Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “I’m a photographer.”

  “A photographer! What kinds of things you enjoy taking pictures of, Renée?”

  “Interesting, beautiful . . . things.”

  “Ah. Art photographer. That’s fascinating.” Her interrogator gazed at her admiringly. “But you know, I can’t resist asking you, what’s so beautiful about an industrial facility? You want to try and explain that to me? Being as it runs more or less counter to our prejudices.”

  “Who are you?” Renée said.

  “Rod Logan, Process Security Manager, Sweeting-Aldren Industries. My assistant Bruce Feschting. We made a special little trip over here to meet you, Renée. Oh, and would you look at that. Bruce outdoes himself again. Sprite and water and a napkin. Apropos of which, Renée, you might want to give your chin a teeny wipe.”

  A party of men in hard-soled shoes marched through the coffee shop, exchanging salutations with Logan and Feschting. Briefcases swung as they headed out the parking-side door.

  “But these art photographs,” Logan said. “What’s the market like? You have a wealthy patron? A lot of corporations buying art these days.”

  “It’s just for me.”

  “Just for you! You don’t mind if I ask what brought you to these particular facilities, do you?”

  “I saw them from the road.”

  “Just driving by, eh? Was there anything in particular that struck you as interesting and beautiful about our facilities?”

  “No. Just the whole thing. How it looked.”

  “Gosh, if the world doesn’t have a way of throwing you for a loop sometimes.” Logan shook his head. “Just totally for a loop. You know, somewhere I’m sure there’s an Earth where a Harvard girl really does go to the airport closest to us and flies by in broad daylight in a well-marked plane and really does want to take pictures for the sheer joy it brings her. Infinite universe, infinity of worlds. But you see, which world am I really in? This one? Or maybe more like this one?” He chopped the air with his hands, suggesting galaxies in motion. “But listen, Renée. I’m a reasonable man. And legally, legally, I can’t really prevent you from snapping away to your little heart’s content. Were you aware of that? That I can’t legally prevent you? But you see, I’m holding your camera on my lap now, and Bruce is holding the other roll of film that was in your purse—”

  “It’s unexposed.”

  “Is it unexposed, Bruce? Yes, so it seems. So you’ll be happy to sell us that one for ten dollars. And as far as what’s in the camera, speaking practically, I’d like to offer you free processing and printing, and we’ll send it to you at your Somerville address. I frankly can’t think of a more amicable arrangement. Because you see, Renée, we take our trade secrets very seriously, and we have armed guards on our property and a million-dollar cash reserve specifically earmarked for prosecuting industrial spies to the fullest extent of the law, so why don’t you let me have these printed and sent to you at our expense? Does that sound reasonable, Bruce?”

  “They’re private,” Renée said.

  “Ah, they’re private, yes. But as a practical matter, in terms of who has the camera on his lap, I’d have to say your only other alternative would be to allow me to open the camera and expose the entire film to light.”

  She clutched her head wretchedly. “Go ahead. Just leave me alone.”

  “You’re sure?” Logan said, already opening the camera.

  A new contingent of executives had entered the coffee shop. Feschting stood up awkwardly and stepped out of the booth. “Mr. Tabscott,” he said. “Mr. Stoorhuys.”

  “Hey, Dave, Dick.” Logan nodded at the newcomers, his hands full of film.

  “Rod, Bruce, where you in from?”

  “In from nowhere. Got a little episode here.”

  Tabscott left the coffee shop, but Stoorhuys stopped and leaned over the booth, his jacket bunching at the elbows, five inches of shirt cuff showing. He bowed his head, but he was looking at Renée, sideways. His lips curled away from his teeth.

  “This is Renée Seitchek,” Logan said. “Our latest flyby. Art photographer. Harvard Geophysics student. Greenness of gills due to violent airsickness.”

  Lips agape, Stoorhuys studied her more closely. “Mr. Logan explained our sensitivity?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll see to it you’re reimbursed for your film.”

  She nodded, eyes cast down.

  “She enjoys photographing beautiful and interesting things,” Logan remarked.

  “She’s a beautiful and interesting thing herself,” Stoorhuys said with patent insincerity. He appeared to have lost interest. His lanky fingers squeezed Logan’s shoulder. “Take it easy.”

