"Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

WOMANLAND

Growing up in St. Paul, Joey Berglund had received numberless assurances that his life was destined to be a lucky one. The way star halfbacks talk about a great open-field run, the sense of cutting and weaving at full speed through a defense that moved in slow motion, the entire field of play as all-visible and instantaneously graspable as a video game at Rookie level, was the way every facet of his life had felt for his first eighteen years. The world had given unto him, and he was fine with taking. He arrived as a first-year student in Charlottesville with the ideal clothes and haircut and found that the school had paired him with a perfect roommate from NoVa (as the locals called the Virginia suburbs of D.C.). For two and a half weeks, college looked like it would be an extension of the world as he had always known it, only better. He was so convinced of this-took it so much for granted-that on the morning of September 11 he actually left his roommate, Jonathan, to monitor the burning World Trade Center and Pentagon while he hurried off to his Econ 201 lecture. Not until he reached the big auditorium and found it all but empty did he understand that a really serious glitch had occurred.

Try as he might, in the weeks and months that followed, he could not recall what he’d been thinking as he’d crossed the semi-deserted campus. It was highly uncharacteristic of him to be so clueless, and the deep chagrin he’d then experienced, on the steps of the Chemistry Building, became the seed of his intensely personal resentment of the terrorist attacks. Later, as his troubles began to mount, it would seem to him as if his very good luck, which his childhood had taught him to consider his birthright, had been trumped by a stroke of higher-order bad luck so wrong as not even to be real. He kept waiting for its wrongness, its fraudulence, to be exposed, and for the world to be set right again, so that he could have the college experience he’d expected. When this failed to happen, he was gripped by an anger whose specific object refused to come into focus. The culprit, in hindsight, seemed almost like bin Laden, but not quite. The culprit was something deeper, something not political, something structurally malicious, like the bump in a sidewalk that trips you and lands you on your face when you’re out innocently walking.

In the days after 9/11, everything suddenly seemed extremely stupid to Joey. It was stupid that a “Vigil of Concern” was held for no conceivable practical reason, it was stupid that people kept watching the same disaster footage over and over, it was stupid that the Chi Phi boys hung a banner of “support” from their house, it was stupid that the football game against Penn State was canceled, it was stupid that so many kids left Grounds to be with their families (and it was stupid that everybody at Virginia said “Grounds” instead of “campus”). The four liberal kids on Joey’s hall had endless stupid arguments with the twenty conservative kids, as if anybody cared what a bunch of eighteen-year-olds thought about the Middle East. A stupidly big fuss was made about the students who’d lost relatives or family friends in the attacks, as if the other kinds of horrible death that were constantly occurring in the world mattered less, and there was stupid applause when a vanful of upperclassmen solemnly departed for New York to give succor to the Ground Zero workers, as if there weren’t enough people in New York to do the job. Joey just wanted normal life to return as fast as possible. He felt as if he’d bumped his old Discman against a wall and knocked its laser out of a track he’d been enjoying and into a track he didn’t recognize or like and also couldn’t make stop playing. Before long, he was so lonely and isolated and hungry for familiar things that he made the rather serious mistake of giving Connie Monaghan permission to take a Greyhound bus to visit him in Charlottesville, thereby undoing a summer’s worth of spadework to prepare her for their inevitable breakup.

All summer, he’d labored to impress on Connie the importance of not getting together for at least nine months, so as to test their feelings for each other. The idea was to develop independent selves and see if these independent selves were still a good match, but to Joey this was no more a “test” than a high-school chemistry “experiment” was research. Connie would end up staying in Minnesota while he pursued a business career and met girls who were more exotic and advanced and connected. Or so he’d imagined before 9/11.

He was careful to schedule Connie’s visit while Jonathan was at home in NoVa for a Jewish holiday. She spent the entire weekend camped out on Joey’s bed with her overnight bag beside her on the floor, zipping her things back inside it as soon as she was done with them, as if trying to minimize her footprint. While Joey endeavored to read Plato for a Monday-morning class, she pored over the faces in his first-year facebook and laughed at the ones with odd expressions or unfortunate names. Bailey Bodsworth, Crampton Ott, Taylor Tuttle. By Joey’s reliable count, they had sex eight times in forty hours, stoning themselves repeatedly on the hydroponic bud she’d brought along. When it came time to take her back to the bus station, he loaded a bunch of new songs onto her MP3 player for the punishing twenty-hour return trip to Minnesota. The sorry truth was that he felt responsible for her, knew he needed to break up with her anyway, and couldn’t think how.

At the bus station, he raised the subject of her education, which she’d promised to pursue but somehow, in her obdurate way, without explanation, hadn’t.

“You need to start taking classes in January,” he told her. “Start at Inver Hills and then maybe transfer to the U. next year.”

“OK,” she said.

“You’re really smart,” he said. “You can’t just keep being a waitress.”

“OK.” She looked away desolately at the line forming by her bus. “I’ll do it for you.”

“Not for me. For you. Like you promised.”

She shook her head. “You just want me to forget about you.”

“Not true, not true at all,” Joey said, although it was fairly true.

“I’ll go to school,” she said. “But it’s not going to make me forget about you. Nothing’s going to make me forget about you.”

“Right,” he said, “but we still need to find out who we are. We both need to do some growing.”

“I already know who I am.”

“Maybe you’re wrong, though. Maybe you still need to-”

“No,” she said. “I’m not wrong. I only want to be with you. That’s all I want in my life. You’re the best person in the world. You can do anything you want, and I can be there for you. You’ll own lots of companies, and I can work for you. Or you can run for president, and I’ll work for your campaign. I’ll do the things that nobody else will do. If you need somebody to break the law, I’ll do that for you. If you want children, I’ll raise them for you.”

Joey was aware of needing his wits about him to reply to this rather alarming declaration, but he was unfortunately still somewhat stoned.

“Here’s the thing I want you to do,” he said. “I want you to get a college education. Like, for example,” he unwisely added, “if you were going to work for me, you’d need to know a lot of different stuff.”

“That’s why I said I’d go to school for you,” Connie said. “Weren’t you listening?”

He was beginning to see, as he hadn’t in St. Paul, that things’ prices weren’t always evident at first glance: that the really big ballooning of the interest charges on his high-school pleasures might still lie ahead of him.

“We’d better get in line,” he said. “If you want a good seat.”

“OK.”

“Also,” he said, “I think we should go at least a week without calling. We need to get back to being more disciplined.”

“OK,” she said, and walked obediently toward the bus. Joey followed with her overnight bag. He at least didn’t have to worry about her making any scenes. She’d never been a compromiser of him, never an insister on sidewalk hand-holding, never a clinger, a pouter, a reproacher. She saved up all her ardor for when they were alone, she was a specialist like that. When the bus doors opened, she stabbed him with one burning look and then handed her bag to the driver and boarded. There was no bullshit about waving through the window or making kissy faces. She put earphones in her ears and slouched down out of sight.

There was no bullshit in the weeks that followed, either. Connie obediently refrained from calling him, and as the national fever began to break and autumn deepened on the Blue Ridge, lingering with hay-colored sunshine and rich smells of warm lawn and turning leaf, Joey attended blowout Cavalier football losses and worked out at the gym and gained numerous pounds of beer weight. He gravitated socially to hall mates from prosperous families who believed in carpet bombing the Islamic world until it learned to behave itself. He wasn’t right-wing himself but was comfortable with those who were. Reaming Afghanistan wasn’t exactly what his sense of dislocation demanded, but it was close enough to afford some satisfaction.

Only when enough beer had been consumed to bring a group conversation around to sex did he feel isolated. His thing with Connie was too intense and strange-too sincere; too muddled with love-to be fungible as coin of bragging. He disdained but also envied his hall mates for their communal bravado, their porny avowals of what they wanted to do to the choicest babes in the facebook or had supposedly done, in isolated instances, while wasted, and seemingly without regret or consequence, to various wasted girls at their academies and prep schools. His hall mates’ yearnings still largely centered on the blow job, which Joey apparently was totally alone in considering little more than a glorified jerkoff, an amusement for the parking lot at lunch hour.

Masturbation itself was a demeaning dissipation whose utility he was nevertheless learning to value as he sought to wean himself from Connie. His preferred venue for release was the Handicapped bathroom in the science library at whose Reserve desk he collected $7.65 an hour for reading textbooks and the Wall Street Journal and occasionally fetching texts for science nerds. Landing a work-study job at the Reserve desk had seemed to him yet another confirmation that he was destined to be fortunate in life. He was astonished that the library still possessed printed matter of such rarity and widespread interest that it had to be guarded in separate stacks and not allowed to leave the building. There was no way it wouldn’t all be digitized within the next few years. Many of the reserved texts were written in formerly popular foreign languages and illustrated with sumptuous color plates; the nineteenth-century Germans had been especially industrious cataloguers of human knowledge. It could even dignify masturbation, a little bit, to use a century-old German sexualanatomy atlas as an auxiliary to it. He knew that sooner or later he would need to break his silence with Connie, but at the end of each evening, after employing the paddle-handled Handicapped faucets to wash his gametes and prostatic fluids down the drain, he decided to risk waiting one more day, until finally, late one evening, at the Reserve desk, on the very day he’d realized that he’d probably waited one day too long, he got a call from Connie’s mother.

“Carol,” he said amiably. “Hello.”

“Hello, Joey. You probably know why I’m calling.”

“No, actually, I don’t.”

“Well, you’ve just about broken our little friend’s heart, is why.”

Stomach lurching, he retreated to the privacy of the stacks. “I was going to call her tonight,” he told Carol.

“Tonight. Really. You were going to call her tonight.”

“Yes.”

“Why do I not believe you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, she’s gone to bed, so it’s good you didn’t call. She went to bed without eating. She went to bed at seven.”

“Good thing I didn’t call, then.”

“This isn’t funny, Joey. She’s very depressed. You’ve given her a depression and you need to stop messing around. Do you understand? My daughter isn’t some dog that you can tie to a parking meter and then forget about.”

“Maybe you should get her an antidepressant.”

“She’s not your pet that you can leave in the back seat with the windows rolled up,” Carol said, warming to her metaphor. “We’re part of your life, Joey. I think we deserve a little more than the nothing you’ve been giving us. This has been a very frightening fall for all concerned, and you have been absent.”

“You know, I do have classes to attend, and so forth.”

“Too busy for a five-minute phone call. After three and a half weeks of silence.”

“I really was going to call her tonight.”

“Never mind Connie even,” Carol said. “Leave Connie out of it for a minute. You and I lived together like a family for almost two years. I never thought I’d hear myself saying this, but I’m starting to get an idea of what you put your mom through. Seriously. I never understood how cold you are until this fall.”

Joey directed a smile of pure oppression at the ceiling. There had always been something not quite right about his interactions with Carol. She was what the prep-school boys on his hall and the fraternity brothers who were rushing him were wont to call a MILF (an acronym that, in Joey’s opinion, sounded faintly cretinous for its omission of the T for “to”). Although he was generally a very sound sleeper, there had occasionally been nights, during the period of his residency at the Monaghans, when he’d awakened in Connie’s bed with strange anxious premonitions of himself: as the unwitting and horrified trespasser of his sister’s bed, for example, or as the accidental shooter of a nail into Blake’s forehead with Blake’s nail gun, or, strangest of all, as the towering crane at a major Great Lakes dockyard, his horizontal member swinging heavy containers off the deck of a mother ship and gently depositing them on a smaller, flatter barge. These visions tended to follow moments of inappropriate connection with Carol-the glimpse of her bare butt through the nearly closed door of her and Blake’s bedroom; the complicit wink she gave Joey pursuant to a dinner-table belch from Blake; the lengthy and explicit rationale she presented to him (illustrated with vivid stories from her own careless youth) for putting Connie on the Pill. Since Connie was constitutionally incapable of being displeased with Joey, it had fallen to her mother to register her discontents. Carol was Connie’s garrulous organ, her straight-talking advocate, and Joey had sometimes had the sense, on weekend nights when Blake was out with buddies, of being the sandwiched party in a virtual threesome, Carol’s mouth running and running with all the things that Connie wouldn’t say, Connie then silently doing with Joey all the things that Carol couldn’t do, and Joey jolting awake in the wee hours with a sense of entrapment in something not quite right. Mom I’d Like Fuck.

“So what am I supposed to do?” he said.

“Well, for starters, I want you to be a more responsible boyfriend.”

“I’m not her boyfriend. We’re on hiatus.”

“What is hiatus? What does that mean?”

“It means we’re experimenting with being apart.”

“That’s not what Connie tells me. Connie tells me you want her to go to school so she can learn administrative skills and be your assistant in your endeavors.”

“Look,” Joey said. “Carol. I was stoned when I said that. I mistakenly said the wrong thing while stoned on the incredibly strong pot that Connie buys.”

