Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Are you . . . Renée’s only caregiver?” Joyce said.

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Louis, that can be so draining. It can tire you in ways you’re not even aware of. Forgive me for asking, but is Renée—fully covered with her insurance? I’m only thinking, if what she really needs is a nurse, maybe it would give you—”

  “It’s no big thing,” Louis said. “It’s just shopping and a little cooking and driving.”

  “Yes, but psychologically—”

  He stood up and crossed the room. “It’s OK. I can handle it. I mean—I can handle it. I appreciate your concern. But it’s no big thing.”

  “I’m sure you can handle it,” Joyce said gently. “I only want . . .”

  “Joyce needs to help people,” Alec commented. “It’s in her nature.”

  With a little shudder, Joyce let this description of her pass. “I only want you to know that if you do need help, there are people out here in the world to help you. If I have any one purpose in life, it’s to let people know that they do not have to suffer in solitude. For every person who has a need, there’s a person, somewhere, who wants to take care of that need.”

  Louis closed his eyes and thought: Please stop talking.

  Joyce looked helplessly at Alec. Anyone could see she was a perceptive person. It obviously really did cause her pain to see Louis suffering, and to know that the streets of Cambridge and Boston were full of people like him—that all you had to do was dip a net in randomly and you’d come up with suffering. And to know that she herself was not suffering.

  “Listen,” she said, “I hope you’ll tell Renée that there are a great many people in this city who care about her and are pulling for her and want to help her. If nothing else, I’m here, and if there’s anything she needs . . .”

  Louis closed his eyes and thought: It is necessary to suffer.

  “And Louis, I know I don’t have any business saying this, but if you stop and think about it, you might want to not donate blood for a while, especially if it’s something you’re doing often. You need your strength for one thing at a time.”

  It is necessary to suffer. It is necessary to suffer.

  “Thanks for the coffee,” Louis said.

  Joyce sighed and shook her head. “You’re welcome.”

  Alec followed him out of the office, arresting him at the top of the stairs. “One sing. Stop a minute, one sing. I spoke with Libby last week. Libby Quinn. She wants your number.”

  “Why does she want my number?”

  “If you need a job, you call her.”

  “Why the change of heart?”

  “Stites is leaving. Some midwestern state he’s going to. You heard this?”

  “And you told her to call me.”

  “Yes, OK, I told her. But she doesn’t have your number. She needs an engineer. I told her, minimum wage, and he loves radio.”

  “Minimum wage. Thanks.”

  “You can make a deal. Sink about it, eh?”

  “I can’t, now.”

  “But you love radio. I knew this about you.”

  “I used to.”

  “So you call me when you want to work. You must call me. And you must give me your number.”

  Louis took the pen Alec offered. “I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer to your friend.”

  “She’s used to it. You go home now.”

  “Tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Yes, maybe. It doesn’t matter.”

  Alec drew a European crossbar through the stem of the 7 in the number Louis had written down. Then he returned to Joyce’s office without another word.

  The only time Louis felt safe from torment now, the only time he liked the person he was, was when he was alone with Renée on Pleasant Avenue. As long as he was in her apartment, he knew what he was doing because everything followed logically from the supposition that he loved her. He was her cook, her comedian, her comforter, her maid. Even three months ago, he wouldn’t have assumed that he could console a sick person weeping over the slowness of her recovery: that the necessary words could come to him as automatically as the motions of sex did. He would probably have sneered at a person who said that love could teach him the many specific skills that constitute patience and grace, and certainly at the person who said that love was a gold ring which if grasped carried you upward with a force comparable in strength to the forces of nature. But this was exactly what he felt now, and the only question was why, when he was by himself or outside of the apartment, his life with Renée still felt like such a sorrow.

