Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  It was the hand he noticed first. A large, red male hand. With an intentness verging on urgency it was kneading a bare female shoulder, and the tanned neck above it, and the area behind her ear, and the ear itself, taking the skin and flesh in its fingers, taking for the purpose of having. Returning to the shoulder. Advancing in snake-like contractions under the narrow strap of her black dress, knuckles nudging the strap slowly out over the smooth globe of the shoulder and down the arm a little, palps of fingers indenting the skin there, palm molding and squeezing and possessing. Idly, with the hand she wasn’t using to hold her beer, the girl pulled the strap back onto her shoulder. She shook her dark mane back and twisted around in her seat, chancing to look straight at Louis. She was twenty and soft and tough, the kind of equine and unintrospective beauty that star outfielders go for. The hand gathered her in again, her hair and shoulders and attention, and dipped under the back of her dress and stayed there. Only then did Louis realize the hand belonged to a fifty-year-old man whose face he knew.

  Renée was hunched forward, chewing a nail. The tag of her T-shirt stood up on her freckled neck. Apparently things were happening on the field, things good for the Royals and bad for the Sox. Louis followed the hand’s creeping progress under the black fabric and around under bimbo’s arm and saw the fingertips halt as close to her breast as propriety allowed, maybe even a centimeter closer. Bimbo whispered into her companion’s ear, mouth lingering, lips dragging across his cheek and meeting his. The obscene red hand squeezed her and released her. The plate umpire roared and punched a batter out. The pigs cheered. The organist noodled. Dimly Louis saw his graying girlfriend’s smile fade and her mouth open: “What’s wrong?

  “Is something wrong?"

  “Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

  He made his hand a pistol, braced his wrist and took a bead on the man’s head. “CEO of Sweeting-Aldren. Right there.”

  Conceivably despite the cheering these words had carried into Mr. Aldren’s ears; he swung around and briefly scanned all the seats less good than his own, allowing his pouchy and inflamed face and narrow eyes to make their impression on Renée.

  “Slime ball,” Louis said, his arm recoiling from the shot he’d let fly.

  “I guess I see what you mean.”

  “Check out his pinky ring.”

  His own hands were cold and white, all his blood boxed up in his heart and temples. Not even a Sox rally and a screaming eighth inning could pry his eyes from the spectacle of fondlement unfolding three rows down. Maybe to her credit, maybe from dim-wittedness, the girl seemed oblivious to the liberties the hand was taking and to the confident, possessing leer that Aldren trained alternately on her and on the players at their feet. She was following the game. And it was not implausible, Louis thought, that she would retain partial possession of herself later on as well, when Aldren took her off to some overfurnished room to penetrate her warm orifices in privacy, the same privacy in which even now, in all probability, his other effluents were being pumped into the yielding earth.

  “He sure can’t keep his hands off her,” Renée observed.

  “It’s more like she can’t keep his hands off her.”

  “But listen.” She touched Louis’s face and made him look at her. “Don’t be so angry. I don’t like it when you’re angry.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  “I wish you’d try, if only for my sake.”

  It was a declaration. Louis looked at the face of the person who had made it, the face with the pretty eyes and upturned nose and acne, and realized that this person had somehow become literally the only thing in the world he could even marginally count on.

  “I love you,” he said unexpectedly, but meaning it. He didn’t see the fan behind him grin and wink at Renée and so didn’t entirely understand why she bounced back in her seat so abruptly and gave her attention to the game, which was ending.

  6

  There’s a specific damp and melancholy ancient smell that comes out in Boston after sunset, when the weather is cool and windless. Convection skims it off the ecologically disrupted water of the Mystic and the Charles and the lakes. The shuttered mills and mothballed plants in Waltham leak it. It’s the breath from the mouths of old tunnels, the spirit rising from piles of soot-dulled glass and the ballast of old railbeds, from all the silent places where cast iron has been rusting, concrete turning friable and rotten like inorganic Roquefort, petroleum distillates seeping back into the earth. In a city where there is no land that has not been changed, this is the smell that has come to be primordial, the smell of the nature that has taken nature’s place. Flowers still bloom, mown grass and falling leaves and fresh snow still alter the air periodically. But their smells are superimposed; sentimental; younger than those patiently outlasting emanations from the undersides of bridges and the rubble of a thousand embankments, the creosoted piers in oil-slicked waterways, the sheets of Globe and Herald wrapped around furry rocks in drainage creeks, and the inside of every blackened metal box still extant on deserted right-of-way, purpose and tokens of ownership effaced by weather, keyhole plugged by corrosion: the smell of infrastructure.

  It was out in force when Louis and Renée came up Dartmouth Street from the Green Line stop at Copley Square. They walked in silence. The windy brake-lit night when they’d driven these streets searching for a parking place seemed buried in the past by much more than the month it actually had been. Again it was a weekend night, but this time the neighborhood was peaceful and sober and untrafficked, as though by some circadian coincidence all the residents had left town or were staying home with family. The twilight sky was like a painted blue backdrop hanging directly behind the row houses and their domestic yellow lights.

