Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Ask at the desk.”

  “Well now.” Like a bully who’d scented a weakling, Stites awakened fully to Louis’s presence. He approached him with the same prowling, intent, and possibly myopic tilting of head that Louis himself assumed when he felt he had a moral edge on someone. “You must be the boyfriend.”

  “You can talk,” Louis said. “But I don’t have to listen.”

  “You must be the boyfriend she told me about on Monday, and the one she told the world about today.”

  Louis blanched a little, but held his ground. “Today,” he said. “You mean—when you guys were calling her a murderer.”

  “On Monday,” Stites raising his voice, “when she told me there was a man who’d hurt her so bad she didn’t want to live anymore. And today when she said there was a man she was in love with and wanted to marry and have children with, and I didn’t see any man there with her. And I reckon you’re the so-called man. Aren’t you.”

  Louis looked into the minister’s light-soaped, accusing tortoiseshells. “You can’t make me feel guiltier than I already do.”

  “Your guilt is your business, Mr. Antichrist. I’m just telling you why I’m here.”

  The so-called man whom Renée had been in love with and had wanted to have children with turned away from Stites. Conscious of an impulse to redeem himself in the minister’s eyes, he crouched by Howard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Howard gave him another red, intimate look and said nothing. Stites had disappeared up the corridor. Louis found him sitting on a sofa in a tiny ICU waiting room with a television mounted on the ceiling. “What did she say about me?” he said from the doorway.

  Stites didn’t take his eyes off the television. “I told you what she said.”

  “Where’d you see her?”

  “Chelsea.”

  “She wanted you to call your people off her.”

  “That’s what she came for, sure. But that’s not why she stayed.”

  “She stayed?”

  Stites smiled at the television. “What’s it to you?”

  Louis looked at the floor. Not for the first time, he felt he was out of his depth in loving Renée.

  “Jody batting .355 over the last eight games,” said the television. “He’s four for his last nine.”

  “She stayed, we talked,” Stites said. “Then she left. Where were you?”

  “I left her. I hurt her.”

  “And now she’s shot and you decide you feel bad about it.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Louis.”

  “Louis,” Stites spread his arms out on the top of the sofa and put his feet up on a coffee table, “I ain’t your rival. I’ll tell you frankly, I thought a lot of her. But she wasn’t interested in me as a man. She was totally faithful to you. I don’t know about if you didn’t exist. But you do exist, so.”

  “If I didn’t exist you’d have to explain to her why one of your people shot her in the back because she had an abortion.”

  “That was not a pro-life person,” Stites said positively, to the television screen, where the Red Sox batter was trying to lay down a bunt.

  “‘An eye for an eye’?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Stites said. “I flat-out don’t believe it. That’s not how we work, even the worst of us. I’d frankly sooner believe it was you.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “The only question is, who else is gonna do a thing like that? You got any idea at all?”

  Louis didn’t answer. On the TV screen a Volvo sedan was crashing into a cinder-block wall, and a plastic married couple and their bald plastic children, not dead, not even scratched, were settling back comfortably into their seats.

  “What’s she like?” Stites asked him. “Day to day?”

  “I don’t know. Neurotic, self-absorbed, insecure. Kind of mean. She doesn’t have a great sense of humor.” He frowned. “She’s a good scientist. A good cook. She doesn’t do anything without thinking about it. She’s very sexy too, somehow.”

  “A good cook, huh? What kinds of things she cook?”

  “Vegetables. Pasta. Fish. She doesn’t eat the higher vertebrates.”

  Out in the Sahara, two young men dying of thirst were rescued by a Budweiser truck carrying beautiful girls in swimsuits and tight cutoffs and halter tops. Everybody was drinking product. The girls’ breasts were firm and round and their stomachs flat and hard and their waists narrow in their Silera maillots. Their limbs sweated like cool, intoxicating beer cans. The men flooded sundry cleavages with a fire hose, spanked asses with the hose’s white spray. The cheesecake, drinking product, was losing inhibitions. Forty feet away, on the table in OR #1, a urologist named Dr. Ishimura was sewing up the place in Renée’s body where her right kidney had been, and a surgeon named Dr. Das was vacuuming up her blood.

