Freedom

  “Is he going to be at your parents’?”

  “No, he’s in Singapore. He just graduated last year, and they’re already flying him to fucking Singapore for some billion-dollar round-the-clock something. She’ll be pining alone at home, bro.”

  Jonathan’s father was the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer, especially for America and Israel. Hardly a week had passed, in October and November, without Jonathan pointing out to Joey an opinion piece in the Times or the Journal in which his father expounded on the menace of radical Islam. They’d also watched him on the NewsHour and Fox News. He had a mouth full of exceptionally white teeth that he flashed every time he started speaking, and he looked almost old enough to be Jonathan’s grandfather. Besides Jonathan and Jenna, he had three much older children from earlier marriages, plus two former wives.

  The house of his third marriage was in McLean, Virginia, on a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where Joey wanted to live as soon as he got rich. Inside the house, whose floors were of fine-grained oak, there seemed to be no end of rooms looking out on a wooded ravine in which woodpeckers swooped among the mostly bare trees. Despite having grown up in a house he’d considered book-filled and tasteful, Joey was staggered by the quantity of hardcover books and by the obviously top quality of the multicultural swag that Jonathan’s father had collected during distinguished foreign residencies. Just as Jonathan had been surprised to learn of Joey’s adventures in high school, Joey was now surprised to see what high-class luxury his messy and somewhat crude-mannered roommate came from. The only real off note was the tackily ornate Judaica parked in various nooks and corners. Seeing Joey smirk at a notably monstrous silver-painted menorah, Jonathan assured him it was extremely old and rare and valuable.

  Jonathan’s mother, Tamara, who’d clearly once been a total babe and was still quite a bit of one, showed Joey the luxurious bedroom and bathroom that would be solely his. “Jonathan tells me you’re Jewish,” she said.

  “Yes, apparently I am,” Joey said.

  “But not observant?”

  “Not even conscious, actually, until a month ago.”

  Tamara shook her head. “I don’t understand that,” she said. “I know it’s very common, but I will never understand it.”

  “It wasn’t like I was Christian or anything, either,” Joey said by way of excuse. “It was all part of the same nonissue.”

  “Well, you’re very welcome with us. I think you might find it interesting to learn a little bit about your heritage. You’ll find that Howard and I aren’t particularly conservative. We just think it’s important to be aware and always be remembering.”

  “They’ll whip you right into shape,” Jonathan said.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be a very gentle whipping,” Tamara said with a milfy smile.

  “That’s great,” Joey said. “I’m definitely up for anything.”

  As soon as they could, the two boys escaped to the basement rec room, whose amenities shamed even those in Blake and Carol’s great-room. Tennis could practically have been played on the blue felt expanses of the mahogany pool table. Jonathan introduced Joey to a complicated, interminable, and frustrating game called Cowboy Pool that required a table without a central ball-collection mechanism. Joey was on the verge of suggesting a switch to air hockey, at which he was annihilatingly skilled, when the sister, Jenna, came downstairs. She acknowledged Joey, barely, from the pinnacle of her two-year age advantage, and began to speak of urgent family matters with her brother.

  Joey suddenly understood, as never before, what people meant by “breathtaking.” Jenna had the unsettling kind of beauty that relegated everything around her, even a beholder’s basic organ functions, to afterthought status. Her figure and complexion and bone structure made the features that he’d so admired in other “pretty” girls now seem like crude approximations of beauty; even the pictures of her hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was thick and shining and strawberry blonde, and she was wearing an oversized Duke athletic jersey and flannel pajama bottoms, which, far from concealing her body’s perfection, demonstrated its power to overcome the baggiest of clothes. Everything else that Joey rested his eyes on in the rec room was notable only for not being her—was all the same second-class blah. And yet, when he did steal a glance at her, his brain was too unsettled to even see much. The whole thing was weirdly tiring. There seemed to be no way to arrange his face that wasn’t false and self-conscious. He was painfully aware of smirking stupidly at the floor while she and her amazingly unawed sibling bickered about the New York City shopping expedition she intended to make on Friday.

  “You can’t leave us the Cabriolet,” Jonathan said. “Joey and I are going to look like a couple of life partners in that thing.”

  Jenna’s one evident defect was her voice, which was pinched and little-girly. “Yeah, right,” she said. “A couple of life partners with jeans hanging halfway down their ass.”

  “I just don’t see why you can’t drive the Cabriolet to New York,” Jonathan said. “You’ve driven it there before.”

  “Because Mom says I can’t. Not on a holiday weekend. The Land Cruiser is safer. I’ll bring it back on Sunday.”

  “Are you kidding? The Land Cruiser is a rollover machine. It’s totally unsafe.”

  “Well, you can tell that to Mom. Tell her your freshman car’s an unsafe rollover machine and that’s why I can’t take it to New York.”

