Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Your girlfriend. I see.”

“She had an abortion, and somebody shot her. And you know who the father was?”

“Louis, I—”

“It was me.”

“Well, Louis, that’s — that’s very interesting. For you to tell me that. Although according to what I read in the paper she had some uncertainty—”

“She only said that to take all the responsibility.”

“I suppose that could be the case, Louis, although you shouldn’t—”

“She said it because she’s a conscientious person who takes responsibility for everything she does.”

“Yes, I’m quite familiar with Renée’s conscientiousness.”

He sat up. He swung his bandaged feet to the floor. “What do you mean? Have you been talking to her?”

“As a matter of fact,” Melanie said, “I saw her the weekend before last, and then again last week. But that’s not what’s important now.”

“You saw her?”

“What’s important is that she recover. That’s what you have to think about.”

“You saw her?”

“Yes, but it is not important .”

“My girlfriend is in the hospital and she almost died and you won’t tell me what’s going on?”

“Louis, she gave me some advice.”

“Advice. Advice. She told you to sell your stock.”

There was no reply except for birdsong. The birds might have been perched on his mother’s shoulder, they sounded so close. “She told you to sell your stock,” Louis said. “Right?”

“Well, yes, I see your father has given you a clear picture of the extremely private dilemma I was facing. And it’s exactly as you say: she advised me to sell my stock.”

Louis hobbled to the desk and sat down. “She gave you the advice? Or did she sell it?”

“You may ask her that yourself, Louis. I’m not going to tell you.”

“She was in surgery for four hours last night. She’s in, like, horrible shape. And you want me to ask her?”

“I don’t see what conceivable difference it could make to you. All I’m going to say is that I do not recall the precise arrangement we had.”

“Meaning she sold it to you.”

No reply.

“Did she tell you she knew me?”

“She said that you and she were not involved.”

“Well, we aren’t, strictly speaking.”

“She also said that you and she had not been involved.”

“Well, she lied.”

“Well, and I suppose I knew that. I suppose I knew it all along.”

Louis hung up and clutched his forehead, which had begun to ache. The bathroom was still steamy and herbally scented from Eileen and Peter’s showers. Alongside Peter’s French skin-care products (“poor lum”) and the wide variety of makeup pencils and brushes and pancakes that Louis had been a little surprised to discover Eileen used, he saw the bloodstained washcloth, the empty box of sterile bandages, the wastebasket full of Kleenexes stained with blood and Betadine, the evidence of the quarter hour he’d spent here before he went to bed. He saw the sun in the window. He pictured Somerville Hospital in the daylight, the daylight of a holiday — Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July — that had fallen on a weekday, when the plug is pulled on ordinary activities, and the empty white hours stretch out towards the evening’s obligatory turkey, the night’s fireworks, or, in this case, the afternoon’s visit to the hospital. They’d told him there was a chance he’d be able to see Renée briefly. He raised the toilet seat, which like every other horizontal surface in the bathroom was dusted with the baby powder Eileen had been using on summer mornings for at least twelve years, and he was just beginning to pee when the telephone rang again. He returned to his room.

Hi, this is Lauren Bowles —

He reached for the receiver, but his fingers curled into a fist. He felt how an object, a chair, must feel, the fibers of its wooden members tensed, its arms and legs paralyzed by the geometry of equal and opposing forces. Watching his fingers nonetheless uncurl and raise the receiver was like watching a chair move in an earthquake.

“Hello?” Lauren said. “Hello?. Hello? Is someone there?”

“It’s me, Lauren.”

“Oh God, Louis, you sound so far away. Are you alone? Can I talk to you?”

Now his lips were the stationary object.

“Are you there?” Lauren said. “I was going to wait to call you like you said to, but I was watching Good Morning America and I saw her. It’s so bad, Louis, it’s really really bad, because I’d just been thinking how I wished she didn’t exist. But they said she’s alive. Right?”

“Yes.”

“You know they called her a hero? Like, Louis’s girlfriend is such an incredibly good person they put her picture on TV and say she’s a hero. Like she’s one of the best people in the country or something. And I’m such a good person I’m sitting there wishing she was dead, right up to when I actually saw her.”

“Yeah, Lauren,” he said harshly. “You shouldn’t listen to what they say. She had that abortion to be spiteful. She uses men for sex. She has a smaller heart than you do.”

Lauren was hurt. “I don’t believe you,” she said. It was the first time he’d ever tried to hurt her. He wanted her to hate him and forget him. But it wasn’t pleasant to be hated, at least not by Lauren, whose goodwill towards him had always been a mystery that made the world seem like a hopeful place. He’d be very sorry to live without that goodwill. He asked her where she was.

“I’m at home. I mean with Emmett. I haven’t let him kiss me, though.”

“He must be delighted to have you back.”

“Right, we’re having some real fun talks.”

He stood on his aching, throbbing feet. As the silence on the line lengthened, it took on the particular curdled flavor of daytime long-distance rates.

“This is the end, isn’t it, Louis.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Were you back together with her?”

“No.”

“But you wanted to be?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, fuck,” said Lauren sadly. “I’m so jealous of her, you can’t believe it. You’d think I was a monster if you knew how jealous. But I swear to God, Louis, I hope she gets better. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

She considered this. “OK,” she said. “I’ll see you. I mean — I won’t see you. I guess. I guess I’m going to let Emmett kiss me now.”

“That’s good.”

“Are you jealous of him?”

“No.”

“Not even a little bit?”

“No.”

“Louis.” There was urgency in the word. “Just say yes. Say yes and I’ll hang up, and it will be the end. Please say yes.”

“I’m not jealous of him, Lauren.”

“Why not? Tell me why not.” She sounded like a crossed child. “Aren’t I pretty? Wouldn’t I do anything in the world for you? Don’t I love you?” Between the moment when a glass is irretrievably knocked from a shelf and the moment when it hits the floor, there is a charged and very finite silence. “I hope she dies!” Lauren said. “I hope she fucking dies right this minute!”

Louis knew that if he’d been in the same room with her, he would have gone away with her and lived with her; he knew it the way he knew his own name. But he was speaking on the telephone, with its little plastic guillotine for chopping heads off conversations. Some providence had steered him back to Boston from Chicago, had steered him in the first place to Chicago, where his father had said: Let me tell you the hard half of the truth about women: They don’t get any prettier when they get older; they don’t get any saner when they get older; and they get older very quickly .

“Look what you made me say,” Lauren said.