Freedom [212]
“Oh my God, baby,” she said. “I was starting to think I’d never hear from you again.”
“It’s been a hard couple of weeks.”
“My God, I know, I know. I was starting to think I should never have told you anything. Can you forgive me?”
“Probably.”
“Oh! Oh! That’s so much better than probably not.”
“Very probably,” he said. “If you still want to come out and see me.”
“You know I do. More than anything in the world.”
She didn’t sound at all like the independent older woman he’d been imagining, and a flutter in his stomach warned him to slow down and be sure he really wanted her back. Warned him not to mistake the pain of losing her for an active desire to have her. But he was eager to change the subject, avoid miring himself in abstract emotional territory, and ask her opinion of Kenny’s offer.
“God, Joey,” she said after he’d explained it to her, “you have to do it. I’ll help you do it.”
“How?”
“I’ll give you the money,” she said as if it were silly of him to even ask. “I’ve still got more than fifty thousand dollars in my trust account.”
The mere naming of this figure sexually excited him. It took him back to their earliest days as a couple on Barrier Street, in his first fall of high school. U2’s Achtung Baby, beloved to both of them but especially to Connie, had been the soundtrack of their mutual deflowering. The opening track, in which Bono avowed that he was ready for everything, ready for the push, had been their love song to each other and to capitalism. The song had made Joey feel ready to have sex, ready to step out of childhood, ready to make some real money selling watches at Connie’s Catholic school. He and she had begun as partners in the fullest sense, he the entrepreneur and manufacturer, she his loyal mule and surprisingly gifted saleswoman. Until their operation was shut down by resentful nuns, she’d proved herself a master of the soft sell, her cool remoteness serving to madden her classmates for her and Joey’s product. Everybody on Barrier Street, including his mother, had always mistaken Connie’s quietness for dullness, for slowness. Only Joey, who had insider access, had seen the potential in her, and this now seemed like the story of their life together: his helping and encouraging her to confound the expectations of everyone, especially his mother, who underestimated the value of her hidden assets. It was central to his faith in his future as a businessman, this ability to identify value, espy opportunity, where others didn’t, and it was central to his love of Connie, too. She moved in mysterious ways! The two of them had started fucking amid the piles of twenty-dollar bills she brought home from her school.
“You need the trust-fund money to go back to college,” he said nevertheless.
“I can do that later,” she said. “You need it now, and I can give it to you. You can give it back to me later.”
“I could give it back to you doubled. You’d have enough to cover all four years then.”
“If you want to,” she said. “You don’t have to.”
They made a date to reunite for his twentieth birthday in New York City, the scene of their happiest weeks as a couple since he’d left St. Paul. The next morning, he called Kenny and declared himself ready to do business. The big new round of Iraq contracts wouldn’t be let until November, Kenny said, and so Joey should enjoy his fall semester and just be sure to be ready with his financing.
Feeling flush in advance, he splurged on an Acela express train to New York and bought a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne on his way to Abigail’s apartment. Her place was more cluttered than ever, and he was happy to shut the door behind him and cab out to LaGuardia to meet Connie’s plane, which he’d insisted she take instead of a bus. The whole city, its pedestrians half naked in the August heat, its bricks and bridges paled by