Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

For a moment Louis watched her shiver and weep in her armchair. Then he bent over and put his hands in her armpits and raised her to her feet. She was very light. The lenses of her glasses each had a single tear streak down the middle. He kissed her unresponding lips with none of the discretion and conscious kindness of their bedtime and hello and goodbye kisses. He kissed her because he was starving for her.

“Don’t.”

“Why not.”

“You’re just doing it because you — ow. Ow!”

He was squeezing her hard, one of his hands directly on the closed entrance wound in her back, his other hand on her butt beneath her sweatpants and underpants, his thigh squarely in her groin. She took his ear in her mouth and said, “Don’t squeeze.”

She shook while he undressed her on the bed. She covered herself with a blanket while he stood up to take his own clothes off.

“Don’t ever put that sweatshirt on again,” she said.

He knelt beside her and peeled back the blanket. He put his cheek on her white belly and the heel of his hand in the hollow of her pelvis. He wanted to fill this hollow with semen. The fast-dwindling warmth of it would tickle her, make her belly convulse like a hillside in the throes of a disaster. He knew this because he’d seen it happen, back in May.

She sat up and tried to pull him onto her.

“I have to look at you,” he said.

“Just hurry along, if you don’t mind.”

Her cunt seemed to him a thing of unbearable beauty. Its readiness, its subtlety, its bed of dark hair. Unconcealed by adipose tissue, the individual muscles in her arms and legs were visible in their small, filet-like glory. Her retroperitoneal scar was a great circle of healed injury stretching from a point below her sternum, around under her ribs, and into the center of her back. For better or worse, his prick shuddered fully into hardness as he turned her body and followed the scar’s irregular progress, its purple and red runes, through the places where it was a bunching of the skin and the more tender-looking places where it was a stretching. He couldn’t help thinking of the aerial photograph of the San Andreas Fault he’d seen in one of her books, how the long raised seam traversed the smooth skin of the California desert, how the narrow groove down the center of the seam was cut by suture-like hatchings. He felt glad to be alive and in this bed. There had ceased to be any question in his mind that the thing he was looking at was Renée Seitchek. The focus of his love had migrated from his imagination into her body, and had taken his imagination along with it, the inescapable joining of her legs now embodying some necessary convergence of emotions in himself, the warmth of her skin identical to the warmth his eyes felt when the lids came down to cover them. He licked her cool thoracostomy scar. He kissed the ragged star of the exit wound beneath her right breast. A bullet had come through here bearing bits of her bone and her lung tissue, but she was breathing without pain now. She played with his prick, opening and closing her opposed finger and thumb, pulling strands in the clear taffy it secreted. She bent sideways and sucked on it, briefly.

He squeezed a blob of nonoxynol jelly into the center of her diaphragm, lubricated the rim and folded it in two, and pushed it into her vagina until it unfolded into place. The procedure was similar in some interesting ways to preparing a bird for roasting.

She looked scared when he settled himself on top of her. He resisted the idea that it was “important” that they were making love now, but unfortunately it did seem kind of important. Her eyes were open wide and she was blinking rapidly, as if it might have been Death and not Louis who was weighing on her chest and sliding a firm piece of his flesh into a narrow gap in hers, and more generally invading the citadel where she had kept her self, her soul, during the months when she was lonelier than she was now. He slung his left leg up over her hip to keep from bearing on her osteomyelitic femur. The position was awkward, and she lay so inertly, through little choice of her own, that he felt like he was clinging to a slippery rock with not many handholds.

“Tell me when I’m hurting you.”

“Well I’m hurting a little in a lot of places.”

“Hurting you too much I mean.”

Eyes closed, she pressed him into her as deeply as he would go. She breathed in the heavy, heedless way that made a man feel like a king and made his ejaculation an event of huge sweetness. He lay beside her and massaged the forward end of her labia with the palm of his hand until she came. He took his prick in his own hand and deposited semen in the pelvic hollow he had a fetish for. She thrashed a little, and rubbed the hollow for a long time before it stopped tickling her. They made inane and sentimental statements about breath and current genital conditions and love. They repeated the major act, straining and sweating until she became fretful and told him she was feeling really sick. He stood up immediately and covered her with the blanket. “Let me get you some lunch.”

She shook her head. She was slack-faced and miserable. “Some toast, some tea.”

“There’s no way I can go out tonight. You’ll have to call her.”

“You can sleep all afternoon. We’ll see how you feel.”

“I’m so tired of being tired.”

“Have a bite. Take a nap.”

When her door was closed and he knew that she was sleeping, he sat at the kitchen table and opened the envelope from Lauren. There was a letter in her pretty, ungainly hand.

September 20

Dear Louis,

I have to write to you today because I have to. I think about how if I’d wrote to you last fall everything would be different. I have to write to you for me, not you, so I hope you don’t mind too much. You don’t have to write back.

Well, the big news is — I’m pregnant! Its a good thing, because I already have a little bread basket. People ask when I’m due and I say April and they can’t believe it. They think I’m going to say December. I spend a lot of time walking on air. I don’t even know if you would know me I’m so different. I feel like I’ve found the real ME. I already love my baby like crazy and talk to him all the time. Well, that’s the big news.

Louis, sometimes I miss you so much I start crying. I miss how funny you were and how considerate. But now I know God didn’t mean for us to be together. God meant for me and Emmett to be together. I’m so thankful I have a life and a good husband and (SOON) a little baby I can love. I still love you (there, I said it!) but in a different way . But do you know what I wish sometimes? I wish I could see Renée, just her and me. I want to kiss her on the cheek because she has you, you are a sweet boy. Is she all well again — I hope? I do hope it with all my heart, Louis.

Well, there’s the news from Texas. I’m not telling MaryAnn I’m pregnant until I know everything’s OK. I’m friend’s with Emmett’s Mom now. She took me to her church group. The people were so wierd there but I’m friend’s with them too. Oh well.

Louis, you will always be my friend even if we never meet again. “The King is dead, long live the King.” That’s what they say in England when their king dies. Get it??

Your friend,

He left the letter on the table so Renée could read it if she wanted. He felt vaguely tainted or compromised, and he wondered if he’d had the wrong idea about Lauren all along. At the moment, at least, she didn’t compare well with the woman he’d just mated with.

His lunch eaten, he faced the problem of the afternoon. In the morning he shopped, worked on his car, did cleaning, and, until a few days ago, took Renée to the clinic for her daily antibiotics shot; in the evening they ate and went to movies or watched TV. But in the afternoon he ran up against the same hopelessness that had afflicted him ever since he lost his job at WSNE. All he could find to do while Renée rested was read books. He’d consumed the novels of Thomas Hardy one after another, not really enjoying them but not stopping until even Jude the Obscure was under his belt. He’d since moved on to Henry James, for whom his mood of patience and suspended judgment made him an ideal reader. He especially liked The Bostonians , because James’s Boston of the 1870s turned out to be inhabited by the same eternal feminists with whom Louis had marched in the big pro-choice rally in July, the same crackpots and dreamers who had funded Rita Kernaghan and come to her memorial, the same slippery journalists who were still trying to insinuate themselves into Renée’s apartment by telephone. He began to forgive the chill of this northern city. He thought about the Brahmin blood running in his own veins. He watched himself being consoled by literature and history, and, observing how much he’d changed in one year, he wondered what kind of person he was ultimately meant to be. But there was still that hopelessness or sorrow right beneath the skin of his afternoons.