  “Hey.” Jonathan turned to Joey. “You want to go to New York for the weekend?”

  “Sure!” Joey said.

  “Just take the Cabriolet,” Jenna said. “It won’t hurt you for three days.”

  “No, this is great,” Jonathan said. “We can all go to New York in the Land Cruiser and go shopping. You can help me find some pants that meet your standards.”

  “Reasons that’s a nonstarter?” Jenna said. “Number one, you don’t even have any place to stay.”

  “Why can’t we crash with you at Nick’s? Isn’t he, like, in Singapore?”

  “Nick’s not going to want a bunch of freshman guys running around his apartment. Plus he might be back by Saturday night.”

  “Two is not a bunch. This would just be me and my incredibly tidy Minnesotan roommate.”

  “I am very tidy,” Joey assured her.

  “No doubt,” she said with zero interest, from her pinnacle. Joey’s presence nevertheless seemed to complicate her resistance—she couldn’t be quite as dismissive to a stranger as she could to her own brother. “I really don’t care,” she said. “I’ll ask Nick. But if he says no, you can’t come.”

  As soon as she went back upstairs, Jonathan presented Joey with a palm to high-five. “New York, New York,” he said. “I bet we can crash with Casey’s family if Nick ends up being as big a dick as he usually is. They’re on the Upper East Side somewhere.”

  Joey was just stunned by Jenna’s beauty. He wandered into the area where she’d stood, which smelled faintly of patchouli. That he might get to spend an entire weekend in her vicinity, through the sheer happenstance of being Jonathan’s roommate, felt like some kind of miracle.

  “You, too, I see,” Jonathan said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the story of my young life.”

  Joey felt himself reddening. “What I don’t get is how you turned out to be so ugly.”

  “Ha, you know what they say about older parents. My dad was fifty-one when I was born. There was a crucial two years of genetic deterioration. Not every boy gets to be pretty like you.”

  “I didn’t realize you had these feelings.”

  “What feelings? I only look for prettiness in girls, where it belongs.”

  “Fuck you, rich kid.”

  “Pretty boy, pretty boy.”

  “Fuck you. Let me kick your ass at air hockey.”

  “Just as long as kicking it is all you want to do.”

  Tamara
’s threat notwithstanding, there was blessedly little religious instruction, or invasive parental interaction of any kind, during Joey’s stay in McLean. He and Jonathan installed themselves in the basement home theater, which had reclining seats and an eight-foot projection screen, and stayed up until 4 a.m. watching bad TV and casting aspersions on each other’s heterosexuality. By the time they roused themselves on Thanksgiving, crowds of relatives were arriving at the house. Since Jonathan was obliged to speak to them, Joey found himself floating through the beautiful rooms like a helium molecule, devoting himself to arranging sight lines that Jenna might pass through or, better yet, alight in. The upcoming excursion to New York, which her boyfriend had surprisingly signed off on, was like money in the bank: he would have, at a minimum, two long car trips to make an impression on her. For now, he wanted only to accustom his eyes to her, to make looking less impossible. She was wearing a demure, high-necked dress, a friendly dress, and either was very adept at applying makeup or simply didn’t wear much. He took note of her good manners, manifested in her patience with bald-pated uncles and face-lifted aunts who seemed to have a lot to say to her.

  Before dinner was served, he slipped away to his bedroom to call St. Paul. Calling Connie was out of the question in his current state; shame about their filthy conversations, curiously absent throughout the fall, was creeping up on him now. His parents were a different matter, however, if only because of the checks of his mother’s that he’d been cashing.

  His dad answered the phone in St. Paul and spoke to him for no more than two minutes before handing him off to his mother, which Joey took as a kind of betrayal. He actually had a fair amount of respect for his dad—for the consistency of his disapproval; for the strictness of his principles—and he might have had even more if his dad hadn’t been so deferential to his mother. Joey could have used some manly backup, but instead his dad kept passing him off to his mom and washing his hands of them.

  “Hello, you,” she said with a warmth that made him cringe. He immediately resolved to be hard with her, but, as happened so often, she wore him down with her humor and her cascading laugh. Before he knew it, he’d described the entire scene in McLean to her, excluding Jenna.

  “A house full of Jews!” she said. “How interesting for you.”

  “You’re a Jew yourself,” he said. “And that makes me a Jew, too. And Jessica, too, and Jessica’s kids if she has any.”

  “No, that’s only if you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” his mother said. After three months in the East, Joey was able to hear that she had a bit of Minnesota accent. “You see,” she said, “I think, when it comes to religion, you’re only what you say you are. Nobody else can say it for you.”

  “But you don’t have any religion.”

  “Exactly my point. That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts. That religion is stoopid. Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished.”