  “Will do, Dave.”

  Moments later she was left alone in the booth. She drank her water, put her head down, filled her lungs. A twenty-dollar bill was lying near her ear. Suddenly a paper bag landed on the table. She jumped.

  “Here’s your barf,” Kevin said.

  She took a handful of napkins when she left the coffee shop. She drove for twenty minutes and finally stopped in a Shawmut Bank parking lot. Crouching behind a dumpster like a raccoon, she tore open the airsickness bag and recovered the film canister from beneath the contents of her stomach. Highway lights flashed in her eyes as she cast a furtive glance over her shoulder.

  It was becoming apparent that she wouldn’t be able to see the pictures before she met with Melanie. She doubted they’d show much in any case. If Sweeting-Aldren maintained a pumping station near its main installation, it was almost certainly hidden in a shed. She drove back to Cambridge, returned the car, and stayed in Widener Library until the closing bells rang.

  The next morning she couldn’t keep her breakfast down. She smoked the remainder of her joint and had a second breakfast at Au Bon Pain before returning to the microfilm machines in Widener. At one-fifteen she made a copy of a picture in the Globe of March 9, 1970. It showed a newly opened four-story bank and office building on Andover Street in Peabody; just visible through the bare trees in the background was the top of a structure that arguably resembled a drilling derrick.

  She took her Series E bond to her bank. It was the gift of a dead grandmother. The customer-service representative observed that it wouldn’t mature for another two years.

  “What’s it worth now?”

  She had eighty hundred-dollar bills in the left front pocket of her jeans when she stepped off the train in Salem with the first wave of returning commuters. The address she’d been given led her to the County Courthouse, across the street from which, in a restored white clapboard house bearing a plaque that said 1753, were the offices of Arger, Kummer & Rudman.

  “Ms. Seitchek,” Henry Rudman said expansively, pressing his broad hand into the small of her back. He put her in a chair directly in front of his desk and hovered there, offering refreshments. “Some cold water, please.”

  Behind his desk, in a corner of his office between a computer and a struggling window airconditioner, Melanie was sitting with her head bowed and her hands clasped on her lap. She gave Renée a single glance, full of hurt, like a woman in a courtroom who no longer expects anything from her husband but a share of his assets and future income. Love had died. It had come to this.

  Renée crossed her arms and tossed her head indifferently. Standing on Rudman’s desk were small photos of a wife and three little girls, but ornamentally the office was dominated by three black-and-white enlargements on the wall, all of them autographed: Ted Williams on a cruise ship, his arm around a younger Rudman’s shoulders; Rudman and Yastrzemski cheek to cheek, at a banquet table; Rudman and Jim Rice, drivers in hand, on a golf course with palm trees in the background. Renée laughed. Her eyes were inflamed, her chin spotted with new pimples. Her hair had been growing out for months, and now all at once it was almost shoulder-length—unwashed, a tangle of stiff waves. She smelled like scalp and outdoor sweat. Altogether she was sleek with skin oil, sleek and dirty and animal and hot. She threw a sudden gla
nce at Melanie, who lowered her eyes again.

  Rudman carried in a cup of water and planted himself behind his desk. “So, ladies, are we all set?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Ms. Seitchek, Mrs. Holland tells me you’ve approached her about making a bet on the performance of a certain piece of real estate and the stock of a certain company. The piece of real estate being her property in Ipswich, and the stock being Sweeting-Aldren common. Is this correct?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t approach her. She approached me. Also, I don’t have anything to say about the real estate. If she wants to draw conclusions based on what I say about the stock, fine.”

  Rudman and Melanie exchanged glances. “You’re a seismologist, Ms. Seitchek.”

  “Yes.”

  “We can assume you’re basing your prediction on your interpretation of seismological data. But the prediction applies only to the stock.”

  “Peabody and Ipswich are eleven miles apart.”

  “This is news?”

  “I’m saying there’s no obvious linkage.”

  Rudman turned. “Mrs. Holland?”

