Freedom [198]
“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