Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Renée,” Stites said, megaphone lowered.

  She looked at the sky. She’d never seen it so white and empty.

  “Take one second and think,” he said. “You were just a tiny speck of cells once. Everything you are, everything you ever felt, came out of that speck. And you’re no one but yourself, you’re no accident, you’re no random thing. You’re you. And that speck inside you is no one but himself, or herself, and she’s just waiting to be born and have the life God means for her to have.”

  She looked at the ground. She wouldn’t have guessed her mind could ever feel so closed.

  “We love you,” Stites said. “We love the person you are and the person you can be. Just think about what you’re doing.”

  He leaned over the yellow tape imploringly, but the plane he inhabited did not intersect with hers. He belonged to a species that was not her own, and this word of his, “love,” was simply a function peculiar to his species. “We love you” made as little sense to her now as a whale saying, “You strain plankton with your baleen, just like me,” or a turtle saying, “You and I have shared this experience of laying eggs in a sandy pit.” It was revolting.

  The way had cleared for her to enter the clinic. The Group of Twelve, in two police vans, was singing “Amazing Grace” in separate keys and time signatures.

  “Renée,” Stites said, “Please listen to me.”

  “This is unforgivable,” she said, merely stating the obvious. She went inside.

  “Oh dear,” said the blond counselor. “Did you lose the key?”

  Renée handed her the key. “How long have they been there?”

  “Since this morning.”

  “I think they’ll go away now.”

  The clinic was frosty with airconditioning and bluish lighting. In a clean white cell, she took her clothes off and hung them on a hook. The jeans, outermost, unflattened, with one hip turned out and the knees slightly bent, were a vivid effigy of her.

  “I don’t want a tranquilizer,” she told the nurse.

  In the adjacent room the table had been set for her, with a smaller side table set for Dr. Wang, the essential stainless flatware gleaming on a paper placemat. No fish knife, no soup spoon—it was a one-course meal.

  The subject lay down in her powder-blue smock. Her face, on the low end of a cushioned gradient, was a deep, purpled red. The speculum was inserted; it said: “This may pinch a little.” The tenaculum was applied, chloroprocaine hydrochloride administered by needle. With her slender, nimble fingers Dr. Wang tore the sterile paper wrapping from a 6-millimeter cannula.

  K-Y jelly applied. Vacuum cleaner activated, hose attached. In and out the cannula went. In and out, up and down. A revelation was the scraping sound it made. It wasn’t a sound you expected from a body; it was the sound of an inanimate object, a trowel scraping the side of a plastic bucket, the last drops of milkshake being sucked from a waxed-paper cup. In and out the cannula went. Ruff, ruff, said the uterus.

  “Ow,” the subject said, again stating the obvious, as the contractions started. She was trying to resist a riptide. Her foot muscles tightened in the stirrups of the pillory, which had wheels now and had been rolled out onto the sidewalk so that every passing scientist and secretary and adolescent and church member could, by simply glancing, see between her parted naked legs, up the speculum, and into the red center of her self. The nurse stroked her forehead. The vacuum cleaner was turned off.

  “Everything seems to be very normal,” said Dr. Wang.

  In the recovery room Renée was given orange juice, an Ergotrate tablet, and a powdered-sugar doughnut that was the first food she’d had since seven in the morning. The cramps weren’t bad, but she was given envelopes with Darvon and more Ergotrate. She was given various straightforward instructions and warnings. She was asked if she had a ride home.

  On the dot of five they let her get dressed.

  “Let me take you out the back way,” the counselor said.

  She shook her head.

  “You have to try to rest until tomorrow.”

  “I will.”

  She was surprised to find a darkened sky outside. A wind with thunder in it upended the hair of the remaining protesters, who were standing in their parking space exactly as they’d been when she last saw them, as if the parking space were the entirety of their planet and their hair were upended by its careening through the air. They looked at Renée somberly, without hatred. Across the street Stites was chatting with the brassy reporter, making her laugh. Smiling, he turned and looked right through Renée. There was a discrete crack of thunder. She waited for a blue Hyundai and a black Infiniti to pass. Then she crossed the street.

  “Howdy, Renée. This is Lindsay, from the Herald.”

  “Hi how are you today!” Lindsay said.

