Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  For three semesters she’d shared her apartment with a seismologist named Claudia Guarducci, a thin, pouty, bored, and very smart Roman doing postdoctoral work for pay at Harvard. They cooked together, saw movies together, deplored colleagues together, accepted or declined dinner invitations together. Claudia bought a motorcycle and gave Renée rides to work on it. They never shared secrets.

  When Claudia returned to Italy they kept in touch with laconic postcards. Missing the smell of her Merit Ultra Lights, Renée went out of her way to stand near smokers. She inquired about postdocs in Rome, thinking that if she went there she could call up Claudia and mention, merely mention, her current whereabouts. The future she wanted would begin in good earnest if she could live in Italy and be best friends with a Roman woman.

  In hindsight it would seem as if all she ever did in life was lay foundations for future towers of shame and self-hatred. Some trusting, autonomous part of herself kept constructing uncool mid-western dreams: European evenings with Claudia Guarducci; domestic tranquillity with Louis Holland; a big pat on the back from the EPA and the citizens of Boston.

  She was finishing her thesis when Claudia informed her, in a two-line postcard, that she had married her old boyfriend at the Istituto Nazionale.

  Renée was amazed by how betrayed she felt. She couldn’t bring herself to write to Claudia again, and the months went by and Claudia didn’t write either. What hurt was knowing that she wasn’t jealous of the man for having Claudia but of Claudia for having a man. This, and knowing what a difference it made that she was female.

  She was sure that if it had been a case of Renée and Claudio, good heterosexual friends, Renée wouldn’t have felt so betrayed. Men who’d gotten married or found girlfriends didn’t drift away from their single male friends, at least not as often as women did. Obviously, men were nobler spirits than women. It came of belonging to the default gender. If both men and women considered their relationships with men inviolable, then men inevitably remained true to their gender while women, equally inevitably, betrayed their own. Men’s moral superiority was structurally guaranteed.

  However, Renée did not wish she were a man.

  A man, if he was your college boyfriend, still “wanted to be friends with” you after he’d dumped you. His male faith in friendship was so unshakable, in fact, that he believed that you would welcome an invitation to his wedding.

  A man, if he was your younger brother, fresh out of college, was realistic at the dinner table about how “women are simply not identical to men, they have different priorities,” speaking glibly and self-servingly this truth that it had taken you thirty years to learn, bolstered in his arrogance by a twenty-three-year-old wife who had “decided not to put off having children” and so considered herself more mature than you.

  A man was a creature who thought it was a sympathetic portrayal of himself to say, “I love women.”

  A man could not admit to a woman that he was wrong and remain a man. He would sooner cry and abase himself and beg forgiveness like a baby than admit to error as a man.

  A man took for granted a woman’s understanding of his penis but congratulated himself for understanding the clitoris and its importance. He smiled inwardly at his superiority to all the men, past and present, who had not penetrated this female secret. He felt proud of his enlightenment and goodness when he quizzed a woman about whether she had come. The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.

  Inescapably immersed in a history made by people of his own sex, a man could never be as selfconscious as a woman: could never feel as much shame. Even a thoughtful man lacked a radical appreciation of how it was only luck, a pairing of X and Y, that had made his life straightforward. At some level he would always still believe that the ease of his life implied a moral superiority; this belief made him ridiculous.

  Women knew their husbands were ridiculous. Therefore married women, especially ones with children, could be friends with each other. The shame of being wedded to a blunt instrument, a lovable but limited creature, and of bearing his children and enduring his superiority, was eased by intercourse with other women similarly burdened or with women whose most fervent wish was to be so burdened.

  Renée, however, wasn’t married. She also believed that even if she were, the sorority of childbearers wouldn’t welcome her. It seemed to her that the sorority’s most successful members—professional women still managing to raise families—developed such steel-clad egos in coping with their lives that they had little imagination to spare for a complicated case like her. Mothers with less demanding jobs were defensive and tended to fear and despise her, because of her ambition. Mothers with no jobs at all attracted her—she felt, in fact, a particular tenderness towards unselfconscious women—but she could not be friends with them either, because they didn’t understand her, and to the extent that they did begin to understand her, they would be confused and hurt by her refusal to be like them.

  Friendless, Renée saw stereotypes everywhere she looked. Her head was full of images of women, and she hated most the ones she most resembled.

  The well-spoken and socially concerned and humorless and defensive female academic.

  The thin, vulnerable, self-absorbed, vaguely haunted-looking single woman who is either a spiritual seeker or simply a loser and probably the latter.

  The unsatisfied thirty-year-old professional female who sees the error of her ways and begins to crave a baby.

  The boring scientist who lives in a computer room but considers herself less boring than others like her because ten years ago she went to Clash concerts.

  The girl who, not having many female friends, grew up reading science fiction and science and popular philosophy and who, as a woman, is still so romantic as to believe in things like corporate malfeasance and heroes who make a difference.

