Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion

“Would you give Peter a chance, Louis? He comes on a little arrogant but he’s very vulnerable underneath.”

“Which reminds me,” Louis said. “He got a phone call while you were out. I was like, Grandmother? Grandmother who?”

“Oh. Rita. She tried to get me to call her Grandmother too.”

“It slipped my mind that she existed.”

“That’s because she and Mom are like—agggggh.” Eileen started strangling herself with both hands. “Do you know anything about this?”

“You know when the last time I had a real conversation with Mom was? Ferguson Jenkins was on the Cubs’ roster.”

“Well, but apparently Grandpa made a whole lot of money at some point, and when he died he didn’t leave anything at all to Mom or Aunt Heidi, because he was married to Rita. Rita got everything.”

“Definitely not the way to Mom’s heart.”

“Except Peter says Rita didn’t really get anything either. It’s all in a trust fund.”

“What’s Peter know about this?”

“He was Rita’s publicist. That’s how I met him.” Eileen hopped up and went to her bookshelf. “Rita turned New Agey after Grandpa died. She’s got a pyramid on the roof of the house. She keeps her wine in the barn because she thinks it won’t mature under the pyramid. This is her new book.” She handed Louis a thin, hot-pink volume. “She has them printed by some pretend publisher in Worcester, and they all come in one shipment, on these huge flats. Last time I was at her house she had them all in the barn, with the wine. Just this massive wall of books. That’s what she needs a publicist for, and for her lectures too. But listen, do you want tortellini with red sauce or linguine with white clam sauce?”

“Whichever’s easier.”

“Well, they’re both in bags.”

“Tortellini,” Louis said. The title of the hot-pink book was Princess Itaray: An Atlantean Case History . On the title page the author had written: To Eileen, my little doll, with love from Grandmother . Louis paged through the book, which was divided into chapters and subchapters and sub-subchapters with boldface numbered headings:

4.1.8 Implications of the Disappearance of the Dime-sian Appendage: A Reversible Fall from Eden?’

He looked at the flap copy. In this fanciful yet erudite work, Dr. Kernaghan advances the hypothesis that the cornerstone of Atlantean society was the universal gratification of sexual desire, and proposes that the human appendix, now a vestigial organ, was, among the Atlanteans, both external and highly functional. With the hypnotic regression of a 14-year-old schoolgirl, Mary M— of Beverly, Massachusetts, Dr. Kernaghan embarks on a compelling exploration of Atlantean deep psychology, the historical origins of repressed sexuality, and the modern world’s potential for a return to a golden age …

“She’s written two other books too,” Eileen said.

“She’s a doctor?”

“Some honorary degree. Milton Friedman thinks it’s the silliest thing he’s ever heard of, isn’t that right, Milton Friedman? Peter helped her a lot—got her on the radio and on TV a couple times. He has all kinds of connections and he’s only in it part-time. Eventually he had to tell her to get somebody else, though. For one thing she drinks an awful lot. She also talks about Grandpa like he’s alive and talks to her all the time. You don’t know whether you’re supposed to laugh or not.”

Louis didn’t mention that he’d made a date for drinks with this woman.

“But anyway, that’s how I met Peter. She’s got a beautiful estate, you probably don’t remember it. We stayed there for a week or something when we were litle. You remember?”

Louis shook his head.

“Neither do I, really. Rita wasn’t on the scene yet. I mean, she was still Grandpa’s secretary. Sometimes I wonder what we’d think of him if he was still alive.”

For the rest of the evening Louis sat in various chairs and Eileen orbited. A plate of food was something towards which she showed no particular sense of responsibility; she left the table and came back; her food was at her mercy. When Louis put his coat on to leave, she awkwardly patted his arm and, still more awkwardly, embraced him. “Take care of yourself, huh?”

He tore himself away. “What do you mean take care of myself? Where do you think I’m going? I’m going two and a half miles.”

She kept her hand on his shoulder until he was out the door. Moments later, as she turned the news on, there was a knock. Louis was standing in the hall, businesslike, looking aside with a frown. “I just remembered something,” he said. “I just remembered the place in Ipswich, Mom’s father’s place. We threw rocks—”

“Oh!” Eileen’s face lit up. “At the horses.”

“We threw rocks at the horses—”

“To save them!”

“To save them from dying. So you remember too. We thought they’d die if they stood still.”

“Yes.”

“That was all.” His round shoulders turned away from her. “See you later.”

In high school Louis had never become so disaffected that he apologized for loving radio. Radio was like a crippled pet or retarded sibling that he always made time for and didn’t mind— didn’t even notice—if people laughed at. When Eileen saw him out walking in distant wastelands he was generally in transit to or from an airconditioned and empty electronics-supply store in some weedy plaza where the only other going concern was a Chinese restaurant in the last of its nine lives, and maybe a depopulated pet store. From the wall of prepackaged ICs and RF connectors and micropots and gator clips and jumpers and variable capacitors he selected components from the top of his wish list and added up the prices in his head, guessing on the sales tax, and handed them to the sad mustached man who preferred to sell stereo systems, and paid for them with the small bills that neighbors had given him for doing low-caste work: wall-washing; brush-clearing; dog-related services. He was ten when he got a crystal diode set, twelve when he built his HeathKit shortwave radio, fourteen when he became WC9HDD, and sixteen when he got his general license. Radio was his thing, his interest. A kid derives a satisfaction that rivals sex or maybe instead connects with it along obscure mental byways when he puts together a few simple metal and ceramic objects—objects he knows to be simple because he has experimentally destroyed many of them with screwdriver and pliers— and connects them to a battery and hears distant voices in his bedroom. There were stray resistors on his bedspread, resistors whose color coding he’d known by heart a year before he learned about sperm and eggs, the afternoon he lost his virginity. “Ouch, what is this?” (It was a 220-ohm metal-film resistor with a gold tolerance band.) Louis also happened to be one of the few ham operators in greater Chicago willing to speak or encode in French, and so when the sunspots were heavy he could be kept busy half the night trading temperature readings and autobiographical data with operators in all the snowed-in corners of Quebec. Which didn’t make him talkative in French class, only bored, since anything he did really well he kept hidden.

He entered Rice University as a prospective double-? major and left it with a degree in French, having in the meantime managed KTRU, the campus station, for three semesters. A week after graduation he went to work for a local C&W station, attending to relatively attractive duties for the abrupt abandoning of which after only eight months he would give no more satisfactory account to Eileen than the question: “Why does anybody quit a job?”

The studios of WSNE, his new employer, were in the western suburb of Waltham, in an office building overlooking one corner of the forty acres devoted to the intersection of Route 128 (“America’s Technology Region”) and the Mass Pike. Louis’s job title was board operator, a peonic position that involved operating the cartridge player, cuing up records, and backtiming the AP network news, but he did this only from six to ten in the morning, because only the morning drive announcer, Dan Drexel, was considered irreplaceable enough to rate his own operator. Louis understood that the remainder of his workday, which ended at 3 p.m., was to be spent on exciting tasks like entering traffic data on a keyboard, transferring agency commercials from reel to cart, writing PSAs, and grading the contest entries with which the station’s dwindling listenership sought to win various worthless gifts. He understood that he would be paid the federal minimum wage.