  The church members in their parking space had turned 180 degrees and were looking at their minister. Before he knew what she was doing, Renée took his megaphone from his hand and darted behind a streetlight standard. She faced the congregation, the milling bystanders, the waiting cops, the photographers, the reporter and the minister.

  “Hello,” she said, pressing harder on the plastic Speak button. “HELLO. MY NAME IS RENÉE SEITCHEK. I’M GOING TO INTERVIEW MYSELF.”

  Stites stepped in front of her, grabbing for the megaphone. “That’s not yours, Renée.”

  She dodged him. She backed up the sidewalk, keeping him in view. “MY STATEMENT,” she said. “SINCE YOU’RE ALL SO INTERESTED. MY STATEMENT IS I JUST HAD AN ABORTION.”

  She stepped off the curb. “FIRST QUESTION: WHAT ELSE—” A car honked. “WHAT ELSE CAN I TELL YOU?

  “ANSWER: MY ADDRESS IS NUMBER 7 PLEASANT AVENUE, SOMERVILLE. MY TELEPHONE NUMBER IS 360-9671. MY BLOOD TYPE IS 0. MY MIDDLE NAME IS ANN. MY INCOME LAST YEAR WAS $12,000. I STEAL OFFICE SUPPLIES FROM MY EMPLOYER. I LIKE TO MASTURBATE. MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS 351-40-1137. I USED TO DO DRUGS WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE. I JUST DID SOME MORE LAST WEEK.”

  A stream of workers leaving their offices had swelled the crowd. Cars were pulling over to the side of the street. Lindsay from the Herald was holding out her cassette recorder while Stites shook his head. Renée aimed the megaphone at him.

  “QUESTION: HOW OLD WAS THE FETUS I JUST ABORTED?

  “ANSWER: APPROXIMATELY FIVE WEEKS. I’M NOT POSITIVE, BECAUSE I’VE ALWAYS HAD IRREGULAR MENSTRUAL PERIODS.

  “QUESTION: WHO WAS THE FATHER?

  “ANSWER.” She took a deep breath. She had to tell one lie here. “ANSWER: I’M NOT SURE. I’VE HAD INTERCOURSE WITH MORE THAN ONE MAN IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS.

  “QUESTION: WHY?

  “ANSWER: BECAUSE I WAS LONELY AND UNHAPPY AND I WANTED TO FEEL GOOD. I WAS ALSO IN LOVE WITH ONE OF THE MEN. I WANTED TO MARRY HIM AND HAVE CHILDREN WITH HIM.

  “QUESTION: WHAT WERE THE MEN’S NAMES?

  “ANSWER: THAT’S PRIVATE. THEY’RE MEN THEY HAVE THE OPTION OF KEEPING THEIR PRIVACY.”

  Here she heard two or three young female voices cheer. Unable to tell what direction the cheers had come from, she continued to aim the megaphone at Stites, who had taken off his glasses and was massaging the inner corners of his eyes.

  “QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF BIRTH CONTROL DO I USE?

  “ANSWER: I USE A DIAPHRAGM. IT WAS WHOLLY MY RESPONSIBILITY, AND WHEN IT FAILED, IT FAILED ME.

  “QUESTION: HOW DO I FEEL NOW?

  “ANSWER: I FEEL VERY, VERY SAD. I FEEL SAD FOR MYSELF AND SAD FOR ALL WOMEN, BECAUSE A MAN WILL NEVER HAVE TO COME TO A PLACE LIKE THIS, NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS. BUT THIS SADNESS BELONGS TO ME, AND NO MAN CAN HAVE IT, AND I AM GLAD TO BE A WOMAN.”

  There was another roll of thunder. A wave of paper litter swept down the street. Renée, blushing, and doubling over with a cramp, set the megaphone on the curb and walked as fast as she could into the wind. She had no idea, no interest in knowing, how many people besides Stites and Lindsay had even listened to her.

  Howard’s great white car was waiting at the intersection of Hampshire a
nd Broadway, aimed in the direction of Harvard. In a fully paved neighborhood like this, with no green foliage in sight, the dark sky looked like a winter sky. Renée waited for a blue Cressida and a gray Accord and a black Infiniti and a silver Camry to pass. As soon as she crossed the street and got in the car, Howard stepped on the gas pedal. She slouched down so far that her eyes were even with the bottom of the window. She kicked aside Coke cans and a championship-size frisbee, rubbing her abdomen with her fist.

