Freedom

  Only when enough beer had been consumed to bring a group conversation around to sex did he feel isolated. His thing with Connie was too intense and strange—too sincere; too muddled with love—to be fungible as coin of bragging. He disdained but also envied his hall mates for their communal bravado, their porny avowals of what they wanted to do to the choicest babes in the facebook or had supposedly done, in isolated instances, while wasted, and seemingly without regret or consequence, to various wasted girls at their academies and prep schools. His hall mates’ yearnings still largely centered on the blow job, which Joey apparently was totally alone in considering little more than a glorified jerkoff, an amusement for the parking lot at lunch hour.

  Masturbation itself was a demeaning dissipation whose utility he was nevertheless learning to value as he sought to wean himself from Connie. His preferred venue for release was the Handicapped bathroom in the science library at whose Reserve desk he collected $7.65 an hour for reading textbooks and the Wall Street Journal and occasionally fetching texts for science nerds. Landing a work-study job at the Reserve desk had seemed to him yet another confirmation that he was destined to be fortunate in life. He was astonished that the library still possessed printed matter of such rarity and widespread interest that it had to be guarded in separate stacks and not allowed to leave the building. There was no way it wouldn’t all be digitized within the next few years. Many of the reserved texts were written in formerly popular foreign languages and illustrated with sumptuous color plates; the nineteenth-century Germans had been especially industrious cataloguers of human knowledge. It could even dignify masturbation, a little bit, to use a century-old German sexualanatomy atlas as an auxiliary to it. He knew that sooner or later he would need to break his silence with Connie, but at the end of each evening, after employing the paddle-handled Handicapped faucets to wash his gametes and prostatic fluids down the drain, he decided to risk waiting one more day, until finally, late one evening, at the Reserve desk, on the very day he’d realized that he’d probably waited one day too long, he got a call from Connie’s mother.

  “Carol,” he said amiably. “Hello.”

  “Hello, Joey. You probably know why I’m calling.”

  “No, actually, I don’t.”

  “Well, you’ve just about broken our little friend’s heart, is why.”

  Stomach lurching, he retreated to the privacy of the stacks. “I was going to call her tonight,” he told Carol.

  “Tonight. Really. You were going to call her tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do I not believe you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, she’s gone to bed, so it’s good you didn’t call. She went to bed without eating. She went to bed at seven.”

  “Good thing I didn’t call, then.”

  “This isn’t funny, Joey. She’s very depressed. You’ve given her a depression and you need to stop messing around. Do you understand? My daughter isn’t some dog that you can tie to a parking meter and then forget about.”

  “Maybe you should get her an antidepressant.”

  “She’s not your pet that you can leave in the back seat with the windows rolled up,” Carol said, warming to her metaphor. “We’re part of your life, Joey. I think we deserve a little more than the nothing you’ve been giving us. This has been a very frightening fall for all concerned, and you have been absent.”

  “You know, I do have classes to attend, and so forth.”

  “Too busy for a five-minute phone call. After three and a half weeks of silence.”

  “I really was going to call her tonight.”

  “Never mind Connie even,” Carol said. “Leave Connie out of it for a minute. You and I lived together like a family for almost two years. I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m starting to get an idea of what you put your mom through. Seriously. I never understood how cold you are until this fall.”

  Joey directed a smile of pure oppression at the ceiling. There had always been something not quite right about his interactions with Carol. She was what the prep-school boys on his hall and the fraternity brothers who were rushing him were wont to call a MILF (an acronym that, in Joey’s opinion, sounded faintly cretinous for its omission of the T for “to”). Although he was generally a very sound sleeper, there had occasionally been nights, during the period of his residency at the Monaghans, when he’d awakened in Connie’s bed with strange anxious premonitions of himself: as the unwitting and horrified trespasser of his sister’s bed, for example, or as the accidental shooter of a nail into Blake’s forehead with Blake’s nail gun, or, strangest of all, as the towering crane at a major Great Lakes dockyard, his horizontal member swinging heavy containers off the deck of a mother ship and gently depositing them on a smaller, flatter barge. These visions tended to follow moments of inappropriate connection with Carol—the glimpse of her bare butt through the nearly closed door of her and Blake’s bedroom; the complicit wink she gave Joey pursuant to a dinner-table belch from Blake; the lengthy and explicit rationale she presented to him (illustrated with vivid stories from her own careless youth) for putting Connie on the Pill. Since Connie was constitutionally incapable of being displeased with Joey, it had fallen to her mother to register her discontents. Carol was Connie’s garrulous organ, her straight-talking advocate, and Joey had sometimes had the sense, on weekend nights when Blake was out with buddies, of being the sandwiched party in a virtual threesome, Carol’s mouth running and running with all the things that Connie wouldn’t say, Connie then silently doing with Joey all the things that Carol couldn’t do, and Joey jolting awake in the wee hours with a sense of entrapment in something not quite right. Mom I’d Like Fuck.

  “So what am I supposed to do?” he said.