  In the days and weeks following the earthquake he had gone to the hospital every afternoon, adhering to a tacit agreement whereby he stayed away until three o’clock or so and Mrs. Seitchek stayed away after that. It wasn’t that there was any special hostility between mother and boyfriend—Louis continued to be resolutely polite to Mrs. Seitchek, and she in turn now recognized him as Renée’s official first choice and went so far as to share with him her views on the “incredibly immature” Howard Chun and the “incredibly dangerous” things her daughter had been doing. The problem was simply that on the one occasion when they had visited Renée at the same time, Renée had looked utterly wretched and refused to speak to either of them—at least until her father came into the room. Then she answered everyone’s questions and kindnesses with a humility that Louis had never seen in her before. He wondered if there was anyone in the world who wouldn’t be afraid of Dr. Seitchek and his trifocals.

  All day long, no matter how many people visited her, Renée seemed never to forget that at night she was alone. She told Louis that whenever she woke up, at whatever time of day or night, she felt like she was still awakening in the windowless ICU where it was always night. She could open her eyes and see his face and still believe that, only a moment earlier, she had been in that other place.

  She let him read her mail while she dozed. There were some twenty-six hundred envelopes in bundles on the table by the head of her bed. Inside them were checks and cash gifts totaling about $19,000, and letters short and long.

  Dear Renée,

  My husband and I are praying for your speedy recovery. Our hearts are with you. Please use the enclosed check for whatever you wish.

  Sincerely,

  Sandy & Roy Hurwitz

  Dear Renée,

  Remember me? I heard you was in the Hospital and remembered our nice talk. Hope you are feeling better now. I lost two friends and everything I own from the earthquake. I’m staying with my daughter now and can’t go home. Looks like you are right about that company. I hope you come see me when you are better.

  “Sincerely”

  Jurene Caddulo

  Renée—

  You don’t know me, but you have made an indellible impression on my mind. I don’t think the people on TV understand what you said and my parents don’t either, but I think I do. Nobody understands me because I hate being a girl but I don’t want to be a boy. I am 17 years old and I have never met a boy whose mind I can respect. I had a fight with my parents about you. I think they admired you but then I told them I admired you and they changed their mind. I am leaving this house in two months to go to college. My mind is always in confusion and I don’t know anyone like me. But I think I might be like you if I could be brave. I have never written a letter like this before. You probably think it’s very stupid. But I lie awake in bed and imagine I’ve been shot because of what I am. We will probably never meet, but I want to tell you I love you and wish you the best in all things. GET WELL.

  Sincerely yours,

  Alexandra Adams

  Louis was jealous of all the people who had written to her, people who didn’t owe her anything and whose interest was therefore beyond suspicion. He was jealous of the men he had to leave the room for when they came to visit her—Howard Chun, various professors and colleagues, even Terry Snall (though Terry came only once and left Renée livid and seething when he tried to “joke” about all the public attention she was getting). He was
especially jealous of Peter Stoorhuys. After the initial flood of visitors and outpouring of sympathy had ebbed, Peter was the only person besides Louis and Mrs. Seitchek who still came to the hospital almost every day. The worst thing about Peter’s visits was that Louis could see that there was no ulterior motive—that Peter simply liked and admired Renée and was sorry she was hurt and regretted that his father was responsible. He was blind to Louis’s jealousy, just couldn’t conceive of it. He brought Renée newspaper and magazine clippings, he brought tapes for her Walkman, he brought his mother. Sometimes he brought Eileen, too, although she continued to be preposterously shy around Renée. Louis paced the halls and rode the elevators and read Glamour and Good Housekeeping with clenched teeth, returned to Room 833 and found Renée and Peter still conversing in low voices. She seldom seemed more relaxed or self-confident than after Peter had visited her.

  In Peter’s eyes, Louis had stopped being Eileen’s little brother and become Renée Seitchek’s boyfriend—the partner in her assault on Sweeting-Aldren, and the man who had helped expose David Stoorhuys as the fraud that Peter had long known him to be. Peter gave Louis clothes, including certain items that he still liked, and single-handedly achieved the breakthrough of perceiving that Louis would never be a salesman of ad space or of anything else. Eileen made dinner for the three of them when Louis came home from the hospital. Whenever he looked unhappy, which was often, she asked him what was wrong and tried hard to cheer him up.

