Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Seitchek was sitting in their office with her feet up on a suitcase. He asked her if there had been any phone calls for him. Her “no” didn’t faze him. Sometimes she answered no and then, when she’d reconciled herself to being interrupted, changed her mind and reeled off several interesting phone messages.

  “Edward’s looking for you,” she said at length. “He heard you were back from London.”

  Edward was the name of Howard’s ultra-picky adviser.

  “Oh yeah,” he said. The uppermost note from Sally on his desktop said FORGET IT!

  “He wants to see you on Monday,” Seitchek said. “First thing in the morning. Something new on Alan Grubb, I think.”

  He beamed. “Can’t come on Monday. Going to San Francisco.” He nodded at Seitchek’s suitcase. “What about you?”

  “L.A.,” she said. “I mean Orange County. I’m going to see my parents and my little . . . nieces. It’s my every-third-year visit.”

  “Oh yeah.” He had an uneasy feeling that this meant she’d finished her thesis while he was in Ireland. “Three years a long time,” he croaked politely.

  “Not long enough.”

  “You wanna ride to the airport?”

  “No thanks,” she said.

  “You wanna ride to the Square?”

  “You’re very eager to have me ride in your car, aren’t you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m double-parked.”

  In California, large lesions of greasy orange flame were eating up the ranges from Eureka to the San Gabriels. Even in the city the air smelled like burning houses. For the first time in the longest time, Howard was sorry to be traveling. Neither the wedding on Saturday afternoon nor the banquet the same night in Chinatown measured up to the nuptial festivities in London. For one thing, the median age of the wedding guests was less than twelve. Howard wore a zootish pinstripe suit and Dock-Sides, without socks; he was the tallest person present. Since his more important relatives had already cornered him in London and updated themselves on his brilliant career, he spent many minutes by himself, drinking beer from a can and wearing an expression of dignity and moderate discomfort as he gazed down on the wizened heads of great-great-aunts and the high-fashion hairstyles of the pre-adolescents. He was getting sick of weddings.

  On Sunday morning he steered his rented car east towards the hills in which he planned to do some camping and casual inspection of fault scarps. There was a bromine-colored pall above the country he was entering, and soon he began to pass blackened fire fighters who had thrown themselves on the road embankment and were sleeping. Already the fires surrounded him on all sides. Changing his mind, he headed for the coast again, wondering if maybe the time hadn’t come to confront Alan Grubb. Grubb was a student at Scripps Institution in San Diego whose thesis was rumored to be identical in content to Howard’s own and two years closer to completion. Howard been told and told and told, by Edward and Seitchek and other stand-ins for his conscience, that he ought to give Grubb a call or try to see him at a convention, but until now he’d only blinked at their suggestions.

  At a supermarket north of Santa Barbara he bought a three-pack of Latin disco tapes, and by midnight he was sleeping in his bucket seat on a side street in central San Diego. At nine the next morning he drove to Scripps. It was dead in the Labor Day sun. A watchman led him to a laboratory where, from a beachfront window, a dour post-doc told him that Alan Grubb would not be back from Italy until September 23. The moral was so plain that it might have been posted in institutional ceramic letters over the entrance to the lab: IT PAYS TO PHONE AHEAD.

  Later in the day, after a productive tanning session, Howard invited himself to visit some friends of his oldest half sister who lived nearby in Linda Vista. He had decent barbecue there. As the afternoon aged, he slouched in his plastic chair and watched the ponderous plate-like migrations of the ice blocks his hosts cooled their pool with, his face almost purple from the martinis he’d been given, his spirits sinking at the thought of spending one more minute in a rented car or entering one more Wendy’s or logging one more frequent-flyer bonus mile. Burnt sesame seeds were falling from the chins of the hosts’ children. His own Mandarin small talk sounded whiny and bitchy to his Americanized ear. Compyu pogam, compyu pogam. He asked to use the telephone, and his hosts led him to it, urging him to stay in Linda Vista for as long as he liked; they hoped (indeed already planned) to take him deep-sea fishing and to Sea World.

  Directory assistance had a single Seitchek listed in Newport Beach. As soon as he heard her voice, Howard began to shake his head emphatically. Seitchek, however, sounded happy to hear from him. She asked him how he was.