“You think I don’t know she smokes pot? You think Blake and I don’t have noses? You’re not telling me anything I don’t know. All you do is make yourself look like a bad boyfriend when you try to snitch on her.”

“My point is that I said the wrong thing. And I haven’t had a chance to correct myself, because we agreed not to talk for a while.”

“And whose responsibility is that? You know you’re like a god to her. Literally like a god, Joey. You tell her to hold her breath, she’ll hold her breath until she faints. You tell her to sit in a corner, she’ll sit in a corner until she keels over with starvation.”

“Well, and whose fault is that?” Joey said.

“It’s yours.”

“No, Carol. It’s yours. You’re the parent. You’re the one whose house she’s living in. I just came along.”

“Yeah, and now you’re going your own way, without taking responsibility. After being all but married to her. After being part of our family.”

“Whoa. Whoa. Carol. I’m a freshman in college. Do you understand that? I mean, the weirdness of even having this conversation?”

“I understand that when I was one year older than you are now, I had a baby girl and was having to make my own way in the world.”

“And how’s that working out for you?”

“Not too bad, as a matter of fact. I wasn’t going to tell you this, because it’s still early on, but since you ask, Blake and I are going to have a little baby. Our little family’s about to get a little bigger.”

It took Joey a moment to compute that she was telling him that she was pregnant.

“Listen,” he said, “I’m still at work. I mean, congratulations and all. I’m just busy at this particular moment.”

“Busy. Right.”

“I promise I’ll call her tomorrow afternoon.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Carol said, “that won’t do it. You need to come out right away and spend some time with her.”

“That’s not an option.”

“Then come for a week at Thanksgiving. We’ll have a nice family Thanksgiving, all four of us. It’ll give her something to look forward to, and you can see for yourself how depressed she is.”

Joey had been planning to spend the holiday in Washington with his roommate, Jonathan, whose older sister, a junior at Duke, either photographed misleadingly well or was somebody not to miss meeting in person. The sister’s name was Jenna, which in Joey’s mind connected her to the Bush twins and all the partying and loose morals that the Bush name connoted.

“I don’t have money for a flight,” he said.

“You can take a bus, just like Connie. Or is the bus not good enough for Joey Berglund?”

“I also have other plans.”

“Well, you better change your plans,” Carol said. “Your girlfriend of the last four years is seriously depressed. She cries for hours, she doesn’t eat. I’ve had to talk to her boss at Frost’s to keep her from getting fired, because she can’t remember orders, she gets confused, she never smiles. She may be getting high at work, I wouldn’t be surprised. Then she comes home and goes straight to bed and stays there. When she has her afternoon shifts, I have to drive all the way home on my lunch break to make sure she’s up and gets dressed for work, because she won’t answer the phone. Then I have to drive her to Frost’s and make sure she goes inside. I tried to send Blake to do it for me, but she won’t talk to him anymore or do anything he says. Sometimes I think she’s trying to wreck my relationship with him, just to be spiteful, because you’re gone. When I tell her to see the doctor, she says she doesn’t need a doctor. When I ask her what she’s trying to prove, and what her plan is for her life, she says her plan is to be with you. That’s her only plan. So whatever your own little Thanksgiving plan is, you better change it.”

“I said I would call her tomorrow.”

“Do you honestly think you can use my daughter as a sex buddy for four years and then just walk away when it suits you? Is that really what you think? She was a child when you started having relations with her.”

Joey thought of the momentous day in his old tree fort when Connie had rubbed the crotch of her cutoff shorts and then taken his somewhat smaller hand and shown him where to touch her: how little persuading he’d required. “I was a child, too, of course,” he said.

“Hon, you were never a child,” Carol said. “You were always so cool and self-possessed. Don’t think I didn’t know you when you were a little baby. You never even cried! I never saw anything like it in my whole life. You wouldn’t even cry when you stubbed your toe. Your face would wrinkle up but you wouldn’t make a peep.”

“No, I cried. I definitely remember crying.”

“You used her, you used me, you used Blake. And now you think you can just turn your back on us and walk away? You think that’s how the world works? You think we’re all just here for your personal pleasure?”

“I’ll try to get her to see a doctor for a prescription. But, Carol, you know, this is a really strange conversation we’re having. Not a good kind of conversation.”

“Well, you better get used to it, because we’re going to be having it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day after that, until I hear you’re coming for Thanksgiving.”

“I’m not coming for Thanksgiving.”

“Well, then, you better get used to hearing from me.”

After the library closed, he went out into the chilly night and sat on a bench outside his dorm, caressing his phone and trying to think of somebody to call. In St. Paul he’d made it clear to all his friends that his thing with Connie was off-limits conversationally, and in Virginia he’d kept it a secret. Almost everybody in his dorm communicated with their parents daily, if not hourly, and although this did make him feel unexpectedly grateful to his own parents, who had been far cooler and more respectful of his wishes than he’d been able to appreciate as long as he lived next door to them, it also touched off something like a panic. He’d asked for his freedom, they’d granted it, and he couldn’t go back now. There had been a brief spate of familial phoning after 9/11, but the talk had mostly been impersonal, his mom amusingly ranting about how she couldn’t stop watching CNN even though she was convinced that watching so much CNN was harming her, his dad taking the opportunity to vent his long-standing hostility to organized religion, and Jessica flaunting her knowledge of non-Western cultures and explaining the legitimacy of their beef with U.S. imperialism. Jessica was at the very bottom of the list of people whom Joey would call in distress. Maybe, if she were his last living acquaintance and he’d been arrested in North Korea and were willing to endure a stern lecture: maybe then.

As if to reassure himself that Carol had been wrong about him, he wept a little in the darkness, on his bench. Wept for Connie in her misery, wept for having abandoned her to Carol-for not being the person who could save her. Then he dried his eyes and called his own mother, whose telephone Carol could probably have heard ringing if she’d stood by a window and listened closely.

“Joseph Berglund,” his mother said. “I seem to remember that name from somewhere.”

“Hi, Mom.”

Immediately a silence.

“Sorry I haven’t called in a while,” he said.

“Oh, well,” she said, “there’s really nothing much happening around here except anthrax scares, a very unrealistic realtor trying to sell our house, and your dad flying back and forth to Washington. You know they make everybody flying into Washington stay in their seat for an hour before they land there? It seems like kind of a weird regulation. I mean, what are they thinking? The terrorists are going to cancel their evil plan because the seat-belt sign is on? Dad says they’re barely even airborne when the stewardesses start warning everybody to use the bathroom right away, before it’s too late. And then they start handing out whole cans of drinks.”

She sounded like a nattering older lady, not the vital force he still imagined when he allowed himself to think of her. He had to squeeze his eyes shut to avert renewed weeping. Everything he’d done with regard to her in the last three years had been calculated to foreclose the intensely personal sort of talks they’d had when he was younger: to get her to shut up, to train her to contain herself, to make her stop pestering him with her overfull heart and her uncensored self. And now that the training was complete and she was obediently trivial with him, he felt bereft of her and wanted to undo it.

“Am I allowed to ask if all is well with you?” she said.

“Everything is well with me.”

“Life’s good in the former slave states?”

“Very good. The weather’s been beautiful.”

“Right, that’s the advantage of growing up in Minnesota. Everywhere you go now, the weather will be nicer.”

“Yep.”

“Are you making lots of new friends? Meeting lots of people?”

“Yep.”

“Well, good good good. Good good good. It’s nice of you to call, Joey. I mean, I know you don’t have to, so it’s nice that you did. You have some real fans here back at home.”

A herd of male first-years burst out of the dorm and onto the lawn, their voices amplified by beer. “Jo-eeee, Jo-eeee,” they lowed affectionately. He nodded to them in cool acknowledgment.

“Sounds like you’ve got some fans there, too,” his mother said.

“Yep.”

“My popular boy.”

“Yep.”

Another silence fell as the herd headed off to fresh watering holes. Joey felt a pang of disadvantage, watching them go. He was already nearly a month ahead of his budgeted fall-semester spending. He didn’t want to be the poor kid who drank only one beer while everybody else was having six, but he didn’t want to look like a freeloader, either. He wanted to be dominant and generous; and this required funds.

“How’s Dad liking his new job?” he made an effort to ask his mother.

“I think he’s liking it OK. It’s sort of driving him insane. You know: suddenly having lots of somebody else’s money to spend on fixing all the things he thinks are wrong with the world. He used to be able to complain that nobody was fixing them. Now he actually has to try to fix them himself, which is impossible, of course, since we’re all going to hell in a hand-basket. He sends me e-mails at three in the morning. I don’t think he’s sleeping much.”

“And what about you? How are you?”

“Oh, well, it’s nice of you to ask, but you don’t really want to know.”

“Sure I do.”

“No, trust me, you don’t. And don’t worry, I’m not saying that in a mean way. It’s not a reproach. You’ve got your life and I’ve got mine. It’s all good good good.”

“No, but, like, what do you do all day?”

“Actually, FYI,” his mother said, “that can be a somewhat awkward question to ask a person. It’s sort of like asking a childless couple why they don’t have any children, or an unmarried person why they aren’t married. You have to be careful with certain kinds of questions that may seem perfectly innocuous to you.”

“Hm.”

“I’m sort of in limbo right now,” she said. “It’s hard to make any big changes in my life when I know I’m going to be moving. I did start a little creative-writing project, for my private amusement. I also have to keep the house looking like a bed-and-breakfast in case a realtor stops by with a potential mark. I spend a lot of time making sure the magazines are nicely fanned.”

Joey’s feeling of bereavement was giving way to irritation, because, no matter how much she denied that she was doing it, she couldn’t seem to help reproaching him. These moms and their reproaches, there was no end to it. He called her for a little support, and the next thing he knew, he was falling short of providing support to her.

“So how are you on money?” she said, as if sensing his irritation. “Do you have enough money?”

“It’s a little tight,” he admitted.

“I bet!”

“Once I’m a resident here, tuition will go way down. It’s just this first year that’s really hard.”

“Do you want me to send you some money?”

He smiled in the darkness. He liked her, in spite of everything; he couldn’t help it. “I thought Dad said there wasn’t going to be any money.”

“Dad doesn’t necessarily have to know every little thing.”

“Well, and the school won’t consider me a state resident if I’m taking anything from you.”

“The school doesn’t have to know everything, either. I could send you a check made out to Cash, if that would help you.”

“Yeah, and then what?”

“Then nothing. I promise. No strings attached. I’m saying you’ve already made your point with Dad. There’s no need to take on horrible debt at high interest, just to keep proving a point you already made.”

“Let me think about it.”

“Why don’t I put a check in the mail to you. Then you can decide on your own if you want to cash it or not. You won’t have to discuss it with me.”

He smiled again. “Why are you doing this?”

“Well, you know, Joey, believe it or not, I want you to have the life you want to have. I’ve had some free time for asking myself questions while I’ve been fanning magazines on the coffee table, and whatnot. Like, if you were to tell me and Dad you never wanted to see us again, for the rest of your life, would I still want you to be happy?”

“That is a bizarre hypothetical question. It has no bearing on reality.”

“That’s nice to hear, but it’s not my point. My point is that we all think we know the answer to the question. Parents are programmed to want the best for their kids, regardless of what they get in return. That’s what love is supposed to be like, right? But in fact, if you think about it, that’s kind of a strange belief. Given what we know about the way people really are. Selfish and shortsighted and egotistical and needy. Why should being a parent, just in and of itself, somehow confer superior-personhood on everybody who tries it? Obviously it doesn’t. I’ve told you a little bit about my own parents, for example-”

“Not very much,” Joey said.

“Well, maybe sometime I’ll tell you more, if you ask me nicely. But my point is that I’ve given some real thought to this question of love, regarding you. And I’ve decided-”

“Mom, do you mind if we talk about something else?”

“I’ve decided-”

“Or, actually, maybe some other day? Next week or something? I’ve got a lot of stuff to do here before I go to bed.”

A silence of injury descended in St. Paul.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just really late, and I’m tired and I still have stuff to do.”

“I was simply explaining,” his mother said in a much lower voice, “why I’m going to send a check.”

“Right, thank you. That’s nice of you. I guess.”

In an even smaller and more injured voice, his mother thanked him for calling and hung up.

Joey looked around the lawn for some bushes or an architectural cranny where he might cry unobserved by passing posses. Seeing none, he ran inside his dorm and, blindly, as if needing to barf, veered into the first john he came to, on a hall not his own, and locked himself into a stall and sobbed with hatred of his mother. Somebody was showering in a cloud of deodorant soap and mildew. A big smiling-faced erection, soaring like Superman, spurting droplets, was Sharpied on the stall’s rust-pocked door. Beneath it somebody had written SCORE NOW OR TAKE A CHIT.

