Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Louis?” Lauren said. She sounded next door. “I miss you.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Atlanta, at the airport. Did you have a good trip?”

  “No.”

  “Louis, I was thinking, I just had this thought. You know how you said you couldn’t see living in this country? Well, I was thinking we really could go to some island. We could both work and save some money, and we could go and start a restaurant or something. Just the two of us. We could have some kids, and go to the beach, and then we’d work in the restaurant.” She paused, awaiting a response. “It sounds so stupid when I say it, but it’s not stupid. We really could. I’ll be everything for you, and anywhere we go is fine with me.”

  Louis listened to the breath coming out of his nose at regular intervals.

  “You think it’s stupid,” Lauren said.

  “No. No, it sounds nice.”

  “You didn’t want me to call.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “No, I’m going to hang up right now and not call anymore. I’m sorry. Just pretend I didn’t call. Will you promise to pretend I didn’t call?”

  “Really, it’s OK.”

  “The other thing I wanted to say”—she lowered her voice—“is I want to make love with you. I really, really, really want to. I wanted to say I’m sorry we didn’t when we had a chance. As soon as I was on the plane I started crying because we hadn’t. And now”—her voice was becoming squeaky—“now I don’t know if we ever will. Louis, I mess everything up, don’t I. When I’m with you, I’m so happy, I try to have everything be perfect. But when I’m alone—when I’m alone I only want things your way.”

  There was a very long pause, with respiratory sounds at either end of the line.

  “Be tough,” Louis said.

  “OK. Goodbye.”

  He wanted to be off the phone, but he hated the sound of this “goodbye.” The word accused him of not loving her. If he loved her, wouldn’t he tell her not to say goodbye yet?

  “’Bye,” he said.

  “All right,” Lauren said, hanging up. Another charge had registered on her credit card.

  Having heard the modest but penetrating ticking of a ten-speed’s freewheel in the driveway, he went down to the kitchen and found his father unstrapping a knapsack from his back.

  “Hi Dad.”

  “Howdy, Lou, welcome home.”

  There was no sign of any $22 million in the kitchen. The linoleum was still torn in front of the sink and back door, the fruit bowl still held, as always, one moribund banana and one obese and obviously mealy apple, there was still the same archaic dishwasher with the words worn off its buttons and dried drools of detergent below the leaky door, still the dirty windows with the storms on, cobwebs and pine needles in the corners, still the old drainer with its rusty ulcerations, still the economy-size bottle of generic dish soap with a pink crust around its nozzle, and still the old father, nattering in his mildly entertaining way about the local drought and its probable global causes. Bob was dressed like a lawn-care-service employee—cuffed blue stay-press trousers, Sears work shoes, and a Greenpeace T-shirt dark with perspiration. Louis watched with an irritation verging on contempt as the man crouched womanishly by the refrigerator and transferred vegetables from the knapsack to the crisper. The beers on the top shelf were still Old Style. Louis took one, reaching over the hair that would now always be thicker than his own, smelling the armpits to which deodorants had long been strangers.

  “You forgot to take your ankle clip off,” he said.

  Bob touched his pants leg, noting that the clip was there, but he didn’t take it off. He smoothed the emptied knapsack and folded it in two.

  Louis looked around the kitchen as if it were a witness to what he had to put up with.

  “Well so here I am,” he said. “You want to tell me why you sent the ticket?”

  “So you couldn’t hang up on me,” Bob said.

  “Expensive way to do that. Or is money no object now?”

  “If you’re worried about that, you can paint the garage for me. And scrape it first. But no, if you want to be strictly logical, there’s no reason for you to be here. There’s no reason for me to care if I see you unhappy, no reason why you and your mother shouldn’t keep making each other miserable and poison the whole family.”

  Louis rolled his eyes, again calling upon the kitchen as his witness. “I take it she’s already in Boston.”

  “She left on Thursday.”

  “It’s nice how she always lets me know when she’s there.”

  “Yes, I know she doesn’t call you. But the fact is you wouldn’t want to see her now anyway.”

