"Freedom" - читать интересную книгу автора (Franzen Jonathan)

BAD NEWS

Jonathan and Jenna’s mother, Tamara, had hurt herself in Aspen. Trying to avoid collision with a hotdogging teenager, she’d crossed her skis and snapped two bones in her left leg, above the boot, and thereby disqualified herself from joining Jenna on Jenna’s January trip to ride horses in Patagonia. To Jenna, who’d witnessed Tamara’s wipeout and pursued the teenager and reported him while Jonathan attended to their fallen mother, the accident was just the latest entry in a long list of things going wrong in her life since her graduation from Duke the previous spring; but to Joey, who’d been talking to Jenna twice or thrice daily in recent weeks, the accident was a much-needed little gift from the gods-the breakthrough he’d been waiting two-plus years for. Jenna, after graduating, had moved to Manhattan to work for a famous party planner and try living with her almost-fiancé, Nick, but in September she’d rented her own apartment, and in November, yielding to relentless overt pressure from her family and to more subtle underminings from Joey, who’d made himself her Designated Understander, she declared her relationship with Nick null and void and unrevivable. By that point, she was taking a highish dose of Lexapro and had nothing in her life to look forward to except riding horses in Patagonia, which Nick had repeatedly promised to do with her and repeatedly postponed, citing his heavy work load at Goldman Sachs. It happened that Joey had ridden a horse or two, albeit clumsily, during his high-school summer in Montana. From the high volume of Jenna’s calls and texts to his cell phone, he already suspected that he’d been promoted to the status of transitional object, if not to potential full-on boyfriend, and his last doubts were dispelled when she invited him to share the luxurious Argentinean resort room that Tamara had booked before the accident. Since it further happened that Joey had business in nearby Paraguay and knew that he would probably end up having to go there, whether he wanted to or not, he said yes to Jenna without hesitation. The only real argument against traveling with her in Argentina was the fact that, five months earlier, at the age of twenty, in a fit of madness in New York City, he’d gone to the courthouse in Lower Manhattan and married Connie Monaghan. But this was by no means the worst of his worries, and he chose, for the moment, to overlook it.

The night before he flew to Miami, where Jenna was visiting a grandparent and would meet him at the airport, he called Connie in St. Paul with the news of his impending travel. He was sorry to have to obfuscate and dissemble with her, but his South American plans did give him a good excuse to further postpone her coming east and moving into the highway-side apartment that he’d rented in a charmless corner of Alexandria. Until a few weeks ago, his excuse had been college, but he was now taking a semester off to manage his business, and Connie, who was miserable at home with Carol and Blake and her infant twin half sisters, couldn’t understand why she still wasn’t allowed to live with her husband.

“I also don’t see why you’re going to Buenos Aires,” she said, “if your supplier’s in Paraguay.”

“I want to practice my Spanish a little,” Joey said, “before I really have to use it. Everybody’s talking about what a great city Buenos Aires is. I have to fly through there anyway.”

“Well, do you want to take a whole week and have our honeymoon there?”

Their missing honeymoon was one of several sore subjects between them. Joey repeated his official line on it, which was that he was too freaked out about his business to relax on a vacation, and Connie fell into one of the silences that she deployed in lieu of reproach. She still never reproached him directly.

“Literally anywhere in the world,” he said. “Once I’ve been paid, I’ll take you anywhere in the world you want to go.”

“I’d settle for just living with you and waking up next to you, actually.”

“I know, I know,” he said. “That would be great. I’m just under such incredible pressure now, I don’t think I’d be fun to be around.”

“You don’t have to be fun,” she said.

“We’ll talk about it when I get back, OK? I promise.”

In the telephonic background, in St. Paul, he faintly heard the squeal of a one-year-old. It wasn’t Connie’s kid, but it was close enough to make him nervous. He’d seen her only once since August, in Charlottesville, over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Christmastime (another sore subject) he’d spent moving from Charlottesville to Alexandria and making appearances in Georgetown with his family. He’d told Connie that he was working hard on his government contract, but in fact he’d killed whole stretches of days watching football, listening to Jenna on the phone, and generally feeling doomed. Connie might have convinced him to let her fly out anyway if she hadn’t been knocked flat by the flu. It had troubled him to hear her feeble voice and know she was his wife and not rush to her side, but he’d needed to go to Poland instead. What he’d discovered in Lodz and Warsaw, during three frustrating days with an American expat “interpreter” whose Polish turned out to be excellent for ordering in restaurants but heavily dependent on an electronic translation device when dealing with hardened Slavic businessmen, had so dismayed and frightened him that, in the weeks since his return, he’d been unable to focus his mind on business for more than five minutes at a time. Everything depended on Paraguay now. And it was much more pleasant to imagine the bed that he was going to share with Jenna than to think about Paraguay.

“Are you wearing your wedding ring?” Connie asked him.

“Um-no,” he said before thinking better of it. “It’s in my pocket.”

“Hm.”

“I’m putting it on right now,” he said, moving toward the coin dish on his nightstand where he’d left the ring. His nightstand was a cardboard box. “It slips right on, it’s great.”

“I’ve got mine on,” Connie said. “I love having it on. I try to remember to put it on my right hand when I’m not in my room, but sometimes I forget.”

“Don’t be forgetting. That’s not good.”

“It’s OK, baby. Carol doesn’t notice stuff like that. She doesn’t even like to look at me. We’re unpleasing to each other’s sight.”

“We really need to be careful, though, OK?”

“I don’t know.”

“Just a little while longer,” he said. “Just until I tell my parents. Then you can wear it all you want. I mean, we’ll both be wearing them all the time then. That’s what I meant.”

It was hard to compare silences, but the one she deployed now felt especially grievous, especially sad. He knew it was killing her to keep their marriage secret, and he kept hoping that the prospect of telling his parents would become less scary to him, but as the months went by the prospect only got scarier. He tried to put his wedding ring on his finger, but it stuck on the last knuckle. He’d bought it in a hurry, in August, in New York, and it was slightly too small. He put it in his mouth instead, probing its compass with his tongue as if it were an orifice of Connie’s, and this turned him on a little. Connected him with her, took him back to August and the craziness of what they’d done. He slipped the ring, drool-slick, onto his finger.

“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.

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.”

“No, people have fights when they love each other but still have actual complete personalities and are living in the real world. Obviously, I’m not saying it’s good to fight excessively.”

“No, just exactly enough. I get it.”

“If you’re never having fights, you need to ask yourself why not, is all I’m saying. Ask yourself, where is the fantasy residing?”

“No, Mom. Sorry. Not going to talk about this.”

“Or who it’s residing in, if you know what I mean.”

“I swear to God, I’m going to hang up, and I’m not going to call you for a year.”

“What realities are not being attended to.”

“Mom!”

“Anyway, that was my one question, and now I’ve asked it, and I won’t ask you any more.”

Although his mother’s happiness levels were nothing to brag about, she persisted in inflicting the norms of her own life on Joey. She probably thought she was trying to protect him, but all he heard was the drumbeat of negativity. She was especially “concerned” about Connie’s lack of any friends besides himself. She’d once cited her own crazy college friend Eliza, who’d had zero other friends, and what a warning sign this should have been. Joey had replied that Connie did so have friends, and when his mother had challenged him to name them, he’d loudly refused to discuss things she knew nothing about. Connie did have some old school friends, at least two or three, but when she spoke of them it was mainly to dissect their superficialities or to compare their intelligence unfavorably with Joey’s, and he could never keep their names straight. His mother had thus scored a palpable hit. And she knew better than to stab an existing wound twice, but either she was the world’s most expert implier, or Joey was the world’s most sensitive inferrer. She had merely to mention an upcoming visit from her old teammate Cathy Schmidt for Joey to hear invidious criticism of Connie. If he called her on it, she became all psychological and asked him to examine his touchiness on the subject. The one counterthrust that would really have shut her up-asking how many friends she’d made since college (answer: none)-was the one he couldn’t bear to make. She had the unfair final advantage, in all their arguments, of being pitiable to him.

Connie bore his mother no corresponding enmity. She had every right to complain, but she never did, and this made the unfairness of his mother’s enmity all the more glaring. As a little girl, Connie had voluntarily, without any prompting from Carol, given his mother handmade birthday cards. His mother had crooned over these cards every year until he and Connie started having sex. Connie had continued to make her birthday cards after that, and Joey, when he’d still been in St. Paul, had seen his mother open one, glance at its greeting with a stony expression, and set it aside like junk mail. More recently, Connie had additionally sent her little birthday presents-earrings one year, chocolates another-for which she received acknowledgments as stiltedly impersonal as an IRS communiqué. Connie did everything she could to make his mother like her again except the one thing that would have worked, which was to stop seeing Joey. She was purehearted and his mother spat on her. The unfairness of it was another reason he had married her.

The unfairness had also, in a roundabout way, made the Republican Party more attractive to him. His mother was a snob about Carol and Blake and held against Connie the mere fact that she lived with them. She took it for granted that all right-thinking people, including Joey, were of one mind about the tastes and opinions of white people from less privileged backgrounds than her own. What Joey liked about the Republicans was that they didn’t disdain people the way liberal Democrats did. They hated the liberals, yes, but only because the liberals had hated them first. They were simply sick of the kind of unexamined condescension with which his mother treated the Monaghans. Over the past two years, Joey had slowly traded places with Jonathan in their political discussions, particularly on the subject of Iraq. Joey had become convinced that an invasion was needed to safeguard America’s petropolitical interests and take out Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, while Jonathan, who’d landed plum summer internships with The Hill and then with the WaPo and was hoping to be a political journalist, was ever more distrustful of the people like Feith and Wolfowitz and Perle and Chalabi who were pushing for the war. Both of them had enjoyed reversing their expected roles and becoming the political outliers of their respective families, Joey sounding more and more like Jonathan’s father, Jonathan more and more like Joey’s. The longer Joey persisted in siding with Connie and defending her against his mother’s snobbery, the more at home he felt with the party of angry anti-snobbism.

