Freedom [141]
“It’s pretty crazy,” she said. “I think that’s one reason Jonathan wanted to come here, and why he won’t leave the apartment. He thinks he’s somehow going to interfere with me and Nick. Like if he gets in the way, and hovers around, he can make it stop.”
“Why don’t they like Nick?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s Catholic. And he was varsity lacrosse. He’s superbright, but not bright in the way they approve of.” Jenna laughed. “I told him about my dad’s think tank once, and the next time his frat had a party they put a sign on the keg that said Think Tank. I thought it was pretty hilarious. But it gives you an idea.”
“Do you get drunk a lot?”
“No, I have the capacity of a flea. Nick stopped drinking, too, once he started working. He has like one Jack and Coke per week now. He’s totally focused on getting ahead. He was the first person in his family to go to a four-year college, total opposite of my family, where you’re an underachiever if you only have one PhD.”
“And he’s nice to you?”
She looked away with a shadow of something in her face. “I feel unbelievably safe with him. Like, I was thinking, if we’d been in the towers on September 11, even on a high floor, he would have found a way to get us out. He would have gotten us through, I just have that feeling.”
“There were a lot of guys like that at Cantor Fitzgerald,” Joey said. “Very tough traders. And they didn’t get out.”
“Well then they weren’t like Nick,” she said.
Seeing her close her mind like this, Joey wondered how hard he would have to make himself, and how much money he would have to earn, to even enter the running for the likes of her. His dick, in his boxers, bestirred itself again, as if to declare its upness for the challenge. But the softer parts of him, his heart and his brain, were awash in hopelessness at the enormity of it.
“I think I might go down to Wall Street and check it out today,” he said.
“Everything’s closed on Saturday.”
“I just want to see what it looks like, since I might end up working there.”
“No offense?” Jenna said, reopening her book. “You seem way too nice for that.”
Four weeks later, Joey was back in Manhattan, housesitting for his aunt Abigail. All fall, he’d been stressing about where to stay during his Christmas vacation, since his two competing homes in St. Paul disqualified each other, and since three weeks was far too long to impose on the family of a new college friend. He’d vaguely planned on staying with one of his better high-school friends, which would have positioned him to pay separate visits to his parents and the Monaghans, but it turned out that Abigail was going to Avignon for the holidays to attend an international miming workshop and was worrying, herself, when she met him on Thanksgiving weekend, about who would stay in her Charles Street apartment and see to the complex dietary requirements of her cats, Tigger and Piglet.
The meeting with his aunt had been interesting, if one-sided. Abigail, though younger than his mother, looked considerably older in all respects except her clothes, which were tarty-teenage. She smelled like cigarettes, and she had a heartrending way of eating her slice of chocolate-mousse cake, parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day. Such few questions as she