  “Uh-huh.” Louis nodded. “That’s very considerate of her. She knows I’m not going to want to see her, so she spares me the awkwardness of saying no to an invitation. That’s so amazingly tactful.”

  “Lou, this is why I wanted you here.”

  “‘This’? ‘This’? This—what, attitude problem of mine? This failure of my niceness regarding Mom?” He swallowed some beer and made a face. “How can you drink this stuff? It’s carbonated gallbladder.”

  “I thought you might want to come,” Bob said, determined not to be provoked. “You’re obviously very angry, and I thought if you understood better why your mother, for example, is behaving the way she is—”

  “Then I’d understand and accept and forgive her. Right?” Louis dared his father to contradict him. “You’d tell me what a tough life Mom has, and what a tough life Eileen has, and what a comparatively easy life I have, and then because it turns out I’ve got things so good I’d go and say, Gee, Mom, I’m sorry, do whatever you want, I totally understand.”

  “No, Louis.”

  “But what I don’t understand is where everybody gets this idea that I’ve got things so easy. You live in this house with her, you see her every day, but you can’t say to her, Jeez, Melanie, aren’t you being kind of mean to Louis? Instead you’ve got to fly me home, so I can be the one who understands.”

  “Lou, she understands, but she can’t help herself.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t help myself. And that’s why I’m not going to have anything more to do with her. She can’t help it, I can’t help it, that’s the end of it.”

  “But you can help it.”

  “What, oh, because why?” he asked the kitchen generally. “Because I was elected at age ten to be Mr. Understanding? Because men have things easy?”

  “That’s part of it, yes.”

  “I’m the one who has things easy? Not Mom who can do whatever the hell she wants and then say she can’t help it? Not Eileen who, you know, cries whenever she can’t have what she wants? Are you serious? That’s such total arrogance. I’m saying I’m no better than they are. What’s wrong with that?”

  “What exactly is your problem with her?”

  “My problem with her . . . I’m not even going to tell you what my problem is.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t feel like it.”

  “Because you’re embarrassed. Because you know it isn’t worthy of you.”

  “Oh, I see. Tell me more about this problem of mine.”

  Bob always savored any lecture invitation. He picked up the black banana and, holding it before his eyes, slowly stripped it. “Maybe it’s the old romance of the left,” he said in his musing, classroom voice. “I tend to think of you and Eileen as sort of the two sides of the national equation. Eileen being the kind of person who thinks she needs wealth and luxury, and you being the kind of person who—”

  “Who says hell no, beans and rice are fine with me.”

  “Yes, you can laugh at me now, but that’s how it seemed.” Bob began to eat the banana; no one else in the family would have touched such a black one. “I thought you felt more or less the way I do. And I used to believe there was a sizable class of people in this country who wanted nothing more than a decent job, decent housing, decent health care, and fir
st-class non-material satisfactions. Because it seemed as if people should be like this. And then in the eighties this turns out to be as wishful as all my other thinking. The decent working people in this country turn out to have the same consumer greed as the bourgeoisie, and every single person is dreaming of having the same luxuries that Donald Trump has, and would poison the world and kill his neighbors to get them if that would help.”

  “Oh,” Louis said. “So I’m greedy. I’m a Donald Trump just like everybody else. That’s my problem with Mom: I want a snazzy town house just like Eileen’s, and I want my VCR and my BMW and I’m pissed at Mom because she won’t give it to me. That’s what you’ve determined?”

  “You’re angry because she’s lent money to Eileen.”

  “Yeah, even if that were the problem, which I don’t really grant, the thing is it’s a fairness thing, a frankness thing. I mean, your working class wouldn’t care about BMWs if they didn’t have to see all these worthless rich assholes driving them around and talking on their car phones. And before you say it—I’m not saying Eileen’s a worthless rich asshole. I’m not saying I necessarily even have a problem with her.”

  “No,” Bob said, tranquilly finishing the banana. “You just see an opportunity to torment your mother and still have justice on your side.”

