Freedom

  “I guess in some theoretical way.”

  “Dude, you’re a Jew! I had no idea!”

  “Only, like, one-quarter,” Joey said. “It’s really watered down.”

  “You could immigrate to Israel right now, no questions asked.”

  “My lifelong dream fulfilled.”

  “I’m just saying. You could be packing a Desert Eagle, or piloting one of those fighter jets, and dating a total sabra.”

  To illustrate his point, Jonathan opened his laptop and navigated to a site devoted to pictures of bronzed Israeli goddesses with high-caliber bandoliers crisscrossing their naked D-cup chests.

  “Not my kind of thing,” Joey said.

  “I’m not that into it, either,” Jonathan said, with perhaps less than complete honesty. “I’m just saying, if it were your kind of thing.”

  “Also, isn’t there a problem with illegal settlements and Palestinians not having any rights?”

  “Yes, there’s a problem! The problem is being a tiny island of democracy and pro-Western government surrounded by Muslim fanatics and hostile dictators.”

  “Yeah, but that just means it was a stupid place to put the island,” Joey said. “If the Jews hadn’t gone to the Middle East, and if we didn’t have to keep supporting them, maybe the Arab countries wouldn’t be so hostile to us.”

  “Dude. Are you familiar with the Holocaust?”

  “I know. But why didn’t they go to New York instead? We would have let them in. They could have had their synagogues here, and so forth, and we could have had some kind of normal relationship with the Arabs.”

  “But the Holocaust happened in Europe, which was supposed to be civilized. When you lose half your world population to genocide, you stop trusting anybody to protect you except yourself.”

  Joey was uncomfortably aware that he was displaying attitudes more his parents’ than his own, and that he was therefore about to lose an argument he didn’t even care about winning. “Fine,” he persisted nonetheless, “but why does that have to be our problem?”

  “Because it’s our business to support democracy and free markets wherever they are,” Jonathan said. “That’s the problem in Saudi Arabia—too many angry people with no economic prospects. That’s how come bin Laden can recruit there. I totally agree with you about the Palestinians. That’s just a giant fucking breeding ground for terrorists. That’s why we have to try to bring freedom to all the Arab countries. But you don’t start doing that by selling out the one working democracy in the entire region.”

  Joey admired Jonathan not only for his coolness but for having the confidence not to pretend to be stupid in order to maintain it. He managed the difficult trick of making it seem cool to be smart. “Hey,” Joey said, to change the subject, “am I still invited to Thanksgiving?”

  “Invited? You’re doubly invited now. My family isn’t the self-hating kind of Jewish. My parents really, really dig Jews. They will roll out the red carpet for you.”

  The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie about seeing a doctor, Joey found himself opening Jonathan’s computer and searching for pictures of his sister, Jenna. He didn’t consider it snooping if he went straight to family photos that Jonathan had already shown him anyway. His roommate’s excitement about his Jewishness seemed to presage a similarly warm reception on Jenna’s part, and he copied the two most fetching pictures of her onto his own hard drive, altering the file extensions to make them unfindable by anyone but him, so that he could picture some concrete alternative to Connie before he made the dreaded call to her.

  The female scene at school had not proved satisfactory thus far. Compared to Connie, the really attractive girls he’d met in Virginia all seemed to have been sprayed with Teflon, encased in suspicion of his motives. Even the prettiest ones wore too much makeup and overly formal clothes and dressed for Cavaliers games as if they were the Kentucky Derby. It was true that certain second-tier girls, at parties where they’d drunk too much, had given him to understand he was a boy to whom hookups were available. But for whatever reason, whether because he was a wuss or because he hated shouting over music or because he thought too highly of himself or because he was unable to ignore how stupid and annoying too much alcohol made a girl, he’d formed an early prejudice against these parties and their hookups and decided that he much preferred hanging out with other guys.

  He sat holding his phone for a long time, for maybe half an hour, while the sky in the windows grayed toward rain. He waited for so long and in such a stupor of reluctance that it was almost like Zen archery when his thumb, of its own accord, hit the speed-dial for Connie’s number and the ringing dragged him forward into action.

  “Hey!” she answered in a cheerful ordinary voice, a voice he realized he’d been missing. “Where are you?”

  “I’m in my room.”

  “What’s it doing there?”

  “I don’t know. It’s kind of gray.”

  “God, it was snowing here this morning. It’s already winter.”

  “Yeah, listen,” he said. “Are you OK?”

  “Me?” She seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. I miss you every minute of the day, but I’m getting used to that.”

  “I’m sorry I went so long without calling.”

  “That’s OK. I love talking to you, but I understand why we need to be more disciplined. I was just working on my Inver Hills application. I also signed up to take the SAT in December, like you suggested.”

  “Did I suggest that?”

  “If I’m going to go to real school in the fall, like you said, it’s what I need to do. I bought a book on how to study for it. I’m going to study three hours every day.”

  “So you’re really OK.”

  “Yes! How are you?”