  “Not bad,” he said. “See some friends, got some friends in Los Angeles, rent a car, not bad. It’s a vacation.”

  “Are you going to come and see me?”

  The invitation in her voice was so warm that he assumed there was a catch somewhere. He lunged at the curtains facing the street and looked out at a car driving by. It was just an ordinary car without any relation to him.

  “No, really,” Seitchek said. “Did you call because you wanted to get together or something?”

  “Sure, why not,” Howard said, as if it were entirely her idea.

  The sky above Newport Beach the next afternoon was a brutal white the mere sight of which, in the single wide window of Seitchek’s, bedroom, negated the effect of the airconditioning and brought into the room the torpor of the young, full-bodied palms outside the window, and the white fire on the terra-cotta roofs beyond them, and the blazing monotony of the beaches in the distance. The walls of the room were bare except for a poster of Magic Johnson slam-dunking and a large acrylic seascape in the muted colors of upholstery. The closet door was open and on either side of it were Hefty trash bags and stacks of cardboard cartons, yellow ones, from Mayflower moving.

  From the hallway Howard gave the room a courteous onceover, leaning in as if there were a velvet rope in the doorway. His neck was covered with shaving cuts and areas of abrasion whose cumulative redness gave him a guilty, crabby, immature expression. Before leaving San Diego he’d scraped himself mercilessly, Seitchek’s cordial invitation having led him to expect an introduction to her family and perhaps a sit-down lunch. When he arrived, though, the house was empty, and she did not even offer him a glass of water. She went back up the staircase which from outside the door he’d heard her descending, and let him follow. She appeared not to really recognize any of the things her eyes fell on, including Howard. She was hollow-cheeked and waif-like, as pale as a person with the flu.

  “You feeling OK?” he said.

  She didn’t answer. On a desk by the window stood a bottle of Nexxus shampoo and a dozen or so Hummel figurines. She pushed on the figurines until they were flush with the wall.

  “I was amazed when you called,” she said suddenly, her back to him. “I was amazed because I’d been lying on the floor here,” she nodded at a space between a twin bed and a wall, “for about five hours, and I was wondering what could possibly ever make me stand up again ever in my life, and obviously the answer was, my mother knocking on the door and saying there was somebody on the phone for me. I was amazed when she told me who it was.”

  She pushed on the figurines again, making sure they could not be straightened more. She turned to Howard and spoke dully. “Did you get to Scripps? Did you see Alan Grubb?”

  “Yeah, no. He wasn’t there. You got a bathroom?”

  “A bathroom? Do we have one?” She waited for him to leave.

  At the bathroom mirror he tugged on his shirt, trying to get it to hang right, and scraped some of the dried blood off his neck. He looked out the window at the swimming pool. When he returned to the bedroom, Seitchek was kneeling near the closet, tossing paperbacks from a full carton into a less full carton. A bit of gum that had once been bright green was lodged in the tread of her left sneaker. Between the waist of her jeans and the white skin of her lower back was a space wide enough to stick an arm down. “Is i
t OK I parked my car in your driveway?” Howard asked.

  “Sure.” She looked up from her books very briefly. “You can poke your cow anywhere you feel like.”

  Poke his cow? Poke his cow? She’d said it so casually, and yet . . . He sat down on a twin bed and pounded on the mattress until the pounding became stylized and irrelevant. “You want to go out? Get something to eat?”

  “No,” she said. “Do you?”

  “Maybe. Maybe get some fish and chips. Saw a fish and chips place. You wanna go there?”

  Ignoring him, she flipped books into the carton, A Separate Peace, Franny and Zooey, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Women’s Room, The Glass Bead Game, The Sot-Weed Factor, a stack of Vonnegut, some Frank Herbert and Robert Heinlein, Watership Down, Fear of Flying, The Sunlight Dialogues, a boxed set of Tolkien, more Salinger, some P. D. James, The Bell Jar, 1984. She straightened her back and reported:

  “My mother went out specially to buy cold cuts and hard rolls and Heineken Dark before she went golfing. I told her you were coming by.”

