Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  Her companion had swung around, capturing the back of his chair in an armpit, and revealed a flushed and amiable face with chalky blue eyes and a bushy reddish mustache. His collar was open, his necktie loosened. He seemed so delighted to see Louis that Louis immediately shook his hand.

  “Henry Rudman,” the man said. He almost but did not quite say Henwy Wudman. “You must be the son that lives in Sumyull. I think your mother said Belknap Street?”

  “That’s right.”

  Henry Rudman nodded vigorously. “Reason I ask is I grew up in Sumvull myself. You familiar with Vinal Avenue?”

  “No, sorry,” Louis said. He leaned over his mother’s shoulder. “Whatcha reading there, Mom?”

  Melanie turned a page in pointed silence.

  “It’s an old brief,” Wudman answered, leaning back in his chair expansively. He waggled his pen like a drumstick. “We got a piece of architectural ornamentation upstairs that’s worn out its welcome. The town of Ipswich agreed a few years back to pay for its removal. Now it’s looking like they want to welsh.”

  “That’s some ornament,” Louis said.

  “Hey, to each his own. I know what you mean, though. I understand you moved up here from Texas. What do you think of the weather?”

  “It stinks!”

  “Yeah, wait’ll you see it do this in June. Tell me, you a Sox fan yet?”

  “Not yet, no,” Louis said. He was appreciating the attention. “Cubs fan.”

  With a big mitt the lawyer swatted his words back in his direction. “Same diff. You like the Cubs, you got everything it takes to be a Sox fan. I mean for instance, who lost us a Series in ’86, Bill Buckner. Who did us the favor of trading us Bill Buckner, Chicago Cubs. Like some kinda conspiracy there. What two teams played the most years without winning the ultimate cigar, you got it, Sox and Cubs. Listen, you want to see a game? Let me send you a couple tickets, I’m a nineteen-year subscriber. Unlikely you’ll get tickets like these through normal channels.”

  Louis drew his head back in surprise, thoroughly disarmed now. “That would be great.”

  Melanie cleared her throat like a starter motor.

  “Hey, don’t mention it,” Rudman said. “I’m a corrupter o’ youth. You gotta excuse us, though, we’re looking at a snake’s nest here.”

  Louis turned to his mother. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Outside. Why don’t you look in the yard. As I told you on the phone, Mr. Rudman and I have a lot to discuss by ourselves.”

  “Don’t let me . . . disturb you,” he told her in his Nembutal voice.

  In the kitchen he found coffee cake, a party-sized urn of coffee, and, on a long counter, other bakery products in white boxes with the name “Holland” in blue crayon. His eyes widened when he opened the refrigerator. There were pâtés and seafood salads in transparent plastic cartons, jumbo fruits in decorated tissue paper, a tin of Russian caviar, half a smoked ham, whole foreign cheeses, premium yogurt in unusual berry flavors, fresh artichokes and asparagus, kosher dill pickles, an intriguing stack of wrapped deli items, German and Dutch beers, name-brand soft drinks, juices in glass bottles, and thirty-dollar-a-pop champagne—

  “Louis.” His mother spoke from the dining room.

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “What are you doing in there?”

  “I’m looking at the food.”

  Silence.

  “No way you’re liable,” Henry Rudman said. “Guy pocks his Jag in the street, somebody else comes along secures a loan with it, no way on earth Guy A’s responsible. It’s straight fraud, doesn’t involve you whatsoever. Can’t really blame the bank either. She’s living in the house and the title she shows ’em’s a first-rate forgery, so good it makes you wonder if she did it all by herself, I bet not. It’s a slick trick. She gets a home-equity loan for two hundred K, spends seventy-two on this pyramid that she’s just gotta have, can’t live without, and puts the difference in a different bank. It’ll cover payments for another ten, fifteen years plus she can throw the occasional pahty on it. Slick trick. She dies, the bank’s screwed. I mean assuming the trustees still have the real title. Your pop must’ve known what he was doing. Four thousand a month tax-free plus a free house with groundskeeping fully paid and she still can’t quite make ends meet, not even paying the Haitian slave wages. I can’t say I like this dead-hand business (you understand this is just a professional opinion), but if I’d been married to a woman like that I wouldn’t let her near the capital myself. Next thing you know, we’d be looking at Mount Fuji in the back yod.”