The nature of his mother’s reproach wasn’t simple the way Carol Monaghan’s was. Carol, unlike her daughter, was not too bright. Connie had a wry, compact intelligence, a firm little clitoris of discernment and sensitivity to which she gave Joey access only behind closed doors. When she and Carol and Blake and Joey used to have dinner together, Connie would eat with her eyes lowered and seem lost in her own strange thoughts, but afterward, alone with Joey in their bedroom, she could reproduce every last deplorable detail of Carol and Blake’s dinner-table behavior. She once asked Joey if he’d noticed that the point of almost every utterance of Blake’s was how stupid other people were and how superior and put-upon he, Blake, was. According to Blake, the morning’s KSTP weather forecast had been stupid, the Paulsens had put their recycling barrel in a stupid place, the seat-belt beeper in his truck was stupid not to shut off after sixty seconds, the commuters driving the speed limit on Summit Avenue were stupid, the stoplight at Summit and Lexington was stupidly timed, his boss at work was stupid, the city building code was stupid. Joey began to laugh while Connie continued, with implacable recall, to list examples: the new TV remote was stupidly designed, the NBC prime-time schedule had been stupidly rearranged, the National League was stupid for not adopting the designated-hitter rule, the Vikings were stupid for letting Brad Johnson and Jeff George get away, the moderator of the second presidential debate had been stupid not to press Al Gore on what a liar he was, Minnesota was stupid to make its hardworking citizens pay for free top-of-the-line medical care for Mexican illegals and welfare cheats, free top-of-the-line medical care-

“And you know what?” Connie said finally.

“What?” Joey said.

“You never do that. You really are smarter than other people, so you never have to call them stupid.”

Joey accepted her compliment uncomfortably. For one thing, he was getting a strong whiff of competition from the direct comparison of him and Blake-an unsettling sense of being a pawn or a prize in some complicated mother-daughter struggle. And although it was true that he’d checked a lot of judgments at the door when he’d moved in with the Monaghans, he had formerly declared all manner of things to be stupid, in particular his mother, who had come to seem to him a font of endless, nerve-grating asininity. Now Connie seemed to be suggesting that what made people complain about stupidity was their own stupidity.

In truth, the only thing his mother had been guilty of being stupid about was Joey himself. Granted, it had also seemed very dumb of her to be, for example, so disrespectful of Tupac, whose best stuff Joey considered unarguably genius-level work, or so hostile toward Married with Children, whose own stupidity was so calculated and extreme that it was flat-out brilliant. But she would never have attacked Married with Children if Joey hadn’t been so devoted to watching it in reruns, she would never have stooped to doing her embarrassingly off-base caricatures of Tupac if Joey hadn’t admired him so much. The actual root cause of her stupidity was her wish for Joey to keep on being her little boy-pal: to continue being more entertained and fascinated by his mother than by great TV or a bona-fide genius rap star. This was the sick heart of her dumbness: she was competing.

Eventually he’d become desperate enough to drive it into her head that he didn’t want to be her little boy-pal anymore. This hadn’t even been his conscious plan, it was more like a by-product of his long-running irritation with his moralistic sister, whom he could think of no finer way to enrage and horrify than to invite a bunch of his friends over to his house and get drunk on Jim Beam while his parents were with his ailing grandmother in Grand Rapids, and then, the following night, to screw Connie extra-specially noisily against the wall that his bedroom shared with Jessica’s, thereby inciting Jessica to crank up her intolerable Belle and Sebastian to club-level volumes and later, after midnight, to pound on his locked bedroom door with her virtuously white knuckles-

“God damn it, Joey! You stop this right now! Right now, do you hear me?”

“Hey, whoa, I’m doing you a favor here.”

“What?”

“Aren’t you sick of not telling on me? I’m doing you a favor! I’m giving you your chance!”

“I’m telling on you now. I’m going to call Dad right now.”

“Go ahead! Didn’t you just hear me? I said I was doing you a favor.”

“You fucker. You smug little fucker. I’m calling Dad right now-” while Connie, stark naked, bloody-red of lip and nipple, sat holding her breath and looking at Joey with a mixture of fear and amazement and excitement and allegiance and delight which convinced him, like nothing before and few things since, that no rule or propriety or moral law mattered to her one-thousandth as much as being his chosen girl and partner in crime.

He hadn’t expected his grandmother to die that week-she wasn’t that old. By hurling shit into the fan one day before she passed, he’d put himself extremely in the wrong. Just how wrong was evidenced by the fact that he was never even yelled at. Up in Hibbing, at the funeral, his parents simply froze him out. He was left to stew separately in his guilt while the rest of his family joined together in a grief that he ought to have been experiencing with them. Dorothy had been the only grandparent in his life, and she’d impressed him, when he was still very young, by inviting him to handle her crippled hand and see that it was still a person’s hand and nothing to be scared of. After that, he’d never objected to the kindnesses his parents had asked him to do for her when she was visiting. She was a person, maybe the only person, to whom he’d been one-hundred-percent good. And now suddenly she was dead.

Her funeral was followed by some weeks of respite from his mother, some weeks of welcome chilliness, but by and by she came after him again. She exploited the pretext of his frankness about Connie to become inappropriately frank with him in turn. She tried to make him her Designated Understander, and this turned out to be even worse than being her little boy-pal. It was devious and irresistible. It started with a confidence: she sat down on his bed one afternoon and launched into telling him how she’d been stalked in college by a drug-addicted pathological liar whom she’d nonetheless loved and his dad had disapproved of. “I had to tell somebody,” she said, “and I didn’t want to tell Dad. I was down getting my new driver’s license yesterday, and I realized that she was in line ahead of me. I haven’t seen her since the night I wrecked my knee. That’s like twenty years? She’s gained a lot of weight, but it was definitely her. And I got so frightened, seeing her. I realized I felt guilty.”

“Why frightened?” he found himself saying, like Tony Soprano’s shrink. “Why guilty?”

“I don’t know. I ran out of there before she could turn around and see me. I still have to go back down for my license. But I was terrified that she was going to turn around and see me. I was terrified of what was going to happen. Because, you know, I am so not a lesbian. You have to believe that I would know it if I were-half my old friends are gay. And I definitely am not.”

“Good to hear,” he said with a nervous smirk.

“But I realized, yesterday, seeing her, that I’d been in love with her. And I was never able to deal with that. And now she has that kind of lithium heaviness-”

“What’s lithium.”

“For manic depression. Bipolar disease.”

“Ah.”

“And I totally abandoned her, because Dad hated her so much. She was suffering, and I never called her again, and I threw her letters away without opening them.”

“But she lied to you. She was scary.”

“I know, I know. But I still feel guilty.”

She told him many other secrets in the months that followed. Secrets that proved to be like candy laced with arsenic. For a while, he actually considered himself lucky to have a mom who was so cool and forthcoming. He responded by disclosing various perversions and petty crimes of his classmates, trying to impress her with how much more jaded and debauched his peers were than young people in the seventies. And then one day, during a conversation about date rape, it had seemed natural enough for her to tell him how she herself had been date-raped as a teenager, and how he mustn’t ever breathe a word of it to Jessica, because Jessica didn’t understand her the way he did-nobody understood her the way he did. He’d lain awake in the nights following that conversation, feeling murderously angry at his mother’s rapist, and outraged by the world’s injustice, and guilty for every negative thing he’d ever said or felt about her, and privileged and important to be granted access to the world of grownup secrets. And then one morning he’d woken up hating her so violently that it made his skin crawl and his stomach turn to be in the same room with her. It was like a chemical transformation. As if there were arsenic leaching from his organs and his bone marrow.

What he’d been dismayed by tonight on the telephone was how completely unstupid she had sounded. This, indeed, was the substance of her reproach. She didn’t seem to be very good at living her life, but it wasn’t because she was stupid. Almost the opposite somehow. She had a comical-tragical sense of herself and seemed, moreover, genuinely apologetic for the way she was. And yet it all added up to a reproach of him. As if she were speaking some sophisticated but dying aboriginal language which it was up to the younger generation (i.e., Joey) to either perpetuate or be responsible for the death of. Or as if she were one of his dad’s endangered birds, singing its obsolete song in the woods in the forlorn hope of some passing kindred spirit hearing it. There was her, and then there was the rest of the world, and by the very way she chose to speak to him she was reproaching him for placing his allegiance with the rest of the world. And who could fault him for preferring the world? He had his own life to try to live! The problem was that when he was younger, in his weakness, he’d let her see that he did understand her language and did recognize her song, and now she couldn’t seem to help reminding him that those capacities were still inside him, should he ever feel like exercising them again.

Whoever was showering in the dormitory bathroom had stopped and was toweling off. The hall door opened and closed, opened and closed; a minty smell of tooth-brushing wafted over from the sinks and into Joey’s stall. His crying had given him a boner that he now removed from his boxers and khakis and held on to for dear life. If he squeezed the base of it really hard, he could make the head of it huge and hideous and almost black with venous blood. He so much liked looking at it, so much enjoyed the feeling of protection and independence its repulsive beauty gave him, that he was reluctant to finish himself off and lose hold of that hardness. To walk around hard every minute of the day, of course, would be to be what people called a prick. Which was what Blake was. Joey didn’t want to be like Blake, but he wanted even less to be his mother’s Designated Understander. With silently spastic fingers, staring at his hardness, he came into the yawning toilet and immediately flushed it.

Upstairs, in his corner room, he found Jonathan reading John Stuart Mill and watching the ninth inning of a World Series game. “Very confounding situation here,” Jonathan said. “I’m experiencing actual pangs of sympathy for the Yankees.”

Joey, who never watched baseball by himself but was amenable to watching it with others, sat down on his bed while Randy Johnson dealt fastballs to a defeat-eyed Yankee. The score was 4-0. “They could still come back,” he said.

“Not going to happen,” Jonathan said. “And I’m sorry, but since when do expansion teams get to play in the Series after four seasons? I’m still trying to accept that Arizona even has a team.”

“I’m glad you’re seeing the light of reason finally.”

“Don’t get me wrong. There’s still nothing sweeter than a Yankee loss, preferably by one run, preferably on a passed ball by Jorge Posada, the chinless wonder. But this is the one year you kind of want them to win anyway. It’s a patriotic sacrifice we all have to make for New York.”

“I want them to win every year,” Joey said, although he didn’t have strong feelings about it.

“Yeah, what’s up with that? Aren’t you supposed to like the Twins?”

“It’s probably mostly because my parents hate the Yankees. My dad loves the Twins because they’ve got a tiny payroll, and naturally the Yankees are the enemy when it comes to payrolls. And my mom’s just an anti-New York maniac in general.”

Jonathan gave him an interested look. To date, Joey had disclosed very little about his parents, only enough to avoid seeming annoyingly mysterious about them. “Why does she hate New York?”

“I don’t know. I guess because it’s where she came from.”

On Jonathan’s TV, Derek Jeter lined out to second base, and the game was over.

“Very complex mix of emotions here,” Jonathan said, turning it off.

“You know, I don’t even know my grandparents?” Joey said. “My mom’s really weird about them. My entire childhood, they came to see us once, for like forty-eight hours. The whole time, my mom was unbelievably neurotic and fake. We went to see them one other time, when we were in New York on vacation, and that was bad, too. I’d get these birthday cards three weeks late from them, and my mom would be, like, cursing them for being so late, even though it wasn’t really their fault. I mean, how are they supposed to remember the birthday of somebody they never get to see?”

Jonathan was frowning thoughtfully. “Where in New York?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in the suburbs. My grandmother’s a politician, in the state legislature or something. She’s this nice, elegant Jewish lady who my mom apparently can’t stand to be in the same room with.”

“Whoa, say that again?” Jonathan sat up straight on his bed. “Your mom is Jewish?”

“I guess in some theoretical way.”

“Dude, you’re a Jew! I had no idea!”

“Only, like, one-quarter,” Joey said. “It’s really watered down.”

“You could immigrate to Israel right now, no questions asked.”

“My lifelong dream fulfilled.”

“I’m just saying. You could be packing a Desert Eagle, or piloting one of those fighter jets, and dating a total sabra.”

To illustrate his point, Jonathan opened his laptop and navigated to a site devoted to pictures of bronzed Israeli goddesses with high-caliber bandoliers crisscrossing their naked D-cup chests.

“Not my kind of thing,” Joey said.

“I’m not that into it, either,” Jonathan said, with perhaps less than complete honesty. “I’m just saying, if it were your kind of thing.”

“Also, isn’t there a problem with illegal settlements and Palestinians not having any rights?”

“Yes, there’s a problem! The problem is being a tiny island of democracy and pro-Western government surrounded by Muslim fanatics and hostile dictators.”

“Yeah, but that just means it was a stupid place to put the island,” Joey said. “If the Jews hadn’t gone to the Middle East, and if we didn’t have to keep supporting them, maybe the Arab countries wouldn’t be so hostile to us.”

“Dude. Are you familiar with the Holocaust?”

