Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Eileen’s lips formed a silent What?

  “My own dad. She’s telling me my own fucking dad shot the hell out of her living-room windows. And I don’t even know whether to believe her. I mean, I’m willing to believe just about anything about the old man. But last I’d heard, she and I were sworn enemies because I wouldn’t work for her anymore. So I said, you know, my dad may be a fascist pig, but he’s not stupid. You can’t tell me it was actually him that fired the gun. But she says, ‘Thérèse saw the car. It was his car.’ And I’m like, well, I don’t really believe this, and so I tell her she’d better call the police. And she says, ‘He’s going to kill me if I go to the police.’ Her exact words. And she says she doesn’t want to die, because old Jack had told her what she was coming back in her next life as. He’d told her she was coming back as a cactus. And she didn’t want to be a cactus and so she didn’t want to die. You know, and she’s crying and she can hardly stand up, and what can I do? I get the hell out of there. You know, file and forget.”

  A silence fell on the becalmed bed. Peter was shaking his head, his lips hanging open. Eileen’s face was very dark. “You never told me this,” she said in an ominously small voice. “You said she wanted you to help her with her new book.”

  “Yeah, I know. But what am I supposed to do? First of all, I didn’t believe her. And second of all, she said he was going to kill her if she told anybody. You know? I was scared.”

  “You told Renée,” Eileen insisted quietly, staring at the bedspread.

  “Because Rita was already dead. The whole thing was moot. You know, and I still didn’t even know if I should believe her. She had enemies in Ipswich, because of the pyramid. For all I knew, she’d made the whole thing up about my dad.”

  “But she didn’t,” Louis said.

  “Right. And instead of her getting shot, it’s Renée. And I tell you, it wasn’t just some nobody that pulled the trigger. It was my own fucking dad.”

  “Please stop swearing,” Eileen said.

  Peter had swung his legs over the bed’s gunwales and was pulling his Nikes on. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but I’m going out there. Out there right this minute.”

  “Maybe we should let the police—”

  “No way I’m going to miss this,” Peter said. “I’ve been waiting half my life.”

  Eileen smiled nervously at Louis. “I guess we’ll go out there.”

  “Guess so.”

  While Peter groomed in the bathroom, she filled Milton Friedman’s water bottle. The gerbil was climbing the bars of its cage, loins and shoulders shuddering as it thrust its penis-like head into the freedom all around it. “I get so scared,” she said to Louis. “He and his dad just don’t get along.”

  “Much to his own credit, apparently.”

  “You’ll watch out for him?”

  “Of course. He’s your boyfriend.”

  She insisted that they ride in Louis’s car, rather than let the angry Peter drive. Louis couldn’t remember when he’d driven Eileen somewhere. Possibly he never had. Peter muttered and cursed in the back seat as they sliced through the light Sunday evening traffic on the Northeast Expressway, but the Hollands were silent. Eileen seemed older after her week’s work in the real world, seemed harder, graver, and physically larger, though if anything she’d lost weight. The hands resting on her lap had little softness anymore. They were hands to grip a mattress during sex, hands to spoon food into a baby’s mouth, hands to sign contracts and run deep credit checks.

  Exiting from Route 128 in Lynnfield, they left the daylight behind and entered a suburban twilight of shadowing trees, of still and bluely glowing lawns and fields and air untom by any sound more violent than the swish of passing tires. Nature’s appearance was inexpressibly benign here in the suburbs. She lay down and whispered like the warm surf between black-bottomed sea and parched land: between the scarred and mourning woods, and the city where a new nature had taken nature’s place. Lawns freely gave away their smell of grass and earth, lay comfortably naked beneath a sky that could be trusted. Each house was like a mother, silent, set back from the roads with windows lit, as an object always welcoming and sheltering, but as a subject always betraying consciousness of the truth that children stop being children, that they’ll leave and that an enclosure that welcomes and shelters will ache with their absence, will have ached all along because it’s an object.

