Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “No doubt. But my boss has got wall-to-wall jobs in the Hamptons for the next three weeks. My services as a clipboard-holder are required. Too bad you have to work so hard yourself, or I could try to sneak you into something.”

  He’d lost count of the half dates and half promises she’d made since he’d known her. None of the fun things she suggested ever quite came to pass, and he could never quite figure out why she bothered to keep suggesting them. Sometimes he thought it had to do with her competing with her brother. Or maybe it was because Joey was Jewish and pleasing to her father, who was the one person she never snarked. Or maybe she was fascinated by his relationship with Connie and took a queenly relish in the nuggets of private info that he laid at her feet. Or maybe she was genuinely into him and wanted to see what he was like when he was older and how much money he could make. Or maybe all of the above. Jonathan had no insights to offer except that his sister was bad news, a freak from Planet Spoiled, with the ethical consciousness of sea sponge, but Joey thought he could glimpse deeper things in her. He refused to believe that someone disposing of the power of so much beauty could be devoid of interesting ideas of how to use it.

  The next day, when he told Connie about his fight with his father, she didn’t get into the merits of their respective arguments but went straight to his hurt and told him how sorry she was. She’d gone back to work as a waitress and seemed willing to wait all summer to see him again. Kenny Bartles had promised him the last two weeks of August as a paid vacation if he agreed to work every weekend before then, and he didn’t want Connie around to complicate things if Jenna came down to Washington; he didn’t see how he’d be able to slip away for an evening or two or three without telling Connie the kind of arrant lie that he was trying to keep to a minimum.

  The equanimity with which she’d accepted the delay he attributed to Celexa. But then one night, during a routine telephone check-in, while he was drinking beer in his apartment, she fell into an especially protracted silence that ended with her saying, “Baby, there are a few things I need to tell you.” The first thing was that she’d stopped taking her medication. The second thing was that the reason she’d stopped taking it was that she’d been sleeping with her restaurant manager and was tired of not coming. She confessed this with curious detachment, as if speaking of some girl who wasn’t her, a girl whose doings were regrettable but understandable. The manager, she said, was married and had two teenage kids and lived on Hamline Avenue. “I thought I’d better tell you,” she said. “I can stop it if you want me to.”

  Joey was shivering. Shuddering almost. A draft was coming through a mental door that he’d assumed was shut and locked but in fact was standing open wide; a door that he could flee through. “Do you want it to stop?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I kind of like it, for the sex, but I don’t feel anything for him. I only feel things for you.”

  “Well, Jesus. I guess I have to think about this.”

  “I know it’s really bad, Joey. I should have told you as soon as it happened. But for a while it was just so nice that somebody was interested. Do you realize how many times we’ve made love since last October?”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m aware.”

  “Either twice or zero times, depending on whether you count when I was sick. There’s something not right there.”

  “I know.”

  “We love each other but we never see each other. Don’t you miss it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you had sex with other people? Is that how you can stand it?”

  “Yeah, I did. A couple of times. But never more than once with anybody.”

  “I was pretty sure you had, but I didn’t want to ask you. I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t going to let you. And that’s not why I did it myself. I did it because I’m lonely. I’m so lonely, Joey. I’m dying of it. And the reason I’m so lonely is I love you and you’re not here. I had sex with somebody else because I love you. I know that sounds mixed up, or dishonest, but it’s the truth.”

  “I believe you,” he said. And he did. But the pain he was experiencing didn’t seem to have anything to do with what he believed or didn’t believe, what she might say now or not say. The mute fact of his sweet Connie having lain down with some middle-aged pig, of her having taken off her jeans and her little underpants and opened her legs repeatedly, had embodied itself in words only long enough for her to speak them and for Joey to hear them before returning to muteness and lodging inside him, out of reach of words, like some swallowed ball of razor blades. He could see, reasonably enough, that she might care no more about her pig of a manager than he’d cared about the girls, all of them either drunk or extremely drunk, in whose overly perfumed beds he’d landed in the previous year, but reason could no more reach the pain in him than thinking Stop! could arrest an onrushing bus. The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

  “Say something to me, baby,” Connie said.

  “When did this start?”

  “I don’t know. Three months ago.”

  “Well, maybe you should just keep doing it,” he said. “Maybe you should go ahead and have his baby and see if he’ll set you up in your own house.”

  It was ugly to reference Carol like this, but in reply Connie only asked him, with limpid sincerity, “Is that what you want me to do?”

  “I don’t know what I want.”

  “It’s not at all what I want. I want to be with you.”

  “Yeah, right. But not before fucking somebody else for three months.”

  This ought to have made her weep and beg forgiveness, or at least lash out at him in turn, but she wasn’t an ordinary person. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right. That’s absolutely fair. I could have told you the first time it happened, and then stopped. But doing it a second time didn’t seem much worse than doing it once. And then the same thing with the third time and the fourth time. And then I wanted to go off my drug, because it seemed stupid to be having sex when I could hardly feel it. And then the counter sort of had to be reset.”

  “And now you’re feeling it, and it’s great.”

  “It is definitely better. You’re the person I love, but at least my nerve endings are working again.”

