The storm of shit he’d taken from his dad for doing this was one of the reasons he couldn’t face telling his parents about his marriage, and one of the reasons he’d been trying, ever since, to see how ruthless he had it in him to be. He wanted to get rich enough and tough enough fast enough that he would never again have to take shit from his dad. To be able just to laugh and shrug and walk away: to be more like Jenna, who, for example, knew almost everything about Connie except the fact that Joey had married her, and who nevertheless considered Connie, at most, an adder of thrill and piquancy to the games she’d like to play with Joey. Jenna took special pleasure in asking him if his girlfriend knew how much he was talking to somebody else’s girlfriend, and in hearing him recount the lies he’d told. She was even worse news than her brother had made her out to be.
At the hospital, Joey saw why the surrounding streets had been so empty: the entire population of Alexandria had converged on the emergency room. It took him twenty minutes just to register, and the desk nurse was unimpressed with the severe stomach pain he feigned in hopes of moving to the head of the line. During the hour and a half that he then sat breathing in the coughings and sneezings of his fellow Alexandrians, watching the last half hour of ER on the waiting-room TV, and texting UVA friends who were still enjoying their winter break, he considered how much easier and cheaper it would be to simply buy a replacement wedding ring. It would cost no more than $300, and Connie would never know the difference. That he felt so romantically attached to an inanimate object—that he felt he owed it to Connie to retrieve this particular ring, which she’d helped him pick out on 47th Street one sweltering afternoon—did not bode well for his project of making himself bad news.
The ER doc who finally saw him was a watery-eyed young white guy with a nasty razor burn. “Nothing to worry about,” he assured Joey. “These things take care of themselves. The object should pass right through without you even noticing.”
“I’m not worried about my health,” Joey said. “I’m worried about getting the ring back tonight.”
“Hm,” the doctor said. “This is an object of actual value?”
“Great value. And I’m assuming there’s some—procedure?”
“If you must have the object, the procedure is to wait a day or two or three. And then . . .” The doctor smiled to himself. “There’s an old ER joke about the mother who comes in with a toddler who’s swallowed some pennies. She asks the doctor if the kid’s going to be OK, and the doctor tells her, ‘Just be sure to watch for any change in his stool.’ Really silly joke. But that’s your procedure, if you must have the object.”
“But I’m talking about a procedure you could do right now.”
“And I’m telling you there isn’t one.”
“Hey, your joke was really funny,” Joey said. “It really made me laugh. Ha ha. You really told it well.”
The charge for this consultation was $275. Being uninsured—the Commonwealth of Virginia considered insurance by one’s parents a form of financial support—he was obliged to present plastic for it on the spot. Unless he happened to become constipated, which was the opposite of the problem he associated with Latin America, he could now look forward to some very smelly beginnings to his days with Jenna.
Returning to his apartment, well after midnight, he packed for his trip and then lay in bed and monitored the progress of his digestion. He’d been digesting things every minute of his life without paying the slightest attention to it. How odd it was to think that his stomach lining and his mysterious small intestine were as much a part of him as his brain or tongue or penis. As he lay and strained to feel the subtle ticks and sighs and repositionings in his abdomen, he had a premonition of his body as a long-lost relative waiting at the end of a long road ahead of him. A shady relative whom he was glimpsing for the first time only now. At some point, hopefully still far in the future, he would have to rely on his body, and at some point after that, hopefully still farther in the future, his body was going to let him down, and he would die. He imagined his soul, his familiar personal self, as a stainless gold ring slowly making its way down through ever-stranger and fouler-smelling country, toward shit-smelling death. He was alone with his body; and since, weirdly, he was his body, this meant he was entirely alone.
He missed Jonathan. In a funny way, his impending trip was a worse betrayal of Jonathan than of Connie. The hiccups of their first Thanksgiving notwithstanding, they’d become best friends in the last two years, and it was only in recent months, beginning with Joey’s business deal with Kenny Bartles and culminating in Jonathan’s discovery of his travel plans with Jenna, that their friendship had soured. Until then, time after time, Joey had been pleasantly surprised by the evidence of how genuinely fond of him Jonathan was. Fond of all of him, not just of the parts of himself that he saw fit to present to the world as a reasonably cool UVA student. The biggest and most pleasant surprise had been how much Jonathan dug Connie. Indeed, it was fair to say that, without Jonathan’s validation of their coupledom, Joey would not have gone so far as to marry her.