And why had he stuck with Connie? The only answer that made sense was that he loved her. He’d had his chances to free himself of her-had, indeed, deliberately created some of them-but again and again, at the crucial moment, had chosen not to use them. The first great opportunity had been his going away to college. His next chance had come a year later, when Connie followed him east to Morton College, in Morton’s Glen, Virginia. Her move did put her within an easy drive of Charlottesville in Jonathan’s Land Cruiser (which Jonathan, approving of Connie, let Joey borrow), but it also set her on course to be a normal college student and develop an independent life. After his second visit to Morton, which the two of them mostly spent dodging her Korean roommate, Joey proposed that, for her sake (since she didn’t seem to be adapting well to college), they again try to break their dependency and cease communication for a while. His proposal wasn’t entirely disingenuous; he wasn’t entirely ruling out a future for them. But he’d been doing a lot of listening to Jenna and was hoping to spend his winter break with her and Jonathan in McLean. When Connie finally got wind of these plans, a few weeks before Christmas, he asked her if she didn’t want to go home to St. Paul and see her friends and family (i.e., the way a normal college freshman might). “No,” she said, “I want to be with you.” Spurred by the prospect of Jenna, and bolstered by an especially satisfying hookup that had fallen in his lap at a recent semi-formal dance, he took a hard line with Connie, who then cried on the phone so stormily that she got the hiccups. She said she never wanted to go home again, never wanted to spend another night with Carol and the babies. But Joey made her do it anyway. And even though he barely spoke to Jenna over the holidays-first she was skiing, then she was in New York with Nick-he continued to pursue his exit strategy until the night in early February when Carol called him with the news that Connie had dropped out of Morton and was back on Barrier Street, more seriously depressed than ever.

Connie had apparently aced two of her December finals at Morton but simply failed to show up for the other two, and there was virulent antipathy between her and the roommate, who listened to the Backstreet Boys so loudly that the treble leaking from her earphones would have driven anybody crazy, and left her TV tuned to a shopping channel all day, and taunted Connie about her “stuck-up” boyfriend, and invited her to imagine all the stuck-up sluts that he was screwing behind her back, and smelled up their room with terrible pickles. Connie had returned to school in January on academic probation but proceeded to spend so much time in bed that the campus health service finally intervened and sent her home. All this Carol reported to Joey with sober worry and a welcome absence of recrimination.

That he’d passed up this latest fine chance to free himself of Connie (who could no longer pretend that her depression was just a figment of Carol’s imagination) was somewhat related to the recent bitter news of Jenna’s “sort-of” engagement to Nick, but only somewhat. Although Joey knew enough to be afraid of hard-core mental illness, it seemed to him that if he eliminated from his pool of prospects every interesting college-age girl with some history of depression, he would be left with a very small pool indeed. And Connie had reason to be depressed: her roommate was intolerable and she’d been dying of loneliness. When Carol put her on the telephone, she used the word “sorry” a hundred times. Sorry to have let Joey down, sorry not to have been stronger, sorry to distract him from his schoolwork, sorry to have wasted her tuition money, sorry to be a burden to Carol, sorry to be a burden to everyone, sorry to be such a drag to talk to. Although (or because) she was too low to ask anything of him-seemed finally halfway willing to let go of him-he told her he was flush with cash from his mother and would fly out to see her. The more she said he didn’t have to do this, the more he knew he did.

The week he’d then spent on Barrier Street had been the first truly adult week of his life. Sitting with Blake in the great-room, the dimensions of which were more modest than he remembered, he watched Fox News’s coverage of the assault on Baghdad and felt his long-standing resentment of 9/11 beginning to dissolve. The country was finally moving on, finally taking history in its hands again, and this was somehow of a piece with the deference and gratitude that Blake and Carol showed him. He regaled Blake with tales from the think tank, the brushes he’d had with figures in the news, the post-invasion planning he was party to. The house was small and he was big in it. He learned how to hold a baby and how to tilt a nippled bottle. Connie was pale and scarily underweight, her arms as skinny and her belly as concave as when she’d been fourteen and he’d first touched them. He lay and held her in the night and tried to excite her, labored to penetrate the thick affective rind of her distraction, enough to feel OK about having sex with her. The pills she was taking hadn’t kicked in yet, and he was almost glad of how sick she was; it gave him seriousness and a purpose. She kept repeating that she’d let him down, but he felt almost the opposite. As if a new and more grownup world of love had revealed itself: as if there were still no end of inner doors for them to open. Through one of her bedroom windows he could see the house he’d grown up in, a house now occupied by black people who Carol said were snooty and kept to themselves, with their framed PhDs on a dining-room wall. (“In the dining room,” Carol emphasized, “where everybody can see them, even from the street.”) Joey was pleased by how little the sight of his old house moved him. For as long as he could remember, he’d wanted to outgrow it, and now it seemed as if he really had. He went so far, one evening, as to call his mother and own up to what was happening.

“So,” she said. “OK. I’m apparently a little bit out of the loop here. You’re saying Connie was at college in the East?”

“Yep. But she had a bad roommate and got depressed.”

“Well, it’s nice of you to inform me, now that it’s all safely in the past.”

“You didn’t exactly make it pleasant to tell you what’s going on with her.”

“No, of course, I’m the villain here. Negative old me. I’m sure that’s how it looks to you.”

“Maybe there’s a reason it looks that way. Have you considered that?”

“I was just under the impression you were free and unencumbered. You know, college doesn’t last long, Joey. I tied myself down when I was young and missed out on a lot of experiences that probably would have been good for me. Then again, maybe I just wasn’t as mature as you are.”

“Yep,” he said feeling steely and, indeed, mature. “Maybe.”

“I would only point out that you did sort of lie to me, whenever that was, two months ago, when I asked you if you’d heard from Connie. Which, lying, maybe not the most mature thing.”

“Your question wasn’t friendly.”

“Your answer wasn’t honest! Not that you necessarily owe me honesty, but let’s at least be straight about it now.”

“It was Christmas. I said I thought she was in St. Paul.”

“Well, exactly. And not to belabor this, but when a person says ‘I think,’ it tends to imply that he isn’t sure. You pretended not to know something you knew very well.”

“I said where I thought she was. But she could have been in Wisconsin or something.”

“Right, visiting one of her many close friends.”

“Jesus!” he said. “You truly have no one but yourself to blame for this.”

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said. “I think it’s very admirable that you’re there with her now, and I mean that seriously. It speaks well of you. I’m proud that you want to take care of somebody who matters to you. I have some acquaintance with depression myself, and, believe me, I know it’s no picnic. Is Connie taking something for it?”

“Yeah, Celexa.”

“Well, I hope that works out for her. My own drug didn’t work out so well for me.”

“You were taking an antidepressant? When?”

“Oh, fairly recently.”

“God, I had no idea.”

“That’s because, when I say I want you to be free and unencumbered, I really mean it. I didn’t want you worrying about me.”

“Jesus, though, you could at least have told me.”

“It was only for a few months anyway. I was a less than exemplary patient.”

“You have to give those drugs some time,” he said.

“Right, so everybody said. Especially Dad, who’s kind of on the front lines with me. He was very sorry to see those good times go. But I was glad to have my head back, such as it is.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“Yes, I know. If you’d told me these things about Connie three months ago, my response would have been: La-la-la! Now you have to put up with me feeling things again.”

“I meant I was sorry you’re hurting.”

“Thank you, sweetie. I do apologize for my feelings.”

Ubiquitous though depression seemed lately to have become, Joey still found it a little worrisome that the two females who loved him the most were both suffering clinically. Was it just chance? Or did he have some actively baneful effect on women’s mental health? In Connie’s case, he decided, the truth was that her depression was a facet of the same intensity he’d always so much loved in her. On his last night in St. Paul, before returning to Virginia, he sat and watched her probe her skull with her fingertips, as if she were hoping to extract excess feeling from her brain. She said that the reason she’d been weeping at seemingly random moments was that even the smallest bad thoughts were excruciating, and that only bad thoughts, no good ones, were occurring to her. She thought about how she’d lost a UVA baseball cap he’d once given her; how she’d been too preoccupied with her roommate, during his second visit to Morton, to ask him what grade he’d gotten on his big American History paper; how Carol had once remarked that boys would like her better if she smiled more; how one of her baby half sisters, Sabrina, had burst into screams the first time she’d held her; how she’d stupidly admitted to Joey’s mother that she was going to New York to see him; how she’d been bleeding disgustingly on the last night before he went away to college; how she’d written such wrong things in the postcards she’d sent Jessica, in an attempt to be friends with his sister again, that Jessica had never replied to them; and on and on. She was lost in a dark forest of regret and self-disgust in which even the smallest tree assumed monstrous proportions. Joey had never been in woods like these himself but was unaccountably drawn to them in her. It even turned him on that she began to sob while he endeavored to fuck her in farewell, at least until the sobbing turned to writhing and thrashing and self-loathing. Her level of distress seemed borderline dangerous, a cousin of suicide, and he was awake for half the night then, trying to talk her out of how terrible about herself she felt for feeling too terrible about herself to give him anything he wanted. It was exhausting and circular and unbearable, and yet, the following afternoon, when he was flying back East, it occurred to him to be afraid of what the Celexa would do to her when it kicked in. He considered his mother’s remark about antidepressants killing feelings: a Connie without oceans of feeling was a Connie he didn’t know and suspected he wouldn’t want.

Meanwhile the country was at war, but it was an odd sort of war in which, within a rounding error, the only casualties were on the other side. Joey was glad to see that the taking of Iraq was every bit the cakewalk he’d expected it to be, and Kenny Bartles was sending him elated e-mails about the need to get his bread company up and running ASAP. (Joey kept having to explain that he was still a college student and couldn’t start work until after finals.) Jonathan, however, was sourer than ever. He was fixated, for example, on the Iraqi antiquities that had been stolen by looters from the National Museum.

“That was one little mistake,” Joey said. “Shit happens, right? You just don’t want to admit that things are going well.”

“I’ll admit it when they find the plutonium and the missiles tipped with smallpox,” Jonathan said. “Which they won’t, because it was all bullshit, all trumped-up bullshit, because the people who started this thing are incompetent clowns.”

“Dude, everybody says there’s WMDs. Even The New Yorker says there are. My mom said my dad wants to cancel their subscription, he’s so mad about it. My dad, the great expert on foreign affairs.”

“How much you want to bet your dad’s right?”

