Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Where’s Emmett?”

  She gave no sign of having heard him.

  “Not here, obviously,” Louis said.

  She bit her lips, still not looking at him.

  “Where is he, Lauren?”

  She raised her chin and said, “We’re not together anymore."

  “Oh, I see. You left him. He left you. You’re separated. You’re divorced.”

  These words caused her great discomfort. She looked at her shoes, inspecting either side of one of them. “I don’t know. Can I come in?”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I made a terrible mistake, Louis, a terrible mistake. Can I come in?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know if I’m too late. If I’m too late I won’t come in. Can I come in?”

  Renée was now standing in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. She and Lauren couldn’t see each other, but Louis could see them both.

  “That was your girlfriend, wasn’t it,” Lauren said.

  He turned to Renée as if he had to check about this. Renée’s face made it clear that she thought he ought to have been rid of the visitor by now. She gestured impatiently: Well? What are you waiting for! But as he continued not to speak, her impatience gave way to alarm, and then the alarm gave way to pain, and finally the pain gave way to an overwhelming disbelief, each of these stages visible and distinct.

  “Oh, is she right there?” Lauren said with mock stupidity.

  You can hurt me. A little. You can bite me, or—

  He was aware of making a mistake, but he had no control. He was fascinated by the pain in Renée’s face. He was finally seeing her. She was finally naked, and he kept looking at her, thinking I am a rapist too. I am a sadist too as he hurt her for his pleasure, doing it with his silence and understanding now what people meant when they talked about how a penis can rule a man, because that was exactly how it felt. But she was a person, just a decent person, and not interested in taking this. With terrible dignity she walked through the dining room and living room. She stepped around Lauren, who leaned aside as if avoiding a stranger on the sidewalk. Renée knocked the leather jacket off the suitcase, barely managing not to trip on it as she hurried out the door.

  “Oh boy,” Louis murmured, to the empty space she left behind. He couldn’t believe all the blood on his hands.

  Lauren closed the door and hung her jacket on the knob. “She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she. You can tell me.”

  “Oh boy,” he murmured again. He hadn’t quite been sober enough to realize that what he was doing to Renée was the worst thing anyone could do to her. But he knew her and he knew this was the worst thing. It was the very worst thing. And though he hadn’t “realized” this, he’d known it perfectly well.

  “I figured you might have one,” Lauren said, slouching almost horizontal on the beige sofa. “It was a risk I was taking. But I knew I could always turn around and go right back.”

  The fact that she would have to walk to her apartment now. The pride with which she’d walk the two and a half miles. And the dogs wouldn’t howl, and she’d take the stairs two at a time in her sneakers and jeans and T-shirt, and lock the door behind her, and would she cry? Only once had he seen her cry, and that was from physical pain, and as soon as she’d locked the door, in his mind’s eye, it became difficult to see her.

  “You want me to go?” Lauren said. “She’ll forgive you if you explain things. Just tell her the truth and she’ll forgive you.” She spread her fingers and studied her nails. “You know, because I don’t want to butt in, if she’s your girlfriend. She is your girlfriend, isn’t she. I could tell by the way she looked at me. She’s your girlfriend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So do you love her?” Lauren swung her head nervously, not wanting to hear the answer. “I can leave right now.”

  “No! No. Just . . . let me lock my car.”

  Renée wasn’t waiting by the car or anywhere close to it. He looked at the empty air above the sidewalk down which she necessarily had walked, since she was no longer in sight. Logic insisted that she’d traversed this distance even if no one had seen her do it. It further insisted that at this very moment she was somewhere between here and her apartment, not on just any block but on some particular block, walking forward, visible to all. It insisted that ail observer in a balloon could have followed every step she took between leaving here and arriving on Pleasant Avenue and climbing the four crumbling concrete stairs to the door of her house and disappearing inside it.

  Louis thought: I hate her.