  “Well, for starters, I want you to be a more responsible boyfriend.”

  “I’m not her boyfriend. We’re on hiatus.”

  “What is hiatus? What does that mean?”

  “It means we’re experimenting with being apart.”

  “That’s not what Connie tells me. Connie tells me you want her to go to school so she can learn administrative skills and be your assistant in your endeavors.”

  “Look,” Joey said. “Carol. I was stoned when I said that. I mistakenly said the wrong thing while stoned on the incredibly strong pot that Connie buys.”

  “You think I don’t know she smokes pot? You think Blake and I don’t have noses? You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All you do is make yourself look like a bad boyfriend when you try to snitch on her.”

  “My point is that I said the wrong thing. And I haven’t had a chance to correct myself, because we agreed not to talk for a while.”

  “And whose responsibility is that? You know you’re like a god to her. Literally like a god, Joey. You tell her to hold her breath, she’ll hold her breath until she faints. You tell her to sit in a corner, she’ll sit in a corner until she keels over with starvation.”

  “Well, and whose fault is that?” Joey said.

  “It’s yours.”

  “No, Carol. It’s yours. You’re the parent. You’re the one whose house she’s living in. I just came along.”

  “Yeah, and now you’re going your own way, without taking responsibility. After being all but married to her. After being part of our family.”

  “Whoa. Whoa. Carol. I’m a freshman in college. Do you understand that? I mean, the weirdness of even having this conversation?”

  “I understand that when I was one year older than you are now, I had a baby girl and was having to make my own way in the world.”

  “And how’s that working out for you?”

  “Not too bad, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t going to tell you this, because it’s still early on, but since you ask, Blake and I are going to have a little baby. Our little family’s about to get a little bigger.”

  It took Joey a moment to compute that she was telling him that she was pregnant.

  “Listen,”
he said, “I’m still at work. I mean, congratulations and all. I’m just busy at this particular moment.”

  “Busy. Right.”

  “I promise I’ll call her tomorrow afternoon.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Carol said, “that won’t do it. You need to come out right away and spend some time with her.”

  “That’s not an option.”

  “Then come for a week at Thanksgiving. We’ll have a nice family Thanksgiving, all four of us. It’ll give her something to look forward to, and you can see for yourself how depressed she is.”

  Joey had been planning to spend the holiday in Washington with his roommate, Jonathan, whose older sister, a junior at Duke, either photographed misleadingly well or was somebody not to miss meeting in person. The sister’s name was Jenna, which in Joey’s mind connected her to the Bush twins and all the partying and loose morals that the Bush name connoted.

  “I don’t have money for a flight,” he said.

  “You can take a bus, just like Connie. Or is the bus not good enough for Joey Berglund?”

  “I also have other plans.”

  “Well, you better change your plans,” Carol said. “Your girlfriend of the last four years is seriously depressed. She cries for hours, she doesn’t eat. I’ve had to talk to her boss at Frost’s to keep her from getting fired, because she can’t remember orders, she gets confused, she never smiles. She may be getting high at work, I wouldn’t be surprised. Then she comes home and goes straight to bed and stays there. When she has her afternoon shifts, I have to drive all the way home on my lunch break to make sure she’s up and gets dressed for work, because she won’t answer the phone. Then I have to drive her to Frost’s and make sure she goes inside. I tried to send Blake to do it for me, but she won’t talk to him anymore or do anything he says. Sometimes I think she’s trying to wreck my relationship with him, just to be spiteful, because you’re gone. When I tell her to see the doctor, she says she doesn’t need a doctor. When I ask her what she’s trying to prove, and what her plan is for her life, she says her plan is to be with you. That’s her only plan. So whatever your own little Thanksgiving plan is, you better change it.”

  “I said I would call her tomorrow.”

  “Do you honestly think you can use my daughter as a sex buddy for four years and then just walk away when it suits you? Is that really what you think? She was a child when you started having relations with her.”

  Joey thought of the momentous day in his old tree fort when Connie had rubbed the crotch of her cutoff shorts and then taken his somewhat smaller hand and shown him where to touch her: how little persuading he’d required. “I was a child, too, of course,” he said.

  “Hon, you were never a child,” Carol said. “You were always so cool and self-possessed. Don’t think I didn’t know you when you were a little baby. You never even cried! I never saw anything like it in my whole life. You wouldn’t even cry when you stubbed your toe. Your face would wrinkle up but you wouldn’t make a peep.”

  “No, I cried. I definitely remember crying.”

  “You used her, you used me, you used Blake. And now you think you can just turn your back on us and walk away? You think that’s how the world works? You think we’re all just here for your personal pleasure?”

  “I’ll try to get her to see a doctor for a prescription. But, Carol, you know, this is a really strange conversation we’re having. Not a good kind of conversation.”

  “Well, you better get used to it, because we’re going to be having it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day after that, until I hear you’re coming for Thanksgiving.”

  “I’m not coming for Thanksgiving.”