  “Louis.”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “Would it be possible for you not to be in the kitchen?”

  “Yeah, just a sec.”

  A dark, cold hall off the rear of the kitchen ended in three doors, one leading outside, the others into a bathroom and a bedroom. Louis sat down on the bed and slurped coffee and wolfed cake. All the hangers in the closet were bare. It was a while before he noticed that a pane was missing from the window. This was the only earthquake damage he saw all morning.

  Out in the back yard he could find no sign of his father, although the air was so still and thick it almost seemed a person walking through it would leave a trail. He crossed a patio and tried one of the French doors at the rear end of the living room. It swung right open.

  The living room was large enough to hold four separate clusters of furniture. Above the fireplace hung a large oil of Louis’s grandfather, a formal portrait painted in 1976, when John Kernaghan was seventy-five or so. His eyebrows had still been dark. With his near-perfect baldness and firm skin and elegant, compact skull he looked ageless. He was, Louis realized, the man responsible for his loss of hair. The painted image drew further life from the living daughter sitting across the hall in the dining room, reading documents with her father’s own glittering unapproachable dark eyes.

  “When they meet on the thirtieth,” Henry Rudman said quietly, “they have to distribute the entire corpus. The entire corpus, it’s unambiguous, they have no choice. The full transfer may take another four to six weeks, but we’re looking at June 15 absolute latest.”

  That the living room did not entirely belong to Melanie yet was clear from the New Age reading matter on the coffee tables, from the ugly phantasmagoric acrylics on the walls, and from the copies of Princess Itaray and Beginning Life at 60 and Star Children that filled the only bookcase. To say nothing of the smell emanating from the bar, a smell of spilled alcohol and bubblegum-scented disinfectant. The bar jutted out from the wall near the inner rear corner of the room and was made of the same blond wood as the two slender barstools in front of it. Shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling displayed several hundred different bottles—liqueurs and digestives with labels in foreign alphabets, a few with pictures of unlikely vegetables. Louis knelt by the gray marble floor behind the bar. There was plenty of room here for a small woman to lie dead, head smashed. It wasn’t hard to see the faint brownish fingers and ridgelines of splashed liquor on the wall. Nor was it hard to see blood. There were traces of it in the sutures between the squares of marble, hardly browned, the nail-polish redness especially visible where the edges of the squares were chipped. Who had cleaned things up? The maid, before her deportation? With his fingertips he pressed on the cold, unyielding marble, putting his body’s weight on it, hearing clearly the whock! of the splitting head.

  “Louis. For God’s sake. What are you doing?”

  He jumped to his feet. His mother was approaching the bar. “Dropped a coin,” he said.

  “You have a morbid interest?”

  “No, no, I just happened to come inside this way.”

  “You came in—?” Melanie shook her head at the French doors as if they were a grievous disappointment to her. “This house,” she said, “has no security whatsoever. I suppose she expected the pyramid to protect against burglars too. That’s very logical and rational, don’t you think? That’s par for the course.”

  Louis heard a faint tink
ling in a toilet behind a wall.

  “Well. You see where she died.” His mother crossed her arms and gazed up at the liquor bottles with satisfaction. “Personally, I can’t think of anything tackier than putting a full-sized bar like this in your living room. Or do you not agree. Maybe you think everyone should have a saloon in their living room. And a bee.”

  She looked at Louis as if she actually expected him to reply. “The insult on the injury,” she continued, “is that she probably had it installed with money that didn’t belong to her. I don’t suppose you missed what Mr. Rudman was saying. That she forged a title to this house to borrow money on. What do you think of that, Louis? Do you think that’s proper? Do you think that’s OK?” With a beautifully shod toe she flipped up one end of a Chinese rug, tilted her head to read the label, and flipped the end down again. She sneered at a coffee table. “Harmonic Lifestyles. Phoenician Deities. Orgone Redux.” She made a gagging, dismissive face. “What do you think of all this, Louis?”

