Strong Motion: A Novel

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Can I make you some lunch?” he said again.

  “You certainly got me back pretty easily, didn’t you?”

  He weighed the consequences of ignoring that she’d said this. He leaned on the doorframe. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean one day I’m living by myself and hating you for how much you hurt me, and the next thing I know I wake up and you’re living with me again and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

  “You woke up a long time ago.”

  “No, I didn’t wake up a long time ago. You listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying I just woke up.”

  “Fine. You just woke up.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  “About . . . ?”

  “About the fact that you’re living with me and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

  “Well, I was about to make you some lunch.”

  “I’m saying you got me back pretty easily.”

  “What was I supposed to do? Keep away from you? While you were in the hospital? I mean, how many times did I tell you I was sorry? And you said to stop saying it—”

  “Well I felt like shit.”

  “But so all I can do is show you how sorry I am and how much I love you.”

  She flinched as though the word love were a dart. “I’m saying I never had a chance to think about what I wanted. Everything just happened. And I’m not at all sure about it.”

  “You’re not sure you want me living here.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “You’re not sure you even want to see me.”

  “That’s the other part of it. I mean, I do want to see you. But everything’s all tied together, there’s no room to think. I want to get to know you, somehow. I don’t want us to be together just because we happen to be together. I want to start over again.”

  “Beginning with me moving out.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  “You want me to leave. You’re trying to say it in a nice way.” She closed her eyes and bit her lip. She wasn’t someone he knew, this underweight woman with the hectic face and overgrown hair and wire-frame glasses. A deft exchange had been effected, and no fraud was involved—the woman was clearly who she seemed to be. She just wasn’t the ghost made of memories and expectations that he had seen at breakfast. She opened her eyes and looked straight ahead. “Yes, I want you to leave.”

  He took an unopened envelope from the table in the hallway and carried it into her room. “Is this the problem?”

  She didn’t even glance at it. “Give me some credit.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “Yeah, all right. It’s part of the problem. It upsets me that you got a letter from her here. It upsets me that I found out about it because you were out and somebody else brought the mail up. Because for all I know, you get letters like this every day—”

  “I do not.”

  “And I just don’t know about it. That’s part of the problem. But it’s not—”

  “You think she sends me letters and I don’t tell you. You think I’ve got a whole second relationship—”

  “Shut up. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s totally inappropriate for her to send you letters here, and it’s up to you to make that clear to her, because she obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with it herself.”

  The personal pronouns—she, her—were pronounced with a hatred like nothing he had heard from her before. Lauren didn’t hate Renée like this.

  “I’ll let her know,” he said.

  She shook her head. “I can’t live with you.”

  “I told you I don’t even think about her anymore. I told you all I want’s a chance to make it up to you. I know I acted like a prick. But I didn’t even sleep with her and I never think about her now.”

  “And boy was that stupid of you. Because it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether you slept with her. It makes zero difference.”

  “Well I would have done it, but she didn’t want to.”

  Renée looked at the ceiling in disgust and disbelief. “That’s sick. That is so sick. She walks into your apartment but she won’t sleep with you. Because what, I can just imagine it. Because she’s a better person than I am, because she really loves you and she won’t fuck you before she marries you. That really makes me feel good, to hear that.”

  “I felt sorry for her,” Louis said, very quietly. He set the letter from Lauren on the desk.

  “Well, here’s somebody else to feel sorry for. I do the best I can with self-pity but I can’t do it all. Here’s a person who has a fever every day and whose back still hurts and whose chest is all scars and who can’t see right anymore and has to live and be ugly and know she’s ugly every minute of the day, if you need somebody to feel sorry for.”

  He frowned. “I’ve never felt sorry for you. I hurt with you, but I admire you and love you. And you’re so beautiful.”

  She made no attempt to hold her tears back. “I can’t live with you. I can’t live with you, and I can’t get rid of you.”

  “It’s easy to get rid of me.”

