Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You need the trust-fund money to go back to college,” he said nevertheless.

  “I can do that later,” she said. “You need it now, and I can give it to you. You can give it back to me later.”

  “I could give it back to you doubled. You’d have enough to cover all four years then.”

  “If you want to,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

  They made a date to reunite for his twentieth birthday in New York City, the scene of their happiest weeks as a couple since he’d left St. Paul. The next morning, he called Kenny and declared himself ready to do business. The big new round of Iraq contracts wouldn’t be let until November, Kenny said, and so Joey should enjoy his fall semester and just be sure to be ready with his financing.

  Feeling flush in advance, he splurged on an Acela express train to New York and bought a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne on his way to Abigail’s apartment. Her place was more cluttered than ever, and he was happy to shut the door behind him and cab out to LaGuardia to meet Connie’s plane, which he’d insisted she take instead of a bus. The whole city, its pedestrians half naked in the August heat, its bricks and bridges paled by haze, was like an aphrodisiac. Going to meet his girlfriend, who’d been sleeping with someone else but was zinging back into his life again, a magnet to a magnet, he might already have been king of the city. When he saw her coming down the concourse at the airport, jumpily dodging other travelers, as if too preoccupied to see them until the last second, he felt flush with more than money. Felt flush with importance, with life to burn, with crazy chances to take, with the story of the two of them. She caught sight of him and started nodding, agreeing with some thing he hadn’t even said yet, her face full of joy and wonder. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” she said spontaneously, dropping the pull handle of her suitcase and colliding with him. “Yeah!”

  “Yeah?” he said, laughing.

  “Yeah!”

  Without even kissing, they ran down to the baggage level and out to the taxi stand, where, by some miracle, nobody was waiting. In the back of their taxi, she peeled off her sweaty cotton cardigan and climbed onto his lap and began to sob in a way akin to coming or a seizure. Her body seemed entirely, entirely new in his arms. Some of the change was real—she was a little less arrowy, a little more womanly—but most of it was in his head. He felt inexpressibly grateful for her infidelity. His feeling was so large that it seemed as if only asking her to marry him could accommodate it. He might even have asked her, right then and there, if he hadn’t noticed the strange marks on her inner left forearm. Running down its soft skin was a series of straight parallel cuts, each about two inches long, the ones nearest her elbow faint and fully healed, the ones approaching her wrist increasingly fresh and red.

  “Yeah,” she said, wet-faced, looking at the scars with wonder. “I did that. But it’s OK.”

  He asked what had happened, though he knew the answer. She kissed his forehead, kissed his cheek, kissed his lips, and peered gravely into his eyes. “Don’t be scared, baby. It was just something I had to do for penance.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Joey, listen. Listen to me. I was very careful to put alcohol on the blade. I just had to do one cut for every night I didn’t hear from you. I did three on the third night and then one every night after that. I stopped as soon as I heard from you.”

  “And what if I hadn’t called? What were you going to do? Slit your wrist?”

  “No. I wasn’t suicidal. This is what I was doing instead of having thoughts like that. I just needed to hurt a little bit. Can you understand that?”

  “Are you sure you weren’t suicidal?”

  “I would never do that to you. Not ever.”

  He ran his fingertips over the scars. Then he raised her unscarred wrist and pressed it to his eyes. He was glad she’d cut herself for him; he couldn’t help it. The ways she moved were mysterious but made sense to him. Somewhere in his head, Bono was singing that it was all right, all right.

  “And you know what’s really incredible?” Connie said. “I stopped at fifteen, which is exactly the number of times I was unfaithful to you. You called me on exactly the right night. It was like some kind of sign. And here.” From the back pocket of her jeans she took a folded cashier’s check. It had the curve of her ass and was impregnated with her ass’s sweat. “I had fifty-one thousand in my trust account. That was almost exactly what you said you needed. It was another sign, don’t you think?”

