Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Thursday night a serious amateur who’d advertised in the Globe came and took away all the radio equipment in a station wagon for $380 cash. Louis had initially asked six hundred.

  On Saturday and Sunday, roughly every two hours, he dialed Renée’s home number and work number. There was no answer at either. He decided that she had no interest in seeing him again. The thought maddened him and he began to dislike her, because he wanted to use her body and was fully prepared to like her, if that was what using it required.

  In the studios of WOLO-AM in downtown Boston, in a glass tower across the tracks from North Station, a sea-captain type wearing white dungarees and red kerchief was being ushered from the vestibule. Moments later the man was heard speaking on the house monitor, extolling a balloon race scheduled for the weekend.

  WOLO’s receptionist returned to her desk behind the counter, warded Louis off with one arm, and pounded on her keyboard. She was a dark-haired jumbo girl, about the same age as he and ridiculously pretty. Her thighs were crossed and her tight skirt was bunched into exciting rills. At length she stopped typing, squinted at her screen, and delicately touched a function key. The screen went blank. She clapped her hands to her cheeks in horror and stared. She turned to Louis, eyes and mouth round. “I don’t know where it went! I don’t know where it went!”

  “I’m supposed to see a Mr. Pincus?”

  “He was in.” She put a finger on a new key and pulled it away as if stung. “But he went out.”

  “Is he coming back?”

  “You’re Holland, Louis, right? Why don’t you leave your name. I can’t deal with you. The manual for this printer was generated on the same printer for quote heuristic reasons unquote and the one sentence I could care less about ends with the phrase, I’ve got this memorized, ‘not to the not to.’ Ends with it.”

  “I thought I had an eleven o’clock appointment.”

  “Definitely not looking good in terms of seeing Mr. Pincus.”

  “Do you know when he’ll be back?”

  “Why don’t we start with where did he go? Hey? He went to the airport. Unlikely thing that’s his final destination. What’s his final destination? ‘Not to the not to.’ You follow me?”

  “Maybe I could make a new appointment.”

  “I’d love to reschedule you, but for reasons of blankness of screen and total unresponsiveness to keyed commands that’s not possible. Why don’t you write your name and number down, and I’ll give him the message, Holland, Louis. I’ll tape it to His screen.”

  She unrolled eight or ten inches of Scotch tape and stuck one end to Louis’s memo and the other to the doorway leading from her cubicle. From a drawer in her work station she removed a cantaloupe-sized red apple and made a tiny white notch in it with her teeth.

  “Do you want to have lunch with me?” Louis said.

  She held the apple up and wiggled it. “Not to the not to!”

  “How about a drink after work?”

  She shook her head and took a larger bite of apple and munched in a glum, blank-minded way, staring at an electrical outlet. Jackhammers rattled in the distance, at some unguessable compass point; cars honked plaintively, as though calling to their young. With a whack the girl bit a slab off the apple. Clearly it would take her another five minutes to reach the core (each bite reinforcing the superfluity of lunch) and another three minutes after that to suck her teeth clean and readjust her mouth, checking its perimeter with the tip of her tongue and then patting it with the back of her wrist. Her screen was still blank.

  “Are you free on the weekend?” Louis said.

  “This person,” she complained.

  “We could have dinner.”

  “Do I know this person? Why am I talking to this person?”

  In the help-wanteds there were thousands of boring jobs and no interesting jobs. Until you opened the help-wanteds it was possible to forget the essence of the average person’s job, which was: you perform this soul-killing “data entry” or “telemarketing” or “word-processing” function and we will reluctantly give you money.

  The help-wanteds were even sadder than the personals. “Very attractive benefits package,” some promised, (STUNNING BLUE-EYED SWF, fortyish but looks 25, seeks . . .) Was there anyone in the world who was independent, highly motivated, creative, and possessed of a minimum five yrs exp w/T-ls, SDLC, HDLC and 3270 BISYNC? And if such a dream candidate did exist, would it not be suspicious in the extreme if he or she were looking for a job? Ads like these seemed to have been placed as bitter ceremonial reminders, lest anybody think that corporations did not, like everyone else, have needs and desires that could not be satisfied.