  Joey struggled to reconcile Carol’s account of Connie with how clear and collected she was sounding. “I talked to your mom last night,” he said.

  “I know. She told me.”

  “She said she’s pregnant?”

  “Yes, a blessed event is coming our way. I think it’s going to be twins.”

  “Really? Why?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just my sense. That it’s going to be especially horrible in some way.”

  “The whole conversation was actually pretty weird.”

  “She’s been spoken to now,” Connie said. “She won’t be calling you again. If she does, let me know, and I’ll make it stop.”

  “She said you were very depressed,” Joey blurted out.

  This brought a sudden silence, total in the black-hole way that only Connie could make a silence.

  “She said you’re sleeping all day and not eating enough,” Joey said. “She sounded really worried about you.”

  After another silence, Connie said, “I was a little bit depressed for a while. But it was none of Carol’s business. And now I’m doing better.”

  “But maybe you need an antidepressant or something?”

  “No. I’m doing much better.”

  “Well, that’s great,” Joey said, although he felt that it was somehow not great at all—that morbid weakness and clinginess on her part might have provided him with a viable escape route.

  “So have you been sleeping with other people?” Connie said. “I thought that might be why you weren’t calling.”

  “No! No. Not at all.”

  “It’s OK with me if you do. I meant to tell you that last month. You’re a guy, you have needs. I don’t expect you to be a monk. It’s just sex, who cares?”

  “Well, the same goes for you,” he said gratefully, sensing another possible escape route here.

  “Except it’s not going to happen with me,” Connie said. “Nobody else sees me the way you do. I’m invisible to men.”

  “I don’t believe that at all.”

  “No, it’s true. Sometimes I try to be friendly, or even flirty, at the restaurant. But it’s like I’m invisible. I don’t really
care anyway. I just want you. I think people sense that.”

  “I want you, too,” he found himself murmuring, in contravention of certain safety guidelines he’d established for himself.

  “I know,” she said. “But guys are different, is all I’m saying. You should feel free.”

  “I’ve actually been jerking off a lot.”

  “Yeah, me, too. For hours and hours. Some days it’s the only thing I feel like doing. That’s probably why Carol thinks I’m depressed.”

  “But maybe you are depressed.”

  “No, I just like to come a lot. I think about you, and I come. I think about you some more, and then I come some more. That’s all it is.”

  Very quickly the conversation devolved into phone sex, which they hadn’t had since the earliest days, when they were sneaking around and whispering on phones in their respective bedrooms. It had become a lot more interesting in the meantime, because they knew how to talk to each other now. At the same time, it was as if they’d never had sex before—was cataclysmic that way.

  “I wish I could lick it off your fingers,” Connie said when they were finished.

  “I’m licking it for you,” Joey said.

  “That’s good. Lick it up for me. Does it taste good?”

  “Yes.”

  “I swear I can taste it in my mouth.”

  “I can taste you, too.”

  “Oh, baby.”

  Which led immediately to further phone sex, a more nervous rendition, since Jonathan’s afternoon class was ending and he might return soon.

  “My baby,” Connie said. “Oh, my baby. My baby, my baby, my baby.”

  Joey, as he climaxed again, believed that he was with Connie in her bedroom on Barrier Street, his arching back her arching back, his little breasts her little breasts. They lay breathing as one into their cell phones. He’d been wrong, the night before, when he’d told Carol that she, not he, was responsible for the way Connie was. He could feel now in his body how they’d made each other who they were.

  “Your mom wants me to spend Thanksgiving with you guys,” he said after a while.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said. “We agreed we were going to try to wait nine months.”

  “Well, she was kind of a bitch about it.”

  “That’s her way. She’s a bitch. But she’s been spoken to, and it won’t happen again.”

  “So you don’t care either way?”

  “You know what I want. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with it.”

  He had been hoping, for paradoxically opposing reasons, that Connie would join Carol in urging him to come back for the holiday. He was keen, on the one hand, to see her and to sleep with her, and, on the other hand, to find fault with her, so that he would have something to resist and break away from. What she was doing instead, with her cool clarity, was resetting a hook that for a while, in recent weeks, he’d managed to work halfway free of. Resetting it deeper than ever.

  “I should probably get off the phone now,” he said. “Jonathan’s coming back.”

  “OK,” Connie said, and let him go.

  Their conversation had diverged so wildly from his expectations that he couldn’t even remember now what he’d expected. He got up from his bed as if surfacing through a wormhole in the fabric of reality, his heart thudding, his vision altered, and paced around the room under the collective gaze of Tupac and Natalie Portman. He’d always liked Connie a lot. Always. And so why now, of all the inopportune moments, was he being gripped, as if for the first time, by such a titanic undertow of really liking her? How could it be, after years of having sex with her, years of feeling tender and protective of her, that he was only now getting sucked into such heavy waters of affection? Feeling connected to her in such a scarily consequential way? Why now?

