Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Renée. What’s yours?”

  “Renée.” Peter turned the name over in a toying tone. “Tell me, Renée. You buy a swimsuit in the last ten years? Be cool, I’m serious. You must have bought one. And right, you’re offended, OK, but chances are it was made of the miracle fabric, the one that doesn’t sag or pinch. Stuff called Silera.”

  “Spandex,” an apocalyptic horseman said.

  “Silera spandex,” Peter said. “The miracle bathing-suit fabric. It’s another of those Sweeting-Aldren blessings. You see, that’s what my dad means about their being an asset to the Commonwealth. No sag, no creep. And hey, really, I’m a little drunk, OK? It’s cool?” Renée stared at him with no expression at all.

  “But listen,” Peter continued generally, “I’m telling you what I can’t wait for is the total blast, Richter magnitude nine point oh, that makes the whole company go belly up. And oh shit—I just had this flash—let me—” His aged face was lit by the brightness of the idea before his eyes. “I just had this flash of nude beaches, after the cruncher. No more Silera, no more swimsuits, no more buildings. Naked nature—can you feel it? Can anybody get at that?”

  “I feel it,” said the horseman.

  “Oh yeah. Yes indeed,” Peter said.

  “They’ve gotta be insured to the gills, though, Peter,” one of the whiskey drinkers pointed out.

  “What?” Peter suddenly became more reasonable. “No, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about money. All these execs like my dad, they’re totally protected, they’d hardly feel it. And the stockholders, they lose a little, but it’s just a part of their portfolios, a good risk that didn’t pay, I mean everybody’s ass is double-covered. I’m talking about poetic justice. I’m talking about how pious these people are. You’ve got to believe me, there is nobody more pious than somebody in the chemical industry. Sure they’re rich as pigs, but that’s not what they’re in the business for. They’re in it as a public service. They’re making the world a better place to live. They’re doing all the nifty things that nature can’t do by herself. And who cares about a million gallons of toxic effluents annually if you never find a worm in your Boston lettuce? That’s what I’m talking about. That’s why I’m just waiting for the cruncher, just to shove all that shit back up their ass.” Peter turned to Louis, who had discovered Eileen’s dishes in a cupboard by the refrigerator. “You looking for something?”

  “Found it,” Louis said. He took Renée by the shoulders and moved her out of his path. As he left the kitchen he heard Peter say, “Renée, yo. You’re not mad at me, are you? You understand.”

  “Why should I be mad at you?”

  “Hey, absolutely. What’s to be mad about. Absolutely.”

  The jumbo girls had vanished, off to greener pastures. The bathroom door was closed, and when Louis failed to find Eileen in the living room he stationed himself by the food table to wait for her. The wall above the table was festooned with yellow-and-black NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO tape. Some of the food didn’t seem intended for consumption. There was a map of greater Boston attached to a piece of cardboard and decorated with whole, white, upright mushrooms, the biggest ones—a Siamese-twin pair—rising from downtown. There was also a plate of raw vegetables selected for their deformities, tomatoes with lingual protuberances, cleft carrots, gnarled peppers. Also an iced flat cake with stylized barbed wire dribbled on in mocha. Also a crystal bowl full of punch the color of old radiator water, with an iridescent film on top and a sheet of self-adhesive notepaper saying love canal punch try some!! Also a bowl of chocolate-chip cookies broken and piled up like rubble, with a toy bulldozer on top and the arms and heads of plastic men sticking up through the crumbs. Also a dish of cinnamon ATOMIC FIREBALLS.

  When the bathroom door began to open, Louis stepped over quickly to block Eileen’s escape. He found himself face to face with the person in the Mylar suit.

  The door closed defensively. Louis turned a corner and found two bedrooms and another closed bathroom door. Suitcases were opened up like sandwiches on the floor of the larger bedroom. Perched on a rattan hamper, glittering in the streetlight the Levolors let in, was Milton Friedman’s cage.

  Louis knocked on the bathroom door, air rasping hard in the vents of his mask. The door opened a crack and Eileen peered out anxiously. “Maybe you can help me?” She let him in and locked the door. “I can’t get the toilet unplugged.”

