“You shouldn’t be making eight thousand dollars a month,” his dad said. “I know you think you’re very smart, but there is something wrong with a world where an unskilled nineteen-year-old can do that. Your situation
“I don’t even want to know what you’re doing anymore. It makes me too sick. You can tell it to your mother, but do me a favor and leave me out.”
Joey smiled fiercely to keep himself from crying. He was experiencing a hurt that felt structural, as if he and his dad had each chosen their politics for the sole purpose of hating the other, and the only way out of it was disengagement. Not telling his dad anything, not seeing him again unless he absolutely had to, sounded good to him, too. He wasn’t even angry, he just wanted to leave the hurt behind. He taxied home to his furnished studio apartment, which his mom had helped him rent, and sent messages to both Connie and Jenna. Connie must have gone to bed early, but Jenna called him back at midnight. She wasn’t the world’s best listener, but she got enough of the gist of his rotten Fourth to assure him that the world wasn’t fair and was never going to be fair, that there would always be big winners and big losers, and that she personally, in the tragically finite life that she’d been given, preferred to be a winner and to surround herself with winners. When he then confronted her with not having called him from McLean, she said she hadn’t thought it would be “safe” to see him for dinner.
“Why wouldn’t it have been safe?”
“You’re kind of a bad habit of mine,” she said. “I need to keep it in check. Need to keep my eyes on the prize.”
“It doesn’t sound like you and the prize are having much fun together.”
“The prize is extremely busy trying to take his boss’s job. That’s what they do in that world, they try to eat each other alive. It’s surprisingly un-frowned upon. But also apparently hugely time-consuming. A girl likes to be taken out now and then, especially in her first summer after college.”
“That’s why you need to come down here,” he said. “I’ll definitely take you out.”
“No doubt. But my boss has got wall-to-wall jobs in the Hamptons for the next three weeks. My services as a clipboard-holder are required. Too bad you have to work so hard yourself, or I could try to sneak you into something.”
He’d lost count of the half dates and half promises she’d made since he’d known her. None of the fun things she suggested ever quite came to pass, and he could never quite figure out why she bothered to keep suggesting them. Sometimes he thought it had to do with her competing with her brother. Or maybe it was because Joey was Jewish and pleasing to her father, who was the one person she never snarked. Or maybe she was fascinated by his relationship with Connie and took a queenly relish in the nuggets of private info that he laid at her feet. Or maybe she was genuinely into him and wanted to see what he was like when he was older and how much money he could make. Or maybe all of the above. Jonathan had no insights to offer except that his sister was bad news, a freak from Planet Spoiled, with the ethical consciousness of sea sponge, but Joey thought he could glimpse deeper things in her. He refused to believe that someone disposing of the power of so much beauty could be devoid of interesting ideas of how to use it.
The next day, when he told Connie about his fight with his father, she didn’t get into the merits of their respective arguments but went straight to his hurt and told him how sorry she was. She’d gone back to work as a waitress and seemed willing to wait all summer to see him again. Kenny Bartles had promised him the last two weeks of August as a paid vacation if he agreed to work every weekend before then, and he didn’t want Connie around to complicate things if Jenna came down to Washington; he didn’t see how he’d be able to slip away for an evening or two or three without telling Connie the kind of arrant lie that he was trying to keep to a minimum.
The equanimity with which she’d accepted the delay he attributed to Celexa. But then one night, during a routine telephone check-in, while he was drinking beer in his apartment, she fell into an especially protracted silence that ended with her saying, “Baby, there are a few things I need to tell you.” The first thing was that she’d stopped taking her medication. The second thing was that the reason she’d stopped taking it was that she’d been sleeping with her restaurant manager and was tired of not coming. She confessed this with curious detachment, as if speaking of some girl who wasn’t her, a girl whose doings were regrettable but understandable. The manager, she said, was married and had two teenage kids and lived on Hamline Avenue. “I thought I’d better tell you,” she said. “I can stop it if you want me to.”
