Freedom

by Jonathan Franzen

  “So,” she said. “OK. I’m apparently a little bit out of the loop here. You’re saying Connie was at college in the East?”

  “Yep. But she had a bad roommate and got depressed.”

  “Well, it’s nice of you to inform me, now that it’s all safely in the past.”

  “You didn’t exactly make it pleasant to tell you what’s going on with her.”

  “No, of course, I’m the villain here. Negative old me. I’m sure that’s how it looks to you.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason it looks that way. Have you considered that?”

  “I was just under the impression you were free and unencumbered. You know, college doesn’t last long, Joey. I tied myself down when I was young and missed out on a lot of experiences that probably would have been good for me. Then again, maybe I just wasn’t as mature as you are.”

  “Yep,” he said feeling steely and, indeed, mature. “Maybe.”

  “I would only point out that you did sort of lie to me, whenever that was, two months ago, when I asked you if you’d heard from Connie. Which, lying, maybe not the most mature thing.”

  “Your question wasn’t friendly.”

  “Your answer wasn’t honest! Not that you necessarily owe me honesty, but let’s at least be straight about it now.”

  “It was Christmas. I said I thought she was in St. Paul.”

  “Well, exactly. And not to belabor this, but when a person says ‘I think,’ it tends to imply that he isn’t sure. You pretended not to know something you knew very well.”

  “I said where I thought she was. But she could have been in Wisconsin or something.”

  “Right, visiting one of her many close friends.”

  “Jesus!” he said. “You truly have no one but yourself to blame for this.”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I think it’s very admirable that you’re there with her now, and I mean that seriously. It speaks well of you. I’m proud that you want to take care of somebody who matters to you. I have some acquaintance with depression myself, and, believe me, I know it’s no picnic. Is Connie taking something for it?”

  “Yeah, Celexa.”

  “Well, I hope that works out for her. My own drug didn’t work out so well for me.”

  “You were taking an antidepressant? When?”

  “Oh, fairly recently.”

  “God, I had no idea.”

  “That’s because, when I say I want you to be free and unencumbered, I really mean it. I didn’t want you worrying about me.”

  “Jesus, though, you could at least have told me.”

  “It was only for a few months anyway. I was a less than exemplary patient.”

  “You have to give those drugs some time,” he said.

  “Right, so everybody said. Especially Dad, who’s kind of on the front lines with me. He was very sorry to see those good times go. But I was glad to have my head back, such as it is.”

  “I’m really sorry.”

  “Yes, I know. If you’d told me these things about Connie three months ago, my response would have been: La-la-la! Now you have to put up with me feeling things again.”

  “I meant I was sorry you’re hurting.”

  “Thank you, sweetie. I do apologize for my feelings.”

  Ubiquitous though depression seemed lately to have become, Joey still found it a little worrisome that the two females who loved him the most were both suffering clinically. Was it just chance? Or did he have some actively baneful effect on women’s mental health? In Connie’s case, he decided, the truth was that her depression was a facet of the same intensity he’d always so much loved in her. On his last night in St. Paul, before returning to Virginia, he sat and watched her probe her skull with her fingertips, as if she were hoping to extract excess feeling from her brain. She said that the reason she’d been weeping at seemingly random moments was that even the smallest bad thoughts were excruciating, and that only bad thoughts, no good ones, were occurring to her. She thought about how she’d lost a UVA baseball cap he’d once given her; how she’d been too preoccupied with her roommate, during his second visit to Morton, to ask him what grade he’d gotten on his big American History paper; how Carol had once remarked that boys would like her better if she smiled more; how one of her baby half sisters, Sabrina, had burst into screams the first time she’d held her; how she’d stupidly admitted to Joey’s mother that she was going to New York to see him; how she’d been bleeding disgustingly on the last night before he went away to college; how she’d written such wrong things in the postcards she’d sent Jessica, in an attempt to be friends with his sister again, that Jessica had never replied to them; and on and on. She was lost in a dark forest of regret and self-disgust in which even the smallest tree assumed monstrous proportions. Joey had never been in woods like these himself but was unaccountably drawn to them in her. It even turned him on that she began to sob while he endeavored to fuck her in farewell, at least until the sobbing turned to writhing and thrashing and self-loathing. Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous, a cousin of suicide, and he was awake for half the night then, trying to talk her out of how terrible about herself she felt for feeling too terrible about herself to give him anything he wanted. It was exhausting and circular and unbearable, and yet, the following afternoon, when he was flying back East, it occurred to him to be afraid of what the Celexa would do to her when it kicked in. He considered his mother’s remark about antidepressants killing feelings: a Connie without oceans of feeling was a Connie he didn’t know and suspected he wouldn’t want.

  Meanwhile the country was at war, but it was an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side. Joey was glad to see that the taking of Iraq was every bit the cakewalk he’d expected it to be, and Kenny Bartles was sending him elated e-mails about the need to get his bread company up and running ASAP. (Joey kept having to explain that he was still a college student and couldn’t start work until after finals.) Jonathan, however, was sourer than ever. He was fixated, for example, on the Iraqi antiquities that had been stolen by looters from the National Museum.