  “Which sister?”

  “Your aunt Abigail. She’s apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are. How do I know this, you ask? Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah. I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey.”

  “I don’t even know what the Kabbalah is,” Joey said.

  “Oh, I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her. It’s very Important and Mystical—I think Madonna’s into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.”

  “Madonna’s Jewish?”

  “Yah, Joey, hence her name.” His mother laughed at him.

  “Well, anyway,” he said, “I’m trying to keep an open mind about it. I don’t feel like rejecting something I haven’t even found out about yet.”

  “That’s right. And who knows? It might even be useful to you.”

  “It might,” he said coolly.

  At the very long dinner table, he was seated on the same side as Jenna, which spared him a view of her and allowed him to concentrate on conversing with one of the bald uncles, who assumed that he was Jewish and regaled him with an account of his recent vacation-slash-business-trip in Israel. Joey pretended to be fluent and impressed with much that was utterly foreign to him: the Western Wall and its tunnels, the Tower of David, Masada, Yad Vashem. Delayed-action resentment of his mother, coupled with the fabulousness of the house and his fascination with Jenna and a certain unfamiliar feeling of genuine intellectual curiosity, was making him actually long to be more Jewish—to see what this kind of belonging might be like.

  Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkeylike cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how “we” had been “leaning on” the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for “the philosopher” (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country behind the mission that his philosophy had revealed as right and necessary. “We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts,” he said, with his smile, to an uncle who had mildly challenged him about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. “Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

  Between Joey’s impulse to impress Jenna and its irruption in actual words there was only one short second of free-fall terror. “But how do you know it’s the truth?” he called out.

  All heads turned to him, and his heart began to pound.

  “We never know for certain,” Jenna’s father said, doing his smile thing. “You’re right about that. But when we discover that our understanding of the world, based on decades of careful empirical study by the very best minds, is in striking accordance with the inductive principle of universal human freedom, it’s a good indication that our thinking is at least approximately on track.”

  Joey nodded eagerly, to show his total and profound agreement, and was surprised when, in spite of himself, he persisted: “But it seems like once we start lying about Iraq, we’re no better than the Arabs with the lie about no Jews being killed on 9/11.”

  Jenna’s father, not ruffled in the slightest, said, “You’re a very bright young man, aren’t you?”

  Joey couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be ironic.

  “Jonathan says you’re a very fine student,” the old man continued gently. “And so I’m guessing you’ve already had the experience of being frustrated with people who aren’t as bright as you are. People who are not only unable but unwilling to admit certain truths whose logic is self-evident to you. Who don’t even seem to care that their logic is bad. Have you never been frustrated that way?”

  “But that’s because they’re free,” Joey said. “Isn’t that what freedom is for? The r
ight to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it’s a pain in the ass sometimes.”

  Around the table, people chuckled at this.

  “That’s exactly right,” Jenna’s father said. “Freedom is a pain in the ass. And that’s precisely why it’s so imperative that we seize the opportunity that’s been presented to us this fall. To get a nation of free people to let go of their bad logic and sign on with better logic, by whatever means are necessary.”

  Unable to bear another second of exposure, Joey nodded even more eagerly. “You’re right,” he said. “I see, you’re right.”

  Jenna’s father went on to unburden himself of further stretched facts and firm opinions that Joey heard hardly a word of. His body was throbbing with the excitement of having spoken up and being heard by Jenna. The feeling he’d misplaced all fall, the feeling of being a player, was coming back to him. When Jonathan stood up from the table, he rose unsteadily and followed him into the kitchen, where they collected enough undrunk wine to fill two sixteen-ounce tumblers for themselves.

  “Dude,” Joey said, “you can’t mix red and white like that.”

  “It’s rosé, dufus,” Jonathan said. “Since when are you Mr. Oenophile?”

  They took their brimming glasses down to the basement and consumed the wine over air hockey. Joey was still so throbbing that he hardly felt the effects, which proved fortunate when Jonathan’s father came downstairs and joined them. “How about a little Cowboy Pool?” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I assume Jonathan’s already taught you our house game?”

  “Yeah, I totally suck at it,” Joey said.

  “It’s the queen of all pool games, combining the best features of both billiards and pocket billiards,” the old man said as he arranged the 1 ball, the 3 ball, and the 5 ball on their appointed spots. Jonathan seemed somewhat mortified by him, which interested Joey, since he tended to assume that only his own parents could truly mortify a person. “We have an additional special house rule that I’m willing to apply to myself tonight. Jonathan? What do you say? The rule is designed to prevent a highly skilled player from parking behind the 5 ball and running up the score. You boys will be allowed to do that, assuming you’ve mastered putting straight draw on the cue ball, whereas I will be obliged to shoot one billiard or sink one of the other balls each time I sink the 5.”