“I don’t know. A hundred dollars?”

“Done!” Jonathan said, extending his hand. “A hundred bucks says they find no weapons by the end of the year.”

Joey shook his hand and then proceeded to worry that Jonathan was right about the WMDs. Not that he cared about a hundred dollars; he was going to be making 8K a month with Kenny Bartles. But Jonathan, a political news junkie, seemed so very sure of himself that Joey wondered if he’d somehow missed the joke in his dealings with his think-tank bosses and Kenny Bartles: had failed to notice them winking or ironically inflecting their voices when they spoke of reasons beyond their own personal or corporate enrichment for invading Iraq. In Joey’s view, the think tank did indeed have a hush-hush motive for supporting the invasion: the protection of Israel, which, unlike the United States, was within striking distance of even the crappy sort of missile that Saddam’s scientists were capable of building. But he’d believed that the neocons at least were serious in fearing for Israel’s safety. Now, already, as March turned to April, they were waving their hands and acting as if it didn’t even matter if any WMDs came to light; as if the freedom of the Iraqi people were the main issue. And Joey, whose own interest in the war was primarily financial, but who’d taken moral refuge in the thought that wiser minds than his had better motives, began to feel that he’d been suckered. It didn’t make him any less eager to cash in, but it did make him feel dirtier about it.

In his soiled mood, he found it easier to talk to Jenna about his summer plans. Jonathan, among other things, was jealous of Kenny Bartles (he got pissy whenever he heard Joey talking on the phone to Kenny), whereas Jenna had dollar signs in her eyes and was all for making killings. “Maybe I’ll see you in Washington this summer,” she said. “I’ll come down from New York and you can take me out to dinner to celebrate my engagement.”

“Sure,” he said. “Sounds like a fun evening.”

“I have to warn you I have very expensive taste in restaurants.”

“How’s Nick going to feel about me taking you to dinner?”

“Just one less bite out of his wallet. It would never occur to him to be afraid of you. But how’s your girlfriend going to feel?”

“She’s not the jealous type.”

“Right, jealousy’s so unattractive, ha ha.”

“What she doesn’t know can’t hurt her.”

“Yes, and there’s quite a bit she doesn’t know, isn’t there? How many little slips have you had now?”

“Five.”

“That is four more than Nick would get away with before I surgically removed his testicles.”

“Yeah, but if you didn’t know about it, it wouldn’t hurt you, right?”

“Believe me,” Jenna said, “I would know about it. That’s the difference between me and your girlfriend. I am the jealous type. I am the Spanish Inquisition when it comes to being fucked around on. No quarter will be given.”

This was interesting to hear, since it was Jenna who had urged him, the previous fall, to avail himself of such casual opportunities as came his way at school, and it was Jenna to whom he’d imagined he was proving something by doing so. She’d given him instruction in the art of cutting dead, in the dining hall, a girl from whose bed he’d crawled four hours earlier. “Don’t be such a tender daisy,” she’d said. “They want you to ignore them. You’re not doing them any favors if you don’t. You need to pretend you’ve never seen them in your life. The last thing in the world they want is you mooning around or acting guilty. They’re sitting there praying to Jesus that you won’t embarrass them.” She’d clearly been speaking from personal experience, but he hadn’t quite believed her until the first time he’d tried it. His life had been easier ever since. Though he did Connie the kindness of not mentioning his indiscretions, he continued to think she wouldn’t much care. (The person he actively had to hide from was Jonathan, who had Arthurian notions of romantic comportment and had torn into Joey furiously, as if he were Connie’s older brother or knightly guardian, when word of a hookup had leaked back to him. Joey had sworn to him that not even a zipper had been lowered, but this falsehood was too absurd not to smirk at, and Jonathan had called him a dick and a liar, unworthy of Connie.) Now he felt as if Jenna, with her shifting standard of fidelity, had suckered him in much the same way his bosses at the think tank had. She’d done for sport, as a meanness to Connie, what the warmongers had done for profit. But it didn’t make him any less keen to buy her a great dinner or to earn, at RISEN, the money to do it.

Sitting alone in RISEN’s frigid one-room office in Alexandria, Joey wrote Kenny’s jumbled faxings out of Baghdad into persuasive reports on the judicious use of taxpayer dollars to remake Saddam-subsidized bakers as CPA-backed entrepreneurs. He used his case studies of the Breadmasters and Hot amp; Crusty chains, written the previous summer, to create a handsome business-plan template for these would-be entrepreneurs to follow. He developed a two-year plan for jacking bread prices up into the vicinity of fair market, with the basic Iraqi khubz as a loss-leader and overpriced pastries and attractively marketed coffee drinks as the moneymakers, so that, by 2005, Coalition subsidies could be phased out without sparking bread riots. Everything he did was at least partial and often total bullshit. He had not the foggiest notion of what a Basra storefront looked like; he suspected, for example, that plate-glass Breadmasters-style refrigerated pastry display windows might not fare well in a city of car bombings and 130-degree summer heat. But the bullshit of modern commerce was a language he’d been happy to find himself fluent in, and Kenny assured him that all that mattered was the appearance of tremendous activity and instantaneous results. “Make it look good yesterday,” Kenny said, “and then we’ll do our best here on the ground to catch up with how it looks. Jerry wants free markets overnight, and that’s what we gotta give him.” (“Jerry” was Paul Bremer, head honcho in Baghdad, whom Kenny may or may not have even met.) In Joey’s idle hours at the office, especially on weekends, he chatted with school friends who were working unpaid internships or flipping burgers in their hometowns and showered him with envy and congratulations for having landed the most awesome summer job ever. He felt as if the progress of his life, which 9/11 had knocked off course, had now fully regained its sensational upward trajectory.

For a while, the only shadows on his satisfaction were Jenna’s postponements of her trip to Washington. A recurrent theme of their conversations was her worry that she’d sown insufficient wild oats before committing herself to Nick. (“I’m not sure that having been a slut for a year at Duke really counts,” she said.) Joey could hear in her worry the whispering of opportunity, and he was confounded when, despite the increasingly raw flirtation of their phone calls, she twice canceled plans to come down and see him, and even more confounded when he learned from Jonathan that she’d been to her parents’ in McLean without letting him know.

Then, on the Fourth of July, during a family visit he was making only to be nice, he vouchsafed to his father the details of his work at RISEN, hoping to impress him with the size of his salary and the scope of his responsibilities; and his father all but disowned him on the spot. Until now, all his life, their relationship had essentially been a standoff, a stalemate of wills. But now his dad was no longer content to send him on his way with a lecture about his coldness and his arrogance. Now he was shouting that Joey made him sick, that it physically disgusted him to have raised a son so selfish and unthinking that he was willing to connive with monsters trashing the country for their personal enrichment. His mother, instead of defending him, ran for her life: upstairs, to her little room. He knew she would be calling him the next morning, trying to smooth things over, feeding him crap about how his dad was only angry because he loved him. But she was too cowardly to stick around, and there was nothing he could do himself but cross his arms tightly and make his face a mask and shake his head and tell his dad, over and over, not to criticize things he didn’t understand.

“What’s not to understand?” his father said. “This is a war for politics and profit. Period!”

“Just because you don’t like people’s politics,” Joey said, “it doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong. You’re pretending that everything they do is bad, you’re hoping they’re going to fail at everything, because you hate their politics. You don’t even want to hear about the good things that are happening.”

“There are no good things happening.”

“Oh, right. It’s a black-and-white world. We’re all bad and you’re all good.”

“You think the way the world works is that Middle Eastern kids the same age as you are getting their heads and their legs blown off so you can make a ton of money? That’s the perfect world you live in?”

“Obviously not, Dad. Would you stop being stupid for a second? People are getting killed over there because their economy is fucked up. We’re trying to fix their economy, OK?”

“You shouldn’t be making eight thousand dollars a month,” his dad said. “I know you think you’re very smart, but there is something wrong with a world where an unskilled nineteen-year-old can do that. Your situation stinks of corruption. You smell really bad to me.”

“Jesus, Dad. Whatever.”

“I don’t even want to know what you’re doing anymore. It makes me too sick. You can tell it to your mother, but do me a favor and leave me out.”

Joey smiled fiercely to keep himself from crying. He was experiencing a hurt that felt structural, as if he and his dad had each chosen their politics for the sole purpose of hating the other, and the only way out of it was disengagement. Not telling his dad anything, not seeing him again unless he absolutely had to, sounded good to him, too. He wasn’t even angry, he just wanted to leave the hurt behind. He taxied home to his furnished studio apartment, which his mom had helped him rent, and sent messages to both Connie and Jenna. Connie must have gone to bed early, but Jenna called him back at midnight. She wasn’t the world’s best listener, but she got enough of the gist of his rotten Fourth to assure him that the world wasn’t fair and was never going to be fair, that there would always be big winners and big losers, and that she personally, in the tragically finite life that she’d been given, preferred to be a winner and to surround herself with winners. When he then confronted her with not having called him from McLean, she said she hadn’t thought it would be “safe” to see him for dinner.

“Why wouldn’t it have been safe?”

“You’re kind of a bad habit of mine,” she said. “I need to keep it in check. Need to keep my eyes on the prize.”

“It doesn’t sound like you and the prize are having much fun together.”

“The prize is extremely busy trying to take his boss’s job. That’s what they do in that world, they try to eat each other alive. It’s surprisingly un-frowned upon. But also apparently hugely time-consuming. A girl likes to be taken out now and then, especially in her first summer after college.”

“That’s why you need to come down here,” he said. “I’ll definitely take you out.”

“No doubt. But my boss has got wall-to-wall jobs in the Hamptons for the next three weeks. My services as a clipboard-holder are required. Too bad you have to work so hard yourself, or I could try to sneak you into something.”

He’d lost count of the half dates and half promises she’d made since he’d known her. None of the fun things she suggested ever quite came to pass, and he could never quite figure out why she bothered to keep suggesting them. Sometimes he thought it had to do with her competing with her brother. Or maybe it was because Joey was Jewish and pleasing to her father, who was the one person she never snarked. Or maybe she was fascinated by his relationship with Connie and took a queenly relish in the nuggets of private info that he laid at her feet. Or maybe she was genuinely into him and wanted to see what he was like when he was older and how much money he could make. Or maybe all of the above. Jonathan had no insights to offer except that his sister was bad news, a freak from Planet Spoiled, with the ethical consciousness of sea sponge, but Joey thought he could glimpse deeper things in her. He refused to believe that someone disposing of the power of so much beauty could be devoid of interesting ideas of how to use it.