  Bending over the boxes again, she riffled the pages of The Bell Jar and then put it back in with the discards. D. T. Suzuki, The World According to Garp and Ragtime followed. She turned to Howard. “You want some books?” With a tremendous shove she slid the box across the carpeting.

  He selected two Heinleins. “These OK?”

  “Anything you want. Really. It’s all going out. How about some shoes? Do you have any little sisters?” She held up a pair of sandals with four-inch cork platforms, a pair of Earth Shoes, a pair of clogs with daisies tooled on the brown leather, a child-sized pair of white plastic go-go boots. She unfolded a pair of polyester bell-bottoms with giant green-and-white checks. “I’m supposed to go through life feeling good about myself, knowing there was a time I was seen in public in these?” She rooted further in a box. “My Nehru jacket. Any interest in Nehru jackets in Taiwan these days?” She stuffed the jacket into a garbage bag.

  “Cold cuts,” Howard hinted.

  “Yeah, pork, beef. My favorite foods.”

  He made an encouraging noise, but it was clear that she’d only been toying with this lunch idea. She pushed her bangs out of her eyes and opened a new carton. “See my first-grade class?” She handed him a sheet of photos. “Here, you want these? You want about five hundred pictures of me?” She slid the whole box over to him. While he peered into it, lifting the corners of a few photographs, she unearthed further treasures—a felt Peanuts banner stating that happiness is a warm puppy; Walter Carlos albums, Three Dog Night albums, Cat Stevens albums, Janis Ian albums, Moody Blues albums, Paul Simon albums; posters by Peter Max; the Game of Life; collections of Doonesbury strips; a throw pillow upholstered with artificial zebra fur; a lamp made out of a 7UP can. She unrolled a full-length poster of Mark Spitz. “I won this,” she said. “I won this at dancing school. The thing is I actually put it up. I put it on my closet door and he looked at me for an entire year, with his seven gold medals. His eyes would follow me.”

  Howard was trying to show an interest in the poster when she let it roll back up and pushed it deep into a trash bag. She released a breath and slumped, generally, staring at the floor. “I had nothing to do with any of these things coming out here. The last time I was here I spent about two days looking at all the pictures and going through my old papers and notebooks. Every single band concert program that had my name in it. All my blue ribbons and acceptance letters and every quiz I ever took and every little paper I ever wrote. Even if I throw it away, it’s like this tremendous weight of implication, which how can I ever, ever, ever escape?”

  Her eyes alighted on a pale blue college exam book lying near her on the floor. She stuffed it in the trash bag. “My parents moved out here the year I went to college. They got this nice four-bedroom house, one bedroom for each of us kids and a big one for themselves. Mine’s also the guest room, isn’t it great? The decor? It’s really me. That’s the thing: it really is me. This is what I try to forget.”

  Howard looked at the poster of Magic Johnson and the Hummel figurines. He bounced a little on the bed. “What you come here for if you don’t like it?”

  “To throw things away.”

  An insight made his eyes glitter evilly. “Thought you came to see your nieces.”

  “Oh, my nieces, yes.” She aimed a sneer through the open door. “You know I’d never seen them before? Not any of them?”

  “Sure.”

  “Although the last time I was here I did have the pleasure of seeing a sister-in-law pregnant. You can see we’re not living in poverty. We could have afforded to bring me home. Obviously I chose not to come.”

  “I don’t go home,” Howard said.

  This interested her. “What, to Taiwan?”

  “Can’t go. Don’t wanna go.”

  She shook her head, forgetting him again. “I start thinking there’s something here for me. That I can come home, I can drink, I can eat, I can sleep, I can come here and be rich like they are, drive the BMW, see the babies, and just be it, you know, for a week. I actually start looking forward to it. I kill myself trying to finish the thesis and get on the plane, and it’s just so dumb of me to set myself up like that. My whole family’s in the living room when I get here, both my little brothers, both my little sisters-in-law, all my little nieces. I’ve finally come to view the babies. I’m very late. But not too late. The suspense must be unbearable for me. Unthinkable that I could be anything but dying to have my nieces crawling on me. And the simple fact that it’s unthinkable is enough to kill my interest on the spot.”