  “Well, then, just do it. Just go. Because this is the real me you’re looking at. This is what I’m like inside. I’m a jealous insecure little ugly shrew. And that’s what I’m going to be, and you can go on living with me because you feel guilty and you can watch me make your life a hell, or you can get out and go live with her right now because I certainly have no desire to live with you if we’re going to fight like this, or else you can be kind to me—”

  “Kind to you?”

  “Kinder than you’ve already been. Kind to me right this minute. You can tell me you don’t think about her all the time. You can tell me I may not be as young as she is, and I may be a scarred-up ugly mess, but I’m still not so bad. You have to tell me that all the time. You have to tell me you don’t write letters to her and you don’t call her and you appreciate me. You have to take all the things you’ve said and say them about a hundred times more often. Because I’m trying to have energy, I’m trying to get back to being a person again, but I can’t do it fast enough.”

  For a moment Louis watched her shiver and weep in her armchair. Then he bent over and put his hands in her armpits and raised her to her feet. She was very light. The lenses of her glasses each had a single tear streak down the middle. He kissed her unresponding lips with none of the discretion and conscious kindness of their bedtime and hello and goodbye kisses. He kissed her because he was starving for her.

  “Don’t.”

  “Why not.”

  “You’re just doing it because you—ow. Ow!”

  He was squeezing her hard, one of his hands directly on the closed entrance wound in her back, his other hand on her butt beneath her sweatpants and underpants, his thigh squarely in her groin. She took his ear in her mouth and said, “Don’t squeeze.”

  She shook while he undressed her on the bed. She covered herself with a blanket while he stood up to take his own clothes off.

  “Don’t ever put that sweatshirt on again,” she said.

  He knelt beside her and peeled back the blanket. He put his cheek on her white belly and the heel of his hand in the hollow of her pelvis. He wanted to fill this hollow with semen. The fast-dwindling warmth of it would tickle her, make her belly convulse like a hillside in the throes of a disaster. He knew this because he’d seen it happen, back in May.

  She sat up and tried to pull him onto her.

  “I have to look at you,” he said.

  “Just hurry along, if you don’t mind.”

  Her cunt seemed to him a thing of unbearable beauty. Its readiness, its subtlety, its bed of dark hair. Unconcealed by adipose tissue, the individual muscles in her arms and legs were visible in their small, filet-like glory. Her retroperitoneal scar was a great circle of healed injury stretching from a point below her sternum, around under her ribs, and into the center of her back. For better or worse, his pric
k shuddered fully into hardness as he turned her body and followed the scar’s irregular progress, its purple and red runes, through the places where it was a bunching of the skin and the more tender-looking places where it was a stretching. He couldn’t help thinking of the aerial photograph of the San Andreas Fault he’d seen in one of her books, how the long raised seam traversed the smooth skin of the California desert, how the narrow groove down the center of the seam was cut by suture-like hatchings. He felt glad to be alive and in this bed. There had ceased to be any question in his mind that the thing he was looking at was Renée Seitchek. The focus of his love had migrated from his imagination into her body, and had taken his imagination along with it, the inescapable joining of her legs now embodying some necessary convergence of emotions in himself, the warmth of her skin identical to the warmth his eyes felt when the lids came down to cover them. He licked her cool thoracostomy scar. He kissed the ragged star of the exit wound beneath her right breast. A bullet had come through here bearing bits of her bone and her lung tissue, but she was breathing without pain now. She played with his prick, opening and closing her opposed finger and thumb, pulling strands in the clear taffy it secreted. She bent sideways and sucked on it, briefly.

  He squeezed a blob of nonoxynol jelly into the center of her diaphragm, lubricated the rim and folded it in two, and pushed it into her vagina until it unfolded into place. The procedure was similar in some interesting ways to preparing a bird for roasting.

