Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Tell me what you’re wearing,” he said.

“Just clothes.”

“Like what, though?”

“Nothing. Clothes.”

“Connie, I swear I’ll tell them as soon as I get paid. I just have to compartmentalize a little now. This fucking contract is freaking me out, and I can’t face anything else at the moment. So just tell me what you’re wearing, OK? I want to picture you.”

“Clothes.”

“Please?”

But she’d begun to cry. He heard the faintest whimper, the microgram of misery she let herself make audible. “Joey,” she whispered. “Baby. I’m so, so sorry. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just at least wait till I’m back from my trip.”

“I don’t know if I can. I need some tiny thing right now. Some tiny . . . thing that’s real. Some little thing that isn’t nothing. You know I don’t want to make things hard for you. But maybe I can at least tell Carol? I just want somebody to know . I’ll make her swear not to tell anyone.”

“She’ll tell the neighbors. You know she’s a blabber.”

“No, I’ll make her swear.”

“And then somebody’s going to be late with their Christmas cards,” he said wildly, aggrieved not with Connie but with the way the world conspired against him, “and they’ll mention it to my parents. And then—And then—!”

“So what can I have if I can’t have that? What’s some little thing that I can have?”

Her instincts must have told her there was something fishy about his trip to South America. And he was definitely feeling guilty now, but not exactly about Jenna. According to his moral calculus, his having married Connie entitled him to one last grand use of his sexual license, which she’d granted him long ago and never expressly revoked. If he and Jenna happened to click in a big way, he would deal with that later. What was burdening him now was the contrast between the muchness that he possessed—a signed contract that stood to net him $600,000 if Paraguay came through for him; the prospect of a week abroad with the most beautiful girl he’d ever met—and the nullity of what, at this moment, he could think to offer Connie. Guilt had been one of the ingredients of his impulse to marry her, but he was feeling no less guilty five months later. He pulled the wedding ring off his finger and put it back nervously in his mouth, closed his incisors on it, turned it with his tongue. The hardness of eighteen-carat gold was surprising. He’d thought gold was supposed to be a soft metal.

“Tell me something good that’s going to happen,” Connie said.

“We’re going to make a ton of money,” he said, tonguing the ring back behind his molars. “And then we’ll take an amazing trip somewhere and do a second wedding and have a great time. We’ll finish school and start a business. It’s all going to be good.”

The silence with which she greeted this was disbelief-flavored. He didn’t believe his words himself. If only because he was so morbidly afraid to tell his parents about his marriage—had built up the scene of disclosure to such monstrous imaginative proportions—the document that he and Connie had signed in August was seeming more like a suicide pact than a marriage certificate: it extrapolated into a brick wall. Their relationship only made sense in the present, when they were together in person and could merge identities and create their own world.

“I wish you were here,” he said.

“Me too.”

“You should have come out for Christmas. That was my mistake.”

“I would only have given you the flu.”

“Just give me a few more weeks. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

“I don’t know if I can do it. But I’ll try.”

“I am so sorry.”

And he was sorry. But also inexpressibly relieved when she let him get off the phone and turn his thoughts to Jenna. He tongued the wedding ring out of his cheek pocket, intending to dry it off and put it away, but somehow, instead, involuntarily, with a kind of double-clutch of the tongue, he swallowed it.

“Fuck!”

He could feel it near the bottom of his esophagus, an angry hardness down there, the protest of soft tissues. He tried to gag it back up but succeeded only in swallowing it farther down, out of range of feeling it, down with the remains of the twelve-inch Subway sandwich that had been his dinner. He ran to the kitchenette sink and stuck a finger down his throat. He hadn’t vomited since he was a little boy, and the gags that were a prelude to it reminded him of how profoundly he’d come to fear throwing up. The violence of it. It was like trying to shoot himself in the head—he couldn’t make himself do it. He bent over the sink with his mouth hanging open, hoping the contents of his stomach might just come flowing out naturally, unviolently; but of course it didn’t happen.

“Fuck! Fucking coward!”

It was twenty minutes to ten. His flight to Miami left Dulles at eleven the next morning, and no way was he getting on a plane with the ring still in his gut. He paced the stained beige carpeting of his living room and decided that he’d better see a doctor. A quick online search turned up the nearest hospital, on Seminary Road.

He threw on a coat and ran down to Van Dorn Street, looking for a cab to flag, but the night was cold and traffic unusually sparse. He had enough funds in his business account to have bought himself a car, even a very nice one, but since some of the money was Connie’s and the rest of it was a bank loan secured on her collateral, he was being very careful with his spending. He wandered out into the street, as if by presenting himself as a target he might attract more traffic and, thus, a cab. But there were no cabs tonight.

On his phone, as he bent his steps toward the hospital, he found a fresh text from Jenna: excited. u? He texted back: totally. Jenna’s communications with him, the mere sight of her name or her e-mail address, had never ceased to have a Pavlovian effect on his gonads. The effect was very different from the one that Connie had on him (Connie of late was hitting him higher and higher up: in his stomach, his breathing muscles, his heart) but no less insistent and intense. Jenna excited him the way large sums of money did, the way the delicious abdication of social responsibility and embrace of excessive resource consumption did. He knew perfectly well that Jenna was bad news. Indeed, what excited him was wondering if he might become bad enough news himself to get her.

The walk to the hospital took him directly past the blue-mirrored façade of the office building in which he’d spent all of his days and many of his evenings the previous summer, working for an outfit called RISEN (Restore Iraqi Secular Enterprise Now), an LBI subsidiary that had won a no-bid contract to privatize the formerly state-controlled bread-baking industry in newly liberated Iraq. His boss at RISEN had been Kenny Bartles, a well-connected Floridian in his early twenties whom Joey had succeeded in impressing a year earlier, when he’d worked at Jonathan and Jenna’s father’s think tank. Joey’s summer position at the think tank had been one of five directly funded by LBI, and his job, though ostensibly advisory to governmental entities, had consisted entirely of researching ways in which LBI might commercially exploit an American invasion and takeover of Iraq, and then writing up these commercial possibilities as arguments for invading. To reward Joey for doing the primary research on Iraqi bread production, Kenny Bartles had offered him a full-time job with RISEN, over in Baghdad, in the Green Zone. For numerous reasons, including resistance from Connie, warnings from Jonathan, a wish to stay near Jenna, the fear of getting killed, the need to maintain Virginia residency, and a nagging sense that Kenny wasn’t trustworthy, Joey had declined the offer and agreed instead to spend the summer setting up RISEN’s Stateside office and interfacing with the government.