  “You have a plunger?”

  She pushed one eagerly into his hands. The tip of her necktie was wet. “You have to get a good seal,” he said, bearing down through the cloudy, pinkened water. It appeared to be a matter of a tampon. Eileen looked on with her fingers knit together, and when the water suddenly dropped and made the familiar flushing sound, she said, “Thank you so much,” and unlocked the door. He grabbed the knob.

  “What?” she said, retreating from him.

  “Talk time.”

  It was interesting to see how her superficiality fell away, like a shell of dry Elmer’s glue coming loose, and exposed a tired, vacant face. She tried a smile. “You having a nice time?”

  “Do you know what I just figured out?” He crossed his arms and put his back against the door. “I just figured out why you didn’t return my calls. You didn’t return my calls because you’re not living in your apartment. You’re living here.”

  “Yeah, Louis,” she said in a different voice, “I don’t even have that apartment anymore. My machine’s right here. When was the last time you tried to call?”

  “And you didn’t bother to tell me.”

  “I knew you were coming tonight, I thought I’d tell you now.”

  “But you didn’t tell me now. I had to come and ask.”

  “Yeah, you had to come and ask.”

  “So the idea is you’re living with him now.”

  She laughed. “I guess so.”

  “You guess so. You’re only sleeping in the same bed with him.”

  “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about? What bed I’m sleeping in?” She took a twisted towel off a rack and began to fold it and pet it. “My little brother wants to talk to me about who I’m sleeping with. I guess he thinks that’s what brothers are for.” She put the towel back on the rack. “Will you let me out now, please?”

  “Eileen, the guy’s a snake.”

  “Oh, is that so?” The pitch of her voice neared the upper range of human hearing. “My fiancé is a snake? That’s very nice of you, Louis. That’s very thoughtful.”

  “Ah, fiancé, fiancé.” He couldn’t figure out these women and their “fiancés.” They wielded the word like a weapon; it didn’t seem natural. “You should have said so sooner. I meant to say, he is a prince!”

  She reached and yanked the mask down below his chin. “You are so hateful. You never gave him a chance! You are so so hateful.”

  “That’s what Mom tells me too.”

  “And so cool too. You’ve always got an answer.”

  “Can I help it if he’s a snake?”

  “He is not a snake. He is a very, very vulnerable and sensitive person.”

  “Who when I last saw him was making suggestive remarks to my—to the person I brought to your party.”

  “Well, maybe he has less inhibitions than you do. Maybe he has less inhibitions than anybody in our family. I mean it, Louis, I know Peter and you don’t. I don’t see why you think you can just go calling somebody I care for a—a—a snake!”

  “Ah, ‘care for.’ You ‘care for’ him and you’re—”

  “YOU’RE a snake! YOU’RE a snake!”

  “You ‘care for’ him and you’re going to marry him. Makes sense, I’m sure he cares for you too, Eileen. But I wonder if maybe you’re not being taken for a ride. Let me ask you a question, this little property here, do you guys rent or own?”

  “That is none of your business.”

  Louis threw his head back into the door. “Meaning you actually managed to do it. You actually kept after her until
she couldn’t stand it anymore and she broke down and gave you whatever you needed to buy this place. Isn’t that right? Isn’t that right? You were so ruthless you actually got her to cough up money she says she doesn’t even have yet. Isn’t that right?”

  Eileen looked at him so furiously he was sure she was going to hit him. But instead she opened the glass shower door, stepped in, and shut the door behind her. Her voice echoed dully in the stall. “I’m not coming out till you’re gone.”

  He was too close to tears to say anything for a moment. It was the money, the money. He thought of the transfer of those funds and felt a column of tears pushing on the inside of his head, from his throat to his eyes. Behind the shower door the shadowy outline of his sister had sunk to its knees. The wet, hollow sound of her crying was like something in the pipes. He wished he’d never left Houston.