  15

  He was awakened in the morning by the machine by his bed. His amplified mother was shouting at Eileen about some State Farm policy: AND I NEED YOUR WORK NUMBER SO—

  “Hello Mom,” he said over a squawk of feedback as he deactivated the machine.

  “Louis? Where are you?”

  He coughed. “Where do you think?”

  “Goodness, yes, that’s a silly question. How—how are you?”

  “Well. Apart from the fact that my girlfriend was shot in the back last night and almost died, uh.”

  There was a silence. He could hear mid-morning birds chirping on Argilla Road.

  “Your girlfriend,” Melanie said.

  “You probably saw it on the news. Her name’s Renée. Seitchek. Remember you met her?”

  “Your girlfriend. I see.”

  “She had an abortion, and somebody shot her. And you know who the father was?”

  “Louis, I—”

  “It was me.”

  “Well, Louis, that’s—that’s very interesting. For you to tell me that. Although according to what I read in the paper she had some uncertainty—”

  “She only said that to take all the responsibility.”

  “I suppose that could be the case, Louis, although you shouldn’t—”

  “She said it because she’s a conscientious person who takes responsibility for everything she does.”

  “Yes, I’m quite familiar with Renée’s conscientiousness.”

  He sat up. He swung his bandaged feet to the floor. “What do you mean? Have you been talking to her?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Melanie said, “I saw her the weekend before last, and then again last week. But that’s not what’s important now.”

  “You saw her?”

  “What’s important is that she recover. That’s what you have to think about.”

  “You saw her?”

  “Yes, but it is not important.”

  “My girlfriend is in the hospital and she almost died and you won’t tell me what’s going on?”

  “Louis, she gave me some advice.”

  “Advice. Advice. She told you to sell your stock.”

  There was no reply except for birdsong. The birds might have been perched on his mother’s shoulder, they sounded so close. “She told you to sell your stock,” Louis said. “Right?”

  “Well, yes, I see your father has given you a clear picture of the extremely private dilemma I was facing. And it’s exactly as you say: she advised me to sell my stock.”

  Louis hobbled to the desk and sat down. “She gave you the advice? Or did she sell it?”

  “You may ask her that yourself, Louis. I’m not going to tell you.”

  “She was in surgery for four hours last night. She’s in, like, horrible shape. And you want me to ask her?”

  “I don’t see what conceivable difference it could make to you. All I’m going to say is that I do not recall the precise arrangement we had.”

  “Meaning she sold it to you.”

  No reply.

  “Did she tell you she knew me?”

  �
�She said that you and she were not involved.”

  “Well, we aren’t, strictly speaking.”

  “She also said that you and she had not been involved.”

  “Well, she lied.”

  “Well, and I suppose I knew that. I suppose I knew it all along.”

  Louis hung up and clutched his forehead, which had begun to ache. The bathroom was still steamy and herbally scented from Eileen and Peter’s showers. Alongside Peter’s French skin-care products (“poor lum”) and the wide variety of makeup pencils and brushes and pancakes that Louis had been a little surprised to discover Eileen used, he saw the bloodstained washcloth, the empty box of sterile bandages, the wastebasket full of Kleenexes stained with blood and Betadine, the evidence of the quarter hour he’d spent here before he went to bed. He saw the sun in the window. He pictured Somerville Hospital in the daylight, the daylight of a holiday—Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July—that had fallen on a weekday, when the plug is pulled on ordinary activities, and the empty white hours stretch out towards the evening’s obligatory turkey, the night’s fireworks, or, in this case, the afternoon’s visit to the hospital. They’d told him there was a chance he’d be able to see Renée briefly. He raised the toilet seat, which like every other horizontal surface in the bathroom was dusted with the baby powder Eileen had been using on summer mornings for at least twelve years, and he was just beginning to pee when the telephone rang again. He returned to his room.