  At the other end of the scale were the laconic one-liners seeking watchmen or receptionists and mentioning no benefits or wages; ads like ugly prostitutes who, on the plus side, didn’t ask much.

  Running a business was clearly nothing but unpleasant trouble. Companies wanted good employees and did not want bad employees. But the bad employees were eager to stay and take the companies’ money, while the good employees were eager to leave and work for competitors. To Louis all the thousands of jobs listed in the paper seemed like noxious effluents that the companies were trying to pay people to take off their hands. How they hated to have to pay so much and offer such juicy “benefits” to be rid of these noxious duties! How they wished it weren’t so! He could feel their anger at the expense of disposing of all this garbage. The top executives dumped the problem on the personnel department, and the people in personnel wore plastic suits easily mistaken for faces and personalities. Their job was to handle the poisonous but inevitable employment by-products without letting them come in contact with their skin. Their cordiality was guaranteed non-stick. It was 100 percent impermeable.

  “What are you, on vacation, Lou?”

  “No, I told you. I was fired.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were fired.”

  “Actually, I did.”

  “Gee that’s tough, I can’t believe it. Seems like everybody’s getting laid off these days.”

  “Yeah, although that obviously can’t be the case.”

  “What I don’t understand is why would anybody want to fire a nice kid like you.”

  “Well, because I don’t believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior. I don’t believe in the literal truth of the Bible.”

  Mullins frowned. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “The place where I worked was taken over by fundamentalist anti-abortionists and all non-Christians had to go.”

  “Aw Lou. Aw Lou. You shouldn’t of done that.” Mullins shook his head. “Now you’re, whataya, whataya, lookin’ for a new job?”

  “Right now I’m looking for a woman I saw ten days ago and want to see again.”

  “You’re not married, are you.”

  “No.”

  “You gotta have a job, Lou.”

  On Pleasant Avenue a ten-speed chained to a parking sign had been wrestled to the ground without relinquishing its hold on the signpost. The bumblebees bouncing off the honeysuckle were like coalescences of the day’s yellow, angry heat. The noise of hardwinged insects like the buzz of high-voltage transformers damaged, overloaded, by this heat; like the monotonous, depersonalized spirits of exterminated Indians made volatile by this heat.

  Inside the front door, in a chamber filled with incredibly powerful and hot canine body odor and dog-food breath, Louis saw orange flowers bloom and had to fight his way up the stairs like a diver close to not making it. His glasses slid off his sweating head. No one answered his knocking, although Renée’s apartment was traitorous and welcomed his mind’s eye.

  It was a twenty-five-minute walk to Harvard. With the help of some friendly strangers he managed to locate the Hoffman Laboratory of Geological Sciences, which was a quintuple-decker sandwich of brick and window on white concrete slabs. The interior was airconditioned and smelled like the sterile insides of computers. The office of Dr. Seitchek was situated on th
e ground floor, across from a computer room, and contained two desks. Howard Chun was sitting with his feet up on the one closer to the door, energetically firing a rubber band at the wall in front of him and shagging it on the fly. The other desk, by the window, was bare except for a stack of unopened mail.

  “She’s not here.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Howard lurched forward to catch the rubber band before it fell between his sneakers. “What you want her for?”

  “She’s a friend of mine.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “Think she’s at home.”

  “I was just there.”

  Howard began to snap the rubber band viciously against his own fingers, frowning at the reddening skin. Suddenly he peered over an armrest at the floor. “Wanna see something?” He shot the rubber band at a piece of paper on the wall. “That’s the earthquakes we got since March.”

  The circles appeared to be epicenters, scaled linearly to magnitude. “What are the dotted lines?” Louis said.

  “Mapped faults near Ipswich. Dashed line, big aeromagnetic feature, may be old suture, may be nothing. Six miles deep, maybe four or five. Mapped faults are shallow. Only problem is, Ipswich cluster’s deep, more like five, six miles.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Probably there’s other faults. Or faults aren’t mapped right. Doesn’t look right. Two unrelated swarms, so close in time and space. That’s low probability.”