Aside from his preferred porn sites, which themselves were touchingly tame in comparison to the ones to which Joey turned in moments of need, Jonathan had no sex life. He was a bit of a wonk, yes, but far wonkier dudes than he were coupling up. He was just terminally awkward with girls, awkward to the point of not being interested, and Connie, when he finally met her, turned out to be the one girl he could relax and be himself around. No doubt it helped that she was so deeply and exclusively into Joey, thus relieving Jonathan of the stress of trying to impress her or of worrying that she wanted something from him. Connie behaved like an older sister with him, a much nicer and more interested older sister than Jenna. While Joey was studying or working at the library, she played Jonathan’s video games with him for hours, laughing congenially at her losses and listening, in her limpid way, to his explications of their features. Though Jonathan ordinarily made a fetish of his bed and his special childhood pillow and his nightly need for nine hours of sleep, he discreetly vacated the dorm room before Joey even had to ask him for some privacy. After Connie returned to St. Paul, Jonathan told him he thought his girlfriend was amazing, totally hot but also easy to be with, and this made Joey, for the first time, proud of her. He stopped thinking of her so much as a weakness of his, a problem to be solved at his earliest convenience, and more as a girlfriend whose existence he didn’t mind owning up to with his other friends. Which, in turn, made him all the angrier about his mother’s veiled but implacable hostility.
“One question, Joey,” his mother had said on the telephone, during the weeks when he and Connie were housesitting for his aunt Abigail. “Am I allowed one question?”
“Depends on what it is,” Joey said.
“Are you and Connie having any fights?”
“Mom, no, I’m not going to talk about this.”
“You may be curious why that’s the one question I’m asking. Maybe you’re a tiny bit curious?”
“Nope.”
“It’s because you should be having fights, and there’s something wrong if you’re not.”
“Yeah, by that definition, you and dad must be doing everything right.”
“Ha-ha-ha! That’s really hilarious, Joey.”
“Why should I have fights? People have fights when they don’t get along.”
“No, people have fights when they love each other but still have actual complete personalities and are living in the real world. Obviously, I’m not saying it’s good to fight excessively.”
“No, just exactly enough. I get it.”
“If you’re never having fights, you need to ask yourself why not, is all I’m saying. Ask yourself, where is the fantasy residing?”
“No, Mom. Sorry. Not going to talk about this.”
“Or who it’s residing in, if you know what I mean.”
“I swear to God, I’m going to hang up, and I’m not going to call you for a year.”
“What re
alities are not being attended to.”
“Mom!”
“Anyway, that was my one question, and now I’ve asked it, and I won’t ask you any more.”
Although his mother’s happiness levels were nothing to brag about, she persisted in inflicting the norms of her own life on Joey. She probably thought she was trying to protect him, but all he heard was the drumbeat of negativity. She was especially “concerned” about Connie’s lack of any friends besides himself. She’d once cited her own crazy college friend Eliza, who’d had zero other friends, and what a warning sign this should have been. Joey had replied that Connie did so have friends, and when his mother had challenged him to name them, he’d loudly refused to discuss things she knew nothing about. Connie did have some old school friends, at least two or three, but when she spoke of them it was mainly to dissect their superficialities or to compare their intelligence unfavorably with Joey’s, and he could never keep their names straight. His mother had thus scored a palpable hit. And she knew better than to stab an existing wound twice, but either she was the world’s most expert implier, or Joey was the world’s most sensitive inferrer. She had merely to mention an upcoming visit from her old teammate Cathy Schmidt for Joey to hear invidious criticism of Connie. If he called her on it, she became all psychological and asked him to examine his touchiness on the subject. The one counterthrust that would really have shut her up—asking how many friends she’d made since college (answer: none)—was the one he couldn’t bear to make. She had the unfair final advantage, in all their arguments, of being pitiable to him.
Connie bore his mother no corresponding enmity. She had every right to complain, but she never did, and this made the unfairness of his mother’s enmity all the more glaring. As a little girl, Connie had voluntarily, without any prompting from Carol, given his mother handmade birthday cards. His mother had crooned over these cards every year until he and Connie started having sex. Connie had continued to make her birthday cards after that, and Joey, when he’d still been in St. Paul, had seen his mother open one, glance at its greeting with a stony expression, and set it aside like junk mail. More recently, Connie had additionally sent her little birthday presents—earrings one year, chocolates another—for which she received acknowledgments as stiltedly impersonal as an IRS communiqué. Connie did everything she could to make his mother like her again except the one thing that would have worked, which was to stop seeing Joey. She was purehearted and his mother spat on her. The unfairness of it was another reason he had married her.
The unfairness had also, in a roundabout way, made the Republican Party more attractive to him. His mother was a snob about Carol and Blake and held against Connie the mere fact that she lived with them. She took it for granted that all right-thinking people, including Joey, were of one mind about the tastes and opinions of white people from less privileged backgrounds than her own. What Joey liked about the Republicans was that they didn’t disdain people the way liberal Democrats did. They hated the liberals, yes, but only because the liberals had hated them first. They were simply sick of the kind of unexamined condescension with which his mother treated the Monaghans. Over the past two years, Joey had slowly traded places with Jonathan in their political discussions, particularly on the subject of Iraq. Joey had become convinced that an invasion was needed to safeguard America’s petropolitical interests and take out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, while Jonathan, who’d landed plum summer internships with The Hill and then with the WaPo and was hoping to be a political journalist, was ever more distrustful of the people like Feith and Wolfowitz and Perle and Chalabi who were pushing for the war. Both of them had enjoyed reversing their expected roles and becoming the political outliers of their respective families, Joey sounding more and more like Jonathan’s father, Jonathan more and more like Joey’s. The longer Joey persisted in siding with Connie and defending her against his mother’s snobbery, the more at home he felt with the party of angry anti-snobbism.