  The medium-attractive female academic who in her quest to feel very attractive acquires the reputation of an easy lay.

  The woman who cannot get along with other women and who hangs out with men and who in the course of time ends up sleeping with many of them and who, a traitor to her own sex, is respected by men only to the extent that she is like a man.

  The medium-attractive and well-spoken academic female whom no one likes but who nevertheless considers herself extremely special and lovable and unusual and wears a certain smile that shows this and is therefore disliked all the more.

  As the hateful stereotypes homed in on her, the only thing that saved her from concluding that all she really hated was herself was her selfconsciousness. selfconsciousness was a guardian angel that accompanied her everywhere. In grocery stores it told her how to select foods—apples, eggs, fish, bread, butter, broccoli—that could be trusted not to put words in her mouth. Words like I am a yuppie or I am trying hard not to be a yuppie or See how original I am or See how timid I am as I try to avoid being like the people I don’t want to be, including those who are selfconsciously original. It required daily vigilance to keep herself from cooking like well-educated thirty-year-olds on TV, or like gastronomes who became orgasmic over nice pasta, or like women on a magazine diet, or like men who thought it made them sexy and sophisticated to cook with capers and chuckle greedily about ’71 Richebourgs. Or, conversely, like people who never gave a thought to food. Because unfortunately eating junk was not an option. In the future she imagined for herself, she would not be eating junk. She could hardly swallow junk.

  Similarly, she couldn’t bring herself to wear ugly clothes or to furnish her apartment with trash. In fact, when she shopped in a department store, the clothes and utensils that struck her as unimplicating invariably turned out to be the most expensive in their class. Clearly, if you were rich enough, transparency could be purchased. Not being rich, she faced the task of finding attractive and moderately priced things while avoiding every implicating mass-produced contemporary style. This hunt for neutral tops and neutral shoes and neutral outerwear and neutral chairs was tim
e-consuming and made her all the more painfully aware of herself.

  She hated new things “inspired by” old things—products soiled by a modern designer’s nostalgia for the fifties or the twenties. The old things themselves she could trust, provided they hadn’t passed through the soiling hands of a consciousness like her own. It had been a pleasure to outfit her apartment from a naïve flea market held weekly in the Somerville Library parking lot. But when she stepped into a “vintage” clothing store, even a store with nice merchandise, she felt faint and ill and soon fled. Only in a naïve thrift store, such as the Salvation Army ran, could she hope to hold out long enough to find something, and then only if she was not in Boston, because in Boston these stores were haunted by other bargain-hunting young people dangerously similar to herself.

  Once every month or two, year in, year out, she thought of the clothes her mother hadn’t given her.

  They had come to light during her family’s last year in Lake Forest, when everyone but Renée was about to move to California. She discovered them in a roomful of belongings bound for Goodwill. She was rescuing one last armful of them—some classic narrow skirts, a jacket with an emerald-green velvet collar, a bright red high-waisted hourglass dress, a checkered wool overcoat, a pair of black-on-brown saddle shoes—when her mother caught her.

  “What are you doing with these?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I thought you were throwing them away.”

  “I am throwing them away.”

  “Well, can’t I have them, then?”

  “I’m giving them to Goodwill. Please put them back where you found them.”

  “Why can’t I have them?”

  “Honey, you have so many outfits in your closet that you’ve hardly even tried on. What do you need these old things for?”

  “They’re nice. I want them. Please let me have them.”

  Her mother shook her head sadly. “I’m very sorry if you had your heart set on these. But I don’t want you wearing them.”

  “Oh, why not, why not, why not?”

  “I just don’t want to see you wearing them. They have associations for me.”

  “But I’m going away. You won’t see me.”

  “You know I’ll buy you anything you want. Things just like this. New things, better things. But think about if you had a boyfriend, that you broke up with. Would you give him to your best friend?”

  “These are clothes.”

  “For me it’s the same thing,” her mother said.

  Renée marched unsteadily out of her own bedroom, eyes brimming. Her mother didn’t bend. The clothes went to Goodwill. In her memory they remained the most beautiful clothes she’d ever seen, the most perfect imaginable clothes for her. She might not have trusted her memory, except that there were pictures of the clothes in the family photo albums—pictures of the young Beth Macaulay on a tour of Europe that lasted through six seasons, pictures of the checkered coat in the Bois du Bologne. The checkered coat in Dublin. The striped sundress at Berck-Plage. Beth Macaulay in Arles, her perfect skin, her black-rimmed, black-lensed sunglasses, her funky saddle shoes, her diary. Her red dress in black-and-white in Rome. Her checkered coat in Venice.

  She was three months pregnant when she married Daniel Seitchek, a young cardiologist from a West Side family of wholesalers and junior-college intellectuals. How painfully pained and washed out the young and pretty Elizabeth looked in black-and-white (the soot black of South Chicago, the white of fresh snow, the black-and-white of her checkered coat) as she held up her bundled baby girl for the camera.