  “What do you think about when you think about me?” he asked her, looking into his eyes in the mirror. “Do you think of an enemy? Do you think of a person, who knows you and used to play with you? Or do you ever even think about me at all?”

  Eileen sniffled and gasped. “He is not a snake.”

  “Yeah, I don’t even have anything against him anymore. I mean, you’re right, I don’t know him. And it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m not going to bother you anymore.”

  In reply she only cried. Louis started to leave the bathroom, but something he’d seen in the mirror without seeing it now registered. He unfastened his fallen mask and put it in his pocket. The face he was looking at was both softer and older, more sensual, than the face he considered his own. He thought: I’m not such a bad-looking guy. For some reason the thought brought a rush of fear to his head and heart, the fear you feel when you fall in love; when you swing out to pass a car on a narrow road; when someone catches you in a lie.

  Renée was standing in the kitchen doorway, her back arched a little so that her neck and shoulders rested against the jamb. Her beer bottle was empty. When Louis appeared, she gave him a weak, ironic smile, as if to indicate both boredom and a diminished faith in his ability to relieve it. He asked her: “Do you want to be here?”

  She shrugged. “Sure. Do you not?”

  “No, but you can stay if you want. Or we can go get something to eat or something.”

  Neither alternative seemed to appeal to her much. “Let’s go,” she said.

  The last they saw of the party was the man in the Mylar suit doing a gorilla dance for the amusement of the other guests.

  Outside, there was a moon. The silver smoothness of the street was broken here and there by manhole covers and the furry remains of squirrels. “Is something wrong?” Renée said.

  “Yeah, a bunch of stuff. Mainly I’m sorry I dragged you to this party.”

  “Don’t be. It was interesting. Although . . .”

  “Although what a waste of a parking space.”

  In the car he divided his attention equally between the road and his silent passenger. The more she didn’t look at him, the more he turned to look at her. Her upturned nose, her pale cheeks, her whole thirty-year-old head, of which the plain wedge of dark hair, with its overlay of individual and meandering white strands, seemed the truest part. Spillages of orange street light ran over and over down the front of her dress, turning it an orange that was black in the orange context.

  “You have pretty hair,” he essayed.

  She shifted sharply in the bucket seat, repositioning her legs and shoulders like a person with a stomach cramp.

  “Fuck,” he said, “never mind. But I do like it.”

  “So do I,” she said flatly, throwing him a quick, smiley glance.

  When they reached Pleasant Avenue he set the brake and turned the engine off. Renée stared penetratingly at the rear window of the car in front of them, its corroded chrome frame and Celtics decal. On the sidewalk to the left of Louis lay a copper-tone range, the oven door uppermost and asterisked with guano. “This party totally depressed you, didn’t it.”

  A gust of wind rocked the car.

  “I was going to ask you,” she said, ignoring his question, “if you thought it was true what that person was saying about Sweeting-Aldren. The thing about a million gallons of effluent every year.”

  “I was hardly listening.”

  “Because that’s definitely not what they’re saying in the paper. In the paper they’re talking about zero gallons.”

  “My sister wants to marry this guy.”

  “He’s the boyfriend?” Another gust rocked the car. “I didn’t realize.”

  “For richer and for poorer.”

  “But I actually kind of liked him. He wouldn’t be my first choice as a brother-in-law, but he’s not stupid. Just a type.”

  Louis leaned over the hand brake and kissed her.

  She let him walk right into the warm vestibule of her mouth. It might have been a minute’s journey from the enamel rill between her front teeth to either of the elastic dead ends to which her lips came; an hour’s journey down her throat. He took her hair in his fists, pressing her head into the seatback with his lips.

  Headlights turned up the street. She pulled away, flattening her offended hair with one hand. “I was just about to say I can’t stand sitting around in cars.”

  Inside the house they were greeted by a baying from the large lungs of several dogs in the ground-floor apartment. “Dobermans,” Renée said. The air was hot and canine. It was fresher on the second-floor landing, and when she stopped to take a key down from a ledge, Louis kissed her again, backing her into a wall covered with paper that smelled like a used-book store. The baying downstairs subsided into frustrated gnashings, and she tried to pull away even as her mouth kept pressing into his. Suddenly a baby started crying, it seemed like right behind the door beside them. They went up a set of steeper stairs to her apartment.