  Eileen directed Louis to a street with only six houses on it, the largest of them belonging to the Stoorhuyses. Peter led them in through the front door. The Stoorhuys living room was a long, low-ceilinged, formal room whose native face was masked by heavy floral drapes and fifteen or twenty bad oil paintings in ornate gilded frames. The paintings were all of European cities—rain-slicked cobblestones, shuttered hotels and scabrous palaces in the dusky colors of ancient clothing, all the reds maroons, all the yellows umbers, all the whites streaked and crusted like guano; there were no people in this Europe.

  Floral patterns held sway in the Stoorhuys kitchen. Little nosegays grew like mildew on the chair cushions and the wallpaper, the quilted food-processor and mixer cozies, the stoneware plates and bowls, the enamel lids for the stove elements, and the crocks of flour and sugar and coffee. One of Peter’s sisters, a slender, diffident, homely blonde in collegiate summer fashions, was making popcorn in the microwave. In the adjacent family room, the elder Stoorhuyses were sitting in the glow and squawk of Murder, She Wrote.

  Eileen introduced Louis to the diffident Sarah and then to Peter’s mother, who had risen to greet the visitors. She was a tall, gentle woman with an unabashedly ruined face and too-long hair. Louis shook her hand quickly before he followed Peter into the family room. When Peter switched off the TV and turned to face his father, Louis touched the power switch himself and likewise turned, standing at Peter’s side like a second.

  Mr. Stoorhuys was sprawled on a leather sofa. He wore a white Ferdinand Marcos shirt with a huge tab collar. “You want to turn that back on, Pete?”

  “Peter, we were watching,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys from the doorway.

  “I think Dad’s got something to say to us,” Peter said. “Don’t you, Dad.”

  Stoorhuys looked up guardedly, trying to fathom the connection between his son and Louis. “Not that I know of,” he said.

  “Nothing about Renée Seitchek?”

  “Oh, that poor girl,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys.

  “She’s Louis’s girlfriend,” Eileen said. She had sat down in a rocker and was sightlessly turning the pages of a coffee-table book called Colourful St. Kitts.

  “She’s your girlfriend?” Mrs. Stoorhuys was stricken. “What a terrible thing!”

  “Yeah, it is terrible,” Peter said as Louis tried, without success, to pin Stoorhuys with a stare. “Isn’t it, Dad? Somebody shoots her in the back and then blames it on somebody else. It’s a goddamn shame she didn’t die, isn’t it? Then nobody knows all her papers disappeared.”

  The corn popping in the kitchen sounded like muffled gunfire. Stoorhuys had opened an Architectural Digest on the sofa and was stroking his bushy forelock, trying to subdue it. “You’ve lost me, Pete.”

  “Her papers,” Peter said. “The papers that show whose fault the earthquakes are. She’s told the police, Dad. They’re going to be heading for Peabody any minute.”

  “Peter, what are you talking about?” his mother said.

  “It was an accident, right, Dad? You just wanted to scare her. Fire a few shots over her head. But then, what the hell. There she is. Just, just—kill her then, right? Why not just kill her?”

  Peter was shaking so much that his elbow bumped Louis’s. Stoorhuys turned a page of his magazine, his jaw rigid as he pretended to read. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh yeah? Watch him, Ma. He’s got a phone call he wants to make. Just watch. I guarantee you he’s going to get on the phone. Or he’s going to have to go out for a minute. He’s going to wait till you’re not looking,
or he’s going to get up in the night. He’s going to go to Peabody, or he’s going to run for his life.”

  Stoorhuys shook his head, as if with deep sadness, and said nothing. But his face was covered with sweat and his hands were trembling.

  “David,” Mrs. Stoorhuys said. “What’s he talking about?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just more of the same. He’s good, I’m bad. He’s smart, I’m stupid.”

  “You’re damn right,” Peter said. “Or am I the one that’s pumping toxic waste underground? And causing earthquakes?”

  “It’s a lie.”

  “A lie? His girlfriend’s in the hospital”—Peter nodded at Louis, who continued to stare implacably at Stoorhuys—“and she didn’t think it was a lie. And everything she had that proved it’s true got stolen the day she was shot. You’re saying that’s a lie?” Stoorhuys paged back through his magazine, studying the photographs. “I don’t know anything about this.”