  Eileen had been suspicious when Louis called. He’d found it necessary to fire a salvo of apologies at her, attributing his recent meanness to the fact that he’d lost his job. His remorse was just authentic enough to make her sentimental. She said it was “really tough luck” that he was unemployed. She expressed a vague interest in having him over sometime, to which non-invitation he insltantly responded: “Great! How about Friday night?” She said she’d check with Peter. He said he and Renée would plan to come around eight. She said, but she had to check with Peter. He said one thing he should mention was that Renée didn’t eat red meat or poultry. “Oh, that’s OK,” Eileen said, her voice brightening. “I’ll just make some vegetarian thing.”

  Once the date had been set, the difficult task turned out to be persuading Renée to lie.

  “A mathematician?” She’d gaped at him. “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but what’s Peter going to think when a seismologist starts asking him about waste disposal? He’s going to think earthquakes. Do we want him thinking earthquakes? Mentioning to his dad that there’s this seismologist who’s curious about the company? You told me you were a math person, before you went into geophysics.”

  “I’m not even going to discuss this with you.”

  “Why? Why? All you have to do is say it. I mean assuming anyone’s polite enough to ask about your work, which I doubt they will. You just say, whatever, applied mathematics. Isn’t that what seismology is anyway?”

  “It’s a lie. I blush when I lie.”

  “Uh! You’re so exemplary I can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah, and I wonder if you appreciate that. I’m really beginning to wonder.”

  “Lying is a social skill,” he said patiently. “Everybody has to lie. And this particular lie is like totally benign.”

  “Misrepresenting myself, manipulating two people who’ve invited us to dinner in good faith, trying to get some time alone with one of them so I can extract information on the pretext of idle curiosity? This is a benign lie?”

  It was in moments of frustration like this one that Louis thought of Lauren. He was convinced that Lauren would have lied for him. Lauren would have known what to do.

  “Lo
ok,” Renée said. “If the subject comes up naturally, in the course of a conversation, and I don’t have to lie, fine. Otherwise, I know you’re angry at these people, I know you feel like you’ve been stepped on. But they’re still people, and to go there in total cynicism, which is what you’re doing—I find it very worrisome that you’d consider doing this.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said. She was getting on his nerves. “Things aren’t so black-and-white. For one thing, I actually had a not-bad talk with Eileen. It’s not like I’m blaming her the way I blame my mother. You know, she’s a victim too. You think I’d go there in total cynicism?”

  “I’m saying I can see you beginning to think you can treat people whatever way you want to, because you’re so angry. And the reason this matters to me is that I care about you.”

  He filled his lungs with air. He let it out slowly. The idea that Renée so fully understood his shortcomings was almost more than he could stand.

  “OK, OK, you’re right,” he said, more temperately. “But it’s like you’re killing everything by thinking too much. I’m not asking you to be diabolical. I’m just saying let’s go and have a good time and try to get what we want. It’s like you do so much thinking that it’s impossible for you to have dinner with people under any circumstances. The only way you can stay exemplary is to stay by yourself. Because you’re never going to really respect the people you’re with, and the music they like, and the food they eat, and the clothes they wear, and the less than totally intense thoughts they have—”

  “I said I would go.”

  “And that’s morally wrong, right? It’s deceptive. To act like you’re on the same level they are, when inside you feel more exemplary and aware and everything. It turns you into a false person, with a false smile and no friends, which is ultimately—”

  “Fuck you, Louis. You really do abuse me.”

  “Which is ultimately very sad. Because underneath you’re a very lovable person, and you want to be liked and have fun.”

  He was perplexed by her stubbornness. He honestly believed that she’d be a happier person if she could loosen up a little; but all he got for his pains was the feeling that he was an odious Male. Of course, maybe he was an odious Male. The odious Male seeking control over a virtuous and difficult woman won’t scruple to exploit whatever weakness he can find in her—her age, her mannerisms, her insecurity, and her loneliness above all. He can be as cowardly and cruel as he wants to as long as logic is on his side. And the woman, yielding to his logic, can do no more to save her pride than demand his fidelity. She says, “You’ve humiliated me and won me now, so you’d better not hurt me.” But hurting her is precisely what the man is tempted to do, because now that she has yielded he feels contempt for her, and he also knows that if he hurts her she’ll become virtuous and difficult again . . . These archetypes forced entry to the apartment on Pleasant Avenue like vulgar relatives. Louis wanted to turn them away, but it’s not so easy to slam the door in your relatives’ faces.

  In the brick house on Marlborough Street, at the door of the Stoorhuys-Holland residence, he watched stress do extreme and painful things to Eileen’s face and Renée’s face as they squeezed through the moment of hellos. Then he handed over a bag of beer. Eileen was wearing an oversized black karate outfit, with her hair fanned on her back and shoulders. The effect was stylish and reminded him of borzois, dogs which when he passed them on the street always seemed like they’d be happier running around in jeans and sneakers but couldn’t, because their owners were rich.