  What was wrong was that he felt utterly at sea. Now that Eileen was being a peach and Peter no longer patronized him, he had no choice but to be sincere with them. But sincerity implied some kind of belief in something—the kind of belief that Eileen and Peter had in living in America and making a good life for themselves, or that Renée had in the power of women. Louis still thought the country sucked and he had his doubts about the okayness of being male. If he’d ever known how to believe in anything else, he’d long ago forgotten.

  He was jealous of the people with pure motives who brought Renée pleasures—pleasures that she shared with him because he was always around her, pleasures that were small and discrete and more easily appreciated than any brought by the man who did things like watching her sleep, or helping her walk up and down the hall, or telling her he was sorry. He was also jealous of the people with impure motives whom she smilingly indulged because amusement hurt less than anger. This latter class did not include journalists (these she simply refused to see) but did include the Hollywood scouts who wanted to buy her story for a prime-time dramatization; the pro-choice activist who wondered if she might address a rally by telephone; and, just before she was released from Brigham & Women’s, her own mother, who one afternoon at three o’clock met Louis at the door of Room 833 and asked him for his help in persuading Renée to return to Newport Beach to complete her recuperation. Renée’s father had already gone back, and her mother pointed out that when she left the hospital she would still need care at home. The problem, Mrs. Seitchek told Louis, was that her daughter only smiled and shook her head at the idea of returning to California. She had $19,000 and insisted she was going to hire a nurse. Which just seemed so cold, so wrong, so—

  Louis said, “I can’t help you here, Mrs. Seitchek.”

  He left her in the hall and went into Room 833. Renée said, “You know why she wants me back there with her?”

  “She wants to take care of you.”

  “Yeah, she does,” she admitted. “But what she really hopes is that if I stay there I’ll develop a taste for golf. And kelly-green skirts. And meet one of the young doctors she can’t stop talking about, and marry him.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  He waited a moment. “You’re not really going to get a nurse, are you?”

  “Watch me.”

  “But I can do it myself.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “Please let me.”

  “I don’t want you to.”

  “You have to let me.”

  She closed her eyes. “I know I have to let you.”

  More than anything else, he was jealous of her infirmity. It was like a baby that was partly his but dwelt inside her body alone. Listening to it and learning its secrets absorbed most of her attention every day. Whenever he thought he understood it—when he thought that it no longer hurt her to laugh, or that she still needed him to reach things from the table for her—she would turn around and correct him. He had guesses; she had certainty. He supposed that maybe she did still love him, but even if she did she had no time for him. Her distance, the feebleness of her feelings towards him, reminded him of the dreams he had where she was cold to him: where love wasn’t there, where there was another man she wasn’t telling him about.

  But the baby was his, too. The pain in her body, the pain from her bullet-torn back muscles and pierced diaphragm and splintered rib and femur and the surgical incisions, had a way of spreading into his own body and making it difficult for him to breathe. He remembered when she was mobile and unbreakable, when he could lie on top of her on a hard floor and she could laugh, when they could drink Rolling Rock and listen to the Stones, when they could be mean to each other and it didn’t matter, when he could hate the world and it didn’t matter. What hurt him was his feeling of responsibility. He wished he were still working for WSNE, still driving on Route 2 in the blue vernal morning twilight, still in his car with Renée before he kissed her. He wished he’d let her hand her Sweeting-Aldren files over to Larry Axelrod and the EPA. He wished he could have paid attention to all nine innings of the Red Sox game they’d seen from Henry Rudman’s seats, could remember who had won and how, could have knowledge as clean and permanent and inconsequential as a box score. He didn’t understand how he could have let a small part of his life—his greed? his hurt? his outrage?—make him responsible for the pain and desolation that had descended on himself and her and much of Boston. But he was responsible, and he knew it.

