Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

She was wearing a linen skirt and a sleeveless blue blouse with sweat circles reaching nearly to her waist. Beside her was a large suitcase and a small pile of outer garments.

“Well, well, well,” he said.

“I’ve been evicted,” she said with a sad, meek smile. “Thanks to you.”

His dick, if no other part of him, was pleased with this ratification of its divining powers.

Jonathan and Jenna’s mother, Tamara, had hurt herself in Aspen. Trying to avoid collision with a hotdogging teenager, she’d crossed her skis and snapped two bones in her left leg, above the boot, and thereby disqualified herself from joining Jenna on Jenna’s January trip to ride horses in Patagonia. To Jenna, who’d witnessed Tamara’s wipeout and pursued the teenager and reported him while Jonathan attended to their fallen mother, the accident was just the latest entry in a long list of things going wrong in her life since her graduation from Duke the previous spring; but to Joey, who’d been talking to Jenna twice or thrice daily in recent weeks, the accident was a much-needed little gift from the gods—the breakthrough he’d been waiting two-plus years for. Jenna, after graduating, had moved to Manhattan to work for a famous party planner and try living with her almost-fiancé, Nick, but in September she’d rented her own apartment, and in November, yielding to relentless overt pressure from her family and to more subtle underminings from Joey, who’d made himself her Designated Understander, she declared her relationship with Nick null and void and unrevivable. By that point, she was taking a highish dose of Lexapro and had nothing in her life to look forward to except riding horses in Patagonia, which Nick had repeatedly promised to do with her and repeatedly postponed, citing his heavy work load at Goldman Sachs. It happened that Joey had ridden a horse or two, albeit clumsily, during his high-school summer in Montana. From the high volume of Jenna’s calls and texts to his cell phone, he already suspected that he’d been promoted to the status of transitional object, if not to potential full-on boyfriend, and his last doubts were dispelled when she invited him to share the luxurious Argentinean resort room that Tamara had booked before the accident. Since it further happened that Joey had business in nearby Paraguay and knew that he would probably end up having to go there, whether he wanted to or not, he said yes to Jenna without hesitation. The only real argument against traveling with her in Argentina was the fact that, five months earlier, at the age of twenty, in a fit of madness in New York City, he’d gone to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan and married Connie Monaghan. But this was by no means the worst of his worries, and he chose, for the moment, to overlook it.

The night before he flew to Miami, where Jenna was visiting a grandparent and would meet him at the airport, he called Connie in St. Paul with the news of his impending travel. He was sorry to have to obfuscate and dissemble with her, but his South American plans did give him a good excuse to further postpone her coming east and moving into the highway-side apartment that he’d rented in a charmless corner of Alexandria. Until a few weeks ago, his excuse had been college, but he was now taking a semester off to manage his business, and Connie, who was miserable at home with Carol and Blake and her infant twin half sisters, couldn’t understand why she still wasn’t allowed to live with her husband.

“I also don’t see why you’re going to Buenos Aires,” she said, “if your supplier’s in Paraguay.”

“I want to practice my Spanish a little,” Joey said, “before I really have to use it. Everybody’s talking about what a great city Buenos Aires is. I have to fly through there anyway.”

“Well, do you want to take a whole week and have our honeymoon there?”

Their missing honeymoon was one of several sore subjects between them. Joey repeated his official line on it, which was that he was too freaked out about his business to relax on a vacation, and Connie fell into one of the silences that she deployed in lieu of reproach. She still never reproached him directly.

“Literally anywhere in the world,” he said. “Once I’ve been paid, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go.”

“I’d settle for just living with you and waking up next to you, actually.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “That would be great. I’m just under such incredible pressure now, I don’t think I’d be fun to be around.”

“You don’t have to be fun,” she said.

“We’ll talk about it when I get back, OK? I promise.”

In the telephonic background, in St. Paul, he faintly heard the squeal of a one-year-old. It wasn’t Connie’s kid, but it was close enough to make him nervous. He’d seen her only once since August, in Charlottesville, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Christmastime (another sore subject) he’d spent moving from Charlottesville to Alexandria and making appearances in Georgetown with his family. He’d told Connie that he was working hard on his government contract, but in fact he’d killed whole stretches of days watching football, listening to Jenna on the phone, and generally feeling doomed. Connie might have convinced him to let her fly out anyway if she hadn’t been knocked flat by the flu. It had troubled him to hear her feeble voice and know she was his wife and not rush to her side, but he’d needed to go to Poland instead. What he’d discovered in Lodz and Warsaw, during three frustrating days with an American expat “interpreter” whose Polish turned out to be excellent for ordering in restaurants but heavily dependent on an electronic translation device when dealing with hardened Slavic businessmen, had so dismayed and frightened him that, in the weeks since his return, he’d been unable to focus his mind on business for more than five minutes at a time. Everything depended on Paraguay now. And it was much more pleasant to imagine the bed that he was going to share with Jenna than to think about Paraguay.

“Are you wearing your wedding ring?” Connie asked him.

“Um—no,” he said before thinking better of it. “It’s in my pocket.”

“Hm.”

“I’m putting it on right now,” he said, moving toward the coin dish on his nightstand where he’d left the ring. His nightstand was a cardboard box. “It slips right on, it’s great.”

“I’ve got mine on,” Connie said. “I love having it on. I try to remember to put it on my right hand when I’m not in my room, but sometimes I forget.”

“Don’t be forgetting. That’s not good.”

“It’s OK, baby. Carol doesn’t notice stuff like that. She doesn’t even like to look at me. We’re unpleasing to each other’s sight.”

“We really need to be careful, though, OK?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just until I tell my parents. Then you can wear it all you want. I mean, we’ll both be wearing them all the time then. That’s what I meant.”

It was hard to compare silences, but the one she deployed now felt especially grievous, especially sad. He knew it was killing her to keep their marriage secret, and he kept hoping that the prospect of telling his parents would become less scary to him, but as the months went by the prospect only got scarier. He tried to put his wedding ring on his finger, but it stuck on the last knuckle. He’d bought it in a hurry, in August, in New York, and it was slightly too small. He put it in his mouth instead, probing its compass with his tongue as if it were an orifice of Connie’s, and this turned him on a little. Connected him with her, took him back to August and the craziness of what they’d done. He slipped the ring, drool-slick, onto his finger.