Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

The wedding ring was still stalled somewhere in his abdomen as he breasted through the churning warm sea of travelers at Miami International and located Jenna in the cooler, calm bay of a business-class lounge. She was wearing sunglasses and was additionally defended by an iPod and the latest Condé Nast Traveler . She gave Joey a once-over, head to toe, the way a person might confirm that a product she’d ordered had arrived in acceptable condition, and then removed her hand luggage from the seat beside her and—a little reluctantly, it seemed—pulled the iPod wires from her ears. Joey sat down smiling helplessly at the amazement of traveling with her. He’d never flown business-class before.

“What?” she said.

“Nothing, I’m just smiling.”

“Oh. I thought there was some schmutz on my face or something.”

Several men in the vicinity were checking him out resentfully. He forced himself to stare down each of them in turn, to mark Jenna as claimed. It was going to be tiring, he realized, to have to do this everywhere they went in public. Men sometimes stared at Connie, too, but usually seemed to accept, without undue regret, that she was his. With Jenna, already, he had the sense that other men’s interest was not deterred by his presence but continued to seek ways around him.

“I have to warn you I’m a little grouchy,” she said. “I’m getting my period, and I just spent three days among the ancients, looking at pictures of their grandkids. Also, I can’t believe it, but they make you pay for alcohol in this lounge now. I was like, I could have sat in the gate area and done that .”

“Do you want me to get you something?”

“Actually, yes. I’d like a double Tanqueray and tonic.”

It seemed not to occur to her, or, fortunately, to the bartender, that he was under age. Returning with drinks and a lightened wallet, he found Jenna with her earphones in again and her face in her magazine. He wondered if she were somehow mistaking him for Jonathan, so little was she making of his arrival. He took out the novel his own sister had given him for Christmas, Atonement , and struggled to interest himself in its descriptions of rooms and plantings, but his mind was on the text that Jonathan had sent him that afternoon: hope it’s fun looking at a horse’s ass all day. It was the first he’d heard from him since calling him preemptively, three weeks earlier, with word of his travel plans. “So I guess everything’s come up roses for you,” Jonathan had said. “First the insurgency and now my mom’s leg.”

“It’s not like I wanted her to break her leg,” Joey had said.

“No, I’m sure. I’m sure you wanted the Iraqis to welcome us with wreaths of flowers, too. I’m sure you’re very sorry about how fucked up everything’s gotten. Just not quite sorry enough to not cash in.”

“What was I supposed to do? Say no? Make her go by herself? She’s actually pretty depressed. She’s really looking forward to this trip.”

“And I’m sure Connie understands about that. I’m sure you’ve gotten her total seal of approval.”

“If that were any of your business, I might dignify it with an answer.”

“Hey, you know what? It is totally my business if I have to lie to her about it. I already have to lie about my opinion of Kenny Bartles whenever I talk to her, because you took her money and I don’t want her worrying. And now I’m supposed to lie about this, too?”

“How about just not talking to her constantly instead?”

“It’s not constantly, asshole. I’ve talked to her, like, three times in the last three months. She considers me a friend, all right? And apparently entire weeks can go by without her hearing anything from you. So what am I supposed to do? Not pick up when she calls? She calls me for information about you. Which, there’s something a little weird about this picture, right? Since she is still your girlfriend.”

“I’m not going to Argentina to sleep with your sister.”

“Ha. Ha. Ha.”

“I swear to God, I’m going as a friend. The same way you and Connie are friends. Because your sister’s depressed and it’s a nice thing to do. But Connie’s not going to understand that, so if you could just, like, not mention it, if she calls, that would be the kindest thing you could do for all concerned.”

“You’re so full of shit, Joey, I don’t even want to talk to you anymore. Something’s happened to you that makes me literally sick to my stomach. If Connie calls me while you’re gone, I don’t know what I’m going to say. I probably won’t tell her anything. But the only reason she calls me is she doesn’t hear enough from you, and I’m sick of being in the middle like that. So you do whatever the fuck you want, just leave me out of it.”

Having sworn to Jonathan that he wouldn’t have sex with Jenna, Joey felt insured against every contingency in Argentina. If nothing happened, it would prove him honorable. If something did happen, he would not have to be chagrined and disappointed that something hadn’t. It would answer the question, still open in his mind, of whether he was a soft person or a hard person, and what the future might hold for him. He was very curious about this future. Judging from his nasty text message, Jonathan wasn’t looking to be a part of it either way. And the message definitely did sting, but Joey, for his part, was sick of his friend’s relentless moralizing.

On the plane, in the privacy of their vast seats, and under the influence of a second large drink, Jenna deigned to remove her sunglasses and converse. Joey told her about his recent trip to Poland, chasing the mirage of Pladsky A10 parts, and his discovery that all but a very few of the seeming scores of suppliers advertising these parts on the internet were either bogus or sourced from the same single outlet in Lodz, where Joey and his almost worse than useless interpreter had found shockingly little to buy at any price. Taillights, mudguards, push plates, some battery boxes and grilles, but very few of the engine and suspension parts that were critical for maintaining a vehicle out of production since 1985.

“The internet’s fucked up, isn’t it?” Jenna said. She’d picked all the almonds out of her own nut bowl and was now picking them out of Joey’s.

“ So fucked up, so fucked up,” he said.

“Nick always said international e-commerce is for losers. E-anything-financial, really, unless the system’s proprietary. He says free information’s by definition worthless. Like, if a Chinese supplier is listed on the internet, you can tell, just from that, that it can’t be any good.”

“Right, I know that, I’m very aware of that,” Joey said, not wanting to hear about Nick. “But truck parts should be more like eBay or something. Just an efficient way to connect buyers with sellers they might not be able to find otherwise.”

“All I know is Nick never buys anything on the internet. He doesn’t even trust PayPal. And he’s, you know, pretty well up on these things.”

“Well, and that’s why I went to Poland. Because you have to do these things in person.”

“Right, that’s what Nick says, too.”

Her somewhat slack-jawed chewing of the almonds was irritating him, as were her fingers, lovely though they were, as they rooted methodically in his nut bowl. “I thought you didn’t like to drink,” he said.

“Heh-heh. I’ve been working on increasing my tolerance lately. I’ve made great strides.”

“Well, anyway,” he said, “I need some good things to happen in Paraguay, or I don’t know what I’m going to do. I spent a fortune on shipping that Polish crap, and now I’m hearing from my partner, Kenny, that there wasn’t even enough to get partially paid for. It’s sitting in some goat pasture outside Kirkuk, probably not even guarded. And Kenny’s pissed off with me because I didn’t send some other kind of truck parts instead, even though they’re totally useless if they’re not from the same model and manufacturer. Kenny’s like, Just send me weight, because we get paid by weight, if you can believe that. And I’m like, These are thirty-year-old trucks that weren’t built for dust storms or Middle Eastern summers, they’re going to be breaking down, and when you’re trying to run convoys through an insurgency, you do not want your truck to be breaking down. And meanwhile I’ve got plenty of outflow but no income.”