Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  The trolley snaked and groaned beneath the center of the city. Riders spoke quietly, and flattered by their deference the enveloping silence grew glutted and despotic. They were nearly at Lechmere before Louis dared ask if Renée had gotten anything out of Peter.

  She shook her head. “He was very cautious, when I brought it up. He seemed surprised when I told him what he’d said at the party. He said he must have been very drunk. I said it must be true, though, what he’d said. And he said, yeah, his dad says the company doesn’t do any dumping, but he’s pretty sure they do. I asked him why he thought so, and he said he’d heard some things, but it wasn’t anything he could prove. That was all I could get him to say, without seeming like I really cared.”

  “Did he ask you what’s causing the earthquakes? I was noticing you—”

  “Yes. I lied, exactly the way you wanted me to. I sat there and told him a lie.”

  Louis collared her and pulled on her ear, but she was very unhappy. He waited until they’d crossed Cambridge Street and were in his car before he said, “Aren’t you going to ask what I found out from Eileen?”

  “Did you find something out?”

  “Nah. Only that Peter’s parents had earthquake insurance for their house. A special rider.”

  He watched his words sink in. “You’re kidding,” she said.

  “She volunteered it. I didn’t even ask.”

  “Nobody. Nobody around here buys earthquake coverage.”

  “So I gather.”

  “Oh wow.” She pressed her head into the headrest. “Wow.” She took his hand and squeezed it hard, hitting her thigh with it. He gave her a kiss and she snapped it off like a grape from its stem.

  “Are you mine?” he said.

  “Yes!”

  They drove home to Pleasant Avenue. On the kitchen table were the United Airlines tickets that had come in the mail that morning. Apparently Louis’s father had purchased a Boston-Chicago round trip in Louis’s name, without telling him, after a bad conversation they’d had on the previous weekend.

  “These,” he said tiredly.

  “I still don’t understand why he sent them.”

  He drank a glass of water. “It’s this von Clausewitz side of him. We have this conversation where I basically hang up on him, and he turns around and buys me plane tickets. Because now it’s my fault if he loses three hundred bucks because I don’t go.”

  “You could just say you have to work.”

  “You mean, tell a lie? Funny you suggest it. Unfortunately, I already told him I’m unemployed. And the thing is, it’s a nice thing. I was totally rude to him, and he turns the other cheek and gives me three hundred bucks’ worth of tickets, because in his own pot-headed way he’s trying to hold the family together. I told you he called me because he’d found out about my little run-in with my mother, up in Ipswich. He’s like, You want to trash her sofa? That’s cool, Lou, but you should consider her feelings too. Which has only been his refrain for about twenty years, you know, that I should consider her feelings too. Which is exactly what he’s going to tell me if I go out there. And so, like, why go? I’ve already heard it.”

  Renée put her chin on his shoulder and her hand on his crotch and squeezed him. “I won’t object if you don’t go.”

  “The person who should go is you, not me. You and him would really hit it off.” He dropped into a chair, and she sat down on his lap. He slid his hands up under her T-shirt. “I guess we’ll just see how we feel next Sunday.”

  “When are we going to move you in?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime before then. Wednesday?”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “In the meantime . . .” He pulled her shirt up slowly, bunching it above her black bra.

  “I have to do some work. Plus the system backup on Monday, which will take all night.”

  He unhooked her bra and freed her breasts, these female things that it had seemed, tonight, that he had never seen before. They were soft and animate little scones. He was just beginning to take a good, hard look at them when—

  “Mm!”

  She jumped to her feet, pulling down her shirt, and crossed her arms and faced the wall. He thought she’d gotten tangled up in her selfconsciousness again. Once she’d fixed her bra though, she apologized and said it was only the raccoon, the raccoon at the window, it had been looking straight at her.

  He hadn’t seen this raccoon yet. He went to the window, but with the kitchen lights on, all he could make out through the screen was some rear porch lights in the trees, and a length of white gutter at the bottom of the piece of roof outside the window.