“I know. But why didn’t they go to New York instead? We would have let them in. They could have had their synagogues here, and so forth, and we could have had some kind of normal relationship with the Arabs.”

“But the Holocaust happened in Europe, which was supposed to be civilized. When you lose half your world population to genocide, you stop trusting anybody to protect you except yourself.”

Joey was uncomfortably aware that he was displaying attitudes more his parents’ than his own, and that he was therefore about to lose an argument he didn’t even care about winning. “Fine,” he persisted nonetheless, “but why does that have to be our problem?”

“Because it’s our business to support democracy and free markets wherever they are,” Jonathan said. “That’s the problem in Saudi Arabia-too many angry people with no economic prospects. That’s how come bin Laden can recruit there. I totally agree with you about the Palestinians. That’s just a giant fucking breeding ground for terrorists. That’s why we have to try to bring freedom to all the Arab countries. But you don’t start doing that by selling out the one working democracy in the entire region.”

Joey admired Jonathan not only for his coolness but for having the confidence not to pretend to be stupid in order to maintain it. He managed the difficult trick of making it seem cool to be smart. “Hey,” Joey said, to change the subject, “am I still invited to Thanksgiving?”

“Invited? You’re doubly invited now. My family isn’t the self-hating kind of Jewish. My parents really, really dig Jews. They will roll out the red carpet for you.”

The following afternoon, alone in their room, and oppressed by not yet having made the promised call to Connie about seeing a doctor, Joey found himself opening Jonathan’s computer and searching for pictures of his sister, Jenna. He didn’t consider it snooping if he went straight to family photos that Jonathan had already shown him anyway. His roommate’s excitement about his Jewishness seemed to presage a similarly warm reception on Jenna’s part, and he copied the two most fetching pictures of her onto his own hard drive, altering the file extensions to make them unfindable by anyone but him, so that he could picture some concrete alternative to Connie before he made the dreaded call to her.

The female scene at school had not proved satisfactory thus far. Compared to Connie, the really attractive girls he’d met in Virginia all seemed to have been sprayed with Teflon, encased in suspicion of his motives. Even the prettiest ones wore too much makeup and overly formal clothes and dressed for Cavaliers games as if they were the Kentucky Derby. It was true that certain second-tier girls, at parties where they’d drunk too much, had given him to understand he was a boy to whom hookups were available. But for whatever reason, whether because he was a wuss or because he hated shouting over music or because he thought too highly of himself or because he was unable to ignore how stupid and annoying too much alcohol made a girl, he’d formed an early prejudice against these parties and their hookups and decided that he much preferred hanging out with other guys.

He sat holding his phone for a long time, for maybe half an hour, while the sky in the windows grayed toward rain. He waited for so long and in such a stupor of reluctance that it was almost like Zen archery when his thumb, of its own accord, hit the speed-dial for Connie’s number and the ringing dragged him forward into action.

“Hey!” she answered in a cheerful ordinary voice, a voice he realized he’d been missing. “Where are you?”

“I’m in my room.”

“What’s it doing there?”

“I don’t know. It’s kind of gray.”

“God, it was snowing here this morning. It’s already winter.”

“Yeah, listen,” he said. “Are you OK?”

“Me?” She seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. I miss you every minute of the day, but I’m getting used to that.”

“I’m sorry I went so long without calling.”

“That’s OK. I love talking to you, but I understand why we need to be more disciplined. I was just working on my Inver Hills application. I also signed up to take the SAT in December, like you suggested.”

“Did I suggest that?”

“If I’m going to go to real school in the fall, like you said, it’s what I need to do. I bought a book on how to study for it. I’m going to study three hours every day.”

“So you’re really OK.”

“Yes! How are you?”

Joey struggled to reconcile Carol’s account of Connie with how clear and collected she was sounding. “I talked to your mom last night,” he said.

“I know. She told me.”

“She said she’s pregnant?”

“Yes, a blessed event is coming our way. I think it’s going to be twins.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s just my sense. That it’s going to be especially horrible in some way.”

“The whole conversation was actually pretty weird.”

“She’s been spoken to now,” Connie said. “She won’t be calling you again. If she does, let me know, and I’ll make it stop.”

“She said you were very depressed,” Joey blurted out.

This brought a sudden silence, total in the black-hole way that only Connie could make a silence.

“She said you’re sleeping all day and not eating enough,” Joey said. “She sounded really worried about you.”

After another silence, Connie said, “I was a little bit depressed for a while. But it was none of Carol’s business. And now I’m doing better.”

“But maybe you need an antidepressant or something?”

“No. I’m doing much better.”

“Well, that’s great,” Joey said, although he felt that it was somehow not great at all-that morbid weakness and clinginess on her part might have provided him with a viable escape route.

“So have you been sleeping with other people?” Connie said. “I thought that might be why you weren’t calling.”

“No! No. Not at all.”

“It’s OK with me if you do. I meant to tell you that last month. You’re a guy, you have needs. I don’t expect you to be a monk. It’s just sex, who cares?”

“Well, the same goes for you,” he said gratefully, sensing another possible escape route here.

“Except it’s not going to happen with me,” Connie said. “Nobody else sees me the way you do. I’m invisible to men.”

“I don’t believe that at all.”

“No, it’s true. Sometimes I try to be friendly, or even flirty, at the restaurant. But it’s like I’m invisible. I don’t really care anyway. I just want you. I think people sense that.”

“I want you, too,” he found himself murmuring, in contravention of certain safety guidelines he’d established for himself.

“I know,” she said. “But guys are different, is all I’m saying. You should feel free.”

“I’ve actually been jerking off a lot.”

“Yeah, me, too. For hours and hours. Some days it’s the only thing I feel like doing. That’s probably why Carol thinks I’m depressed.”

“But maybe you are depressed.”

“No, I just like to come a lot. I think about you, and I come. I think about you some more, and then I come some more. That’s all it is.”

Very quickly the conversation devolved into phone sex, which they hadn’t had since the earliest days, when they were sneaking around and whispering on phones in their respective bedrooms. It had become a lot more interesting in the meantime, because they knew how to talk to each other now. At the same time, it was as if they’d never had sex before-was cataclysmic that way.

“I wish I could lick it off your fingers,” Connie said when they were finished.

“I’m licking it for you,” Joey said.

“That’s good. Lick it up for me. Does it taste good?”

“Yes.”

“I swear I can taste it in my mouth.”

“I can taste you, too.”

“Oh, baby.”

Which led immediately to further phone sex, a more nervous rendition, since Jonathan’s afternoon class was ending and he might return soon.

“My baby,” Connie said. “Oh, my baby. My baby, my baby, my baby.”

Joey, as he climaxed again, believed that he was with Connie in her bedroom on Barrier Street, his arching back her arching back, his little breasts her little breasts. They lay breathing as one into their cell phones. He’d been wrong, the night before, when he’d told Carol that she, not he, was responsible for the way Connie was. He could feel now in his body how they’d made each other who they were.

“Your mom wants me to spend Thanksgiving with you guys,” he said after a while.

“You don’t have to do that,” she said. “We agreed we were going to try to wait nine months.”

“Well, she was kind of a bitch about it.”

“That’s her way. She’s a bitch. But she’s been spoken to, and it won’t happen again.”

“So you don’t care either way?”

“You know what I want. Thanksgiving has nothing to do with it.”

He had been hoping, for paradoxically opposing reasons, that Connie would join Carol in urging him to come back for the holiday. He was keen, on the one hand, to see her and to sleep with her, and, on the other hand, to find fault with her, so that he would have something to resist and break away from. What she was doing instead, with her cool clarity, was resetting a hook that for a while, in recent weeks, he’d managed to work halfway free of. Resetting it deeper than ever.

“I should probably get off the phone now,” he said. “Jonathan’s coming back.”

“OK,” Connie said, and let him go.

Their conversation had diverged so wildly from his expectations that he couldn’t even remember now what he’d expected. He got up from his bed as if surfacing through a wormhole in the fabric of reality, his heart thudding, his vision altered, and paced around the room under the collective gaze of Tupac and Natalie Portman. He’d always liked Connie a lot. Always. And so why now, of all the inopportune moments, was he being gripped, as if for the first time, by such a titanic undertow of really liking her? How could it be, after years of having sex with her, years of feeling tender and protective of her, that he was only now getting sucked into such heavy waters of affection? Feeling connected to her in such a scarily consequential way? Why now?

It was wrong, it was wrong, he knew it was wrong. He sat down at his computer to view the pictures of Jonathan’s sister and try to reestablish some order. Luckily, before he was able to get the file extensions changed back to JPG and be caught red-handed, Jonathan himself walked in.

“My man, my Jewish brother,” he said, falling to his bed like a shooting victim. “ ’Sup?”

“ ’Sup,” Joey said, hastily closing a graphical window.

“Whoa, Jesus, a little bit of chlorine in the air here? You been to the pool, or what?”

Joey almost, right then, told his roommate everything, the whole story of him and Connie right up to the present moment. But the dream world he’d been in, the nethery place of sexually merged identities, was receding quickly in the face of Jonathan’s male presence.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with a smile.

“Crack a window, for God’s sake. I mean, I like you and all, but I’m not ready to go all the way yet.”

Taking Jonathan’s complaint to heart, Joey did, after that, open the windows. He called Connie again the very next day, and again two days after that. He quietly shelved his sound arguments against too-frequent calling and fell gratefully on phone sex as a replacement for his solitary science-library masturbation, which now seemed to him a squalid aberration, embarrassing to recall. He succeeded in persuading himself that, as long as they avoided ordinary newsy chitchat and spoke only of sex, it was OK to exploit this loophole in his otherwise strict embargo on excess contact. As they continued to exploit it, however, and October became November and the days grew shorter, he realized that it was making their contact all the deeper and realer to hear Connie finally naming the things they’d done and the things she imagined them doing in the future. This deepening was somewhat strange, since all they were doing was getting each other off. But in hindsight it seemed to him as if, in St. Paul, Connie’s silence had formed a kind of protective barrier: had given their couplings what politicians called deniability. To discover, now, that sex had been fully registering in her as language-as words that she could speak out loud-made her much realer to him as a person. The two of them could no longer pretend that they were just mute youthful animals mindlessly doing their thing. Words made everything less safe, words had no limits, words made their own world. One afternoon, as Connie described it, her excited clitoris grew to be eight inches long, a protruding pencil of tenderness with which she gently parted the lips of his penis and drove herself down to the base of its shaft. Another day, at her urging, Joey described to her the sleek warm neatness of her turds as they slid from her anus and fell into his open mouth, where, since these were only words, they tasted like excellent dark chocolate. As long as her words were in his ear, urging him on, he wasn’t ashamed of anything. He returned to the wormhole three or four or even five times a week, disappeared into the world the two of them created, and later reemerged and shut the windows and went out to the dining hall or down to his dormitory lounge and effortlessly performed the shallow affability that college life required of him.

It was, as Connie had said, only sex. The permission she’d given him to pursue it elsewhere was very much on Joey’s mind as he rode with Jonathan to NoVa for Thanksgiving. They were in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser, which he’d received as a high-school graduation present and now parked off campus in open defiance of the first-year no-cars rule. It was Joey’s impression, from movies and books, that much could happen quickly when college students were let loose at Thanksgiving. All fall, he’d taken care not to ask Jonathan any questions about his sister, Jenna, figuring that he had nothing to gain by arousing Jonathan’s suspicions prematurely. But as soon as he mentioned Jenna in the Land Cruiser he saw that all his care had been for naught. Jonathan gave him a knowing look and said, “She’s got a very serious boyfriend.”

“No doubt.”

“Or, no, sorry, I misspoke. I should have said that she is very serious about a boyfriend who in fact is ridiculous and a class-A jackass. I won’t insult my own intelligence by asking why you’re asking about her.”

“I was just being polite,” Joey said.

“Ha-ha. It was interesting, when she finally went away to college, I found out who my real friends were and which ones were only interested in coming over to my house as long as she was there. It turned out to be about fifty percent of them.”

“I had the same problem, but not with my sister,” Joey said, smiling at the thought of Jessica. “For me it was Foosball and air hockey and a beer keg.” He proceeded, in the freedom of being on the road, to divulge to Jonathan the circumstances of his last two years of high school. Jonathan listened attentively enough but seemed interested in only one part of the story, the part about his living with his girlfriend.

“And where is this person now?” he asked.

“In St. Paul. She’s still at home.”

“No shit,” Jonathan said, very impressed. “But wait a minute. That girl Casey saw going into our room on Yom Kippur-that wasn’t her, was it?”

“Actually, yes,” Joey said. “We broke up, but we sort of had one little backslide.”

“You fucking little liar! You told me that was just some hookup.”

“No. All I said was I didn’t want to talk about it.”

“You gave me to believe it was a hookup. I can’t believe you deliberately brought her out here when I was gone.”

