Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

In Peter’s eyes, Louis had stopped being Eileen’s little brother and become Renée Seitchek’s boyfriend — the partner in her assault on Sweeting-Aldren, and the man who had helped expose David Stoorhuys as the fraud that Peter had long known him to be. Peter gave Louis clothes, including certain items that he still liked, and single-handedly achieved the breakthrough of perceiving that Louis would never be a salesman of ad space or of anything else. Eileen made dinner for the three of them when Louis came home from the hospital. Whenever he looked unhappy, which was often, she asked him what was wrong and tried hard to cheer him up.

What was wrong was that he felt utterly at sea. Now that Eileen was being a peach and Peter no longer patronized him, he had no choice but to be sincere with them. But sincerity implied some kind of belief in something — the kind of belief that Eileen and Peter had in living in America and making a good life for themselves, or that Renée had in the power of women. Louis still thought the country sucked and he had his doubts about the okayness of being male. If he’d ever known how to believe in anything else, he’d long ago forgotten.

He was jealous of the people with pure motives who brought Renée pleasures — pleasures that she shared with him because he was always around her, pleasures that were small and discrete and more easily appreciated than any brought by the man who did things like watching her sleep, or helping her walk up and down the hall, or telling her he was sorry. He was also jealous of the people with impure motives whom she smilingly indulged because amusement hurt less than anger. This latter class did not include journalists (these she simply refused to see) but did include the Hollywood scouts who wanted to buy her story for a prime-time dramatization; the pro-choice activist who wondered if she might address a rally by telephone; and, just before she was released from Brigham & Women’s, her own mother, who one afternoon at three o’clock met Louis at the door of Room 833 and asked him for his help in persuading Renée to return to Newport Beach to complete her recuperation. Renée’s father had already gone back, and her mother pointed out that when she left the hospital she would still need care at home. The problem, Mrs. Seitchek told Louis, was that her daughter only smiled and shook her head at the idea of returning to California. She had $19,000 and insisted she was going to hire a nurse. Which just seemed so cold, so wrong, so—

Louis said, “I can’t help you here, Mrs. Seitchek.”

He left her in the hall and went into Room 833. Renée said, “You know why she wants me back there with her?”

“She wants to take care of you.”

“Yeah, she does,” she admitted. “But what she really hopes is that if I stay there I’ll develop a taste for golf. And kelly-green skirts. And meet one of the young doctors she can’t stop talking about, and marry him.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t know her.”

He waited a moment. “You’re not really going to get a nurse, are you?”

“Watch me.”

“But I can do it myself.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“Please let me.”

“I don’t want you to.”

“You have to let me.”

She closed her eyes. “I know I have to let you.”

More than anything else, he was jealous of her infirmity. It was like a baby that was partly his but dwelt inside her body alone. Listening to it and learning its secrets absorbed most of her attention every day. Whenever he thought he understood it — when he thought that it no longer hurt her to laugh, or that she still needed him to reach things from the table for her — she would turn around and correct him. He had guesses; she had certainty. He supposed that maybe she did still love him, but even if she did she had no time for him. Her distance, the feebleness of her feelings towards him, reminded him of the dreams he had where she was cold to him: where love wasn’t there, where there was another man she wasn’t telling him about.

But the baby was his, too. The pain in her body, the pain from her bullet-torn back muscles and pierced diaphragm and splintered rib and femur and the surgical incisions, had a way of spreading into his own body and making it difficult for him to breathe. He remembered when she was mobile and unbreakable, when he could lie on top of her on a hard floor and she could laugh, when they could drink Rolling Rock and listen to the Stones, when they could be mean to each other and it didn’t matter, when he could hate the world and it didn’t matter. What hurt him was his feeling of responsibility. He wished he were still working for WSNE, still driving on Route 2 in the blue vernal morning twilight, still in his car with Renée before he kissed her. He wished he’d let her hand her Sweeting-Aldren files over to Larry Axelrod and the EPA. He wished he could have paid attention to all nine innings of the Red Sox game they’d seen from Henry Rudman’s seats, could remember who had won and how, could have knowledge as clean and permanent and inconsequential as a box score. He didn’t understand how he could have let a small part of his life — his greed? his hurt? his outrage? — make him responsible for the pain and desolation that had descended on himself and her and much of Boston. But he was responsible, and he knew it.

A Town Car with a PROLIFE 7 vanity plate was parked outside the house when he got back to Pleasant Avenue. He went inside and mounted the stairs slowly, still a little light-headed with Red Cross sickness.

Philip Stites was standing in the middle of Renée’s room, beside the chair he’d rolled over from the desk and had obviously been sitting in. Renée sat in her armchair in a thick sweater and sweatpants and the glasses which she needed all the time now. This morning she’d weighed in at 98 pounds, up one pound from the previous Friday but still down seven from her weight in June. The feverish rigidity of her face muted her expressions. All that registered when she looked at Louis was the flash of sunlight on her lenses. He hurried into the other big room, the room he slept in, and set the books he’d bought on the floor.

“Louis,” Renée said.

He returned to the hallway. “Yo.”

“Philip was just leaving.”

“Oh. So long.”

Stites, wearing an inscrutable smile, waved his hand. Renée was looking at Louis intently. “I didn’t realize the two of you had met,” she said.

“It must have slipped my mind.”

“Those were unhappy circumstances,” Stites said. “These are much happier ones.”

Renée kept her disapproving eyes on Louis even as Stites took her hand and wished her well. Louis opened the door for the minister. “So, Philip,” he said. “Thanks for coming. I’m sure it meant a lot to her.”

Stites started down the stairs, motioned casually to Louis to follow, as if he had no doubt that Louis would, and stopped on the doggy second-floor landing. Louis glanced at Renée, whose expression hadn’t changed, and descended the stairs.

“Why do I get this impression of hostility?” Stites asked a beam of bright dust specks.

“I hear you’re leaving town,” Louis said.

“Tomorrow morning. Ever been to Omaha, Nebraska? About the only thing it’s got in common with Boston is a big sky.”

“You feel you’ve done sufficient damage here.”

Stites failed to react to this stimulus. He unwrapped a stick of sugarless gum and daintily pushed it into his mouth. “Hostility, hostility,” he said. “I came to apologize to Renée for any pain I ever caused her. And I tell you what, Louis, it made me pretty happy to hear what you been doing for her.”

“I’m glad I made you happy, Philip.”

“Fine, say what you gotta say. You’ll never see me again. But you know damn well that what you’re doin’ is a very good thing.”