  Hi, this is Lauren Bowles—

  He reached for the receiver, but his fingers curled into a fist. He felt how an object, a chair, must feel, the fibers of its wooden members tensed, its arms and legs paralyzed by the geometry of equal and opposing forces. Watching his fingers nonetheless uncurl and raise the receiver was like watching a chair move in an earthquake.

  “Hello?” Lauren said. “Hello? . . . Hello? Is someone there?”

  “It’s me, Lauren.”

  “Oh God, Louis, you sound so far away. Are you alone? Can I talk to you?”

  Now his lips were the stationary object.

  “Are you there?” Lauren said. “I was going to wait to call you like you said to, but I was watching Good Morning America and I saw her. It’s so bad, Louis, it’s really really bad, because I’d just been thinking how I wished she didn’t exist. But they said she’s alive. Right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know they called her a hero? Like, Louis’s girlfriend is such an incredibly good person they put her picture on TV and say she’s a hero. Like she’s one of the best people in the country or something. And I’m such a good person I’m sitting there wishing she was dead, right up to when I actually saw her.”

  “Yeah, Lauren,” he said harshly. “You shouldn’t listen to what they say. She had that abortion to be spiteful. She uses men for sex. She has a smaller heart than you do.”

  Lauren was hurt. “I don’t believe you,” she said. It was the first time he’d ever tried to hurt her. He wanted her to hate him and forget him. But it wasn’t pleasant to be hated, at least not by Lauren, whose goodwill towards him had always been a mystery that made the world seem like a hopeful place. He’d be very sorry to live without that goodwill. He asked her where she was.

  “I’m at home. I mean with Emmett. I haven’t let him kiss me, though.”

  “He must be delighted to have you back.”

  “Right, we’re having some real fun talks.”

  He stood on his aching, throbbing feet. As the silence on the line lengthened, it took on the particular curdled flavor of daytime long-distance rates.

  “This is the end, isn’t it, Louis.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Were you back together with her?”

  “No.”

  “But you wanted to be?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, fuck,” said Lauren sadly. “I’m so jealous of her, you can’t believe it. You’d think I was a monster if you knew how jealous. But I swear to God, Louis, I hope she gets better. Do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  She considered this. “OK,” she said. “I’ll see you. I mean—I won’t see you. I guess . . . I guess I’m going to let Emmett kiss me now.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Are you jealous of him?”

  “No.”

  “Not even a little bit?”

  “No.”

  “Louis.” There was urgency in the word. “Just say yes. Say yes and I’ll hang up, and it will be the end. Please say yes.”

  “I’m not jealous of him, Lauren.”

  “Why not? Tell me why not.” She sounded like a crossed child. “Aren’t I pretty? Wouldn’t I do anything in the world for you? Don’t I love you?” Between the moment when a glass is irretrievably knocked from a shelf and the moment when it hits the floor, there is a charged and very finite silence. “I hope she dies!” Lauren said. “I hope she fucking dies right this minute!”

  Louis knew that if he’d been in the same room with her, he would have gone away with her and lived with her; he knew it the way he knew his own name. But he was speaking on the telephone, with its little plastic guillotine for chopping heads off conversations. Some providence had steered him back to Boston from Chicago, had steered him in the first place to Chicago, where his father had said: Let me tell you the hard half of the truth about women: They don’t get any prettier when they get older; they don’t get any saner when they get older; and they get older very quickly.

  “Look what you made me say,” Lauren said.

  “Hang up.”

  “All right. I will.”

  “I’m hanging up,” he said.

  As he removed the receiver from his ear, he heard her say, “I wanted you!”