The next day, when he told Connie about his fight with his father, she didn’t get into the merits of their respective arguments but went straight to his hurt and told him how sorry she was. She’d gone back to work as a waitress and seemed willing to wait all summer to see him again. Kenny Bartles had promised him the last two weeks of August as a paid vacation if he agreed to work every weekend before then, and he didn’t want Connie around to complicate things if Jenna came down to Washington; he didn’t see how he’d be able to slip away for an evening or two or three without telling Connie the kind of arrant lie that he was trying to keep to a minimum.

The equanimity with which she’d accepted the delay he attributed to Celexa. But then one night, during a routine telephone check-in, while he was drinking beer in his apartment, she fell into an especially protracted silence that ended with her saying, “Baby, there are a few things I need to tell you.” The first thing was that she’d stopped taking her medication. The second thing was that the reason she’d stopped taking it was that she’d been sleeping with her restaurant manager and was tired of not coming. She confessed this with curious detachment, as if speaking of some girl who wasn’t her, a girl whose doings were regrettable but understandable. The manager, she said, was married and had two teenage kids and lived on Hamline Avenue. “I thought I’d better tell you,” she said. “I can stop it if you want me to.”

Joey was shivering. Shuddering almost. A draft was coming through a mental door that he’d assumed was shut and locked but in fact was standing open wide; a door that he could flee through. “Do you want it to stop?” he said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I kind of like it, for the sex, but I don’t feel anything for him. I only feel things for you.”

“Well, Jesus. I guess I have to think about this.”

“I know it’s really bad, Joey. I should have told you as soon as it happened. But for a while it was just so nice that somebody was interested. Do you realize how many times we’ve made love since last October?”

“Yeah, I know. I’m aware.”

“Either twice or zero times, depending on whether you count when I was sick. There’s something not right there.”

“I know.”

“We love each other but we never see each other. Don’t you miss it?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had sex with other people? Is that how you can stand it?”

“Yeah, I did. A couple of times. But never more than once with anybody.”

“I was pretty sure you had, but I didn’t want to ask you. I didn’t want you to think I wasn’t going to let you. And that’s not why I did it myself. I did it because I’m lonely. I’m so lonely, Joey. I’m dying of it. And the reason I’m so lonely is I love you and you’re not here. I had sex with somebody else because I love you. I know that sounds mixed up, or dishonest, but it’s the truth.”

“I believe you,” he said. And he did. But the pain he was experiencing didn’t seem to have anything to do with what he believed or didn’t believe, what she might say now or not say. The mute fact of his sweet Connie having lain down with some middle-aged pig, of her having taken off her jeans and her little underpants and opened her legs repeatedly, had embodied itself in words only long enough for her to speak them and for Joey to hear them before returning to muteness and lodging inside him, out of reach of words, like some swallowed ball of razor blades. He could see, reasonably enough, that she might care no more about her pig of a manager than he’d cared about the girls, all of them either drunk or extremely drunk, in whose overly perfumed beds he’d landed in the previous year, but reason could no more reach the pain in him than thinking Stop! could arrest an onrushing bus. The pain was quite extraordinary. And yet also weirdly welcome and restorative, bringing him news of his aliveness and his caughtness in a story larger than himself.

“Say something to me, baby,” Connie said.

“When did this start?”

“I don’t know. Three months ago.”

“Well, maybe you should just keep doing it,” he said. “Maybe you should go ahead and have his baby and see if he’ll set you up in your own house.”

It was ugly to reference Carol like this, but in reply Connie only asked him, with limpid sincerity, “Is that what you want me to do?”

“I don’t know what I want.”

“It’s not at all what I want. I want to be with you.”

“Yeah, right. But not before fucking somebody else for three months.”

This ought to have made her weep and beg forgiveness, or at least lash out at him in turn, but she wasn’t an ordinary person. “That’s true,” she said. “You’re right. That’s absolutely fair. I could have told you the first time it happened, and then stopped. But doing it a second time didn’t seem much worse than doing it once. And then the same thing with the third time and the fourth time. And then I wanted to go off my drug, because it seemed stupid to be having sex when I could hardly feel it. And then the counter sort of had to be reset.”

“And now you’re feeling it, and it’s great.”

“It is definitely better. You’re the person I love, but at least my nerve endings are working again.”

“So why’d you even tell me now? Why not go four months? Four’s hardly any worse than three, right?”

“Four’s actually what I was planning,” she said. “I thought I could tell you when I come out next month, and we could make a plan to be together more often, so we could start being monogamous again. That’s still what I want. But I started having bad thoughts again last night, and I thought I’d better tell you.”

“Are you getting depressed? Does your doctor know you quit the drug?”

“She knows, but Carol doesn’t. Carol seems to think the drug is going to make everything OK between her and me. She thinks it’s going to solve her problem permanently. I take a pill out of the bottle every night and put it in my sock drawer. I think she might be counting them when I’m at work.”

“You should probably be taking them,” Joey said.

“I’ll go back on them if I can’t see you anymore. If I see you, though, I want to feel everything. And I don’t think I’ll need them if I keep on seeing you. I know that sounds like a threat or something, but it’s just the truth. I’m not trying to influence you about whether to see me again or not. I understand that I did a bad thing.”

“Are you sorry about it?”

“I know I should say yes, but I don’t actually know. Are you sorry you slept with other people?”

“No. Especially not now.”

“Same with me, baby. I’m exactly like you. I just hope you can remember that, and let me see you again.”

Connie’s confession was his last, best chance to escape with his conscience clear. He could so easily have fired her for cause, if only he’d felt angry enough to do it. After he got off the phone, he hit the bottle of Jack Daniel’s that he was normally disciplined enough to keep away from, and then he went out walking the humid streets of his bleak non-neighborhood, relishing the blunt-force summer heat and the collective roar of the air conditioners compounding it. In a pocket of his khakis was a handful of coins that he took out and began to fling, a few at a time, into the street. He threw them all away, the pennies of his innocence, the dimes and quarters of his self-sufficiency. He needed to rid himself, to rid himself. He had nobody to tell about his pain, least of all his parents but also not Jonathan, for fear of damaging his friend’s good opinion of Connie, and certainly not Jenna, who didn’t understand love, and not his school friends, either-they all, to a man, saw girlfriends as a senseless impediment to the pleasures they intended to spend the next ten years pursuing. He was totally alone and didn’t understand how it had happened to him. How there had come to be an ache named Connie at the center of his life. He was being driven crazy by so minutely feeling what she felt, by understanding her too well, by not being able to imagine her life without him. Every time he had a chance to get away from her, the logic of self-interest failed him: was supplanted, like a gear that his mind kept popping out of, by the logic of the two of them.

A week went by without her calling him, and then another week. He became sensible, for the first time, of her greater age. She was twenty-one now, a legal adult, a woman interesting and attractive to married men. In the grip of jealousy, he was suddenly seeing himself as the lucky one of the two of them, the mere boy on whom she’d bestowed her ardor. She assumed fantastically alluring form in his imagination. He’d sometimes dimly sensed that their connection was extraordinary, enchanted, fairy-tale-like, but only now did he appreciate how much he counted on her. For the first few days of their silence, he managed to believe that he was punishing her by not calling her, but before long he came to feel like the punished one, the person waiting to see whether she, in her ocean of feeling, might find a drop of mercy and break the silence for him.

In the meantime, his mother informed him that she would be sending him no more monthly $500 checks. “I’m afraid Dad’s put an end to that,” she said with a breeziness that annoyed him. “I hope it was at least useful while it lasted.” Joey felt a certain relief at no longer having to indulge her wish to support him and no longer owing her regular phone calls in return; he was also glad to stop lying to the Commonwealth of Virginia about his level of parental support. But he’d come to rely on the monthly infusions to make ends meet, and he was now sorry about having taken so many cabs and ordered in so many meals that summer. He couldn’t help hating his father and feeling betrayed by his mother, who, when push came to shove, despite the many complaints about her marriage that she inflicted on Joey, seemed always to end up deferring to his father.

Then his aunt Abigail called to offer him the use of her apartment in late August. For the last year and a half, he’d been on Abigail’s e-mail list for the performances she gave at bizarrely named small venues in New York, and she’d called him every few months to deliver one of her self-justifying monologues. If he clicked the Ignore button on his phone, she didn’t leave a message but simply kept calling until he clicked Answer. He had the impression that her days consisted largely of cycling through every number she knew until someone finally answered, and he hated to consider who else might be on her calling list, given the tenuousness of his own connection with her. “I’m giving myself the little gift of a beach vacation,” she told him now. “I’m afraid poor Tigger died of kitty cancer, though not before some verrrrry expensive kitty-cancer treatments, and Piglet’s all alone.” Although Joey was feeling somewhat dirty about his flirtation with Jenna, as part of a more general new queasiness about infidelity, he accepted Abigail’s offer. If he never heard from Connie, he thought, he might console himself by showing up in Jenna’s neighborhood and asking her to dinner.

And then Kenny Bartles called with the news that he was selling RISEN and its contracts to a friend of his in Florida. Had already sold them, in fact. “Mike’s going to call you in the morning,” Kenny said. “I told him he had to keep you on till August fifteen. I didn’t want the hassle of trying to replace you after that anyway. I got bigger and better fish to fry.”

“Oh yeah?” Joey said.

“Yeah, LBI’s willing to subcontract me to procure a fleet of heavy-duty trucks. Not a job for the squeamish, and a lot better bread than bread’s been, if you know what I mean. It’s easy in, easy out-none of this bullshit with quarterly reports. I show up with the trucks, they cut the check, end of story.”

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah, well, here’s the thing,” Kenny said. “I could still really use you there in D.C. I’m looking for a partner to invest with me and make up some of the shortfall I’m looking at. If you’re willing to work, you could pay yourself a little salary, too.”

“That sounds great,” Joey said. “But I have to go back to school, and I don’t have any money to invest.”

