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.