She leaned over his lap and squinted at the paper. Louis was dismayed to see how readily she tolerated Peter’s attention, and how pretty her flushing cheeks had made her, and how close her neck and shoulders were to Peter’s face. Peter, for all his faults, appreciated what an interesting and sexy and brave person Renée was; odious, immature Louis only said unpleasant things to her and criticized her. How could she fail to notice the contrast? The worst of it was that Louis didn’t know himself which way he wanted things, whether it was better to have a sad and twisted girlfriend who needed him so much that he could say whatever he wanted to her, or to be involved with a real woman who could attract other men and fill him with anxiety and forget him.
Eileen looked even less pleased than Louis. While the two thirty-year-olds huddled on the sofa in their faded jeans, she sat in her goofy silk pajamas and leveled on Renée the same evil stare she’d been using for twenty years whenever something she felt was rightfully hers was being denied her, even momentarily.
“Need some help with dinner?” Louis asked her in a cartoon voice.
He followed her to the kitchen, where she continued to glance balefully in the direction of Renée and Peter.
“So,” he said. “You’re all done. You passed all your exams.”
“Yeah.” From the refrigerator she took Russian dressing and a green salad big enough for twelve. “You want to toss this?”
She put her head in the oven. Hearing nothing from the other room but a rustling paper, Louis imagined that Peter and Renée’s mouths had already found each other, Peter squeezing her breasts and stifling her cries . . . His feelings had acquired such a physical bite that he could hardly believe he’d ever been in bed with her before, had ever tasted or touched any more of her than the mere idea: a voice, a willingness, a head, an older person—anything but the woman he now imagined in the other room. And it was a great thing, jealousy. It was a drug that charged up the nerve endings and delivered a first-class rush. On the minus side, it damaged his control over the salad he was tossing, which goaded by fork and spoon was surging from the bowl, cucumber disks splatting on the counter; and underneath the rush (which was great) he suspected he did not feel well at all.
Hands in thermal mitts, Eileen gazed dispassionately at the mess he was making. “Did I tell you what happened the night we had our finals party?”
“No.”
She pulled her hair behind her ears with quilted paws. “It was so funny. It was so, so funny. My friend Sandi’s dad owns this limousine company, and he was supposed to let us use three stretch limos, as a graduation present, and we were going to have this road party and end up in Manhattan and have dinner and go dancing at the Rainbow Room?”
“Uh huh.”
“But so these limos come to pick us up, and we’re all dressed and it’s raining, but there are only two of them? And there are eighteen of us?” Briefly she doubled over with the funniness of her memories. But we all pile into these two limos and we start having champagne and caviar, and we’re watching this video that this other friend found in the library which what it’s about is management training in the dairy industry? It’s all these cows and milking machines and guys with clipboards and crew cuts talking to the guys who work the machines. And slapping the cows and looking at cheeses and lobbying in Washington? It’s totally fifties, there’s this long shot of the Capitol Building, where they’re going to be lobbying for milk subsidies?”
“Uh huh.”
“Hoo ha ha,” she laughed. “But so we’re somewhere in Connecticut, out in the middle of nowhere, and this horrible thing happens to the other limo—not the one I’m in, the other one—somehow all the radiator fluid ends up on the highway and none of it’s in the radiator, and the driver won’t drive it anymore? And there are eighteen of us and it’s pouring rain and we only have one limousine to get to New York in, and the driver says he won’t take more than ten, and of course nobody wants to volunteer not to go.”
“Of course.”
“But we can just barely see this truck stop, down in the valley, it’s this huge truck stop, with about a million trucks out in front of it and nothing else around, just woods. So we all decide, who needs Manhattan, we’re just going to have our party right here. So we all go in, and there are about a thousand of these big red-faced truckers, they’ve all got tattoos and they’re smoking and eating this greasy food. And we’re totally dressed up, the guys are all in black tie, and Sandi’s in this Oscar de la Renta dress that’s cut like—!” The neckline Eileen drew across her chest indicated nipple exposure on Sandi’s part. “But we all walk right in anyway, and of course everybody’s staring at us, we’re carrying our champagne glasses, the tall kind, and the guys are carrying the bottles—”
“Was Peter there?”