“OK. Sure. It’s your life. But how about a smaller piece of the action? The way I read the specs, the Polish Pladsky A10 is gonna do just fine. They’re not in production anymore, but there’s fleets of ’em standing around military bases in Hungary and Bulgaria. Also somewhere in South America, which doesn’t help me. But I’m gonna hire drivers in Eastern Europe, convoy the trucks across Turkey, and deliver ’ em in Kirkuk. That ’s going to tie me up for God knows how long, and there’s also a nine-hundred-K subcontract for spare parts. You think you could handle the spare parts as a sub sub?”

“I don’t know anything about truck parts.”

“Neither do I. But Pladsky built a good twenty thousand A10s, back in the day. There’ve gotta be tons of parts out there. All you gotta do is track ’em down, crate ’em up, ship ’ em out. Put in three hundred K, take out nine hundred six months later. That’s an eminently reasonable markup, given the circumstances. My impression is that’s a low-end markup in procurement. No eyebrows will be raised. You think you can get your hands on three hundred K?”

“I can hardly get my hands on lunch money,” Joey said. “What with tuition and so forth.”

“Yeah, well, but, realistically, all you gotta do is find fifty K. With that, plus a signed contract in hand, any bank in the country’s gonna give you the rest. You can do most of this stuff on the internet in your dorm room or whatever. It sure beats working the dish belt, huh?”

Joey asked for some time to think it over. Even with all the takeout and taxis he’d indulged in, he had $10,000 saved up for the coming academic year, plus potentially another $8,000 available on his credit card, and a quick internet search turned up numerous banks willing to make high-interest loans with small collateral, as well as multiple pages of Google matches for pladsky a10 parts. He was aware that Kenny wouldn’t have offered him the parts contract if finding the parts were as straightforward as he’d made it sound, but Kenny had made good on all his RISEN promises, and Joey couldn’t stop imagining the excellence of being worth half a million dollars when he turned twenty-one, a year from now. On an impulse, because he was excited and, for once, not preoccupied with their relationship, he broke his phone silence with Connie to solicit her opinion. Much later, he would reproach himself for having had her savings in the back of his mind, along with the fact that she was now legally in control of them, but in the moment of his calling he felt quite innocent of self-interested motive.

“Oh my God, baby,” she said. “I was starting to think I’d never hear from you again.”

“It’s been a hard couple of weeks.”

“My God, I know, I know. I was starting to think I should never have told you anything. Can you forgive me?”

“Probably.”

“Oh! Oh! That’s so much better than probably not.”

“Very probably,” he said. “If you still want to come out and see me.”

“You know I do. More than anything in the world.”

She didn’t sound at all like the independent older woman he’d been imagining, and a flutter in his stomach warned him to slow down and be sure he really wanted her back. Warned him not to mistake the pain of losing her for an active desire to have her. But he was eager to change the subject, avoid miring himself in abstract emotional territory, and ask her opinion of Kenny’s offer.

“God, Joey,” she said after he’d explained it to her, “you have to do it. I’ll help you do it.”

“How?”

“I’ll give you the money,” she said as if it were silly of him to even ask. “I’ve still got more than fifty thousand dollars in my trust account.”

The mere naming of this figure sexually excited him. It took him back to their earliest days as a couple on Barrier Street, in his first fall of high school. U2’s Achtung Baby, beloved to both of them but especially to Connie, had been the soundtrack of their mutual deflowering. The opening track, in which Bono avowed that he was ready for everything, ready for the push, had been their love song to each other and to capitalism. The song had made Joey feel ready to have sex, ready to step out of childhood, ready to make some real money selling watches at Connie’s Catholic school. He and she had begun as partners in the fullest sense, he the entrepreneur and manufacturer, she his loyal mule and surprisingly gifted saleswoman. Until their operation was shut down by resentful nuns, she’d proved herself a master of the soft sell, her cool remoteness serving to madden her classmates for her and Joey’s product. Everybody on Barrier Street, including his mother, had always mistaken Connie’s quietness for dullness, for slowness. Only Joey, who had insider access, had seen the potential in her, and this now seemed like the story of their life together: his helping and encouraging her to confound the expectations of everyone, especially his mother, who underestimated the value of her hidden assets. It was central to his faith in his future as a businessman, this ability to identify value, espy opportunity, where others didn’t, and it was central to his love of Connie, too. She moved in mysterious ways! The two of them had started fucking amid the piles of twenty-dollar bills she brought home from her school.

“You need the trust-fund money to go back to college,” he said nevertheless.

“I can do that later,” she said. “You need it now, and I can give it to you. You can give it back to me later.”

“I could give it back to you doubled. You’d have enough to cover all four years then.”

“If you want to,” she said. “You don’t have to.”

They made a date to reunite for his twentieth birthday in New York City, the scene of their happiest weeks as a couple since he’d left St. Paul. The next morning, he called Kenny and declared himself ready to do business. The big new round of Iraq contracts wouldn’t be let until November, Kenny said, and so Joey should enjoy his fall semester and just be sure to be ready with his financing.

Feeling flush in advance, he splurged on an Acela express train to New York and bought a hundred-dollar bottle of champagne on his way to Abigail’s apartment. Her place was more cluttered than ever, and he was happy to shut the door behind him and cab out to LaGuardia to meet Connie’s plane, which he’d insisted she take instead of a bus. The whole city, its pedestrians half naked in the August heat, its bricks and bridges paled by haze, was like an aphrodisiac. Going to meet his girlfriend, who’d been sleeping with someone else but was zinging back into his life again, a magnet to a magnet, he might already have been king of the city. When he saw her coming down the concourse at the airport, jumpily dodging other travelers, as if too preoccupied to see them until the last second, he felt flush with more than money. Felt flush with importance, with life to burn, with crazy chances to take, with the story of the two of them. She caught sight of him and started nodding, agreeing with some thing he hadn’t even said yet, her face full of joy and wonder. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” she said spontaneously, dropping the pull handle of her suitcase and colliding with him. “Yeah!”

“Yeah?” he said, laughing.

“Yeah!”

Without even kissing, they ran down to the baggage level and out to the taxi stand, where, by some miracle, nobody was waiting. In the back of their taxi, she peeled off her sweaty cotton cardigan and climbed onto his lap and began to sob in a way akin to coming or a seizure. Her body seemed entirely, entirely new in his arms. Some of the change was real-she was a little less arrowy, a little more womanly-but most of it was in his head. He felt inexpressibly grateful for her infidelity. His feeling was so large that it seemed as if only asking her to marry him could accommodate it. He might even have asked her, right then and there, if he hadn’t noticed the strange marks on her inner left forearm. Running down its soft skin was a series of straight parallel cuts, each about two inches long, the ones nearest her elbow faint and fully healed, the ones approaching her wrist increasingly fresh and red.

“Yeah,” she said, wet-faced, looking at the scars with wonder. “I did that. But it’s OK.”

He asked what had happened, though he knew the answer. She kissed his forehead, kissed his cheek, kissed his lips, and peered gravely into his eyes. “Don’t be scared, baby. It was just something I had to do for penance.”

“Jesus.”

“Joey, listen. Listen to me. I was very careful to put alcohol on the blade. I just had to do one cut for every night I didn’t hear from you. I did three on the third night and then one every night after that. I stopped as soon as I heard from you.”

“And what if I hadn’t called? What were you going to do? Slit your wrist?”

“No. I wasn’t suicidal. This is what I was doing instead of having thoughts like that. I just needed to hurt a little bit. Can you understand that?”

“Are you sure you weren’t suicidal?”

“I would never do that to you. Not ever.”

He ran his fingertips over the scars. Then he raised her unscarred wrist and pressed it to his eyes. He was glad she’d cut herself for him; he couldn’t help it. The ways she moved were mysterious but made sense to him. Somewhere in his head, Bono was singing that it was all right, all right.

“And you know what’s really incredible?” Connie said. “I stopped at fifteen, which is exactly the number of times I was unfaithful to you. You called me on exactly the right night. It was like some kind of sign. And here.” From the back pocket of her jeans she took a folded cashier’s check. It had the curve of her ass and was impregnated with her ass’s sweat. “I had fifty-one thousand in my trust account. That was almost exactly what you said you needed. It was another sign, don’t you think?”

He unfolded the check, which was payable to JOSEPH R. BERGLUND in the amount of FIFTY THOUSAND dollars. He wasn’t ordinarily superstitious, but he had to admit that these signs were impressive. They were like the signs that told deranged people, “Kill the president NOW,” or told depressed people, “Throw yourself out a window NOW.” Here the urgent irrational imperative seemed to be: “Wed your lives together NOW.”

Outbound traffic on the Grand Central was at a standstill, but the inbound side was moving briskly, the cab was sailing right along, and this, too, was a sign. That they hadn’t had to wait in line for a cab was a sign. That tomorrow was his birthday was a sign. He couldn’t remember the state he’d been in even one hour earlier, heading to the airport. There was only the present moment with Connie, and whereas, before, when they’d fallen through a cosmic fissure into their two-person world, it had happened only at night, in a bedroom or some other contained space, it was now happening in broad daylight, under a citywide haze. He held her in his arms, the cashier’s check resting on her sweaty breastbone, between the damp straps of her top. One of her hands was pressed flat against one of his breasts as if it might give milk. The grown-woman smell of her underarms intoxicated him, he wished it were much stronger, he felt there was no limit to how strongly he wanted her underarms to stink.

“Thank you for fucking somebody else,” he murmured.

“It wasn’t easy for me.”

“I know.”

“I mean, it was very easy in one way. But almost impossible in another. You know that, right?”

“I totally know it.”

“Was it hard for you, too? Whatever you did last year?”

“Actually, no.”

“That’s because you’re a guy. I know what it’s like to be you, Joey. Do you believe that?”

“Yes.”

“Then everything’s going to be all right.”

