Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Don’t let me. disturb you,” he told her in his Nembutal voice.

In the kitchen he found coffee cake, a party-sized urn of coffee, and, on a long counter, other bakery products in white boxes with the name “Holland” in blue crayon. His eyes widened when he opened the refrigerator. There were pâtés and seafood salads in transparent plastic cartons, jumbo fruits in decorated tissue paper, a tin of Russian caviar, half a smoked ham, whole foreign cheeses, premium yogurt in unusual berry flavors, fresh artichokes and asparagus, kosher dill pickles, an intriguing stack of wrapped deli items, German and Dutch beers, name-brand soft drinks, juices in glass bottles, and thirty-dollar-a-pop champagne—

“Louis.” His mother spoke from the dining room.

“Yeah, Mom.”

“What are you doing in there?”

“I’m looking at the food.”

Silence.

“No way you’re liable,” Henry Rudman said. “Guy pocks his Jag in the street, somebody else comes along secures a loan with it, no way on earth Guy A’s responsible. It’s straight fraud, doesn’t involve you whatsoever. Can’t really blame the bank either. She’s living in the house and the title she shows ’em’s a first-rate forgery, so good it makes you wonder if she did it all by herself, I bet not. It’s a slick trick. She gets a home-equity loan for two hundred K, spends seventy-two on this pyramid that she’s just gotta have, can’t live without, and puts the difference in a different bank. It’ll cover payments for another ten, fifteen years plus she can throw the occasional pahty on it. Slick trick. She dies, the bank’s screwed. I mean assuming the trustees still have the real title. Your pop must’ve known what he was doing. Four thousand a month tax-free plus a free house with groundskeeping fully paid and she still can’t quite make ends meet, not even paying the Haitian slave wages. I can’t say I like this dead-hand business (you understand this is just a professional opinion), but if I’d been married to a woman like that I wouldn’t let her near the capital myself. Next thing you know, we’d be looking at Mount Fuji in the back yod.”

“Louis.”

“Yeah, Mom.”

“Would it be possible for you not to be in the kitchen?”

“Yeah, just a sec.”

A dark, cold hall off the rear of the kitchen ended in three doors, one leading outside, the others into a bathroom and a bedroom. Louis sat down on the bed and slurped coffee and wolfed cake. All the hangers in the closet were bare. It was a while before he noticed that a pane was missing from the window. This was the only earthquake damage he saw all morning.

Out in the back yard he could find no sign of his father, although the air was so still and thick it almost seemed a person walking through it would leave a trail. He crossed a patio and tried one of the French doors at the rear end of the living room. It swung right open.

The living room was large enough to hold four separate clusters of furniture. Above the fireplace hung a large oil of Louis’s grandfather, a formal portrait painted in 1976, when John Kernaghan was seventy-five or so. His eyebrows had still been dark. With his near-perfect baldness and firm skin and elegant, compact skull he looked ageless. He was, Louis realized, the man responsible for his loss of hair. The painted image drew further life from the living daughter sitting across the hall in the dining room, reading documents with her father’s own glittering unapproachable dark eyes.

“When they meet on the thirtieth,” Henry Rudman said quietly, “they have to distribute the entire corpus. The entire corpus, it’s unambiguous, they have no choice. The full transfer may take another four to six weeks, but we’re looking at June 15 absolute latest.”

That the living room did not entirely belong to Melanie yet was clear from the New Age reading matter on the coffee tables, from the ugly phantasmagoric acrylics on the walls, and from the copies of Princess Itaray and Beginning Life at 60 and Star Children that filled the only bookcase. To say nothing of the smell emanating from the bar, a smell of spilled alcohol and bubblegum-scented disinfectant. The bar jutted out from the wall near the inner rear corner of the room and was made of the same blond wood as the two slender barstools in front of it. Shelves reaching nearly to the ceiling displayed several hundred different bottles — liqueurs and digestives with labels in foreign alphabets, a few with pictures of unlikely vegetables. Louis knelt by the gray marble floor behind the bar. There was plenty of room here for a small woman to lie dead, head smashed. It wasn’t hard to see the faint brownish fingers and ridgelines of splashed liquor on the wall. Nor was it hard to see blood. There were traces of it in the sutures between the squares of marble, hardly browned, the nail-polish redness especially visible where the edges of the squares were chipped. Who had cleaned things up? The maid, before her deportation? With his fingertips he pressed on the cold, unyielding marble, putting his body’s weight on it, hearing clearly the whock! of the splitting head.

“Louis. For God’s sake. What are you doing?”

He jumped to his feet. His mother was approaching the bar. “Dropped a coin,” he said.

“You have a morbid interest?”

“No, no, I just happened to come inside this way.”

“You came in—?” Melanie shook her head at the French doors as if they were a grievous disappointment to her. “This house,” she said, “has no security whatsoever. I suppose she expected the pyramid to protect against burglars too. That’s very logical and rational, don’t you think? That’s par for the course.”

Louis heard a faint tinkling in a toilet behind a wall.

“Well. You see where she died.” His mother crossed her arms and gazed up at the liquor bottles with satisfaction. “Personally, I can’t think of anything tackier than putting a full-sized bar like this in your living room. Or do you not agree. Maybe you think everyone should have a saloon in their living room. And a bee.”

She looked at Louis as if she actually expected him to reply. “The insult on the injury,” she continued, “is that she probably had it installed with money that didn’t belong to her. I don’t suppose you missed what Mr. Rudman was saying. That she forged a title to this house to borrow money on. What do you think of that, Louis? Do you think that’s proper? Do you think that’s OK?” With a beautifully shod toe she flipped up one end of a Chinese rug, tilted her head to read the label, and flipped the end down again. She sneered at a coffee table. “Harmonic Lifestyles. Phoenician Deities. Orgone Redux.” She made a gagging, dismissive face. “What do you think of all this, Louis?”

“I think I’m going to scream if you ask me another question like that.”

“Every single thing I see here makes me sick. Sick . She said this to the portrait above the fireplace."

“But it’s all yours now, right?”

“Effectively. Yes.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“I have no idea. I came in here to tell you that you’re making Mr. Rudman and me very nervous lurking around like this. You couldn’t find your father?”

“No.”

“Well, if you want to stay, you can be in the back room, there’s a TV in there, maybe you can find a game on. There’s lots of food in the refrigerator, you can help yourself. Or you could sweep the patio for me, and I have a few other little jobs for someone, but I do not just want you lurking around. This isn’t your house, you know.”

Louis looked at her with neutral expectancy, as if she were a chess opponent who’d made a move he wanted to be sure she wasn’t going to change her mind about. Then, the arbitrary grace period expiring, he said, “You have a good lunch on Thursday?”