  He sat on the bed and looked at the motionless chairs and the motionless walls until the light in the window became an afternoon light and he decided it was late enough to try to see Renée. He would rather have seen Lauren. He dressed, loosening the laces of his shoes until he could fit his feet in them. He stamped one foot and then the other to settle them into their pain. He made himself chew and swallow two bananas.

  At Somerville Hospital a new woman manned the reception desk. She had a long neck and a tiny head. “We have no Seitchek listed,” she said.

  “What do you mean no Seitchek listed?”

  “This is that poor girl from Harvard? Let me see what I can find here.” She flipped again through her jumbo Rolodex. “No, I’m afraid she’s not.”

  “Are you telling me she’s dead?”

  “Well . . .” The woman requested data on her telephone. She reported to Louis: “She’s at Brigham & Women’s. They just transferred her.”

  Brigham & Women’s was back in Eileen’s neck of the woods, over behind Fenway Park in a whole small city of the sick and recovering, where brick and concrete hospital buildings had budded like yeast, putting out wings upon wings at odd angles, nourished by what was obviously an ever-growing stock of unwell people. There was no free parking. Louis went up an elevator, down an endless arterial corridor, through a lobby, down an elevator. He told a nurse at the octagonal ICU desk that he wanted to see Renée Seitchek. The nurse said Renée was in surgery. “Are you a family member, Louis?”

  “I’m her boyfriend.”

  The nurse dropped her eyes to a stack of folders with red tabs and shuffled them nervously. “I’m afraid it’s immediate family only.”

  “What if I said I’m her husband?”

  “But you’re not her husband, Louis. Mrs. Seitchek’s in the staff lounge around the corner if you’d like to talk to her.”

  The staff lounge was empty except for a petite woman in pleated navy-blue slacks and a pink blouse who was pouring coffee into a styrofoam cup. Her hair was short, permed, and frosted. She wore heavy gold jewelry of simple design on her tanned hands and wrists. A soap was playing on the television next to her.

  “Mrs. Seitchek?”

  When the woman turned, he saw Renée’s very own expression of mild sur
prise. He was looking at a Renée who had aged twenty-five years; who had let the sun broil her skin to the color of crust on white bread; who had plucked her eyebrows and put on silvery pink lipstick; who had not slept last night; and who had been born very pretty. His first impulse was to fall in love with her.

  “Louis Holland,” he said.

  Mrs. Seitchek looked at him uncertainly. “Yes?”

  “Renée’s boyfriend.”

  “Oh,” she said. He watched her take in his baldness, his white shirt, his black pants. A trace of one of Renée’s own grim smiles bent her lips. “I see.” She turned back to the coffee cart and sweetened her coffee from a pink packet. “Are you from Harvard, Louis?”

  “No. Chicago originally. But I wanted to know how she is, and when I can see her.”

  “She’s in surgery again, her leg now. A bullet hit the bone.” Mrs. Seitchek’s shoulders drooped, and she rested her hands on the coffee cart. “She’ll be on a ventilator for a while, and very heavily sedated. You can get in touch with me in a week or ten days, when she’s on the floor and we have some idea who she’d like to have visit her. Maybe she’ll want to see you then.”

  “Can’t I see her sooner?”

  “It’s only immediate family, Louis. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m her boyfriend.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’d sort of like to see her as soon as possible.”

  Mrs. Seitchek shook her head, her back still turned. “Louis, I don’t know if you know anything about our relationship with Renée. I certainly don’t know a thing about you, I didn’t even know your name. So let me explain that Renée does not confide in me. We love her very much, but for whatever reasons, she’s chosen to be distant. I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me?” She turned to him. “How many boyfriends Renée has?”

  “Just me,” Louis said. “Except—”

  “Except.”

  “Well, we had a fight.”

  Again he saw a trace of Renée’s bitter smile. “And the young Chinese man. Howard. He’s not her boyfriend?”

  “Not really.”

  “Not really. I see. And the young man who was here just before you? Terry.”