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,