  “Well, then, you better get used to hearing from me.”

  After the library closed, he went out into the chilly night and sat on a bench outside his dorm, caressing his phone and trying to think of somebody to call. In St. Paul he’d made it clear to all his friends that his thing with Connie was off-limits conversationally, and in Virginia he’d kept it a secret. Almost everybody in his dorm communicated with their parents daily, if not hourly, and although this did make him feel unexpectedly grateful to his own parents, who had been far cooler and more respectful of his wishes than he’d been able to appreciate as long as he lived next door to them, it also touched off something like a panic. He’d asked for his freedom, they’d granted it, and he couldn’t go back now. There had been a brief spate of familial phoning after 9/11, but the talk had mostly been impersonal, his mom amusingly ranting about how she couldn’t stop watching CNN even though she was convinced that watching so much CNN was harming her, his dad taking the opportunity to vent his long-standing hostility to organized religion, and Jessica flaunting her knowledge of non-Western cultures and explaining the legitimacy of their beef with U.S. imperialism. Jessica was at the very bottom of the list of people whom Joey would call in distress. Maybe, if she were his last living acquaintance and he’d been arrested in North Korea and were willing to endure a stern lecture: maybe then.

  As if to reassure himself that Carol had been wrong about him, he wept a little in the darkness, on his bench. Wept for Connie in her misery, wept for having abandoned her to Carol—for not being the person who could save her. Then he dried his eyes and called his own mother, whose telephone Carol could probably have heard ringing if she’d stood by a window and listened closely.

  “Joseph Berglund,” his mother said. “I seem to remember that name from somewhere.”

  “Hi, Mom.”

  Immediately a silence.

  “Sorry I haven’t called in a while,” he said.

  “Oh, well,” she said, “there’s really nothing much happening around here except anthrax scares, a very unrealistic realtor trying to sell our house, and your dad flying back and forth to Washington. You know they make everybody flying into Washington stay in their seat for an hour before they land there? It seems like kind of a weird regulation. I mean, what are they thinking? The terrorists are going to cancel their evil plan because the seat-belt sign is on? Dad says they’re barely even airborne when the stewardesses start warning everybody to use the bathroom right away, before it’s too late. And then they start handing out whole cans of drinks.”

  She sounded like a nattering older lady, not the vital force he still imagined when he allowed himself to think of her. He had to squeeze his eyes shut to avert renewed weeping. Everything he’d done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they’d had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

  “Am I allowed to ask if all is well with you?” she said.

  “Everything is well with me.”

  “Life’s good in the former slave states?”

  “Very good. The weather’s been beautiful.”

  “Right, that’s the advantage of growing up in Minnesota. Everywhere you go now, the weather will be nicer.”

  “Yep.”

  “Are you making lots of new friends? Meeting lots of people?”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, good good good. Good good good. It’s nice of you to call, Joey. I mean, I know you don’t have to, so it’s nice that you did. You have some real fans here back at home.”

  A herd of male first-years burst out of the dorm and onto the lawn, their voices amplified by beer. “Jo-eeee, Jo-eeee,” they lowed affectionately. He nodded to them in cool acknowledgment.

  “Sounds like you’ve got some fans there, too,” his mother said.

  “Yep.”

  “My popular boy.”

  “Yep.”

  Another silence fell as the herd headed off to fresh watering holes. Joey felt a pang of disadvantage, watching them go. He was already nearly a month ahead of his budgeted fall-semester s
pending. He didn’t want to be the poor kid who drank only one beer while everybody else was having six, but he didn’t want to look like a freeloader, either. He wanted to be dominant and generous; and this required funds.

  “How’s Dad liking his new job?” he made an effort to ask his mother.

  “I think he’s liking it OK. It’s sort of driving him insane. You know: suddenly having lots of somebody else’s money to spend on fixing all the things he thinks are wrong with the world. He used to be able to complain that nobody was fixing them. Now he actually has to try to fix them himself, which is impossible, of course, since we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket. He sends me e-mails at three in the morning. I don’t think he’s sleeping much.”

  “And what about you? How are you?”

  “Oh, well, it’s nice of you to ask, but you don’t really want to know.”

  “Sure I do.”

  “No, trust me, you don’t. And don’t worry, I’m not saying that in a mean way. It’s not a reproach. You’ve got your life and I’ve got mine. It’s all good good good.”

  “No, but, like, what do you do all day?”

  “Actually, FYI,” his mother said, “that can be a somewhat awkward question to ask a person. It’s sort of like asking a childless couple why they don’t have any children, or an unmarried person why they aren’t married. You have to be careful with certain kinds of questions that may seem perfectly innocuous to you.”

  “Hm.”

  “I’m sort of in limbo right now,” she said. “It’s hard to make any big changes in my life when I know I’m going to be moving. I did start a little creative-writing project, for my private amusement. I also have to keep the house looking like a bed-and-breakfast in case a realtor stops by with a potential mark. I spend a lot of time making sure the magazines are nicely fanned.”