“No, this was just from our class, we had to limit it. But we went to this room that had a jukebox, and, well. It was so much fun. We were surrounded by all these truckers and making all these jokes and listening to all these oldies and country music. Sandi called her dad and had him send an extra limo, but it was like midnight before it came and by that point the other limo driver had gone to Hartford for more champagne. Sandi was dancing with this trucker that she linked arms with and drank champagne? Everybody was really getting into it. But it was so much fun. We got back about six in the morning, we were all totally plotzed. Everybody asked us how New York was, and when we said where we’d been, nobody would believe us. They just couldn’t believe we’d spent the night in a truck stop.”
“It is amazing,” Louis said.
She nodded, removing garlic bread from the oven. “You want to tell them we’re going to eat?”
He went to the living room. The look Renée gave him as she headed for the dining room was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was just miles away.
“Something smells very good,” she said to Eileen, encouragingly, when they’d all sat down. Louis grunted in agreement. This was right before he realized that the sauce oozing from his slab of moussaka was full of ground beef. Appalled, he looked across the table at Renée, but she was now leagues away and filling her plate with salad. Raising a slice of eggplant with his fork, he uncovered a veritable ants’ nest of beef granules.
“Did I tell you what happened the night of the last earthquake?” Eileen paused and with her eyes made an approval-seeking connection between Renée’s plate and Renée herself. Renée, however, was occupied with raising fortifications, handling her hands and flatware with such absorption and willed inconspicuousness that although she was as nakedly in view as the other three, Louis could look straight at her and still not see what was happening to her moussaka or how she felt about it. He understood this to mean he shouldn’t make an issue of it.
“It was so funny,” Eileen said. “Last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics gave a talk at school, and afterward this professor of mine had him over to dinner with some of his students. He’s got this gr-r-reat house in Nahant, with about three acres overlooking the water—”
“Nahant,” Peter said. “Major Mafia neighborhood.”
Renée nodded and smiled, her eyes on her napkin.
“It’s not all Mafia, Peter. Because Seton lives there, and he’s not Mafia.”
“You got some kind of proof of that?”
“He’s not! He’s not Mafia. He’s a—a Harvard professor!”
“Ohhhh,” Peter said, smirking for Renée’s benefit. “I see.”
“He’s not Mafia,” Eileen assured Louis. “He’s an adjunct professor. But the Nobel guy, he’s Japanese. I can never get his name right. I know it when I hear it but I can’t remember it. Do—you remember?”
Louis’s jaw dropped. “You’re asking me if I remember the name of last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics?”
“See, neither do I. But anyway, he’s this funny little guy with round glasses, and we were having cognac after dinner in Seton’s living room, and people were starting to leave, and suddenly there was this earthquak
e. I was standing by the fireplace and I started screaming, because it was really an earthquake, I mean it was really strong.” She blushed a little, realizing she had everyone’s attention now, even Peter’s. “Stuff was falling off the mantel, and the floor was—it was like being on the T. Peter, that’s what it was like. It was like standing up on the T, you had to hold on to something or you’d lose your balance. It only lasted a couple seconds, but everyone was shouting and glasses were breaking and the lights were flickering. But then it stopped, and like one after another we all started noticing—Hakasura? Haka—? Hakanaka? Shoot. But anyway, we started noticing that he was still sitting in his corner of the sofa and talking about econometric inversions. He hadn’t even noticed the earthquake! Or he’d noticed it but he’d kept right on talking. He was holding on to the girl’s arm to keep her from standing up, the girl he was talking to, and finally he sees that we’re all standing there looking at him. He finishes his sentence and he looks up and he asks, ‘Is someone hurt?’ (but in his accent which I can’t do), and we say, ‘No,’ and he goes, ‘Well then. We have a saying in Japan—’”
She frowned. “Shoot. Shoot.” She looked at Peter. “Do you remember what it was?”