  “I think I’m going to scream if you ask me another question like that.”

  “Every single thing I see here makes me sick. Sick. She said this to the portrait above the fireplace."

  “But it’s all yours now, right?”

  “Effectively. Yes.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I have no idea. I came in here to tell you that you’re making Mr. Rudman and me very nervous lurking around like this. You couldn’t find your father?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you want to stay, you can be in the back room, there’s a TV in there, maybe you can find a game on. There’s lots of food in the refrigerator, you can help yourself. Or you could sweep the patio for me, and I have a few other little jobs for someone, but I do not just want you lurking around. This isn’t your house, you know.”

  Louis looked at her with neutral expectancy, as if she were a chess opponent who’d made a move he wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to change her mind about. Then, the arbitrary grace period expiring, he said, “You have a good lunch on Thursday?”

  “It was a business lunch. I thought I explained that to you at the time.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “I don’t remember, Louis.”

  “You don’t remember? That was three days ago! Piece of fish? Reuben sandwich?”

  They could hear Mr. Rudman handling dishes in the kitchen now, whistling a show tune.

  “What is it that you want?” Melanie asked levelly.

  “I want to know what you had for lunch on Thursday.”

  She took a deep breath, trying to contain her annoyance. “I don’t remember.”

  He scrunched up his face. “You serious?”

  “Louis—” She waved a hand, trying to suggest some generic entree, something not worth mentioning. “I don’t remember, a piece of fish, yes. Filet of sole. I’m extremely busy.”

  “Filet of sole. Filet of sole.” He nodded so emphatically, it was like bowing. Then he froze, not even letting breath out. “Broiled? Poached?”

  “I’m going back to the dining room now,” Melanie said, remaining rooted to the center of a Chinese rug. “I’ve had a very upsetting week—” She paused to let Louis challenge this. “A very upsetting week. I’m sure you understand that and can show some consideration.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re all grieving in our own way, obviously. It’s just I heard this crazy rumor about your having inherited twenty-two million dollars.” He tried to meet her eyes, but she’d turned away, squeezing her thumbs, fists balled. “Crazy, huh? But getting back to this lunch, let’s see, Mr. Aldren and whatever his name is, Tweedledum, they had steak, right? And Mr. Stoorhuys—” He snapped his fingers. “Rabbit. Half a rabbit, grilled. Or what do you call it? Braised.”

  “I’m going back to the dining room now.”

  “Just tell me, come on, is that what he had? Did he have rabbit?”

  “I don’t know, I didn’t happen to notice—”

  “You didn’t notice rabbit? Sort of stretched out on the plate? Maybe a little cranberry sauce with it? Or red cabbage? Potato pancakes? What kind of restaurant was it? Help me picture this, Mom. Was it really expensive?”

  Melanie took another deep breath. “We went to a restaurant called La Côte Américaine. I had filet of sole and Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys had soup and grilled steaks or chops, I truly don’t recall exactly what—”

  “But not rabbit. You’d recall that.”

  “But no, not rabbit, Louis. You’re being quite a bit less funny than you seem to think you are.”

  Louis’s eyes narrowed. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get back to the twenty-two million, then. What are you going to do with it?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “How about a yacht? They make nice gifts.”

  “This is not at all funny.”

  “So it’s true?”

  Melanie shook her head. “It’s not true.”

  “Oh, it’s not true. Meaning it’s false. Meaning, what, twenty-one point nine? Twenty-two point one?”

  “I mean it does not concern you.”

  “Oh, I see, it doesn’t concern me. Let’s forget it, then, let’s drop it. Hey, people inherit twenty-two million dollars every day. What’d you do at work today? Oh, I inherited twenty-two million dollars, would you pass me the butter?”

  “Please stop mentioning that figure.”

