Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Right,” Louis said. “I’m a hell of a guy. See my Band-Aid? I’ve been giving blood. My penance, right? Because I sinned, right?” He stared at Stites, quivering. “I laughed at Jesus and I wasn’t faithful to my girlfriend and I let her kill our baby, but now I’ve got it all straight in my mind. I’m taking care of her and trying to live a Christian life. We’ll get married and have children and we’ll all be singing hymns on TV. Except I’m such a good Christian that if anybody tries to say I’m doing the right thing I deny it because if I didn’t, that would be pride, and pride’s a sin, right? And faith is a thing inside you. So I’m not only a hell of guy, I’m deep and true, right?”

Stites chewed his gum with smooth, slow jawstrokes. “Nothing you say makes me stop loving God.”

“Well, go ahead. Go ahead.”

“I hope you find some happiness.”

“Yeah, you too. Have fun in Omaha.”

Stites looked at Louis with the complicity and pleasure of a person being told a joke. He laughed, exposing his little wad of gum. It wasn’t a forced or cruel laugh but the laugh of someone who had expected to be delighted, and was. He gave Louis a last, knowing look and trotted down the stairs. Through the landing’s filthy window, Louis watched him evade the grasping honeysuckle and get into his car. He felt a large but strangely painless emptiness inside him, as when he’d been bluffed in a poker game.

Upstairs again, he assumed a casual manner. “Can I make you some lunch?”

Renée sat in her armchair and looked at him. The chair occupied a shadow between patches of sunshine on the floorboards. Her silence was ominous in the extreme.

“Can I make you some lunch?” he said again.

“You certainly got me back pretty easily, didn’t you?”

He weighed the consequences of ignoring that she’d said this. He leaned on the doorframe. “What do you mean?”

“I mean one day I’m living by myself and hating you for how much you hurt me, and the next thing I know I wake up and you’re living with me again and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

“You woke up a long time ago.”

“No, I didn’t wake up a long time ago. You listen to what I’m saying. I’m saying I just woke up.”

“Fine. You just woke up.”

“So what are you going to do about it?”

“About.?”

“About the fact that you’re living with me and we’re acting like nothing ever happened.”

“Well, I was about to make you some lunch.”

“I’m saying you got me back pretty easily.”

“What was I supposed to do? Keep away from you? While you were in the hospital? I mean, how many times did I tell you I was sorry? And you said to stop saying it—”

“Well I felt like shit.”

“But so all I can do is show you how sorry I am and how much I love you.”

She flinched as though the word love were a dart. “I’m saying I never had a chance to think about what I wanted. Everything just happened. And I’m not at all sure about it.”

“You’re not sure you want me living here.”

“That’s part of it.”

“You’re not sure you even want to see me.”

“That’s the other part of it. I mean, I do want to see you. But everything’s all tied together, there’s no room to think . I want to get to know you, somehow. I don’t want us to be together just because we happen to be together. I want to start over again.”

“Beginning with me moving out.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You want me to leave. You’re trying to say it in a nice way.” She closed her eyes and bit her lip. She wasn’t someone he knew, this underweight woman with the hectic face and overgrown hair and wire-frame glasses. A deft exchange had been effected, and no fraud was involved — the woman was clearly who she seemed to be. She just wasn’t the ghost made of memories and expectations that he had seen at breakfast. She opened her eyes and looked straight ahead. “Yes, I want you to leave.”

He took an unopened envelope from the table in the hallway and carried it into her room. “Is this the problem?”

She didn’t even glance at it. “Give me some credit.”

“Answer the question.”

“Yeah, all right. It’s part of the problem. It upsets me that you got a letter from her here. It upsets me that I found out about it because you were out and somebody else brought the mail up. Because for all I know, you get letters like this every day—”

“I do not.”

“And I just don’t know about it. That’s part of the problem. But it’s not—”

“You think she sends me letters and I don’t tell you. You think I’ve got a whole second relationship—”

“Shut up. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying it’s totally inappropriate for her to send you letters here, and it’s up to you to make that clear to her, because she obviously doesn’t see anything wrong with it herself.”

The personal pronouns— she, her —were pronounced with a hatred like nothing he had heard from her before. Lauren didn’t hate Renée like this.

“I’ll let her know,” he said.

She shook her head. “I can’t live with you.”

“I told you I don’t even think about her anymore. I told you all I want’s a chance to make it up to you. I know I acted like a prick. But I didn’t even sleep with her and I never think about her now.”

“And boy was that stupid of you. Because it doesn’t make the slightest difference to me whether you slept with her. It makes zero difference.”

“Well I would have done it, but she didn’t want to.”

Renée looked at the ceiling in disgust and disbelief. “That’s sick. That is so sick. She walks into your apartment but she won’t sleep with you. Because what, I can just imagine it. Because she’s a better person than I am, because she really loves you and she won’t fuck you before she marries you. That really makes me feel good, to hear that.”

“I felt sorry for her,” Louis said, very quietly. He set the letter from Lauren on the desk.

“Well, here’s somebody else to feel sorry for. I do the best I can with self-pity but I can’t do it all. Here’s a person who has a fever every day and whose back still hurts and whose chest is all scars and who can’t see right anymore and has to live and be ugly and know she’s ugly every minute of the day, if you need somebody to feel sorry for.”

He frowned. “I’ve never felt sorry for you. I hurt with you, but I admire you and love you. And you’re so beautiful.”

She made no attempt to hold her tears back. “I can’t live with you. I can’t live with you, and I can’t get rid of you.”

“It’s easy to get rid of me.”

“Well, then, just do it. Just go. Because this is the real me you’re looking at. This is what I’m like inside. I’m a jealous insecure little ugly shrew. And that’s what I’m going to be, and you can go on living with me because you feel guilty and you can watch me make your life a hell, or you can get out and go live with her right now because I certainly have no desire to live with you if we’re going to fight like this, or else you can be kind to me—”

“Kind to you?”

“Kinder than you’ve already been. Kind to me right this minute. You can tell me you don’t think about her all the time. You can tell me I may not be as young as she is, and I may be a scarred-up ugly mess, but I’m still not so bad. You have to tell me that all the time . You have to tell me you don’t write letters to her and you don’t call her and you appreciate me. You have to take all the things you’ve said and say them about a hundred times more often. Because I’m trying to have energy, I’m trying to get back to being a person again, but I can’t do it fast enough.”