Freedom

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Freedom Page 51

by Jonathan Franzen


  “Can we turn a light on?” he said.

  “It’s too bright. I don’t like it.”

  “Just, like, the bathroom light? It’s pitch-dark in here.”

  She rolled off him and sighed peevishly. “Maybe we should just go to sleep. It’s so late, and I’m totally bloody anyway.”

  He touched his penis and was sorry to find it even more flaccid than it felt. “I might have had a little too much wine.”

  “Me, too. So let’s sleep.”

  “I’m just going to turn the bathroom light on, OK?”

  He did this, and the sight of her sprawled on the bed, confirming her particular identity as the most beautiful girl he knew, gave him hope that all systems were Go again. He crawled to her and commenced a project of kissing every part of her, beginning with her perfect feet and ankles and then moving up her calves and the inside of her thighs . . .

  “I’m sorry, that is just too gross,” she said abruptly, when he’d reached her panties. “Here.” She pushed him onto his back and took his penis in her mouth. Again, at first, he was hard, and her mouth felt heavenly, but then he slipped away a little and softened, and worried about softening and tried to will hardness, will connection, think about whose mouth he was in, and then unfortunately he considered how little fellatio had ever interested him, and wondered what was wrong with him. Jenna’s allure had always largely consisted of the impossibility of imagining that he could have her. Now that she was a tired, drunk, bleeding person crouching between his legs and doing businesslike oral work, she could have been almost anybody, except Connie.

  To her credit, she kept working long after his own faith had died. When she finally stopped, she examined his penis with neutral curiosity; she gave it a wiggle. “Not happening, huh?”

  “I can’t explain it. It’s really embarrassing.”

  “Ha, welcome to my world on Lexapro.”

  After she’d fallen asleep and begun emitting light snores, he lay boiling with shame and regret and homesickness. He was very, very disappointed in himself, although why, exactly, he should have felt so disappointed to fail to fuck a girl he wasn’t in love with and didn’t even like much, he couldn’t have said. He thought about the heroism of his parents’ having stayed together all these years, the mutual need that underlay even the worst of their fighting. He saw his mother’s deference to his father in a new light, and forgave her a little bit. It was unfortunate to have to need somebody, it was evidence of grievous softness, but his self was now seeming to him, for the first time, less than infinitely capable of anything, less than one-hundred-percent bendable to whatever goals he’d set his sights on.

  In the first early austral light of morning, he awoke with a monstrous boner of whose durability he had not the shadow of a doubt. He sat up and looked at the tumble of Jenna’s hair, the parting of her lips, the delicate downy line of her jaw, her almost holy beauty. Now that the light was better, he couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been in the dark. He slid back under the covers and poked her, gently, in the small of her back.

  “Stop it!” she said loudly, immediately. “I’m trying to fall back asleep.”

  He pressed his nose between her shoulder blades and inhaled her patchouli smell.

  “I mean it,” she said, jerking away from him. “It’s not my fault we were up until three.”

  “It wasn’t three,” he murmured.

  “It felt like three. It felt like five!”

  “It’s five now.”

  “Augggh! Don’t even say that! I need to sleep.”

  He lay there interminably, manually monitoring his boner, trying to keep it halfway up. From outside came neighings, distant clangings, the crowing of a rooster, the rural sounds of anywhere. As Jenna continued to sleep, or pretend to, a roiling announced itself in his bowels. Despite his best resistance, the roiling increased until it was an urgency that trounced all others. He padded into the bathroom and locked the door. In his shaving kit was a kitchen fork that he’d brought for the extremely disagreeable task ahead of him. He sat clutching it in a sweaty hand as his shit slid out of him. There was a lot of it, two or three days’ worth. Through the door, he heard the telephone ring, their six-thirty wake-up call.

  He knelt on the cool floor and peered into the bowl at the four large turds afloat in it, hoping to see the glint of gold immediately. The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with the fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of a fork had been a wishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but to lift out each turd and run it through his fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged. Holding his breath, his eyes watering furiously, he grasped the most promising turd and let go of his latest fantasy, which was that one hand would suffice. He had to use both hands, one to hold the shit and the other to pick through it. He retched once, drily, and got to work, pushing his fingers into the soft and body-warm and surprisingly lightweight log of excrement.

  Jenna knocked on the door. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Just a minute!”

  “What are you doing in there? Jerking off?”

  “I said just a minute! I have diarrhea.”

  “Oh, Christ. Can you at least hand me a tampon?”

  “In a minute!”

