Freedom [139]
“Well, so, anyway, I thought maybe we could meet up or something,” Joey said. He was already having second thoughts about this, but his aunt now became responsive, as if her monologue had been a thing she’d just needed to flush from herself.
“You know,” she said, “I’ve seen pictures of you and your sister. Verrrrrry handsome pictures, in your verrrrrry beautiful house. I think I might even recognize you on the street.”
“Uh huh.”
“My apartment is unfortunately not so beautiful at the moment. A little fragrant also! But if you’d like to meet me at my favorite café, and be served by the gayest waiter in the Village, who is my personal best male bud, I’d be verrrrry happy to. I can tell you all the things your mother doesn’t want you to know about us.”
This sounded good to Joey, and they made a date.
For the trip to New York, Jenna brought along a high-school friend, Bethany, whose looks were ordinary only by comparison. The two of them sat in back, where Joey could neither see Jenna nor, between the endless stereo whining of Slim Shady and Jonathan’s chanting of his lyrics, make out what she and Bethany were talking about. The only interactions between back and front were Jenna’s criticisms of her brother’s driving. As if his hostility toward Joey the night before had been transmuted into road rage, Jonathan was tailgating at eighty and muttering abuse at less aggressive drivers; he seemed in general to be reveling in being an asshole. “Thank you for not killing us,” Jenna said when the SUV had come to rest in a staggeringly expensive midtown parking garage and the music had blessedly ceased.
The trip soon proved to have all the makings of a bust. Jenna’s boyfriend, Nick, shared a rambling, decaying apartment on 54th Street with two other Wall Street trainees who were also gone for the weekend. Joey wanted to see the city, and he wanted even more not to seem to Jenna like some little Eminem-listening juvie, but the living room was equipped with a huge plasma TV and late-model Xbox that Jonathan insisted he immediately join him in enjoying. “See you later, kids,” Jenna said as she and Bethany went out to meet up with other friends. Three hours later, when Joey suggested taking a walk before it got too late, Jonathan told him not to be such a faggot.
“What is wrong with you?” Joey said.
“No, I’m sorry, what is wrong with you? You should have tagged along with Jenna if you wanted to do girl stuff.”
Doing girl stuff in fact sounded rather appealing to Joey. He liked girls, he missed their company and the way they talked about things; he missed Connie. “You were the one who said you wanted to go shopping.”
“What’s the matter, are my pants not tight enough in the butt for you?”
“It also might be nice to get some dinner?”
“Right, somewhere romantic, just the two of us.”
“New York pizza? Isn’t it supposed to be the world’s best pizza?”
“No, that’s New Haven.”
“OK, a deli then. New York deli. I’m starving.”
“So go look in the fridge.”
“You go look in the fucking fridge. I’m getting out of here.”
“Yeah, fine. Do that.”
“Will you be here when I get back? So I can get in?”
“Yes, honey.”
With a lump in his throat, a girly nearness to tears, Joey went out into the night. Jonathan’s loss of cool was extremely disappointing to him. He was suddenly sensible of his own superior maturity, and as he drifted through the late shopping crowds on Fifth Avenue he considered how he might convey this maturity to Jenna. He bought two Polish sausages from a street vendor and pushed into even thicker crowds at Rockefeller Center and watched the ice skaters and admired the enormous unlit Christmas tree, the stirring floodlit heights of the NBC tower. So he liked doing girl stuff, so what? It didn’t make him a wuss. It just made him very lonely. Watching the skaters,