Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Glad to see you’ve calmed down about this, Mom.”

  “In the meantime, Louis, I wondered if you and—Renée, too, of course, if she likes—would have any interest in staying in this house. It would be rent-free and very comfortable. If you’re here, Renée, and you still want to work at Harvard, I realize it might be a longish commute. But the advantages, I think, are obvious. I can pay you a caretaker’s fee as well, especially if you’d be willing to show the house to prospective buyers. You see, I can’t help thinking it might lift your spirits to get out of Somerville. And of course the extra income and the savings on rent, Louis, as long as you’re out of work and not sure where you’re going . . .”

  Louis looked around the room. In spite of himself, he’d expected to feel the presence of ghosts—a spirit named Rita, a spirit named Jack; the spirits of Anna Krasner and his father. They’d all haunted this living room when he was far away from it, especially when he was in Evanston. But now when he looked at the blandly replastered walls and stolid furniture, he knew he could wait as long as he wanted, and he’d still see only the empty present.

  “You don’t have to decide now,” Melanie said.

  “What?” He looked at her as if she were a ghost. “Um, I don’t think so. But thanks.”

  “Well, think it over.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen.

  A silence fell in the unhaunted room.

  “I’m surprised,” Louis said. “I thought she’d be different.”

  Renée tugged on the ends of her check, making the paper snap. “I didn’t.” There was a pack of matches from the Four Seasons Hotel in the ashtray on the end table. She lit one and held it before her eyes until the flame licked her fingers. She blew it out and lit another one. She held it over the ashtray and pushed a corner of her check into the flame just as Melanie returned from the kitchen. When she saw what Renée was doing she began to lunge, instinctively, to stop her. But in the blink of an eye she’d caught herself. She crossed her arms and watched with impersonal amusement as the check took fire and dwindled to a warped black cinder.

  “Well,” she said, eyebrows raised. “I guess that’s quite a statement.”

  “Let’s forget it.”

  “Yeah, what’s for dinner?” Louis said.

  On the last day of the regular season the Red Sox clinched the division title and Renée’s orthopedist pronounced her well enough to do whatever she felt like doing. She had been scheduled to begin work in New York on October 1 as a research fellow at Columbia, and Louis had urged her to go, provided she consider taking him along, but she had still been so incapacitated in mid-August, when the final decision had to be made, that she instead asked Harvard if she could stay on for another year. Harvard had been hoping all along to retain her and came through with an offer of an open-ended position as a post-doc. It wasn’t as if Renée’s feelings about Boston had changed. But somehow getting shot in the place and weathering its earthquakes and spending a month in one of its hospitals had given her a feeling of obligation towards it, a sense of belonging that she had lacked in her six years of normal life here. She didn’t want to leave Boston on crutches. She also recognized that she was fully capable of hating any other place she went to just as much.

  So they were both still in Somerville when the Red Sox were destroyed in the American League playoffs. After the first game, Renée couldn’t bear to watch the carnage, but Louis didn’t lose hope until the final inning.

  Real life commenced for everyone in Boston on the morning after. Renée began to spend long hours at the lab again, and Louis, bored and broke, took a job at a Harvard Square copy shop. Every night he left work with his eyeballs parched by the heat of xerography. He dreamed about making change. He appreciated Renée’s silence on the topic of what he was doing with his life. He was happy to be living with her, happy to be watching her regain her strength and seeing her enjoy the Algerian and Kenyan and American music he played her, happy to be learning more about her work and going out with her and Peter and Eileen and Beryl Slidowsky and the various damaged spirits he worked with at the copy place. He was so happy, in fact, that the less he liked his job, the more necessary it seemed for him to keep it. It was his way of clinging to the lump of sorrow he had inside him, now that he’d lost his conviction of his own rightness. For the moment, this sorrow was the only thing he had that indicated there might be more to the world than the piggishness and stupidity and injustice which every day were extending their hegemony. As much as he loved Renée, he knew that she was mortal; that he couldn’t build a life on her alone, could not even be counted on to keep being good to her without some other anchor. He didn’t know what form this anchor would take when he was older than the twenty-four he’d now turned; he didn’t know if other people needed anchors; he suspected that Renée, in accepting her womanhood, had already found hers. He only knew that, for himself, it was necessary to go to work and serve even the arrogant professors and anal-compulsive artists and psychotic pamphleteers efficiently and temperately, to look them in the eye and thank them for their patronage, to write the date and the customer’s name on receipts for forty-five cents, and to love the world in its materiality every one of the thousand times a day he pushed the Start button on the Xerox 1075. He saw that as a material thing himself he was akin to rocks. The waves in the ocean, the rain that eroded mountains, and the sand that would form the next epoch’s rocks would all survive him, and in loving this nature he was doing no more than loving his own fundamental species, expressing a patriotic preference for existence over nonexistence. He felt that, if nothing else, he could always anchor himself on the rocks in the world. But this was a dim consolation. He hoped there would be some greater thing that his sorrow could lead him to. And so when he noticed that instead of alienating his co-workers he had become the friend and confidant of almost all of them, and that Renée was turning into a person who sometimes cried for happiness, he quickly looked inside himself and found his core of sorrow and clung to it tightly.