  Mercifully, the ring turned up in the second of the turds he broke apart. A hardness amid softness, a clean circle within chaos. He rinsed his hands as well as he could in the filthy water, flushed the toilet with his elbow, and bore the ring to the sink. The stench was appalling. He washed his hands and the ring and the faucets three times with lots of soap, while Jenna, outside the door, complained that breakfast was in twenty minutes. And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing at the stench, he was a different person. He could see this person so clearly, it was like standing outside himself. He was the person who’d handled his own shit to get his wedding ring back. This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

  The world immediately seemed to slow down and steady itself, as if it, too, were settling into a new necessity. The first, spirited horse that he was given at the stables shucked him onto the ground almost gently, without ill will, employing no more violence than was strictly necessary to dislodge him from the saddle. He was then put on a twenty-year-old mare from whose broad back he watched Jenna quickly receding on her stallion down a dusty trail, her left arm raised in backhanded farewell or perhaps just good equestrian form, while Félix galloped past Joey to join her. He saw that it would make sense if she ended up fucking Félix instead of him, since Félix was the vastly superior horseman; he experienced this as a relief, maybe even as a mitzvah, since poor Jenna certainly needed fucking by somebody. He himself spent the morning walking, and eventually cantering, with Ellen’s young daughter, Meredith, the novel reader, and listening while she delivered herself of an impressive store of horse lore. It didn’t make him feel soft to do this; it made him feel firm. The Andean air was lovely. Meredith seemed a little sweet on him and gave him patient instruction in how to be less confusing to his horse. Jeremy, when the group collected for midmorning snacks by a spring at which there was no sign of Jenna and Félix, was more viciously instructive to his quiet, red-faced wife, whom h
e apparently blamed for falling so far back behind the leaders. Joey, cupping his clean hands to drink spring water from a stone basin, and no longer caring what Jenna might be up to, felt compassion for Jeremy. It was fun to ride horses in Patagonia—she’d been right about that.

  His feeling of peace lasted until late in the afternoon, when he checked his voice mail from the room phone, at Jenna’s mother’s expense, and found messages from Carol Monaghan and Kenny Bartles. “Hi, hon, it’s your mother-in-law,” Carol said. “How about that, huh? Mother-in-law! Isn’t that a weird thing to be saying. I think it’s fantastic news, but you know what, Joey? I’ll be honest with you. I think if you thought enough of Connie to marry her, and if you thought highly enough of your own maturity to enter into matrimony, you should have the decency to tell your parents. That’s just my two cents’ worth, but I don’t see any reason for you to keep this so hush-hush unless you’re ashamed of Connie. And I really don’t know what to say about a son-in-law who’s ashamed of my daughter. Maybe I’ll just say I’m not a very good secret keeper, I am personally opposed to all this hush-hush. OK? Maybe I’ll just leave it at that.”

  “What the fuck, man?” Kenny Bartles said. “Where the fuck are you? I just sent you like ten e-mails. Are you in Paraguay? Is that why you’re not getting back to me? When the contract says January 31, DOD fucking means January 31. I sure the fuck hope you’ve got something in the pipeline for me, because January 31’s nine days from now. LBI’s already all over my ass because these fucking trucks are breaking down. Some bullshit design flaw in the rear axle, I hope to God you got some rear axles for me. Or whatever, man. Fifteen tons of fucking hood ornaments, I would thank you very much for that. Until you get me some kind of weight, until we can see a date of confirmed delivery of full weight of something, I don’t have a limb to stand on.”

  Jenna returned at sunset, all the more gorgeous for being dust-covered. “I’m in love,” she said. “I’ve met the horse of my dreams.”

  “I have to leave,” Joey said immediately. “I have to go to Paraguay.”

  “What? When?”

  “Tomorrow morning. Tonight, ideally.”

  “Good Lord, are you that pissed off with me? It’s not my fault you lied to me about your riding skills. I didn’t come here to walk. I didn’t come here to waste five nights of double occupancy, either.”

  “Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I’ll pay my half of it back.”

  “Fuck paying it back.” She looked him up and down scornfully. “It’s just, do you think you can find some other way to be a disappointment? I’m not sure you’ve checked every conceivable disappointment box yet.”

  “That’s a really mean thing to say,” he said quietly.

  “Believe me, I can say meaner things, and I intend to.”

  “Also, I didn’t tell you I was married. I’m married. I married Connie. We’re going to live together.”

  Jenna’s eyes widened, as if with pain. “God, you are weird! You are such a fucking weirdo.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I thought you actually understood me. Unlike every other guy I’ve ever met. God, I’m stupid!”

  “You’re not,” he said, pitying her for the disability of her beauty.

  “But if you think I’m sorry to hear you’re married, you are much mistaken. If you think I thought of you as marriage material, my God. I don’t even want to have dinner with you.”

  “Then I don’t want to have dinner with you, either.”

  “Well, great, then,” she said. “You are now officially the worst travel companion ever.”

  While she showered, he packed his bag and then loitered on the bed, thinking that, perhaps, now that the air had been cleared, they might have sex once, to avoid the shame and defeat of not having had it, but when Jenna emerged from the bathroom, in a thick Estancia El Triunfo robe, she correctly read the look on his face and said, “No way.”