  As soon as he was inside again, Lauren stood up, stretched her arms luxuriantly, and smiled as if it were morning and she’d slept divinely and she knew that he, of all people, would be happy to know this. Freed of the burden of seeing her through Renée’s eyes, he was now properly amazed to have in Toby’s beige apartment this pretty and complicated girl he’d loved so much. She came to him and put her face against his, bending back for a moment to snatch his glasses off. Not kissing him, but with her eyes staring into his with the astonishment and goofy emptiness that eyes take on at point-blank range, and with her nose pressed against his and her words making his lips vibrate, she said, “I am in love with you, I am in love with you, Louis, I’ve been thinking about you every minute of the day, I am in love with you, I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.”

  She caught her breath, her pupils and milky gray-green irises still centered in his vision. She kissed him, placed his hands on various parts of herself, curled up her own hands and pressed her knuckles on his chest. She twisted her head back and forth beneath his mouth, as if he were a shower she was taking. Her perfume was so integrated with her sweaty face-smell that his nose couldn’t find the border between them, it was all one nice Laureny smell.

  “I promise you,” she said. “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll stay, I’ll go away, I’ll stay with Emmett, I’ll leave Emmett, I’ll marry you, I’ll have babies for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll marry you, I’ll live with you without being married to you. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay for as long as you want me to and I’ll leave whenever you say, you can own me, you can throw me away or keep me, you can do anything but sell me, anything, anything, anything.”

  He held her, remembering her specific dimensions and how her back had felt when she’d cried in his kitchen in Houston and he’d put his arms around her.

  “Oh Louis,” she said, crying and smiling. “You were so good to me, and I was so bad to you. But I’m going to make it up to you. If you let me, I’ll make it up to you.”

  “Although of course you’re married now.”

  “Oh, that.” A familiar guilty, sullen look crossed her face. “You know, I’m still trying to be a good person. I’m trying to love God and be a Christian, and I’m here in Boston seeing you. Marriage is a holy sacrament and I’m here seeing you. It’s like I’m the same old person, right? Everything I touch turns into garbage. And the thing is you’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks I’m worth something. The only person. Remember when I told you I’d never really loved anybody?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, it was true. It was true. But it’s not true now, because as soon as I couldn’t see you anymore, I felt this thing. I guess I thought it was guilt or something, but I wanted to see you and talk to you, just to hear your voice a little, but I’d already told you we couldn’t, and I thought you must hate me, or that you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

  She sat on the sofa and frowned as if something didn’t quite make sense. “You see,” she said, “but there was Emmett too, and I felt sorry for him because he’d always been so incredibly patient with me, plus his family really seemed to like me. They gave me all this stuff when we got engaged, his grandmother gave me these beautiful pearls and his mother gave me this inlaid box that was like a hundred and fifty years old and had been in the family forever. But then I slept with some other guys and I also said I’d slept wi
th you that time, right under his nose, and I gave him his ring back but I never even had the courage to give the other stuff back. And then when we started to get back together they were all still incredibly nice to me. They treated me like I’d been sick but now I was well, and I just felt so sorry for them, and really grateful too, and I thought, you know, This is the sacrifice I’m going to make. Because all I wanted was to be a good person. And it’s so clear that if you want to be good you have to sacrifice things. Plus I thought, they’re all so nice to me, it’s not even that much of a sacrifice. And my parents wanted me to get married because they think Emmett’s really great, which he is, I guess, except I don’t love him. I only love you.”

  Louis closed his eyes.

  “But so. We got married.” Lauren chewed her lip, her eyes on some remembered scene or ceremony. He thought she was going to go on, but apparently this was all she had to say.

  “So then what. It turns out he’s a brute.”

  She shook her head.

  “Yes? No?”

  Perched on the edge of the sofa, she stared sullenly at a silver radiator. She tossed her head, flipping her hair off her shoulders. Her face was tough and uncaring. “I was unfaithful to him.”

  “Right. Of course.”

