Freedom [221]
“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