  “That was one little mistake,” Joey said. “Shit happens, right? You just don’t want to admit that things are going well.”

  “I’ll admit it when they find the plutonium and the missiles tipped with smallpox,” Jonathan said. “Which they won’t, because it was all bullshit, all trumped-up bullshit, because the people who started this thing are incompetent clowns.”

  “Dude, everybody says there’s WMDs. Even The New Yorker says there are. My mom said my dad wants to cancel their subscription, he’s so mad about it. My dad, the great expert on foreign affairs.”

  “How much you want to bet your dad’s right?”

  “I don’t know. A hundred dollars?”

  “Done!” Jonathan said, extending his hand. “A hundred bucks says they find no weapons by the end of the year.”

  Joey shook his hand and then proceeded to worry that Jonathan was right about the WMDs. Not that he cared about a hundred dollars; he was going to be making 8K a month with Kenny Bartles. But Jonathan, a political news junkie, seemed so very sure of himself that Joey wondered if he’d somehow missed the joke in his dealings with his think-tank bosses and Kenny Bartles: had failed to notice them winking or ironically inflecting their voices when they spoke of reasons beyond their own personal or corporate enrichment for invading Iraq. In Joey’s view, the think tank did indeed have a hush-hush motive for supporting the invasion: the protection of Israel, which, unlike the United States, was within striking distance of even the crappy sort of missile that Saddam’s scientists were capable of building. But he’d believed that the neocons at least were serious in fearing for Israel’s safety. Now, already, as March turned to April, they were waving their hands and acting as if it didn’t even matter if any WMDs came to light; as if the freedom of the Iraqi people were the main issue. And Joey, whose own interest in the war was primarily financial, but wh
o’d taken moral refuge in the thought that wiser minds than his had better motives, began to feel that he’d been suckered. It didn’t make him any less eager to cash in, but it did make him feel dirtier about it.

  In his soiled mood, he found it easier to talk to Jenna about his summer plans. Jonathan, among other things, was jealous of Kenny Bartles (he got pissy whenever he heard Joey talking on the phone to Kenny), whereas Jenna had dollar signs in her eyes and was all for making killings. “Maybe I’ll see you in Washington this summer,” she said. “I’ll come down from New York and you can take me out to dinner to celebrate my engagement.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Sounds like a fun evening.”

  “I have to warn you I have very expensive taste in restaurants.”

  “How’s Nick going to feel about me taking you to dinner?”

  “Just one less bite out of his wallet. It would never occur to him to be afraid of you. But how’s your girlfriend going to feel?”

  “She’s not the jealous type.”

  “Right, jealousy’s so unattractive, ha ha.”

  “What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

  “Yes, and there’s quite a bit she doesn’t know, isn’t there? How many little slips have you had now?”

  “Five.”

  “That is four more than Nick would get away with before I surgically removed his testicles.”

  “Yeah, but if you didn’t know about it, it wouldn’t hurt you, right?”

  “Believe me,” Jenna said, “I would know about it. That’s the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.”

  This was interesting to hear, since it was Jenna who had urged him, the previous fall, to avail himself of such casual opportunities as came his way at school, and it was Jenna to whom he’d imagined he was proving something by doing so. She’d given him instruction in the art of cutting dead, in the dining hall, a girl from whose bed he’d crawled four hours earlier. “Don’t be such a tender daisy,” she’d said. “They want you to ignore them. You’re not doing them any favors if you don’t. You need to pretend you’ve never seen them in your life. The last thing in the world they want is you mooning around or acting guilty. They’re sitting there praying to Jesus that you won’t embarrass them.” She’d clearly been speaking from personal experience, but he hadn’t quite believed her until the first time he’d tried it. His life had been easier ever since. Though he did Connie the kindness of not mentioning his indiscretions, he continued to think she wouldn’t much care. (The person he actively had to hide from was Jonathan, who had Arthurian notions of romantic comportment and had torn into Joey furiously, as if he were Connie’s older brother or knightly guardian, when word of a hookup had leaked back to him. Joey had sworn to him that not even a zipper had been lowered, but this falsehood was too absurd not to smirk at, and Jonathan had called him a dick and a liar, unworthy of Connie.) Now he felt as if Jenna, with her shifting standard of fidelity, had suckered him in much the same way his bosses at the think tank had. She’d done for sport, as a meanness to Connie, what the warmongers had done for profit. But it didn’t make him any less keen to buy her a great dinner or to earn, at RISEN, the money to do it.