  “Like how low?”

  Howard crossed his arms and wrinkled his nose. “Like really low. Never see it.”

  “Huh.” Louis looked again at the pile of mail on Renée’s desk. Outside the window Japanese tourists were filing up an asphalt-topped path between oak trees.

  Howard leaned dangerously far back in his swivel chair and retrieved his rubber band with outstretched fingers. “Wanna see something else?” Feet still on his desk, he rolled back and opened his top drawer and handed Louis a photograph, a 5 X 7 on yellowing, once-glossy paper. It was a picture of an adolescent girl in a marching-band uniform. She was clutching a clarinet to her chest. The jacket was Prussian blue with cream-colored trim and gold buttons; the cap had a black plastic bill and gold braid on the band. Long limp hair, mid-seventies hair, framed her face and did its best to conceal (but actually in effect extended and accentuated) the zones of acne on her cheeks and forehead. She was wearing the rigid, self-defeating smirk of teens who hate their face and for whom being photographed is an unspeakable cruelty, and was staring at an infinity somewhere to her left, as if by not meeting the camera’s eye she could make it overlook her. Pentagonal yellow leaves lay on the lawn between her and an out-of-focus station wagon and a double-door garage.

  “You know who it is?”

  “Where’d you get this?”

  “It’s Renée.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  Howard slammed his back into the vinyl backrest of his chair several times. Then he shoved off the desk with his feet and rolled halfway across the room. “Found it.”

  “Where?”

  “Just got it.”

  Louis tried to give it back.

  “Take it,” Howard said. “You want it?”

  “Why are you giving it to me?”

  Howard shrugged. He’d made his last offer.

  “Did you steal it?”

  “Just got it. You want it, take it. I don’t want it.”

  In the twilight, through his open window, he heard John Mullins tell the soprano and her husband that that nice-looking fella next door here—just moved in, nice-looking kid—had gotten fired from his job. He told ’em he didn’t believe in Jesus, and they fired him.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” Louis said.

  Renée was eating seedless red grapes at her kitchen table. She held the glass bowl at chest level and used only her wrist, bending it back and forth efficiently, to convey them to her mouth. “Very bad week for that.”

  “I got what’s-his-face, Terry, once, and he hung up on me.”

  “People are a little angry with me, through no fault of my own.” Quiet in bare feet, she got up and put the grape bones in the sink. Sweat stuck her hair to her neck and forehead in narrow, curving blades. In the window behind Louis, a box fan hummed on Lo, dispensing comfort with its sound, not its draft. (While their dressings are being changed, burn patients would rather listen to white noise than to music.)

  “I’ll just give you an idea of what things have been like.” She showed him the jack of her disconnected telephone, then plugged it in and upended a paper shopping bag from DeMoula’s Market Basket, dumping maybe sixty or eighty envelopes onto the kitchen table. “Here’s a nice one.” She handed him an envelope without a return address. It contained a typewritten note:

  Dear Bitch,

  I hope you die of aids.

  Sincerely,

  An enemy.

  “Gets right to the point,” she said brightly. “Here’s another nice one.”

  Dear “Ms” Seichek,

  I saw you on TV and your attitude makes me sick. Your attitude is have sex then kill the baby. What’s the difference between abortion and infancitide? One. Abortion is legal in Mass and infancitide is murder. You explain it to me. You said abortion on demand is o.k. for 14-years-olds. What about the parents. Another thing is you never mention adoption or homes. In this poor world there is no such thing as an unwanted baby. Maybe you want to have babies someday but your sterile. I think abortion stance should be taken into account for adoption. You don’t get any. Have you ever held a baby in your arms? Maybe you won’t have a chance now because of what you said. Maybe God is Merciful if you pray. Do you know how to pray? I can not pray for you.

  Mrs. Axel Hardy

  68 Frond Drive

  Hingham, Mass.

  “That’s the one about adoption, right? Check this one out. This guy put part of the chain letter in too.”

