Freedom [134]
“No, this is great,” Jonathan said. “We can all go to New York in the Land Cruiser and go shopping. You can help me find some pants that meet your standards.”
“Reasons that’s a nonstarter?” Jenna said. “Number one, you don’t even have any place to stay.”
“Why can’t we crash with you at Nick’s? Isn’t he, like, in Singapore?”
“Nick’s not going to want a bunch of freshman guys running around his apartment. Plus he might be back by Saturday night.”
“Two is not a bunch. This would just be me and my incredibly tidy Minnesotan roommate.”
“I am very tidy,” Joey assured her.
“No doubt,” she said with zero interest, from her pinnacle. Joey’s presence nevertheless seemed to complicate her resistance—she couldn’t be quite as dismissive to a stranger as she could to her own brother. “I really don’t care,” she said. “I’ll ask Nick. But if he says no, you can’t come.”
As soon as she went back upstairs, Jonathan presented Joey with a palm to high-five. “New York, New York,” he said. “I bet we can crash with Casey’s family if Nick ends up being as big a dick as he usually is. They’re on the Upper East Side somewhere.”
Joey was just stunned by Jenna’s beauty. He wandered into the area where she’d stood, which smelled faintly of patchouli. That he might get to spend an entire weekend in her vicinity, through the sheer happenstance of being Jonathan’s roommate, felt like some kind of miracle.
“You, too, I see,” Jonathan said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the story of my young life.”
Joey felt himself reddening. “What I don’t get is how you turned out to be so ugly.”
“Ha, you know what they say about older parents. My dad was fifty-one when I was born. There was a crucial two years of genetic deterioration. Not every boy gets to be pretty like you.”
“I didn’t realize you had these feelings.”
“What feelings? I only look for prettiness in girls, where it belongs.”
“Fuck you, rich kid.”
“Pretty boy, pretty boy.”
“Fuck you. Let me kick your ass at air hockey.”
“Just as long as kicking it is all you want to do.”
Tamara’s threat notwithstanding, there was blessedly little religious instruction, or invasive parental interaction of any kind, during Joey’s stay in McLean. He and Jonathan installed themselves in the basement home theater, which had reclining seats and an eight-foot projection screen, and stayed up until 4 a.m. watching bad TV and casting aspersions on each other’s heterosexuality. By the time they roused themselves on Thanksgiving, crowds of relatives were arriving at the house. Since Jonathan was obliged to speak to them, Joey found himself floating through the beautiful rooms like a helium molecule, devoting himself to arranging sight lines that Jenna might pass through or, better yet, alight in. The upcoming excursion to New York, which her boyfriend had surprisingly signed off on, was like money in the bank: he would have, at a minimum, two long car trips to make an impression on her. For now, he wanted only to accustom his eyes to her, to make looking less impossible. She was wearing a demure, high-necked dress, a friendly dress, and either was very adept at applying makeup or simply didn’t wear much. He took note of her good manners, manifested in her patience with bald-pated uncles and face-lifted aunts who seemed to have a lot to say to her.
Before dinner was served, he slipped away to his bedroom to call St. Paul. Calling Connie was out of the question in his current state; shame about their filthy conversations, curiously absent throughout the fall, was creeping up on him now. His parents were a different matter, however, if only because of the checks of his mother’s that he’d been cashing.
His dad answered the phone in St. Paul and spoke to him for no more than two minutes before handing him off to his mother, which Joey took as a kind of betrayal. He actually had a fair amount of respect for his dad—for the consistency of his disapproval; for the strictness of his principles—and he might have had even more if his dad hadn’t been so deferential to his mother. Joey could