  He unfolded the check, which was payable to JOSEPH R. BERGLUND in the amount of FIFTY THOUSAND dollars. He wasn’t ordinarily superstitious, but he had to admit that these signs were impressive. They were like the signs that told deranged people, “Kill the president NOW,” or told depressed people, “Throw yourself out a window NOW.” Here the urgent irrational imperative seemed to be: “Wed your lives together NOW.”

  Outbound traffic on the Grand Central was at a standstill, but the inbound side was moving briskly, the cab was sailing right along, and this, too, was a sign. That they hadn’t had to wait in line for a cab was a sign. That tomorrow was his birthday was a sign. He couldn’t remember the state he’d been in even one hour earlier, heading to the airport. There was only the present moment with Connie, and whereas, before, when they’d fallen through a cosmic fissure into their two-person world, it had happened only at night, in a bedroom or some other contained space, it was now happening in broad daylight, under a citywide haze. He held her in his arms, the cashier’s check resting on her sweaty breastbone, between the damp straps of her top. One of her hands was pressed flat against one of his breasts as if it might give milk. The grown-woman smell of her underarms intoxicated him, he wished it were much stronger, he felt there was no limit to how strongly he wanted her underarms to stink.

  “Thank you for fucking somebody else,” he murmured.

  “It wasn’t easy for me.”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, it was very easy in one way. But almost impossible in another. You know that, right?”

  “I totally know it.”

  “Was it hard for you, too? Whatever you did last year?”

  “Actually, no.”

  “That’s because you’re a guy. I know what it’s like to be you, Joey. Do you believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then everything’s going to be all right.”

  And, for the next ten days, everything was. Later, of course, Joey could see that the first, hormone-soaked days after a period of long abstinence were a less than ideal time to be making huge decisions about his future. He could see that, instead of trying to offset the unbearable weight of Connie’s $50,000 gift with something as heavy as a marriage proposal, he should have written out a promissory note with a schedule for payment of interest and principal. He could see that if he’d separated himself from her for even an hour, to take a walk by himself or to talk to Jonathan, he might have achieved some useful clarity and distance. He could see that postcoital decisions were a lot more realistic than precoital ones. In the moment, though, there had been no post-, it had all been pre- upon pre- upon pre-. Their craving for each other cycled on and on through the days and nights like the compressor of Abigail’s hardworking bedroom-window air conditioner. The new dimensions of their pleasure, the sense of adult gravity conferred by their joint business venture and by Connie’s sickness and infidelity, made all their prior pleasures forgettable and childish in comparison. Their pleasure was so great, and their need for it so bottomless, that when it waned even for an hour, on their third morning in the city, Joey reached out to press the nearest button to get more of it. He said, “We should get married.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing,” Connie said. “Do you want to do it now?”

  “You mean like today?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think there’s a waiting period. Some kind of blood test?”

  “Well, let’s go do that, then. Do you want to?”

  His heart was pounding blood into his loi
ns. “Yes!”

  But first they had to have the fuck about the excitement of going to have the blood tests. Then they had to have the fuck about the excitement of finding out they didn’t need to have them. Then they wandered up Sixth Avenue like a couple drunk beyond caring what anybody thought of them, like red-handed murderers, Connie braless and wanton and attracting male stares, Joey in a state of testosterone heedlessness in which, if anybody had challenged him, he would have thrown a punch for the sheer joy of it. He was taking the step that needed to be taken, the step he’d been wanting to take since the first time his parents had said no to him. The fifty-block walk uptown with Connie, in a baking welter of honking cabs and filthy sidewalks, felt as long as his entire life before it.

  They went into the first deserted-looking jewelry store they came to on 47th Street and asked for two gold rings that they could take away right now. The jeweler was in full Hasidic regalia—yarmulke, forelocks, phylacteries, black vest, the works. He looked first at Joey, whose white T-shirt was spattered with mustard from a hot dog he’d bolted along the way, and then at Connie, whose face was flaming with heat and with abrasion by Joey’s face. “The two of you are getting married?”