  “Listen,” Renée said.

  There was a strange huffing, almost too faint to credit.

  “He’s right around the corner,” she said. “He gets nervous and goes around the corner, but then he gets more interested and comes back. I say he, but I’m not sure about that. Which is interesting, how an animal without gender, I always say he. Default gender: male. We should get away from the window, though. It—”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “What?”

  “It’s like an earthquake. It only comes if you’re not looking.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But it does come. I mean, there really is a raccoon.”

  “Yes! You think I’m lying to you?”

  They sat down at the table. Louis cheated, pretending not to watch the window but continually stealing peeks, and still it came as a complete surprise when he realized that the screen had stopped being blank. At what moment, exactly, had the dun-colored snout and perspicacious leather nose and shiny eyes appeared?

  This time when he went to the window the raccoon retreated only as far as the gutter. From there it gave him a hurt look, over its shoulder, like a doubtful suicide on a ledge. It was a big animal, ring-tailed and bandit-eyed, larger than a cat. The moment Louis turned to glance at Renée, the raccoon returned to the window. It paced back and forth, a dark blur of fur for the most part, but now and again (and each time surprisingly) it pushed its nose against the screen and looked at Renée.

  “Oh, it still has its sore,” she said, concerned.

  “This is great. Do you feed it?”

  “Sometimes I put stuff out. It usually doesn’t eat much. I don’t see it very often. Sometimes it comes two or three nights in a row, and then I won’t see it for a month. Three months, once. I thought it was gone. A dog got it, a car got it. Rabies.”

  Louis watched it climb up a drainpipe, hunching its furry and powerful shoulders like a cat, extending an arm like a monkey and then, as it put its chin on the gutter and heaved itself onto the roof, looking more like a person than anything else. The ceiling creaked, once, under its weight. With a smile, he turned to make a comment to Renée; but the room was empty.

  He found her naked in the sheets. Full of desire, he stripped and came to her, but even in the midst of his anticipation, even as he clambered into her arms and rested his weight on her volume and felt the uniform warmth of her skin and took her head in his hands, he wondered how she always worked it so he came to her, rather than vice versa. He wondered why he had to feel so alone when they made love, so alone with her pleasure as he propelled the long wave train that led to her satisfaction (on the green plotting screen in the computer room she’d shown him what a large and distant earthquake looked like as it registered on the department’s digital seismograph: a flat, bright line faintly rippled by the primary wave, settling down for a moment and then swinging more violently as the secondary wave arrived, and more violently still as more and more shock waves bounced off the earth’s outer core and inner core and crust, the sS and ScS and SS and PP and PKiKP, until finally the line went totally haywire in the grip of tremendous, rolling surface waves, the Love waves and Rayleigh waves that demolished bridges and leveled buildings and tore the earth up everywhere). It wasn’t that they didn’t fit together or come enough; it just seemed as if at no point, not even
in this most typical of acts between sexes, did she ever present herself or give herself or even let him see her as a woman. Even before jealousy had sharpened his interest, he’d been telling himself to stop and look at this woman the next time they made love, and each time they made love he forgot, and remembered only afterward. There was something like an earthquake’s own shyness in the way she tricked his eye, so that he could be with her and feel the presence of everything but those very qualities his imagination called up when he was alone and pictured a Woman. Always it seemed to suit some obscure purpose of hers to have the two of them be the same sex, excitable through matching nerves and satiable through matching stimulation. Some principle of seduction, some acknowledgment of difference, was missing. And it seemed as if whenever she sensed that he felt an absence she started talking, in a voice orgasm-drunk and lulling—pro-him, pro-them, pro-sex.

  So he turned the lights on. It was two in the morning. “I want to look at you,” he said.

  She squinted in the brightness. “We don’t need all these on.”

