Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

A silence fell on the becalmed bed. Peter was shaking his head, his lips hanging open. Eileen’s face was very dark. “You never told me this,” she said in an ominously small voice. “You said she wanted you to help her with her new book.”

“Yeah, I know. But what am I supposed to do? First of all, I didn’t believe her. And second of all, she said he was going to kill her if she told anybody. You know? I was scared.”

“You told Renée,” Eileen insisted quietly, staring at the bedspread.

“Because Rita was already dead. The whole thing was moot. You know, and I still didn’t even know if I should believe her. She had enemies in Ipswich, because of the pyramid. For all I knew, she’d made the whole thing up about my dad.”

“But she didn’t,” Louis said.

“Right. And instead of her getting shot, it’s Renée. And I tell you, it wasn’t just some nobody that pulled the trigger. It was my own fucking dad.”

“Please stop swearing,” Eileen said.

Peter had swung his legs over the bed’s gunwales and was pulling his Nikes on. “I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but I’m going out there. Out there right this minute.”

“Maybe we should let the police—”

“No way I’m going to miss this,” Peter said. “I’ve been waiting half my life.”

Eileen smiled nervously at Louis. “I guess we’ll go out there.”

“Guess so.”

While Peter groomed in the bathroom, she filled Milton Friedman’s water bottle. The gerbil was climbing the bars of its cage, loins and shoulders shuddering as it thrust its penis-like head into the freedom all around it. “I get so scared,” she said to Louis. “He and his dad just don’t get along .”

“Much to his own credit, apparently.”

“You’ll watch out for him?”

“Of course. He’s your boyfriend.”

She insisted that they ride in Louis’s car, rather than let the angry Peter drive. Louis couldn’t remember when he’d driven Eileen somewhere. Possibly he never had. Peter muttered and cursed in the back seat as they sliced through the light Sunday evening traffic on the Northeast Expressway, but the Hollands were silent. Eileen seemed older after her week’s work in the real world, seemed harder, graver, and physically larger, though if anything she’d lost weight. The hands resting on her lap had little softness anymore. They were hands to grip a mattress during sex, hands to spoon food into a baby’s mouth, hands to sign contracts and run deep credit checks.

Exiting from Route 128 in Lynnfield, they left the daylight behind and entered a suburban twilight of shadowing trees, of still and bluely glowing lawns and fields and air untom by any sound more violent than the swish of passing tires. Nature’s appearance was inexpressibly benign here in the suburbs. She lay down and whispered like the warm surf between black-bottomed sea and parched land: between the scarred and mourning woods, and the city where a new nature had taken nature’s place. Lawns freely gave away their smell of grass and earth, lay comfortably naked beneath a sky that could be trusted. Each house was like a mother, silent, set back from the roads with windows lit, as an object always welcoming and sheltering, but as a subject always betraying consciousness of the truth that children stop being children, that they’ll leave and that an enclosure that welcomes and shelters will ache with their absence, will have ached all along because it’s an object.

Eileen directed Louis to a street with only six houses on it, the largest of them belonging to the Stoorhuyses. Peter led them in through the front door. The Stoorhuys living room was a long, low-ceilinged, formal room whose native face was masked by heavy floral drapes and fifteen or twenty bad oil paintings in ornate gilded frames. The paintings were all of European cities — rain-slicked cobblestones, shuttered hotels and scabrous palaces in the dusky colors of ancient clothing, all the reds maroons, all the yellows umbers, all the whites streaked and crusted like guano; there were no people in this Europe.

Floral patterns held sway in the Stoorhuys kitchen. Little nosegays grew like mildew on the chair cushions and the wallpaper, the quilted food-processor and mixer cozies, the stoneware plates and bowls, the enamel lids for the stove elements, and the crocks of flour and sugar and coffee. One of Peter’s sisters, a slender, diffident, homely blonde in collegiate summer fashions, was making popcorn in the microwave. In the adjacent family room, the elder Stoorhuyses were sitting in the glow and squawk of Murder, She Wrote.

Eileen introduced Louis to the diffident Sarah and then to Peter’s mother, who had risen to greet the visitors. She was a tall, gentle woman with an unabashedly ruined face and too-long hair. Louis shook her hand quickly before he followed Peter into the family room. When Peter switched off the TV and turned to face his father, Louis touched the power switch himself and likewise turned, standing at Peter’s side like a second.

Mr. Stoorhuys was sprawled on a leather sofa. He wore a white Ferdinand Marcos shirt with a huge tab collar. “You want to turn that back on, Pete?”

“Peter, we were watching,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys from the doorway.

“I think Dad’s got something to say to us,” Peter said. “Don’t you, Dad.”

Stoorhuys looked up guardedly, trying to fathom the connection between his son and Louis. “Not that I know of,” he said.

“Nothing about Renée Seitchek?”

“Oh, that poor girl,” said Mrs. Stoorhuys.

“She’s Louis’s girlfriend,” Eileen said. She had sat down in a rocker and was sightlessly turning the pages of a coffee-table book called Colourful St. Kitts .

“She’s your girlfriend?” Mrs. Stoorhuys was stricken. “What a terrible thing!”

“Yeah, it is terrible,” Peter said as Louis tried, without success, to pin Stoorhuys with a stare. “Isn’t it, Dad? Somebody shoots her in the back and then blames it on somebody else. It’s a goddamn shame she didn’t die, isn’t it? Then nobody knows all her papers disappeared.”

The corn popping in the kitchen sounded like muffled gunfire. Stoorhuys had opened an Architectural Digest on the sofa and was stroking his bushy forelock, trying to subdue it. “You’ve lost me, Pete.”

“Her papers,” Peter said. “The papers that show whose fault the earthquakes are. She’s told the police, Dad. They’re going to be heading for Peabody any minute.”

“Peter, what are you talking about?” his mother said.

“It was an accident, right, Dad? You just wanted to scare her. Fire a few shots over her head. But then, what the hell. There she is. Just, just — kill her then, right? Why not just kill her?”

Peter was shaking so much that his elbow bumped Louis’s. Stoorhuys turned a page of his magazine, his jaw rigid as he pretended to read. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh yeah? Watch him, Ma. He’s got a phone call he wants to make. Just watch. I guarantee you he’s going to get on the phone. Or he’s going to have to go out for a minute. He’s going to wait till you’re not looking, or he’s going to get up in the night. He’s going to go to Peabody, or he’s going to run for his life.”

Stoorhuys shook his head, as if with deep sadness, and said nothing. But his face was covered with sweat and his hands were trembling.

“David,” Mrs. Stoorhuys said. “What’s he talking about?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just more of the same. He’s good, I’m bad. He’s smart, I’m stupid.”

“You’re damn right,” Peter said. “Or am I the one that’s pumping toxic waste underground? And causing earthquakes?”