And why had he stuck with Connie? The only answer that made sense was that he loved her. He’d had his chances to free himself of her—had, indeed, deliberately created some of them—but again and again, at the crucial moment, had chosen not to use them. The first great opportunity had been his going away to college. His next chance had come a year later, when Connie followed him east to Morton College, in Morton’s Glen, Virginia. Her move did put her within an easy drive of Charlottesville in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser (which Jonathan, approving of Connie, let Joey borrow), but it also set her on course to be a normal college student and develop an independent life. After his second visit to Morton, which the two of them mostly spent dodging her Korean roommate, Joey proposed that, for her sake (since she didn’t seem to be adapting well to college), they again try to break their dependency and cease communication for a while. His proposal wasn’t entirely disingenuous; he wasn’t entirely ruling out a future for them. But he’d been doing a lot of listening to Jenna and was hoping to spend his winter break with her and Jonathan in McLean. When Connie finally got wind of these plans, a few weeks before Christmas, he asked her if she didn’t want to go home to St. Paul and see her friends and family (i.e., the way a normal college freshman might). “No,” she said, “I want to be with you.” Spurred by the prospect of Jenna, and bolstered by an especially satisfying hookup that had fallen in his lap at a recent semi-formal dance, he took a hard line with Connie, who then cried on the phone so stormily that she got the hiccups. She said she never wanted to go home again, never wanted to spend another night with Carol and the babies. But Joey made her do it anyway. And even though he barely spoke to Jenna over the holidays—first she was skiing, then she was in New York with Nick—he continued to pursue his exit strategy until the night in early February when Carol called him with the news that Connie had dropped out of Morton and was back on Barrier Street, more seriously depressed than ever.
Connie had apparently aced two of her December finals at Morton but simply failed to show up for the other two, and there was virulent antipathy between her and the roommate, who listened to the Backstreet Boys so loudly that the treble leaking from her earphones would have driven anybody crazy, and left her TV tuned to a shopping channel all day, and taunted Connie about her “stuck-up” boyfriend, and invited her to imagine all the stuck-up sluts that he was screwing behind her back, and smelled up their room with terrible pickles. Connie had returned to school in January on academic probation but proceeded to spend so much time in bed that the campus health service finally intervened and sent her home. All this Carol reported to Joey with sober worry and a welcome absence of recrimination.
That he’d passed up this latest fine chance to free himself of Connie (who could no longer pretend that her depression was just a figment of Carol’s imagination) was somewhat related to the recent bitter news of Jenna’s “sort-of” engagement to Nick, but only somewhat. Although Joey knew enough to be afraid of hard-core mental illness, it seemed to him that if he eliminated from his pool of prospects every interesting college-age girl with some history of depression, he would be left with a very small pool indeed. And Connie had reason to be depressed: her roommate was intolerable and she’d been dying of loneliness. When Carol put her on the telephone, she used the word “sorry” a hundred times. Sorry to have let Joey down, sorry not to have been stronger, sorry to distract him from his schoolwork, sorry to have wasted her tuition money, sorry to be a burden to Carol, sorry to be a burden to everyone, sorry to be such a drag to talk to. Although (or because) she was too low to ask anything of him—seemed finally halfway willing to let go of him—he told her he was flush with cash from his mother and would fly out to see her. The more she said he didn’t have to do this, the more he knew he did.
The week he’d then spent on Barrier Street had been the first truly adult week of his life. Sitting with Blake in the great-room, the dimensions of which were more modest than he remembered, he watched Fox News’s coverage of the assault on Baghdad and felt his long-standin
g resentment of 9/11 beginning to dissolve. The country was finally moving on, finally taking history in its hands again, and this was somehow of a piece with the deference and gratitude that Blake and Carol showed him. He regaled Blake with tales from the think tank, the brushes he’d had with figures in the news, the post-invasion planning he was party to. The house was small and he was big in it. He learned how to hold a baby and how to tilt a nippled bottle. Connie was pale and scarily underweight, her arms as skinny and her belly as concave as when she’d been fourteen and he’d first touched them. He lay and held her in the night and tried to excite her, labored to penetrate the thick affective rind of her distraction, enough to feel OK about having sex with her. The pills she was taking hadn’t kicked in yet, and he was almost glad of how sick she was; it gave him seriousness and a purpose. She kept repeating that she’d let him down, but he felt almost the opposite. As if a new and more grownup world of love had revealed itself: as if there were still no end of inner doors for them to open. Through one of her bedroom windows he could see the house he’d grown up in, a house now occupied by black people who Carol said were snooty and kept to themselves, with their framed PhDs on a dining-room wall. (“In the dining room,” Carol emphasized, “where everybody can see them, even from the street.”) Joey was pleased by how little the sight of his old house moved him. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted to outgrow it, and now it seemed as if he really had. He went so far, one evening, as to call his mother and own up to what was happening.
Freedom Page 46