  Sitting alone in RISEN’s frigid one-room office in Alexandria, Joey wrote Kenny’s jumbled faxings out of Baghdad into persuasive reports on the judicious use of taxpayer dollars to remake Saddam-subsidized bakers as CPA-backed entrepreneurs. He used his case studies of the Breadmasters and Hot & Crusty chains, written the previous summer, to create a handsome business-plan template for these would-be entrepreneurs to follow. He developed a two-year plan for jacking bread prices up into the vicinity of fair market, with the basic Iraqi khubz as a loss-leader and overpriced pastries and attractively marketed coffee drinks as the moneymakers, so that, by 2005, Coalition subsidies could be phased out without sparking bread riots. Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit. He had not the foggiest notion of what a Basra storefront looked like; he suspected, for example, that plate-glass Breadmasters-style refrigerated pastry display windows might not fare well in a city of car bombings and 130-degree summer heat. But the bullshit of modern commerce was a language he’d been happy to find himself fluent in, and Kenny assured him that all that mattered was the appearance of tremendous activity and instantaneous results. “Make it look good yesterday,” Kenny said, “and then we’ll do our best here on the ground to catch up with how it looks. Jerry wants free markets overnight, and that’s what we gotta give him.” (“Jerry” was Paul Bremer, head honcho in Baghdad, whom Kenny may or may not have even met.) In Joey’s idle hours at the office, especially on weekends, he chatted with school friends who were working unpaid internships or flipping burgers in their hometowns and showered him with envy and congratulations for having landed the most awesome summer job ever. He felt as if the progress of his life, which 9/11 had knocked off course, had now fully regained its sensational upward trajectory.

  For a while, the only shadows on his satisfaction were Jenna’s postponements of her trip to Washington. A recurrent theme of their conversations was her worry that she’d sown insufficient wild oats before committing herself to Nick. (“I’m not sure that having been a slut for a year at Duke really counts,” she said.) Joey could hear in her worry the whispering of opportunity, and he was confounded when, despite the increasingly raw flirtation of their phone calls, she twice canceled plans to come down and see him, and even more confounded when he learned from Jonathan that she’d been to her parents’ in McLean without letting him know.

  Then, on the Fourth of July, during a family visit he was making only to be nice, he vouchsafed to his father the details of his work at RISEN, hoping to impress him with the size of his salary and the scope of his responsibilities; and his father all but disowned him on the spot. Until now, all his life, their relationship had essentially been a standoff, a stalemate of wills. But now his dad was no longer content to send him on his way with a lecture about his coldness and his arrogance. Now he was shouting that Joey made him sick, that it physically disgusted him to have raised a son so selfish and unthinking that he was willing to connive with monsters trashing the country for their personal enrichment. His mother, instead of defending him, ran for her life: upstairs, to her little room. He knew she would be calling him the next morning, trying to smooth things over, feeding him crap about how his dad was only angry because he loved him. But she was too cowardly to stick around, and there was nothing he could do himself but cross his arms tightly and make his face a mask and shake his head and tell his dad, over and over, not to criticize things he didn’t understand.

  “What’s not to understand?” his father said. “This is a war for politics and profit. Period!”

  “Just because you don’t like people’s politics,” Joey said, “it doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong. You’re pretending that everything they do is bad, you’re hoping they’re going to fail at everything, because you hate their politics. You don’t even want to hear about the good things that are happening.”

  “There are no good things happening.”

  “Oh, right. It’s a black-and-white world. We’re all bad and you’re all good.”

  “You think the way the world works is that Middle Eastern kids the same age as you are getting their heads and their legs blown off so you can make a ton of money? That’s the perfect world you live in?”

  “Obviously not, Dad. Would you stop being stupid for a second? People are getting killed over there because their economy is fucked up. We’re trying to fix their economy, OK?”

  “You shouldn’t be making eight thousand dollars a month,” his dad said. “I know you think you’re very smart, but there is something wrong with a world where an unskilled nineteen-year-old can do that. Your situation stinks of corruption. You smell really bad to me.”

  “Jesus, Dad. Whatever.”

  �
�I don’t even want to know what you’re doing anymore. It makes me too sick. You can tell it to your mother, but do me a favor and leave me out.”

  Joey smiled fiercely to keep himself from crying. He was experiencing a hurt that felt structural, as if he and his dad had each chosen their politics for the sole purpose of hating the other, and the only way out of it was disengagement. Not telling his dad anything, not seeing him again unless he absolutely had to, sounded good to him, too. He wasn’t even angry, he just wanted to leave the hurt behind. He taxied home to his furnished studio apartment, which his mom had helped him rent, and sent messages to both Connie and Jenna. Connie must have gone to bed early, but Jenna called him back at midnight. She wasn’t the world’s best listener, but she got enough of the gist of his rotten Fourth to assure him that the world wasn’t fair and was never going to be fair, that there would always be big winners and big losers, and that she personally, in the tragically finite life that she’d been given, preferred to be a winner and to surround herself with winners. When he then confronted her with not having called him from McLean, she said she hadn’t thought it would be “safe” to see him for dinner.

  “Why wouldn’t it have been safe?”

  “You’re kind of a bad habit of mine,” she said. “I need to keep it in check. Need to keep my eyes on the prize.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you and the prize are having much fun together.”

  “The prize is extremely busy trying to take his boss’s job. That’s what they do in that world, they try to eat each other alive. It’s surprisingly un-frowned upon. But also apparently hugely time-consuming. A girl likes to be taken out now and then, especially in her first summer after college.”

  “That’s why you need to come down here,” he said. “I’ll definitely take you out.”