand. It might be enough for three years if I get financial aid. And then there’s the twelve thousand that I’ve saved, and I can work summers.”

“That’s great,” Joey compelled himself to say.

“I was just going to wait until I turned twenty-one, and take the cash. But then I thought about what you said, and I saw you were right about getting a good education.”

“If you went to the U., though,” Joey said, “you could get an education and still have the cash when you were done.”

Upstairs, a television began to bark, and the tromping continued.

“It sounds like you don’t want me near you,” Connie said neutrally, without reproach, just stating a fact.

“No, no,” he said. “Not at all. That might potentially be great. I’m just thinking practically.”

“I already can’t stand being in that house. And then Carol’s going to have her babies, and it’s going to get even worse. I can’t be there anymore.”

Not for the first time, he experienced an obscure resentment of her father. The man had been dead for a number of years now, and Connie had never had a relationship with him and rarely even alluded to his existence, but to Joey this had somehow made him even more of a male rival. He was the man who’d been there first. He’d abandoned his daughter and paid off Carol with a low-rent house, but his money had continued to flow and pay for Connie’s Catholic schooling. He was a presence in her life that had nothing to do with Joey, and though Joey ought to have been glad that she had other resources besides himself—that he didn’t have total responsibility for her—he kept succumbing to moral disapproval of the father, who seemed to Joey the source of all that was amoral in Connie herself, her strange indifference to rules and conventions, her boundless capacity for idolatrous love, her irresistible intensity. And now, on top of all that, Joey resented the father for making her far better off financially than he himself was. That she didn’t care about money even one percent as much as he did only made it worse.