  It was wrong, it was wrong, he knew it was wrong. He sat down at his computer to view the pictures of Jonathan’s sister and try to reestablish some order. Luckily, before he was able to get the file extensions changed back to JPG and be caught red-handed, Jonathan himself walked in.

  “My man, my Jewish brother,” he said, falling to his bed like a shooting victim. “ ’Sup?”

  “ ’Sup,” Joey said, hastily closing a graphical window.

  “Whoa, Jesus, a little bit of chlorine in the air here? You been to the pool, or what?”

  Joey almost, right then, told his roommate everything, the whole story of him and Connie right up to the present moment. But the dream world he’d been in, the nethery place of sexually merged identities, was receding quickly in the face of Jonathan’s male presence.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with a smile.

  “Crack a window, for God’s sake. I mean, I like you and all, but I’m not ready to go all the way yet.”

  Taking Jonathan’s complaint to heart, Joey did, after that, open the windows. He called Connie again the very next day, and again two days after that. He quietly shelved his sound arguments against too-frequent calling and fell gratefully on phone sex as a replacement for his solitary science-library masturbation, which now seemed to him a squalid aberration, embarrassing to recall. He succeeded in persuading himself that, as long as they avoided ordinary newsy chitchat and spoke only of sex, it was OK to exploit this loophole in his otherwise strict embargo on excess contact. As they continued to exploit it, however, and October became November and the days grew shorter, he realized that it was making their contact all the deeper and realer to hear Connie finally naming the things they’d done and the things she imagined them doing in the future. This deepening was somewhat strange, since all they were doing was getting each other off. But in hindsight it seemed to him as if, in St. Paul, Connie’s silence had formed a kind of protective barrier: had given their couplings what politicians called deniability. To discover, now, that sex had been fully registering in her as language—as words that she could speak out loud—made her much realer to him as a person. The two of them could no longer pretend that they were just mute youthful animals mindlessly doing their thing. Words made everything less safe, words had no limits, words made their own world. One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate. As long as her words were in his ear, urging him on, he wasn’t ashamed of anything. He returned to the wormhole three or four or even five times a week, disappeared into the world the two of them created, and later reemerged and shut the windows and went out to the dining hall or down to his dormitory lounge and effortlessly performed the shallow affability that college life required of him.

  It was, as Connie had said, only sex. The permission she’d given him to pursue it elsewhere was very much on Joey’s mind as he rode with Jonathan to NoVa for Thanksgiving. They were in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser, which he’d received as a high-school graduation present and now parked off campus in open defiance of the first-year no-cars rule. It was Joey’s impression, from movies and books, that much could happen quickly when college students were let loose at Thanksgiving. All fall, he’d taken care not to ask Jonathan any questions about his sister, Jenna, figuring that he had nothing to gain by arousing Jonathan’s suspicions prematurely. But as soon as he mentioned Jenna in the Land Cruiser he saw that all his care had been for naught. Jonathan gave him a knowing look and said, “She’s got a very serious boyfriend.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Or, no, sorry, I misspoke. I should have said that she is very serious about a boyfriend who in fact is ridiculous and a class-A jackass. I won’t insult my own intelligence by asking why you’re asking about her.”

  “I was just being polite,” Joey said.

  “Ha-ha. It was interesting, when she f
inally went away to college, I found out who my real friends were and which ones were only interested in coming over to my house as long as she was there. It turned out to be about fifty percent of them.”

  “I had the same problem, but not with my sister,” Joey said, smiling at the thought of Jessica. “For me it was Foosball and air hockey and a beer keg.” He proceeded, in the freedom of being on the road, to divulge to Jonathan the circumstances of his last two years of high school. Jonathan listened attentively enough but seemed interested in only one part of the story, the part about his living with his girlfriend.

  “And where is this person now?” he asked.

  “In St. Paul. She’s still at home.”

  “No shit,” Jonathan said, very impressed. “But wait a minute. That girl Casey saw going into our room on Yom Kippur—that wasn’t her, was it?”

  “Actually, yes,” Joey said. “We broke up, but we sort of had one little backslide.”

  “You fucking little liar! You told me that was just some hookup.”

  “No. All I said was I didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “You gave me to believe it was a hookup. I can’t believe you deliberately brought her out here when I was gone.”

  “Like I said, we had one backslide. We’re broken up now.”

  “For real? You don’t talk to her on the phone?”

  “Just a tiny little bit. She’s really depressed.”

  “I am impressed with what a sneaky little liar you turn out to be.”

  “I’m not a liar,” Joey said.

  “Said the liar. Do you have a picture of her on your computer?”

  “No,” Joey lied.

  “Joey the secret stud,” Jonathan said. “Joey the runaway. God damn. You’re making more sense to me now.”

  “Right, but I’m still Jewish, so you still have to like me.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like you. I said you’re making more sense. I could care less if you’ve got a girlfriend—I’m not going to tell Jenna. I’ll just warn you right now that you’re lacking the key to her heart.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A job at Goldman Sachs. That’s what her boyfriend has. His stated ambition is to be worth a hundred million at age thirty.”