  “Aren’t I a great person, Louis? Aren’t I just the greatest? But there was this guy I knew from before, and it was like I had so much more in common with him than with Emmett, you know, he’d fuck anybody, you know that kind of person, and I just didn’t care. I could tell I’d made too big a sacrifice, and it was like I needed to do some rotten stuff to make up, you know, and balance things. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess what I finally realized was that I wanted him to throw me out again because there was this thing in me. And what the thing was, was that I was in love with another person who used to be in love with me until I hurt him, and I loved him so much, and I missed him.” Tears came to her eyes again and she lowered her chin, as though trying to burp, still staring at the radiator. “I mean, Emmett’s real nice and all. But he treats me like this sick baby, and after a while I can’t stand it, so I go and do this horrible shit to him, but that just makes it all the more clear that I’m this sick baby, you know. And finally I just don’t believe anymore that somewhere inside him behind all his niceness he doesn’t really just hate my guts and wish I was dead.”

  There was a long silence. Louis felt panic at the thought of Renée, who during these minutes when he hadn’t been thinking about her had doubtless made it all the way back to her apartment. Time was passing in her life even as it was standing still in his. She was getting all this time to think while he was not.

  A question in a low voice crossed the room: “What’s her name?”

  “Who? Oh. Renée.”

  “That’s a pretty name.”

  “She hates it.”

  “She does?”

  “So she says.”

  “Is she in love with you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are you guys really boy- and girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you might want to go out with me? I mean, right now?”

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “Yeah, but I want to go out with you. That’s what I’ve wanted all day. I just have to go to the bathroom.”

  They were getting in his car when John Mullins came lurching and paddling down the driveway from behind his house. He aimed his ghastly face at Louis, his mouth like a gunshot wound, and stared without a trace of recognition.

  “Have you ever been up here?” Louis said.

  Lauren shook her head. “It’s nice. It’s so different. We’ve been hearing about all the earthquakes. Were you in them? Were you scared?”

  “Nah.”

  The polygons of dirt between the footpaths in Harvard Yard had been seeded and roped off to fatten up the grass for the trampling pleasure of graduates and parents and alumni, later in June. For some reason a handful of women from the Church of Action in Christ were picketing the Holyoke Center, carrying large photographs of aborted fetuses. The colors were garish and oily, like Korean pickles. The messages were topical: QUAKES ARE GOD'S WRATH. CAMBRIDGE = EPICENTER OF BUTCHERY. PSALM 139.

  By the Red Line escalators, young punks were drinking vodka and kicking beanbags. Hare Krishnas in robes the color of orange sherbet drummed and juggled in front of the Coop. Lauren swung her shoulders as she walked, undaunted by the scene. The pedestrians in the side streets, the men with scrubbed faces and narrow little shoes, the women with thin hair and small mouths and ultra-sexy shades, posed no threat to her confidence. She put her hand in Louis’s back pocket. A year ago this had been all he wanted, just to walk down the street with her and be her man.

  They stopped outside a slightly worn Tex-Mex establishment. He shied from the door—the clientele was what Renée would have called “the implicating people” and what he considered “the Eileen’s-friends kind of people”—but Lauren towed him in. She had them seated in the smoking section, explaining in a low voice that she still smoked and drank a little, because she’d realized that it was impossible to make yourself perfect all at once. “The only time I haven’t been a mess was last summer, when I was seeing you. That’s the only time in my whole life I haven’t felt like a mess. You helped me so much. And I was so bad to you.”

  She leaned back to allow room on her lap for a menu. Louis asked what she was doing for money. She said she was using her American Express card, which Emmett’s parents paid the bills for. “It’s pretty rotten of me, isn’t it? To fly up here like that.”

  “Are you going to pay them back?”

  She shrugged. “They’re real well off.”

  “You should pay them back as soon as you can.”

  She nodded obediently. “OK.”

