Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Definitely not.”

  “Definitely not. All right. That’s not quite the impression he gave, but if you say so . . .”

  Louis tried to think of someone who knew for sure that he and Renée had lived together, of some hard evidence of a relationship. He thought of saying: Your son Michael sells real estate and your son Danny is an intern in radiology. But he could already hear the obvious reply: If you’re her lover, where were you yesterday afternoon?

  Mrs. Seitchek dropped a coffee stirrer in a wastebasket. “You see the problem, don’t you? My daughter was the victim of a crime, and we have no idea who’s responsible. We didn’t have the tiniest inkling of her private life until we came here. And I have to say, things aren’t much clearer now. So under the circumstances I think it’s best if we just wait.”

  “But next time you talk to her . . . maybe you could at least tell her that Louis is—you know. Around?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “I said we’ll see. I don’t want to upset her if—”

  “I am her boyfriend, Mrs. Seitchek. I’m going to die of grief if she dies. I’m—”

  “So am I, Louis. So is her father, so are her brothers. We all love her, and we all want her to live.”

  “Well, so tell her.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Excuse my stupidity, but—”

  “Please go now.” Mrs. Seitchek’s eyes had filled. “Please go.”

  Louis wanted to put his arms around her. He wanted to kiss her and take her clothes off, to have her be Renée, to bury his face in her. Suddenly close to tears himself, he ran from the room.

  Outside, as he passed the octagonal desk, he saw a man he thought he recognized from the family picture Renée had shown him once. The man had bright red skin and thin white hair, combed straight back, and he wore a pair of very scary glasses—thick trifocals with outsized lenses and heavy-duty plastic frames. He was reading the fine print on a bottle of liquid medicine.

  “Excuse me, are you Dr. Seitchek?”

  The man’s eyes flicked up to the middle band of the trifocals and looked at Louis piercingly. “Yes.”

  “I’m a friend of your daughter. I wonder if you could give her a message sometime in the next—days. I wonder if you could tell her Louis loves her.”

  Dr. Seitchek returned his eyes to the bottle. He was a former dean of Northwestern’s medical school, and although Renée was as reticent about him as about everyone else in her family, Louis had gotten the idea that he was something of a major figure in American cardiology. His voice was low, limited, professional. “You’ve spoken to my wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “She explained our uncertainties?”

  “Sort of.”

  The magnified eyes stabbed Louis with another look. “Renée terminated a pregnancy yesterday. Were you aware of that?”

  “Yeah. In fact I was the, uh, other party.”

  “Your name is Louis.”

  “Louis Holland. Yes.”

  “I’ll give her the message.”

  “I really appreciate it.” He touched Dr. Seitchek’s shoulder, but his hand might have been a fly alighting there for all the response it got. “Can I ask something else? —Who she thinks might have done it? Did they ask her?”

  Dr. Seitchek again raised his eyes from the bottle of medicine. “I don’t think she has any idea.”

  “That’s what she said? That she has no idea?”

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  “She could talk?”

  “She was conscious and alert this morning. But she doesn’t appear to have any memory of yesterday afternoon. I don’t think she saw anything anyway.”

  “But what did she say?”

  Dr. Seitchek studied him as if there were fine print on his face. “Is there something you think she should have said?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something you want to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Let me give you the detective’s number. I guess you know we’re offering a reward?”

  Pleasant Avenue was deserted in the Friday late morning sun. Louis tried not to look at the blood on the stoop, but he couldn’t help seeing it, peripherally, as he went inside. He took Renée’s spare key from behind a patch of loose wallpaper in the stairwell.

  Her apartment was very clean and very hot. He opened the kitchen window, letting a fresh northern breeze and the whitish noise of commerce on Highland Avenue trickle into the suffocating, coffee-scented stillness. He went to her bedroom and noted the bareness of her desk, where he’d last seen the pile of articles about induced seismicity and the Peabody earthquakes. There was again that atmosphere of finality, of control, of planned departure, that he’d noticed the first time he came here. It took him a conscious effort to break through the force fields she’d set up and search her desk and bookshelves. He looked inside every folder, every envelope. He searched her closets and her dresser, reaching down through socks and sweaters. Nowhere did he find anything remotely connected with Sweeting-Aldren, New England earthquakes, or injection wells.

