Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Yes, uh-huh. There really was.”

“How’d you know it was up here?”

“Oh. instruments plus an educated guess.”

“So, and what’s causing these earthquakes?”

“Rupture of stressed rock along a fault a few miles underneath us.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

She became smiley and shook her head. “No.”

“Are there going to be any more?”

She shrugged. “Definitely yes if you’re willing to wait a hundred years. Probably yes if you wait ten years. Probably not if you leave here in a week.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to get two earthquakes in a row like this?”

“Nope. Not particularly. In California it might mean something, but not here. I mean, of course it means something; but we don’t know what.”

She spoke as though she wanted to be precise for precision’s sake, not for his. “As a rule,” she said, “if you feel an earthquake around here, it’s happening on a fault that nobody even knew was there, at some peculiar depth, in the context of local stresses that are pretty much anybody’s guess. You have to be a fundamentalist minister to make predictions right now.”

The white hairs she had ran across the grain of the darker hair, lying on top of it rather than blending in. Her skin was cream-colored.

“How old are you?” Louis asked.

A pair of startled and unamused eyes came to rest on him. “I’m thirty, how old are you?”

“Twenty-three,” he said with a frown, as if a calculation had yielded an unexpected result. He asked her what her name was. “Renée,” she said grimly. “Seitchek. What about you?”

In the parking lot Howard was stepping on the belly of a delighted Jackie and the bearded Caucasian was leaning against a ridiculous automobile, a low-slung late-seventies sedan with a bleached and peeling vinyl roof and rippling white flanks, gray patches of reconstruction, and no hubcaps. It was an AMC Matador. The bearded Caucasian had a long face and red lips. The lenses of his glasses were shaped like TV screens, and the cuffs of his jeans were tucked into the tops of brown work boots. Simply because she had stopped by his side, the half-full glass of Renée’s attractiveness became half-empty.

The Matador apparently belonged to Howard. “You need a ride someplace?” he said to Louis.

“Sure, maybe to my house.”

“If I were you,” the bearded Caucasian said, “I’d go back right away and make sure everything’s OK.”

Renée pointed at Louis. “That’s what he’s doing, Terry. He’s going right back.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Terry said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

Renée looked away and made a face. Howard unlocked the car, and Louis and Terry got in the back seat, sinking ankle-deep into pizza cartons, Coke cans, and sportswear. The car radio came on with the engine. It was playing a Red Sox game.

“Where’s the dog?” Renée said.

Howard shrugged and put the car in reverse.

“Howard, wait, you’re going to run over it.”

They peered out their respective windows, trying to locate the dog. Louis took it upon himself to get out and look behind the car, the exhaust pipe of which was putting out blue-black clouds of the foulest smoke he’d ever smelled a car produce. It coated his respiratory tract like some poison sugar. He got back in the car, reporting no dog.

“This is Louis, incidentally,” Renée explained to Terry from the front seat. “Louis, this is Terry Snall and Howard Chun.”

“You’re all seismologists,” Louis said.

Terry shook his head. “Renée and Howard are the seismologists. They’re real high-powered.” There seemed to be a back-handed message here, Terry either not really believing the other two to be high-powered or else implying that to be high-powered was not the same as to be a worthwhile person. “Renée told me your grandmother died in last week’s earthquake,” he said. “That’s awful.”

“She was old.”

“Howard and Renée thought it was a nothing earthquake. They were saying it was no good. They wanted it to be bigger. That’s how seismologists think. I think it’s terrible about your grandmother.”

“Yeah, we don’t, Terry. We’re glad she died.”

“I’m not saying that.”

“What do you think he is saying, Howard?”

Howard turned the steering wheel obliviously, the car chugging and rumbling like a ferry boat. Louis looked out the back window, expecting to see the dog, but the lot the trash barrels guarded was completely empty now.

. Two balls and two strikes , the baseball announcer said.

“Two balls and one strike,” Renée said.

. The two-two pitch .

“The two -one pitch,” Renée said.

Ball three, three and two. Roger had him oh and two and now he’s gone to a full count .

“One strike, airbrain. Three balls and one strike.”

. Scoreboard has it as three balls and one strike .

. Bob , the color man said, I think it is three and one .

Renée turned off the radio in disgust, and Terry remarked, ostensibly to Louis: “Nothing’s ever quite good enough for Renée.”

In the front seat Renée turned to Howard and made a gesture of utter bafflement.

“I wonder if they felt the earthquake at the ballpark,” Terry said.

“Yeah, I wonder,” Renée said. “They’re playing in Minnesota.”

“Left at the sign,” Louis told Howard. He hardly recognized the road they were on as the one down which he’d jogged.

“Where you wanna go next?” Howard asked generally. “Try Plum Island?”

“We better head back,” Terry said.

“What a drag,” Renée said.

“No death and destruction,” Terry said.

“No sand blows is all I meant. Although it’s true,” she said to Louis, “that we feel some ambivalence about destructive earthquakes. They’re like cadavers, full of information.”

Her articulateness was getting on Louis’s nerves. He pointed out the stone Kernaghan gate, and Howard hardly slowed the car as he started to turn. Then he slammed on the brakes and wheeled hard to the right, the car skidding almost sideways back onto the road. A black Mercedes swung out of the gate and swerved around them and sped off towards Ipswich. It was driven by a man Louis recognized as Mr. Aldren. Very belatedly, Howard applied the horn.

“See if you can kill me,” Renée said, pressing with one hand on the windshield and sliding back on the seat cushion she’d been thrown from.

A strange and new and not entirely unpleasant sensation came over Louis as they drove up the hill and he saw, as these students were seeing, the money the estate represented. It was a sensation of exposure but of satisfaction too. Money: it says: I’m not nobody. The awed silence in the car held until the house and its party hat came into view and Renée laughed. “Oh my God.”

“You ought to come inside,” Louis said on a wealthy man’s impulse. “Have some food, see some damage.”

Terry was quick to shake his head. “No thanks.”

“No, no,” Louis insisted. “Come in.” He was thinking how unwelcome his mother would find these visitors. “I mean, if you’re at all curious.”

“Oh, we’re curious,” Renée said. “Aren’t we, Howard? It’s our business to be curious.”

“I just hope no one’s hurt,” Terry said.

Not until Louis had opened the door and ushered everyone inside did he realize how little he’d believed there’d been an earthquake. And what he felt most strongly, as he stopped in the front hall, was that he was seeing the work of an angry hand. The minister who’d said that God was angry with the Commonwealth; the Haitian who’d believed there was an angry spirit in the house: he saw what they were getting at, for a force had entered the house while he was away and had attacked it, pulling a piece of plaster from the dining-room ceiling and flinging it onto the table, where water from broken vases had soaked the plaster brown. The force had thrown open the doors of the breakfront, toppled anything more upright than horizontal and scattered china polyhedra across the floor. It had yanked on paintings in the living room, trashed the bar and opened cracks across the walls and ceiling. The room smelled like a frat house on a Sunday morning.