Freedom [127]
What he’d been dismayed by tonight on the telephone was how completely unstupid she had sounded. This, indeed, was the substance of her reproach. She didn’t seem to be very good at living her life, but it wasn’t because she was stupid. Almost the opposite somehow. She had a comical-tragical sense of herself and seemed, moreover, genuinely apologetic for the way she was. And yet it all added up to a reproach of him. As if she were speaking some sophisticated but dying aboriginal language which it was up to the younger generation (i.e., Joey) to either perpetuate or be responsible for the death of. Or as if she were one of his dad’s endangered birds, singing its obsolete song in the woods in the forlorn hope of some passing kindred spirit hearing it. There was her, and then there was the rest of the world, and by the very way she chose to speak to him she was reproaching him for placing his allegiance with the rest of the world. And who could fault him for preferring the world? He had his own life to try to live! The problem was that when he was younger, in his weakness, he’d let her see that he did understand her language and did recognize her song, and now she couldn’t seem to help reminding him that those capacities were still inside him, should he ever feel like exercising them again.
Whoever was showering in the dormitory bathroom had stopped and was toweling off. The hall door opened and closed, opened and closed; a minty smell of tooth-brushing wafted over from the sinks and into Joey’s stall. His crying had given him a boner that he now removed from his boxers and khakis and held on to for dear life. If he squeezed the base of it really hard, he could make the head of it huge and hideous and almost black with venous blood. He so much liked looking at it, so much enjoyed the feeling of protection and independence its repulsive beauty gave him, that he was reluctant to finish himself off and lose hold of that hardness. To walk around hard every minute of the day, of course, would be to be what people called a prick. Which was what Blake was. Joey didn’t want to be like Blake, but he wanted even less to be his mother’s Designated Understander. With silently spastic fingers, staring at his hardness, he came into the yawning toilet and immediately flushed it.
Upstairs, in his corner room, he found Jonathan reading John Stuart Mill and watching the ninth inning of a World Series game. “Very confounding situation here,” Jonathan said. “I’m experiencing actual pangs of sympathy for the Yankees.”
Joey, who never watched baseball by himself but was amenable to watching it with others, sat down on his bed while Randy Johnson dealt fastballs to a defeat-eyed Yankee. The score was 4–0. “They could still come back,” he said.
“Not going to happen,” Jonathan said. “And I’m sorry, but since when do expansion teams get to play in the Series after four seasons? I’m still trying to accept that Arizona even has a team.”
“I’m glad you’re seeing the light of reason finally.”
“Don’t get me wrong. There’s still nothing sweeter than a Yankee loss, preferably by one run, preferably on a passed ball by Jorge Posada, the chinless wonder. But this is the one year you kind of want them to win anyway. It’s a patriotic sacrifice we all have to make for New York.”
“I want them to win every year,” Joey said, although he didn’t have strong feelings about it.
“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you supposed to like the Twins?”
“It’s probably mostly because my parents hate the Yankees. My dad loves the Twins because they’ve got a tiny payroll, and naturally the Yankees are the enemy when it comes to payrolls. And my mom’s just an anti–New York maniac in general.”
Jonathan gave him an interested look. To date, Joey had disclosed very little about his parents, only enough to avoid seeming annoyingly mysterious