  It was a bare, clean place. There was nothing on the kitchen counter but a radio/cassette player, nothing in the dish rack but a plate, a glass, a knife, and a fork. That the light was warm and the four chairs around the table looked comfortable somehow made the kitchen all the more unwelcoming. It was like the kitchen of the kind of man who was careful to wash the dinner dishes and wipe the counters before he went into the bedroom and put a bullet in his brain.

  A large room opposite the bathroom contained a bed and a desk. Another large room contained an armchair and bookshelves and many square yards of blond floorboards. When Renée came out of the bathroom she stood with her back to the woodwork between the doors to these two rooms and faced the kitchen, her hands clasped behind her. “Do you want something to eat, or drink?”

  “Nice place,” Louis said simultaneously.

  “I used to share it with a friend.”

  She didn’t move, didn’t lean aside even a little bit, as he went into the bedroom. He put his feet down as quietly as he could. Everything about the place made him feel intrusive, as though even loud footsteps might disturb things. (When police detectives arrive at the scene of a crime, aren’t there often some respectful, meditative moments before attention is turned to the body on the floor?) The desk lamp had been left burning over a stack of 11 x 17 fanfold computer paper, on the top sheet of which a program in Fortran was being revised in black ink. (Until the moment of the crime, yes, work had been in progress, it had been an ordinary evening . . . ) Above the desk hung a bathymetric map of the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It was spattered with thousands of dots in different colors, many grouped in dense elongated swarms like army-ant columns; beneath them, barbed line-segments were applied like war paint to the ocean. Continuing to tread carefully, as he had when he first entered Rita Kernaghan’s living room, Louis returned to the kitchen. Renée was still standing with her hands behind her back. She might have been a missionary at a stake, with her hands tied, unable to cover her nakedness, unable to cross herself or shield her face from the flames that would soon be leaping up, but like that missionary she stared straight ahead. She did flinch discemibly when Louis tou
ched her shoulders (even the greatest saints must have flinched when the first flames licked their skin), and despite the way she’d kissed him on the landing he was surprised by her unhidden look of need.

  The wind whistled on the dormers in the bedroom. It rose without falling, consuming more and more of the roof, finding further timbers in the house to bend and further panes to rattle, further expanses of wall to lean on. It seemed to be doing the work for Louis as he parted and lifted the two sides of Renée’s cardigan, which slid easily off her shoulders and, falling to the floor, unbound her hands. She put her wrists around his neck.

  It was still dark when he woke up. DR. RENEE SEITCHEK, whose internal anatomy he imagined had been rearranged in the escalating violence of their union, and whose hands had proved no less articulate than the rest of her in showing his own hands how best to bring her the releases he couldn’t deliver otherwise (he liked and admired the silent and perspiring and possessed way she came), now lay next to him and slept so heavily that she looked like she’d been struck unconscious by a blow to the head. There were sparse flocks of freckles on her shoulders. Through a crack between a shade and a window frame Louis could see tree boughs, lit by streetlight from below and blanketed with blackness, rocking in the wind. This wind tonight, she’d told him during a lull, had reminded her of an earthquake she’d seen in the mountains once. She’d been hiking in the Sierra Nevada with a high-school group. “And all of a sudden there was something happening in the country to the east. We could see for forty or fifty miles, and what it was like was when you’re by a perfectly calm lake, and you can see the wind coming the way you could hear it on the street tonight, the way the leading edge roughs up the water when it comes. That’s exactly what this event was like. It was this thing coming across the mountains, this visible rolling wave, and then suddenly we were in it. We definitely knew we were in it because there were little rockslides and the ground shook. But it wasn’t like the other events I’ve felt, because there was this visual connection.” She had actually seen the wave they were feeling. It hadn’t come out of nowhere. It had looked like nothing on God’s earth. And he wanted then, again, to take possess have take possess possess the body in which this memory resided.