Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

“Lauren?”

MaryAnn had spoken from halfway up the stairs. Lauren made her face stupid and mouthed her own name.

“Lauren?”

MaryAnn had climbed the remainder of the stairs and was coming up the hall. She stopped outside the door. This was the point at which Lauren closed her eyes and cried out sharply. She repeated it: a physical cry, a cry of pleasant surprise. Then she began to pant, and produce half-moaning coughs of fake transport, and drag her heels across the carpeting. She was glaring at Louis’s bed, and what she was doing with her feet was angry too.

Louis lowered his head over the broken Flaubert and laughed joylessly. MaryAnn was descending the stairs again. Lauren stood up and smiled cruelly at the floor, as if she had X-ray vision and could see her mother entering the dining room and slumping into one of the chairs along the wall. Then Louis’s bed attracted her attention. She stepped up onto it and started bouncing. Soon the springs were groaning and the one slightly shorter leg of the bed was tapping on the floor.

“Up — pan — down, up — pan — down,” she said. Her singsong words matched the rhythm of the springs. “In — nan — dout, in — nan — dout. Up — pan — down, up — pan — down. In — nan — dout, in — nan — dout—”

“Stop,” Louis said, more irritated than anything else. “She gets the message already.”

Lauren stopped. “Am I bothering you?”

“You’re fucked up,” he said without looking at her. “You’re really fucked up. And you’ve got the wrong idea about me.”

“But you like me, right?” she asked him from the doorway.

“Yeah, sure. I like you. I like you.”

Her new Eurythmies album was playing on her father’s audiophile-quality stereo when Louis slipped out and down the stairs and out the front door into air that didn’t smell like toffee. When he returned in the evening, from a long walk nowhere, he circled the house twice and didn’t see any sign of youth. Inside, Mr. Bowles told him that Lauren and Emmett had driven back to Beaumont to be with Emmett’s family for Easter Sunday. It was a full week before MaryAnn would speak to him again.

The retriever had come back. Louis, cold and stiff, watched her run arcs across the sand in front of him, nimble tangents along the retreating and advancing foam lines. He could hear voices from the direction of the parking lot. After a while the white air released three young or youngish figures who were fanned out on the beach and seemed to be combing it methodically. The one who passed right in front of him was a tall Oriental male in a down jacket and loose white yachting pants. He glanced gloomily at Louis, said, “Hey,” and scuffed on by, gouging divots in the sand out of disgust or some vandalistic impulse.

The person closest to the water was having a problem with the dog. He was a bearded Caucasian whose glasses were held on with a black elastic band. Jackie was snapping at his raised elbows. “Go! Go! Get away!” he commanded as she barked and tried to corner him between a pair of broken waves scissoring up onto the sand from two directions. He gave the air a vicious warning kick, and she retreated. Meanwhile the third person, a female with short black hair, had run on far ahead, her windbreaker and jeans fading into the whiteness. This was the person who, when the group returned in tighter formation a few minutes later, said, “I’m going to go ask this guy,” in a voice not low enough to escape Louis’s hearing. She came up the sand towards him. She had a small, pleasant face, with a short nose and pretty brown eyes. Her expres sion was fixed in an intense, frosty smileyness. “Sorry to bother you,” she said. “We were wondering if you’d been here for a while.”

The bearded Caucasian drew up behind her shoulder, and the thought went through Louis’s head that these people were plainclothes cops; they seemed so purposeful.

“Yeah,” he said. “Are you looking for something?”

Before she could answer, Jackie jumped on the bearded Caucasian, hooking her front claws on his belt and getting dragged along on tiptoe as he tried to pull away. Hands high, he turned reproachfully to Louis.

“Not my dog,” Louis said.

“We’re looking for disturbances in the sand,” the smiley woman said. She held her arm out to one side and snapped her fingers and snapped them again, just casually getting the dog’s attention, her eyes not leaving Louis. She was a few inches shorter than he and at least a few years older; there was some gray in her dark hair. “We thought that if you were here during the earthquake you might have seen something.”

He looked at her blankly.

“We’re from Harvard Geophysics,” the bearded Caucasian explained in a grating, impatient voice. “We felt the earthquake and got a rough location. It was big enough, we thought there might be some surface effects on the sand.”

Louis frowned. “Which earthquake is this?”

The woman glanced at the Caucasian. The dog was licking her fingers. “The earthquake an hour and a half ago,” she said.

“There was an earthquake an hour and a half ago?”

“Yes.”

“Around here?”

“Yes.”

“That you felt, wherever, down in Cambridge?”

“Yes!” Her smile had become one of genuine amusement at his confusion.

“Shit.” Louis scrambled stiffly to his feet. “I missed it! Or but, wait a minute, maybe it was not that big?”

With a loud sigh the bearded Caucasian rolled his eyes and headed back up the beach.

“It wasn’t small,” the woman said. “The magnitude will prob ably be about 5.3. The city’s not in ruins or anything, but a 5.3, that registers around the world. Our colleague Howard”—she aimed some smileyness at the Oriental, who was skipping stones between waves—”is quite happy about that, as you can see. It means a lot of information.”

Louis thought of the car with its theft alarm ringing.

“And you didn’t feel anything at all?” the woman said.

“Nothing.”

“Too bad.” She smiled strangely, looking him right in the eye. “It was a nice earthquake.”

He looked around, still disoriented. “You expected the beach to be all torn up?”

“We were just curious. Sometimes the sand subsides and cracks. It can also liquefy and boil up to the surface. There was an event here about two hundred fifty years ago that did some serious damage. We were hoping we’d see something like that. But—” She clicked her tongue. “We didn’t.”

By the water’s edge her colleague Howard was playing with the dog, tapping her behind the ears with alternating hands while her head thrashed back and forth. Louis still didn’t believe there had really been an earthquake. “Would a house around here be wrecked?”

“Depends on what you mean by wrecked,” the woman said. “You have a house?”

“It’s my mother’s house. My ex-grandmother’s house, which you couldn’t possibly care less about, but she was the person who died in the earthquake last week.”

“No! Really?” Concern became the woman better than amusement did. “I’m very sorry.”

“Yeah? I’m not. I hardly knew her.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“What you sorry about?” Howard asked her, coming up from the water.

The woman indicated Louis. “This … person’s grandmother was the one who died in the April 6 event.”

“Bad luck,” Howard said. “Usually, small earthquake like that, nobody dies.”

“Howard is an expert in shallow seismicity,” the woman said.

Howard squinted into the white sky as though wishing this description of him weren’t accurate. He had a hairstyle like half a coconut.

“What about you?” Louis asked the woman.