  He turned on one further light and stood by the bed looking down, intending, once and for all, to really see this woman. The game was up; she couldn’t hide; she didn’t try. In the glare of the lights, he saw: the blackness of hair and eyelids. The red smudge of mouth and nipples. Wry labia distended and flecked with foam. An ear with metal in it. The loll of untensed muscles beneath grayish skin. Dull, puckered areas of dried or drying semen. Dark fuzz on upper lip and wrists. The fetal mashedness of a tired face. All the qualities laid out like organs for sale in a French butcher’s meat case. This was the warm body he’d been holding? This was his girlfriend, Renée?

  He’d been tricked yet again. He’d seen an angel floating on thermals high above him, and not believing in it had shot it down and found it to be nothing but a feathered and lumpy piece of meat. The report of the gun echoed off into space like the laughter of the angel that had escaped.

  Suspiciously uncurious about what he was standing there for, Renée pulled the sheet over her shoulders. He supposed it was possible that she was just very sleepy. He crawled into bed, craving her desperately.

  On Sunday the Globe ran an endless article on the recent earthquakes, the long columns flanked by the usual escort of photos and graphics and boxes. Renée wasn’t mentioned in the main text, but she did get quoted in a box headlined EARTHQUAKES: GOD’S WILL, EARTH SPIRITS, OR CHANCE PHENOMENA?

  For Harvard University seismologist Renée Seitchek, the line between science and religion has proved particularly tortuous. Seitchek, who in the April 27 broadcast denounced efforts by Stites to link the abortion issue to the temblors, has become a target of illegal telephone and mail harassment directed at clinics and physicians who perform abortions and other pro-choice advocates in greater Boston.

  Stites and other COAIC leaders deny responsibility for the harassment, but Seitchek believes the barrage of hate mail she has received constitutes an attempt by the religious right to stifle free and accurate expression of scientific views.

  “The science of earthquakes is a science of uncertainties,” Seitchek said. “By admitting this uncertainty we run the risk of appearing to allow room for superstition, and yet if a scientist tries to forestall this and draw a sharp line between scientific debate and moral debate, she apparently is running the risk of being harassed by Philip Stites.”

  According to the box, Stites’s “successful prediction” of the recent earthquakes had attracted dozens of new followers to his church, which was still housed in the shaky tenement in Chelsea. The church claimed to have suffered “no real damage” since moving in, though by now nearly every home north of Cambridge had had a few dishes broken or walls cracked.

  Cumulative property damage, in fact, had reached an estimated $100 million, with more than 80 percent of it due to the most recent pair of quakes near Peabody. On a sheet of paper marked THEIR FAULT, Louis wrote:

  April 20, Peabody $3,400,000

  May 10—11, Peabody $80,000,000 +

  It gave him great satisfaction to carry all the zeroes out.

  In her spare moments, Renée was continuing to develop the scientific case against Sweeting-Aldren, studying every documented instance of induced seismicity. Louis was glad to see her working, but he was in no hurry for her to finish. The longer they delayed taking action against the company, the more time the earth had to shudder again under Peabody and cause further damage and run the company’s tab to still more satisfying heights. In his view, Sweeting-Aldren’s management were slimes and enemies of nature, and he wanted to see them bankrupt, if not in jail. He felt suspense almost erotic in intensity as he waited, day after day, for the next large earthquake. To occupy himself, he began to read basic seismology texts while Renée was away at work.

  Late in the afternoon on Wednesday she came back to the apartment with a new manila folder filled with photocopies. She’d been at Widener reading old newspapers.

  “Some interesting things here,” she said.

  He opened the folder greedily, but she stopped him. “Let’s get your stuff. I’ll tell you later.”

  It was summer again. Heat coiled off car roofs in the no man’s land of Davis Square, the marquee of the Somerville Theater trembling in the giddy swirl of gas fumes. Louis and Renée had been going to the theater at night for cheap double features and free airconditioning.