  She looked scared when he settled himself on top of her. He resisted the idea that it was “important” that they were making love now, but unfortunately it did seem kind of important. Her eyes were open wide and she was blinking rapidly, as if it might have been Death and not Louis who was weighing on her chest and sliding a firm piece of his flesh into a narrow gap in hers, and more generally invading the citadel where she had kept her self, her soul, during the months when she was lonelier than she was now. He slung his left leg up over her hip to keep from bearing on her osteomyelitic femur. The position was awkward, and she lay so inertly, through little choice of her own, that he felt like he was clinging to a slippery rock with not many handholds.

  “Tell me when I’m hurting you.”

  “Well I’m hurting a little in a lot of places.”

  “Hurting you too much I mean.”

  Eyes closed, she pressed him into her as deeply as he would go. She breathed in the heavy, heedless way that made a man feel like a king and made his ejaculation an event of huge sweetness. He lay beside her and massaged the forward end of her labia with the palm of his hand until she came. He took his prick in his own hand and deposited semen in the pelvic hollow he had a fetish for. She thrashed a little, and rubbed the hollow for a long time before it stopped tickling her. They made inane and sentimental statements about breath and current genital conditions and love. They repeated the major act, straining and sweating until she became fretful and told him she was feeling really sick. He stood up immediately and covered her with the blanket. “Let me get you some lunch.”

  She shook her head. She was slack-faced and miserable. “Some toast, some tea.”

  “There’s no way I can go out tonight. You’ll have to call her.”

  “You can sleep all afternoon. We’ll see how you feel.”

  “I’m so tired of being tired.”

  “Have a bite. Take a nap.”

  When her door was closed and he knew that she was sleeping, he sat at the kitchen table and opened the envelope from Lauren. There was a letter in her pretty, ungainly hand.

  September 20

  Dear Louis,

  I have to write to you today because I have to. I think about how if I’d wrote to you last fall everything would be different. I have to write to you for me, not you, so I hope you don’t mind too much. You don’t have to write back.

  Well, the big news is—I’m pregnant! Its a good thing, because I already have a little bread basket. People ask when I’m due and I say April and they can’t believe it. They think I’m going to say December. I spend a lot of time walking on air. I don’t even know if you would know me I’m so different. I feel like I’ve found the real ME. I already love my baby like crazy and talk to him all the time. Well, that’s the big news.

  Louis, sometimes I miss you so much I start crying. I miss how funny you were and how considerate. But now I know God didn’t mean for us to be together. God meant for me and Emmett to be together. I’m so thankful I have a life and a good husband and (SOON) a little baby I can love. I still love you (there, I said it!) but in a different way. But do you know what I wish sometimes? I wish I could see Renée, just her and me. I want to kiss her on the cheek because she has you, you are a sweet boy. Is she all well again—I hope? I do hope it with all my heart, Louis.

  Well, there’s the news from Texas. I’m not telling MaryAnn I’m pregnant until I know everything’s OK. I’m friend’s with Emmett’s Mom now. She took me to her church group. The people were so wierd there but I’m friend’s with them too. Oh well.

  Louis, you will always be my friend even if we never meet again. “The King is dead, long live the King.” That’s what they say in England when their king dies. Get it??

  Your friend,

  Lauren

  He left the letter on the table so Renée could read it if she wanted. He felt vaguely tainted or compromised, and he wondered if he’d had the wrong idea about Lauren all along. At the moment, at least, she didn’t compare well with the woman he’d just mated with.

  His lunch eaten, he faced the problem of the afternoon. In the morning he shopped, worked on his car, did cleaning, and, until a few days ago, took Renée to the clinic for her daily antibiotics shot; in the evening they ate and went to movies or watched TV. But in the afternoon he ran up against the same hopelessness that had afflicted him ever since he lost his job at WSNE. All he could find to do while Renée rested was read books. He’d consumed the novels of Thomas Hardy one after another, not really enjoying them but not stopping until even Jude the Obscure was under his belt. He’d since moved on to Henry James, for whom his mood of patience and suspended judgment made him an ideal reader. He especially liked The Bostonians, because James’s Boston of the 1870s turned out to be inhabited by the same eternal feminists with whom Louis had marched in the big pro-choice rally in July, the same crackpots and dreamers who had funded Rita Kernaghan and come to her memorial, the same slippery journalists who were still trying to insinuate themselves into Renée’s apartment by telephone. He began to forgive the chill of this northern city. He thought about the Brahmin blood running in his own veins. He watched himself being consoled by literature and history, and, observing how much he’d changed in one year, he wondered what kind of person he was ultimately meant to be. But there was still that hopelessness or sorrow right beneath the skin of his afternoons.

