Freedom [203]
The week he’d then spent on Barrier Street had been the first truly adult week of his life. Sitting with Blake in the great-room, the dimensions of which were more modest than he remembered, he watched Fox News’s coverage of the assault on Baghdad and felt his long-standing resentment of 9/11 beginning to dissolve. The country was finally moving on, finally taking history in its hands again, and this was somehow of a piece with the deference and gratitude that Blake and Carol showed him. He regaled Blake with tales from the think tank, the brushes he’d had with figures in the news, the post-invasion planning he was party to. The house was small and he was big in it. He learned how to hold a baby and how to tilt a nippled bottle. Connie was pale and scarily underweight, her arms as skinny and her belly as concave as when she’d been fourteen and he’d first touched them. He lay and held her in the night and tried to excite her, labored to penetrate the thick affective rind of her distraction, enough to feel OK about having sex with her. The pills she was taking hadn’t kicked in yet, and he was almost glad of how sick she was; it gave him seriousness and a purpose. She kept repeating that she’d let him down, but he felt almost the opposite. As if a new and more grownup world of love had revealed itself: as if there were still no end of inner doors for them to open. Through one of her bedroom windows he could see the house he’d grown up in, a house now occupied by black people who Carol said were snooty and kept to themselves, with their framed PhDs on a dining-room wall. (“In the dining room,” Carol emphasized, “where everybody can see them, even from the street.”) Joey was pleased by how little the sight of his old house moved him. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted to outgrow it, and now it seemed as if he really had. He went so far, one evening, as to call his mother and own up to what was happening.
“So,” she said. “OK. I’m apparently a little bit out of the loop here. You’re saying Connie was at college in the East?”
“Yep. But she had a bad roommate and got depressed.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to inform me, now that it’s all safely in the past.”
“You didn’t exactly make it pleasant to tell you what’s going on with her.”
“No, of course, I’m the villain here. Negative old me. I’m sure that’s how it looks to you.”
“Maybe there’s a reason it looks that way. Have you considered that?”
“I was just under the impression you were free and unencumbered. You know, college doesn’t last long, Joey. I tied myself down when I was young and missed out on a lot of experiences that probably would have been good for me. Then again, maybe I just wasn’t as mature as you are.”
“Yep,” he said feeling steely and, indeed, mature. “Maybe.”
“I would only point out that you did sort of lie to me, whenever that was, two months ago, when I asked you if you’d heard from Connie. Which, lying, maybe not the most mature thing.”
“Your question wasn’t