  He shrugged. “You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. Go home to your little wife. I don’t like weird people who lie to me. I’m frankly embarrassed to be in the same room with you at this point.”

  And so he went to Paraguay, and it was a disaster. Armando da Rosa, the owner of the country’s largest military-surplus dealership, was a neckless ex-officer with merging white eyebrows and hair that looked dyed with black shoe polish. His office, in a slummy suburb of Asunción, had shinily waxed linoleum floors and a large metal desk behind which a Paraguayan flag hung limply on a wooden pole. Its back door opened onto acres of weed and dirt and sheds with rusting corrugated roofs, patrolled by big dogs that were all fang and skeleton and spiky hair and looked as if they’d barely survived electrocution. The impression Joey got from da Rosa’s rambling monologue, in English little better than Joey’s Spanish, was that he had suffered a career setback some years earlier and had escaped court-martial through the efforts of certain loyal officer friends of his, and had received instead, by way of justice, the concession to sell surplus and decommissioned military gear. He was wearing fatigues and a sidearm that made Joey uneasy to walk in front of him. They pushed through weeds ever higher and woodier and more buzzing with outsized South American hornets, until, by a rear fence crowned saggily with concertina, they reached the mother lode of Pladsky A10 truck parts. The good news was that there were certainly a lot of them. The bad news was that they were in abominable condition. A line of rust-rimmed truck hoods lay semi-fallen like toppled dominoes; axles and bumpers were jumbled in piles like giant old chicken bones; engine blocks were strewn in the weeds like the droppings of a T. rex; conical mounds of more severely rusted smaller parts had wildflowers growing on their slopes. Moving through the weeds, Joey turned up nests of mud-caked and/or broken plastic parts, snake pits of hoses and belts cracked by the weather, and decaying cardboard parts cartons with Polish words on them. He was fighting tears of disappointment at the sight of it.

  “Lot of rust here,” he said.

  “What is rust?”

  He broke a large flake of it off the nearest wheel hub. “Rust. Iron oxide.”

  “This happens because of the rain,” da Rosa explained.

  “I can give you ten thousand dollars for the lot of it,” Joey said. “If it’s more than thirty tons, I can give you fifteen. That’s a lot better than scrap value.”

  “Why you want these shit?”

  “I’ve got a fleet of trucks I need to maintain.”

  “You, you are a very young man. Why you want these?”

  “Because I’m stupid.”

  Da Rosa gazed off into the tired, buzzing second-growth jungle beyond the fence. “Can’t give you everything.”

  “Why not?”

  “This trucks, the Army not use. But they can use if there is war. Then my parts are valuable.”

  Joey closed his eyes and shuddered at the stupidity of this. “What war? Who are you going to fight? Bolivia?”

  “I am saying if there is war we need parts.”

  “These parts are fucking useless. I’m offering you fifteen thousand dollars for it. Quince mil dólares.”

  Da Rosa shook his head. “Cincuenta mil.”

  “Fifty thousand dollars? No. Fucking. Way. You understand? No way.”

  “Treinta.”

  “Eighteen. Diez y ocho.”

  “Veinticinco.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Joey said, turning back in the direction of the office. “I’ll think about giving you twenty, if it’s over thirty tons. Veinte, all right? That’s my last offer.”

  For a minute or two, after shaking da Rosa’s oily hand and stepping back into the taxi he’d left waiting in the road, he felt good about himself, about the way he’d handled the negotiation, and about his bravery in traveling to Paraguay to conduct it. What his father didn’t understand about him, what only Connie really did, was that he had an excellent cool head for business. He suspected that he got his instincts from his mother, who was a born competitor, and it gave him a particular filial s
atisfaction to exercise them. The price he’d extracted from da Rosa was far lower than he’d allowed himself to hope for, and even with the cost of paying a local shipper to load the parts into containers and get them to the airport, even with the staggering sum that it would then cost him to fly the containers by charter to Iraq, he would still be within parameters that would assure him obscene profit. But as the taxi wove through older, colonial portions of Asunción, he began to fear that he couldn’t do it. Could not send such arrantly near-worthless crap to American forces trying to win a tough unconventional war. Although he hadn’t created the problem—Kenny Bartles had done that, by choosing the obsolete, bargain-basement Pladsky to fulfill his own contract—the problem was nonetheless his. And it created an even worse problem: counting the costs of start-up and the paltry but expensive shipment of parts from Lodz, he’d already spent all of Connie’s money and half of the first installment of his bank loan. Even if he were somehow able to back out now, he would leave Connie wiped out and himself in crippling debt. He turned the wedding ring on his finger nervously, turned it and turned it, wanting to put it in his mouth for comfort but not trusting himself not to swallow it again. He tried to tell himself that there must be more A10 parts out there somewhere, in some neglected but rainproof depot in Eastern Europe, but he’d already spent long days searching the internet and making phone calls, and the chances weren’t good.

 

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