  Eileen and Peter were married four days after Christmas. Shortly beforehand, Louis learned that his parents no longer lived together. This circumstance had come to light one night when Eileen called Melanie at eleven-thirty and spoke instead to a stranger, a man. Melanie had rented out her house on Argilla Road and taken an apartment in Back Bay, a not-inexpensive one with a view of the Public Gardens. She crisply explained to Eileen that the man was a high-school friend of hers, and did not elaborate. Subsequent prying on Eileen’s part yielded the man’s name (Albert Anderson), his line of work (radiation oncology), and his marital status (widower).

  Melanie had raised no objection when Eileen and Peter decided to have Christmas in their apartment on Marlborough Street. Bob flew in from Evanston and stayed in their extra room, and Melanie and Louis and Renée came over on Christmas morning, Melanie with thousands of dollars’ worth of clothing gifts for everyone. She and Bob evidently had some kind of understanding that allowed them to be polite to each other in public.

  Whatever the understanding was, it broke down at the wedding three days later. Louis was with Eileen in the church parlor when she caught sight of Melanie. “She promised me,” Eileen said, blood draining from her face. “She promised me she wouldn’t wear that.”

  The offending outfit consisted of a backless green velvet cocktail dress of a cut such as makes men’s jaws drop, a pair of green lizard-skin pumps, and a necklace of platinum and emeralds designed for wear in bank vaults only. Melanie smiled prettily at Eileen and gave a little shrug. Eileen erupted in tears while two of her bridesmaids held Kleenexes beneath her eyes to save her makeup. The entire wedding party heard the fight her parents had in the cloakroom, or at least heard the female side:

  “I will not! I will not!”

  “And who do you think’s paying for this wedding?”

  “To tell you the truth, Bob, I don’t give a damn what you think.”

  Louis’s timeworn advice to Eileen was “Fuck her. It’s your wedd
ing.” Eileen seemed to understand this; at any rate she stopped crying long enough to exchange vows with Peter. Her best college friend and Peter’s four sisters wore lime-green taffeta bridesmaid’s dresses, while Louis himself, tuxedoed and mildly bewildered, served efficiently and temperately as Peter’s best man. Renée sat with the distaff and continued to be a great hit with Bob Holland. She and Louis had taken dancing lessons in preparation for the reception, which was held in a ballroom at the Copley Plaza. Melanie charmed all corners, outshone the younger women and outdanced everybody, and not many people even noticed the bride’s father sitting at the rear of the room in one of his fifties suits, smashing himself on scotch and imparting philosophy to Louis and Renée. He told them that he’d called Anna Krasner again and told her she was now the only person in the world who could confirm that Sweeting-Aldren had drilled a deep injection well. He’d told her that all the company’s records and all of Renée’s hard evidence had been destroyed. He’d told her that June’s earthquake had left seventy-one people dead. She’d said, “I told you not to call me anymore.”

  He drank more scotch and said he still believed his wife would come back to him, in the fullness of time.