  He cast a benign smile on the loud students at neighboring tables. What a convivial and pleasant thing it could be to be normal and eat in a cheerful restaurant surrounded by other young people doing the same, and how especially pleasant to do it in the company of a pretty girl who had just declared her love. His towering resentment of the likes of the all-befouling Mr. Aldren dwindled to an irritation he could take or leave. It was true that when Lauren left him and their fajita dinners alone even for one minute, while she went to the bathroom, the fires in him reignited, and he began to burn holes in the heads of a table of male and female law students who kept making their harried waitress banter with them. A cake with candles came, and, being very original, four of the five men sang harmony instead of melody. By the time they were singing Dear Nico-ole, the fifth man had decided to be creative and original too, and so only the females were left to do the melody. But when Lauren returned and said maybe they could go dancing, Louis calmed down immediately. He gave her credit card a wistful look. He was pretty close to broke.

  Cool lawns and cigarette smoke, a warm June night. It had now been five hours since Renée walked away; she’d now had five hours to be thinking by herself. Louis bought a Phoenix and Lauren picked out a club across the river which, when they got there, he was amazed to think had been operating probably every night he’d been in Boston, providing fun for a crowd whose median age was roughly his own. They put their hands out to get them stamped, the buckles and wrist strap on Lauren’s jacket dangling. He didn’t mention that the only time in his life he’d ever consented to dance was at a May Day party in Nantes, among Algerians. Fortunately the club was already crowded and it was mostly a matter of bumping and clutching anyway, and except for some rap cuts the music was abhorrent and difficult to move to, the rhythm “shallow,” as restaurant reviewers sometimes say of spice in chili, it had a “searing, superficial heat” rather than the “deep burning heat” that comes from careful cooking and good ingredients. But with Lauren in his arms he could taste the joys of being uncritical.

  They drove up Soldiers Field Road with the windows down and her hair billowing and migrating towards her inside shoulder
, the river moving against the lights of MIT and Harvard, the lights moving against the six northern stars visible in the muggy night. That it was one-thirty meant Renée had now had nearly eight hours to be alone and think, but he computed the figure only out of habit, because he could no longer imagine her so well.

  In his apartment they lay down in their clothes on his futon and Lauren tried his glasses on. “This is what you’re like,” she said, crawling over him, the glasses sliding down her nose and her hair hanging on his ears. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone as happy as she was. She was full of sport and it suited both their needs to be like teenagers, enjoying the clothes that kept them separate, taking very small steps down the carnal road, enjoying the countryside along the road, its season and smells, and remembering when a season was so long that you forgot that other seasons followed it, and a smell was a smell and a sound was a sound, sensations not yet clogged with memories. At length, when they heard his roommate Toby’s printer starting up, they took some clothes off. Lauren handed her breasts over casually, like surplus charms she was glad to donate to the needy. But when he put his hand in her underpants she stopped him, saying,

  “Don’t.”

  “Don’t you—?”

  “I don’t need it,” she said, very hoarse.

  He lay on his back, needing it very much.

  “If we did that now,” she said, bending over him and tickling his chest with hers. “We’d just be pigs.”

  He pictured Renée alone in her apartment and thought he might as well have been a pig already.

  “Don’t you think?” Lauren whispered.

  “Don’t you think we should just start right now trying to be strong and do the right thing? Don’t you think there are certain things we shouldn’t do if we’re not going to stay together? Can’t we just be happy like this?” Louis seriously doubted there was any way at all for him to be happy. He knew that if he promised to love her, she’d take off her underpants and let him come inside her, and that somehow it would be easy then for him to dump her and go back to Renée. What stopped him wasn’t the fear of hurting her. It was that he had always been good to her, and he believed she really loved him now, and he couldn’t stand the idea of killing her precarious faith in a human being’s goodness. All he could do was lie still and hope she’d fuck him anyway, faithlessly, out of a pity he didn’t deserve. Then he could be rid of her.