Freedom [119]
Joey was aware of needing his wits about him to reply to this rather alarming declaration, but he was unfortunately still somewhat stoned.
“Here’s the thing I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to get a college education. Like, for example,” he unwisely added, “if you were going to work for me, you’d need to know a lot of different stuff.”
“That’s why I said I’d go to school for you,” Connie said. “Weren’t you listening?”
He was beginning to see, as he hadn’t in St. Paul, that things’ prices weren’t always evident at first glance: that the really big ballooning of the interest charges on his high-school pleasures might still lie ahead of him.
“We’d better get in line,” he said. “If you want a good seat.”
“OK.”
“Also,” he said, “I think we should go at least a week without calling. We need to get back to being more disciplined.”
“OK,” she said, and walked obediently toward the bus. Joey followed with her overnight bag. He at least didn’t have to worry about her making any scenes. She’d never been a compromiser of him, never an insister on sidewalk hand-holding, never a clinger, a pouter, a reproacher. She saved up all her ardor for when they were alone, she was a specialist like that. When the bus doors opened, she stabbed him with one burning look and then handed her bag to the driver and boarded. There was no bullshit about waving through the window or making kissy faces. She put earphones in her ears and slouched down out of sight.
There was no bullshit in the weeks that followed, either. Connie obediently refrained from calling him, and as the national fever began to break and autumn deepened on the Blue Ridge, lingering with hay-colored sunshine and rich smells of warm lawn and turning leaf, Joey attended blowout Cavalier football losses and worked out at the gym and gained numerous pounds of beer weight. He gravitated socially to hall mates from prosperous families who believed in carpet bombing the Islamic world until it learned to behave itself. He wasn’t right-wing himself but was comfortable with those who were. Reaming Afghanistan wasn’t exactly what his sense of dislocation demanded, but it was close enough to afford some satisfaction.
Only when enough beer had been consumed to bring a group conversation around to sex did he feel isolated. His thing with Connie was too intense and strange—too sincere; too muddled with love—to be fungible as coin of bragging. He disdained but also envied his hall mates for their communal bravado, their porny avowals of what they wanted to do to the choicest babes in the facebook or had supposedly done, in isolated instances, while wasted, and seemingly without regret or consequence, to various wasted girls at their academies and prep schools. His hall mates’ yearnings still largely centered on the blow job, which Joey apparently was totally alone in considering little more than a glorified jerkoff, an amusement for the parking lot at lunch hour.
Masturbation itself was a demeaning dissipation whose utility he was nevertheless learning to value as he sought to wean himself from Connie. His preferred venue for release was the Handicapped bathroom in the science library at whose Reserve desk he collected $7.65 an hour for reading textbooks and the Wall Street Journal and occasionally fetching texts for science nerds. Landing a work-study job at the Reserve desk had seemed to him yet another confirmation that he was destined to be fortunate in life. He was astonished that the library still possessed printed matter of such rarity and widespread interest that it had to be guarded in separate stacks and not allowed to leave the building. There was no way it wouldn’t all be digitized within the next few years. Many of the reserved texts were written in formerly popular foreign languages and illustrated with sumptuous color plates; the nineteenth-century Germans had been especially industrious cataloguers of human knowledge. It could even dignify masturbation, a little