  “You feeling OK?” Howard said.

  “Could be worse.”

  “OK if I stop by the lab?”

  “Why don’t you take me home first.”

  “Just for a second, OK? Gotta get a rope for Somerville Lumber.”

  “What are you getting at Somerville Lumber?”

  “Wall unit.”

  She laughed emptily. “Are you going to want me to help you with that?”

  The chugging of the car’s engine was like the noise of a window fan in a heat wave, keeping her discomfort within tolerable limits. When Howard turned it off, in the reserved-only parking lot outside the computer-room door, she felt weak and ill and slouched down even farther.

  A gust of warm wind blew through the open front-seat windows. Tires squealed. A gray Cressida swung into the lot and stopped behind the car, blocking it in. A young Oriental woman in a business suit and sneakers jumped out and ran and pounded on the door to the computer room. It was Howard’s so-called fiancée, Sally Go. Someone let her in.

  Beyond the green hedge and bank of mulch there was motion on Oxford Street, action within three independent frames of reference, the blurred whiz of car roofs, the floating by of bicyclists with their heads and shoulders high off the ground and their bikes obscured by the hedge, and the bouncing gait of pedestrians, students and working people heading home with noticeable haste because the trees were now showing the white undersides of their leaves and the boughs of the tallest ones were beginning to heave with some violence. The wind carried fragments of distant sounds. The thunder was increasing, booming like the earth in a New England earthquake. Renée half sat and half lay with her hand on her abdomen, drawing some of the cramp pain out into her fingertips. Already she could not have said how long she’d been waiting in the car.

  Behind her, in a part of the sky that she was too enervated to turn to see, an eclipse-like darkness gathered. The trees were in constant motion, all the sounds from Oxford Street landing in pieces well to the north, but still the ground was dry, and people in dry clothes were on the sidewalk, and the air was warm and filled with petals and green leaves. She thought she’d never breathed more beautiful air. She felt badness draining out of her. The weather, which was nature’s, had taken over the green spaces and paved spaces between buildings. The air smelled of midsummer and late afternoon and thunder and love, and its temperature was so exactly the temperature of her skin that being in it was like being in nothing, or meeting no boundary between her self and the world. She could hear lightning static on the radios of passing cars. She felt the poignancy of cars and hot asphalt and brick buildings and radio transmissions, all the things that human beings had made, as the weather swept over them. How deeply they were immersed in the world, how deeply she was. Life not on the world’s skin but deep inside it, in the sea of atmosphere and churning trees, with a deep, vaulted ceiling of black cloud above it, electrons rising and descending on white ladders. She wanted to embrace it all by breathing it, but she felt that she could never breathe deeply enough, just as sometimes she thought she could never be close enough physically to a person she loved.

  She wondered: what exactly did she love here? Thunder echoed and leaves followed spiral tracks into the dark green sky. Watching her mind from a safe ironic distance, she formed the thought: Thank you for making me alive to be here. It rang false, but not completely false. She tried again: Thank you for this world.

  Half serious, half not, she tried again and again. She was still trying when the computer-room door flew open and Sally Go came running out. Sally pushed her tear-streaked face through Renée’s open window.

  “I saw you!” she said. “I work right there, and I saw you! Me and my friends, we saw you!” She had one of those no-stick city voices. “I hate this kind of shit you’re pulling. He was supposed to marry me. You’re crazy. I hate you! I hope you die! I hate you so much.”

  Renée opened her mouth to speak, but the girl was already in her car. She backed out with a screech and drove away.

  Howard returned with a hank of nylon rope.

  “Was that your girlfriend?”

  He shrugged, starting the engine. By now the wind had blown most of the cars and people off the streets. A black curtain was hanging at the end of Kirkland Street, a November twilight.

  “You’re going to get your wall unit wet,” Renée said.

  “Got some plastic,” Howard said.