  Dr. Renée Scheik

  Hoffmann Laboratories

  20 Oxford Street

  Cambridge, Mass. 02138

  Dear Dr. Scheik,

  Next to convicted drug kinpins there is nothing more despicable in the world than abortionists. Half the people entering abortion clinics never come out alive. How can you sleep at night knowing all the lives you took at work? Or do you take drugs to sleep (ha ha). I hope they shut you down and you go to jail. The keep men and women apart in jails, good thing. May they do the worst to you.

  Signed,

  John Doe

  This had been typed on the back of an nth-generation Xerox reading:

  -2-

  has IMPACT but sometimes you cannot get through. Sometimes the number will be changed temporarily to an unlisted number. Sometimes you will get a busy signal or a no-answer or a machine. If a work number has been changed, get the new one from directory assistance (555-1212). Remember that clinics and private doctors cannot afford to be unlisted. Persistence is important—for a week, two weeks, even three. However it is also important to match EACH CALL with a first class letter. If the chain is not broken, it has been estimated that each pro-abortionist on the list will receive UPWARDS OF 1600 LETTERS by the time all nine boxes on page 1 are full. There is power in numbers! Imagine the impact of 1600 impassioned personal pleas! And 1600 telephone calls! But if you break the chain this number will be cut in half, and if another friend breaks the chain, it will be cut in half again.

  Jesus fed 5000 with five loaves and two fishes. You can have the SAME POWER if you send out six copies of this letter. If this copy is too blurry, retype before sending.

  Note: Long distance dialing is cheaper between 5pm and 8am (local time), but keep in mind most clinics keep regular working hours in their time zone (i.e. 9 to 5).

  HOW TO CHOOSE

  DO NOT choose names from the list at random. Start with the DAY OF THE MONTH you were born on—you will see there are 31 names on the list—and work forwards through the lis
t if you were born in an odd-numbered month (e.g. January =1, February = 2 etc.), and backwards if you were born

  “I’m going to eat some more grapes,” Renée said. “Do you want some?” Her refrigerator had round shoulders and a handle that latched. The chrome trademark on the door said FIAT.

  Louis was shaking his head in wonder. “This is so much worse than what happened to me.”

  “You sure you don’t want any? Grapes?”

  “Who put you on the list?”

  “Stites or somebody else in his organization, I’m 95 percent sure. It’s all Boston-area addresses. The thing about ‘Hoffmann Laboratories’ is a nice touch. These people aren’t stupid.”

  “You ought to complain to somebody.”

  “I talked on the phone to this guy at the Globe. He asked me to send him some copies of the letters, which I did. I guess they want to see who else is getting them before they run anything. He said he’d call me back through the department office, but he hasn’t yet.”

  “What about the post office. The phone company.”

  “That just seemed hopeless somehow. I don’t care about getting these people prosecuted, I only care about the world knowing what incredible jerks they are.”

  The telephone on the table began to ring. Louis put his hand on it and looked at Renée, who shrugged.

  “Is, ah, Dr. Seechek there?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Oh, you’re a man, I didn’t—”

  “No, sir,” Louis said. “I have a deep voice.”

  Renée threw him a very doubtful look.

  “My name is Joe. Uh, Doe. John Doe. I understand you’re employed at the Hoffman Laboratories and”—Mr. Doe’s voice became high and strangled—“that abortions are performed there?”

  “Yeah, I understand you understand that.”

  “I’d kinda like to talk to you about your work for a second, if I can, Dr. Seechek. Do you have a second?”

  Louis was enjoying himself, but Renée unplugged the phone, took the handset from him, and said to the dead line, “Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off.” The DeMoula’s bag tore as she began to stuff her hate mail back inside it, faint shadows of words playing on her lips. He was surprised to notice areas of redness and roughness encroaching on her pale complexion. He wondered whether this was a recent development or whether, clued in by the old photograph, he was seeing things about her that until now her manner had concealed. Her pores had become evident. There was a patch of subdued but not eradicated acne high on one cheek, also blemishes around her mouth that made it seem to run. She struck him as younger and a little dirtier, more like the kind of girl it was easy to do whatever you wanted with—the kind with more passion than self-esteem.