  He figured Eileen was entertaining them tonight because she’d lacked the skills to escape his self-invitation, but it was possible that she was also curious about Renée. She led them into the living room—empty of partygoers, it had some dignity now, was less of a station, more of a room—and explained that Peter had been helping one of his little sisters set up a new computer and was due home at any minute. She asked “you guys” if they’d had trouble parking. She hoped “you guys” didn’t mind eating so late. She offered “you guys” beer or wine or beer or . . . whatever. She hoped “you guys” liked moussaka. Having thus exhausted the possibilities for addressing them collectively, she jumped out of her chair and said, “Where is my boy?”

  They listened to her phoning in the kitchen, her voice getting higher, its girlish tone stretching thin as the irritation underneath it swelled. When she returned to the living room she slipped into her chair as though she didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. However, there was no conversation. Her guests merely looked at her, and at length she pretended to wake out of a trance. “He’s coming,” she averred.

  Renée spoke. “You— You’re in business school?”

  Eileen nodded rockingly, not looking at her. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

  “You must be about done, though,” Louis said.

  “Oh, yeah.” She nodded and rocked, some aspect of the stereo holding her attention. “I’m all done, actually.”

  “Where will you be working?” Renée asked.

  “Um.” She rocked. “Bank of Boston?”

  There was a long silence. Shyness had paralyzed Eileen, shyness of the kind that makes a five-year-old bury her face in her mother’s arms when a stranger asks too many questions.

  “What kind of thing will you be doing there?” Renée said gently.

  “Um . . . commercial loans?”

  “And . . . what kind of thing does that entail?”

  Blank-eyed, Eileen turned to Louis, who frantically indicated that it was her question to answer, not his.

  “Commercial lending,” she said. “It’s, you know, helping corporations finance things. Capital improvements. Acquisitions, takeovers. Development. It’s—really not very interesting.”

  “It sounds like it would be very interesting,” Renée said.

  “Oh, well, it is interesting. To me, it’s very interesting. But I think Louis said that you’re a scientist?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, yeah, well. It’s not interesting in that way. It’s more of a people kind of job, you know, where you have to deal with different kinds of people. That’s sort of where the interest is.”

  Here Eileen ran out of gas. No matter how Renée tried to draw her out, she could think of nothing else to say about the work she would be doing. What puzzled Louis was that she didn’t take the obvious escape route, which would have been to ask Renée about her work, or him about his lack of it. She just squirmed and let the gruesome silences accrete.

  It was almost nine when Peter breezed into the apartment, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and carrying two boxes of floppies. Instantly Eileen became voluble again and launched into a more detailed account of Peter’s day, beginning with his little sister’s visit to the Computer Factory. When he returned from the kitchen, a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand, she tried to rope him into the narrative by smiling up at him, this her boyfriend, the topic of her conversation, her very words made flesh. “Did you get everything set up?” she asked.

  Peter let the question lie on the floor a few seconds before he squashed it with an impatient “Yeah.” To Louis he doled out a small and hollow “how’s it going.” Renée, however, he joined on the sofa and regaled with a long and thorough inspection of her head and arms and lap and head, smiling slyly all the while, as if they shared some secret. He dangled his whiskey glass between his knees and hunched over it like an ice fisherman peering through his hole. He said it was good to see her here again. He remembered she’d come to the party in mourning, very cool. He lamented that they hadn’t had a chance to talk more at the party. He focused on Renée, saying one thing after another to her, as if Louis and Eileen were conversing separately and not listening. Or as if he were the host of the Tonight Show, forgetting the audience in his fascination with this special guest, appropriating our fantasies of leaning close to her. Renée, thoroughly confused, began to smile at her knees the way you smile at a pretty good joke told by a person you’re not sure about. She gave no reply at a
ll when Peter asked her if she’d seen yesterday’s Globe.

  “You’re kidding,” he said, “you didn’t see it?”

  She shook her head, still smiling. Peter looked over his shoulder at Eileen. “We still have that paper, don’t we?”

  Eileen shrugged crossly.

  “It’s gotta be in the kitchen,” he said. “You want to get it?” Louis was very sorry to see his sister unfold herself from her chair and silently obey the order. When she returned, Peter took the newspaper from her hands without looking at her.

  “See this?” Peter let everything but the Metro/Region section slide to the floor. “Right here? Lead story? ‘Pro-Choice Advocates Decry Mail and Phone Harassment.’ And a fetching little picture of you? Courtesy of Channel 4 news. And here and here and here?” Inevitably, condescension had crept into his voice. “How about that? You’re all over the place.”

  “We didn’t get a paper,” Renée vaguely said to Louis, as if this were his fault.

  “Dr. Renée Seitchek, Harvard University seismologist—”

  She turned again to Louis, with a dark and vindicated look. “This TV show, I didn’t see that. Sounds pretty wild.”

  “It wasn’t wild. It was stupid.”

  “Right.” Peter nodded as if he’d said it himself. “Like even worse than stupid. You express an opinion and next thing you know you’re getting hate mail and you can’t even use your own telephone. You know what?” He put his hand on his hip and leaned away so he could see her better. “I think you’re being very brave. To speak up like this. I think that’s awfully damn brave. Private citizen branded an abortionist for expressing an opinion on TV? It’s like the ultimate nightmare.”