Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

He woke Renée at five-thirty. Her temperature was low enough for her to consider going out, and by six they were on their way to Ipswich. The golds of the season and the hour were in the trees reflected in the contoured glass of cars on I-93. Through the few windows that weren’t smoked for privacy, lone commuters could be seen hunching aggressively over steering wheels or talking about their lives on telephones.

“She wants to kiss me on the cheek,” Renée said.

“Oh, you read that, did you.”

“This is some southern species I don’t understand.”

“She’s a nice person. Very mixed up.”

“You pursue this topic at your own risk. You must know I’d be happier if you told me she’s a total jerk. Her and her little breadbasket.”

“What can I say? I’m embarrassed.”

It was night when they reached Ipswich. The frame of the pyramid still squatted on the house on Argilla Road, silhouetted against the moon-whitened sky, but most of the aluminum siding had been removed. It lay twisted in piles by the circular drive. Extension ladders weighted down a pair of tarpaulins covering tools and stacks of lumber near the front door.

The lean, sophisticated woman of Brahmin stock who was Louis’s mother ushered him and Renée into the living room and poured them drinks at the bar. Again buckets of money had been spent to repair the house, to demonstrate that wealth was stronger than any earthquake. Melanie’s navy-blue dress had navy-blue buttons and padded shoulders and hugged her hips and thighs and knees. She’d visited Renée in the hospital, once, and hadn’t seen her since then. She didn’t fuss over her now. It was left to Louis to make her comfortable on the sofa.

“Before our brains get too clouded,” Melanie said, “we have some business to discuss.” She took an envelope from the mantelpiece. “This is for you, Renée. I think you’ll agree that everything’s correct here?”

Renée silently showed Louis the contents of the envelope. There was a personal check, made out to her, for the sum of six hundred thousand and xx/100ths dollars, and a receipt for the same amount made out to Melanie Holland.

“You’ll notice I’ve dated it the thirtieth,” Melanie said. “You’ll recall this was the deadline we established. Louis, you’ve witnessed that she has the check in her possession?”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“If you’ll just sign the receipt then, Renée.” Melanie held out a pen which Renée looked at blankly. “Or is something not correct?”

Silently Renée took the pen and signed the receipt. Melanie folded it in half, tucked it in the breast pocket of her dress, and delivered herself of a huge sigh. “Well. That’s taken care of. Now we can relax a little. How are you, Renée?”

Renée raised her chin. She held the check in her lap like a handkerchief she’d been using. “Not too bad,” she said.

“That’s marvelous. You’re looking so much more like yourself than the last time I saw you. I hope Louis is taking good care of you?”

Renée turned and looked at him as if she’d forgotten him until this mention of his name. She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

“Louis, that reminds me of the other business I wanted to discuss. This is our last piece of business for tonight, I promise.” Melanie gave a false little laugh. “I suppose you know I haven’t been able to sell this house. I realize it’s not simply my own personal misfortune that there isn’t a buyer to be found between here and New Jersey for a house at last year’s prices. I’m willing to accept the depression of the market in the Northeast and whatever loss that entails for me. Unfortunately, we had another little tremor up here last Tuesday. You can hardly blame me for being surprised. I know I wasn’t alone in thinking we’d seen the end of all that. But no, there was another tremor. Fine. Perhaps there’ll be more. Fine. But in the meantime—”

“Glad to see you’ve calmed down about this, Mom.”

“In the meantime, Louis, I wondered if you and — Renée, too, of course, if she likes — would have any interest in staying in this house. It would be rent-free and very comfortable. If you’re here, Renée, and you still want to work at Harvard, I realize it might be a longish commute. But the advantages, I think, are obvious. I can pay you a caretaker’s fee as well, especially if you’d be willing to show the house to prospective buyers. You see, I can’t help thinking it might lift your spirits to get out of Somerville. And of course the extra income and the savings on rent, Louis, as long as you’re out of work and not sure where you’re going. ”

Louis looked around the room. In spite of himself, he’d expected to feel the presence of ghosts — a spirit named Rita, a spirit named Jack; the spirits of Anna Krasner and his father. They’d all haunted this living room when he was far away from it, especially when he was in Evanston. But now when he looked at the blandly replastered walls and stolid furniture, he knew he could wait as long as he wanted, and he’d still see only the empty present.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Melanie said.