  “Watch him, Ma. Watch him make the phone call. He’s got to make that phone call.”

  Mrs. Stoorhuys wasn’t listening. She was massaging her collarbone and looking as if the ficus tree at her feet were about to make her cry.

  “If somebody’s slandering us,” Stoorhuys said, “I’ll have to let the company know. But that doesn’t—”

  “Right, the company, the company. That’s what counts, isn’t it, Dad? Who cares about Ma? She’s just a person. It’s the company—”

  “The company that paid for your education!” Stoorhuys jumped from the sofa and advanced on his son. “The company that straightened your teeth! That put food on your plate and clothes on your back for twenty years!”

  “Straightened my teeth? My God, you think we’re living in Charlestown? You think you’re making thirty grand a year?”

  As quickly as he’d heated up, Stoorhuys cooled off again. He sighed and chose, for some reason, to address Louis. “You see what I get at home?” he said. “You see the thanks I get?”

  Louis wore an expression of the utmost seriousness and did not reply. He watched as the older man picked up a seersucker jacket from the back of the sofa, patted the keys in one of its pockets, and inserted his bony arms in its sleeves. “Janet, I have to go to the office for a little while. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for all this.”

  Although Mrs. Stoorhuys nodded, it was a long time before she raised her eyes from the ficus tree; and then she looked at her husband as if she hadn’t heard him speak. “David,” she said. “I’ve never made any trouble for you about your work. I’ve never . . . pressed you. I’ve never asked you questions that I . . . could have asked you. But you have to tell me now. You didn’t really have anything to do with—that girl’s . . . ? That’s all I want to know. You just have to tell me that.”

  The fragility of her poise, the tremor in her voice, made even Louis squirm. Stoorhuys himself balled his fists and looked around the room for some inanimate object to vent his feelings on. His glance fell on Peter. He smiled bitterly. “You see what you’ve done, Pete? You satisfied now? Now that she’s on your side?”

  “I’m asking you a question,” Mrs. Stoorhuys said. “I want you to answer it. I’ve never asked you questions, but I think I have a right to ask you about this—”

  “Oh, you do, do you?” Stoorhuys said, flashing fury. “Well, maybe you’re a little late. Maybe you’re about twenty years too late.” Again, he turned to Louis. “Twenty years ago I got a raise that almost doubled our income overnight. And when I told her about it, do you know what she asked me?”

  “I have a right to ask now,” she said.

  “You know what she asked me?” He moved closer to Louis, smiling a little, preparing the punch line. “She asked me if we could get a house where the kids could all have their own rooms. And that was it. That was the extent of her curiosity.”

  “Why was it up to me to ask? You could have told me!”

  Stoorhuys ignored her, continuing to speak only to Louis. “I would have quit the job if she’d asked me one question about it then. I was ready to quit. One question would have done it. But you see, I didn’t even matter. Even then, I didn’t matter. As long as the kids all had their own—”

  “Peter. Have I been a good mother? Have I been a good mother to you?”

  “Twenty years,” Stoorhuys said. “Twenty years, and she decides to ask me now. She could have asked me a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. But for twenty years, day after day—! She has no right to ask me questions now. And Peter has no right to blame this all on me. He’s not neutral. You have to understand what it’s like with her. I hear her on the phone with him, I hear her asking him about his work and giving him advice, and telling him what to do. But never a word, never a word about my work. My work that has given her everything she’s got.”

  “It was better not to—”

  He spun around and shouted in her face. “Never a word!” She put her hands in the air and let them hover an inch from her ears. “Never a word! You made your choice, you chose the children, and now you think you have the right to ask me questions? And blame me? Who do you think has gotten the benefit of those twenty years? You think it’s me? You think I haven’t made a few sacrifices myself? Janet—and Peter, you listen to me too—Janet, I have been a better husband than you will ever know. Than you will ever know.”

  Louis could see it now, how if this man had had a gun in his hand and a woman in front of him, he might have killed her. Everyone could see it now. Mrs. Stoorhuys buried her face in her hands. As Peter moved to comfort her, she twisted away and ran from the room.

