Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Riding northward along the coast, Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder, the impact of those ketones and esters still fresh in his brain, he saw the stone fences wandering through the tangled, scrubby woods and had to force himself not to picture the early settlers in a landscape that looked just like this. He knew it wasn’t until well into the eighteenth century that erosion and repeated plowing had begun to fill the fields with glacial boulders, and that the farmers, running out of wood, had turned to stones to build their fences. And it wasn’t until the Erie Canal and the railroads had opened up the heartland that farming in New England was finally abandoned, its fields reclaimed by trunk and thorn. The sterile waters and monotonous forests of skinny, crownless trees were no more a picture of the nineteenth century than of the seventeenth century; were as alien as the esters in his nose, as her hand on his shoulder, her fingernails on his neck, her fingertips on his earlobe.

  He was a boy from the woods himself, from the still-virgin forest of western Oregon. It had only been a year ago, right before his most recent visit to his mother, that Weyerhaeuser had clear-cut the hillside behind her house, reaping a one-time-only profit, and left the land to decay into the river like a shaved, dead wolf. The next time he was home he would see it after “reforestation”: the varied, misty forest of Sitka spruce and hemlock and cedar and northern redwood supplanted by weeds and slash and identical Douglas firs shooting up at geometrical intervals from the loose, bulldozed earth. The same wave of profit-taking that had crashed onto Cape Ann in 1630 was even now rolling out over the Pacific Coast, carrying with it the last of the continent’s virginity.

  Anna handled a joint like a cigarette, tapping the ash loose with a long red nail, expelling the smoke through her nose, perching on the edge of the sofa with her legs crossed at the knee. Kernaghan couldn’t keep his face straight. He seemed more interested in simply holding a joint, enjoying its illegality and symbolism, than in taking hits. As it filled with smoke, the living room altered as if a reel were ending in a cheap theater, frames, entire actions dropping out, voices and faces in and out of sync, bright dots and dark squiggles, the room jumping and then taking on the orange tones of the new projector’s bulb; Bob saw that until now the world on the spherical screen around him had been projected by a light with too much blue in it. The gray light in the windows looked like sunshine. The three stoned people crowded around the refrigerator and lifted pieces of aluminum foil, seeing what the cook had left. In the hallway Anna pressed her stomach into Bob’s, kissed him, unbuttoned his shirt, and backed up the hallway bending over with her palms beckoning as if he were a pet she wanted to jump into her arms.

  In Beverly, on a no-account street, he followed her into her ordinary little house. The dust ruffles on the overstuffed furniture, the family photographs with their cheap gilded frames, the tawdriness, the poor taste, made him wild about her and as certain of conquest as he was of her La-Z-Boy’s softness when he sank into its arms. She was selecting LPs from a brass stand reminiscent of a dish rack. Kernaghan, who’d been left in the car, was giggling in the bushes, spying through the window, rain snaking down the glaze of his baldness.

  They didn’t see him again, but he must have been in the back seat as they returned to Argilla Road, he must have followed them inside, tittering like a leprechaun, and he may even have been watching in the living room the entire time, maybe in the corner where twenty years later Rita would split her head open. Watching Anna load the record changer with Frank Sinatra albums, watching her remove her paisley blouse and Silera bra, watching the white flesh of her midriff bunch into folds as she bent forward to pull her high-heeled boots off and slip her yellow spandex miniskirt and white underpants down her legs. Watching the rippling and rounding of the muscles in Bob’s shoulders, the tensing of his youthful buttocks, the action of his hips. Hearing the smack of her heavy breasts against the flatness of his chest, watching fast breath dry the saliva in the corners of her mouth, hearing him cry out, hearing her tell him, “He can only do it . . . with Dom Pérignon bottles!” Watching him raise her hips from the carpet and replow the warm, moist, trembling earth. Watching the in and out, seeing their chests heave and their mouths angle to cover one another as if they were two half-drowned swimmers in mutual resuscitation, watching the jiggling of her flesh, the sway of his, watching him sprawl across her forking legs, watching him gulp air red-faced and obliviously, until finally he had watched enough and could totter across the room and touch Bob’s shoulder.

