Freedom [210]
“Are you sorry about it?”
“I know I should say yes, but I don’t actually know. Are you sorry you slept with other people?”
“No. Especially not now.”
“Same with me, baby. I’m exactly like you. I just hope you can remember that, and let me see you again.”
Connie’s confession was his last, best chance to escape with his conscience clear. He could so easily have fired her for cause, if only he’d felt angry enough to do it. After he got off the phone, he hit the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he was normally disciplined enough to keep away from, and then he went out walking the humid streets of his bleak non-neighborhood, relishing the blunt-force summer heat and the collective roar of the air conditioners compounding it. In a pocket of his khakis was a handful of coins that he took out and began to fling, a few at a time, into the street. He threw them all away, the pennies of his innocence, the dimes and quarters of his self-sufficiency. He needed to rid himself, to rid himself. He had nobody to tell about his pain, least of all his parents but also not Jonathan, for fear of damaging his friend’s good opinion of Connie, and certainly not Jenna, who didn’t understand love, and not his school friends, either—they all, to a man, saw girlfriends as a senseless impediment to the pleasures they intended to spend the next ten years pursuing. He was totally alone and didn’t understand how it had happened to him. How there had come to be an ache named Connie at the center of his life. He was being driven crazy by so minutely feeling what she felt, by understanding her too well, by not being able to imagine her life without him. Every time he had a chance to get away from her, the logic of self-interest failed him: was supplanted, like a gear that his mind kept popping out of, by the logic of the two of them.
A week went by without her calling him, and then another week. He became sensible, for the first time, of her greater age. She was twenty-one now, a legal adult, a woman interesting and attractive to married men. In the grip of jealousy, he was suddenly seeing himself as the lucky one of the two of them, the mere boy on whom she’d bestowed her ardor. She assumed fantastically alluring form in his imagination. He’d sometimes dimly sensed that their connection was extraordinary, enchanted, fairy-tale-like, but only now did he appreciate how much he counted on her. For the first few days of their silence, he managed to believe that he was punishing her by not calling her, but before long he came to feel like the punished one, the person waiting to see whether she, in her ocean of feeling, might find a drop of mercy and break the silence for him.
In the meantime, his mother informed him that she would be sending him no more monthly $500 checks. “I’m afraid Dad’s put an end to that,” she said with a breeziness that annoyed him. “I hope it was at least useful while it lasted.” Joey felt a certain relief at no longer having to indulge her wish to support him and no longer owing her regular phone calls in return; he was also glad to stop lying to the Commonwealth of Virginia about his level of parental support. But he’d come to rely on the monthly infusions to make ends meet, and he was now sorry about having taken so many cabs and ordered in so many meals that summer. He couldn’t help hating his father and feeling betrayed by his mother, who, when push came to shove, despite the many complaints about her marriage that she inflicted on Joey, seemed always to end up deferring to his father.
Then his aunt Abigail called to offer him the use of her apartment in late August. For the last year and a half, he’d been on Abigail’s e-mail list for the performances she gave at bizarrely named small venues in New York, and she’d called him every few months to deliver one of her self-justifying monologues. If he clicked the Ignore button on his phone, she didn’t leave a message but simply kept calling until he clicked Answer. He had the impression that her days consisted largely