Freedom [200]
Returning to his apartment, well after midnight, he packed for his trip and then lay in bed and monitored the progress of his digestion. He’d been digesting things every minute of his life without paying the slightest attention to it. How odd it was to think that his stomach lining and his mysterious small intestine were as much a part of him as his brain or tongue or penis. As he lay and strained to feel the subtle ticks and sighs and repositionings in his abdomen, he had a premonition of his body as a long-lost relative waiting at the end of a long road ahead of him. A shady relative whom he was glimpsing for the first time only now. At some point, hopefully still far in the future, he would have to rely on his body, and at some point after that, hopefully still farther in the future, his body was going to let him down, and he would die. He imagined his soul, his familiar personal self, as a stainless gold ring slowly making its way down through ever-stranger and fouler-smelling country, toward shit-smelling death. He was alone with his body; and since, weirdly, he was his body, this meant he was entirely alone.
He missed Jonathan. In a funny way, his impending trip was a worse betrayal of Jonathan than of Connie. The hiccups of their first Thanksgiving notwithstanding, they’d become best friends in the last two years, and it was only in recent months, beginning with Joey’s business deal with Kenny Bartles and culminating in Jonathan’s discovery of his travel plans with Jenna, that their friendship had soured. Until then, time after time, Joey had been pleasantly surprised by the evidence of how genuinely fond of him Jonathan was. Fond of all of him, not just of the parts of himself that he saw fit to present to the world as a reasonably cool UVA student. The biggest and most pleasant surprise had been how much Jonathan dug Connie. Indeed, it was fair to say that, without Jonathan’s validation of their coupledom, Joey would not have gone so far as to marry her.
Aside from his preferred porn sites, which themselves were touchingly tame in comparison to the ones to which Joey turned in moments of need, Jonathan had no sex life. He was a bit of a wonk, yes, but far wonkier dudes than he were coupling up. He was just terminally awkward with girls, awkward to the point of not being interested, and Connie, when he finally met her, turned out to be the one girl he could relax and be himself around. No doubt it helped that she was so deeply and exclusively into Joey, thus relieving Jonathan of the stress of trying to impress her or of worrying that she wanted something from him. Connie behaved like an older sister with him, a much nicer and more interested older sister than Jenna. While Joey was studying or working at the library, she played Jonathan’s video games with him for hours, laughing congenially at her losses and listening, in her limpid way, to his explications of their features. Though Jonathan ordinarily made a fetish of his bed and his special childhood pillow and his nightly need for nine hours of sleep, he discreetly vacated the dorm room before Joey even had to ask him for some privacy. After Connie returned to St. Paul, Jonathan told him he thought his girlfriend was amazing, totally hot but also easy to be with, and this made Joey, for the first time, proud of her. He stopped thinking of her so much as a weakness of his, a problem to be solved at his earliest convenience, and more as a girlfriend whose existence he didn’t mind owning up to with his other friends. Which, in turn, made him all the angrier about his mother’s veiled but implacable hostility.
“One question, Joey,” his mother had said on the telephone, during the weeks when he and Connie were housesitting for his aunt Abigail. “Am I allowed one question?”
“Depends on what it is,” Joey said.
“Are you and Connie having any fights?”
“Mom, no, I’m not going to talk about this.”
“You may be curious why that’s the one question I’m asking. Maybe you