Freedom [204]
“Your answer wasn’t honest! Not that you necessarily owe me honesty, but let’s at least be straight about it now.”
“It was Christmas. I said I thought she was in St. Paul.”
“Well, exactly. And not to belabor this, but when a person says ‘I think,’ it tends to imply that he isn’t sure. You pretended not to know something you knew very well.”
“I said where I thought she was. But she could have been in Wisconsin or something.”
“Right, visiting one of her many close friends.”
“Jesus!” he said. “You truly have no one but yourself to blame for this.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I think it’s very admirable that you’re there with her now, and I mean that seriously. It speaks well of you. I’m proud that you want to take care of somebody who matters to you. I have some acquaintance with depression myself, and, believe me, I know it’s no picnic. Is Connie taking something for it?”
“Yeah, Celexa.”
“Well, I hope that works out for her. My own drug didn’t work out so well for me.”
“You were taking an antidepressant? When?”
“Oh, fairly recently.”
“God, I had no idea.”
“That’s because, when I say I want you to be free and unencumbered, I really mean it. I didn’t want you worrying about me.”
“Jesus, though, you could at least have told me.”
“It was only for a few months anyway. I was a less than exemplary patient.”
“You have to give those drugs some time,” he said.
“Right, so everybody said. Especially Dad, who’s kind of on the front lines with me. He was very sorry to see those good times go. But I was glad to have my head back, such as it is.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Yes, I know. If you’d told me these things about Connie three months ago, my response would have been: La-la-la! Now you have to put up with me feeling things again.”
“I meant I was sorry you’re hurting.”
“Thank you, sweetie. I do apologize for my feelings.”
Ubiquitous though depression seemed lately to have become, Joey still found it a little worrisome that the two females who loved him the most were both suffering clinically. Was it just chance? Or did he have some actively baneful effect on women’s mental health? In Connie’s case, he decided, the truth was that her depression was a facet of the same intensity he’d always so much loved in her. On his last night in St. Paul, before returning to Virginia, he sat and watched her probe her skull with her fingertips, as if she were hoping to extract excess feeling from her brain. She said that the reason she’d been weeping at seemingly random moments was that even the smallest bad thoughts were excruciating, and that only bad thoughts, no good ones, were occurring to her. She thought about how she’d lost a UVA baseball cap he’d once given her; how she’d been too preoccupied with her roommate, during his second visit to Morton, to ask him what grade he’d gotten on his big American History paper; how Carol had once remarked that boys would like her better if she smiled more; how one of her baby half sisters, Sabrina, had burst into screams the first time she’d held her; how she’d stupidly admitted to Joey’s mother that she was going to New York to see him; how she’d been bleeding disgustingly on the last night before he went away to college; how she’d written such wrong things in the postcards she’d sent Jessica, in an attempt to be friends with his sister again, that Jessica had never replied to them; and on and on. She was lost in a dark forest of regret and self-disgust in which even the smallest tree assumed monstrous proportions. Joey had never been in woods like these himself but was unaccountably drawn to them in her. It even turned him on that she began to sob while he endeavored to fuck her in farewell, at least until the sobbing turned to writhing and thrashing and self-loathing. Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous, a cousin of suicide, and he was awake for half the night then, trying to talk her out of how terrible about herself she felt for feeling too terrible about herself to give him anything he wanted. It was exhausting and circular and unbearable, and yet, the following