Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Bob realized he was alone. A mantle of rain was descending on Peabody, closing up the vistas between the surrounding process structures, quarantining the place. Kernaghan and Anna were leaning against a front fender of his car. They exchanged glances. Finally Anna said, “Jack and I were wondering if you had any pot.”

“Pot.”

“Marijuana.”

Bob laughed. It happened that he did, back on Argilla Road. In those days, an ounce would last him months.

Riding northward along the coast, Anna’s hand resting on his shoulder, the impact of those ketones and esters still fresh in his brain, he saw the stone fences wandering through the tangled, scrubby woods and had to force himself not to picture the early settlers in a landscape that looked just like this. He knew it wasn’t until well into the eighteenth century that erosion and repeated plowing had begun to fill the fields with glacial boulders, and that the farmers, running out of wood, had turned to stones to build their fences. And it wasn’t until the Erie Canal and the railroads had opened up the heartland that farming in New England was finally abandoned, its fields reclaimed by trunk and thorn. The sterile waters and monotonous forests of skinny, crownless trees were no more a picture of the nineteenth century than of the seventeenth century; were as alien as the esters in his nose, as her hand on his shoulder, her fingernails on his neck, her fingertips on his earlobe.

He was a boy from the woods himself, from the still-virgin forest of western Oregon. It had only been a year ago, right before his most recent visit to his mother, that Weyerhaeuser had clear-cut the hillside behind her house, reaping a one-time-only profit, and left the land to decay into the river like a shaved, dead wolf. The next time he was home he would see it after “reforestation”: the varied, misty forest of Sitka spruce and hemlock and cedar and northern redwood supplanted by weeds and slash and identical Douglas firs shooting up at geometrical intervals from the loose, bulldozed earth. The same wave of profit-taking that had crashed onto Cape Ann in 1630 was even now rolling out over the Pacific Coast, carrying with it the last of the continent’s virginity.

Anna handled a joint like a cigarette, tapping the ash loose with a long red nail, expelling the smoke through her nose, perching on the edge of the sofa with her legs crossed at the knee. Kernaghan couldn’t keep his face straight. He seemed more interested in simply holding a joint, enjoying its illegality and symbolism, than in taking hits. As it filled with smoke, the living room altered as if a reel were ending in a cheap theater, frames, entire actions dropping out, voices and faces in and out of sync, bright dots and dark squiggles, the room jumping and then taking on the orange tones of the new projector’s bulb; Bob saw that until now the world on the spherical screen around him had been projected by a light with too much blue in it. The gray light in the windows looked like sunshine. The three stoned people crowded around the refrigerator and lifted pieces of aluminum foil, seeing what the cook had left. In the hallway Anna pressed her stomach into Bob’s, kissed him, unbuttoned his shirt, and backed up the hallway bending over with her palms beckoning as if he were a pet she wanted to jump into her arms.

In Beverly, on a no-account street, he followed her into her ordinary little house. The dust ruffles on the overstuffed furniture, the family photographs with their cheap gilded frames, the tawdriness, the poor taste, made him wild about her and as certain of conquest as he was of her La-Z-Boy’s softness when he sank into its arms. She was selecting LPs from a brass stand reminiscent of a dish rack. Kernaghan, who’d been left in the car, was giggling in the bushes, spying through the window, rain snaking down the glaze of his baldness.

They didn’t see him again, but he must have been in the back seat as they returned to Argilla Road, he must have followed them inside, tittering like a leprechaun, and he may even have been watching in the living room the entire time, maybe in the corner where twenty years later Rita would split her head open. Watching Anna load the record changer with Frank Sinatra albums, watching her remove her paisley blouse and Silera bra, watching the white flesh of her midriff bunch into folds as she bent forward to pull her high-heeled boots off and slip her yellow spandex miniskirt and white underpants down her legs. Watching the rippling and rounding of the muscles in Bob’s shoulders, the tensing of his youthful buttocks, the action of his hips. Hearing the smack of her heavy breasts against the flatness of his chest, watching fast breath dry the saliva in the corners of her mouth, hearing him cry out, hearing her tell him, “He can only do it. with Dom Pérignon bottles!” Watching him raise her hips from the carpet and replow the warm, moist, trembling earth. Watching the in and out, seeing their chests heave and their mouths angle to cover one another as if they were two half-drowned swimmers in mutual resuscitation, watching the jiggling of her flesh, the sway of his, watching him sprawl across her forking legs, watching him gulp air red-faced and obliviously, until finally he had watched enough and could totter across the room and touch Bob’s shoulder.

“Bob, Bob, Bob!” he said, eyes half-shut with mirth. Bob saw his penis, swollen and perpendicular, a pinkish black instrument.

“Oh my God!” Anna screamed with laughter. “Oh my God!”

Bob could hear her giggling, squealing, shrieking while he put his overcoat and boots on. He stumbled into the rain, across the lawn and through the sterile, altered woods. He smelled woodsmoke and wet leaves, heard the wind being combed by a thousand narrow tree trunks, water from branches slapping the slick leaves on the ground. It was almost Thanksgiving. The dusk and the wet smells and wet sounds were the ones that had once made him shiver when he stepped outside his house for firewood, and made him hurry back inside where it was warm and he could forget the keening wind mourning the dead past of the land, dragging over the hard rooftops, jealous of the life inside. So deep in the stunted woods that the dark bulk of Kernaghan’s house might simply have been night on the horizon, he sank to his knees in the leaves and stayed until the rain had stopped, and his head had cleared, and the sky froze into glittering crystals in the shape of Orion and Perseus, and he’d heard the starter of Anna’s car.

You bought her a condominium?

I helped her with a loan .

Oh, Melanie .

Bob, it was an excellent time for her to buy .

She looks up to you. She takes her lead from you. You know, you don’t have to give her everything she wants. You could give her some guidance instead .

The money is mine to do what I want with .

I’m saying if you wonder why Lou got so mad at you, it’s not too hard to figure out. Just think about how it looks to him, why don’t you. Just think about it .

Give me some credit I have every intention of being fair to him in the long run. But if you could hear the way he harps on the money. It’s impossible to have a rational discussion with him. He’s just like you. He’s even worse. I told you, he ruined a sofa. He kicked a Waterford bowl into the fireplace .

Well, good for him .

He has no conception of what I’m going through .

He understands that Eileen takes and takes and takes from you, and he gets nothing .

Bob, you cannot compare the two .

Obviously he thinks you can .

I don’t understand it. Ever since this whole thing started he’s been terrible. I just would not have expected this of him. He’s been storing up resentment .