Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sounds good, Dad.”

  “Shall we shag?” his father said, chalking his cue.

  Joey and Jonathan looked at each other and snickered explosively. The old man didn’t even notice.

  It pained Joey to suck so badly at a game, and the effects of the wine became apparent when the old man gave him a few pointers that only made him suck worse. Jonathan, meanwhile, was competing intensely, bearing down with a look of dead seriousness that Joey hadn’t seen in him before. During one of his longer runs, his father took Joey aside and asked about his summer plans.

  “That’s a long way away,” Joey said.

  “Not so far at all, really. What are your areas of greatest interest?”

  “I mostly need to make money, and stay in Virginia. I’m paying my own way through school.”

  “So Jonathan tells me. It’s a remarkable ambition. And forgive me if I’m going too far here, but my wife says you’re beginning to develop an interest in your heritage, after not being raised in faith. I don’t know if that’s at all a factor in your deciding to make your own way in the world, but if it is, I want to congratulate you on thinking for yourself and having the courage to do that. In time, you might even come back to lead your family in their own exploration.”

  “I’m definitely sorry I never learned anything about it.”

  The old man shook his head the same disapproving way his wife had. “We have the most marvelous and durable tradition in the world,” he said. “I think for a young person today it ought to have a particular appeal, because it’s all about personal choice. Nobody tells a Jew what he has to believe. You get to decide all of that for yourself. You can choose your very own apps and features, so to speak.”

  “Right, interesting,” Joey said.

  “And what are your other plans? Are you interested in a business career the way everybody else seems to be these days?”

  “Yes, definitely. I’m thinking of majoring in econ.”

  “That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money. Now, I didn’t have to make my own money, although I don’t mind saying I’ve done a pretty good job of managing what I was given. I owe a lot to my great-grandfather in Cincinnati, who came over here with nothing. He was given an opportunity in this country, which gave him the freedom to make the most of his abilities. That’s why I’ve chosen to spend my life the way I have—to honor that freedom and try to ensure that the next American century be similarly blessed. Nothing wrong with making money, nothing at all. But there has to be something more in your life than that. You have to choose which side you’re on, and fight for it.”

  “Absolutely,” Joey said.

  “There may be some good-paying summer jobs at the Institute this summer, if you’re interested in doing something for your country. Our fund-raising’s been off the charts since the attacks. Very gratifying to see. You could think about applying if you’re so inclined.”

  “Definitely!” Joey said. He was sounding to himself like one of Socrates’ young interlocutors, whose lines of dialogue, on page after page, consisted of variations on “Yes, unquestionably” and “Undoubtedly it must be so.” “That sounds great,” he said. “I’ll definitely apply.”

  Putting too much draw on the cue ball, Jonathan scratched unexpectedly, thereby negating all the points he’d accumulated on his run. “Fuck!” he cried, and added, for good measure, “Fuck!” He banged his cue on the edge of the table; and there ensued an awkward moment.

  “You have to be especially careful when you’ve run up a big score,” his father said.

  “I know that, Dad. I know that. I was being careful. I just got a little distracted by you guys’ conversation.”

  “Joey, your turn?”

  What was it about witnessing a friend’s meltdown that made him uncontrollably want to smile? He had a wonderful sense of liberation, not having to interact with his own dad in these ways. He could feel more of his good luck returning with each passing moment. For Jonathan’s sake, he was glad that he immediately missed his own next shot.

  But Jonathan turned pissy on him anyway. After his father, twice victorious, went back upstairs, he began calling Joey a faggot in not-so-funny ways and finally said he didn’t think that going to New York with Jenna was such a good idea.

  “Why not?” Joey said, stricken.

  “I don’t know. I just don’t feel like it.”

  “It’s going to be awesome. We can try to get into Ground Zero and see what it looks like.”

  “That whole area’s blocked off. You can’t see anything.”

  “I also want to see where they film the Today show.”