“Like I said, we had one backslide. We’re broken up now.”

“For real? You don’t talk to her on the phone?”

“Just a tiny little bit. She’s really depressed.”

“I am impressed with what a sneaky little liar you turn out to be.”

“I’m not a liar,” Joey said.

“Said the liar. Do you have a picture of her on your computer?”

“No,” Joey lied.

“Joey the secret stud,” Jonathan said. “Joey the runaway. God damn. You’re making more sense to me now.”

“Right, but I’m still Jewish, so you still have to like me.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t like you. I said you’re making more sense. I could care less if you’ve got a girlfriend-I’m not going to tell Jenna. I’ll just warn you right now that you’re lacking the key to her heart.”

“And what’s that?”

“A job at Goldman Sachs. That’s what her boyfriend has. His stated ambition is to be worth a hundred million at age thirty.”

“Is he going to be at your parents’?”

“No, he’s in Singapore. He just graduated last year, and they’re already flying him to fucking Singapore for some billion-dollar round-the-clock something. She’ll be pining alone at home, bro.”

Jonathan’s father was the founder and luminary president of a think tank devoted to advocating the unilateral exercise of American military supremacy to make the world freer and safer, especially for America and Israel. Hardly a week had passed, in October and November, without Jonathan pointing out to Joey an opinion piece in the Times or the Journal in which his father expounded on the menace of radical Islam. They’d also watched him on the NewsHour and Fox News. He had a mouth full of exceptionally white teeth that he flashed every time he started speaking, and he looked almost old enough to be Jonathan’s grandfather. Besides Jonathan and Jenna, he had three much older children from earlier marriages, plus two former wives.

The house of his third marriage was in McLean, Virginia, on a sylvan cul-de-sac that was like a vision of where Joey wanted to live as soon as he got rich. Inside the house, whose floors were of fine-grained oak, there seemed to be no end of rooms looking out on a wooded ravine in which woodpeckers swooped among the mostly bare trees. Despite having grown up in a house he’d considered book-filled and tasteful, Joey was staggered by the quantity of hardcover books and by the obviously top quality of the multicultural swag that Jonathan’s father had collected during distinguished foreign residencies. Just as Jonathan had been surprised to learn of Joey’s adventures in high school, Joey was now surprised to see what high-class luxury his messy and somewhat crude-mannered roommate came from. The only real off note was the tackily ornate Judaica parked in various nooks and corners. Seeing Joey smirk at a notably monstrous silver-painted menorah, Jonathan assured him it was extremely old and rare and valuable.

Jonathan’s mother, Tamara, who’d clearly once been a total babe and was still quite a bit of one, showed Joey the luxurious bedroom and bathroom that would be solely his. “Jonathan tells me you’re Jewish,” she said.

“Yes, apparently I am,” Joey said.

“But not observant?”

“Not even conscious, actually, until a month ago.”

Tamara shook her head. “I don’t understand that,” she said. “I know it’s very common, but I will never understand it.”

“It wasn’t like I was Christian or anything, either,” Joey said by way of excuse. “It was all part of the same nonissue.”

“Well, you’re very welcome with us. I think you might find it interesting to learn a little bit about your heritage. You’ll find that Howard and I aren’t particularly conservative. We just think it’s important to be aware and always be remembering.”

“They’ll whip you right into shape,” Jonathan said.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be a very gentle whipping,” Tamara said with a milfy smile.

“That’s great,” Joey said. “I’m definitely up for anything.”

As soon as they could, the two boys escaped to the basement rec room, whose amenities shamed even those in Blake and Carol’s great-room. Tennis could practically have been played on the blue felt expanses of the mahogany pool table. Jonathan introduced Joey to a complicated, interminable, and frustrating game called Cowboy Pool that required a table without a central ball-collection mechanism. Joey was on the verge of suggesting a switch to air hockey, at which he was annihilatingly skilled, when the sister, Jenna, came downstairs. She acknowledged Joey, barely, from the pinnacle of her two-year age advantage, and began to speak of urgent family matters with her brother.

Joey suddenly understood, as never before, what people meant by “breathtaking.” Jenna had the unsettling kind of beauty that relegated everything around her, even a beholder’s basic organ functions, to afterthought status. Her figure and complexion and bone structure made the features that he’d so admired in other “pretty” girls now seem like crude approximations of beauty; even the pictures of her hadn’t done her justice. Her hair was thick and shining and strawberry blonde, and she was wearing an oversized Duke athletic jersey and flannel pajama bottoms, which, far from concealing her body’s perfection, demonstrated its power to overcome the baggiest of clothes. Everything else that Joey rested his eyes on in the rec room was notable only for not being her-was all the same second-class blah. And yet, when he did steal a glance at her, his brain was too unsettled to even see much. The whole thing was weirdly tiring. There seemed to be no way to arrange his face that wasn’t false and self-conscious. He was painfully aware of smirking stupidly at the floor while she and her amazingly unawed sibling bickered about the New York City shopping expedition she intended to make on Friday.

“You can’t leave us the Cabriolet,” Jonathan said. “Joey and I are going to look like a couple of life partners in that thing.”

Jenna’s one evident defect was her voice, which was pinched and little-girly. “Yeah, right,” she said. “A couple of life partners with jeans hanging halfway down their ass.”

“I just don’t see why you can’t drive the Cabriolet to New York,” Jonathan said. “You’ve driven it there before.”

“Because Mom says I can’t. Not on a holiday weekend. The Land Cruiser is safer. I’ll bring it back on Sunday.”

“Are you kidding? The Land Cruiser is a rollover machine. It’s totally unsafe.”

“Well, you can tell that to Mom. Tell her your freshman car’s an unsafe rollover machine and that’s why I can’t take it to New York.”

“Hey.” Jonathan turned to Joey. “You want to go to New York for the weekend?”

“Sure!” Joey said.

“Just take the Cabriolet,” Jenna said. “It won’t hurt you for three days.”

“No, this is great,” Jonathan said. “We can all go to New York in the Land Cruiser and go shopping. You can help me find some pants that meet your standards.”

“Reasons that’s a nonstarter?” Jenna said. “Number one, you don’t even have any place to stay.”

“Why can’t we crash with you at Nick’s? Isn’t he, like, in Singapore?”

“Nick’s not going to want a bunch of freshman guys running around his apartment. Plus he might be back by Saturday night.”

“Two is not a bunch. This would just be me and my incredibly tidy Minnesotan roommate.”

“I am very tidy,” Joey assured her.

“No doubt,” she said with zero interest, from her pinnacle. Joey’s presence nevertheless seemed to complicate her resistance-she couldn’t be quite as dismissive to a stranger as she could to her own brother. “I really don’t care,” she said. “I’ll ask Nick. But if he says no, you can’t come.”

As soon as she went back upstairs, Jonathan presented Joey with a palm to high-five. “New York, New York,” he said. “I bet we can crash with Casey’s family if Nick ends up being as big a dick as he usually is. They’re on the Upper East Side somewhere.”

Joey was just stunned by Jenna’s beauty. He wandered into the area where she’d stood, which smelled faintly of patchouli. That he might get to spend an entire weekend in her vicinity, through the sheer happenstance of being Jonathan’s roommate, felt like some kind of miracle.

“You, too, I see,” Jonathan said, shaking his head sadly. “This is the story of my young life.”

Joey felt himself reddening. “What I don’t get is how you turned out to be so ugly.”

“Ha, you know what they say about older parents. My dad was fifty-one when I was born. There was a crucial two years of genetic deterioration. Not every boy gets to be pretty like you.”

“I didn’t realize you had these feelings.”

“What feelings? I only look for prettiness in girls, where it belongs.”

“Fuck you, rich kid.”

“Pretty boy, pretty boy.”

“Fuck you. Let me kick your ass at air hockey.”

“Just as long as kicking it is all you want to do.”

Tamara’s threat notwithstanding, there was blessedly little religious instruction, or invasive parental interaction of any kind, during Joey’s stay in McLean. He and Jonathan installed themselves in the basement home theater, which had reclining seats and an eight-foot projection screen, and stayed up until 4 a.m. watching bad TV and casting aspersions on each other’s heterosexuality. By the time they roused themselves on Thanksgiving, crowds of relatives were arriving at the house. Since Jonathan was obliged to speak to them, Joey found himself floating through the beautiful rooms like a helium molecule, devoting himself to arranging sight lines that Jenna might pass through or, better yet, alight in. The upcoming excursion to New York, which her boyfriend had surprisingly signed off on, was like money in the bank: he would have, at a minimum, two long car trips to make an impression on her. For now, he wanted only to accustom his eyes to her, to make looking less impossible. She was wearing a demure, high-necked dress, a friendly dress, and either was very adept at applying makeup or simply didn’t wear much. He took note of her good manners, manifested in her patience with bald-pated uncles and face-lifted aunts who seemed to have a lot to say to her.

Before dinner was served, he slipped away to his bedroom to call St. Paul. Calling Connie was out of the question in his current state; shame about their filthy conversations, curiously absent throughout the fall, was creeping up on him now. His parents were a different matter, however, if only because of the checks of his mother’s that he’d been cashing.

His dad answered the phone in St. Paul and spoke to him for no more than two minutes before handing him off to his mother, which Joey took as a kind of betrayal. He actually had a fair amount of respect for his dad-for the consistency of his disapproval; for the strictness of his principles-and he might have had even more if his dad hadn’t been so deferential to his mother. Joey could have used some manly backup, but instead his dad kept passing him off to his mom and washing his hands of them.

“Hello, you,” she said with a warmth that made him cringe. He immediately resolved to be hard with her, but, as happened so often, she wore him down with her humor and her cascading laugh. Before he knew it, he’d described the entire scene in McLean to her, excluding Jenna.

“A house full of Jews!” she said. “How interesting for you.”

“You’re a Jew yourself,” he said. “And that makes me a Jew, too. And Jessica, too, and Jessica’s kids if she has any.”

“No, that’s only if you’ve been drinking the Kool-Aid,” his mother said. After three months in the East, Joey was able to hear that she had a bit of Minnesota accent. “You see,” she said, “I think, when it comes to religion, you’re only what you say you are. Nobody else can say it for you.”

“But you don’t have any religion.”

“Exactly my point. That was one of the few things that my parents and I agreed on, bless their hearts. That religion is stoopid. Although apparently my sister now disagrees with me, which means that our record of disagreeing about absolutely everything is still unblemished.”

“Which sister?”

“Your aunt Abigail. She’s apparently deep into the Kabbalah and rediscovering her Jewish roots, such as they are. How do I know this, you ask? Because we got a chain letter, or e-mail actually, from her, about the Kabbalah. I thought it was pretty bad form, and so I actually e-mailed her back, to ask her please not to send me any more chain letters, and she e-mailed me back about her Journey.”

“I don’t even know what the Kabbalah is,” Joey said.

“Oh, I’m sure she’d be happy to tell you all about it, if you ever want to be in touch with her. It’s very Important and Mystical-I think Madonna’s into it, which tells you pretty much all you need to know right there.”

“Madonna’s Jewish?”

“Yah, Joey, hence her name.” His mother laughed at him.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “I’m trying to keep an open mind about it. I don’t feel like rejecting something I haven’t even found out about yet.”

“That’s right. And who knows? It might even be useful to you.”

“It might,” he said coolly.

At the very long dinner table, he was seated on the same side as Jenna, which spared him a view of her and allowed him to concentrate on conversing with one of the bald uncles, who assumed that he was Jewish and regaled him with an account of his recent vacation-slash-business-trip in Israel. Joey pretended to be fluent and impressed with much that was utterly foreign to him: the Western Wall and its tunnels, the Tower of David, Masada, Yad Vashem. Delayed-action resentment of his mother, coupled with the fabulousness of the house and his fascination with Jenna and a certain unfamiliar feeling of genuine intellectual curiosity, was making him actually long to be more Jewish-to see what this kind of belonging might be like.

Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkeylike cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how “we” had been “leaning on” the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for “the philosopher” (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country behind the mission that his philosophy had revealed as right and necessary. “We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts,” he said, with his smile, to an uncle who had mildly challenged him about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. “Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

Between Joey’s impulse to impress Jenna and its irruption in actual words there was only one short second of free-fall terror. “But how do you know it’s the truth?” he called out.

All heads turned to him, and his heart began to pound.

“We never know for certain,” Jenna’s father said, doing his smile thing. “You’re right about that. But when we discover that our understanding of the world, based on decades of careful empirical study by the very best minds, is in striking accordance with the inductive principle of universal human freedom, it’s a good indication that our thinking is at least approximately on track.”

Joey nodded eagerly, to show his total and profound agreement, and was surprised when, in spite of himself, he persisted: “But it seems like once we start lying about Iraq, we’re no better than the Arabs with the lie about no Jews being killed on 9/11.”

