Freedom полностью

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.”