Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Do you really want us here?” Renée asked Louis.

“Of course.” He had his duties as a host to consider. “Let me show you the kitchen.”

Howard stood on one foot and leaned to look into the living room, his other leg hovering in the front hall for balance. Terry, very ill at ease, stuck close to Renée, who said quietly, “You see what living on the epicenter does.”

There was less evident damage in the kitchen: some broken jars, some paint chips and plaster on the floor. Louis’s father, standing by the sink, was delighted to meet the three students. He shook their hands and asked them to repeat their names.

“Where’s Mom?” Louis asked.

“You didn’t see her? She’s taking pictures for Prudential. I recommend you don’t try to clean anything up before she’s done. In fact, Lou,” Bob added in an undertone, “I don’t think she was even conscious of doing it, but I found her helping some stuff off the shelves in the living room. Ugly things, you know.”

“Of course,” Louis said. “Good idea.”

“But what a day!” his father continued in a louder voice. “What a day! You all felt it, right?” He addressed the four of them and all but Louis nodded. “I was in the back room, I thought it was the end of the WORLD. I clocked twelve seconds of strong shaking on my watch.” He pointed at his watch. “When it started, I felt the whole house tense , like it had got wind of something.” His hands flew and twisted in the air like wheeling pigeons. “Then I heard this booming, it felt like a freight train going by outside the windows. This feeling of weight , tremendous weight . I could hear all sorts of little things falling down inside the walls, and then while I sat there looking — in all modesty, I wasn’t the least bit afraid, I mean because it felt so natural, so inevitable — I sat there and I saw a window just shatter . And just when I thought it was over, it all intensified , wonderful, wonderful, this final climax — like she was coming! Like the whole earth was coming!”

Bob Holland looked at the faces around him. The three students were listening to him seriously. Louis was like a white statue staring at the floor.

“I guess you people must know,” Bob continued, “that there’s a whole history of earthquakes in New England. Were you aware that the Native Americans thought they caused epidemics? That made a lot of sense to me today, that idea of disease in the earth. They were scientists too, you know. Scientists in a very profound and different way. You want to hear about superstition, let me tell you there was a woman in these parts in 1755, her name was Elizabeth Burbage. Minister’s daughter, a spinster. The Godfearing citizens of Marblehead — he-he! Marblehead! — tried her as a witch and drove her out of town because three neighbors claimed she’d had foreknowledge of the great Cambridge earthquake of November 18. Sixty-three years after the Salem trials! Regarding an act of God! Marblehead! Wonderful!”

Louis was too mortified to keep track of people during the next few minutes. He opened the refrigerator and persuaded Renée and Howard to accept apples. His father began to repeat his story, and just to get him out of sight Louis followed him back to the room where his adventure had occurred. Here Bob reconstructed the twelve seconds of shaking second by second, insight by insight. He was as high as he ever got. The shattering windowpane in particular had seemed to him a quintessential moment, encapsulating the entire story of man and nature.

When Louis finally broke away, he found that Terry and Howard had gone outside, Terry to sit in the back seat of the car and Howard to sit on the hood, eating his apple smackingly. Renée? Howard shrugged. Still inside.

Louis found her in the living room, talking to his mother. She gave him her now familiar smiley smile, and his mother, who wore a camera on a strap, conveyed her now equally familiar unwillingness to be disturbed. “Maybe you can excuse us for a minute, Louis.”

He executed an ostentatious about-face and went and sat down halfway up the stairs. His mother and Renée spoke for nearly five more minutes. All he caught was the cadences — long hushed utterances from his mother, briefer and brighter repetitious noises from Renée. When the latter finally appeared in the front hall, she looked up the stairs. Louis was hunched and motionless, like a spider waiting for a fly to hit his web. “I guess we’re going now,” she said. “Thanks for having us in.”

She turned to leave, and Louis was down the stairs in a flash, homing in on the entangled fly. He put his hand on her arm and held it. “What did you just talk about with my mother?”

Renée’s eyes moved from the hand on her arm to the person it belonged to. She didn’t look happy about this hand.

“She’s worried about the earthquakes,” she said. “I told her what I know.”

“I’m going to call you.”

She gave him a ghost of a shrug. “OK.”

When he came inside, having seen the great fuming car off down the drive, his mother was photographing the dining room. She briefly lowered the camera from her face. “That Renée Seitchek,” she said. “Is an extremely impressive young woman.” She focused the camera on the ceiling and pressed a button, and for a moment the room went white.

Louis’s job at WSNE had come to him by way of a Rice friend of his, a woman named Beryl Slidowsky who’d had a popular show on KTRU playing music like the Dead Kennedys and Jane’s Addiction. In February, at a point when the résumés and demo tapes he’d been sending to stations in a dozen northern cities had netted him all of two responses, both flatly negative, Louis called Beryl and asked about the radio scene in Boston. She had been at WSNE for about three months; it so happened that she was about to quit. The owner, she hastened to say, was great, but the person who managed the station was literally giving her an ulcer. She was happy to put in a good word for Louis, however, if he wanted. Wasn’t he sort of, like, generally fairly tolerant? Hadn’t he survived an entire year with those ghastly Bowleses?

The cause of Beryl’s peptic distress turned out to be a female in her late thirties named Libby Quinn. Libby had come aboard as a receptionist eighteen years earlier, when the station was still located in Burlington, and although she’d never even finished high school she had made herself indispensable to WSNE. She did all the programming and much of the administration, wrote and recorded spots for local non-agency advertisers, and, with Alec Bressler, lined up guests for the talk shows. She had rosy Irish cheeks and dark blond hair that she wore in a braid or a bun. She favored the English Country look — heather-colored skirts and cardigans, knee socks, lace-up shoes — and was seldom seen without a mug of herbal tea. She seemed utterly innocuous to Louis.

At the beginning of his second week of work, Libby appeared at the door of his cubicle and beckoned to him with a single index finger. “Come to my office?”

He followed her up the corridor. In her office there were multiple photos of two blondes in their late teens; they were awfully old to be her daughters, but they looked just like her.

She handed Louis a dog-eared stack of printouts. “There’s an uncollected ninety-five thousand here. It’s only people who don’t do business with us anymore. How would you feel about trying to collect some of it?”

“Love to.”

“I’d do it myself, but it’s really more of a man’s job.”