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
“No, I’m sorry, what is wrong with
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
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.