  A Town Car with a PROLIFE 7 vanity plate was parked outside the house when he got back to Pleasant Avenue. He went inside and mounted the stairs slowly, still a little light-headed with Red Cross sickness.

  Philip Stites was standing in the middle of Renée’s room, beside the chair he’d rolled over from the desk and had obviously been sitting in. Renée sat in her armchair in a thick sweater and sweatpants and the glasses which she needed all the time now. This morning she’d weighed in at 98 pounds, up one pound from the previous Friday but still down seven from her weight in June. The feverish rigidity of her face muted her expressions. All that registered when she looked at Louis was the flash of sunlight on her lenses. He hurried into the other big room, the room he slept in, and set the books he’d bought on the floor.

  “Louis,” Renée said.

  He returned to the hallway. “Yo.”

  “Philip was just leaving.”

  “Oh. So long.”

  Stites, wearing an inscrutable smile, waved his hand. Renée was looking at Louis intently. “I didn’t realize the two of you had met,” she said.

  “It must have slipped my mind.”

  “Those were unhappy circumstances,” Stites said. “These are much happier ones.”

  Renée kept her disapproving eyes on Louis even as Stites took her hand and wished her well. Louis opened the door for the minister. “So, Philip,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I’m sure it meant a lot to her.”

  Stites started down the stairs, motioned casually to Louis to follow, as if he had no doubt that Louis would, and stopped on the doggy second-floor landing. Louis glanced at Renée, whose expression hadn’t changed, and descended the stairs.

  “Why do I get this impression of hostility?” Stites asked a beam of bright dust specks.

  “I hear you’re leaving town,” Louis said.

  “Tomorrow morning. Ever been to Omaha, Nebraska? About the only thing it’s got in common with Boston is a big sky.”

  “You feel
you’ve done sufficient damage here.”

  Stites failed to react to this stimulus. He unwrapped a stick of sugarless gum and daintily pushed it into his mouth. “Hostility, hostility,” he said. “I came to apologize to Renée for any pain I ever caused her. And I tell you what, Louis, it made me pretty happy to hear what you been doing for her.”

  “I’m glad I made you happy, Philip.”

  “Fine, say what you gotta say. You’ll never see me again. But you know damn well that what you’re doin’ is a very good thing.”

  “Right,” Louis said. “I’m a hell of a guy. See my Band-Aid? I’ve been giving blood. My penance, right? Because I sinned, right?” He stared at Stites, quivering. “I laughed at Jesus and I wasn’t faithful to my girlfriend and I let her kill our baby, but now I’ve got it all straight in my mind. I’m taking care of her and trying to live a Christian life. We’ll get married and have children and we’ll all be singing hymns on TV. Except I’m such a good Christian that if anybody tries to say I’m doing the right thing I deny it because if I didn’t, that would be pride, and pride’s a sin, right? And faith is a thing inside you. So I’m not only a hell of guy, I’m deep and true, right?”

  Stites chewed his gum with smooth, slow jawstrokes. “Nothing you say makes me stop loving God.”

  “Well, go ahead. Go ahead.”

  “I hope you find some happiness.”

  “Yeah, you too. Have fun in Omaha.”

  Stites looked at Louis with the complicity and pleasure of a person being told a joke. He laughed, exposing his little wad of gum. It wasn’t a forced or cruel laugh but the laugh of someone who had expected to be delighted, and was. He gave Louis a last, knowing look and trotted down the stairs. Through the landing’s filthy window, Louis watched him evade the grasping honeysuckle and get into his car. He felt a large but strangely painless emptiness inside him, as when he’d been bluffed in a poker game.

  Upstairs again, he assumed a casual manner. “Can I make you some lunch?”

  Renée sat in her armchair and looked at him. The chair occupied a shadow between patches of sunshine on the floorboards. Her silence was ominous in the extreme.