And, for the next ten days, everything was. Later, of course, Joey could see that the first, hormone-soaked days after a period of long abstinence were a less than ideal time to be making huge decisions about his future. He could see that, instead of trying to offset the unbearable weight of Connie’s $50,000 gift with something as heavy as a marriage proposal, he should have written out a promissory note with a schedule for payment of interest and principal. He could see that if he’d separated himself from her for even an hour, to take a walk by himself or to talk to Jonathan, he might have achieved some useful clarity and distance. He could see that postcoital decisions were a lot more realistic than precoital ones. In the moment, though, there had been no post-, it had all been pre- upon pre- upon pre-. Their craving for each other cycled on and on through the days and nights like the compressor of Abigail’s hardworking bedroom-window air conditioner. The new dimensions of their pleasure, the sense of adult gravity conferred by their joint business venture and by Connie’s sickness and infidelity, made all their prior pleasures forgettable and childish in comparison. Their pleasure was so great, and their need for it so bottomless, that when it waned even for an hour, on their third morning in the city, Joey reached out to press the nearest button to get more of it. He said, “We should get married.”

“I was just thinking the same thing,” Connie said. “Do you want to do it now?”

“You mean like today?”

“Yes.”

“I think there’s a waiting period. Some kind of blood test?”

“Well, let’s go do that, then. Do you want to?”

His heart was pounding blood into his loins. “Yes!”

But first they had to have the fuck about the excitement of going to have the blood tests. Then they had to have the fuck about the excitement of finding out they didn’t need to have them. Then they wandered up Sixth Avenue like a couple drunk beyond caring what anybody thought of them, like red-handed murderers, Connie braless and wanton and attracting male stares, Joey in a state of testosterone heedlessness in which, if anybody had challenged him, he would have thrown a punch for the sheer joy of it. He was taking the step that needed to be taken, the step he’d been wanting to take since the first time his parents had said no to him. The fifty-block walk uptown with Connie, in a baking welter of honking cabs and filthy sidewalks, felt as long as his entire life before it.

They went into the first deserted-looking jewelry store they came to on 47th Street and asked for two gold rings that they could take away right now. The jeweler was in full Hasidic regalia-yarmulke, forelocks, phylacteries, black vest, the works. He looked first at Joey, whose white T-shirt was spattered with mustard from a hot dog he’d bolted along the way, and then at Connie, whose face was flaming with heat and with abrasion by Joey’s face. “The two of you are getting married?”

Both of them nodded, neither quite daring to say yes aloud.

“Then mazel tov,” the jeweler said, opening drawers. “I have rings in all sizes for you.”

To Joey, from far away, through a fine tear in his otherwise tough bubble of madness, came a pang of regret about Jenna. Not as a person he wanted (the wanting would return later, when he was alone and sane again) but as the Jewish wife he was never going to have now: as the person to whom it might actually have mattered that he was Jewish. He’d long ago given up on trying to care, himself, about his Jewishness, and yet, seeing the jeweler in his well-worn Hasidic trappings, his vestments of minority religion, he had the peculiar thought that he was letting down the Jews by marrying a Gentile. Morally dubious though Jenna was in most respects, she was still a Jew, with great-great-aunts and uncles who’d died in the camps, and this humanized her, took the edge off her inhuman beauty, and made him sorry to let her down. Interestingly, he felt this only about Jenna, not Jonathan, who was already fully human to Joey and did not require Jewishness to make him any more so.

“What do you think?” Connie asked, gazing at the rings arrayed on velvet.

“I don’t know,” he said from his little cloud of regret. “They all look good.”

“Pick them up, try them on, handle them,” the jeweler said. “You can’t hurt gold.”

Connie turned to Joey and searched his eyes. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

“I think so. Are you?”

“Yes. If you are.”

The jeweler stepped away from the counter and found something to busy himself with. And Joey, seeing himself through Connie’s eyes, couldn’t bear the uncertainty in his own face. It enraged him murderously on her behalf. Everybody else doubted her, and she needed him not to, and so he chose not to.

“Definitely,” he said. “Let’s take a look at these.”

When they’d selected their rings, Joey tried to bargain down the price, which he knew he was supposed to do in a store like this, but the jeweler merely gave him a disappointed look, as if to say: You’re marrying this girl and you’re quibbling with me about fifty dollars?

Leaving the store, the rings in his front pocket, he almost collided on the sidewalk with his old hall mate Casey.

“Dude!” Casey said. “What are you doing here?”

He was wearing a three-piece suit and was already losing his hair. He and Joey had drifted apart, but Joey had heard he was working in his dad’s law office for the summer. Running into him at this moment seemed to Joey another important sign, although of what, exactly, he wasn’t sure. He said, “You remember Connie, right?”

“Hi, Casey,” she said with fiendishly blazing eyes.

“Yeah, sure, hi,” Casey said. “But, dude, what the fuck? I thought you were in Washington.”

“I’m taking a vacation.”

“Man, you should have called me, I had no idea. What are you guys doing on this street anyway? Buying an engagement ring?”

“Yeah, ha ha, right,” Joey said. “What are you doing here?”

Casey fished a watch on a chain from his vest pocket. “Is this cool or what? It used to be my dad’s dad’s. I had it cleaned and repaired.”

“It’s beautiful,” Connie said. She bent over to admire it, and Casey shot Joey a frown of inquiry and comic alarm. From the various acceptable guy-to-guy responses available to him, Joey chose to produce a sheepish smirk suggesting mucho excellente sex, the irrational demands of girlfriends, their need to be bought trinkets, and so forth. Casey cast a quick connoisseurial glance at Connie’s bare shoulders and nodded judiciously. The entire exchange took four seconds, and Joey was relieved by how easy it was, even at a moment like this, to seem to Casey a person like Casey: to compartmentalize. It boded well for his continuing to have an ordinary life at college.

“Dude, aren’t you hot in that suit?” he said.

“My blood is Southern,” Casey said. “We don’t sweat like you Minnesotans.”

“Sweating is wonderful,” Connie offered. “I love sweating in the summer.”

This obviously struck Casey as a too-intense thing to say. He put his watch back in its pocket and looked down the street. “Anyhow,” he said. “If you guys want to go out or something, you should give me a call.”

When they were alone again, in the five o’clock flow of workers on Sixth Avenue, Connie asked Joey if she’d said the wrong thing. “Did I embarrass you?”

“No,” he said. “He’s a total dork. It’s ninety-five degrees and he’s wearing a three-piece suit? He’s a total pompous dork, with that stupid watch. He’s already turning into his dad.”

“I open my mouth and strange things come out.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Are you embarrassed to be marrying me?”

“No.”

“It kind of seemed like you were. I’m not saying it’s your fault. I just don’t want to embarrass you around your friends.”

“You don’t embarrass me,” he said angrily. “It’s just that hardly any of my friends even have girlfriends. I’m just kind of in a weird position.”

He might reasonably have expected to have a little fight then, might have expected her to try to extract, via sulking or reproach, a more definitive avowal of his wish to marry her. But Connie could not be fought with. Insecurity, suspicion, jealousy, possessiveness, paranoia-the unseemly kind of stuff that so annoyed those friends of his who’d had, however briefly, girlfriends-were foreign to her. Whether she genuinely lacked these feelings, or whether some powerful animal intelligence led her to suppress them, he could never determine. The more he merged with her, the more he strangely also felt he didn’t know the first thing about her. She acknowledged only what was right in front of her. She did what she did, responded to what he said to her, and otherwise seemed wholly untroubled by things occurring outside her field of vision. He was haunted by his mother’s insistence that fights were good in a relationship. Indeed, it almost seemed to him as if he were marrying Connie to see if she would finally start fighting with him: to get to know her. But when he did marry her, the following afternoon, nothing changed at all. In the back of a cab, as they rode away from the courthouse, she wove her ringed left hand into his ringed left hand and rested her head on his shoulder with something that couldn’t quite be described as contentedness, because that would have implied that she’d been discontented before. It was more like mute submission to the deed, the crime, that had needed to be done. The next time Joey saw Casey, in Charlottesville a week later, neither of them even mentioned her.

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.”

He might have worried about admitting this to Jenna if she’d been paying attention, but she was now yanking on her onboard video screen, peevishly trying to wrest it from its stowage hole. He lent a gallant hand.

“So, I’m sorry,” she said, “you were saying…? Something about not getting paid?”

“Oh, no, I’m definitely getting paid. In fact, I’m probably going to end up making more than Nick does this year.”

“I doubt that, frankly.”

“Well, it’s going to be a lot.”

“Nick’s in a whole different universe of remuneration.”

This was too much for Joey. “Why am I here?” he said. “Do you even want me here? You’ve either been ignoring me or talking about Nick, who I thought you were broken up with.”

Jenna shrugged. “I told you I was grouchy. But a little word to the wise? I’m not too terribly interested in your business deal. The whole reason you’re here and Nick isn’t is I got sick of hearing him talk about money all day and all night.”

“I thought you liked money.”

“It doesn’t mean I like to hear about it. You’re the one who brought it up.”

“I’m sorry I brought it up!”

“OK, then. Apology accepted. But also? I don’t see why I can’t mention Nick if you’re going to be talking about your woman all the time.”

“I talk about her because you ask about her.”

“I’m not sure I see the difference.”

“Well, and also, she’s still my girlfriend.”

“Right. I guess that is one difference.” And she leaned over suddenly and offered her mouth to his. First the merest brush, then a softness almost like warm whipped cream, and then full flesh. Her lips felt every bit as beautiful, as complexly animated and valuable, as they had always looked to him. He leaned into the kiss, but she pulled away and smiled approvingly. “Happy boy,” she said.

When a flight attendant came to take their dinner orders, he asked for beef. He was planning to eat nothing but beef for the entire trip, on the theory that it was somewhat constipating; he hoped to make it all the way to Paraguay before he had to go ring-hunting in the bathroom. Jenna watched Pirates of the Caribbean while she ate, and he put on his headphones and watched it with her, leaning awkwardly into her space rather than pulling up his own screen, but there were no further kisses, and the one drawback of business-class seats, as he discovered when the movie ended and they bedded down beneath their respective comforters, was that no cuddling or incidental contact was possible.

