Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

You should call him and apologize .

Oh, now, really. For what? What do I apologize for? I’m the one with the problem! I’m the one who’s caught in the middle!

You should call him and apologize. It’s what you should do, and if you can’t do it, then you can’t complain, either, and you can’t complain if I take matters into my own hands .

Well, go right ahead. You always know what the right thing to do is. You’ve never, ever, faced a situation where you weren’t sure what to do. Everything’s always been very clear for you. Everything’s simple and nice. You wanted me, you married me. You live your politically correct life, and leave everything else to me, which is what you married me for .

I married you because I loved you .

I know that, Bob. I know that. Don’t tell me —

And I still love you .

DON’T TELL ME THAT .

A long silence.

Give it away , Bob said finally.

Give what .

The money .

I will. I’ll give — a lot. I’ll give — half! But I have to have it first.

Give it all and you’ll be happy. Set aside a little for the kids, and a little for yourself. Set aside a million and give the rest away. You’ll be happy .

I can’t, Bob. I can’t .

All the while, a hole is being drilled into the earth in Peabody at a cost in labor, equipment, and energy of maybe five thousand dollars a day. Anna tags the core samples as they come up and stores them in a refrigerated building to retard oxidation. She has her own padlock on the building. She couldn’t tell schist from feldspar if her life depended on it, but the samples will be hers alone to study and exploit, and her only thought is deeper, deeper, deeper . She still thinks there’s oil or at least methane down there. But delays and costly breakdowns are becoming frequent as the drill bit chews past the one-mile mark. Competitors with new plants are eating into Sweeting-Aldren’s war profits. With the hole now well below the water table, plenty deep for waste disposal, management decides it’s time to eliminate further funding. Kernaghan, however, knows that Anna will leave the company if the drilling stops too soon. He threatens and deceives and cajoles Aldren Sr. into funding the drilling at least through the end of 1970.

Rita can’t figure it out. A number as hot and proud as Anna? With an impotent goat? Obviously Kernaghan has found a way to buy the girl. But the months go by and Anna isn’t promoted, she doesn’t move out of her dowdy pillbox in Beverly, she drives the same old Ford. Certain heavy pieces of jewelry are suspicious, but Rita is sure the girl’s too shrewd to have sold herself for some earrings and a diamond pendant.

“She hates the guy,” Anna’s fellow researchers confide when Rita asks.

“But she sleeps with him.”

“He has Power over her,” they say mysteriously, meaning they have no idea.

Rita visits Anna herself.

“I love him passionately,” Anna says, laughing in Rita’s face; Kernaghan has told her all about Rita. “And he’s crazy about me.”

“So why don’t you marry him?”

“What do I care about marriage? He wants a woman who sneezes at money.”

Talking to Anna fans the embers of Rita’s jealousy, turns the warm glow into a white, directed flame. She begins to wonder about the big derrick called the F2 Line, which management has surrounded with a high, opaque fence and which Anna visits daily. Rita begins to snoop, to listen in on occupied telephone lines, to open forbidden drawers, to watch for keys to unattended file cabinets. The more she finds out, the easier it is to read between the lines of memos and decipher her bosses’ winks and decode the remarks they make in hallways. She pieces together the details of Anna’s “research initiative.”

It’s midwinter, the hole now eighteen thousand feet deep, when Rita comes to Anna’s office with two copies of a confidential memo. She gives one to the girl. “Recognize this?”

Anna, bored: “What if I do?”

Rita hands her the other, which is identical to the first — copies to be sent to and destroyed by various executives and Anna Krasner, Research Scientist — except that the words “deep exploratory well” on the copy Anna received are replaced by the words “deep waste disposal well.”

Anna shrugs. “So?”

“Well, my dear, it doesn’t look like lover boy drilled your hole because he loves you. He drilled it to pump waste down. Seems to me that he got you awfully cheap. Wouldn’t you say? Buying you with somebody else’s money? As far as he’s concerned, your dream’s just a giant sewer.”

Anna shrugs again. But a week later she fails to report to work, and a janitor discovers that her desk is bare. She simply vanishes into the greater world that Boston sometimes forgets lies all around it. And Kernaghan has only guesses about why she’s left him. He may suspect Rita, but when he comes to see her, she, being far from through with her revenge, is careful not to gloat.

The company wastes no time in taking down the drilling derrick and putting in a pumping station. In the wake of Earth Day, Congress and Nixon are moving towards agreement on creating an environmental-protection administration and enacting Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. Kernaghan suggests that the pumping program be kept quiet, since (a) they’ve been drilling without a license, and (b) given the current ecological hysteria, the public might be alarmed if it learned that highly toxic chemicals are being pumped into the earth, no matter how safe the process is in reality. The chain of command terminating in the actual pumping is carefully broken up, so that only the top executives know the real story, and loopholes of deniability are left for all but one of them. The various plant managers and workers involved in the waste stream are told the fluids pumped at F2 are being stored temporarily in an underground tank, or told the fluids are harmless.

On the day before Kernaghan’s seventy-second birthday, the day of his retirement, when the company’s waste disposal program for the future is firmly in place, Rita appears at his door. She’s been following the conspiracy as it develops, documenting every stage. She’s the secretary of one of the executives involved — maybe even Aldren Sr. She’s come to Kernaghan for blackmail.

“No way,” Louis said. “You don’t blackmail somebody into marrying you. You don’t want to be married to a guy that hates you.”

“Who said anything about marriage? She’s trying to blackmail him, period. She wants all that money he never paid her for her favors. She shows him a list of the documents she has, and she says, Give me X amount of money or else you guys are going to jail. Remember we’re talking about a woman who later defrauded her local bank. And when he sees how serious she is, he starts to weep, genuinely, because he’s tired, and he’s lost Anna, and he’s afraid. He says, Please, Rita, I’m an old man, the best days of my life were spent with you, let’s be friends.”

“But she’s suspicious.”

“Of course she’s suspicious. But it’s hard to see straight when you’ve got all the power. He’s on his knees saying marry me. He’s laughing, he’s crying, he’s insane. He’s utterly in her power, and she’s a woman. She can’t quite bring herself to stick the knife in.”

“Yeah, but wait a second, you can’t tell me the most important thing for him was what the woman looked like, and how old she was, and then say, Oh, but he made an exception for ugly old Rita. If money’s what she wants, I mean not marriage, why doesn’t he buy her off?”