  “Bob, Bob, Bob!” he said, eyes half-shut with mirth. Bob saw his penis, swollen and perpendicular, a pinkish black instrument.

  “Oh my God!” Anna screamed with laughter. “Oh my God!”

  Bob could hear her giggling, squealing, shrieking while he put his overcoat and boots on. He stumbled into the rain, across the lawn and through the sterile, altered woods. He smelled woodsmoke and wet leaves, heard the wind being combed by a thousand narrow tree trunks, water from branches slapping the slick leaves on the ground. It was almost Thanksgiving. The dusk and the wet smells and wet sounds were the ones that had once made him shiver when he stepped outside his house for firewood, and made him hurry back inside where it was warm and he could forget the keening wind mourning the dead past of the land, dragging over the hard rooftops, jealous of the life inside. So deep in the stunted woods that the dark bulk of Kernaghan’s house might simply have been night on the horizon, he sank to his knees in the leaves and stayed until the rain had stopped, and his head had cleared, and the sky froze into glittering crystals in the shape of Orion and Perseus, and he’d heard the starter of Anna’s car.

  You bought her a condominium?

  I helped her with a loan.

  Oh, Melanie.

  Bob, it was an excellent time for her to buy.

  She looks up to you. She takes her lead from you. You know, you don’t have to give her everything she wants. You could give her some guidance instead.

  The money is mine to do what I want with.

  I’m saying if you wonder why Lou got so mad at you, it’s not too hard to figure out. Just think about how it looks to him, why don’t you. Just think about it.

  Give me some credit I have every intention of being fair to him in the long run. But if you could hear the way he harps on the money . . . It’s impossible to have a rational discussion with him. He’s just like you. He’s even worse. I told you, he ruined a sofa. He kicked a Waterford bowl into the fireplace.

  Well, good for him.

  He has no conception of what I’m going through.

  He understands that Eileen takes and takes and takes from you, and he gets nothing.

  Bob, you cannot compare the two.

  Obviously he thinks you can.

  I don’t understand it. Ever since this whole thing started he’s been terrible. I just would not have expected this of him. He’s been storing up resentment.

  You should call him and apologize.

  Oh, now, really. For what? What do I apologize for? I’m the one with the problem! I’m the one who’s caught in the middle!

  You should call him and apologize. It’s what you should do, and if you can’t do it, then you can’t complain, either, and you can’t complain if I take matters into my own hands.

  Well, go right ahead. You always know what the right thing to do is. You’ve never, ever, faced a situation where you weren’t sure what to do. Everything’s always been very clear for you. Everything’s simple and nice. You wanted me, you married me. You live your politically correct life, and leave everything else to me, which is what you married me for.

  I married you because I loved you.

  I know that, Bob. I know that. Don’t tell me—

  And I still love you.

  DON’T TELL ME THAT.

  A long silence.

  Give it away, Bob said finally.

  Give what.

  The money.

  I will. I’ll give—a lot. I’ll give—half! But I have to have it first.

&n
bsp; Give it all and you’ll be happy. Set aside a little for the kids, and a little for yourself. Set aside a million and give the rest away. You’ll be happy.

  I can’t, Bob. I can’t.

  All the while, a hole is being drilled into the earth in Peabody at a cost in labor, equipment, and energy of maybe five thousand dollars a day. Anna tags the core samples as they come up and stores them in a refrigerated building to retard oxidation. She has her own padlock on the building. She couldn’t tell schist from feldspar if her life depended on it, but the samples will be hers alone to study and exploit, and her only thought is deeper, deeper, deeper. She still thinks there’s oil or at least methane down there. But delays and costly breakdowns are becoming frequent as the drill bit chews past the one-mile mark. Competitors with new plants are eating into Sweeting-Aldren’s war profits. With the hole now well below the water table, plenty deep for waste disposal, management decides it’s time to eliminate further funding. Kernaghan, however, knows that Anna will leave the company if the drilling stops too soon. He threatens and deceives and cajoles Aldren Sr. into funding the drilling at least through the end of 1970.

