Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

The horse farms now behind him, he was walking between swampy fields and dense black loaves of bramble. Abandoned among dead rushes, looking severe and prophetic, stood an entirely rusted bailer; as if they’d just picked the last flesh off its skeleton, two sea gulls wheeled away from it. Louis watched them until their wings dissolved in the whiteness and their bodies dwindled to the status of floaters in his vision.

The road to the beach seemed to rise and vaporize. It stretched out so long and straight that he started jogging, working the stiffness out of his legs, running faster. Soon, as he heard his breathing grow heavy, and as he watched the cordgrass and rockweed of the marshes bob up and down with the motion of his head, it began to seem as if he were watching a scene from a movie, a scene of a psychopath closing in on a girl in underthings, where the killer’s point of view is rendered with a moving handheld camera and heavy bronchial action on the sound track. This sensation became so powerful and disturbing and his breathing filled his ears so much that by and by, to reclaim himself, he began to chant aloud: “Ho! Ho! Hey! Me! Here! Here! Ho!” This did the trick, but something else must have been happening as he ran down this road, because when he passed a guardhouse and abruptly drew up and slowed to a walking pace, he felt as if he’d run not only out of the marshes but clear out of Sunday as well, ending up in the dunes of some eighth, nameless day of the week which he was the only person in the world to know about.

A siren was wailing in his head. The sky (if sky was the word for a thing commencing directly before his eyes) was still the same uniform white, but now it seemed as if the sun were hovering right beyond the threshold of visibility, an arrow’s flight away and single-serving-sized, and as if, when the mists blew off, the proximate borders of a miniature world would likewise be revealed, an unthreatening brook-like void now lapping behind him in the direction he’d come from, the direction of Sunday and his mother and her wealth.

He entered a parking lot. Its perimeter was guarded by a detachment of green barrels stenciled with a single word: PLEASE. Clumps of beach grass to the seaward side were suspended in the air, the supporting dunes invisible. Through his feet he thought he could feel the impact of waves, the faint shudder. The siren left his head and localized itself in a lone, clog-like Le Baron parked at the far end of the lot. Its theft alarm was ringing. Then the ringing stopped, but it had stretched something inside Louis’s head, some muscle-like apparatus that continued to throb after the sound was withdrawn from it.

He was still trying to figure out what kind of place he was in when a black animal came charging up from behind a trash barrel. It was a retriever, fully grown. She skidded past him and paused in a playful attitude, head lower than her tail. Then she jumped on him. He removed her paws from his chest but it was like dealing with a rubber ball, the paws bouncing back into his hands as soon as they’d hit the ground. One of her tags listed a 508 number and the name jackie. There was no owner in sight. She followed him companionably up a wooden walkway and onto the sand, sniffing his footprints as they formed.

The beach was rain-soaked and unpeopled. Brown waves were stopping in their tracks, each of them like a failed quarterback sneak, the opposing forces meshing and falling to little purpose. Well south of the parking lot, at a point where the beach widened and a creek carried iron-rich mud out from behind the dunes, the dog suddenly took off running. She turned her head hard to one side as though she wanted to look back at Louis but also did not want to slow down, and then without showing even this much regret she ran harder, far, far up the beach, and disappeared.

He felt a stab of real loneliness then. He sat down on a rock and propped his chin on one hand. The sea drew breath like a sick person; time stretched long between the impact of one wave and the reassurance of the next. The breakers were dark and rotten with suspended sand and organic matter. All Louis could see in the direction in which the dog had run was sand, water, mist.

Though he’d laughed, it hadn’t really surprised him to hear that Eileen had already tried to tap their mother’s new resources. Very early in her life Eileen had acquired the ability to beg from Melanie and live with herself afterward. In the years of their common adolescence, Louis would often pass her on the stairs and see her folding up one or more twenties, and then in the dining room he’d find further evidence of a transaction, the maternal purse occupying a new place on the table and its owner visibly composing herself, a message for him in her eyes: The wallet has been put away now, so don’t you be asking me, too. Which was interesting, because he never did ask, not even when he had a need more compelling than Eileen’s need for another lightweight Benetton item or another concert ticket. He never asked because it somehow always seemed that Eileen had beaten him to it. And this must not have been a matter of timing, since whenever it did occur to him to ask, he always felt he had to hold off for a while because Eileen had asked so recently, and while he held off she would go and ask again and receive again. It was clear that if she really had beaten Louis to their mother’s money, she’d done it long ago, once and for all.

The day was bound to come when they met in the hall and did not pass in silence. It came the same summer that Eileen put the car in the lake. Louis had returned from mowing grass, and in the hall upstairs he saw her with the usual twenties in her hand, twenties folded into quarters and held with the nonchalance of a victorious dog walking from a fray with a disputed scrap of pot roast in its teeth. Long-compounded resentment and the ugliness of the fingers clasping the twenties made Louis say, “How much do you have there?” She said, “How much do I have where?” He said, “In your hand. Maybe you’d like to give me twenty of that.” She stared at him as though he’d suggested she take her shirt off. “No way! Go ask for yourself. I asked for this for me.” He said, “Yeah, well, you just asked, so what am I supposed to do?” She said, “I asked for this for me . You can go ask for yourself.” And he said: “I don’t feel like asking. I like to earn my money.”

It was as if she’d known all her life that this moment would come. Her face boiled and she threw the poisoned bills at his feet and slammed the door of her room behind her. Later, from his own room, Louis heard his mother say, “Eileen? Eileen, honey, you dropped your money out here.”

In truth, Melanie might have preferred to be more evenhanded, especially if it hadn’t involved increased outlays. Certainly she took Eileen’s requests as opportunities to upbraid her for her selfishness and to make an example of Louis and his independent spirit. But with one of her children making no demands at all, it became not only financially feasible but personally more convenient just to give the other child everything she wanted. Eileen could be supernaturally silent and evil when something had been denied her. She sat at the dinner table and stared at Melanie’s clothes and her jewelry so long and so hard that she began to poison the simplest of her mother’s pleasures. She would not relent until money or its equivalent in goods was offered. It was joyless, this conspiracy between mother and daughter, but it worked. The end of the conspiracy was to keep the money unpoisoned, and to achieve this end only Louis had to be tiptoed around, since his father could satisfy his few personal wants through direct withdrawals and otherwise left everything to Melanie. Only Louis — odd, grumpy Louis — had the power to poison money. The others’ comfort depended on his restraint. And he exercised this restraint, and deliberately let Eileen be spoiled, and only once, when he confronted her in the upstairs hall, was there any hint of all the poison pooling up inside him.