Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

Renée laughed. “You’re scary.”

  Stites offered her half his orange. “Why’s that?”

  She took the orange. “Because you’re smart and you’re so sure you’re right. You’re so sure that everything is simple.”

  “You got it backwards. It’s your world thinks everything is simple: take what you want, and there won’t be any consequences. Because let me tell you, there’s two kinds of certainty: positive and negative. The Bible teaches us it’s wrong to be certain in a positive way, like being certain you’re right or that you’re saved. But the Bible is full of people with the other kind of certainty: my certainty that this society is wrong. I am full of that negative certainty.”

  “It’s wrong about a lot of things,” Renée said, “but not about a woman’s right to privacy. And I don’t actually think it persecutes you. Running your ads is just bad business for a TV station. If the majority truly weren’t satisfied with their lives, they’d turn to religion. The fact that they don’t seems to indicate that they are satisfied.”

  “You’re not the first person who proved revolution logically impossible: the fact that people haven’t revolted yet means they’re satisfied. That’s real persuasive.”

  “I think people mainly want you not to interfere with their private lives.”

  “I wouldn’t interfere if I didn’t think lives were at stake. But as it is, I’m morally bound to interfere. And you think my church’s anger is ugly, and my methods are extreme, but just think how ugly and extreme the hippie protesters must have looked to conservatives in 1969, even though they had a good moral argument, just like I have today. Plus it’d be one thing if society just openly worshipped mammon and said yes, we’re willing to destroy innocent lives for the sake of easy sex. What gets me is the piousness. The idea that you can turn people’s lives into hellish pursuits of pleasure and claim you’re doing them a favor. It’s hard to figure a world that sees religious belief as a form of psychosis but thinks the desire to own a better microwave is the most natural feeling there can be. People who send money to a TV preacher because they feel a lack in their lives are under a evil spell, but people who need fur coats to show off in at the grocery store are just normal folks like you and me. It’s like the most holy thing in this country is the U.S. Constitution. The human race has never been without suffering in its history, but Mr. Boston Globe and Mr. Massachusetts Senator are suddenly smarter than everybody else in human history. They’re certain they’ve got the answer, and the answer is statutory this and statutory that and university studies of human behavior and the U.S. Constitution. But I tell you, Renée, I tell you, the only reason anyone could possibly think the Constitution is the greatest invention in human history is that God gave America so many fantastic riches that even total idiocy could make a showing in the short run, if you don’t count thirty million poor people and the systematic waste of all the riches God gave us and the fact that to most of the downtrodden people of the world the word America is synonymous with greed, weapons, and immorality.”

  “And freedom.”

  “A code word for wealth and decadence. Believe me. What the majority of Russians think is great about America is McDonald’s and VCRs. Only politicians and anchormen are stupid or dishonest enough to act otherwise. Prime ministers come to Washington, we tell ’em, Welcome to the land of the free. The prime ministers say, Give us more money. I swear we must be the world’s laughingstock. What are you smiling at?”

  “You remind me of a cynical man I knew.”

  “Cynical, huh? You think it’s cynical to recognize that all human beings, myself included, want to gratify their senses without having to take responsibility for it? How about calling me Christian instead, or honest, or realistic? Because what I see on the other side is pure sentimentality and wishful thinking. This idea that human beings are essentially good and selfless. That you can cure sorrow and loneliness and envy and gluttony and lust and deceit and rage and pride with full employment and good psychologists. You know what my favorite modern-day fable is?”

  “What.”

  “Chappaquiddick. The perfect liberal sees what a human being really is all about, and he takes off running. Spends the rest of his life denying that what he saw has any meaning. Telling everybody else what’s wrong with them. Listen, liberalism’s so dishonest it won’t even admit that everything good about it, the supposed compassion at the center of it—which is irrational, mind you, just like all religion is—comes straight from the two-thousand-year tradition of Christianity. But at least it’s got that compassion. It’s innocent, same as a six-year-old. But God’s got a soft spot in His heart for all the innocents of the world. And so the thing I hate most is the conservative politician. The conservative side is just pure cynical economic self-interest. Granted it’s pretty realistic about human greed, so it’s fairly grownup, you know, like about the level of a smart-assed thirteen-year-old. But it’s even more to blame than liberalism for supplanting God with the pursuit of wealth. And I find that unforgivable.”

  “And that’s why you live in this crummy building. With angry middle-class women.”

  “You got it.”

  “I guess you’re pretty admirable.”

  “You said that. I didn’t. ’Cause of course it’s a danger everybody runs if they try to do some good. The idea that if you know you’re doing good, it doesn’t really count. But I say, what’s the alternative—being a jerk just so you know you’re not guilty of pridefulness?”

  “Not a bad alternative. You should try it.”

  “You’re a little bit of a cynic yourself. What’d you come here for?”

  In the courtyard, outside the open window, a hush fell as the volleyball went thump, thump. Pieces of orange peel lay white side up on Stites’s cleaned plate. Renée smiled. “No reason at all.”

  “Nobody comes for no reason,” he said.

  “I came because I was bored.”