  Melanie pressed her lips together, counting the proverbial five. “I’d like to remind you, Renée, that while it’s true I did approach you, it was you who mentioned money and suggested an arrangement. I’d also like to remind you that you began by deliberately concealing that you had information that could help me, and you did not tell me this would not apply to real estate.”

  Renée gave her a smiley smile. “You want me to leave?”

  “Ladies, ladies.”

  “I would appreciate it if you told the truth.” Melanie said whitely. “That is all I am saying.”

  “All right, Ms. Seitchek? You try to tell the truth so we can move along? That goes for you too, Mrs. Holland.”

  Melanie struck a righteous pose.

  “Now, Ms. Seitchek, ah.” Rudman scratched his mustache. “Mrs. Holland represented that you hoped she’d wager, ah, fifty thousand dollars, which we can assume is—”

  “No,” Renée said emphatically. “No. I said I wanted a minimum of fifty thousand dollars. I also said that the more right I am, the more I should be rewarded.”

  “I never agreed to any such thing.”

  “Did I say you did?”

  “Ladies.”

  “I also said I’d bet as much money as I could get my hands on. Which I’m ready to do.” She took out her wad of bills and tossed them onto Rudman’s desk.

  “Cash!” he exclaimed like a horrified Faust, half rising from his chair.

  “Put that away,” Melanie said.

  “Ms. Seitchek. Please, ah. This is very touching, gesture-wise, but really, you want to keep that in a safe place. You don’t want that on people’s desks, with no rubber band, et cetera. I was on the point of telling you that Mrs. Holland respectfully declines the offer of security and a sliding scale. In return she insists on the cap of fifty thousand you proposed.”

  Renée stood up and stuffed the bills back in her pocket. “No deal.”

  “Mrs. Holland?”

  Melanie cocked her head mechanically, like a bird. “What kind of a cap did you have in mind, Renée? Or did you want no cap at all? Perhaps you were thinking of a straight thirty percent?”

  “One million dollars.”

  Melanie blew air out derisively.

  “How much cash do you have there, Ms. Seitchek? If I may ask.”

  Ignoring him, she took a step towards Melanie and addressed her directly. “I’m going to tell you what this particular stock is going to do in the next three months or six months, whichever you prefer. You’ll either buy or sell your shares on my recommendation. If you make five hundred thousand dollars because I gave you the right advice, I want fifty thousand. If you make ten million, I want one million. That’s ten percent up to one million. If you make nothing at all, or if you lose money, you keep all the cash I have on me now. It’s eight thousand dollars.”

  Rudman was shaking his head and waving his arms, trying to whistle the play dead. Melanie looked up at Renée wildly. “It’s Louis!” she said. “It’s not you at all. You—you’re not even here! It’s Louis!”

  “Oh dear, Mrs. Holland. Really.”

  “You are wrong,” Renée said, shaking with hatred. “You are so wrong.”

  Rudman nodded at her. “You see? She says you’re wrong. You see? But, ah, Ms. Seitchek, you’ll have to excuse us for a second.”

  He led Melanie across the office and into a conference room, lined with precedents, that opened off the rear. Hearing the latch click, Renée sat down and closed her eyes and breathed. Five minutes passed before Rudman stepped out. “Ten percent up to 200 K, eight thousand security.”

  She didn’t turn around. “No,” she said, and added, as if it were a foreign word she wasn’t sure she’d pronounced right: “No.”

  He retreated. This time he was back in less than a minute. “Last offer, Ms. Seitchek. Three hundred fifty K.”

  “No.”

  Again the latch clicked. She thought she was alone, but then she felt his hand on her shoulder, and his mustache bore down on her. “You said no?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Let me ask you a question, Ms. Seitchek. Little question, OK? What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  She stared straight ahead.

  “Sure, Hahvahd’s a great school, and maybe you’re a great little grad student, but, uh, three hundred fifty thousand dollars—”

  “Before taxes.”