  She smiled, seeing that Howard was flipping through her pictures. “The thing is I can’t just show pleasure and interest in the abstract. I have to talk to these girls. I have to have a relationship with them. With this two-and-a-half-year-old girl and these two babies who don’t speak a word yet. I start to say some clever thing, like I’m talking to a dog or something, but then I hear them all listening, and so I try to think of something sweet to say, and that’s even worse, I mean, it’s just a child, what do you say, what do you say?— ”

  She paused, staring at the back wall of the closet, and Howard leaned to look inside it, almost believing there was someone in there listening to what she said.

  “All I can hear is the incredible stupidity and lameness of the things I’m saying. And the girls know it. At least, the oldest one definitely knows it. She knows I’m not one of those women who think there’s nothing better in the world than having a child like her, and so of course she doesn’t like me, why should she. And there’s this little scene where she won’t come near me, and I hate her and she hates me, and the reason is that I’m more like her than I’m like any of the four parents, and she knows it.” She nodded positively. “I’m almost thirty years old, and I’m more like her than I am like them. And it’s one thing to be three years old and be a child, but to be me and still be so selfconscious— I could still stand it if they didn’t all so obviously pity me. They give me these pitying looks, and they actually have the gall to tell me that I can’t imagine what a grownup life is like—I can’t imagine how busy you are, and how little time to read the newspaper you have—because I don’t have children myself. As soon as I have children, I’ll understand. And what I want to say is, Let me tell you some of the things you don’t know about life and never will. But these women, it’s like they’ve been waiting all their lives for a chance to ignore a person like me, and now that they have their babies they’re allowed to. They’re allowed to be totally self-absorbed and totally rude to me, because they have children. As soon as you have children you’re allowed to close your mind. And no one can say you’re not grownup. And any kind of life that I might have, any different kind of life, any kind of life that could be envied—it’s obviously not working, because I’m still just this incredibly embarrassing adolescent. I can’t possibly compete with these twenty-four-year-old parents, all their narcissism and basic human decency. There’s ju
st no contest.”

  She fell silent, shaking her head and staring into the closet. Howard had begun to bounce on his toes with his hands in his pockets and elbows flapping. He raised a leg for balance and peered into the hall, as if he’d heard a sound. There had been no sound. When he turned back, Seitchek’s eyes were on him.

  “And this is what I see,” she said bitterly. “In my free, exciting East Coast life. This is what I look up from the screen and see. This is the great alternative.”

  He bounced on his toes. “Think I gotta go now,” he said. “Gotta see some people, think I better go.”

  She smiled at him horribly. “What about your core cuts? Don’t you want your core cuts? Don’t you want to go poke your cow in the diveway?” She turned away in disgust. “See, I don’t even care what I say anymore. I don’t even care who’s listening.”

  Howard continued to bounce, wandering and tilting like a top in the latter stages of its revolution, his vibrations jarring his hands out of his pockets. He veered close to Seitchek. When she looked up at him, he slapped her so hard that she fell back on her elbows.

  They stared at each other. There was an odd, silent moment of discovery. It was as if the time of day had changed. Then Seitchek’s face twisted and she covered it with her hands. “Oh God. Oh God, I am so embarrassed.”

  Already Howard was bending down, his hands in the neighborhood of her head. He patted her cheek and touched her ears and then patted her shoulders with both hands, not remorsefully but impatiently, as if he’d bumped a table and was rushing to right the stupid vases that had fallen. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

  She hit him on the jaw with her fingernails. “Get away from me! Get away from me! Go dive your cow, get away from me.” She struck at his eyes, and he had to grab her wrists and pin them cruelly as she fought to break free. She struggled beneath him, gulping air and breaking into what he thought was sobs but turned out to be something more like laughter, because things were not at all the way he’d thought they were. Her fingers were in his hair. She was pressing his face into hers, and he squeezed his eyes shut, the short lashes interlocking like the stitches a rag doll has to see with, because he was not yet ready to look at the person underneath him and believe his luck in obtaining a girl like this, in a house like this, with four large bedrooms and a thirty-foot pool and a wet bar in the living room.