Jenna’s father, not ruffled in the slightest, said, “You’re a very bright young man, aren’t you?”

Joey couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be ironic.

“Jonathan says you’re a very fine student,” the old man continued gently. “And so I’m guessing you’ve already had the experience of being frustrated with people who aren’t as bright as you are. People who are not only unable but unwilling to admit certain truths whose logic is self-evident to you. Who don’t even seem to care that their logic is bad. Have you never been frustrated that way?”

“But that’s because they’re free,” Joey said. “Isn’t that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it’s a pain in the ass sometimes.”

Around the table, people chuckled at this.

“That’s exactly right,” Jenna’s father said. “Freedom is a pain in the ass. And that’s precisely why it’s so imperative that we seize the opportunity that’s been presented to us this fall. To get a nation of free people to let go of their bad logic and sign on with better logic, by whatever means are necessary.”

Unable to bear another second of exposure, Joey nodded even more eagerly. “You’re right,” he said. “I see, you’re right.”

Jenna’s father went on to unburden himself of further stretched facts and firm opinions that Joey heard hardly a word of. His body was throbbing with the excitement of having spoken up and being heard by Jenna. The feeling he’d misplaced all fall, the feeling of being a player, was coming back to him. When Jonathan stood up from the table, he rose unsteadily and followed him into the kitchen, where they collected enough undrunk wine to fill two sixteen-ounce tumblers for themselves.

“Dude,” Joey said, “you can’t mix red and white like that.”

“It’s rosé, dufus,” Jonathan said. “Since when are you Mr. Oenophile?”

They took their brimming glasses down to the basement and consumed the wine over air hockey. Joey was still so throbbing that he hardly felt the effects, which proved fortunate when Jonathan’s father came downstairs and joined them. “How about a little Cowboy Pool?” he said, rubbing his hands together. “I assume Jonathan’s already taught you our house game?”

“Yeah, I totally suck at it,” Joey said.

“It’s the queen of all pool games, combining the best features of both billiards and pocket billiards,” the old man said as he arranged the 1 ball, the 3 ball, and the 5 ball on their appointed spots. Jonathan seemed somewhat mortified by him, which interested Joey, since he tended to assume that only his own parents could truly mortify a person. “We have an additional special house rule that I’m willing to apply to myself tonight. Jonathan? What do you say? The rule is designed to prevent a highly skilled player from parking behind the 5 ball and running up the score. You boys will be allowed to do that, assuming you’ve mastered putting straight draw on the cue ball, whereas I will be obliged to shoot one billiard or sink one of the other balls each time I sink the 5.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Yeah, sounds good, Dad.”

“Shall we shag?” his father said, chalking his cue.

Joey and Jonathan looked at each other and snickered explosively. The old man didn’t even notice.

It pained Joey to suck so badly at a game, and the effects of the wine became apparent when the old man gave him a few pointers that only made him suck worse. Jonathan, meanwhile, was competing intensely, bearing down with a look of dead seriousness that Joey hadn’t seen in him before. During one of his longer runs, his father took Joey aside and asked about his summer plans.

“That’s a long way away,” Joey said.

“Not so far at all, really. What are your areas of greatest interest?”

“I mostly need to make money, and stay in Virginia. I’m paying my own way through school.”

“So Jonathan tells me. It’s a remarkable ambition. And forgive me if I’m going too far here, but my wife says you’re beginning to develop an interest in your heritage, after not being raised in faith. I don’t know if that’s at all a factor in your deciding to make your own way in the world, but if it is, I want to congratulate you on thinking for yourself and having the courage to do that. In time, you might even come back to lead your family in their own exploration.”

“I’m definitely sorry I never learned anything about it.”

The old man shook his head the same disapproving way his wife had. “We have the most marvelous and durable tradition in the world,” he said. “I think for a young person today it ought to have a particular appeal, because it’s all about personal choice. Nobody tells a Jew what he has to believe. You get to decide all of that for yourself. You can choose your very own apps and features, so to speak.”

“Right, interesting,” Joey said.

“And what are your other plans? Are you interested in a business career the way everybody else seems to be these days?”

“Yes, definitely. I’m thinking of majoring in econ.”

“That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to make money. Now, I didn’t have to make my own money, although I don’t mind saying I’ve done a pretty good job of managing what I was given. I owe a lot to my great-grandfather in Cincinnati, who came over here with nothing. He was given an opportunity in this country, which gave him the freedom to make the most of his abilities. That’s why I’ve chosen to spend my life the way I have-to honor that freedom and try to ensure that the next American century be similarly blessed. Nothing wrong with making money, nothing at all. But there has to be something more in your life than that. You have to choose which side you’re on, and fight for it.”

“Absolutely,” Joey said.

“There may be some good-paying summer jobs at the Institute this summer, if you’re interested in doing something for your country. Our fund-raising’s been off the charts since the attacks. Very gratifying to see. You could think about applying if you’re so inclined.”

“Definitely!” Joey said. He was sounding to himself like one of Socrates’ young interlocutors, whose lines of dialogue, on page after page, consisted of variations on “Yes, unquestionably” and “Undoubtedly it must be so.” “That sounds great,” he said. “I’ll definitely apply.”

Putting too much draw on the cue ball, Jonathan scratched unexpectedly, thereby negating all the points he’d accumulated on his run. “Fuck!” he cried, and added, for good measure, “Fuck!” He banged his cue on the edge of the table; and there ensued an awkward moment.

“You have to be especially careful when you’ve run up a big score,” his father said.

“I know that, Dad. I know that. I was being careful. I just got a little distracted by you guys’ conversation.”

“Joey, your turn?”

What was it about witnessing a friend’s meltdown that made him uncontrollably want to smile? He had a wonderful sense of liberation, not having to interact with his own dad in these ways. He could feel more of his good luck returning with each passing moment. For Jonathan’s sake, he was glad that he immediately missed his own next shot.

But Jonathan turned pissy on him anyway. After his father, twice victorious, went back upstairs, he began calling Joey a faggot in not-so-funny ways and finally said he didn’t think that going to New York with Jenna was such a good idea.

“Why not?” Joey said, stricken.

“I don’t know. I just don’t feel like it.”

“It’s going to be awesome. We can try to get into Ground Zero and see what it looks like.”

“That whole area’s blocked off. You can’t see anything.”

“I also want to see where they film the Today show.”

“It’s stupid. It’s just a window.”

“Come on, it’s New York. We’ve got to do this thing.”

“Well, so go with Jenna then. That’s what you want anyway, isn’t it? Go to Manhattan with my sister, and then work for my dad next summer. And my mom’s a big horse rider. Maybe you want to ride horses with her, too.”

The one bad aspect of Joey’s good fortune were the moments when it seemed to come at someone else’s expense. Never having experienced envy himself, he was impatient with its manifestations in other people. In high school, more than once, he’d had to terminate friendships with kids who couldn’t handle his having so many other friends. His feeling was: fucking grow up already. His friendship with Jonathan, however, was nonterminable, at least for the remainder of the school year, and although Joey was annoyed by his sulking he did keenly understand the pain of being a son.

“So, fine,” he said. “We’ll stay here. You can show me D.C. You want to do that instead?”

Jonathan shrugged.

“Seriously. Let’s hang out in D.C.”

Jonathan brooded about this for a while. Then he said, “You had him on the run, man. All that bullshit about the noble lie? You had him on the run, and then suddenly you got this shit-eating grin. You’re such a fucking little faggot suck-up.”

“Yeah, I didn’t see you saying anything, either,” Joey said.

“I’ve already been through it.”

“Well then why should I go through it?”

“Because you haven’t been through it yet. You haven’t earned the right not to. You haven’t fucking earned anything.”

“Said the kid with the Land Cruiser.”

“Look, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I’m going to go do some reading.”

“Fine.”

“I’ll go to New York with you. I don’t even care if you sleep with my sister. You probably deserve each other.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll find out.”

“Let’s just be friends, OK? I don’t have to go to New York.”

“No, we’ll go,” Jonathan said. “Pathetically enough, I really don’t want to drive that Cabriolet.”

Upstairs, in his turkey-smelling bedroom, Joey found a stack of books on the nightstand-Elie Wiesel, Chaim Potok, Exodus, The History of the Jews-and a note from Jonathan’s father: Some kindling for you. Feel free to keep or pass along. Howard. Flipping through them, feeling both a deep lack of personal interest and a deepening respect for people who were interested, Joey became angry with his mother all over again. Her disrespect of religion seemed to him just more of her me me me: her competitive Copernican wish to be the sun around which all things revolved. Before he went to sleep, he dialed 411 and got a number for Abigail Emerson in Manhattan.

The next morning, while Jonathan was still sleeping, he called Abigail and introduced himself as her sister’s son and said he was coming to New York. In response, his aunt cackled weirdly and asked him if he was good with plumbing.

“Beg pardon?”

“Things are going down but they’re not staying down,” Abigail said. “It’s kind of like me after too much brandy.” She proceeded to tell him about the low elevation and antiquated sewers of Greenwich Village, about her super’s holiday plans, about the pros and cons of ground-floor courtyard apartments, and about the “pleasure” of returning at midnight on Thanksgiving and finding her neighbors’ incompletely disintegrated flushings floating in her bathtub and washed up on the shores of her kitchen sink. “It’s all verrrrrrry, very lovely,” she said. “The perfect kickoff to a long weekend of no super.”

“Well, so, anyway, I thought maybe we could meet up or something,” Joey said. He was already having second thoughts about this, but his aunt now became responsive, as if her monologue had been a thing she’d just needed to flush from herself.

“You know,” she said, “I’ve seen pictures of you and your sister. Verrrrrry handsome pictures, in your verrrrrry beautiful house. I think I might even recognize you on the street.”

“Uh huh.”

“My apartment is unfortunately not so beautiful at the moment. A little fragrant also! But if you’d like to meet me at my favorite café, and be served by the gayest waiter in the Village, who is my personal best male bud, I’d be verrrrry happy to. I can tell you all the things your mother doesn’t want you to know about us.”

This sounded good to Joey, and they made a date.

For the trip to New York, Jenna brought along a high-school friend, Bethany, whose looks were ordinary only by comparison. The two of them sat in back, where Joey could neither see Jenna nor, between the endless stereo whining of Slim Shady and Jonathan’s chanting of his lyrics, make out what she and Bethany were talking about. The only interactions between back and front were Jenna’s criticisms of her brother’s driving. As if his hostility toward Joey the night before had been transmuted into road rage, Jonathan was tailgating at eighty and muttering abuse at less aggressive drivers; he seemed in general to be reveling in being an asshole. “Thank you for not killing us,” Jenna said when the SUV had come to rest in a staggeringly expensive midtown parking garage and the music had blessedly ceased.

The trip soon proved to have all the makings of a bust. Jenna’s boyfriend, Nick, shared a rambling, decaying apartment on 54th Street with two other Wall Street trainees who were also gone for the weekend. Joey wanted to see the city, and he wanted even more not to seem to Jenna like some little Eminem-listening juvie, but the living room was equipped with a huge plasma TV and late-model Xbox that Jonathan insisted he immediately join him in enjoying. “See you later, kids,” Jenna said as she and Bethany went out to meet up with other friends. Three hours later, when Joey suggested taking a walk before it got too late, Jonathan told him not to be such a faggot.

“What is wrong with you?” Joey said.

“No, I’m sorry, what is wrong with you? You should have tagged along with Jenna if you wanted to do girl stuff.”

Doing girl stuff in fact sounded rather appealing to Joey. He liked girls, he missed their company and the way they talked about things; he missed Connie. “You were the one who said you wanted to go shopping.”

“What’s the matter, are my pants not tight enough in the butt for you?”

“It also might be nice to get some dinner?”

“Right, somewhere romantic, just the two of us.”

“New York pizza? Isn’t it supposed to be the world’s best pizza?”

“No, that’s New Haven.”

“OK, a deli then. New York deli. I’m starving.”

“So go look in the fridge.”

“You go look in the fucking fridge. I’m getting out of here.”

“Yeah, fine. Do that.”

“Will you be here when I get back? So I can get in?”

“Yes, honey.”

With a lump in his throat, a girly nearness to tears, Joey went out into the night. Jonathan’s loss of cool was extremely disappointing to him. He was suddenly sensible of his own superior maturity, and as he drifted through the late shopping crowds on Fifth Avenue he considered how he might convey this maturity to Jenna. He bought two Polish sausages from a street vendor and pushed into even thicker crowds at Rockefeller Center and watched the ice skaters and admired the enormous unlit Christmas tree, the stirring floodlit heights of the NBC tower. So he liked doing girl stuff, so what? It didn’t make him a wuss. It just made him very lonely. Watching the skaters, feeling homesick for St. Paul, he called up Connie. She was on her shift at Frost’s and could stay on the phone only long enough for him to tell her that he missed her, to describe where he was standing, and to say he wished he could show it to her.

