Freedom [147]
“Do something new to me,” she said into his ear.
“That TV is really bothering me.”
“Do the thing we talked about, baby. We can both listen to the same music. I want to feel you in my ass.”
He forgot about the TV, the blood in his head drowned it out as he did what she had asked for. After the new threshold had been crossed, its resistances negotiated, its distinctive satisfactions noted, he went and washed himself in Abigail’s bathroom and fed the cats and lingered in the living room, feeling the need to establish some distance, however feebly and belatedly. He roused his computer from its sleep, but there was only one new e-mail. It was from an unfamiliar address at duke.edu and had the subject header in town? Not until he’d opened it and begun reading did he fully comprehend that it had come from Jenna. Had been typed, character by character, by Jenna’s privileged fingers.
hello mr bergland. jonathan tells me you’re in the big city, as am i. who knew how many football games there are to watch and how much money young bankers bet on them? not i, said the fly. you may still be doing christmas-y things like your blond protestant progenitors, but nick says to come over if you have questions about wall st, he’s willing to answer them. i suggest you act now while his generous mood (and vacation!) lasts. apparently even goldman shuts down this time of year, who knew. your friend, jenna.
He read the message five times before it began to lose its savor. It seemed to him as clean and fresh as he was feeling dirty and red-eyed. Jenna was being either exceptionally thoughtful or, if she was trying to rub his nose in her tightness with Nick, exceptionally mean. Either way, he could see that he’d succeeded in making an impression on her.
Pot smoke came slipping from the bedroom, followed by Connie, as nude and light-footed as the cats. Joey closed the computer and took a hit from the joint that she held up to his face, and then another hit, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another.
THE NICE MAN’S ANGER
Late on a dismal afternoon in March, in cold and greasy drizzle, Walter rode with his assistant, Lalitha, up from Charleston into the mountains of southern West Virginia. Although Lalitha was a fast and somewhat reckless driver, Walter had come to prefer the anxiety of being her passenger to the judgmental anger that consumed him when he was at the wheel—the seemingly inescapable sense that, of all the drivers on the road, only he was traveling at exactly the right speed, only he was striking an appropriate balance between too punctiliously obeying traffic rules and too dangerously flouting them. In the last two years, he’d spent a lot of angry hours on the roads of West Virginia, tailgating the idiotic slowpokes and then slowing down himself to punish the rude tailgaters, ruthlessly defending the inner lane of interstates from assholes trying to pass him on the right, passing on the right himself when some fool or cellphone yakker or sanctimonious speed-limit enforcer clogged the inner lane, obsessively profiling and psychoanalyzing the drivers who refused to use their turn signals (almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity, the compromised state of which was already manifest in the compensatory gigantism of their pickups and SUVs), experiencing murderous hatred