  She remembered the letter from Louis and, without thinking, put her hand under the flap of her leather bag and tried to open it surreptitiously, but Howard looked at her. She slowly drew her hand out. Beneath the Dane Street bridge the wind was flattening stands of ragweed and cattail. The first drops of rain scored the windshield. She was coming home to Somerville, in her jeans and sneakers, with her emptied womb. The brown and yellow and white and blue clapboard had never looked so beautiful as in the green light of the beginning storm. She could already feel the overheatedness of her apartment, smell the rain on the hot slates outside the kitchen window, hear the water on the roof. She was so impatient to be home that when Howard stopped on Pleasant Avenue she hardly thanked him. She jumped out and slammed the door.

  Huge raindrops were falling on the honeysuckle. Howard pulled away but had driven no more than thirty feet when, directly across the street from Renée, the driver-side window of a black Infiniti was powered down, and an arm reached out and shot her in the back with a small revolver and let fly four more bullets as she fell down the crumbling stoop. Howard hit the brakes. In his mirror he saw the Infiniti fishtail onto Walnut Street and disappear.

  III

  ARGILLA ROAD

  12

  No one ever had trouble finding the Hollands’ house on Wesley Avenue. It was the one with fourteen adolescent white pine trees crammed into its narrow front yard. Bob had planted the trees in the spring of 1970 and then watched approvingly as, over the years, they killed the ground cover with their acidic droppings and enveloped the yard in gloom. Every weekday morning before he biked to campus, he policed the forest floor for gum wrappers and Whopper boxes. On weekends he pulled wind-blown trash from the treetops with a long-handled rake, the pines swaying like shaggy dogs submitting mutely to a brushing. They writhed when he turned a hose on them to rinse sulfuric air pollutants off.

  In the back yard, behind a high fence protecting the cheerful lawns of an engineer and an assistant athletic director, Bob had allowed the land to regress into the Illinois prairie that had predated (he never tired of explaining this) the arrival of the Europeans’ wasteful and destructive agriculture practices. Resident amid the chest-high growth were moles, snakes, mice, blue jays, and lots and lots of hornets. There were also lawn-mower traps, in the form of steel stakes hidden in the undergrowth and projecting four inches above the earth. Bob had planted these in 1983 after Melanie, discovering mice in the bedrooms, paid a neighbor boy to destroy the prairie with a mower and a hoe. Now the prairie was sequestered from the house by a low chain-link fence, and any small animals that crossed the border were eaten by the Hollands’ specially appointed cats, Drake and Cromwell. Periodically Bob put on gloves and ventured in among the hornets to uproot maple saplings and other broad-leafed intruders.

  The house itself, of which only the roof and third-floor dormer still stood above the pine trees, was unusual in having a half-circular living room and, directly above, a half-circular master bedroom. These rooms, plus the dining room and front porch, belonged to Melanie. She kept them reasonably neat, and visitors to the house never
saw the Bronze Age kitchen or the Stone Age basement, where there were piles of laundry whose bottom strata dated from the mid-1970s. Bob stayed mainly in his study, which was the only room on the third floor. Nowadays, for months at a stretch, the children’s rooms were visited by nothing but airborne dust. The doors were always open, though, exposing the furnishings like the unburied dead—granting them no rest.

  As Louis came up Davis Street from the El stop a dry wind from the west was blowing in his face. The flat, unwatered lawns were as brown now in June as they used to be in August. House after house stood deserted-looking in a deep post-graduation silence, a desolation which the charcoal smoke creeping around from one solitary family’s back yard made all the more complete.

  It was cooler among his father’s pine trees. Yellow beams slanted through suspended yellow pollen, the sun hanging in the branches as if it hadn’t moved in twenty years. The smell of resin was sharp and suppressive of insect motion. (Melanie often said she felt like she lived in a cemetery.) Taped to the front door was a message in Bob’s hand that said Louis, I’m at the Jewel.

  He went straight upstairs to his room, dropped his bag, and fell down on the waiting bed, overcome by the heat and the lifelessness of the neighborhood and the fact that he was home. He didn’t know why he’d let himself come home. He shut his eyes, wondering, Why, why, why, as if the word alone could carry him over the next five days to the moment his return flight left. But the thought of the return flight led to the thought of Boston. He rolled onto his stomach, pulling at his face with his hands. He tried to think of something, anything, that had made him happy in the past, but no trace of pleasure remained from the days he’d spent with Lauren, and although there was something about Renée that had had some happiness attached, it was nothing he could remember now.

  Telephones rang. Mechanically he rose and answered in his parents’ bedroom.