“You couldn’t remember when you told me either.”
“It was like, ‘If you— If you—.’” She looked around the table sheepishly. “I can’t remember. I thought I did but I don’t. It was something like—”
“They get the idea,” Peter said.
It began to seem to Louis that he was the only person at the table who did not belong. By and by Renée rose from behind her fortifications to answer questions about earthquakes, as usual sounding like a seminar leader; and it was Peter, not Louis, who seemed to possess what she said; it was Peter whose face shone with the reflected radiance of her expertise.
After ritual consumption of Hāagen-Dazs, Louis selflessly left the thirty-year-olds alone in the living room in case Renée needed more time to pry facts out of Peter.
“You seem kinda down,” Eileen told him in the kitchen, as he watched her load the dishwasher. “Is it your job?”
“What job? I don’t have a job.”
“So you haven’t found anything.”
“I’m not even looking.”
“But weren’t you like real interested in radio?”
He duly noted that she’d scored a point by “showing concern” for him like this. He laughed, briefly, at the idea he was interested in radio.
“Do you have money to pay your rent and stuff?” she said.
“Nah. But I’m moving in with Renée this week, so.”
Surprise muted her voice. “You are?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. I didn’t know that.” She turned up the corners of her mouth. “That’s nice.”
“Yes.”
She made a strong second effort. “She’s really smart, isn’t she? She is so smart. And she’s like—your age?”
Louis stared at his sister. “Yeah. My age.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“I met her at the beach. She had a beach ball.”
“Uh huh. Be sure and give me your new address, OK?” She scraped Renée’s uneaten beef into the trash, where there were two Stouffer’s frozen moussaka boxes, and put the plate in the dishwasher. “And you know, if you’re really low on cash, you could probably ask Mom—”
“Hey. There’s a thought.”
“Well although she’s kind of upset right now. I don’t know if you heard, it’s this really terrible thing. She’s getting all this money, but about 90 percent of it’s in stock in Grandpa’s company, Sweeting-Aldren, you know, where Peter’s dad works?”
“Oh, yeah. Chemical company?”
“Right. Except she doesn’t get control of it until next month, and you probably haven’t been reading in the paper, but the company’s in really awful shape, because of the earthquakes and this chemical spill near their plant. Peter’s dad’s the operations vice president and he’s in charge of all this stuff. But so for a while the stock price was falling like a point a day, which is really terrible, and Mom’s sitting there with all this stock and she has to watch it fall like two million dollars in value without being able to do anything about it. Can you believe that? I mean, two million dollars? And she can’t do a thing about it. Plus most of the other stuff she has is real estate, I guess mainly Rita’s property, and there’s suddenly this depression in real estate up there, because of the earthquakes. So she’s really upset. She flies out here and then she can’t do anything, so she goes home but then she just sits around and worries, so she keeps flying back. She doesn’t even call me anymore, when she’s here, which is fine with me; she’s not herself. Does she call you?”
“I’m seldom near a phone, so I wouldn’t know.”
“I really feel sorry for her. I mean, sheesh! Two million dollars.”
“It’s a hard, cruel world,” Louis said.
Eileen activated the dishwasher and looked around to see what dishes hadn’t made the final cut. “Peter’s family was really lucky,” she said. “The last earthquake did a lot of damage to their house. We were out there and we saw. Part of the house sort of settled? They have this new addition which they’re going to have to tear it down, and put a new foundation in, and their doors don’t close anymore. They live in Lynnfield, they have this wonderful house, and it turns out they had earthquake insurance? It was just really lucky. You could get it as a rider, but nobody used to want it until this year. But I guess the Stoorhuyses just wanted to be completely insured, and so now they’re not going to have to pay anything. One of their neighbors, it’s going to cost like twenty thousand dollars to fix their house. And you can’t get the rider anymore unless you wait a year before it takes effect.”
