Freedom [145]
He hired a geek to fix his aunt’s computer and reconfigure his own, he spent sixty dollars on prepared foods at Dean & DeLuca, and when he went to Port Authority and met Connie at her gate he didn’t think he’d ever been happier to see her. In the previous month, mentally comparing her to the incomparable Jenna, he’d lost sight of how fine she was herself, in her slender, economical, ardent way. She was wearing an unfamiliar peacoat and walked right up to him and put her face against his face and her wide-open eyes against his eyes, as if pressing herself into a mirror. Some drastic all-organ melting occurred inside him. He was about to get laid about forty times, but it was more than that. It was as if the bus station and all the low-income travelers flowing around the two of them were equipped with Brightness and Color controls that were radically lowered by the mere presence of this girl he’d known forever. Everything seemed faint and far away as he led her through passages and halls that he’d seen in living color not thirty minutes earlier.
In the hours that followed, Connie made several somewhat alarming disclosures. The first came while they were riding the subway down to Charles Street and he asked her how she’d managed to get so much time off at the restaurant—whether she’d found people to cover her shifts.
“No, I just quit,” she said.
“You quit? Isn’t this sort of a bad time of year to do that to them?”
She shrugged. “You needed me here. I told you all you ever have to do is call me.”
His alarm at this disclosure restored the brightness and color of the subway car. It was like the way his brain on pot would jolt back to present awareness after being lost in a deep stoned reverie: he could see that the other subway riders were leading their lives, pursuing their goals, and that he needed to take care to do this, too. Not get sucked too far into something he couldn’t control.
Mindful of one of their crazier phone-sex episodes, in which the lips of her vagina had opened so fantastically wide that they covered his entire face, and his tongue was so long that its tip could reach her vagina’s inscrutable inner end, he had shaved very carefully before leaving for Port Authority. Now that the two of them were together in the flesh, however, these fantasies revealed their absurdity and were disagreeable to recall. In the apartment, instead of taking Connie straight to bed, as he’d done on the weekend in Virginia, he turned on the TV and checked the score of a college bowl game that meant nothing to him. It then seemed a matter of great urgency to check his e-mail and see if any of his friends had written in the last three hours. Connie sat with the cats on the sofa and waited patiently while his computer powered up.
“By the way,” she said, “your mom says to say hi.”
“What?”
“Your mom says hi. She was out chipping ice when I was leaving. She saw me with my bag and asked where I was going.”
“And you told her?”
Connie’s surprise was innocent. “Was I not supposed to? She told me to have a good time and to say hi to you.”
“Sarcastically?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it was, come to think of it. I was just happy she spoke to me at all. I know she hates me. But then I thought maybe she’s finally starting to get used to me.”
“I doubt it.”
“I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. You know I’d never say the wrong thing if I knew it was wrong. You know that, don’t you?”
Joey stood up from his computer, trying not to be angry. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Or only a little bit your fault.”
“Baby, are you ashamed of me?”
“No.”
“Are you ashamed of the stuff we said on the phone? Is that what this is?”
“No.”
“I actually am, a little bit. Some of it was pretty sick. I’m not sure I need to do that anymore.”
“You were the one who started it!”
“I know. I know, I know. But you can’t blame me for everything. You can only blame me for half of it.”
As if to acknowledge the truth of this, he ran to where she was sitting on the sofa and knelt down at her feet, bowing his head and resting