  He woke Renée at five-thirty. Her temperature was low enough for her to consider going out, and by six they were on their way to Ipswich. The golds of the season and the hour were in the trees reflected in the contoured glass of cars on I-93. Through the few windows that weren’t smoked for privacy, lone commuters could be seen hunching aggressively over steering wheels or talking about their lives on telephones.

  “She wants to kiss me on the cheek,” Renée said.

  “Oh, you read that, did you.”

  “This is some southern species I don’t understand.”

  “She’s a nice person. Very mixed up.”

  “You pursue this topic at your own risk. You must know I’d be happier if you told me she’s a total jerk. Her and her little breadbasket.”

  “What can I say? I’m embarrassed.”

  It was night when they reached Ipswich. The frame of the pyramid still squatted on the house on Argilla Road, silhouetted against the moon-whitened sky, but most of the aluminum siding had been removed. It lay twisted in piles by the circular drive. Extension ladders weighted down a pair of tarpaulins covering tools and stacks of lumber near the f
ront door.

  The lean, sophisticated woman of Brahmin stock who was Louis’s mother ushered him and Renée into the living room and poured them drinks at the bar. Again buckets of money had been spent to repair the house, to demonstrate that wealth was stronger than any earthquake. Melanie’s navy-blue dress had navy-blue buttons and padded shoulders and hugged her hips and thighs and knees. She’d visited Renée in the hospital, once, and hadn’t seen her since then. She didn’t fuss over her now. It was left to Louis to make her comfortable on the sofa.

  “Before our brains get too clouded,” Melanie said, “we have some business to discuss.” She took an envelope from the mantelpiece. “This is for you, Renée. I think you’ll agree that everything’s correct here?”

  Renée silently showed Louis the contents of the envelope. There was a personal check, made out to her, for the sum of six hundred thousand and xx/100ths dollars, and a receipt for the same amount made out to Melanie Holland.

  “You’ll notice I’ve dated it the thirtieth,” Melanie said. “You’ll recall this was the deadline we established. Louis, you’ve witnessed that she has the check in her possession?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “If you’ll just sign the receipt then, Renée.” Melanie held out a pen which Renée looked at blankly. “Or is something not correct?”

  Silently Renée took the pen and signed the receipt. Melanie folded it in half, tucked it in the breast pocket of her dress, and delivered herself of a huge sigh. “Well. That’s taken care of. Now we can relax a little. How are you, Renée?”

  Renée raised her chin. She held the check in her lap like a handkerchief she’d been using. “Not too bad,” she said.

  “That’s marvelous. You’re looking so much more like yourself than the last time I saw you. I hope Louis is taking good care of you?”

  Renée turned and looked at him as if she’d forgotten him until this mention of his name. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

  “Louis, that reminds me of the other business I wanted to discuss. This is our last piece of business for tonight, I promise.” Melanie gave a false little laugh. “I suppose you know I haven’t been able to sell this house. I realize it’s not simply my own personal misfortune that there isn’t a buyer to be found between here and New Jersey for a house at last year’s prices. I’m willing to accept the depression of the market in the Northeast and whatever loss that entails for me. Unfortunately, we had another little tremor up here last Tuesday. You can hardly blame me for being surprised. I know I wasn’t alone in thinking we’d seen the end of all that. But no, there was another tremor. Fine. Perhaps there’ll be more. Fine. But in the meantime—”