He didn’t see how he was going to fall asleep, but then suddenly it was morning and breakfast was being served, and then they were in Argentina. It was nowhere near as exotic as he’d imagined it. Except that everything was in Spanish and more people were smoking, civilization here seemed like civilization anywhere. The plate glass and floor tiles and plastic seats and lighting fixtures were exactly the same, and the flight to Bariloche boarded with the rear seats first, like any American connecting flight, and there was nothing marvelously different about the 727 or the factories and farm fields and highways he could see from the window. Dirt was still dirt, and plants still grew in it. Most of the passengers in the first-class cabin were speaking English, and six of them-an English couple and an American mother with three children-joined Joey and Jenna in wheeling their Priority-tagged luggage to the cushy white Estancia El Triunfo van that was waiting for them in a no-parking zone outside the Bariloche airport.

The driver, an unsmiling young man with thick black chest hair pushing through his half-unbuttoned shirt, rushed over to take Jenna’s bag and stow it in the rear and install her in the front passenger seat before Joey could even clock what was happening. The English couple grabbed the next two seats, and Joey found himself sitting toward the rear with the mother and her daughter, who was reading a young-adult horse novel.

“My name is Félix,” the driver said into an unnecessary microphone, “welcome to Rio Negro Province please use the seat belts we are driving two hours the road will be bumpy in places I have cold drinks for those who want them El Triunfo is remote but lucksurious you must forgive the bumps in the road thank you.”

The afternoon was clear and blazing, and the way to El Triunfo led through prosperous subalpine country so similar to western Montana that Joey had to wonder why they’d flown eight thousand miles for it. Whatever Félix was saying to Jenna, nonstop, in hushed Spanish, was drowned out by the nonstop braying of the Englishman, Jeremy. He brayed about the good old days when England was at war with Argentina in the Falklands (“our second-finest hour”), the capture of Saddam Hussein (“Har, I wonder how Mister smelled when he came out of that hole”), the hoax of global warming and the irresponsible fearmongering of its perpetrators (“Next year they’ll be warning us about the dangerous new ice age”), the laughable ineptitude of South American central bankers (“When your inflation rate is a thousand percent, methinks your problem is more than bad luck”), the laudable indifference of South Americans to women’s “football” (“Leave it to you Americans to excel at that particular travesty”), the surprisingly drinkable reds coming out of Argentina (“They blow the best wines of South Africa out-of-the-water”), and his own copious salivation at the prospect of eating steak for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (“I’m a carnivore, a carnivore, a terrible disgusting carnivore”).

For relief from Jeremy, Joey struck up a conversation with the mother, Ellen, who was pretty without being attractive and was wearing the stretch cargo pants that a certain kind of mom favored nowadays. “My husband’s a very successful real estate developer,” she said. “I trained as an architect at Stanford, but I’m home with our children now. We decided to homeschool them, which is very rewarding, and great in terms of taking vacations when it suits our schedule, but a lot of work, let me tell you.”

Her children, the reading daughter and the game-playing sons behind her, either didn’t hear this or didn’t mind being a lot of work to her. When she heard that Joey had a small business in Washington, she asked him if he knew about Daniel Jennings. “Dan’s a friend of ours in Morongo Valley,” she said, “who’s done all this research on our taxes. He’s actually gone back and looked at the record of debates in Congress, and you know what he discovered? That there’s no legal basis for the federal income tax.”

“There’s no legal basis for anything, really, when you get right down to it,” Joey said.

“But obviously the federal government doesn’t want you to know that all the money it’s collected for the last hundred years rightfully belongs to us citizens. Dan has a website where ten different history professors say he’s right, there’s no legal basis whatsoever. But nobody in the mainstream media will touch it. Which, don’t you think that’s a little strange? Wouldn’t you think at least one network or one newspaper would want to cover it?”

“I guess there must be some other side to the story,” Joey said.

“But why are we only getting that other side? Doesn’t it seem news-worthy that the federal government owes us taxpayers three hundred trillion dollars? Because that’s the figure Dan came up with, including compound interest. Three hundred trillion dollars.”

“That’s a lot,” he agreed politely. “That would be a million dollars for every person in the country.”

“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?”

“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.”

“What the fuck, man?” Kenny Bartles said. “Where the fuck are you? I just sent you like ten e-mails. Are you in Paraguay? Is that why you’re not getting back to me? When the contract says January 31, DOD fucking means January 31. I sure the fuck hope you’ve got something in the pipeline for me, because January 31’s nine days from now. LBI’s already all over my ass because these fucking trucks are breaking down. Some bullshit design flaw in the rear axle, I hope to God you got some rear axles for me. Or whatever, man. Fifteen tons of fucking hood ornaments, I would thank you very much for that. Until you get me some kind of weight, until we can see a date of confirmed delivery of full weight of something, I don’t have a limb to stand on.”

Jenna returned at sunset, all the more gorgeous for being dust-covered. “I’m in love,” she said. “I’ve met the horse of my dreams.”

“I have to leave,” Joey said immediately. “I have to go to Paraguay.”

“What? When?”

“Tomorrow morning. Tonight, ideally.”

“Good Lord, are you that pissed off with me? It’s not my fault you lied to me about your riding skills. I didn’t come here to walk. I didn’t come here to waste five nights of double occupancy, either.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry about that. I’ll pay my half of it back.”

“Fuck paying it back.” She looked him up and down scornfully. “It’s just, do you think you can find some other way to be a disappointment? I’m not sure you’ve checked every conceivable disappointment box yet.”

“That’s a really mean thing to say,” he said quietly.

“Believe me, I can say meaner things, and I intend to.”

“Also, I didn’t tell you I was married. I’m married. I married Connie. We’re going to live together.”

Jenna’s eyes widened, as if with pain. “God, you are weird! You are such a fucking weirdo.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“I thought you actually understood me. Unlike every other guy I’ve ever met. God, I’m stupid!”

“You’re not,” he said, pitying her for the disability of her beauty.

“But if you think I’m sorry to hear you’re married, you are much mistaken. If you think I thought of you as marriage material, my God. I don’t even want to have dinner with you.”

“Then I don’t want to have dinner with you, either.”

“Well, great, then,” she said. “You are now officially the worst travel companion ever.”

While she showered, he packed his bag and then loitered on the bed, thinking that, perhaps, now that the air had been cleared, they might have sex once, to avoid the shame and defeat of not having had it, but when Jenna emerged from the bathroom, in a thick Estancia El Triunfo robe, she correctly read the look on his face and said, “No way.”

He shrugged. “You sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure. Go home to your little wife. I don’t like weird people who lie to me. I’m frankly embarrassed to be in the same room with you at this point.”

And so he went to Paraguay, and it was a disaster. Armando da Rosa, the owner of the country’s largest military-surplus dealership, was a neckless ex-officer with merging white eyebrows and hair that looked dyed with black shoe polish. His office, in a slummy suburb of Asunción, had shinily waxed linoleum floors and a large metal desk behind which a Paraguayan flag hung limply on a wooden pole. Its back door opened onto acres of weed and dirt and sheds with rusting corrugated roofs, patrolled by big dogs that were all fang and skeleton and spiky hair and looked as if they’d barely survived electrocution. The impression Joey got from da Rosa’s rambling monologue, in English little better than Joey’s Spanish, was that he had suffered a career setback some years earlier and had escaped court-martial through the efforts of certain loyal officer friends of his, and had received instead, by way of justice, the concession to sell surplus and decommissioned military gear. He was wearing fatigues and a sidearm that made Joey uneasy to walk in front of him. They pushed through weeds ever higher and woodier and more buzzing with outsized South American hornets, until, by a rear fence crowned saggily with concertina, they reached the mother lode of Pladsky A10 truck parts. The good news was that there were certainly a lot of them. The bad news was that they were in abominable condition. A line of rust-rimmed truck hoods lay semi-fallen like toppled dominoes; axles and bumpers were jumbled in piles like giant old chicken bones; engine blocks were strewn in the weeds like the droppings of a T. rex; conical mounds of more severely rusted smaller parts had wildflowers growing on their slopes. Moving through the weeds, Joey turned up nests of mud-caked and/or broken plastic parts, snake pits of hoses and belts cracked by the weather, and decaying cardboard parts cartons with Polish words on them. He was fighting tears of disappointment at the sight of it.

“Lot of rust here,” he said.

“What is rust?”

He broke a large flake of it off the nearest wheel hub. “Rust. Iron oxide.”

“This happens because of the rain,” da Rosa explained.

“I can give you ten thousand dollars for the lot of it,” Joey said. “If it’s more than thirty tons, I can give you fifteen. That’s a lot better than scrap value.”

“Why you want these shit?”

“I’ve got a fleet of trucks I need to maintain.”

“You, you are a very young man. Why you want these?”

“Because I’m stupid.”

Da Rosa gazed off into the tired, buzzing second-growth jungle beyond the fence. “Can’t give you everything.”

“Why not?”

“This trucks, the Army not use. But they can use if there is war. Then my parts are valuable.”

Joey closed his eyes and shuddered at the stupidity of this. “What war? Who are you going to fight? Bolivia?”

“I am saying if there is war we need parts.”

“These parts are fucking useless. I’m offering you fifteen thousand dollars for it. Quince mil dólares.”

Da Rosa shook his head. “Cincuenta mil.”

“Fifty thousand dollars? No. Fucking. Way. You understand? No way.”

“Treinta.”

“Eighteen. Diez y ocho.”

“Veinticinco.”

“I’ll think about it,” Joey said, turning back in the direction of the office. “I’ll think about giving you twenty, if it’s over thirty tons. Veinte, all right? That’s my last offer.”

For a minute or two, after shaking da Rosa’s oily hand and stepping back into the taxi he’d left waiting in the road, he felt good about himself, about the way he’d handled the negotiation, and about his bravery in traveling to Paraguay to conduct it. What his father didn’t understand about him, what only Connie really did, was that he had an excellent cool head for business. He suspected that he got his instincts from his mother, who was a born competitor, and it gave him a particular filial satisfaction to exercise them. The price he’d extracted from da Rosa was far lower than he’d allowed himself to hope for, and even with the cost of paying a local shipper to load the parts into containers and get them to the airport, even with the staggering sum that it would then cost him to fly the containers by charter to Iraq, he would still be within parameters that would assure him obscene profit. But as the taxi wove through older, colonial portions of Asunción, he began to fear that he couldn’t do it. Could not send such arrantly near-worthless crap to American forces trying to win a tough unconventional war. Although he hadn’t created the problem-Kenny Bartles had done that, by choosing the obsolete, bargain-basement Pladsky to fulfill his own contract-the problem was nonetheless his. And it created an even worse problem: counting the costs of start-up and the paltry but expensive shipment of parts from Lodz, he’d already spent all of Connie’s money and half of the first installment of his bank loan. Even if he were somehow able to back out now, he would leave Connie wiped out and himself in crippling debt. He turned the wedding ring on his finger nervously, turned it and turned it, wanting to put it in his mouth for comfort but not trusting himself not to swallow it again. He tried to tell himself that there must be more A10 parts out there somewhere, in some neglected but rainproof depot in Eastern Europe, but he’d already spent long days searching the internet and making phone calls, and the chances weren’t good.

