Freedom [209]
“I know.”
“We love each other but we never see each other. Don’t you miss it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you had sex with other people? Is that how you can stand it?”
“Yeah, I did. A couple of times. But never more than once with anybody.”
“I was pretty sure you had, but I didn’t want to ask you. I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t going to let you. And that’s not why I did it myself. I did it because I’m lonely. I’m so lonely, Joey. I’m dying of it. And the reason I’m so lonely is I love you and you’re not here. I had sex with somebody else because I love you. I know that sounds mixed up, or dishonest, but it’s the truth.”
“I believe you,” he said. And he did. But the pain he was experiencing didn’t seem to have anything to do with what he believed or didn’t believe, what she might say now or not say. The mute fact of his sweet Connie having lain down with some middle-aged pig, of her having taken off her jeans and her little underpants and opened her legs repeatedly, had embodied itself in words only long enough for her to speak them and for Joey to hear them before returning to muteness and lodging inside him, out of reach of words, like some swallowed ball of razor blades. He could see, reasonably enough, that she might care no more about her pig of a manager than he’d cared about the girls, all of them either drunk or extremely drunk, in whose overly perfumed beds he’d landed in the previous year, but reason could no more reach the pain in him than thinking Stop! could arrest an onrushing bus. The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.
“Say something to me, baby,” Connie said.
“When did this start?”
“I don’t know. Three months ago.”
“Well, maybe you should just keep doing it,” he said. “Maybe you should go ahead and have his baby and see if he’ll set you up in your own house.”
It was ugly to reference Carol like this, but in reply Connie only asked him, with limpid sincerity, “Is that what you want me to do?”
“I don’t know what I want.”
“It’s not at all what I want. I want to be with you.”
“Yeah, right. But not before fucking somebody else for three months.”
This ought to have made her weep and beg forgiveness, or at least lash out at him in turn, but she wasn’t an ordinary person. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right. That’s absolutely fair. I could have told you the first time it happened, and then stopped. But doing it a second time didn’t seem much worse than doing it once. And then the same thing with the third time and the fourth time. And then I wanted to go off my drug, because it seemed stupid to be having sex when I could hardly feel it. And then the counter sort of had to be reset.”
“And now you’re feeling it, and it’s great.”
“It is definitely better. You’re the person I love, but at least my nerve endings are working again.”
“So why’d you even tell me now? Why not go four months? Four’s hardly any worse than three, right?”
“Four’s actually what I was planning,” she said. “I thought I could tell you when I come out next month, and we could make a plan to be together more often, so we could start being monogamous again. That’s still what I want. But I started having bad thoughts again last night, and I thought I’d better tell you.”
“Are you getting depressed? Does your doctor know you quit the drug?”
“She knows, but Carol doesn’t. Carol seems to think the drug is going to make everything OK between her and me. She thinks it’s going to solve her problem permanently. I take a pill out of the bottle every night and put it in my sock drawer. I think she might be counting them when I’m at work.”
“You should probably be taking them,” Joey said.
“I’ll go back on them if I can’t see you anymore. If I see you, though, I want to feel everything. And I don’t think I’ll need them if I keep on seeing you. I know that sounds like a threat or something, but it’s just the truth. I’m not trying to influence you about