  Peter ran after her. “Ma—”

  They heard her stumbling on the stairs and Peter shouting, “Ma!”

  Louis and Eileen watched Stoorhuys take his car keys from his pocket.

  “So you shot her?” Louis said casually.

  Stoorhuys looked up at him, surprised. It was as if he hadn’t really registered Louis’s face until this moment. “I don’t even know you,” he said, leaving the room.

  A silence fell. Eileen rocked in her chair and turned a page of Colourful St. Kitts.

  “Boy,” Louis said.

  “Isn’t it awful?”

  “Everybody who’s had anything to do with that company is basically damned, including me.”

  “I’ll take care of you. You be my baby.”

  “Yeah, well. I don’t know about that.”

  Peter returned to the kitchen smoking a cigarette. He poured an inch of scotch into a glass and held the liter-and-a-half bottle up so Eileen and Louis could see it from the family room.

  “Yes please,” they said.

  They sat and drank and sweated on the deck by the swimming pool, where the exhaust from Peter’s father’s Porsche was hanging in the air. The blower of the Stoorhuyses’ central airconditioning unit took a break, and Eileen removed her shoes and dipped her legs in the pool. “What’s going to happen?” she said.

  Louis listened to the crickets and to the pipping of a bat. “Investigation,” he said. “Big stink in the press. Maybe there’ll be some lawsuits. If we’re lucky, we can eventually forget it.”

  Peter spoke from the end of the diving board where he was sitting. “He as much as admitted he pulled the trigger. And how do you live with that? Was I supposed to call the cops? Tie him down?”

  One by one the lights in the upstairs bedrooms were extinguished. The airconditioner came on again. Went off, came on, and Louis wondered if he might simply die the next time its white noise ceased. Eileen was swimming slow laps, on her back, in her bra and underpants. Peter could have been a corpse stretched out on the diving board. Louis focused his consciousness on the sound of the airconditioner, trying to anticipate the instant of cessation, trying to greet this little death with open eyes. What he heard instead, at length, was false morning. Not just a bird or two awakening, but hundreds of them, and the yelping of a neighbor’s dog.

  He stumbled out of his chair, not knowing what to do. “Her
e one comes,” he said.

  Eileen let her legs sink to the floor of the pool, at the shallow end. She shook water from her ear. “What?”

  It began so gradually, as such a gentle cradling of himself in immense and invisible hands, that he couldn’t have said where the line was, where no-motion had given way to the welling spreading deepening feeling that enveloped them. For one moment, it really was like coming; it felt like the best thing he could ever feel.

  Then something extremely serious happened, comparable in his experience only to the high-speed collision he’d witnessed on Lake Forest Road on one of his radio-parts-buying expeditions in high school, when the monotonous afternoon to-and-fro of suburban traffic jumped the track of the ordinary, and even a quarter mile away he could feel the impact in his bones, the noise of instant death filling the sky like a flash of lightning, the squealings, the screechings, the subsidiary bangs each more major than a fender bender, and ever) person in sight began to run, terrified, in all directions: it was with the same kind of impact, the same awful sense of the world’s derailment, the same strident and thundering protest of rigid materials deforming that the earth now shuddered and erupted and windows exploded and flowerpots flew.

  Peter was tossed into the water splayed bizarrely, like a thrown cat. A wind that Louis couldn’t feel whipped the trees. He fell down and two pieces of deck furniture roughed him up, stepping on his fingers with their metal feet, jabbing his ribs with metal elbows. He heard himself shouting Oh, come on, STUPID STUPID and heard Eileen screaming like some shipwreck victim far below him, in the thundering surf at the base of cliffs. The back yard seemed to be sinking into the earth’s adipose layer of humus and glacial till, the encircling treetops lurching towards a meeting as the country’s skin dimpled in upon itself. Birds filled the air, wheeling frantically, spreading chaos. The lights went out and the stars turned blurry. The ground hit Louis like the hard bed of a truck with no brakes on a rutted downhill road. He was scared, but mostly he was mad at the ground, at its meanness. He wanted it to stop, and when it did stop, finally, he got up and kicked it furiously.