Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

They were in the midst of a Bob Newhart Festival. “We’re playing every comedy recording,” Drexel reminded the audience, “that the Button-Down Mind ever made and WSNE ever purchased. In just one moment we’ll hear what must be an all-time favorite Newhart act, but first a roundup of world news.”

Louis cued up the fourth cut on Side Two of Behind the Button-Down Mind while Davidson Chevy-Geo talked financing.

“You have sugar in your beard,” he told Drexel.

As always, Drexel brushed at the wrong spot. The ad was ending, and he cozied up to the boom mike with a lusting cat’s unconscious simper. “Nineteen sixty-three,” he crooned. “And the Button-Down Mind takes on the surprising world of children’s TV.” On the word “TV” his pointing finger came to rest on Louis, who removed his thumb from the turntable and let it spin.

Four hours later the talk-show announcer Kim Alexander took over the studio board. Outside in the midmorning sun, Louis sat down by a willow tree on part of the grassy expanse that made the Crossroads Office Park a park. The lawn was one of those familiar suburban places where the concrete of the enclosing curbs hasn’t lost its white film of lime yet, and the agreeably nose-curdling smell of junipers hangs heavy, and there’s no litter, not even cigarette filters (or maybe one single piece of artful litter, in the Japanese style), and no one, but no one, ever picnics. Louis didn’t understand these spaces. Why astroturf and plastic trees weren’t used instead.

He watched a new Lincoln Town Car with smoked side windows round the cul-de-sac and ease to a stop opposite the WSNE entrance to Building III. Its vanity plate read: PROLIFE 7. Libby Quinn debouched from the passenger side and hurried into the studios. The Lincoln’s engine surged like a powerful man sighing: PROLIFE 7. Louis shrugged and lay back on the warm new grass, letting the sun saturate his optic nerves with orangeness.

It can make a person dizzy to lie in hot sun. For several seconds he thought the funny thing happening to him was due to a loose wire in his nervous system, some spazzing synapse, and not, as the chorus of car alarms from the parking lot suddenly indicated was the case, to an earthquake.

He lost several seconds scrambling to his feet. By the time he was upright the event was ending, the ground now moving almost imperceptibly, like a diving board when a person stands motionless at the very end of it, above a swimming pool.

Traffic on 128 was unruffled. Louis looked challengingly at the air around him, as though daring the physical world to do that again when his back wasn’t turned, just daring it. But the only disturbance remaining was the marginal instability of his own body, the swaying of legs through which blood was being pumped with less than perfect smoothness (even great mimes and palace guards can’t be statues). The ground itself was still.

Inside, as he approached Alec’s office, he heard the owner quarreling with Libby in the inner sanctum. Someone less attracted to fights might have retreated, but Louis stationed himself on the threshold of the outer office, which contained a ten-inch black-and-white Zenith and a sofa with folded bedding and unironed shirts on the armrest.

“I won’t return this man’s calls,” Alec said. “I refuse to know this man. But my station manager has breakfast with him? My station manager who I told, no, we don’t deal with this type person? I understand he’s a very goodlooking young man. Very moral, very char-is-ma-tic. It compromises you to have lunch, yes, or cocktails, or dinner . But breakfast—is a very moral meal!”

“Closing your eyes won’t make him go away, Alec. Not unless you can also find a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy him off with. He’s already filed the challenge.”

“So? Last time we renewed—”

“The last time we renewed, nobody challenged it and the station wasn’t gutted.”

“They don’t take away licenses so easily.”

“Plus Philip Stites hadn’t paid Ford & Rothman to study our audience.”

“So—blackmail! A very moral sing!”

“Face it. He wants a station.”

“And you’re going to work for this man? You’re going to be his station manager?”

“When you won’t let me collect on dead accounts? When all you can broadcast during drive hours is Somalian war news and Phyllis Diller?”

“People love Phyllis Diller!”

“One point seven percent at 8 a.m. That’s the March figure. I think it speaks for itself.”

“OK, we do some local noose. We do the war on drugs. We do airplane crashes. OK. All-new programming, as of today. We tell FCC, new programming, very noose-oriented—”

“Alec, there’s nobody to do the news, besides me.”

“Maybe we get Slidowsky back—”

“You know very well what I think of that girl.”

“I can do it. Louis can do it. We listen to the other stations and copy it down. We can hire a student, I can sell—”

“What can you sell?”

“I sell my car. When do I use this car? I don’t need this car.”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“But sink about it. Libby. Sink about it. I sell my station to Philip Stites, against my principles. Do you respect me for this?”

“I respect a man who does the responsible thing. And I think the responsible thing to do here is sell the station while you still might come out in the black.”

Alec muttered something vaguely, something about sinking.

“Do you need me?” Libby said to Louis, coming through the outer office.

Louis assumed a preoccupied air. “You feel the earthquake?”

She patted her bun and smiled demurely. “I guess I didn’t.”

“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”

“Yes. You feel it?”

“No … I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.

“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again—is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“They appear weak. Smokers.”

“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”

Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”

“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”

Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.

Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.

“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.

“Uh-huh. So did we.”

“Where was it? How big?”

“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”

“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”