  “Me? Are you kidding? I’m trying to stay away from her! I’m trying to shut her out of my mind! Which is literally what she asked me to do. She said, let’s pretend this didn’t happen, and what do you think I’ve been trying to do? You know—in my own stupid trusting way. I don’t know where you get this idea I’m tormenting her. I went and talked to her one time, when I found out that I was the only one being asked to pretend this didn’t happen, I mean, that Eileen wasn’t. I had one five-minute lapse, and that was it. And now you tell me you ‘hoped’ I might not be as ‘materialistic’ as Eileen. Well . . . maybe I wasn’t! Maybe I was this perfect, greedless guy you always wanted me to be. But I get no thanks from anyone, and then you give me this little talk about how ‘disappointed’ you are, and how innocent you were, and how I’m like the working class that never seems to do what the marxists want it to. I mean, it’s no wonder us workers all turn out wishing we could be Donald Trump. We’re sorry you’re disappointed. You think I want to disappoint you? When the only possible justification I have for living this stupid fucking way I live is that maybe at least my father thinks it’s not so stupid? But you obviously can’t see this, because you obviously don’t have the slightest idea what I’m really like, because for twenty-three years you’ve been too stoned to notice. You talk about innocent, you talk about dumb, look at me here.”

  Bob’s eyes had widened suddenly, as if he’d felt a knife go in his back. Louis, taking deep breaths, dropped his eyes to the floor. “And you’re hurt, I know, I’m sorry. It was an exaggeration.”

  “No, you’re right,” Bob said as he turned towards the door. “You hit the nail on the head.”

  “Yeah, walk away now, would you. Make me feel like the invulnerable one, huh? Like the only person in this family who doesn’t get overcome with grief and guilt.”

  “I have nothing more to say now.”

  “You walk away. Mom walks away. Eileen walks away. What else am I supposed to think except that I’m the one with the problem?—That I’m always so fucking right? Is that it?” He was speaking to an empty doorway. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong. What am I doing wrong?”

  He listened to the creak of wooden stairs. “AREN’T YOU GLAD I CAME HOME?”

  Bob Holland had come from a small town north of Eugene, Oregon. In the East, at Harvard, he’d written his doctoral dissertation on the origins of land speculation in seventeenth-century Massachusetts and met Melanie, whom he began to stalk relentlessly but didn’t succeed in capturing until he’d returned to Boston from a two-year post-doctoral stint in England, at the University of Sheffield. The young Hollands came to Evanston in the early sixties and conceived Eileen the same month Bob was offered tenure. For a few years he was the history department’s shining star, teaching hugely popular courses on Colonial America and nineteenth-century industrialization, giving exams with questions like Describe what might have been or Was it progress?, and bestowing A’s and B’s on all comers. He grew marijuana in planters on the roof, turned his lawn into a jungle, rode buses to Washington. Student activists caucused in his basement. He was teargassed and spent a night in jail, once.

  However, as everybody knows, the spirit of those days soon wasted itself in violence, licentiousness, self-indulgence, commercial co-optation, and despair. Each autumn’s fresh crop of students contained more well-groomed and unplayful weeds than the crop before it. Bob managed to cultivate militancy in a few of them, but history and numbers were against him, and his mind was a little too scrambled by disappointment and hallucinogens for him to be able to thrive in the increasingly hostile environment. As early as 1980 he found himself classed by students and faculty alike as just another Old Marxist Drone.

  The Drones were an exclusively male bunch. They sat in their own corner at faculty meetings, well apart from the newly emboldened conservatives in their bow ties and the recently hired minority faculty in their assertively ethnic costumes and all the kiddies, leftist and otherwise, in their tight short skirts and herringbone blazers. The Drones had red faces and tousled hair. They wore flannel shirts and down vests. Among themselves they traded the too-obvious smiles of people who are publicly intoxicated and think it’s funny. They saw fascism everywhere—in the administration, in the cafeterias, in the bookstore—and said so on the record. They proposed Jerry Garcia and Oliver North as commencement speakers. They raised their hands during earnest policy discussions and tried to have humorous remarks about psychedelic drugs inserted in the record. They were all terribly nostalgic about psychedelic drugs.