“What?” He looked at her as if she were a ghost. “Um, I don’t think so. But thanks.”

“Well, think it over.” She excused herself and went to the kitchen.

A silence fell in the unhaunted room.

“I’m surprised,” Louis said. “I thought she’d be different.”

Renée tugged on the ends of her check, making the paper snap. “I didn’t.” There was a pack of matches from the Four Seasons Hotel in the ashtray on the end table. She lit one and held it before her eyes until the flame licked her fingers. She blew it out and lit another one. She held it over the ashtray and pushed a corner of her check into the flame just as Melanie returned from the kitchen. When she saw what Renée was doing she began to lunge, instinctively, to stop her. But in the blink of an eye she’d caught herself. She crossed her arms and watched with impersonal amusement as the check took fire and dwindled to a warped black cinder.

“Well,” she said, eyebrows raised. “I guess that’s quite a statement.”

“Let’s forget it.”

“Yeah, what’s for dinner?” Louis said.

On the last day of the regular season the Red Sox clinched the division title and Renée’s orthopedist pronounced her well enough to do whatever she felt like doing. She had been scheduled to begin work in New York on October 1 as a research fellow at Columbia, and Louis had urged her to go, provided she consider taking him along, but she had still been so incapacitated in mid-August, when the final decision had to be made, that she instead asked Harvard if she could stay on for another year. Harvard had been hoping all along to retain her and came through with an offer of an open-ended position as a post-doc. It wasn’t as if Renée’s feelings about Boston had changed. But somehow getting shot in the place and weathering its earthquakes and spending a month in one of its hospitals had given her a feeling of obligation towards it, a sense of belonging that she had lacked in her six years of normal life here. She didn’t want to leave Boston on crutches. She also recognized that she was fully capable of hating any other place she went to just as much.

So they were both still in Somerville when the Red Sox were destroyed in the American League playoffs. After the first game, Renée couldn’t bear to watch the carnage, but Louis didn’t lose hope until the final inning.

Real life commenced for everyone in Boston on the morning after. Renée began to spend long hours at the lab again, and Louis, bored and broke, took a job at a Harvard Square copy shop. Every night he left work with his eyeballs parched by the heat of xerography. He dreamed about making change. He appreciated Renée’s silence on the topic of what he was doing with his life. He was happy to be living with her, happy to be watching her regain her strength and seeing her enjoy the Algerian and Kenyan and American music he played her, happy to be learning more about her work and going out with her and Peter and Eileen and Beryl Slidowsky and the various damaged spirits he worked with at the copy place. He was so happy, in fact, that the less he liked his job, the more necessary it seemed for him to keep it. It was his way of clinging to the lump of sorrow he had inside him, now that he’d lost his conviction of his own rightness. For the moment, this sorrow was the only thing he had that indicated there might be more to the world than the piggishness and stupidity and injustice which every day were extending their hegemony. As much as he loved Renée, he knew that she was mortal; that he couldn’t build a life on her alone, could not even be counted on to keep being good to her without some other anchor. He didn’t know what form this anchor would take when he was older than the twenty-four he’d now turned; he didn’t know if other people needed anchors; he suspected that Renée, in accepting her womanhood, had already found hers. He only knew that, for himself, it was necessary to go to work and serve even the arrogant professors and anal-compulsive artists and psychotic pamphleteers efficiently and temperately, to look them in the eye and thank them for their patronage, to write the date and the customer’s name on receipts for forty-five cents, and to love the world in its materiality every one of the thousand times a day he pushed the Start button on the Xerox 1075. He saw that as a material thing himself he was akin to rocks. The waves in the ocean, the rain that eroded mountains, and the sand that would form the next epoch’s rocks would all survive him, and in loving this nature he was doing no more than loving his own fundamental species, expressing a patriotic preference for existence over nonexistence. He felt that, if nothing else, he could always anchor himself on the rocks in the world. But this was a dim consolation. He hoped there would be some greater thing that his sorrow could lead him to. And so when he noticed that instead of alienating his co-workers he had become the friend and confidant of almost all of them, and that Renée was turning into a person who sometimes cried for happiness, he quickly looked inside himself and found his core of sorrow and clung to it tightly.