“Fucking Kenny,” he said aloud, thinking what a very inconvenient time this was to be developing a conscience. “Fucking criminal.”

Back in Miami, waiting for his last connecting flight, he forced himself to call Connie.

“Hi, baby,” she said brightly. “How’s Buenos Aires?”

He skated past the details of his itinerary and cut straight to an account of his anxieties.

“It sounds like you did fantastic,” Connie said. “I mean, twenty thousand dollars, that’s a great price, right?”

“Except that it’s about nineteen thousand more than the stuff is worth.”

“No, baby, it’s worth what Kenny will pay you.”

“And you don’t think I should be, like, morally worried about this? About selling total crap to the government?”

She went silent while she considered this. “I guess,” she said finally, “if it makes you too unhappy, you maybe shouldn’t do it. I only want you to do things that make you happy.”

“I’m not going to lose your money,” he said. “That’s the one thing I know.”

“No, you can lose it. It’s OK. You’ll make some more money somewhere else. I trust you.”

“I’m not going to lose it. I want you to go back to college. I want us to have a life together.”

“Well, then, let’s have it! I’m ready if you are. I’m so ready.”

Out on the tarmac, under an unsettled gray Floridian sky, proven weapons of mass destruction were taxiing hither and thither. Joey wished there were some different world he could belong to, some simpler world in which a good life could be had at nobody else’s expense. “I got a message from your mom,” he said.

“I know,” Connie said. “I was bad, Joey. I didn’t tell her anything, but she saw my ring and she asked me, and I couldn’t not tell her then.”

“She was bitching about how I should tell my parents.”

“So let her bitch. You’ll tell them when you’re ready.”

He was in a somber mood when he got back to Alexandria. No longer having Jenna to look forward to or fantasize about, no longer being able to imagine a good outcome in Paraguay, no longer having anything but unpleasant tasks before him, he ate an entire large bag of ruffled potato chips and called Jonathan to repent and seek solace in friendship. “And here’s the worst of it,” he said. “I went down there as a married man.”

“Dude!” Jonathan said. “You married Connie?”

“Yeah. I did. In August.”

“That is the most insane thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I thought I’d better tell you, since you’ll probably hear about it from Jenna. Who it’s safe to say is not very happy with me right now.”

“She must be royally pissed off.”

“You know, I know you think she’s awful, but she’s not. She’s just really lost, and all anybody can see is what she looks like. She’s so much less lucky than you are.”

Joey proceeded to tell Jonathan the story of the ring, and the ghastly scene in the bathroom, with his hands full of crap and Jenna knocking on the door, and in his own laughter and in Jonathan’s laughter and disgusted groans he found the solace he’d been looking for. What had been abhorrent for five minutes made a great story forever after. When he went on to admit that Jonathan had been right about Kenny Bartles, Jonathan’s response was clear and adamant: “You’ve got to bail out of that contract.”

“It’s not so easy. I’ve got to protect Connie’s investment.”

“Find a way out. Just do it. The stuff going on over there is really bad. It’s worse than you even know.”

“Do you still hate me?” Joey said.

“I don’t hate you. I think you’ve been a total asshole. But hating you doesn’t seem to be an option for me.”

Joey felt enough cheered by this talk to go to bed and sleep for twelve hours. The next morning, when it was midafternoon in Iraq, he called Kenny Bartles and asked to be let out of his contract.

“What about all the parts in Paraguay?” Kenny said.

“There was plenty of weight. But it’s all useless rusted shit.”

“Send it anyway. My ass is on the line.”

“You’re the one who bought the stupid A10s,” Joey said. “It’s not my fault there’s no parts for them.”

“You just told me there’s plenty of parts. And I’m telling you to send them. What am I not understanding here?”

“I’m saying I think you should find somebody else to buy me out. I don’t want to be a part of this.”

“Joey, whoa, man, listen. You signed the contract. And this is not the eleventh hour for Shipment Number One, this is the fucking thirteenth hour. You cannot back out on me now. Not unless you want to eat whatever you’re already out of pocket. At the moment, I don’t even have the cash to buy you out, because the Army hasn’t paid me for the parts yet, because your Polish shipment was too light. Try to look at this from my side, would you?”

“But the stuff in Paraguay looks so bad, I don’t think they’re even going to accept it.”

“You leave that to me. I know the LBI people on the ground here. I can make it work. You just need to send me thirty tons, and then you can go back to reading poetry or whatever.”

“How do I know you can make it work?”

“That’s my problem, right? Your contract is with me, and I’m saying just get me weight and you will get your money.”

Joey didn’t know which was worse, the fear that Kenny was lying to him and that he would be screwed not only out of the money he’d already spent but out of the vast additional outlays still ahead of him, or the idea that Kenny was telling the truth and LBI was going to pay $850K for nearly worthless parts. He saw no choice but to go over Kenny’s head and talk directly to LBI. This entailed a morning of being passed around telephonically by people at LBI headquarters, in Dallas, before he was connected with the pertinent vice president. He laid out his dilemma as plainly as possible: “There aren’t any good parts available for this truck, Kenny Bartles won’t buy out the contract for me, and I don’t want to send you bad parts.”

“Is Bartles willing to accept what you’ve got?” the VP said.

“Yeah. But they’re no good.”

“Not your worry. If Bartles accepts them, you’re off the hook. I suggest you make the shipment right away.”

“I don’t think you’re quite hearing me,” Joey said. “I’m saying you don’t want that shipment.”

The VP digested this for a moment and said, “We will not be doing business with Kenny Bartles in the future. We’re not at all happy about the A10 situation. But that is not your worry. Your worry should be getting sued for nonfulfillment of contract.”

“Who-by Kenny?”

“It’s a total hypothetical. It’s never going to happen, as long as you send the parts. You just need to remember that this is not a perfect war in a perfect world.”

And Joey tried to remember this. Tried to remember that the worst that could happen, in this less than perfect world, was that all the A10s would break down and need to be replaced by better trucks at a later date, and that victory in Iraq might thereby be infinitesimally delayed, and that American taxpayers would have wasted a few million dollars on him and Kenny Bartles and Armando da Rosa and the creeps in Lodz. With the same determination that he’d brought to grabbing hold of his own turds, he flew back to Paraguay and hired an expediter and oversaw the loading of thirty-two tons of parts into containers and drank five bottles of wine in the five nights he had to wait for Logística Internacional to forklift them into a veteran C-130 and fly off with them; but there was no gold ring hidden in this particular pile of shit. When he got back to Washington, he kept right on drinking, and when Connie finally came out with three suitcases and moved in with him, he kept drinking and slept badly, and when Kenny called from Kirkuk to say that the delivery had been accepted and that Joey’s $850,000 was in the pipeline, he had such a bad night that he called Jonathan and confessed what he had done.

“Oh, dude, that’s bad,” Jonathan said.

“Don’t I know it.”

“You just better hope you don’t get caught. I’m already hearing a lot of stories from that eighteen billion in contracts they let in November. I wouldn’t be surprised if we get congressional hearings.”

“Is there somebody I can tell? I don’t even want the money, except what I owe Connie and the bank.”

“That’s very noble of you.”

“I couldn’t screw Connie out of the money. You know that’s the only reason I did it. But I’m wondering if maybe you could tell somebody at the Post what’s going on. Like, that you heard something from an anonymous source?”

“Not if you want it to stay anonymous. And if you don’t, you know who’s going to get smeared, don’t you?”

“But if I’m the whistle-blower?”

“The minute you blow the whistle, Kenny smears you. LBI smears you. They’ve got a whole line item in their budget for smearing whistle-blowers. You’ll be the perfect scapegoat. The pretty-faced college kid with the rusty truck parts? The Post will eat it up. Not that your sentiment doesn’t do you credit. But I highly recommend you stay mum.”

Connie found work at a temp agency while they waited for the dirty $850,000 to filter down through the system. Joey wandered through his days watching TV and playing video games and trying to learn how to be domestic, how to plan a dinner and shop for it, but the simplest short trip to the supermarket exhausted him. The depression that for years had stalked the women nearest him seemed finally to have identified its rightful prey and sunk its teeth in him. The one thing he knew he absolutely had to do, which was tell his family that he’d married Connie, he could not do. Its necessity filled the little apartment like a Pladsky A10 truck, confining him to the margins, leaving him insufficient air to breathe. It was there when he woke up and there when he went to bed. He couldn’t imagine giving the news to his mother, because she would inevitably perceive the marriage as a pointed personal blow to her. Which, in a way, it probably was. But he dreaded no less the conversation with his father, the reopening of that wound. And so, every day, even as the secret suffocated him, even as he imagined Carol blabbing the news to all his former neighbors, one of whom would surely tell his parents soon, he put off making the announcement another day. That Connie never nagged him only made the problem more solely his.

And then one night, on CNN, he saw the news of an ambush outside Fallujah in which several American trucks had broken down, leaving their contract drivers to be butchered by insurgents. Although he didn’t see any A10s in the CNN footage, he became so anxious that he had to drink himself to sleep. He woke up some hours later, in a sweat, mostly sober, beside his wife, who slept literally like a baby-with that world-trusting sweet stillness-and he knew he had to call his father in the morning. He’d never felt so afraid of anything as of making this call. But he could see now that nobody else could advise him what to do, whether to blow the whistle and suffer the consequences or stay mum and keep the money, and that nobody else could absolve him. Connie’s love was too unqualified, his mother’s too self-involved, Jonathan’s too secondary. It was to his strict, principled father that a full accounting needed to be made. He’d been battling him all his life, and now the time had come to admit that he was beaten.