  Absent from the nuptials, of course, was Peter’s father. The government of St. Kitts-Nevis continued to resist American pressure to extradite the five Sweeting-Aldren executives, and it now appeared the men would never be brought to trial unless they were foolish enough to reenter the country of their own accord. Stoorhuys had gotten wind of his son’s engagement—possibly from The New York Times, which carried the announcement, but more likely from his wife. On Christmas Eve the mailman brought Peter and Eileen an envelope with a Caribbean postmark and a hand-written message on its flap: To Be Opened At Your Wedding And Read Aloud. Peter chucked it in the trash.

  In the spring there were two more weddings. The first—that of Howard Chun and Sally Go—took place in New York, and the Pleasant Avenue contingent was not invited. Renée heard about it afterward in the computer room, from Howard’s second groomsman, Terry Snall. Terry said there had been a traditional Chinese banquet for more than two hundred people. He said it had been a very interesting cultural experience for him.

  The second wedding, in late April, was actually just an afternoon reception at the Hotel Charles, Alec Bressler and Joyce Edelstein having tied the knot a week earlier in the Middlesex County courthouse. A sizable chunk of Boston’s liberal elite turned out for the reception, plus a few of Alec’s former DJs (who accounted for nearly all of the heavy drinking) and Louis and Renée. Joyce Edelstein twice broke away from well-wishers of her own class to put her arm around Renée and tell her she’d been dying to meet her and wanted to have a long talk; but somehow the conversation never happened.

  Alec, however, had news for Louis.

  “A new station,” he said, leading him away from Renée. “Is a wedding present from the bride. FM 92.2. She agrees I have no politics, I agree I show profit after fourth quarter. Is an oral agreement we have. Profit means I do music in the daytime. I don’t know music, it all sounds same to my ear. But then I have the nighttime for good programming. So, so, are you ready to work?”

  “Me?”

  “Music program to start with, also noose work or in-house ads. Your choice. Is only daytime hours, not bad, eh?”

  “And a minimum wage and no benefits.”

  “So, OK, but only till fourth quarter. Then we see.”

  “This is very nice of you, Alec—”

  “Not nice. Self-interest!”

  “But I’ll have to think about it.”

  Alec ducked. “Sink fast. I’m on the air June first.”

  The dance band was starting its third set when Louis and Renée left the hotel. It was such a fine day that they had walked to the Square in their party clothes. The sun was setting now, but its warmth still hung in the trees of Cambridge, along with the remains of kites and aluminumized balloons, hopelessly snarled plastic grocery bags, sneakers joined at the laces, tattered sweatshirts and streamers of magnetic tape, and with the trees’ own green leaves. In the countryside north and south of Boston the forests were still gray, but a yellowness commenced in the far suburbs and grew to a pale green as Nature learned for better or worse to trust the warmth of civilization, until finally in the inner suburbs and the city all the foliage was out in force, and it was almost summer.

  “Tell me why you even have to think about it,” Renée said.

  “Just because I have to.”

  “You don’t think you’ve been making copies long enough? You think Alec’s being too nice to you?”

  “It means at least another year for you with Snall and Chun.”

  “As long as it’s not forever, I don’t care.”

  “Still have to think about it.”

  “Why won’t you be happy? Why won’t you let yourself?”

  “What makes you think I’m not?”

  “How can we ever live, if you’re not happy? How can we think about, I don’t know, having a baby or—”

  “Baby?”

  “Well, just for an example.”

  He stopped and stared at Renée. They were on the sidewalk of the Dane Street bridge. “You’d consider having a baby with me?”

  “I might,” she said.

  “You and me. We do the thing and you get pregnant and we have a baby.”

  “Don’t you ever think about it? I could see doing it if we were both happy.”

  “Well . . . Huh!”

  “Don’t you ever want to with me? Don’t you ever think about how we could already have one right now? How old she’d be right now? And who she’d look like? Aren’t you ever sorry, even a little bit?”

  He walked away from her, over the crest of the bridge and down the other side. He was reaching into the familiar place inside him, but what he found there didn’t feel like a sorrow anymore. He wondered if it had really been a sorrow to begin with.

  “Oh, what’s wrong, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I swear to you. I just have to walk now. Walk with me, come on. We have to keep walking.”

  Table of Contents

  I Default Gender

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  II I Heart Life

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  III Argilla Road

  12

  13

  IV In the Black

  14

  15

  16

  17