  The light in the room had become personal, making facial expressions more ambiguous and eye contact less sure. “Are you married?” Stites said.

  “No.”

  “Got a boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “No kids, I guess.”

  She shook her head.

  “You want kids?”

  She shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t like what happens to women when they have them.”

  “What happens to them?”

  “They just become women.”

  “You mean: they grow up.”

  Thump, thump went the volleyball. Sneakered feet scraped and fell on the hard dirt. The carpet pattern began to rearrange itself as Renée stared at it. “Do you want to sleep with me?” she said.

  “Ha.” Stites smiled, apparently more amused than anything else. “I guess not.”

  “Because you’re afraid I’ll tell somebody,” she said in a cruel voice. “Or you’re afraid you’ll go to hell. Or you’re afraid it’ll hurt your faith. Or I’m not attractive enough.”

  “A person’s lost if he tries to find reasons to say no. He just has to say no, straight from the heart.”

  “Why.”

  “Because if you do, you can feel your love of God grow.”

  “What if you don’t love God at all? What if you don’t believe there is a God?”

  “Then you have to look.”

  “Why.”

  “Because, just from sitting here with you, I think you’d be happy if you did. Because I think you’re a real person, and I feel love for you, and your happiness would make me happy.”

  “You feel love for me.”

  “A Christian love.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I’m no more perfect than you are.”

  She slid closer to him. “You could make me happy very quickly.”

  The only thing giving expression to his face was the pair of lambent rectangles on his glasses, reflections of incandescence from the doorway. He crossed his arms. “Tell me what y
ou feel like after you’ve had sex.”

  “I feel good.” She sat up straighter, proud. “I feel like I know something about myself. Like I have a base line, and I know what the very bottom of me is like. Like I know that good and evil don’t have anything to do with it. Like I’m an animal, in a good way.”

  The rectangles on Stites’s glasses seemed to take on wistfulness. “I guess you’re probably lucky,” he said.

  “I don’t think I’m any different than any woman. I mean, any woman who hasn’t had her mind fucked up by male religion.”

  “Them’s fightin’ words.”

  She moved even closer. “Fight me.”

  “You play fair and scoot back a little, I’ll fight you.”

  She retreated. “Well?”

  He joined his hands on his shins, above the argyle socks. “Well, I suppose it comes down to why God made sex such a great pleasure. You obviously consider this irrelevant, but what happens if you conceive a child in the course of making yourself feel good?”

  “Funny you should ask.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean it’s funny you should ask.”

  “Well, what’s the answer?”

  “You know what my answer is. If I’m in a halfway decent shape emotionally and financially, I have the baby. Otherwise I have an abortion.”

  “But what about the potentiality you destroy with an abortion?”

  “I don’t know. What about the potentialities I destroyed when I broke up with a high-school boyfriend? We could have had eight kids by now. Am I an eight-time murderer?”

  “Right. But have you ever known anybody who was conceived out of wedlock?”

  “Well, me, for one.”

  “You?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure I’m the perfect example. I’m sure I would have been aborted, if it had been more convenient for my mother.”

  “And how do you feel about that?”

  “Completely indifferent,” she said. Her eyes fell on the fragment of scripture on the wall; she found the typeface ugly. “My life began at five. If anything had happened earlier—no loss to me. There was no me.”

  “But no way you love yourself, if you’re so indifferent. No way you love the world. You must hate it. You must hate life.”

  “I love myself, I hate myself. It adds up to zero.”

  A long, long volley developed in the courtyard, the stillness and suspense around it growing deeper the longer it went on. Then the players groaned. Stites spoke quietly. “You don’t know how much it grieves me to hear you say that.”

  “I can be fun to sleep with.”

  “You think you have the right to throw your life away.”

  “The thought has crossed my mind.”

  “I think you’re very unhappy. I think you must have been very hurt by something.”

  Renée raised her face to the pitted ceiling, leaning back on her hands, the image of a person enjoying weather at the beach. She was smiling and continued to smile, but after a while her breathing become rough, like a water pump that at first only brings up air, “I—” Her breathing turned to shudders. “I am hurt about somebody. I’m terribly hurt. I’m so hurt I want to die.”

  Stites scrambled to his feet and went into the bathroom. He came back with a glass of water, but Renée was no longer there. She’d gone into the hall.

  “I guess I’m going to leave,” she said.

  “I want to help you.”

  “You can’t help me.”

  He set the water on the crossbeam of a pillory and took her bare arms in his hands. “You’re you,” he said. “You’re only you. And you’ve been you since the moment you were conceived. Your whole history was there when you were one minute old. And the hurt you feel is holy. It’s an inch away from being the truest happiness.”

  Her face was an inch away from his. She stood on her toes and opened her mouth, planting the softest part of her lips on the sharp stubble around his mouth. The next thing she knew, an entire glass of water had been poured over her head.

  “Fuck!” she cried, bouncing on her feet, throwing the water off in gobs. She backed up the hallway, fists clenched at her hips. “Fuck you!”