“I love you, baby,” she said.

“I love you, too.”

The next morning, he got his chance with Jenna. She was apparently an early riser and had already been out to buy breakfast when Joey, rising early himself, wandered into the kitchen in a UVA T-shirt and paisley boxers. Finding her reading a book at the kitchen table, he felt pretty much stark-naked.

“I bought some bagels for you and my undeserving brother,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said, considering whether to go and put some pants on or just keep strutting his stuff. Since she showed no further interest in him, he decided to risk not dressing. But then, as he waited on a toasting bagel and stole glances at her hair and her shoulders and her bare, crossed legs, he began to get a boner. He was about to make his escape to the living room when she looked up and said, “I’m sorry, this book? This book is ungodly boring.”

He took cover behind a chair. “What’s it about?”

“I thought it was about slavery. Now I’m not even sure what it’s about.” She showed him two facing pages of dense prose. “The really funny thing? This is the second time I’m reading it. It’s on like half the syllabuses at Duke. Syllabi. And I still can’t figure out what the actual story is. You know, what actually happens to the characters.”

“I read Song of Solomon for school last year,” Joey said. “I thought it was pretty amazing. It’s like the best novel I ever read.”

She made a complicated face of indifference toward him and annoyance with her book. He sat down across the table from her, took a bite of bagel and chewed it for a while, chewed it some more, and finally realized that swallowing was going to be an issue. There was no hurry, however, since Jenna was still trying to read.

“What do you think’s up with your brother?” he said when he’d managed to get a few bites down.

“What do you mean?”

“He’s being kind of a jerk. Kind of immature. Don’t you think?”

“Don’t ask me. He’s your friend.”

She continued to stare at her book. Her disdainful imperviousness was identical to that of the top-tier girls at Virginia. The only difference was that she was even more attractive to him than those girls, and that he was close enough to her now to smell her shampoo. Underneath the table, in his boxers, his half-mast boner was pointing at her like a Jaguar’s hood ornament.

“So what are you doing today?” he said.

She closed her book as if resigning herself to his continued presence. “Shopping,” she said. “And there’s a party in Brooklyn tonight. What about you?”

“Apparently nothing, since your brother doesn’t want to leave the apartment. I have an aunt who I’m supposed to see at four, but that’s it.”

“I think it’s harder for guys,” Jenna said. “Being at home. My dad is amazing, and I’m fine with that, I’m fine with him being famous. But I think Jonathan always feels like he has to prove something.”

“By watching TV for ten hours?”

She frowned and looked directly at Joey, possibly for the first time. “Do you even like my brother?”

“No definitely. He’s just been weird since Thursday night. Like, the way he was driving yesterday? I thought you might have some insight.”

“I think for him the biggest thing is wanting to be liked for his own sake. You know, and not because of who our dad is.”

“Right,” Joey said. And was inspired to add: “Or who his sister is.”

She blushed! A small amount. And shook her head. “I’m not anybody.”

“Ha ha ha,” he said, blushing as well.

“Well, I’m certainly not like my dad. I don’t have any big ideas, or any great ambition. I’m actually quite the selfish little person, when you get right down to it. A hundred acres in Connecticut, some horses and a full-time groom, and maybe a private jet, and I’ll be all set.”

Joey noted that it had taken no more than one allusion to her beauty to get her to open up and start talking about herself. And once the door had opened even just a millimeter, once he’d slipped through the crack in it, he knew what to do. How to listen and how to understand. It wasn’t fake listening or fake understanding, either. It was Joey in Womanland. Before long, in the dirty winter light of the kitchen, as he took instruction from Jenna on how to dress a bagel properly, with lox and onions and capers, he was feeling not greatly more uncomfortable than he would have felt talking with Connie, or his mom, or his grandmother, or Connie’s mom. Jenna’s beauty was no less dazzling than ever, but his boner entirely subsided. He offered her some nuggets about his family situation, and in return she admitted that her own family wasn’t too happy about her boyfriend.

“It’s pretty crazy,” she said. “I think that’s one reason Jonathan wanted to come here, and why he won’t leave the apartment. He thinks he’s somehow going to interfere with me and Nick. Like if he gets in the way, and hovers around, he can make it stop.”

“Why don’t they like Nick?”

“Well, for one thing, he’s Catholic. And he was varsity lacrosse. He’s superbright, but not bright in the way they approve of.” Jenna laughed. “I told him about my dad’s think tank once, and the next time his frat had a party they put a sign on the keg that said Think Tank. I thought it was pretty hilarious. But it gives you an idea.”

“Do you get drunk a lot?”

“No, I have the capacity of a flea. Nick stopped drinking, too, once he started working. He has like one Jack and Coke per week now. He’s totally focused on getting ahead. He was the first person in his family to go to a four-year college, total opposite of my family, where you’re an underachiever if you only have one PhD.”

“And he’s nice to you?”

She looked away with a shadow of something in her face. “I feel unbelievably safe with him. Like, I was thinking, if we’d been in the towers on September 11, even on a high floor, he would have found a way to get us out. He would have gotten us through, I just have that feeling.”

“There were a lot of guys like that at Cantor Fitzgerald,” Joey said. “Very tough traders. And they didn’t get out.”

“Well then they weren’t like Nick,” she said.

Seeing her close her mind like this, Joey wondered how hard he would have to make himself, and how much money he would have to earn, to even enter the running for the likes of her. His dick, in his boxers, bestirred itself again, as if to declare its upness for the challenge. But the softer parts of him, his heart and his brain, were awash in hopelessness at the enormity of it.

“I think I might go down to Wall Street and check it out today,” he said.

“Everything’s closed on Saturday.”

“I just want to see what it looks like, since I might end up working there.”

“No offense?” Jenna said, reopening her book. “You seem way too nice for that.”

Four weeks later, Joey was back in Manhattan, housesitting for his aunt Abigail. All fall, he’d been stressing about where to stay during his Christmas vacation, since his two competing homes in St. Paul disqualified each other, and since three weeks was far too long to impose on the family of a new college friend. He’d vaguely planned on staying with one of his better high-school friends, which would have positioned him to pay separate visits to his parents and the Monaghans, but it turned out that Abigail was going to Avignon for the holidays to attend an international miming workshop and was worrying, herself, when she met him on Thanksgiving weekend, about who would stay in her Charles Street apartment and see to the complex dietary requirements of her cats, Tigger and Piglet.

The meeting with his aunt had been interesting, if one-sided. Abigail, though younger than his mother, looked considerably older in all respects except her clothes, which were tarty-teenage. She smelled like cigarettes, and she had a heartrending way of eating her slice of chocolate-mousse cake, parceling out each small bite for intensive savoring, as if it were the best thing that was going to happen to her that day. Such few questions as she asked Joey she answered for him before he could get a word in. Mostly she delivered a monologue, with ironic commentary and self-conscious interjections, that was like a train that he was permitted to hop onto and ride for a while, supplying his own context and guessing at many of the references. In her nattering, she seemed to him a sad cartoon version of his mother, a warning of what she might become if she wasn’t careful.

Apparently, to Abigail, the mere fact of Joey’s existence was a reproach that necessitated a lengthy accounting of her life. The traditional marriage-babies-house thing was not for her, she said, and neither was the shallow commercialized world of conventional theater, with its degrading rigged open calls and its casting directors who only wanted this year’s model and had not the airy-fairiest notion of originality of expression, and neither was the world of stand-up, which she’d wasted a verrrrry long time trying to break into, working up great material about the truth of American suburban childhood, before realizing it was all just testosterone and potty humor. She denigrated Tina Fey and Sarah Silverman exhaustively and then extolled the genius of several male “artists” whom Joey decided must be mimes or clowns and with whom she declared herself lucky to be in ever-increasing contact, albeit still mainly via workshops. As she talked on and on, he found himself admiring her determination to survive without success of the sort still plausibly available to him. She was so dotty and self-involved that he was spared the annoyance of feeling guilty and could go straight to compassion. He perceived that, as the representative not only of his own but of her sister’s superior good fortune, he could do his aunt no greater kindness than to let her justify herself to him, and to promise to come and see her perform at his earliest opportunity. For this she rewarded him with the housesitting offer.

His first days in the city, when he was going from store to store with his hall mate Casey, were like hyper-vivid continuations of the urban dreams he was having all night. Humanity coming at him from every direction. Andean musicians piping and drumming in Union Square. Solemn firefighters nodding to the crowd assembled by a 9/11 shrine outside a station house. A pair of fur-coated ladies ballsily appropriating a cab that Casey had hailed outside Bloomingdale’s. Très hot middle-school girls wearing jeans under their miniskirts and slouching on the subway with their legs wide open. Cornrowed ghetto kids in ominous jumbo parkas, National Guard troops patrolling Grand Central with highly advanced weapons. And the Chinese grandmother hawking DVDs of films that hadn’t even opened yet, the break-dancer who ripped a muscle or a tendon and sat rocking in pain on the floor of the 6 train, the insistent saxophone player to whom Joey gave five dollars to help him get to his gig, despite Casey’s warning that he was being conned: each encounter was like a poem he instantly memorized.

Casey’s parents lived in an apartment with an elevator that opened directly into it, a must-have feature, Joey decided, if he ever made it big in New York. He joined them for dinner on both Christmas Eve and Christmas, thereby shoring up the lies he’d told his parents about where he was staying for the holidays. Casey and his family were leaving for a ski trip in the morning, however, and Joey knew that he was wearing thin his welcome in any case. When he returned to Abigail’s stale, cluttered apartment and found that Piglet and/or Tigger had vomited in several locations, in punitive feline protest of his long day’s absence, he came up against the strangeness and dumbness of his plan to spend two entire weeks on his own.

He immediately made everything even worse by speaking to his mother and admitting that some of his plans had “fallen through” and he was housesitting for her sister “instead.”

“In Abigail’s apartment?” she said. “By yourself? Without her even speaking to me? In New York City? By yourself?”

“Yep,” Joey said.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “you have to tell her that’s not acceptable. Tell her she has to call me right away. Tonight. Right away. Immediately. Non-optional.”

“It’s way too late for that. She’s in France. It’s OK, though. This is a very safe neighborhood.”

But his mother wasn’t listening. She was having words with his father, words Joey couldn’t make out but which sounded somewhat hysterical. And then his dad was on the line.

“Joey? Listen to me. Are you there?”

“Where else would I be?”

“Listen to me. If you don’t have the personal decency to come and spend a few days with your mother in a house that’s meant so much to her and that you’re never going to set foot in again, that’s fine with me. That was your own terrible decision that you can repent at your leisure. And the stuff you left in your room, which we were hoping you’d come and deal with-we’ll just give it to Goodwill, or let the garbagemen haul it away. That’s your loss, not ours. But to be on your own in a city that you’re too young to be on your own in, a city that’s repeatedly been attacked by terrorists, and not just for a night or two but for weeks, is a recipe for making your mother anxious the entire time.”

“Dad, it’s a totally safe neighborhood. It’s Greenwich Village.”

“Well, you’ve ruined her holiday. And you’re going to ruin her last days in this house. I don’t know why I keep expecting more of you at this point, but you are being brutally selfish to a person who loves you more than you can even know.”

“Why can’t she say it herself, then?” Joey said. “Why do you have to say it? How do I even know it’s true?”

“If you had one speck of imagination, you’d know it’s true.”

“Not if she never says it herself! If you’ve got a problem with me, why don’t you tell me what your problem is, instead of always talking about her problems?”

“Because, frankly, I’m not as worried as she is,” his father said. “I don’t think you’re as smart as you think you are, I don’t think you’re aware of all the dangers in the world. But I do think you’re pretty smart and know how to take care of yourself. If you ever did get into trouble, I would hope we’d be the first people you’d call. Otherwise, you’ve made your choice in life, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

“Well-thanks,” Joey said with only partial sarcasm.

“Don’t thank me. I have very little respect for what you’re doing. I’m just recognizing that you’re eighteen years old and free to do what you want. What I’m talking about is my personal disappointment that a child of ours can’t find it in his heart to be kinder to his mother.”

“Why don’t you ask her why not?” Joey countered savagely. “She knows why not! She fucking knows, Dad. Since you’re so wonderfully concerned about her happiness, and all, why don’t you ask her, instead of bothering me?”

“Don’t talk to me that way.”

“Well then don’t talk to me that way.”

“All right, then, I won’t.”

His father seemed glad to let the subject drop, and Joey was also glad. He relished feeling cool and in control of his life, and it was disturbing to discover that there was this other thing in him, this reservoir of rage, this complex of family feelings that could suddenly explode and take control of him. The angry words he’d spoken to his father had felt pre-formed, as if there were an aggrieved second self inside him 24/7, ordinarily invisible but clearly fully sentient and ready to vent itself, at a moment’s notice, in the form of sentences independent of his volition. It made him wonder who his real self was; and this was very disturbing.