  Both of them nodded, neither quite daring to say yes aloud.

  “Then mazel tov,” the jeweler said, opening drawers. “I have rings in all sizes for you.”

  To Joey, from far away, through a fine tear in his otherwise tough bubble of madness, came a pang of regret about Jenna. Not as a person he wanted (the wanting would return later, when he was alone and sane again) but as the Jewish wife he was never going to have now: as the person to whom it might actually have mattered that he was Jewish. He’d long ago given up on trying to care, himself, about his Jewishness, and yet, seeing the jeweler in his well-worn Hasidic trappings, his vestments of minority religion, he had the peculiar thought that he was letting down the Jews by marrying a Gentile. Morally dubious though Jenna was in most respects, she was still a Jew, with great-great-aunts and uncles who’d died in the camps, and this humanized her, took the edge off her inhuman beauty, and made him sorry to let her down. Interestingly, he felt this only about Jenna, not Jonathan, who was already fully human to Joey and did not require Jewishness to make him any more so.

  “What do you think?” Connie asked, gazing at the rings arrayed on velvet.

  “I don’t know,” he said from his little cloud of regret. “They all look good.”

  “Pick them up, try them on, handle them,” the jeweler said. “You can’t hurt gold.”

  Connie turned to Joey and searched his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I think so. Are you?”

  “Yes. If you are.”

  The jeweler stepped away from the counter and found something to busy himself with. And Joey, seeing himself through Connie’s eyes, couldn’t bear the uncertainty in his own face. It enraged him murderously on her behalf. Everybody else doubted her, and she needed him not to, and so he chose not to.

  “Definitely,” he said. “Let’s take a look at these.”

  When they’d selected their rings, Joey tried to bargain down the price, which he knew he was supposed to do in a store like this, but the jeweler merely gave him a disappointed look, as if to say: You’re marrying this girl and you’re quibbling with me about fifty dollars?

  Leaving the store, the rings in his front pocket, he almost collided on the sidewalk with his old hall mate Casey.

  “Dude!” Casey said. “What are you doing here?”

  He was wearing a three-piece suit and was already losing his hair. He and Joey had drifted apart, but Joey had heard he was working in his dad’s law office for the summer. Running into him at this moment seemed to Joey another important sign, although of what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. He said, “You remember Connie, right?”

  “Hi, Casey,” she said with fiendishly blazing eyes.

  “Yeah, sure, hi,” Casey said. “But, dude, what the fuck? I thought you were in Washington.”

  “I’m taking a vacation.”

  “Man, you should have called me, I had no idea. What are you guys doing on this street anyway? Buying an engagement ring?”

  “Yeah, ha ha, right,” Joey said. “What are you doing here?”

  Casey fished a watch on a chain from his vest pocket. “Is this cool or what? It used to be my dad’s dad’s. I had it cleaned and repaired.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Connie said. She bent over to admire it, and Casey shot Joey a frown of inquiry and comic alarm. From the various acceptable guy-to-guy responses available to him, Joey chose to produce a sheepish smirk suggesting mucho excellente sex, the irrational demands of girlfriends, their need to be bought trinkets, and so forth. Casey cast a quick connoisseurial glance at Connie’s bare shoulders and nodded judiciously. The entire exchange took four seconds, and Joey was relieved by how easy it was, even at a moment like this, to seem to Casey a person like Casey: to compartmentalize. It boded well for his continuing to have an ordinary life at college.

  “Dude, aren’t you hot in that suit?” he said.

  “My blood is Southern,” Casey said. “We don’t sweat like you Minnesotans.”

  “Sweating is wonderful,” Connie offered. “I love sweating in the summer.”

  This obviously struck Casey as a too-intense thing to say. He put his watch back in its pocket and looked down the street. “Anyhow,” he said. “If you guys want to go out or something, you should give me a call.”

