Freedom [197]
“Don’t be forgetting. That’s not good.”
“It’s OK, baby. Carol doesn’t notice stuff like that. She doesn’t even like to look at me. We’re unpleasing to each other’s sight.”
“We really need to be careful, though, OK?”
“I don’t know.”
“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just until I tell my parents. Then you can wear it all you want. I mean, we’ll both be wearing them all the time then. That’s what I meant.”
It was hard to compare silences, but the one she deployed now felt especially grievous, especially sad. He knew it was killing her to keep their marriage secret, and he kept hoping that the prospect of telling his parents would become less scary to him, but as the months went by the prospect only got scarier. He tried to put his wedding ring on his finger, but it stuck on the last knuckle. He’d bought it in a hurry, in August, in New York, and it was slightly too small. He put it in his mouth instead, probing its compass with his tongue as if it were an orifice of Connie’s, and this turned him on a little. Connected him with her, took him back to August and the craziness of what they’d done. He slipped the ring, drool-slick, onto his finger.
“Tell me what you’re wearing,” he said.
“Just clothes.”
“Like what, though?”
“Nothing. Clothes.”
“Connie, I swear I’ll tell them as soon as I get paid. I just have to compartmentalize a little now. This fucking contract is freaking me out, and I can’t face anything else at the moment. So just tell me what you’re wearing, OK? I want to picture you.”
“Clothes.”
“Please?”
But she’d begun to cry. He heard the faintest whimper, the microgram of misery she let herself make audible. “Joey,” she whispered. “Baby. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just at least wait till I’m back from my trip.”
“I don’t know if I can. I need some tiny thing right now. Some tiny . . . thing that’s real. Some little thing that isn’t nothing. You know I don’t want to make things hard for you. But maybe I can at least tell Carol? I just want somebody to know. I’ll make her swear not to tell anyone.”
“She’ll tell the neighbors. You know she’s a blabber.”
“No, I’ll make her swear.”
“And then somebody’s going to be late with their Christmas cards,” he said wildly, aggrieved not with Connie but with the way the world conspired against him, “and they’ll mention it to my parents. And then—And then—!”
“So what can I have if I can’t have that? What’s some little thing that I can have?”
Her instincts must have told her there was something fishy about his trip to South America. And he was definitely feeling guilty now, but not exactly about Jenna. According to his moral calculus, his having married Connie entitled him to one last grand use of his sexual license, which she’d granted him long ago and never expressly revoked. If he and Jenna happened to click in a big way, he would deal with that later. What was burdening him now was the contrast between the muchness that he possessed—a signed contract that stood to net him $600,000 if Paraguay came through for him; the prospect of a week abroad with the most beautiful girl he’d ever met—and the nullity of what, at this moment, he could think to offer Connie. Guilt had been one of the ingredients of his impulse to marry her, but he was feeling no less guilty five months later. He pulled the wedding ring off his finger and put it back nervously in his mouth, closed his incisors on it, turned it with his tongue. The hardness of eighteen-carat gold was surprising. He’d thought gold was supposed to be a soft metal.
“Tell me something good that’s going to happen,” Connie said.
“We’re going to make a ton of money,” he said, tonguing the ring back behind his molars. “And then we’ll take an amazing trip somewhere and do a second wedding and have a great time. We’ll finish school and start a business. It’s all going to be good.”
The silence with which she greeted this was disbelief-flavored. He didn’t believe his words himself. If only because he was so morbidly afraid