  Lacking public support for an assault on society at large, the Drones subverted the only authority they knew, which was the university. They never missed an open party or reception. They clustered around whatever food and alcohol the university had paid for, and grimly, but winking now and then like the conspirators they felt themselves to be, consumed many dollars’ worth. They were gleeful in abusing privileges, borrowing stacks of library books never to return them, working departmental copy machines to death, and insisting on their share of funds to bring in guest speakers—ex-Yippies or minor functionaries from Romania or Angola—to whose lectures only the Drones themselves came, with their keen appetite for refreshments. Challenged by their peers, they fell back on a hoary argument: Society is corrupt, this university is a product of society, therefore this university is corrupt.

  There were Drones in Bob’s own department who hadn’t seen an article into print since Kent State. When the subject of publications arose, these men regarded their truncated careers with the proud, resigned faces of amputees. Drones taught Rocks for Jocks, seminars on Popular Culture, and courses in Russian History for which the syllabi hadn’t changed in three decades.

  Bob himself, atypically, was a good scholar. Even during the darkest Reagan years, when he was getting stoned five afternoons a week, he immersed himself in primary and secondary sources and came up with many marvelous, marvelous historical facts and insights which, shorn of their cannabidiolic aura by the sober glow of his computer, still retained enough mettle to form the bases for a book called Filling the Earth: God, Wilderness, and the Massachusetts Bay Company and for two articles on wampum, beaver pelts, and inflationary spirals, all written in fluid prose and published very respectably.

  It was mainly Melanie who kept Bob in line. For all that he enjoyed teasing her and baiting her, he lived in fear of losing her respect. She probably hadn’t set foot on campus a dozen times in twenty-five years, so he was free to make a fool of himself there, but elsewhere he was careful to preserve his dignity. For Melanie he would slick back his hair and put on one of his ancient suits and ride with her downtown to the symphony or opera and nap in his seat until
it was time to go home. He endured countless dinners with her college friends, all of whose husbands seemed to be past or current members of the Stock Exchange and still could get nothing better than a laugh out of him when the conversation turned to politics. For months at a time, when Melanie was in rehearsal or performance at the Theatrical Society, Bob cooked dinners for Louis and Eileen. Melanie shouted at him and shouted at the children; he covered his ears with his hands and smiled as if she were onstage and doing very well; she shouted all the louder, and he went upstairs and she followed, shouting; but the next time she saw the children she was flustered and sometimes blushed. The children never consciously recognized the obvious fact, which was that the man in their house was wildly in love with the woman and the woman less than perfectly immune to the man, but undoubtedly they got the basic idea. Eileen felt pity and affection for their father. Louis felt morbid embarrassment.

  Dusk was falling on Monday by the time Louis returned to Wesley Avenue from an all-day walk to Lake Forest. He’d located the bland, wide house that Renée had grown up in. He’d eaten two large orders of french fries along the way. Now the wind and the light had died, and Wesley Avenue was so deserted—the whole neighborhood so obviously empty of watchful human beings—that it seemed the day might as well have never happened, or at best should have gone in the record books with an asterisk. In the sky above Dewey School, alma mater of the Holland kids, the orange trail of a bottle rocket faded and there was a white flash. Humidity fattened the report.

  Louis entered the stuffy house and drank two glasses of iced tea. He peeled off his T-shirt, wrung it out, and put a fresh one on. With each step he took up the stairs to the third floor, the temperature rose by a degree and the smell of old timber and warm plaster intensified. Bob’s door, ajar, let out just enough light to illuminate the yellowed quotation that was taped to it:

  For I ask, What would a Man value Ten Thousand or a Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent Land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land Parts of America, where he had no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World, to draw Money to him by the Sale of the Product? It would not be worth the inclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild Common of Nature, whatever was more than would supply the Conveniences of Life to be had there for him and his Family.