“If you change your mind,” his father said when they’d exhausted their limited supplies of Christmas chitchat, “I’m more than happy to buy you a plane ticket so you can come out here for a few days. It would mean the world to your mother. And to me, too. I would like that myself.”

“Thanks,” Joey said, “but, you know, I can’t. I’ve got the cats.”

“You can put them in a kennel, your aunt will be none the wiser. I’ll pay for that, too.”

“OK, maybe. Probably not, but maybe.”

“All right, then, Merry Christmas,” his father said. “Mom says Merry Christmas, too.”

Joey heard her calling it in the background. Why, exactly, did she not get back on the line and say it to him directly? It seemed pretty damning of her. Another useless admission of her guilt.

Though Abigail’s apartment wasn’t tiny, there wasn’t one square inch of it unoccupied by Abigail. The cats patrolled it like her plenipotentiaries, depositing hair everywhere. Her bedroom closet was densely packed with pants and sweaters in messy stacks that bunched up the hanging coats and dresses, and her drawers were unopenably stuffed. Her CDs were all unlistenable chanteuses and New Age burble, shelved in double rows and wedged sideways into every chink. Even her books were occupied with Abigail, covering topics like Flow, creative visualization, and the conquering of self-doubt. There was also all manner of mystical accessories, not just Judaica but Eastern incense burners and elephant-headed statuettes. The one thing there wasn’t much in the way of was food. It was now occurring to Joey, as he paced the kitchen, that unless he wanted to eat pizza three times a day he would actually have to go to a grocery store and shop and cook for himself. Abigail’s own food supplies consisted of rice cakes, forty-seven forms of chocolate and cocoa, and instant ramen noodles of the sort that satisfied him for ten minutes and then left him hungry in a new, gnawing way.

He thought of the spacious house on Barrier Street, he thought of his mother’s outstanding cooking, he thought of caving in and accepting his father’s offer of a plane ticket, but he was determined not to give his hidden self more opportunities to vent itself, and his only option for not continuing to think about St. Paul was to go to Abigail’s brass bed and jerk off, and then to jerk off again while the cats yowled reproachfully outside the bedroom door, and then, still not satisfied, to boot up his aunt’s computer, since he couldn’t get internet on his own computer here, and seek out porn to jerk off to some more. In the way of such things, each free site he happened upon was linked to an even raunchier and more compelling one. Eventually one of these better sites started generating pop-up windows like some Sorcerer’s Apprentice nightmare; it got so bad that he had to shut down the computer. Rebooting impatiently, his abused and sticky dick going limp in his hand, he found the system commandeered by hard-drive-overloading, keyboard-freezing alien software. Never mind that he’d infected his aunt’s computer. Right now he couldn’t get the one thing in the world he wanted, which was to see one more pretty female face distended with ecstasy, so that he could come for a fifth time and try to get a little sleep. He shut his eyes and stroked himself, struggling to summon up enough remembered images to get the job done, but the meowing of the cats was too distracting. He went to the kitchen and cracked open a bottle of brandy that he hoped wouldn’t be too expensive to replace.

Awakening hungover late the next morning, he smelled what he hoped was just cat shit but proved, when he ventured into the cramped and infernally overheated bathroom, to be raw sewage. He called the super, Mr. Jiménez, who arrived two hours later with a wheeled grocery basket filled with plumbing tools.

“This ol’ building gotta lotta problems,” Mr. Jiménez said, shaking his head fatalistically. He told Joey to be sure to lower the bathtub drain stopper and firmly plug the sinks when he wasn’t using them. These instructions were in fact on Abigail’s list, along with complicated protocols of cat nourishment, but Joey, the day before, in his rush to escape the place and get to Casey’s, had forgotten to follow them.

“Lotta, lotta problems,” Mr. Jiménez said, using a plunger to nudge West Village waste back down the drain.

As soon as Joey was alone again and confronting afresh the specter of two weeks of solitude and brandy abuse and/or masturbation, he called Connie and told her he would pay for her bus ticket if she would come out and stay with him. She instantly agreed, except for the part about his paying; and his vacation was saved.

He hired a geek to fix his aunt’s computer and reconfigure his own, he spent sixty dollars on prepared foods at Dean amp; DeLuca, and when he went to Port Authority and met Connie at her gate he didn’t think he’d ever been happier to see her. In the previous month, mentally comparing her to the incomparable Jenna, he’d lost sight of how fine she was herself, in her slender, economical, ardent way. She was wearing an unfamiliar peacoat and walked right up to him and put her face against his face and her wide-open eyes against his eyes, as if pressing herself into a mirror. Some drastic all-organ melting occurred inside him. He was about to get laid about forty times, but it was more than that. It was as if the bus station and all the low-income travelers flowing around the two of them were equipped with Brightness and Color controls that were radically lowered by the mere presence of this girl he’d known forever. Everything seemed faint and far away as he led her through passages and halls that he’d seen in living color not thirty minutes earlier.

In the hours that followed, Connie made several somewhat alarming disclosures. The first came while they were riding the subway down to Charles Street and he asked her how she’d managed to get so much time off at the restaurant-whether she’d found people to cover her shifts.

“No, I just quit,” she said.

“You quit? Isn’t this sort of a bad time of year to do that to them?”

She shrugged. “You needed me here. I told you all you ever have to do is call me.”

His alarm at this disclosure restored the brightness and color of the subway car. It was like the way his brain on pot would jolt back to present awareness after being lost in a deep stoned reverie: he could see that the other subway riders were leading their lives, pursuing their goals, and that he needed to take care to do this, too. Not get sucked too far into something he couldn’t control.

Mindful of one of their crazier phone-sex episodes, in which the lips of her vagina had opened so fantastically wide that they covered his entire face, and his tongue was so long that its tip could reach her vagina’s inscrutable inner end, he had shaved very carefully before leaving for Port Authority. Now that the two of them were together in the flesh, however, these fantasies revealed their absurdity and were disagreeable to recall. In the apartment, instead of taking Connie straight to bed, as he’d done on the weekend in Virginia, he turned on the TV and checked the score of a college bowl game that meant nothing to him. It then seemed a matter of great urgency to check his e-mail and see if any of his friends had written in the last three hours. Connie sat with the cats on the sofa and waited patiently while his computer powered up.

“By the way,” she said, “your mom says to say hi.”

“What?”

“Your mom says hi. She was out chipping ice when I was leaving. She saw me with my bag and asked where I was going.”

“And you told her?”

Connie’s surprise was innocent. “Was I not supposed to? She told me to have a good time and to say hi to you.”

“Sarcastically?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it was, come to think of it. I was just happy she spoke to me at all. I know she hates me. But then I thought maybe she’s finally starting to get used to me.”

“I doubt it.”

“I’m sorry if I said the wrong thing. You know I’d never say the wrong thing if I knew it was wrong. You know that, don’t you?”

Joey stood up from his computer, trying not to be angry. “It’s OK,” he said. “It’s not your fault. Or only a little bit your fault.”

“Baby, are you ashamed of me?”

“No.”

“Are you ashamed of the stuff we said on the phone? Is that what this is?”

“No.”

“I actually am, a little bit. Some of it was pretty sick. I’m not sure I need to do that anymore.”

“You were the one who started it!”

“I know. I know, I know. But you can’t blame me for everything. You can only blame me for half of it.”

As if to acknowledge the truth of this, he ran to where she was sitting on the sofa and knelt down at her feet, bowing his head and resting his hands on her legs. Up close to her jeans like this, her best tight jeans, he thought of the long hours she’d sat on a Greyhound bus while he was watching second-rate college bowl games and talking on the phone with friends. He was in trouble, he was falling into some unanticipated fissure in the ordinary world, and he couldn’t bear to look up at her face. She rested her hands on his head and offered no resistance when, by and by, he pushed forward and pressed his face into her denim-sheathed zipper. “It’s OK,” she knew to say, stroking his hair. “It’s going to be OK, baby. Everything’s going to be OK.”

In his gratitude, he peeled down her jeans and rested his closed eyes against her underpants, and then these, too, he pulled down so he could press his shaved lip and chin into her scratchy hair, which he noticed that she’d trimmed for him. He could feel one of the cats clambering onto his feet, seeking attention. Pussy, pussy.

“I just want to stay here for about three hours,” he said, breathing her smell.

“You can stay there all night,” she said. “I have no plans.”

But then his telephone rang in his pants pocket. Taking it out to shut it off, he saw his old St. Paul number and felt like smashing the phone in his anger at his mother. He spread Connie’s legs and attacked her with his tongue, delving and delving, trying to fill himself with her.

The third and most alarming of her disclosures came during a postcoital interlude at some later evening hour. Hitherto absent neighbors were tromping on the floor above the bed; the cats were yowling bitterly outside the door. Connie was telling him about the SAT, which he’d forgotten she was even going to take, and about her surprise at how much easier the real questions had been than the practice questions in her study books. She was feeling emboldened to apply to schools within a few hours of Charlottesville, including Morton College, which wanted midwestern students for geographical diversity and which she now thought she could get into.

This seemed all wrong to Joey. “I thought you were going to go to the U.,” he said.

“I still might,” she said. “But then I started thinking how much nicer it would be to be closer to you, so we could see each other on weekends. I mean, assuming everything goes well and we still want to. Don’t you think that would be nice?”

Joey untangled his legs from hers, trying to get some clarity. “Definitely maybe,” he said. “But, you know, private schools are incredibly expensive.”

This was true, Connie said. But Morton offered financial aid, and she’d spoken to Carol about her educational trust fund, and Carol had admitted that there was still a lot of money in it.

“Like how much?” Joey said.

“Like a lot. Like seventy-five thousand. It might be enough for three years if I get financial aid. And then there’s the twelve thousand that I’ve saved, and I can work summers.”

“That’s great,” Joey compelled himself to say.

“I was just going to wait until I turned twenty-one, and take the cash. But then I thought about what you said, and I saw you were right about getting a good education.”

“If you went to the U., though,” Joey said, “you could get an education and still have the cash when you were done.”

Upstairs, a television began to bark, and the tromping continued.

“It sounds like you don’t want me near you,” Connie said neutrally, without reproach, just stating a fact.

“No, no,” he said. “Not at all. That might potentially be great. I’m just thinking practically.”

“I already can’t stand being in that house. And then Carol’s going to have her babies, and it’s going to get even worse. I can’t be there anymore.”

Not for the first time, he experienced an obscure resentment of her father. The man had been dead for a number of years now, and Connie had never had a relationship with him and rarely even alluded to his existence, but to Joey this had somehow made him even more of a male rival. He was the man who’d been there first. He’d abandoned his daughter and paid off Carol with a low-rent house, but his money had continued to flow and pay for Connie’s Catholic schooling. He was a presence in her life that had nothing to do with Joey, and though Joey ought to have been glad that she had other resources besides himself-that he didn’t have total responsibility for her-he kept succumbing to moral disapproval of the father, who seemed to Joey the source of all that was amoral in Connie herself, her strange indifference to rules and conventions, her boundless capacity for idolatrous love, her irresistible intensity. And now, on top of all that, Joey resented the father for making her far better off financially than he himself was. That she didn’t care about money even one percent as much as he did only made it worse.

“Do something new to me,” she said into his ear.

“That TV is really bothering me.”

“Do the thing we talked about, baby. We can both listen to the same music. I want to feel you in my ass.”

He forgot about the TV, the blood in his head drowned it out as he did what she had asked for. After the new threshold had been crossed, its resistances negotiated, its distinctive satisfactions noted, he went and washed himself in Abigail’s bathroom and fed the cats and lingered in the living room, feeling the need to establish some distance, however feebly and belatedly. He roused his computer from its sleep, but there was only one new e-mail. It was from an unfamiliar address at duke.edu and had the subject header in town? Not until he’d opened it and begun reading did he fully comprehend that it had come from Jenna. Had been typed, character by character, by Jenna’s privileged fingers.

hello mr bergland. jonathan tells me you’re in the big city, as am i. who knew how many football games there are to watch and how much money young bankers bet on them? not i, said the fly. you may still be doing christmas-y things like your blond protestant progenitors, but nick says to come over if you have questions about wall st, he’s willing to answer them. i suggest you act now while his generous mood (and vacation!) lasts. apparently even goldman shuts down this time of year, who knew. your friend, jenna.

He read the message five times before it began to lose its savor. It seemed to him as clean and fresh as he was feeling dirty and red-eyed. Jenna was being either exceptionally thoughtful or, if she was trying to rub his nose in her tightness with Nick, exceptionally mean. Either way, he could see that he’d succeeded in making an impression on her.

Pot smoke came slipping from the bedroom, followed by Connie, as nude and light-footed as the cats. Joey closed the computer and took a hit from the joint that she held up to his face, and then another hit, and then another, and another, and another, and another, and another.