  He sat down on her bed and wondered if she’d thrown it all away. She’d thrown away her tapes and records, she’d thrown his own tapes and television and clothes into the hall, she’d thrown away a potential baby; maybe she’d thrown away their theory too.

  He opened the drawer in her spavined maple nightstand. The last filled square on her calendar was Thursday’s, where she’d written NCHA 3pm, and more faintly, in pencil in one corner, the number 48. There was a penciled 41 in the previous Thursday’s square, a penciled 39 and the words 35 Federal, Salem, 6pm in ink in the Tuesday before that, a penciled 35 and a Washington Street address in the Friday before that, and a penciled H the day before that. Stretching back into May were 27 days whose whiteness was disturbed only by penciled L’s. Then came six boxes in a row with penciled X’s and another L. Then six completely white days leading back to the last Saturday in April, where she had written Party 8:30pm in ink and penciled in a solitary L.

  Altogether there were eighteen L’s. He’d never seen her making these notations. He wouldn’t have been able to guess how many times they’d made love; now he didn’t have to.

  The Salem address he recognized as Henry Rudman’s, but the Washington Street address meant nothing to him. He wrote it down on the Sheraton Baltimore notepad that she kept by her reading lamp. Then he put the calendar back in the drawer and smoothed the bedsheets where he’d been sitting.

  It was nearly four o’clock before Howard Chun, sporting two black eyes and carrying a squash racket, came in to work at Hoffman Lab. Louis was waiting in the corridor by his office. He asked if Renée had mentioned that the Peabody earthquakes might have been induced by Sweeting-Aldren.

  Howard unlocked his office and went inside. “Too deep,” he said. “Injection wells are shallow.”

  “She found some papers that made it look like they drilled a really deep well in 1970.”

  “Cost too much to pump. Take too much pressure.”

  “Well, it was a theory she had. She was looking into it last month, and I want to know if she was looking into it last week. Because I think it might have been the company that shot her.”

  “You tell the police?”

  “I don’t want to unless I know she was looking into it.” Howard unlocked her desk and file cabinets, and Louis, to his unsurprise, found nothing. He crossed the hall to the system rooms, where Howard had logged on from several terminals. “Can I look in her computer accounts?”

  “She never say anything,” Howard said.

  “I know, but she was working on it.”

  Howard logged on from yet another terminal, using Renée’s name and password. “You see her yet?”

  “No.”

  “She love you.”

  “Does she?”

  Howard nodded. “Love love love love,” he said, idly, as he employed a utility cal
led XFILES. “These are text files she change or create since last backup, June 4. Far enough back?”

  There were only six files—three brief letters to other scientists and three of her papers about Tonga. Louis scrolled through them all. “You’re sure this is everything?”

  “Everything that’s here.”

  “Is it possible for someone else to get access to her accounts?”

  “Too easy, yeah. Got a stupid operator password. Just ‘OP.’ Really stupid.”

  “I’m sorry I hit you. I was jealous of you.”

  “Love love love,” Howard said.

  An evening chill was creeping into the lobby of the building that the Washington Street address had led him to. The directory had a listing for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, but the night guard said to come back on Monday, because everyone had gone home.

  “I have to see her,” Louis said, on the telephone.

  “Maybe on Monday,” said Mrs. Seitchek, from her hotel room.

  “I have to see her. When you go there in the morning, ask her if she thinks it might have been somebody from Sweeting-Aldren that . . . did it.”

  “Sweet ’n’ what?”

  “Sweeting-Aldren. The chemical company.”

  “Louis, I think you should be talking to the police, not me.”

  “Tell her I think it might have been Sweeting-Aldren. Will you just tell her that? She’ll know if she wants to let the police know. It’s not my decision.”

  “Something’s going on here, and I think I have a right to know what it is.”

