Freedom [216]
When they were alone again, in the five o’clock flow of workers on Sixth Avenue, Connie asked Joey if she’d said the wrong thing. “Did I embarrass you?”
“No,” he said. “He’s a total dork. It’s ninety-five degrees and he’s wearing a three-piece suit? He’s a total pompous dork, with that stupid watch. He’s already turning into his dad.”
“I open my mouth and strange things come out.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Are you embarrassed to be marrying me?”
“No.”
“It kind of seemed like you were. I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just don’t want to embarrass you around your friends.”
“You don’t embarrass me,” he said angrily. “It’s just that hardly any of my friends even have girlfriends. I’m just kind of in a weird position.”
He might reasonably have expected to have a little fight then, might have expected her to try to extract, via sulking or reproach, a more definitive avowal of his wish to marry her. But Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia—the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends—were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, he could never determine. The more he merged with her, the more he strangely also felt he didn’t know the first thing about her. She acknowledged only what was right in front of her. She did what she did, responded to what he said to her, and otherwise seemed wholly untroubled by things occurring outside her field of vision. He was haunted by his mother’s insistence that fights were good in a relationship. Indeed, it almost seemed to him as if he were marrying Connie to see if she would finally start fighting with him: to get to know her. But when he did marry her, the following afternoon, nothing changed at all. In the back of a cab, as they rode away from the courthouse, she wove her ringed left hand into his ringed left hand and rested her head on his shoulder with something that couldn’t quite be described as contentedness, because that would have implied that she’d been discontented before. It was more like mute submission to the deed, the crime, that had needed to be done. The next time Joey saw Casey, in Charlottesville a week later, neither of them even mentioned her.
The wedding ring was still stalled somewhere in his abdomen as he breasted through the churning warm sea of travelers at Miami International and located Jenna in the cooler, calm bay of a business-class lounge. She was wearing sunglasses and was additionally defended by an iPod and the latest Condé Nast Traveler. She gave Joey a once-over, head to toe, the way a person might confirm that a product she’d ordered had arrived in acceptable condition, and then removed her hand luggage from the seat beside her and—a little reluctantly, it seemed—pulled the iPod wires from her ears. Joey sat down smiling helplessly at the amazement of traveling with her. He’d never flown business-class before.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing, I’m just smiling.”
“Oh. I thought there was some schmutz on my face or something.”
Several men in the vicinity were checking him out resentfully. He forced himself to stare down each of them in turn, to mark Jenna as claimed. It was going to be tiring, he realized, to have to do this everywhere they went in public. Men sometimes stared at Connie, too, but usually seemed to accept, without undue regret, that she was his. With Jenna, already, he had the sense that other men’s interest was not deterred by his presence but continued to seek ways around him.
“I have to warn you I’m a little grouchy,” she said. “I’m getting my period, and I just spent three days among the ancients, looking at pictures of their grandkids. Also, I can’t believe it, but they make you pay for alcohol in this lounge now. I was like, I could have sat in the gate area and done that.”
“Do you want me to get you something?”
“Actually, yes.