Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“Exactly. It’s outrageous, don’t you think? How much they owe us.”

He considered pointing out how difficult it would be for the Treasury to refund, say, the money that had been spent on winning World War II, but Ellen didn’t strike him as a person you could argue with, and he was feeling carsick. He could hear Jenna speaking Spanish excellent enough that, having taken it only through high school, he couldn’t catch much beyond her repetition of caballos this and caballos that. Sitting with his eyes closed, in a van full of jerks, he was visited by the thought that the three people he most loved (Connie), liked (Jonathan), and respected (his father) were all at least very unhappy with him, if not, by their own report, sickened by him. He couldn’t free himself of the thought; it was like some kind of conscience reporting for duty. He willed himself not to barf, because wouldn’t barfing now, a mere thirty-six hours after a good barf would have been very useful to him, be the height of irony? He’d imagined that the road to being fully hard, to being bad news, would get steeper and more arduous only gradually, with many compensatory pleasures along the way, and that he would have time to acclimate to each stage of it. But here he was, at the very beginning of the road, already feeling as if he might not have the stomach for it.

Estancia El Triunfo was undeniably paradisiacal, however. Nestled beside a clear-running stream, surrounded by yellow hills rolling up toward a purple ridgeline of sierras, were lushly watered gardens and paddocks and fully modernized stone guesthouses and stables. Joey and Jenna’s room had deliciously needless expanses of cool tiled floor and big windows open to the rushing of the stream below them. He’d feared there would be two beds, but either Jenna had intended to share a king-size with her mother or she’d changed the reservation. He stretched out on the deep-red brocade bedspread, sinking into its thousand-dollar-a-night plushness. But Jenna was already changing into riding clothes and boots. “Félix is going to show me the horses,” she said. “Do you want to come along?”

He didn’t want to, but he knew he’d better do it anyway. Their shit still stinks was the phrase in his head as they approached the fragrant stables. In golden evening light, Félix and a groom were leading out a splendid black stallion by its bridle. It frisked and skittered and bucked a little, and Jenna went straight over to it, looking rapt in a way that reminded him of Connie and made him like her better, and reached up to stroke the side of its head.

“Cuidado,” Félix said.

“It’s OK,” Jenna said, looking intently into the horse’s eye. “He likes me already. He trusts me, I can tell. Don’t you, baby?”

“¿Deseas que algo algo algo?” Félix said, tugging on the bridle.

“Speak English, please,” Joey said coldly.

“He’s asking if I want them to saddle him,” Jenna explained, and then spoke rapidly in Spanish to Félix, who objected that algo algo algo peligroso; but she was not a person to be gainsaid. While the groom pulled rather brutally on the bridle, she grasped the horse’s mane and Félix put his hairy hands on her thighs and boosted her up onto the horse’s bare back. It spread its legs and pranced sideways, straining against the bridle, but Jenna was already leaning far forward, her chest in its mane, her face near its ear, murmuring soothing nothings. Joey was totally impressed. After the horse had been calmed down, she took the reins and cantered off to the far corner of the paddock and engaged in recondite equestrian negotiations, compelling the horse to stand in place, to step backwards, to lower and raise its head.

The groom remarked something to Félix about the chica, something husky and admiring.

“My name’s Joey, by the way,” Joey said.

“Hello,” Félix said, his eyes on Jenna. “You want a horse, too?”

“I’m fine for now. Just do me a favor and speak English, though, OK?”

“As you like.”

It did Joey’s heart good to see how happy Jenna was on the horse. She’d been so negative and depressive, not only on the trip but on the phone for months before it, that he’d begun to wonder if there was anything at all to like about her besides her beauty. He could see now that she at least knew how to enjoy what money could bring her. And yet it was daunting to consider how very much money was required to make her happy. To be the person who kept her in fine horses: not a task for the fainthearted.

Dinner wasn’t served until after ten o’clock, at a long communal table hewn whole from a tree that must have been six feet in diameter. The fabled Argentinean steaks were excellent, and the wine drew brays of approval from Jeremy. Joey and Jenna both put away glass after glass of it, and this may have been why, after midnight, when they were finally making out on their oceanic bed, he experienced his first-ever attack of a phenomenon he’d heard a lot about but had been unable to imagine himself ever experiencing personally. Even in the least appealing of his hookups, he’d performed admirably. Even now, as long as he was confined by his pants, he had the impression of being as hard as the wood of the communal dining table, but either he was mistaken about this or he couldn’t stand full exposure to Jenna. As she humped his bare leg through her underpants, grunting a little with every thrust, he felt himself flying out centrifugally, a satellite breaking free of gravity, mentally farther and farther away from the woman whose tongue was in his mouth and whose gratifyingly nontrivial tits were mashed into his chest. She fooled around more brutally, less pliantly, than Connie did—that was part of it. But he also couldn’t see her face in the dark, and when he couldn’t see it he had only the memory, the idea, of its beauty. He kept telling himself that he was finally getting Jenna, that this was Jenna, Jenna, Jenna . But in the absence of visual confirmation all he had in his arms was a random sweaty attacking female.

“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?”