  “Aren’t we being a little fucking greedy here? You ever heard of a thing called moderation? Quitting while you’re ahead? Compassion for a lady who’s obviously not all there? I’m sure I don’t need to tell you she’s in there telling me to accept your terms. You know what she just told me? She told me you’re the Devil, Devil with a capital D, I’m telling you she means it literally, sweah to God. With a straight face! That’s the type person you’re putting the screws in. But just between you and me, little girl, you’re not the Devil. You’re a greasy little grad student that God only knows how she got her claws in a fine lady like Mrs. Holland. And you wanna know something else? You’re not getting more than 350 K. I don’t have to tell you we’re dealing with a person who’s lost perspective. She’d give you the whole million, but I’m not going to let her. She can crack in two and go sit in an asylum for all I care, but I’m not going to let her hand over a million bucks to some little sneak that’s selling secrets behind her employer’s back. I’m telling you that’s what I think of you, Ms. Seitchek. I think you are a greasy little piece of dead fish. You hear me?”

  She was utterly motionless.

  “Yeah, and for your information, guys don’t get much easier-going than me.”

  “After taxes,” she said quietly. “Six hundred is 350 after taxes, more or less. And I am leaving if you don’t accept it.”

  “Hey, great idea. Why don’t you leave right now? Or do you need me to explain about selling blocks of stock. Maybe a lesson in capital gains? You ever heard of that? Broker’s fees? Nah, what am I saying, you probably got the tax code memorized.”

  She jumped up, and before he could stop her she was in the conference room. Melanie was leaning against the oval table, sobbing.

  “Six hundred thousand,” Renée said as she wrenched free of Rudman’s grasp. “Six hundred thousand.”

  “Shut up! Shut up!”

  Melanie seized Rudman’s hand imploringly. “Henry, do it!”

  “Mrs. Holland—”

  “Do it. I said do it. Do it and we’re done with it.”

  10

  Midnight in the system rooms. The roar of fans and airconditioning fills them tightly, to the very corners, like the breath in an inflated mattress. All the consoles have gone dim. In its private closet, the line printer is drumming numbers onto paper. The day’s New York Times lies by the laser printer. A headline reads:

  STUDY REVEALS DEPTH OF RELATIONSHIPS,

  NOT QUANTITY, AS KEY T
O HAPPINESS

  Far away a door has closed, and someone’s footsteps seem to be getting fainter, but suddenly they are louder, echoing in the stairwell, louder and louder in their leisurely descent, impossibly loud by the time they reach the landing outside the system rooms. They don’t so much as pause here. The hallway has counted twenty-four of them when the loading-dock door is opened; the last sound is the sound of the door falling shut.

  The diodes on the face of the CPU unit flicker knowingly.

  The printer has filled its metal basket, and the oblong scene in the single street-side window has changed to the blue of fifty fathoms, to the green of ten fathoms, to the dripping misty yellows of a summer morning, by the time the first students come in. They carry coffee and move cautiously, as if wading through some waste-deep backwash of night.

  In front of the building, outside the Peabody Museum and its collection of glass flowers, there is an unprepossessing dogwood tree. Tourists photograph themselves in front of this tree thirty or forty times a day, roping it into their lives like a bystander accused of imaginary crimes, and shooting it summarily. There are pictures of this tree in albums in Tokyo and Yokohama and Hokkaido, and Stuttgart and Padua, and Riyadh and Malmö.

  On the terrace ringing the student lounge, up on the building’s penthouse floor, the sun has yet to burn the dew off the tandem of hemispherical charcoal grills, and the square bottle of lighting fluid, and the jumbo laboratory tongs that students manipulate their coals with. A bag of charcoal is slumped against the railing, exhausted. Inside the lounge, on a table by the elevator, discolored slabs of melon and a chunk of apple with the skin coming loose are floating in a clear plastic bowl. Howard Chun is sleeping on a sofa, a peaceful corpse, hands folded on his chest. Triangular potato chip fragments lie scattered on the brown carpeting.

  P-wave residuals, lateral heterogeneity, core-mantle boundary, centroid-moment-tensor, rupture propagation, slab penetration, non-double-couple events, shear-strength coefficients, intraplate seismicity, deconvolution, source-time functions, normal modes, aseismic slip, migration of the poles. One student calls his programs things like “Kelly” and “Diane” and “Martha.” These are the names of women he has pursued or is pursuing. He likes to say his favorite commands aloud: “Do Martha. Run Kelly. Execute Diane.”