Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

“Sure I do.” Louis was pale and perspiring. “They’re handsome.”

“You know,” she said, “I used to be in love with England. The whole country. I used to think I’d be considered pretty there, or prettiness wouldn’t matter. Like it was some wonderful old minor league I’d shine in.”

“You are pretty,” the tequila said.

MaryAnn shook her head. “When I got my master’s in English I was in New York. I went to work for the Duncan McGriff Agency, it was a big literary agency. I suppose we had some famous clients, but the way we really earned our money was by charging reading fees. I wasn’t a reader. I was the person who took the readers’ reports on manuscripts and turned them into personalized letters from Duncan himself. I had a sheet with about twenty different ways to personalize them, to say how he’d read the manuscript while he was sitting at home by his swimming pool where his three dear children were frolicking. Or how he’d read the manuscript on a mountaintop while watching a glorious sunset. This is literally what I had to write. But the sad thing was, no matter how bad a manuscript was, I always had to say that the work showed great promise but was not yet in commercially salable form. And there were various degrees to this, because there were people out there —innocent people out in Nebraska—who would send in their manuscripts again and again, and pay the full fee every time, and we could never say yes , and never say no . Which was also how Duncan was with me, although that’s a different story. I worked there for five years. I was still sitting there in my little chair at my little desk the day the Justice Department came and closed us down for an even worse thing we were doing. And Louis, I was twenty -eight then. It was like I’d been stabbed! It’s funny, twenty-eight still seems an old age to me, like I was never an older maid than I was that year. I couldn’t believe it, I mean, what had happened to those years. But so anyway, I married Jerry, and that’s when I really started to panic, because the feeling didn’t go away. The feeling that I’d missed my chance to have the life I wanted. Everything still eluded me, except now it was worse, because now I was married . It wasn’t so much that Jerry—well, you know him. It wasn’t his fault. I knew what he was like and I married him. It was my fault. And do you know, once you’ve started to think about something, once you’ve gotten it in your head that you have insomnia, it makes it all the harder to fall asleep?”

Louis was drifting in a slow spin towards the center of his empty teacup. MaryAnn gave him a glance full of hurt and worry, as though it were he, not she, whom she felt sorry for. “Well,” she said in a lower voice, “when I saw how nothing changed when I got married, I got it in my head that nothing ever would. I made Jerry hate me and then I said to myself: I have a husband who hates me. Do you see? There’s an aloneness you can catch like a disease and not get rid of. A wrongness—a wrongness you can never fix. And it was the same thing when we adopted Lauren. Like everything else, it was my idea. I wanted to stop the slide, and the one thing I knew was I’d never seen a woman who didn’t love her baby. But Louis—” Tears rushed into her face and voice and then receded. “I didn’t have faith! I didn’t have faith! The whole time we were dealing with the agency, I felt cold and dead inside. I tried to rationalize it. I said to myself, everything will change the instant I get to hold her (or him, we didn’t know). But in my heart, in my heart , all I thought was: Maybe this won’t work either. Maybe I’m the woman who even motherhood won’t change. This is what I felt , in my heart , and I still didn’t stop the process. Even though I was sick to my stomach every time we communicated with the agency. Sick for a week, from guilt and the strain of pretending to feel something I didn’t. And then when she came— well, it was already a bit of a disappointment that she was eight months old. You know, of course I’m the one who gets the eight-month-old baby.”

She pressed her crossed arms into her breasts and rocked a little. Louis dimly wondered what was so wrong with a baby being eight months old, but—

“But it was either that or nothing at all, and you know Jerry and I don’t discuss things, we just blame each other afterward. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that Lauren knew. Even when she was tiny she could feel me doubting myself. She could feel how I didn’t really believe I was her mother. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get us to believe in me. And how could I blame her then for all the things she did to me? For biting me like an animal? For the gutter language? For all the worry and the dread when she wouldn’t come home? How could I feel anything but guilt? Guilt, Louis, was the biggest thing of all. That this was our life, our only life, and this was what I’d done to it. I was not going to get another chance . Do you see?”

She looked up at him beseechingly, leaning forward, seeming to want to pour her breasts out at his feet. She must have forgotten who she was talking to. She must somehow have been thinking that when she looked up at him he would take her in his arms and rescue her. But all she saw was a drunken college boy swallowing a yawn. “Oh God.” She turned away, furious with herself. “Why, why, why do I ever speak?”

After that night, things were more straightforward between them, more like they were between Louis and his own mother, more realistic. MaryAnn didn’t watch him eat his breakfast anymore; having explained herself to him, she could afford to be anywhere in the house. He was part of the family now—family meaning action at a distance, invisible fields that pass through walls. He began to count the weeks until he was free of Dryden Street.

During Easter vacation the Bowleses urged him to bring someone over to dinner to help finish up the rack of arctic caribou a colleague of Mr. Bowles’s had brought them back from Elsemere Island. Louis invited a girl he was friends with, a DJ at KTRU from whom he’d been learning about Wagner and Richard Strauss and with whom, in a mutuality of opportunism, he’d been spending some afternoons in a dormitory bed. MaryAnn seemed to have intuited this circumstance. Over the braised caribou she patronized his friend relentlessly, harping in particular on the beauty of her hair, as if it were understood that lookswise her hair was all she had going for her. Afterward, as he walked her home, the friend said she didn’t think Mrs. Bowles was very nice. “She’s crazy,” Louis said. “They’re both crazy.” Nevertheless, the idea had been planted in his head that this friend wasn’t necessarily worthy of him, and he soon began to patronize her himself and then avoided her entirely.

The next morning he woke up very late with a queasiness he associated with the questionable taste of the caribou. When he stepped into the hall, in his gym shorts and gray T-shirt, it took him a moment to notice the girl standing against one wall of the alcove beyond the stairwell. It was like the moment when you realize there’s a bird inside your house which happens to be still now but could fly into your face at any second. The spot in the alcove where the girl stood was just the kind of meaningless random spot where a bird in its confusion lands, and where Louis himself, in Evanston, could frequently be found. The girl was wearing a tight black tank top and a gray-and-white plaid miniskirt; she had a bimboish cumulus of dark blond hair, long bare legs, green ankle socks, and shiny shoes. Her fists were clenched and her jaw was set. Her chest was heaving with what appeared to be rage. She gave Louis a white-hot look, and his heart jumped as violently as if suddenly wings were flapping along walls and claws and a beak veering past his eyes.