  “I’m going to give you my number, and I want you to tell her what I said.”

  It took him all of Saturday, in the earth sciences library upstairs from the university’s Peabody Museum, to track down and photocopy the handful of papers that Renée had started with six weeks ago. They were all there, however; they were all real. He reread the paper by A. F. Krasner, trying to smell the female mammal who’d composed it, but the prose, the very typeface, was old and withered.

  The answering machine on Marlborough Street said: Louis, this is Liz Seitchek. You may meet me at the surgical ICU at ten tomorrow morning.

  Channel 4’s Penny Spanghorn said that Renée Seitchek was in serious but stable condition at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. There had been statements of sympathy and outrage from NOW, Planned Parenthood, the mayor of Boston, and the president of Harvard. Police forces throughout the metro area were involved in the hunt for the assailant. The car driven by the assailant had been stolen from the Hertz rental-car lot at Logan Airport Thursday morning. There were no other strong leads.

  The first-place Red Sox, meanwhile, were beginning a seven-game home stand at Fenway Park.

  Eileen emerged from the master bedroom and looked at Louis mournfully. The king-sized bed behind her was covered with reference books and a supine Peter. Louis set down the orange juice he’d been drinking and put his arms around her. She squeezed him so hard it hurt. Then she gave him a plastic card and told him to go rent two movies.

  “Breathe deeply?” the nurse said.

  Renée breathed. Her face was drawn and heavily broken out and creased by the pain that existence in general and breathing in particular caused her. Her hair was matted and full of dandruff. She was hooked up to IV tubes but was breathing on her own. Her ears were naked.

  “A little deeper?”

  The effort was made.

  “Let me hear you cough.”

  She coughed.

  “You can lie back now.” The nurse checked the bag of urine hanging from the bed and left her alone with Louis. Immediately he dropped to his knees and pressed her free hand, the hand without a tube in it, to his eyes. But Renée came straight to the point, in a weak, precise voice. “Mom says you think they did this to me.”

  He released her hand and pulled a chair over. “How are you?”

  “Everything hurts.” She frowned as if she didn’t welcome the distraction of his question. “Why do you think it was them?”

  “Because I couldn’t find any of our papers in your apartment or your office.”

  “You were in my apartment.”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  She continued to frown unhappily. “It’s in a big envelope,” she said. “Manila envelope. In the big drawer in my desk.”

  “It’s not. It’s not there.”

  She devoted some attention to merely breathing. Thick bundles of unopened envelopes were stacked on the stand beside her pillows. “It was there,” she said. “I know it was there.”

  “They knew you were interested?”

  “It was so stupid of me . . . I didn’t even care anymore.”

  “Did you tell anyone else?”

  “No. But the computer at work. There’s a letter and a paper.”

  “I don’t think so. Howard and I checked.”

  Now she smiled with pain, all her teeth showing. “Oh boy.”

  “You’ll have to tell the police.”

  “Oh boy, boy, will I tell them.”

  “Did you have a copy of the paper?”

  She nodded. “On a little tape. A five-inch tape, in a drawer in the airconditioned room. The gray desk there.”

  “Is it labeled?”

  “It’s a tape I use. It says ‘Do Not Erase.’ Have Howard print it out for you. You can send it to the press. Larry Axelrod.”

  There was a silence. Her shallow breathing barely disturbed the sheet on her. “I really miss you,” Louis said. “I really love you.”

  She stared at the ceiling; she still hadn’t looked at him. He touched her hair, and the feel of it and the warmth of her scalp led him irresistibly to lean over her and kiss her mouth. Her lips were puffy and unmoving. They released a strong smell of medicine, an unRenée-like smell both harsh and cloying, akin to formaldehyde: the smell of the possibility, suddenly real, that she simply might never forgive him.

  The white Matador lumbered into the Hoffman parking lot at one o’clock and ejected Howard from the driver’s side. His hair was wet and he was obviously irritated. He’d been asleep when Louis called him, a little after noon.