  “It’s stupid. It’s just a window.”

  “Come on, it’s New York. We’ve got to do this thing.”

  “Well, so go with Jenna then. That’s what you want anyway, isn’t it? Go to Manhattan with my sister, and then work for my dad next summer. And my mom’s a big horse rider. Maybe you want to ride horses with her, too.”

  The one bad aspect of Joey’s good fortune were the moments when it seemed to come at someone else’s expense. Never having experienced envy himself, he was impatient with its manifestations in other people. In high school, more than once, he’d had to terminate friendships with kids who couldn’t handle his having so many other friends. His feeling was: fucking grow up already. His friendship with Jonathan, however, was nonterminable, at least for the remainder of the school year, and although Joey was annoyed by his sulking he did keenly understand the pain of being a son.

  “So, fine,” he said. “We’ll stay here. You can show me D.C. You want to do that instead?”

  Jonathan shrugged.

  “Seriously. Let’s hang out in D.C.”

  Jonathan brooded about this for a while. Then he said, “You had him on the run, man. All that bullshit about the noble lie? You had him on the run, and then suddenly you got this shit-eating grin. You’re such a fucking little faggot suck-up.”

  “Yeah, I didn’t see you saying anything, either,” Joey said.

  “I’ve already been through it.”

  “Well then why should I go through it?”

  “Because you haven’t been through it yet. You haven’t earned the right not to. You haven’t fucking earned anything.”

  “Said the kid with the Land Cruiser.”

  “Look, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m going to go do some reading.”

  “Fine.”

  “I’ll go to New York with you. I don’t even care if you sleep with my sister. You probably deserve each other.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “Let’s just be friends, OK? I don’t have to go to New York.”

  “No, we’ll go,” Jonathan said. “Pathetically enough, I really don’t want to drive that Cabriolet.”

  Upstairs, in his turkey-smelling bedroom, Joey found a stack of books on the nightstand—Elie Wiesel, Chaim Potok, Exodus, The History of the Jews—and a note from Jonathan’s father: Some kindling for you. Feel free to keep or pass along. Howard. Flipping through them, feeling both a deep lack of personal interest and a deepening respect for people who were interested, Joey became angry with his mother all over again. Her disrespect of religion seemed to him just more of her me me me: her competitive Copernican wish to be the sun around which all things revolved. Before he went to sleep, he dialed 411 and got a number for Abigail Emerson in Manhattan.

  The next morning, while Jonathan was still sleeping, he called Abigail and introduced himself as her sister’s son and said he was coming to New York. In response, his aunt cackled weirdly and asked him if he was good with plumbing.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Things are going down but they’re not staying down,” Abigail said. “It’s kind of like me after too much brandy.” She proceeded to tell him about the low elevation and antiquated sewers of Greenwich Village, about her super’s holiday plans, about the pros and con
s of ground-floor courtyard apartments, and about the “pleasure” of returning at midnight on Thanksgiving and finding her neighbors’ incompletely disintegrated flushings floating in her bathtub and washed up on the shores of her kitchen sink. “It’s all verrrrrrry, very lovely,” she said. “The perfect kickoff to a long weekend of no super.”

  “Well, so, anyway, I thought maybe we could meet up or something,” Joey said. He was already having second thoughts about this, but his aunt now became responsive, as if her monologue had been a thing she’d just needed to flush from herself.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve seen pictures of you and your sister. Verrrrrry handsome pictures, in your verrrrrry beautiful house. I think I might even recognize you on the street.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “My apartment is unfortunately not so beautiful at the moment. A little fragrant also! But if you’d like to meet me at my favorite café, and be served by the gayest waiter in the Village, who is my personal best male bud, I’d be verrrrry happy to. I can tell you all the things your mother doesn’t want you to know about us.”

  This sounded good to Joey, and they made a date.