  When they were alone again, in the five o’clock flow of workers on Sixth Avenue, Connie asked Joey if she’d said the wrong thing. “Did I embarrass you?”

  “No,” he said. “He’s a total dork. It’s ninety-five degrees and he’s wearing a three-piece suit? He’s a total pompous dork, with that stupid watch. He’s already turning into his dad.”

  “I open my mouth and strange things come out.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Are you embarrassed to be marrying me?”

  “No.”

  “It kind of seemed like you were. I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just don’t want to embarrass you around your friends.”

  “You don’t embarrass me,” he said angrily. “It’s just that hardly any of my friends even have girlfriends. I’m just kind of in a weird position.”

  He might reasonably have expected to have a little fight then, might have expected her to try to extract, via sulking or reproach, a more definitive avowal of his wish to marry her. But Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia—the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends—were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, he could never determine. The more he merged with her, the more he strangely also felt he didn’t know the first thing about her. She acknowledged only what was right in front of her. She did what she did, responded to what he said to her, and otherwise seemed wholly untroubled by things occurring outside her field of vision. He was haunted by his mother’s insistence that fights were good in a relationship. Indeed, it almost seemed to him as if he were marrying Connie to see if she would finally start fighting with him: to get to know her. But when he did marry her, the following afternoon, nothing changed at all. In the back of a cab, as they rode away from the courthouse, she wove her ringed left hand into his ringed left hand and rested her head on his shoulder with something that couldn’t quite be described as contentedness, because that would have implied that she’d been discontented before. It was more like mute submission to the deed, the crime, that had needed to be done. The next time Joey saw Casey, in Charlottesville a week later, neither of them even mentioned her.

  The wedding ring was still stalled somewhere in his abdomen as he breasted through the churning warm sea of travelers at Miami International and located Jenna in the cooler, calm bay of a business-class lounge. She was weari
ng sunglasses and was additionally defended by an iPod and the latest Condé Nast Traveler. She gave Joey a once-over, head to toe, the way a person might confirm that a product she’d ordered had arrived in acceptable condition, and then removed her hand luggage from the seat beside her and—a little reluctantly, it seemed—pulled the iPod wires from her ears. Joey sat down smiling helplessly at the amazement of traveling with her. He’d never flown business-class before.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing, I’m just smiling.”

  “Oh. I thought there was some schmutz on my face or something.”

  Several men in the vicinity were checking him out resentfully. He forced himself to stare down each of them in turn, to mark Jenna as claimed. It was going to be tiring, he realized, to have to do this everywhere they went in public. Men sometimes stared at Connie, too, but usually seemed to accept, without undue regret, that she was his. With Jenna, already, he had the sense that other men’s interest was not deterred by his presence but continued to seek ways around him.

  “I have to warn you I’m a little grouchy,” she said. “I’m getting my period, and I just spent three days among the ancients, looking at pictures of their grandkids. Also, I can’t believe it, but they make you pay for alcohol in this lounge now. I was like, I could have sat in the gate area and done that.”

  “Do you want me to get you something?”

  “Actually, yes. I’d like a double Tanqueray and tonic.”

  It seemed not to occur to her, or, fortunately, to the bartender, that he was under age. Returning with drinks and a lightened wallet, he found Jenna with her earphones in again and her face in her magazine. He wondered if she were somehow mistaking him for Jonathan, so little was she making of his arrival. He took out the novel his own sister had given him for Christmas, Atonement, and struggled to interest himself in its descriptions of rooms and plantings, but his mind was on the text that Jonathan had sent him that afternoon: hope it’s fun looking at a horse’s ass all day. It was the first he’d heard from him since calling him preemptively, three weeks earlier, with word of his travel plans. “So I guess everything’s come up roses for you,” Jonathan had said. “First the insurgency and now my mom’s leg.”