  Rita can’t figure it out. A number as hot and proud as Anna? With an impotent goat? Obviously Kernaghan has found a way to buy the girl. But the months go by and Anna isn’t promoted, she doesn’t move out of her dowdy pillbox in Beverly, she drives the same old Ford. Certain heavy pieces of jewelry are suspicious, but Rita is sure the girl’s too shrewd to have sold herself for some earrings and a diamond pendant.

  “She hates the guy,” Anna’s fellow researchers confide when Rita asks.

  “But she sleeps with him.”

  “He has Power over her,” they say mysteriously, meaning they have no idea.

  Rita visits Anna herself.

  “I love him passionately,” Anna says, laughing in Rita’s face; Kernaghan has told her all about Rita. “And he’s crazy about me.”

  “So why don’t you marry him?”

  “What do I care about marriage? He wants a woman who sneezes at money.”

  Talking to Anna fans the embers of Rita’s jealousy, turns the warm glow into a white, directed flame. She begins to wonder about the big derrick called the F2 Line, which management has surrounded with a high, opaque fence and which Anna visits daily. Rita begins to snoop, to listen in on occupied telephone lines, to open forbidden drawers, to watch for keys to unattended file cabinets. The more she finds out, the easier it is to read between the lines of memos and decipher her bosses’ winks and decode the remarks they make in hallways. She pieces together the details of Anna’s “research initiative.”

  It’s midwinter, the hole now eighteen thousand feet deep, when Rita comes to Anna’s office with two copies of a confidential memo. She gives one to the girl. “Recognize this?”

  Anna, bored: “What if I do?”

  Rita hands her the other, which is identical to the first—copies to be sent to and destroyed by various executives and Anna Krasner, Research Scientist—except that the words “deep exploratory well” on the copy Anna received are replaced by the words “deep waste disposal well.”

  Anna shrugs. “So?”

  “Well, my dear, it doesn’t look like lover boy drilled your hole because he loves you. He drilled it to pump waste down. Seems to me that he got you awfully cheap. Wouldn’t you say? Buying you with somebody else’s money? As far as he’s concerned, your dream’s just a giant sewer.”

  Anna shrugs again. But a week later she fails to report to work, and a janitor discovers that her desk is bare. She simply vanishes into the greater world that Boston sometimes forgets lies all around it. And Kernaghan has only guesses about why she’s left him. He may suspect Rita, but when he comes to see her, she, being far from through with her revenge, is careful not to gloat.

  The company wastes no time in taking down the drilling derrick and putting in a pumping station. In the wake of Earth Day, Congress and Nixon are moving towards agreement on creating an environmental-protection administration and enacting Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Kernaghan suggests that the pumping program be kept quiet, since (a) they’ve been drilling without a license, and (b) given the current ecological hysteria, the public might be alarmed if it learned that highly toxic chemicals are being pumped into the earth, no matter how safe the process is in reality. The chain of command terminating in the actual pumping is carefully broken up, so that only the top executives know the real story, and loopholes of deniability are left for all but one of them. The various plant managers and workers involved in the waste stream are told the fluids pumped at F2 are being stored temporarily in an underground tank, or told the fluids are harmless.

  On the day before Kernaghan’s seventy-second birthday, the day of his retirement, when the company’s waste disposal program for the future is firmly in place, Rita appears at his door. She’s been following the conspiracy as it develops, documenting every stage. She’s the secretary of one of the executives involved—maybe even Aldren Sr. She’s come to Kernaghan for blackmail.

  “No way,” Louis said. “You don’t blackmail somebody into marrying you. You don’t want to be married to a guy that hates you.”

  “Who said anything about marriage? She’s trying to blackmail him, period. She wants all that money he never paid her for her favors. She shows him a list of the documents she has, and she says, Give me X amount of money or else you guys are going to jail. Remember we’re talking about a woman who later defrauded her local bank. And when he sees how serious she is, he starts to weep, genuinely, because he’s tired, and he’s lost Anna, and he’s afraid. He says, Please, Rita, I’m an old man, the best days of my life were spent with you, let’s be friends.”