  For the trip to New York, Jenna brought along a high-school friend, Bethany, whose looks were ordinary only by comparison. The two of them sat in back, where Joey could neither see Jenna nor, between the endless stereo whining of Slim Shady and Jonathan’s chanting of his lyrics, make out what she and Bethany were talking about. The only interactions between back and front were Jenna’s criticisms of her brother’s driving. As if his hostility toward Joey the night before had been transmuted into road rage, Jonathan was tailgating at eighty and muttering abuse at less aggressive drivers; he seemed in general to be reveling in being an asshole. “Thank you for not killing us,” Jenna said when the SUV had come to rest in a staggeringly expensive midtown parking garage and the music had blessedly ceased.

  The trip soon proved to have all the makings of a bust. Jenna’s boyfriend, Nick, shared a rambling, decaying apartment on 54th Street with two other Wall Street trainees who were also gone for the weekend. Joey wanted to see the city, and he wanted even more not to seem to Jenna like some little Eminem-listening juvie, but the living room was equipped with a huge plasma TV and late-model Xbox that Jonathan insisted he immediately join him in enjoying. “See you later, kids,” Jenna said as she and Bethany went out to meet up with other friends. Three hours later, when Joey suggested taking a walk before it got too late, Jonathan told him not to be such a faggot.

  “What is wrong with you?” Joey said.

  “No, I’m sorry, what is wrong with you? You should have tagged along with Jenna if you wanted to do girl stuff.”

  Doing girl stuff in fact sounded rather appealing to Joey. He liked girls, he missed their company and the way they talked about things; he missed Connie. “You were the one who said you wanted to go shopping.”

  “What’s the matter, are my pants not tight enough in the butt for you?”

  “It also might be nice to get some dinner?”

  “Right, somewhere romantic, just the two of us.”

  “New York pizza? Isn’t it supposed to be the world’s best pizza?”

  “No, that’s New Haven.”

  “OK, a deli then. New York deli. I’m starving.”

  “So go look in the fridge.”

  “You go look in the fucking fridge. I’m getting out of here.”

  “Yeah, fine. Do that.”

  “Will you be here when I get back? So I can get in?”

  “Yes, honey.”

  With a lump in his throat, a girly nearness to tears, Joey went out into the night. Jonathan’s loss of cool was extremely disappointing to him. He was suddenly sensible of his own superior maturity, and as he drifted through the late shopping crowds on Fifth Avenue he considered how he might convey this maturity to Jenna. He bought two Polish sausages from a street vendor and pushed into even thicker crowds at Rockefeller Center and watched the ice skaters and admired the enormous unlit Christmas tree, the stirring floodlit heights of the NBC tower. So he liked doing girl stuff, so what? It didn’t make him a wuss. It just made him very lonely. Watching the skaters, feeling homesick for St. Paul, he called up Connie. She was on her shift at Frost’s and could stay on the phone only long enough for him to tell her that he missed her, to describe where he was standing, and to say he wished he could show it to her.

  “I love you, baby,” she said.

  “I love you, too.”

  The next morning, he got his chance with Jenna. She was apparently an early riser and had already been out to buy breakfast when Joey, rising early himself, wandered into the kitchen in a UVA T-shirt and paisley boxers. Finding her reading a book at the kitchen table, he felt pretty much stark-naked.

  “I bought some bagels for you and my undeserving brother,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said, considering whether to go and put some pants on or just keep strutting his stuff. Since she showed no further interest in him, he decided to risk not dressing. But then, as he waited on a toasting bagel and stole glances at her hair and her shoulders and her bare, crossed legs, he began to get a boner. He was about to make his escape to the living room when she looked up and said, “I’m sorry, this book? This book is ungodly boring.”

  He took cover behind a chair. “What’s it about?”

  “I thought it was about slavery. Now I’m not even sure what it’s about.” She showed him two facing pages of dense prose. “The really funny thing? This is the second time I’m reading it. It’s on like half the syllabuses at Duke. Syllabi. And I still can’t figure out what the actual story is. You know, what actually happens to the characters.”