Louis thought of Mr. Stoorhuys, his forelock, his too-short jacket sleeves. His bushy, wagging tail. “Do you see them a lot? Peter’s family?”
Eileen’s face darkened. “Peter and his dad don’t get along too well. His mom’s real nice, though, so we see them a little. He’s got four sisters and a brother. He’s the oldest.” She looked at Louis sideways; there was a clump of suds on her silk lapel. “You know, he’s really a nice person. He’s a great older brother. He’s always doing stuff for his sisters.”
Louis was at a loss. “I’ll make an effort.”
He was called upon to make that effort almost immediately. Eileen took him into the living room and asked Peter if he had any ideas for a job Louis could get. Peter scrutinized him as though his job qualifications were written on his body. Renée was also looking at him, flashing LET’S LEAVE signals. Peter asked what kind of minimum salary requirements we were looking at.
Louis spoke in his zombie voice. “I wouldn’t say no to five thousand a month plus benefits and paid sick leave. I type thirty-five words per minute.”
“Frankly,” Peter said, “with requirements like those I think you’re going to be looking for a lo-o-o-ng time. Now, what I was going to suggest is you look for the kind of arrangement I got into with Boston magazine a few years back. We’re probably the best publication you could be with at this stage. We’re a little labor-rich right now, so I would not get my hopes up, but, uh, I could put in a word for you, if you want.”
Eileen gave Louis a huge smile: here was a really good possibility for him! Peter might be able to do something for him right away!
Peter swirled the ruddy liquid in his snifter. “What they may do,” he said, “is start you off on a one hundred percent commission basis. Doesn’t sound so great, huh. But if you don’t let ’em set a ceiling, it can work in your favor. I started out that way myself, and you know what I made my first month?”
During the moment Louis was given to guess the figure, Renée listed illy on the sofa, overcome by the high voltage of misunderstanding in the room.
“Twenty-one hundred dollars,” Peter said. “And that was three years ago. Granted, I had some experience at that point, so these may not be equivalent si
tuations. You may have to bust your butt for a couple of months. But if you can hack it, you’ll be pretty close to where I am now in two years max.”
“Thanks for the advice,” Louis said. “I’ll think it over and get back to you. Do you have a fax number?”
“Just give me a call,” Peter said.
“Think it over, huh, Louis?” Eileen earnestly touched his arm. “He can really help you.”
Renée had teletransported herself to the door. Again the grotesque distortion of faces as she and Eileen exchanged thanks and good wishes, squeezing through the moment of departure.
“Yo, Renée,” Peter said across the room. “Take care of yourself.”
Outside, the city made its rustling noises, its sighs and murmurs, its auditory offerings to the indifferent sky above it. Somewhere a subway wheel screeched on a rail, so far away the sound was dime-sized. The avengers walked up the street without speaking, doing three-on-two rhythms with their feet, Louis’s stride long, Renée’s more rapid. She was biting her lip and blinking as if resisting tears.
“You had a bad time,” Louis said.
“Yeah. I had a bad time. I had a very bad time, but it was my fault.”
“It’s your fault my sister gives you a plate of beef?”
“I can eat a little beef. It doesn’t kill me. I mean, yes it does kill me: I can’t eat it. But it’s not like it makes me sick. It’s only me. It’s only my problem with it.”
“I was the one,” he objected slowly, “who made you go. The whole thing was my idea.”
“Do you know why I stopped eating meat?” She was staring straight ahead. A damp breeze full of infrastructure dragged sickles of her hair across her forehead. “It’s not for—moral superiority. Just so you know that. It’s only because I don’t want to forget. I refuse to say OK, I’ll forget this is a cow. It’s nothing noble, it’s nothing compassionate. It’s only me and my problems.”
Across the street a Camry had found a parking place and was swinging in happily, rump first. Louis decided this was a good time to say nothing.
Strong Motion: A Novel Page 23
