Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“I can’t explain it. It’s really embarrassing.”

“Ha, welcome to my world on Lexapro.”

After she’d fallen asleep and begun emitting light snores, he lay boiling with shame and regret and homesickness. He was very, very disappointed in himself, although why, exactly, he should have felt so disappointed to fail to fuck a girl he wasn’t in love with and didn’t even like much, he couldn’t have said. He thought about the heroism of his parents’ having stayed together all these years, the mutual need that underlay even the worst of their fighting. He saw his mother’s deference to his father in a new light, and forgave her a little bit. It was unfortunate to have to need somebody, it was evidence of grievous softness, but his self was now seeming to him, for the first time, less than infinitely capable of anything, less than one-hundred-percent bendable to whatever goals he’d set his sights on.

In the first early austral light of morning, he awoke with a monstrous boner of whose durability he had not the shadow of a doubt. He sat up and looked at the tumble of Jenna’s hair, the parting of her lips, the delicate downy line of her jaw, her almost holy beauty. Now that the light was better, he couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been in the dark. He slid back under the covers and poked her, gently, in the small of her back.

“Stop it!” she said loudly, immediately. “I’m trying to fall back asleep.”

He pressed his nose between her shoulder blades and inhaled her patchouli smell.

“I mean it,” she said, jerking away from him. “It’s not my fault we were up until three.”

“It wasn’t three,” he murmured.

“It felt like three. It felt like five!”

“It’s five now.”

“Augggh! Don’t even say that! I need to sleep.”

He lay there interminably, manually monitoring his boner, trying to keep it halfway up. From outside came neighings, distant clangings, the crowing of a rooster, the rural sounds of anywhere. As Jenna continued to sleep, or pretend to, a roiling announced itself in his bowels. Despite his best resistance, the roiling increased until it was an urgency that trounced all others. He padded into the bathroom and locked the door. In his shaving kit was a kitchen fork that he’d brought for the extremely disagreeable task ahead of him. He sat clutching it in a sweaty hand as his shit slid out of him. There was a lot of it, two or three days’ worth. Through the door, he heard the telephone ring, their six-thirty wake-up call.

He knelt on the cool floor and peered into the bowl at the four large turds afloat in it, hoping to see the glint of gold immediately. The oldest turd was dark and firm and noduled, the ones from deeper inside him were paler and already dissolving a little. Although he, like all people, secretly enjoyed the smell of his own farts, the smell of his shit was something else. It was so bad as to seem evil in a moral way. He poked one of the softer turds with the fork, trying to rotate it and examine its underside, but it bent and began to crumble, clouding the water brown, and he saw that this business of a fork had been a wishful fantasy. The water would soon be too turbid to see a ring through, and if the ring broke free of its enveloping matter it would sink to the bottom and possibly go down the drain. He had no choice but to lift out each turd and run it through his fingers, and he had to do this quickly, before things got too waterlogged. Holding his breath, his eyes watering furiously, he grasped the most promising turd and let go of his latest fantasy, which was that one hand would suffice. He had to use both hands, one to hold the shit and the other to pick through it. He retched once, drily, and got to work, pushing his fingers into the soft and body-warm and surprisingly lightweight log of excrement.

Jenna knocked on the door. “What’s going on in there?”

“Just a minute!”

“What are you doing in there? Jerking off?”

“I said just a minute! I have diarrhea.”

“Oh, Christ. Can you at least hand me a tampon?”

“In a minute!”

Mercifully, the ring turned up in the second of the turds he broke apart. A hardness amid softness, a clean circle within chaos. He rinsed his hands as well as he could in the filthy water, flushed the toilet with his elbow, and bore the ring to the sink. The stench was appalling. He washed his hands and the ring and the faucets three times with lots of soap, while Jenna, outside the door, complained that breakfast was in twenty minutes. And it was a strange thing to feel, but he definitely felt it: when he emerged from the bathroom with the ring on his ring finger, and Jenna rushed past him and then reeled out again, squealing and cursing at the stench, he was a different person. He could see this person so clearly, it was like standing outside himself. He was the person who’d handled his own shit to get his wedding ring back. This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to be if he’d been free to choose, but there was something comforting and liberating about being an actual definite someone, rather than a collection of contradictory potential someones.

The world immediately seemed to slow down and steady itself, as if it, too, were settling into a new necessity. The first, spirited horse that he was given at the stables shucked him onto the ground almost gently, without ill will, employing no more violence than was strictly necessary to dislodge him from the saddle. He was then put on a twenty-year-old mare from whose broad back he watched Jenna quickly receding on her stallion down a dusty trail, her left arm raised in backhanded farewell or perhaps just good equestrian form, while Félix galloped past Joey to join her. He saw that it would make sense if she ended up fucking Félix instead of him, since Félix was the vastly superior horseman; he experienced this as a relief, maybe even as a mitzvah, since poor Jenna certainly needed fucking by somebody. He himself spent the morning walking, and eventually cantering, with Ellen’s young daughter, Meredith, the novel reader, and listening while she delivered herself of an impressive store of horse lore. It didn’t make him feel soft to do this; it made him feel firm. The Andean air was lovely. Meredith seemed a little sweet on him and gave him patient instruction in how to be less confusing to his horse. Jeremy, when the group collected for midmorning snacks by a spring at which there was no sign of Jenna and Félix, was more viciously instructive to his quiet, red-faced wife, whom he apparently blamed for falling so far back behind the leaders. Joey, cupping his clean hands to drink spring water from a stone basin, and no longer caring what Jenna might be up to, felt compassion for Jeremy. It was fun to ride horses in Patagonia—she’d been right about that.

His feeling of peace lasted until late in the afternoon, when he checked his voice mail from the room phone, at Jenna’s mother’s expense, and found messages from Carol Monaghan and Kenny Bartles. “Hi, hon, it’s your mother-in-law ,” Carol said. “How about that, huh? Mother-in-law! Isn’t that a weird thing to be saying. I think it’s fantastic news, but you know what, Joey? I’ll be honest with you. I think if you thought enough of Connie to marry her, and if you thought highly enough of your own maturity to enter into matrimony, you should have the decency to tell your parents. That’s just my two cents’ worth, but I don’t see any reason for you to keep this so hush-hush unless you’re ashamed of Connie. And I really don’t know what to say about a son-in-law who’s ashamed of my daughter. Maybe I’ll just say I’m not a very good secret keeper, I am personally opposed to all this hush-hush. OK? Maybe I’ll just leave it at that.”