Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

“Congratulations?”

“I’m still more at the point where I like how I feel sitting here reading than where I’m actually reading. I go through the laws till I get to the sex laws. The punishment’s always stoning the person until they’re dead. That’s what you get for sodomy. Sodomy’s nice! But it’s an abomination unto the Lord.”

Louis sighed. “What’s with the new costume?”

“What do you mean?”

“The white dress. The, uh, Shirley Temple thing in your hair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it, nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just, like, no offense, but are you on some kind of medication?”

She shook her head and smiled lamely. “No.”

“Lithium? Valium?”

His words sank in. Her eyes grew dark and she straightened her back. “What kind of question is that?” “You’re just very different,” he said.

“I’m the way I want to be . So you can leave me alone, all right? Get out of my room!”

Louis, gratified by her response, was about to apologize when he was struck in the ear by the spine of a flying Bible. He leaned his head on the door and held his hurt ear. Lauren hopped off the bed and picked up the floppy Bible by one corner, as if it were a pelt, and sat down with it again. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t been very nice to you, have I? I guess I must have a problem with you. I must not like you or something.”

He laughed sadly.

“It’s not personal. You’re obviously a nice person. But it’s better if you just keep away from me, don’t you think? So goodbye, OK?”

Louis felt exactly like a casual lover being discarded.

Later, though, after he’d driven home with his books and drunk a beer, he decided that the only explanation for how she’d acted was that she recognized his existence and had strong feelings about him. His logic was confirmed empirically the following week, when she called him on the telephone. Again there was a curious lack of connection between present and immediate past. She just started telling him what she was doing, which was mainly that she’d enrolled in a couple of summer-session courses at U of Houston. She wanted to graduate after one more semester in Austin and so she was taking a course about the Incas and the Mayas and also Introductory Chemistry, the latter because she’d gotten an F in high-school chemistry and she wanted to try to do something really hard now, as penance. She didn’t ask Louis about his own life, but at one point she did stop talking long enough for him to suggest they get together sometime. There was a silence. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t care. Just not at my house.”

He was waiting outside the physical sciences building at the U of H after her first chemistry lecture. A thousand grackles were conversing in the quadrangle, and there was an alien, a freak, among the students leaving the building. It was Lauren. She’d cut her hair off and shaved her head.

She was glaring at every student who looked at her. Her head was small and very white, almost as white as her dress, and the half-moons of bruise-colored pigment beneath her eyes seemed darker. She asked Louis, in a nasty voice, how she looked.

“Like a pretty girl who shaved her head.”

She turned away, disgusted. “You think I care what you think?”

As they walked to the parking lot he almost hoped some man passing by would be rude to her so he could knock him down. When they got inside her Beetle she didn’t start it right away. She twisted her head around as if she needed to feel its bareness. Her knuckles, on the steering wheel, were white. “Do you still want to sleep with me?”

“When you put it like that?”

“It’s what you wanted, right? I’ll do it if you want me to. But it has to be now.”

“I only want to if you want to.”

“Well I’m never going to want to, ever. So this is your chance.”

“Well so I guess that means no.”

She nodded, not taking her eyes off the windshield. “Don’t forget, OK? You had your chance.”

On the stoops in the neighborhood north of U of H, not much more than a mile from downtown, middle-aged men drank beer from quart bottles and listened to low-volume hip-hop on twenty-year-old transistors. The hoods of rusted yellow, orange, green wingtips were raised in the driveways of shotgun shacks that squatted in the sandy mud. The early evening air was still and smelled like the black hamlets at the end of gravel roads in backwoods Mississippi.

At a Vietnamese restaurant up the street from the King of Glory HOLINESS CHURCH, Louis ordered pork with lemon grass. It came with sticky, translucent rice pancakes which when wrapped around the meat and lettuce and mint and bean sprouts bore an uncanny resemblance to condoms. Lauren looked at them with grim amusement. She’d ordered coffee that she wasn’t drinking. She tore the tops off sugar packets and made them wink at her. Finally, reluctantly, miserably, she said, “What’s an electron?”

“An electron?” It was as if she’d mentioned the name of Louis’s best friend. “A subatomic particle. It’s the smallest unit of negative electric charge.”

“Oh thanks.” She was disgusted again. “That really helps me. I have a dictionary.”

“You can also think of it as kind of an imaginary construct—”

“I’m sorry I asked. I am very sorry.” She looked around wildly, as if she wanted to walk out on him. “What is it about this stuff? It’s like the smart people aren’t really learning about science, they’re just learning how to sound like assholes.”

“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.

“I don’t understand what the thing is . I don’t understand what it looks like . What’s it for?” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to understand it.”

“I can help you understand it.”

She sneered. “I bet you can.”

“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”

She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”

“Yeah, but … who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”

“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”

“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”

She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.

“Right,” she said. “You’re nice, I keep forgetting. But don’t forget, all right? I’m not going to owe you anything.”

As the days got hotter and the nights got longer, Louis watched Lauren’s hair grow back and saw the string on her wrist turn gray and shiny. She wasn’t shy about asking him for help. One night she spent almost four hours in his kitchen refusing to understand gram-molecular weights. Every statement in her chemistry book was like a nerd she specifically despised, and it wounded her pride to have to consort with it as a true and accurate reflection of physical reality. What she hated most of all, though, was Louis’s explanations. She didn’t want to hear about page 61 or page 59 if the problem she was having was on page 60. She claimed to understand everything except the one thing she wasn’t understanding right then. She just wanted him to tell her the answer . When she was especially provoked, she accused him of sounding like her father. But she always ended up thanking him for his help, and as the summer aged he believed he could see it getting harder for her to leave his apartment without touching his hand or kissing him goodbye. She had to bite her lip and bolt.