  He’d disappeared into his office. People were coming up the stairwell behind her, and already some of the pillories were occupied, big female duffs in sweats hanging out, rolls of fat visible above some of the waistbands. Metal creaked as other pillories were activated.

  Stites had sat down at his desk and begun to read the Bible in the light of a bare ceiling bulb. The window at his shoulder was dark now. He didn’t look up when Renée appeared in the doorway, one side of her hair matted, dissolved mascara pooling under one eye.

  “I hate you,” she said. “I hate your church, I hate your religion. You’re nothing but hatred yourself. It’s just like you said. It’s all negative. You hate women, you hate sex, and you hate the world as it is.”

  There were bare lightbulbs in his eyes. “I feel a love for you, Renée. You’re not a cold person. You’re full of emotion and need, and you came here, and just from an hour with you I feel a love for you. It’s a Christian love, but the Light gets filtered through the fact that I’m a man, and so I’d love to have you in my arms. I’d like to take you. All right? I’m telling you this because you seem to think it’s easy for me. I want you to know: I’m a man. I’m not made of stone. And you damn well better respect me.”

  “I’d respect you if you went ahead and did it.”

  He closed the Bible and leaned back in his chair. “You know, what I read about every day is what a tough life women have in today’s society. How they have to make all these hard choices, how they have to take so much responsibility for their families. They have to be mothers and they have to be working men too, if liberal society’s gonna function.”

  “It’s not just women,” Renée said. “Men have to change too.”

  “Oh, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Except you don’t hear so much about men complaining and men being caught in a bind. Do you? Men still have the choice, right? They have job satisfaction, and if they want to, they can feel good about parenting too. It’s like life is getting better for men, they’re getting options in a positive sense, while women are getting all these extra options in a negative sense. Wouldn’t you call this sort of the major paradox of the age? That the better things get for women liberal-politically, the worse things get in reality?”

  “The fact that I sort of agree with you only makes me angrier, because I know what you’re going to say.”

  “What? That the one thing people never seem to suspect is that it’s the politics itself that’s to blame? Because of course this society doesn’t understand things like ‘joy.’ The joy a mother feels. This society only understands ‘jobs,’ and ‘statutes,’ and especially ‘money.’”

  “And that women are first-class citizens. That joy isn’t worth much if it’s forced on you. And that it’s better to have painful options than no options.”

  “I was just going to say I don’t deny there are women like you. Our Lord tells us that some people are born eunuchs and some people are made into eunuchs along the way.”

  “Well fuck you too.”

  “But the fact is, most women want to have children. But society needs them for other stuff, you know, to make more money and more profits, so it has to kinda lure them away with their vanity and pride and greed. Which women have every bit as much of as men do.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “But if a woman’s left to her own better instincts, she don’t need a big-shot job to make her feel good about herself.”

  “Her rightful place is in the home.”

  “That’s right. The church understands this about women. It understands the joy of motherhood.”

  “Well then tell me one thing about this God of yours.” Renée took a step towards Stites. “Just one thing. If women aren’t supposed to have the same kind of life as men have, tell me why your God gave
us the same kind of consciousness.”

  Stites lunged forward like a trap springing closed. “He didn’t! He gave all people the commandment: Be fruitful, and multiply! And you yourself was the one who said this ‘consciousness’ doesn’t survive the birth of a woman’s first child. That she’s ‘just a woman’ then, right? See what I’m saying? The woman who’s unhappy because she’s got a man’s consciousness is the woman who has disobeyed the word of the Lord. The Lord promises you salvation if you obey His word. And this kind of consciousness problem you’re talking about vanishes in a woman who’s got a baby, just like the covenant says it will. She becomes an instinctive mother, just like you say, and just like the church knows she will. It’s a fact!”

  She nodded impatiently. “But the fact remains that women are given consciousness only to have it taken away again. They get shown what they could have—if they were male—and then it’s denied them. And you can say, well, most women aren’t like me. But even if there was only one of me, which I can’t believe at all, I’m stuck with a nasty choice, and the only way you can justify it is to say we’re paying for Eve’s sin or some such garbage. And I’m telling you that’s a hole in your religion you can drive a truck through: the fact that life basically shits for women and always has.”

  “And always will, Renée. As it ultimately shits for every person on earth. And so the real choice you have is either suffer for no reason, suffer and be bitter and bring evil to the lives around you, or else find a way to God through your suffering. And I think the Bible might agree with me that there are a lot more women in heaven than men. Just for the suffering they’ve endured and the pride they’ve swallowed. Because the last will be first and the first will be last.”

  “If there is a heaven.”

  “It’s at hand. It’s starin’ you in the face. That’s what you’re here for. You know your name means ‘born again’?”

  “Oh my God,” Renée said, utterly disgusted.

  Stites stood up and walked around his desk. “Will you at least come again? I won’t ask if I can pray for you, because you can’t stop me. But can I call you?”

  She shook her head very slowly. She was staring at him, inscribing his image in her mind so that she’d always be able to find it there: the tired eyes behind the round tortoiseshell glasses, the yellow tie that now had a spot of bean juice on it, the male hips, the stubble on his cheeks.