  “Her paper’s on a tape,” Louis said. “You have to help me print it out.”

  Howard let him into the building with an angry huff. “What tape.”

  “It says ‘Do Not Erase..”

  Howard went to the system room and picked up a tape from the table with the consoles. “This tape?”

  The label said Do Not Erase in Renée’s handwriting. Howard huffed and threaded the tape onto a drive in the gelid inner sanctum and gave instructions from a console. He huffed some more. “Not it,” he said. “This is Terry.”

  They searched both rooms for another five-inch tape that said Do Not Erase. Terry Snall came in and asked what they were looking for. “‘Do Not Erase’?” Alarm flickered in his face, very briefly, before he caught himself. “Oh, yeah. I just used it myself.”

  “Renée had something on it,” Louis said.

  “Well, not anymore,” Terry answered with a little laugh.

  “You mean you erased it?”

  “And I’m not going to feel guilty.”

  “You erased the tape?”

  “I’m not going to feel guilty,” Terry said. “It didn’t have a write-protect ring, it didn’t have a name on it, and I know everybody’s feeling sorry for Renée now, and it’s a terrible thing, but the fact is that if she wants to go deleting other people’s files without telling them she can hardly complain about me using an unmarked tape.”

  “You erased that tape? And then you go to the hospital and act like you’re her boyfriend?”

  “Don’t wait for me to feel guilty,” Terry said. “Because I’m not gonna.”

  Eileen and Peter’s big bed had by this point in the weekend assumed the aspect of a houseboat. In addition to Eileen’s banking texts and notebooks, it was stocked with Esquires and GQs for Peter, the remote-control box for their TV, a Walkman and scattered tapes, rumpled garments, Pepperidge Far
m cookies, a big diet Coke bottle, and a quart-sized yogurt carton with carrot sticks floating in it. Louis declined Eileen’s invitation to come aboard, preferring to sit by the door, next to Milton Friedman’s cage, as he told his story.

  At first, though Eileen listened with open-minded raptness, Peter continued to devote much of his attention to the Wimbledon highlights on the screen in front of him. But soon Eileen grew dull-eyed with confusion and information overload, and it was Peter whose interest quickened. He turned the sound of tennis down and asked Louis questions in a sharp, impatient voice. Then he turned the TV off altogether and stared at the curtained window. The color had drained from his face.

  “What is it?” Eileen said.

  Peter turned to Louis. “The million gallons. When you guys came over that night and she was asking me about that. You already knew about the well then?”

  “Yeah, we did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Um. It was sort of my idea. I guess we didn’t want your dad getting wind of it.”

  “My dad?” Peter plunged his hands into his hair. “Oh, that’s great. That’s just really fucking great.”

  “It seemed to make sense at the time,” Louis said.

  “I can’t believe it. All you had to do was tell me, and none of this would have happened. Remember in January,” Peter said to Eileen, “when Rita called me and I went out there?” He turned to Louis. “I hadn’t seen her in about a year.”

  “She had that drinking problem,” Eileen said.

  “Anyway, she wanted to see me. She told me she was scared. And so I go out there, and the first thing I see is that two of her front windows are broken. And she shows me this bullet hole in her ceiling.”

  Eileen gaped at him. “What?”

  Peter nodded, avoiding her eyes now. “Needless to say, she’d had a few too many. She was grabbing the furniture for balance. But the thing she wanted to tell me was that if anything ‘happened’ to her, I was supposed to tell the police it was the company. She gave me this spiel about how she’s not happy with her pension plan, she’s short on money, she’s been trying to talk the company into giving her a better deal. Meaning blackmail. Because it just so happens that she knows what those guys are doing with all their nasty toxic waste. She says, ‘They’re not burning it, Peter. They say they are, but they’re not. It’s a million gallons a year, and they’re not burning it.’ And so I ask her what they are doing with it, but she won’t tell me. She says, ‘If I tell you, and he finds out, he’s going to kill me.’ That is exactly what she said. Exactly. And I say, Who’s this ‘he’? And she tells me it’s my dad . . .”