  “So why’d you even tell me now? Why not go four months? Four’s hardly any worse than three, right?”

  “Four’s actually what I was planning,” she said. “I thought I could tell you when I come out next month, and we could make a plan to be together more often, so we could start being monogamous again. That’s still what I want. But I started having bad thoughts again last night, and I thought I’d better tell you.”

  “Are you getting depressed? Does your doctor know you quit the drug?”

  “She knows, but Carol doesn’t. Carol seems to think the drug is going to make everything OK between her and me. She thinks it’s going to solve her problem permanently. I take a pill out of the bottle every night and put it in my sock drawer. I think she might be counting them when I’m at work.”

  “You should probably be taking them,” Joey said.

  “I’ll go back on them if I can’t see you anymore. If I see you, though, I want to feel everything. And I don’t think I’ll need them if I keep on seeing you. I know that sounds like a threat or something, but it’s just the truth. I’m not trying to influence you about whether to see me again or not. I understand that I did a bad thing.”

  “Are you sorry about it?”

  “I know I should say yes, but I don’t actually know. Are you sorry you slept with other people?”

  “No. Especially not now.”

  “Same with me, baby. I’m exactly like you. I just hope you can remember that, and let me see you again.”

  Connie’s confession was his last, best chance to escape with his conscience clear. He could so easily have fired her for cause, if only he’d
felt angry enough to do it. After he got off the phone, he hit the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he was normally disciplined enough to keep away from, and then he went out walking the humid streets of his bleak non-neighborhood, relishing the blunt-force summer heat and the collective roar of the air conditioners compounding it. In a pocket of his khakis was a handful of coins that he took out and began to fling, a few at a time, into the street. He threw them all away, the pennies of his innocence, the dimes and quarters of his self-sufficiency. He needed to rid himself, to rid himself. He had nobody to tell about his pain, least of all his parents but also not Jonathan, for fear of damaging his friend’s good opinion of Connie, and certainly not Jenna, who didn’t understand love, and not his school friends, either—they all, to a man, saw girlfriends as a senseless impediment to the pleasures they intended to spend the next ten years pursuing. He was totally alone and didn’t understand how it had happened to him. How there had come to be an ache named Connie at the center of his life. He was being driven crazy by so minutely feeling what she felt, by understanding her too well, by not being able to imagine her life without him. Every time he had a chance to get away from her, the logic of self-interest failed him: was supplanted, like a gear that his mind kept popping out of, by the logic of the two of them.

  A week went by without her calling him, and then another week. He became sensible, for the first time, of her greater age. She was twenty-one now, a legal adult, a woman interesting and attractive to married men. In the grip of jealousy, he was suddenly seeing himself as the lucky one of the two of them, the mere boy on whom she’d bestowed her ardor. She assumed fantastically alluring form in his imagination. He’d sometimes dimly sensed that their connection was extraordinary, enchanted, fairy-tale-like, but only now did he appreciate how much he counted on her. For the first few days of their silence, he managed to believe that he was punishing her by not calling her, but before long he came to feel like the punished one, the person waiting to see whether she, in her ocean of feeling, might find a drop of mercy and break the silence for him.

  In the meantime, his mother informed him that she would be sending him no more monthly $500 checks. “I’m afraid Dad’s put an end to that,” she said with a breeziness that annoyed him. “I hope it was at least useful while it lasted.” Joey felt a certain relief at no longer having to indulge her wish to support him and no longer owing her regular phone calls in return; he was also glad to stop lying to the Commonwealth of Virginia about his level of parental support. But he’d come to rely on the monthly infusions to make ends meet, and he was now sorry about having taken so many cabs and ordered in so many meals that summer. He couldn’t help hating his father and feeling betrayed by his mother, who, when push came to shove, despite the many complaints about her marriage that she inflicted on Joey, seemed always to end up deferring to his father.

  Then his aunt Abigail called to offer him the use of her apartment in late August. For the last year and a half, he’d been on Abigail’s e-mail list for the performances she gave at bizarrely named small venues in New York, and she’d called him every few months to deliver one of her self-justifying monologues. If he clicked the Ignore button on his phone, she didn’t leave a message but simply kept calling until he clicked Answer. He had the impression that her days consisted largely of cycling through every number she knew until someone finally answered, and he hated to consider who else might be on her calling list, given the tenuousness of his own connection with her. “I’m giving myself the little gift of a beach vacation,” she told him now. “I’m afraid poor Tigger died of kitty cancer, though not before some verrrrry expensive kitty-cancer treatments, and Piglet’s all alone.” Although Joey was feeling somewhat dirty about his flirtation with Jenna, as part of a more general new queasiness about infidelity, he accepted Abigail’s offer. If he never heard from Connie, he thought, he might console himself by showing up in Jenna’s neighborhood and asking her to dinner.

  And then Kenny Bartles called with the news that he was selling RISEN and its contracts to a friend of his in Florida. Had already sold them, in fact. “Mike’s going to call you in the morning,” Kenny said. “I told him he had to keep you on till August fifteen. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to replace you after that anyway. I got bigger and better fish to fry.”

