Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“I’ll go.”

She spun around and, purple-faced, bent over him and cried, “You stay here , you stay here , you’re not going anywhere! You can’t go. You don’t have anyplace to go. You stay here because you’re my brother and I don’t want you to go . If you go I’ll never ever ever forgive you.”

Then the door slammed and Louis was left alone in the room, squeezing the penny he hadn’t given her.

For three days they kept out of each other’s way. She left in the morning before Louis was awake, and he returned from a day of what she assumed was job-hunting at eight or nine at night and went straight to his room. By Thursday afternoon she was feeling attractive and remorseful again. She came home with her new French string bag filled with food and was surprised to find Louis in the living room. Was it possible that he’d been spending his days not job-hunting but watching TV? He was wearing his glasses again, and sitting with bowed head and folded hands on the sofa facing the video equipment, which was silent.

“I hope you haven’t eaten dinner,” she said.

He gave no sign of having heard her. He stared at the slatefaced TV and rubbed his thumbs together.

“Is something wrong?” she said, resisting an influx of irritation.

His mouth opened, but only silence came out.

“Well, I’m making a nice dinner,” she said. “So I hope you’ll be ready to eat it.”

As soon as she went to the kitchen she heard the front door open and close. She turned on the kitchen TV and put a Perdue chicken in the oven (in France she’d learned that you could have warm meat in salads — poulet, canard, and the like), and then for a few minutes she forgot where she was and what she was doing, because of the news on Channel 4.

…was tragically gunned down in what police are calling the worst outbreak yet of pro-life violence. Penny Spanghornis standing by, live, at the scene of this tragic, tragic shooting. Penny?

Jerry, this afternoon Renée Seitchek went to New Cambridge Health Associates in Cambridge, where the so-called Church of Action in Christ was performing the latest in its series of illegal door-blocking actions. Police arrested twelve demonstrators for attempting to harass Seitchek. At about five o’clock Seitchek came out of the clinic and spoke with reporters in what was said to be a very emotional confrontation. She stated that she’d had a — she had terminated a pregnancy. Tragically, it now appears that she may have paid for this statement with her life. At about five-thirty she returned to her home here on Pleasant Avenue in Somerville, where she was greeted with a hail of gunfire from an unidentified assailant in a parked car across the street. Shortly before six o’clock, Channel 4 News received an anonymous phone call from an extremist group taking credit for the tragic shooting, and I quote: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” Somerville police say they received a similar phone call at about the same time .

Eileen stared, stricken, at Penny Spanghorn. She was weeping over the arugula and radicchio in her salad spinner — weeping not just for Renée and Louis but for herself as well — when Peter came home from work. She told him that Renée was in critical condition with severe chest and abdominal injuries.

“Shit,” he said, paling. “Is that horrible?”

“It’s so rotten. Everything is so, so rotten.”

“It is truly horrible all right.”

The Church of Action in Christ , said Philip Stites, condemns the wicked and cowardly shooting of Renée Seitchek this afternoon. We in the church deplore all forms of human violence, whether it’s violence against an unborn baby or violence against a citizen of the Commonwealth. Renée Seitchek is a woman of conscience and a creature of God. We mourn her injuries, and we extend our deepest sympathy to her family and friends and join them in sending her our prayers and love .

It was after midnight when Eileen and Peter, watching but not listening to Arsenio Hall in their airconditioned bedroom, heard Louis come in. Eileen went to see him. She was wearing her favorite summer nightshirt, a light cotton Bennington jersey, extra large.

Louis was sitting on the floor of his room, applying a folded Kleenex to the bleeding, popped blisters that covered both his feet. His sweat-soaked shirt was spattered with blood and clung tightly to his breast. His black oxfords, dusty and exhausted-looking, lay next to him. Apparently he hadn’t been wearing any socks.

“Are you hurt?” Eileen said.

“They shot Renée,” he answered in a thin, parched voice.

“I know. I know. I can’t stop crying.”

“They shot Renée.”

“But she’s OK, Louis. They said she’s OK,” although this wasn’t strictly accurate. Channel 4 would only say she hadn’t died yet.

Louis prodded the raw flesh of his feet, tearing at the ragged skin with his fingers. Eileen, watching, felt as if she’d fallen and no one would help her. Even though they were suffering so much more than she was, it seemed to her that Louis and Renée had teamed up to rob her of an inheritance. She felt a flash of jealousy and anger, and in its light she saw that there was an absolute standard of goodness in the world, an ideal that she was infinitely far from achieving. Louis continued to press his thumbnails into his candy-red sores for no other purpose than the pain it brought him. She knew she had to stay with him and comfort him, but she couldn’t bear to see him do that to his feet, and so she left him and lay down by Peter and let guilt and darkness swallow her.

He had run down the stairs and out onto Marlborough Street. The twin lines of brick town houses stretching to the west framed a yellow sun whose plasma had condensed in drops on green thunderstorm-soaked shrubs, in steaming beads on car hoods, in brilliant, smoking sheets on asphalt. A boom box in a basement window rang with the clash and assonance of Sonic Youth. Running, he saw the red high-tops and black roller skates of urban students, the white bunny feet of women in their commuter sneakers, the stiletto heels and penny loafers of real-estate agents, the paws of dogs, the laceless half-soled boots of men with no address. Keys jingled and car doors closed. A man (it had to be a man because hardly any women did it) whistled.

He ran up Mass Ave. and over the river down which a flood might just have roared, flushing all the rental sailboats and waterlogged McDonald’s trash into the sewer of Boston Harbor and leaving in its wake an earthy freshwater pungency. He pushed through the sluggish crowds vented by the subway at Central Square, ran up past the battalion of Volvos and Subarus soon to be carrying free-range chickens and baby zucchini away from Bread & Circus on Prospect Street, and up through the population densities surrounding Inman Square, where Portuguese immigrants and obese native East Cantabrigians mingled with Harvard comparative-lit grad students no more easily than Pastene Brand olive oil mixes with Poland Spring mineral water, and mufflers leaked or scraped on the pavement, and there were suspicious blackish sediments in every puddle, and a blond bearded youth with a lavender bandanna around his neck walked down the middle of the sidewalk singing “Sugar Magnolia” loudly.

By the time he crossed Union Square the sun had fallen into clouds, leaving a humid dusk that smelled of car exhaust and spoiled fruit. He limped up Walnut Street, neck outstretched, feet barely clearing the sidewalk joints, heart working shallowly, futilely, as though his blood in its heat had become too thin to pump. Near the summit of the hill he began to pass cars that had slowed to squeeze past or gawk at the Channel 4 and Channel 7 vans parked just short of the corner of Pleasant Avenue. A squad car blocked access to the street. A second squad car and the less overtly marked sedan of Somerville’s police chief stood just beyond number 7’s chain link fence and its burden of honeysuckle and crime-scene tape. Across the street an officer was taking pictures of the gutter, in which, as one bystander explained to another, some shell casings had come to light. A detective was transferring to a form on a clipboard the eager statements of two boys, one pint-sized and one gallon-sized, whom Louis recognized as the male contingent of the twenty-four-hour haunters of the front porch opposite number 7.