  “I read Song of Solomon for school last year,” Joey said. “I thought it was pretty amazing. It’s like the best novel I ever read.”

  She made a complicated face of indifference toward him and annoyance with her book. He sat down across the table from her, took a bite of bagel and chewed it for a while, chewed it some more, and finally realized that swallowing was going to be an issue. There was no hurry, however, since Jenna was still trying to read.

  “What do you think’s up with your brother?” he said when he’d managed to get a few bites down.

  “What do you mean?”

  “He’s being kind of a jerk. Kind of immature. Don’t you think?”

  “Don’t ask me. He’s your friend.”

  She continued to stare at her book. Her disdainful imperviousness was identical to that of the top-tier girls at Virginia. The only difference was that she was even more attractive to him than those girls, and that he was close enough to her now to smell her shampoo. Underneath the table, in his boxers, his half-mast boner was pointing at her like a Jaguar’s hood ornament.

  “So what are you doing today?” he said.

  She closed her book as if resigning herself to his continued presence. “Shopping,” she said. “And there’s a party in Brooklyn tonight. What about you?”

  “Apparently nothing, since your brother doesn’t want to leave the apartment. I have an aunt who I’m supposed to see at four, but that’s it.”

  “I think it’s harder for guys,” Jenna said. “Being at home. My dad is amazing, and I’m fine with that, I’m fine with him being famous. But I think Jonathan always feels like he has to prove something.”

  “By watching TV for ten hours?”

  She frowned and looked directly at Joey, possibly for the first time. “Do you even like my brother?”

  “No definitely. He’s just been weird since Thursday night. Like, the way he was driving yesterday? I thought you might have some insight.”

  “I think for him the biggest thing is wanting to be liked for his own sake. You know, and not because of who our dad is.”

  “Right,” Joey said. And was inspired to add: “Or who his sister is.”

  She blushed! A small amount. And shook her head. “I’m not anybody.”

  “Ha ha ha,” he said, blushing as
well.

  “Well, I’m certainly not like my dad. I don’t have any big ideas, or any great ambition. I’m actually quite the selfish little person, when you get right down to it. A hundred acres in Connecticut, some horses and a full-time groom, and maybe a private jet, and I’ll be all set.”

  Joey noted that it had taken no more than one allusion to her beauty to get her to open up and start talking about herself. And once the door had opened even just a millimeter, once he’d slipped through the crack in it, he knew what to do. How to listen and how to understand. It wasn’t fake listening or fake understanding, either. It was Joey in Womanland. Before long, in the dirty winter light of the kitchen, as he took instruction from Jenna on how to dress a bagel properly, with lox and onions and capers, he was feeling not greatly more uncomfortable than he would have felt talking with Connie, or his mom, or his grandmother, or Connie’s mom. Jenna’s beauty was no less dazzling than ever, but his boner entirely subsided. He offered her some nuggets about his family situation, and in return she admitted that her own family wasn’t too happy about her boyfriend.

  “It’s pretty crazy,” she said. “I think that’s one reason Jonathan wanted to come here, and why he won’t leave the apartment. He thinks he’s somehow going to interfere with me and Nick. Like if he gets in the way, and hovers around, he can make it stop.”

  “Why don’t they like Nick?”

  “Well, for one thing, he’s Catholic. And he was varsity lacrosse. He’s superbright, but not bright in the way they approve of.” Jenna laughed. “I told him about my dad’s think tank once, and the next time his frat had a party they put a sign on the keg that said Think Tank. I thought it was pretty hilarious. But it gives you an idea.”

  “Do you get drunk a lot?”

  “No, I have the capacity of a flea. Nick stopped drinking, too, once he started working. He has like one Jack and Coke per week now. He’s totally focused on getting ahead. He was the first person in his family to go to a four-year college, total opposite of my family, where you’re an underachiever if you only have one PhD.”