Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“It’s a lie.”

“A lie? His girlfriend’s in the hospital”—Peter nodded at Louis, who continued to stare implacably at Stoorhuys—“and she didn’t think it was a lie. And everything she had that proved it’s true got stolen the day she was shot. You’re saying that’s a lie?” Stoorhuys paged back through his magazine, studying the photographs. “I don’t know anything about this.”

“Watch him, Ma. Watch him make the phone call. He’s got to make that phone call.”

Mrs. Stoorhuys wasn’t listening. She was massaging her collarbone and looking as if the ficus tree at her feet were about to make her cry.

“If somebody’s slandering us,” Stoorhuys said, “I’ll have to let the company know. But that doesn’t—”

“Right, the company, the company. That’s what counts, isn’t it, Dad? Who cares about Ma? She’s just a person. It’s the company—”

“The company that paid for your education!” Stoorhuys jumped from the sofa and advanced on his son. “The company that straightened your teeth! That put food on your plate and clothes on your back for twenty years!”

“Straightened my teeth? My God, you think we’re living in Charlestown? You think you’re making thirty grand a year?”

As quickly as he’d heated up, Stoorhuys cooled off again. He sighed and chose, for some reason, to address Louis. “You see what I get at home?” he said. “You see the thanks I get?”

Louis wore an expression of the utmost seriousness and did not reply. He watched as the older man picked up a seersucker jacket from the back of the sofa, patted the keys in one of its pockets, and inserted his bony arms in its sleeves. “Janet, I have to go to the office for a little while. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation for all this.”

Although Mrs. Stoorhuys nodded, it was a long time before she raised her eyes from the ficus tree; and then she looked at her husband as if she hadn’t heard him speak. “David,” she said. “I’ve never made any trouble for you about your work. I’ve never. pressed you. I’ve never asked you questions that I. could have asked you. But you have to tell me now. You didn’t really have anything to do with — that girl’s.? That’s all I want to know. You just have to tell me that.”

The fragility of her poise, the tremor in her voice, made even Louis squirm. Stoorhuys himself balled his fists and looked around the room for some inanimate object to vent his feelings on. His glance fell on Peter. He smiled bitterly. “You see what you’ve done, Pete? You satisfied now? Now that she’s on your side?”

“I’m asking you a question,” Mrs. Stoorhuys said. “I want you to answer it. I’ve never asked you questions, but I think I have a right to ask you about this—”

“Oh, you do, do you?” Stoorhuys said, flashing fury. “Well, maybe you’re a little late. Maybe you’re about twenty years too late.” Again, he turned to Louis. “Twenty years ago I got a raise that almost doubled our income overnight. And when I told her about it, do you know what she asked me?”

“ I have a right to ask now ,” she said.

“You know what she asked me?” He moved closer to Louis, smiling a little, preparing the punch line. “She asked me if we could get a house where the kids could all have their own rooms. And that was it. That was the extent of her curiosity.”

“Why was it up to me to ask? You could have told me!”

Stoorhuys ignored her, continuing to speak only to Louis. “I would have quit the job if she’d asked me one question about it then. I was ready to quit. One question would have done it. But you see, I didn’t even matter. Even then, I didn’t matter. As long as the kids all had their own—”

“Peter. Have I been a good mother? Have I been a good mother to you?”

“Twenty years,” Stoorhuys said. “Twenty years, and she decides to ask me now . She could have asked me a week ago, a month ago, a year ago. But for twenty years, day after day—! She has no right to ask me questions now. And Peter has no right to blame this all on me. He’s not neutral. You have to understand what it’s like with her. I hear her on the phone with him, I hear her asking him about his work and giving him advice, and telling him what to do. But never a word, never a word about my work. My work that has given her everything she’s got.”

“It was better not to—”

He spun around and shouted in her face. “Never a word!” She put her hands in the air and let them hover an inch from her ears. “Never a word! You made your choice, you chose the children, and now you think you have the right to ask me questions? And blame me? Who do you think has gotten the benefit of those twenty years? You think it’s me? You think I haven’t made a few sacrifices myself? Janet — and Peter, you listen to me too — Janet, I have been a better husband than you will ever know. Than you will ever know.”

Louis could see it now, how if this man had had a gun in his hand and a woman in front of him, he might have killed her. Everyone could see it now. Mrs. Stoorhuys buried her face in her hands. As Peter moved to comfort her, she twisted away and ran from the room.

Peter ran after her. “Ma—”

They heard her stumbling on the stairs and Peter shouting, “Ma!”

Louis and Eileen watched Stoorhuys take his car keys from his pocket.

“So you shot her?” Louis said casually.

Stoorhuys looked up at him, surprised. It was as if he hadn’t really registered Louis’s face until this moment. “I don’t even know you,” he said, leaving the room.

A silence fell. Eileen rocked in her chair and turned a page of Colourful St. Kitts .

“Boy,” Louis said.

“Isn’t it awful?”

“Everybody who’s had anything to do with that company is basically damned, including me.”

“I’ll take care of you. You be my baby.”

“Yeah, well. I don’t know about that.”

Peter returned to the kitchen smoking a cigarette. He poured an inch of scotch into a glass and held the liter-and-a-half bottle up so Eileen and Louis could see it from the family room.

“Yes please,” they said.

They sat and drank and sweated on the deck by the swimming pool, where the exhaust from Peter’s father’s Porsche was hanging in the air. The blower of the Stoorhuyses’ central airconditioning unit took a break, and Eileen removed her shoes and dipped her legs in the pool. “What’s going to happen?” she said.

Louis listened to the crickets and to the pipping of a bat. “Investigation,” he said. “Big stink in the press. Maybe there’ll be some lawsuits. If we’re lucky, we can eventually forget it.”

Peter spoke from the end of the diving board where he was sitting. “He as much as admitted he pulled the trigger. And how do you live with that? Was I supposed to call the cops? Tie him down?”

One by one the lights in the upstairs bedrooms were extinguished. The airconditioner came on again. Went off, came on, and Louis wondered if he might simply die the next time its white noise ceased. Eileen was swimming slow laps, on her back, in her bra and underpants. Peter could have been a corpse stretched out on the diving board. Louis focused his consciousness on the sound of the airconditioner, trying to anticipate the instant of cessation, trying to greet this little death with open eyes. What he heard instead, at length, was false morning. Not just a bird or two awakening, but hundreds of them, and the yelping of a neighbor’s dog.

He stumbled out of his chair, not knowing what to do. “Here one comes,” he said.

Eileen let her legs sink to the floor of the pool, at the shallow end. She shook water from her ear. “What?”