  “But she’s suspicious.”

  “Of course she’s suspicious. But it’s hard to see straight when you’ve got all the power. He’s on his knees saying marry me. He’s laughing, he’s crying, he’s insane. He’s utterly in her power, and she’s a woman. She can’t quite bring herself to stick the knife in.”

  “Yeah, but wait a second, you can’t tell me the most important thing for him was what the woman looked like, and how old she was, and then say, Oh, but he made an exception for ugly old Rita. If money’s what she wants, I mean not marriage, why doesn’t he buy her off?”

  “Because he loves money just as much! He weighs the problem and decides to marry her. If he marries her, she’s silenced and it doesn’t cost him anything. He keeps the money, and he can still chase all the women he wants. Plus marrying her guarantees her silence over the long term. So it’s the right decision. They get married, and immediately he starts converting his entire portfolio to Sweeting-Aldren stock, to make sure that Rita’s stuck with it. When he dies, his will puts Rita’s allowance from the trust fund at the mercy of company dividends: if she attacks the company, it cuts into her allowance. He probably makes sure that at least Aldren knows this. And so then she’s really stuck. In a sense she’s inherited his entire fortune—obviously she insisted on a pre-nuptial agreement to that effect—but he doesn’t let her get control of it. That’s why there’s the otherwise insane stipulation that the trustees must leave the assets invested in Sweeting-Aldren. It’s not because he’s such a gung-ho company man, he’s too smart for that. It’s because he’s getting his revenge on Rita.”

  “And Mom’s the one who pays for it.”

  “It’s usually the women who pay for it, one way or another.”

  Kernaghan had a heart attack in his sleep in 1982. He’d lived eighty years in good health, smoked cigarettes for sixty, and died without pain or terror. Once he was dead and Rita had discovered the mean trick he’d played her with his will, she made a slave of his spirit. He had to knock on tables for her, spell out optimistic messages about the other world with a gliding upturned tumbler, and, most demeaning of all, inhabit the bodies of animals. One week she would look into the eyes of a neighbor’s retriever and patronize her silly husband; the next week Jack would be a blue jay hanging around
outside the kitchen windows. “Up to his same old tricks,” she’d say complacently. Her Haitian maid, for one, believed that Rita had been shoved from that barstool because Jack’s spirit couldn’t take the abuse anymore.

  A less imaginative woman than Rita, a woman who didn’t require a giant pyramid on the roof and an authentic Egyptian mummy in the basement, could have lived very comfortably on the dividends from her Sweeting-Aldren stock. The chemical industry suffered some declines in the seventies and early eighties, but Sweeting-Aldren suffered less than the rest. Not only did it not have to spend tens of millions on pollution control and waste recovery, but it was able to pass some of those savings on to its customers, and so consistently undersell its east coast competition. The pump at F2 ran so smoothly that the old generation of executives forgot about it and the new generation never learned. It was like the national economy, which began to roar again in the mid-eighties. The country borrowed three trillion dollars to buy some weapons and fund a giant leap forward in lifestyle for the wealthy. When the economy grew, so the argument went, tax revenues would increase and the debt would be paid off. But year after year the national debt continued to increase.

  Nature issued her first warning in 1987. Beneath Peabody, in Sweeting-Aldren’s own back yard, the earth begins to shake. It’s no accident. It has always only been a matter of time. Dimly Mr. X, the one executive officially responsible for waste disposal, the one executive who wasn’t granted deniability when the thing was set up in ’72, recalls the concept of induced seismicity. The tremors continue. A worried Mr. X goes to his boss, Aldren Jr., and says the pumping must stop.

  Aldren Jr., steely cold, says: “What pumping?”

  “Sandy, the pumping at F2. Our primary waste stream?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Aldren Jr. “Common knowledge this company incinerates and recycles all its waste.”

  “Joking aside, Sandy, we’re causing a fucking swarm of earthquakes two miles from here.”