  On Belknap Street the soprano had her windows open and sounded near death. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It was a sound so wide that it didn’t seem capable of having issued from as narrow a thing as a human mouth. “I would like to make this person selfconscious,” Renée said. Louis put her to work in the kitchen, the room farthest from the hell of melodious torments. The soprano screamed and screamed. The tortured ear could not believe that no person of authority was coming with a needle or a gun to stop the misery, for humanity’s sake. Louis slid the catch down the front storm door’s piston and got some rope out of the Civic. The futon was going to ride on top.

  “Hey, Lou. Lou! Where you been?” John Mullins came down his porch stairs angrily. He planted his feet in the driveway with his head thrust forward like a desert prophet’s. A cyst-like glob of sweat was hanging on his chin. “People been lookin’ for you, Lou,” he said, all opprobrium. “Where you been? Where you been? Oh my God, you’re not movin’ out, are you? Lou? You’re not movin’ out? Whatsa matter, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you like it around here?”

  “I love it here,” Louis said above the aria. “I’m just making sure all my things fit in the car.”

  “Heh, little Hondacivic. You like this car? Oh, hey, Lou, that girl that was here looking for you, she ever find you? You know who I’m talking about? Pretty girl.”

  The instinctive part of Louis, the part connected to blood pressure and stomach, not the cognitive part, asked Mullins, “When was this?”

  “This morning. About nine, nine-thirty. I was readin’ the paper. I told her you’re not around much in the day.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Big girl. Said she was looking for you.”

  “Fat girl with glasses?”

  “No, no. Pretty girl. She had a suitcase.”

  Louis went inside. Almost immediately he came back out and looked at the car, trying to remember what he had to do. He touched the car once, on the hood, and went inside directly to his room and walked in circles. Renée packed plangently in the kitchen, flatware hitting skillet, the carton grunting as its flaps were folded under one another. He was supposed to pick things up and carry them to the car. However, everything he looked at with a view to carrying it seemed to be the wrong thing to carry at that particular moment. He kept walking around the room. He was like the person whose house is on fire who can’t decide what possession is most precious and so can rescue nothing. The only thing he knew for sure he wanted was to murder the soprano voice, which had begun to hold long, high notes and exaggerate the tremolo. But this voice, its incessancy, now se
emed to him a fundamental property of the world that he was powerless to alter. He stood by his window facing the soprano where she sang behind her opaque screens. He was not unhappy or happy. The wave front advanced across the mountains, changing the landscape as it came, and then he was in it, he was in it. That was all.

  Sooner than he’d expected, he heard voices in the front of the apartment. Female voices. Footsteps. Renée appeared, the carton in her arms. She spoke like a fugitive’s imperfectly deceived mother, when the police are at the door.

  “There’s somebody here to see you.”

  She stepped aside, opening the way past her, pointedly recusing herself from the difficulty. When instead of leaving he looked at her and tried to say something, she was compelled to add: “It’s your friend Lauren.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

  He felt her eyes on him as he walked up the hall, felt tie whole weight of her possession of him, and so it was not entirely a surprise that the girl standing just inside the front door, by a small straw-colored suitcase with a black leather jacket draped over it, should strike him as a vision of liberation. Lauren was tan and fair-haired and taller than he remembered her. One glance made clear how busily his mind had been training itself to appreciate Renée—to see those parts of her that were cute and fresh and to overlook the larger fact, which was that she was thirty years old and not beautiful. He could recognize a bill of large denomination without reading the numbers on it, and he could recognize Lauren’s beauty without referring to her long, muscled twenty-two-year-old’s legs, her golden twenty-two-year-old’s skin, her silky twenty-two-year-old’s hair, now grown out nearly to her shoulders. She was wearing the same plaid ruffled miniskirt she’d had on the first time he saw her, similar black shoes and ankle socks, and a white tank top damp with sweat between her breasts.

  The soprano, breaking off, had left an unwelcome stillness.

  “Hi Louis,” Lauren said in a flat, unsteady voice, not looking at him.

  “Hi, uh. What’s up?”

  “Nothing. I just came to see you.”