Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

The storm of shit he’d taken from his dad for doing this was one of the reasons he couldn’t face telling his parents about his marriage, and one of the reasons he’d been trying, ever since, to see how ruthless he had it in him to be. He wanted to get rich enough and tough enough fast enough that he would never again have to take shit from his dad. To be able just to laugh and shrug and walk away: to be more like Jenna, who, for example, knew almost everything about Connie except the fact that Joey had married her, and who nevertheless considered Connie, at most, an adder of thrill and piquancy to the games she’d like to play with Joey. Jenna took special pleasure in asking him if his girlfriend knew how much he was talking to somebody else’s girlfriend, and in hearing him recount the lies he’d told. She was even worse news than her brother had made her out to be.

At the hospital, Joey saw why the surrounding streets had been so empty: the entire population of Alexandria had converged on the emergency room. It took him twenty minutes just to register, and the desk nurse was unimpressed with the severe stomach pain he feigned in hopes of moving to the head of the line. During the hour and a half that he then sat breathing in the coughings and sneezings of his fellow Alexandrians, watching the last half hour of ER on the waiting-room TV, and texting UVA friends who were still enjoying their winter break, he considered how much easier and cheaper it would be to simply buy a replacement wedding ring. It would cost no more than $300, and Connie would never know the difference. That he felt so romantically attached to an inanimate object—that he felt he owed it to Connie to retrieve this particular ring, which she’d helped him pick out on 47th Street one sweltering afternoon—did not bode well for his project of making himself bad news.

The ER doc who finally saw him was a watery-eyed young white guy with a nasty razor burn. “Nothing to worry about,” he assured Joey. “These things take care of themselves. The object should pass right through without you even noticing.”

“I’m not worried about my health,” Joey said. “I’m worried about getting the ring back tonight.”

“Hm,” the doctor said. “This is an object of actual value?”

“Great value. And I’m assuming there’s some—procedure?”

“If you must have the object, the procedure is to wait a day or two or three. And then . . .” The doctor smiled to himself. “There’s an old ER joke about the mother who comes in with a toddler who’s swallowed some pennies. She asks the doctor if the kid’s going to be OK, and the doctor tells her, ‘Just be sure to watch for any change in his stool.’ Really silly joke. But that’s your procedure, if you must have the object.”

“But I’m talking about a procedure you could do right now.”

“And I’m telling you there isn’t one.”

“Hey, your joke was really funny,” Joey said. “It really made me laugh. Ha ha. You really told it well.”

The charge for this consultation was $275. Being uninsured—the Commonwealth of Virginia considered insurance by one’s parents a form of financial support—he was obliged to present plastic for it on the spot. Unless he happened to become constipated, which was the opposite of the problem he associated with Latin America, he could now look forward to some very smelly beginnings to his days with Jenna.

Returning to his apartment, well after midnight, he packed for his trip and then lay in bed and monitored the progress of his digestion. He’d been digesting things every minute of his life without paying the slightest attention to it. How odd it was to think that his stomach lining and his mysterious small intestine were as much a part of him as his brain or tongue or penis. As he lay and strained to feel the subtle ticks and sighs and repositionings in his abdomen, he had a premonition of his body as a long-lost relative waiting at the end of a long road ahead of him. A shady relative whom he was glimpsing for the first time only now. At some point, hopefully still far in the future, he would have to rely on his body, and at some point after that, hopefully still farther in the future, his body was going to let him down, and he would die. He imagined his soul, his familiar personal self, as a stainless gold ring slowly making its way down through ever-stranger and fouler-smelling country, toward shit-smelling death. He was alone with his body; and since, weirdly, he was his body, this meant he was entirely alone.

He missed Jonathan. In a funny way, his impending trip was a worse betrayal of Jonathan than of Connie. The hiccups of their first Thanksgiving notwithstanding, they’d become best friends in the last two years, and it was only in recent months, beginning with Joey’s business deal with Kenny Bartles and culminating in Jonathan’s discovery of his travel plans with Jenna, that their friendship had soured. Until then, time after time, Joey had been pleasantly surprised by the evidence of how genuinely fond of him Jonathan was. Fond of all of him, not just of the parts of himself that he saw fit to present to the world as a reasonably cool UVA student. The biggest and most pleasant surprise had been how much Jonathan dug Connie. Indeed, it was fair to say that, without Jonathan’s validation of their coupledom, Joey would not have gone so far as to marry her.

Aside from his preferred porn sites, which themselves were touchingly tame in comparison to the ones to which Joey turned in moments of need, Jonathan had no sex life. He was a bit of a wonk, yes, but far wonkier dudes than he were coupling up. He was just terminally awkward with girls, awkward to the point of not being interested, and Connie, when he finally met her, turned out to be the one girl he could relax and be himself around. No doubt it helped that she was so deeply and exclusively into Joey, thus relieving Jonathan of the stress of trying to impress her or of worrying that she wanted something from him. Connie behaved like an older sister with him, a much nicer and more interested older sister than Jenna. While Joey was studying or working at the library, she played Jonathan’s video games with him for hours, laughing congenially at her losses and listening, in her limpid way, to his explications of their features. Though Jonathan ordinarily made a fetish of his bed and his special childhood pillow and his nightly need for nine hours of sleep, he discreetly vacated the dorm room before Joey even had to ask him for some privacy. After Connie returned to St. Paul, Jonathan told him he thought his girlfriend was amazing , totally hot but also easy to be with, and this made Joey, for the first time, proud of her. He stopped thinking of her so much as a weakness of his, a problem to be solved at his earliest convenience, and more as a girlfriend whose existence he didn’t mind owning up to with his other friends. Which, in turn, made him all the angrier about his mother’s veiled but implacable hostility.

“One question, Joey,” his mother had said on the telephone, during the weeks when he and Connie were housesitting for his aunt Abigail. “Am I allowed one question?”

“Depends on what it is,” Joey said.

“Are you and Connie having any fights?”

“Mom, no, I’m not going to talk about this.”

“You may be curious why that’s the one question I’m asking. Maybe you’re a tiny bit curious?”

“Nope.”

“It’s because you should be having fights, and there’s something wrong if you’re not.”

“Yeah, by that definition, you and dad must be doing everything right.”

“Ha-ha-ha! That’s really hilarious, Joey.”

“Why should I have fights? People have fights when they don’t get along.”