Freedom [131]
It was wrong, it was wrong, he knew it was wrong. He sat down at his computer to view the pictures of Jonathan’s sister and try to reestablish some order. Luckily, before he was able to get the file extensions changed back to JPG and be caught red-handed, Jonathan himself walked in.
“My man, my Jewish brother,” he said, falling to his bed like a shooting victim. “ ’Sup?”
“ ’Sup,” Joey said, hastily closing a graphical window.
“Whoa, Jesus, a little bit of chlorine in the air here? You been to the pool, or what?”
Joey almost, right then, told his roommate everything, the whole story of him and Connie right up to the present moment. But the dream world he’d been in, the nethery place of sexually merged identities, was receding quickly in the face of Jonathan’s male presence.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with a smile.
“Crack a window, for God’s sake. I mean, I like you and all, but I’m not ready to go all the way yet.”
Taking Jonathan’s complaint to heart, Joey did, after that, open the windows. He called Connie again the very next day, and again two days after that. He quietly shelved his sound arguments against too-frequent calling and fell gratefully on phone sex as a replacement for his solitary science-library masturbation, which now seemed to him a squalid aberration, embarrassing to recall. He succeeded in persuading himself that, as long as they avoided ordinary newsy chitchat and spoke only of sex, it was OK to exploit this loophole in his otherwise strict embargo on excess contact. As they continued to exploit it, however, and October became November and the days grew shorter, he realized that it was making their contact all the deeper and realer to hear Connie finally naming the things they’d done and the things she imagined them doing in the future. This deepening was somewhat strange, since all they were doing was getting each other off. But in hindsight it seemed to him as if, in St. Paul, Connie’s silence had formed a kind of protective barrier: had given their couplings what politicians called deniability. To discover, now, that sex had been fully registering in her as language—as words that she could speak out loud—made her much realer to him as a person. The two of them could no longer pretend that they were just mute youthful animals mindlessly doing their thing. Words made everything less safe, words had no limits, words made their own world. One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate. As long as her words were in his ear, urging him on, he wasn’t ashamed of anything. He returned to the wormhole three or four or even five times a week, disappeared into the world the two of them created, and later reemerged and shut the windows and went out to the dining hall or down to his dormitory lounge and effortlessly performed the shallow affability that college life required of him.
It was, as Connie had said, only sex. The permission she’d given him to pursue it elsewhere was very much on Joey’s mind as he rode with Jonathan to NoVa for Thanksgiving. They were in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser, which he’d received as a high-school graduation present and now parked off campus in open defiance of the first-year no-cars rule. It was Joey’s impression, from movies and books, that much could happen quickly when college students were let loose at Thanksgiving. All fall, he’d taken care not to ask Jonathan any questions about his sister, Jenna, figuring that he had nothing to gain by arousing Jonathan’s suspicions prematurely. But as soon as he mentioned Jenna in the Land Cruiser he saw that all his care had been for naught. Jonathan