  How difficult it was to reconcile these images with the pink and white and kelly-green golfing outfits and tennis outfits worn by the woman Renée grew up knowing as her mother. This woman who eventually, in California, would drive a car with a plate that said MOMS JAG to high-school baseball games and sit in the stands with other mothers as tan as Egyptians and scream at her boys’ successes and groan laughingly and cover her eyes at their failures. This woman who in her daughter’s hearing once described herself as “kind of a Pollyanna,” and who confessed to being “addicted” to the novels of Tom Clancy. The pictures of the beautifully clad Beth Macaulay in Europe seemed to say that she had once been more like Renée—more romantic, more independent—than anyone watching her little skirts flounce around a tennis court would ever guess. Being afraid of death, Renée wanted to believe that despite their different circumstances she had exactly the same soul as her mother. And it was tempting to let the likelihood of the identity, the common sense of the assumption, stand as a certainty. Unfortunately, she was also rational, and she refused to believe she was the same person as this partygoing Orange County Pollyanna without some sort of proof. And it just so happened that the years when her mother had been a different and presumably more Renée-like individual were precisely the years before there was any such person as Renée.

  Meanwhile she was too selfconscious to fail to see the ironies: That even as she was being vigilant about not turning into a superficial person like her mother, she was spending huge amounts of time worrying about decor, clothes, and cooking. That she’d developed a bourgeois obsession with merchandise and appearances far more profound than her mother’s. And that the intelligent and confident female types towards whom she felt a virulent, defensive animosity were precisely the types towards whom her mother also felt an animosity, though not as virulent and defensive as her daughter’s, since she had her sons and grandchildren to distract and comfort her.

  Renée knew that if she would only call off her quest for a perfect life, and settle down and accept having children as her mother had at her age, then she too could achieve a measure of contentment and forgetfulness. But there was nobody who wanted to marry her, and anyway, she hated people who were obsessed with their parents. A family was birdlime to the people in it, boredom to the people not. She hated the word “obsessed.” She hated people who hated as many things as she did. She hated the life that made her hate so many things. But she didn’t entirely hate herself yet.

  9

  She had only one dress, a ten-year-old beltless cotton print, that she considered fit to wear to lunch with Melanie Holland. The flat dancing slippers that she put on with it were soaked by the time the bus to Lechmere station picked her up on Highland Avenue. A fine, heavy rain choked the airspace above the Charles. The river was so swollen it looked higher than the streets around it.

  On Boylston Street, in front of the hotel, a cab door opened and a pair of legs in skin-tight jeans and cowboy boots swung out, followed by an umbrella, a Filene’s shopping bag, and finally, in a large-cut sealskin jacket, the rest of Melanie. She slammed the door and almost bumped into Renée, who was standing looking at her.

  In the restaurant, hearty appetites were in evidence. Tourists were grinning and white-haired women were whispering about investments, each pair with an air of being the most important in the room. Melanie looked tired. She’d gotten some sun of late, but her skin was wrinkled and glossy, like old enamel work; the tan seemed not to want to stick to it. The silk lining of her jacket, which she’d slipped off her shoulders onto the cushion of the banquette, held her as tenderly as the tissue paper in which fine gifts come. She scrutinized Renée. “My goodness,” she said. “You’re wet!”

  “Yeah, I’m a little wet.”

  “You came by train.”

  “Train and bus, yes.”

  “You live—let’s see if I can guess.” She made a booklet of her hands and raised it to her lips. “You’re in . . . one of those old houses right on the Radcliffe side of the Square.”

  Renée shook her head.

  “More towards Inman Square?”

  “I live in Somerville.”

  “Oh.” Melanie smiled vaguely and looked away. “Somerville.” A waiter came. “Will you have a cocktail with me?”

  “Campari with soda?” Renée said to the waiter.

  “That sounds perfect,” Melanie said. “So red, so chic.”

 
The waiter nodded. So red. So chic.

  “I’m glad you could come on short notice,” Melanie said. “I’m afraid it’s reached the point where I ought to be booking Boston from Chicago and vice versa. Wherever I am one week, I’ll be in the other place the next. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. That’s the way it goes. Do you do much traveling in your job?”

  Renée opened her mouth to answer, but she lost heart. She slid her teaspoon sideways on the tablecloth. “No,” she said, “and maybe you should just tell me what you want.”

  “What I want? I want us to relax and enjoy ourselves and get to know each other a little. I want to be your friend.”

  “You want information.”

  “Partly, yes, but—”

  “Then why don’t you just ask me what you want to ask me? Because I’m not going to be able to help you, and so you might as well get it over with.”

  Melanie turned her head to one side and narrowed her eyes, exactly the way her son sometimes did. “Is something wrong? Is this not a good day? Oh dear!” She leaned across the table. “You’re looking so unhappy. Was this not a good day?”