Freedom полностью

Joey shook his hand and then proceeded to worry that Jonathan was right about the WMDs. Not that he cared about a hundred dollars; he was going to be making 8K a month with Kenny Bartles. But Jonathan, a political news junkie, seemed so very sure of himself that Joey wondered if he’d somehow missed the joke in his dealings with his think-tank bosses and Kenny Bartles: had failed to notice them winking or ironically inflecting their voices when they spoke of reasons beyond their own personal or corporate enrichment for invading Iraq. In Joey’s view, the think tank did indeed have a hush-hush motive for supporting the invasion: the protection of Israel, which, unlike the United States, was within striking distance of even the crappy sort of missile that Saddam’s scientists were capable of building. But he’d believed that the neocons at least were serious in fearing for Israel’s safety. Now, already, as March turned to April, they were waving their hands and acting as if it didn’t even matter if any WMDs came to light; as if the freedom of the Iraqi people were the main issue. And Joey, whose own interest in the war was primarily financial, but who’d taken moral refuge in the thought that wiser minds than his had better motives, began to feel that he’d been suckered. It didn’t make him any less eager to cash in, but it did make him feel dirtier about it.

In his soiled mood, he found it easier to talk to Jenna about his summer plans. Jonathan, among other things, was jealous of Kenny Bartles (he got pissy whenever he heard Joey talking on the phone to Kenny), whereas Jenna had dollar signs in her eyes and was all for making killings. “Maybe I’ll see you in Washington this summer,” she said. “I’ll come down from New York and you can take me out to dinner to celebrate my engagement.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds like a fun evening.”

“I have to warn you I have very expensive taste in restaurants.”

“How’s Nick going to feel about me taking you to dinner?”

“Just one less bite out of his wallet. It would never occur to him to be afraid of you. But how’s your girlfriend going to feel?”

“She’s not the jealous type.”

“Right, jealousy’s so unattractive, ha ha.”

“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

“Yes, and there’s quite a bit she doesn’t know, isn’t there? How many little slips have you had now?”

“Five.”

“That is four more than Nick would get away with before I surgically removed his testicles.”

“Yeah, but if you didn’t know about it, it wouldn’t hurt you, right?”

“Believe me,” Jenna said, “I would know about it. That’s the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.”

This was interesting to hear, since it was Jenna who had urged him, the previous fall, to avail himself of such casual opportunities as came his way at school, and it was Jenna to whom he’d imagined he was proving something by doing so. She’d given him instruction in the art of cutting dead, in the dining hall, a girl from whose bed he’d crawled four hours earlier. “Don’t be such a tender daisy,” she’d said. “They want you to ignore them. You’re not doing them any favors if you don’t. You need to pretend you’ve never seen them in your life. The last thing in the world they want is you mooning around or acting guilty. They’re sitting there praying to Jesus that you won’t embarrass them.” She’d clearly been speaking from personal experience, but he hadn’t quite believed her until the first time he’d tried it. His life had been easier ever since. Though he did Connie the kindness of not mentioning his indiscretions, he continued to think she wouldn’t much care. (The person he actively had to hide from was Jonathan, who had Arthurian notions of romantic comportment and had torn into Joey furiously, as if he were Connie’s older brother or knightly guardian, when word of a hookup had leaked back to him. Joey had sworn to him that not even a zipper had been lowered, but this falsehood was too absurd not to smirk at, and Jonathan had called him a dick and a liar, unworthy of Connie.) Now he felt as if Jenna, with her shifting standard of fidelity, had suckered him in much the same way his bosses at the think tank had. She’d done for sport, as a meanness to Connie, what the warmongers had done for profit. But it didn’t make him any less keen to buy her a great dinner or to earn, at RISEN, the money to do it.