  “Oh yeah?” Joey said.

  “Yeah, LBI’s willing to subcontract me to procure a fleet of heavy-duty trucks. Not a job for the squeamish, and a lot better bread than bread’s been, if you know what I mean. It’s easy in, easy out—none of this bullshit with quarterly reports. I show up with the trucks, they cut the check, end of story.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Kenny said. “I could still really use you there in D.C. I’m looking for a partner to invest with me and make up some of the shortfall I’m looking at. If you’re willing to work, you could pay yourself a little salary, too.”

  “That sounds great,” Joey said. “But I have to go back to school, and I don’t have any money to invest.”

  “OK. Sure. It’s your life. But how about a smaller piece of the action? The way I read the specs, the Polish Pladsky A10 is gonna do just fine. They’re not in production anymore, but there’s fleets of ’em standing around military bases in Hungary and Bulgaria. Also somewhere in South America, which doesn’t help me. But I’m gonna hire drivers in Eastern Europe, convoy the trucks across Turkey, and deliver ’em in Kirkuk. That’s going to tie me up for God knows how long, and there’s also a nine-hundred-K subcontract for spare parts. You think you could handle the spare parts as a sub sub?”

  “I don’t know anything about truck parts.”

  “Neither do I. But Pladsky built a good twenty thousand A10s, back in the day. There’ve gotta be tons of parts out there. All you gotta do is track ’em down, crate ’em up, ship ’em out. Put in three hundred K, take out nine hundred six months later. That’s an eminently reasonable markup, given the circumstances. My impression is that’s a low-end markup in procurement. No eyebrows will be raised. You think you can get your hands on three hundred K?”

  “I can hardly get my hands on lunch money,” Joey said. “What with tuition and so forth.”

  “Yeah, well, but, realistically, all you gotta do is find fifty K. With that, plus a signed contract in hand, any bank in the country’s gonna give you the rest. You can do most of this stuff on the internet in your dorm room or whatever. It sure beats working the dish belt, huh?”

  Joey asked for some time to think it over. Even with all the takeout and taxis he’d indulged in, he had $10,000 saved up for the coming academic year, plus potentially another $8,000 available on his credit card, and a quick internet search turned up numerous banks willing to make high-interest loans with small collateral, as well as multiple pages of Google matches for pladsky a10 parts. He was aware that Kenny wouldn’t have offered him the parts contract if finding the parts were as straightforward as he’d made it sound, but Kenny had made good on all his RISEN promises, and Joey couldn’t stop imagining the excellence of being worth half a million dollars when he turned twenty-one, a year from now. On an impulse, because he was excited and, for once, not preoccupied with their relationship, he broke his phone silence with Connie to solicit her opinion. Much later, he would reproach himself for having had her savings in the back of his mind, along with the fact that she was now legally in control of them, but in the moment of his calling he felt quite innocent of self-interested motive.

  “Oh my God, baby,” she said. “I was starting to think I’d never hear from you again.”

  “It’s been a hard couple of weeks.”

  “My God, I know, I know. I was starting to think I should never have told you anything. Can you forgive me?”

  “Probably.”

  “Oh! Oh! That’s so much better than probably not.”

  “Very probably,” he said. “If you still want to come out and see me.”

  “You know I do. More than any
thing in the world.”

  She didn’t sound at all like the independent older woman he’d been imagining, and a flutter in his stomach warned him to slow down and be sure he really wanted her back. Warned him not to mistake the pain of losing her for an active desire to have her. But he was eager to change the subject, avoid miring himself in abstract emotional territory, and ask her opinion of Kenny’s offer.

  “God, Joey,” she said after he’d explained it to her, “you have to do it. I’ll help you do it.”

  “How?”

  “I’ll give you the money,” she said as if it were silly of him to even ask. “I’ve still got more than fifty thousand dollars in my trust account.”

  The mere naming of this figure sexually excited him. It took him back to their earliest days as a couple on Barrier Street, in his first fall of high school. U2’s Achtung Baby, beloved to both of them but especially to Connie, had been the soundtrack of their mutual deflowering. The opening track, in which Bono avowed that he was ready for everything, ready for the push, had been their love song to each other and to capitalism. The song had made Joey feel ready to have sex, ready to step out of childhood, ready to make some real money selling watches at Connie’s Catholic school. He and she had begun as partners in the fullest sense, he the entrepreneur and manufacturer, she his loyal mule and surprisingly gifted saleswoman. Until their operation was shut down by resentful nuns, she’d proved herself a master of the soft sell, her cool remoteness serving to madden her classmates for her and Joey’s product. Everybody on Barrier Street, including his mother, had always mistaken Connie’s quietness for dullness, for slowness. Only Joey, who had insider access, had seen the potential in her, and this now seemed like the story of their life together: his helping and encouraging her to confound the expectations of everyone, especially his mother, who underestimated the value of her hidden assets. It was central to his faith in his future as a businessman, this ability to identify value, espy opportunity, where others didn’t, and it was central to his love of Connie, too. She moved in mysterious ways! The two of them had started fucking amid the piles of twenty-dollar bills she brought home from her school.