Freedom [132]
“No doubt.”
“Or, no, sorry, I misspoke. I should have said that she is very serious about a boyfriend who in fact is ridiculous and a class-A jackass. I won’t insult my own intelligence by asking why you’re asking about her.”
“I was just being polite,” Joey said.
“Ha-ha. It was interesting, when she finally went away to college, I found out who my real friends were and which ones were only interested in coming over to my house as long as she was there. It turned out to be about fifty percent of them.”
“I had the same problem, but not with my sister,” Joey said, smiling at the thought of Jessica. “For me it was Foosball and air hockey and a beer keg.” He proceeded, in the freedom of being on the road, to divulge to Jonathan the circumstances of his last two years of high school. Jonathan listened attentively enough but seemed interested in only one part of the story, the part about his living with his girlfriend.
“And where is this person now?” he asked.
“In St. Paul. She’s still at home.”
“No shit,” Jonathan said, very impressed. “But wait a minute. That girl Casey saw going into our room on Yom Kippur—that wasn’t her, was it?”
“Actually, yes,” Joey said. “We broke up, but we sort of had one little backslide.”
“You fucking little liar! You told me that was just some hookup.”
“No. All I said was I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“You gave me to believe it was a hookup. I can’t believe you deliberately brought her out here when I was gone.”
“Like I said, we had one backslide. We’re broken up now.”
“For real? You don’t talk to her on the phone?”
“Just a tiny little bit. She’s really depressed.”
“I am impressed with what a sneaky little liar you turn out to be.”
“I’m not a liar,” Joey said.
“Said the liar. Do you have a picture of her on your computer?”
“No,” Joey lied.
“Joey the secret stud,” Jonathan said. “Joey the runaway. God damn. You’re making more sense to me now.”
“Right, but I’m still Jewish, so you still have to like me.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like you. I said you’re making more sense. I could care less if you’ve got a girlfriend—I’m not going to tell Jenna. I’ll just warn you right now that you’re lacking the key to her heart.”
“And what’s that?”
“A job at Goldman Sachs. That’s what her boyfriend has. His stated ambition is to be worth a hundred million at age thirty.”
“Is he going to be at your parents’?”
“No, he’s in Singapore. He just graduated last year, and they’re already flying him to fucking Singapore for some billion-dollar round-the-clock something. She’ll be pining alone at home, bro.”
Jonathan’s father was the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer, especially for America and Israel. Hardly a week had passed, in October and November, without Jonathan pointing out to Joey an opinion piece in the Times or the Journal in which his father expounded on the menace of radical Islam. They’d also watched him on the NewsHour and Fox News. He had a mouth full of exceptionally white teeth that he flashed every time he started speaking, and he looked almost old enough to be Jonathan’s grandfather. Besides Jonathan and Jenna, he had three much older children from earlier marriages, plus two former wives.
The house of his third marriage was in McLean, Virginia, on a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where Joey wanted to live as soon as he got rich. Inside the house, whose floors were of fine-grained oak, there seemed to be no end of rooms looking out on a wooded ravine in which woodpeckers swooped among the mostly bare trees. Despite having grown up in a house he’d considered book-filled and tasteful, Joey was staggered by the quantity of hardcover books and by the obviously top quality of the multicultural swag that Jonathan’s father had collected during distinguished foreign residencies. Just as Jonathan had been surprised to learn of Joey’s adventures in high school, Joey was now surprised