  “Twenty-two million dollars? You want me to stop mentioning twenty-two million dollars? All right, I’ll stop mentioning twenty-two million dollars. Let’s call it alpha.” He began to pace around the rim of a rug. “Alpha equals twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars equals alpha, alpha being neither greater than twenty-two million dollars nor less than twenty-two million dollars.” He drew up. “How’d your father get so rich?”

  “Please, Louis, I asked you to stop mentioning the figure and I meant it. It’s very painful to me.”

  “Yeah, so I see. That’s why I suggested we call it alpha, although I’m afraid alpha doesn’t quite capture the impact. What a terrible painful thing, to inherit that much money. You know Dad says he’s not even going to quit teaching?”

  “Why should he quit teaching?”

  “Don’t tell me you need his salary when you’ve got twenty-two, oops.”

  “I would be grateful if you did not try to tell me what I need and don’t need.”

  “You’d be grateful if I just walked out of here and never mentioned this again.”

  Melanie’s face lit up as if he were a student of hers who’d blurted truth. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that’s exactly right. That is what I would most like from you.”

  Louis’s eyes narrowed further. He said: “Twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars, twenty-two million dollars.” He said it faster and faster, until it twisted his tongue, becoming twollers, twollers. “What a huge amount of money. It means you’re rich, rich rich rich, rich.”

  His mother had turned to face the mantel and covered her ears with her palms, applying such strong isometric pressure to her head that her arms trembled. This was as close to fighting as she and Louis ever got; and it wasn’t really fighting. It was like what a pair of bar magnets do when you try to force the north poles together. It had always been this way. Even when he was a boy of three or four and she had tried to smooth his hair or wipe food off his face, he had twisted his head away on his stout, stubborn neck. If he was sick in bed and she laid a cold hand on his forehead, he had tried to press himself into pillow and mattress with triple gravity, as blindly and determinedly resistant to her touch as the magnet to whose permanent invisible force field the relief of rupture or discharge can never come. Now she raised her head, her white fingers flat on her cheeks, her elbows on the mantel, and looked up at her father. From the rear of the house came the sound of television, amplified rumblings and collisions: bowling.

  “I’m paying Mr. Rudman for his time, Louis.”


  “Right. What’s a lawyer get, a couple hundred bucks an hour? Let’s say 220 an hour into twenty-two million (oh, I’m sorry, there I go again), ten to the second into ten to the seventh, that’s a hundred thousand hours, and assume ten-hour days, two hundred fifty days a year, my God, you’re right. That’s only forty years. I’ll try to be quick.”

  “What is it that you want?”

  “Well, let’s see, I’ve got a job and a cheap apartment and a car that’s paid for, I’m not married, I don’t have expensive habits, and in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t asked you and Dad for a single thing since I was sixteen years old, so it’s probably not money I want, is it, Mom?”

  “I appreciate all that.”

  “Don’t even mention it.”

  “I will mention it. I never get to tell you how proud I am of your independence.”

  “I said forget it.”

  She turned around to face him. “I have an idea,” she said. “I suggested something like this to Eileen and she seemed to feel it was a good idea. I hope your father will go along with it too. I think we should all just act as if this never happened.”

  “This twenty-two million dollars.”

  “Please. Please, please, please. I think we should all just go on with our lives as if nothing is different. Now, it may be that as time goes by a few things will change, in small ways and perhaps in large ways too. For example, I’ll probably be able to make it very easy for you to go back to school if you should ever decide to. And I’m not promising anything, but it’s possible that if you or Eileen ever want to make a down payment on a home I could be of some help there too. But all these things are in the future, and I think the best thing for the four of us to do now is just put it out of our minds.”

  Louis scratched his neck. “You say Eileen thought this was a good idea?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Then what was she crying for on Thursday.”

  “Because . . .” A faraway look came into his mother’s eyes, and then they began to glisten, tears seeming to form directly on her dark brown irises, the way rock candy grows wet with itself. “Because, Louis, she had come to me to ask for money.”