Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“What the state condemns,” Stites said, “the Lord will save.”

A Globe cartoon showed a newsstand where nothing but dubious waivers were on sale.

Renée lived on a narrow street called Pleasant Avenue, on the easternmost of Somerville’s hills. Her house was a shingled triple-decker with a slate-covered mansard roof. The branches of what appeared to be honeysuckle had engulfed the chain link fence in front of it, and Louis was almost through the gate before he saw Renée. She was sitting on the concrete stoop, leaning forward with her hands clasped, hugging to her shins the hem of an antique black dress. Its scooped lace neckline was half covered by the black cardigan she was wearing.

“Hi,” Louis said.

She tilted her head. “Listen.”

“What?”

“The wind. Listen.”

Louis didn’t hear any wind at all. A Camaro spewing music approached and pushed its sonic fist into his face and turned a corner. He looked up the parked-up street, at the end of which, above the broken branches of lopsided trees, there was still some turquoise in the sky and a bright star, maybe Venus. Night had already settled on the intervening yards, which were small and filled with plastic toys and more cars and dark piles of things. This part of Somerville seemed both farther from the suburbs and closer to nature than Louis’s neighborhood. The trees were taller here, the houses in worse repair, and the stillness less neighborly and more wary and forbidding.

“Oh, come on,” Renée said to the reluctant wind.

It did come. Louis heard it first at the far end of the street and saw the branches there suddenly buck, and then he heard it glancing off the nearer roofs and whistling on the nearer eaves and aerials, approaching like some specific and discrete messenger or angel. Then it reached him, an invisible hand that spread his collar and set the honeysuckle heaving before the trees took it up and made it general. When it died away it left the street seeming closer to the sky.

“Well. That was it.” Renée stood up and spanked the seat of her dress. “Where’s your costume?”

“It’s in my pocket,” Louis said. He was wearing a loud tweed jacket over a plaid flannel shirt; from the neck down, he looked Sicilian. “Where’s yours?”

“This is it.”

“You’re in mourning.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

Another quantum of wind came whistling down the street and flattened her hair, parting it above her ear. There was something bare about her, something she wasn’t wearing. A purse, Louis thought; but it was more than this. In his car, she pulled slack into her shoulder belt and moved away from him, leaning into the crook between seat and window. She rested her palms on the upholstery to either side of her legs, and it seemed to cost her an effort of will to hold her shoulders back, as if she were fighting the inclination to hunch over and cross her arms across her chest, as if she were in a doctor’s office, sitting naked on the paper-covered table and fighting that inclination. But of course she was fully clothed now. Louis said he’d seen her on TV.

“Oh yeah?” She raised her arm slowly, trying to rest her elbow on top of the bucket seat, but the seat was too high. More slowly yet, she lowered her hand to the cushion again. “Was it awful?”

“You didn’t watch it?”

“I don’t have a TV.”

“What makes you think it was awful?”

“Well, only that this jerk of a reporter started asking me questions about Philip Stites. Which I understand is what they put on the show.”

Her voice, which was strangely bright to begin with, became downright merry at words like “jerk” and “awful.”

“The regular department chairman where I work’s on leave in California, and of the other two seismologists you can talk to, one’s been in the hospital since February and the other’s kind of an amazing person, because he’s never available although he lives right in Cambridge and works all the time. But so when Channel 4 called up to arrange to get the Harvard view of things ”—this with a merry stress—“I was the person to be talked to. They obviously had this angle which was going to be science versus religion, only it wasn’t so obvious at the time. Plus I was a woman, so it was a perfect setup. I’d never been in front of a camera before. It just didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to answer. The other seismologists he talked to not only actually know something about New England seismicity (which I don’t) but from what I hear were smart enough not to take the bait on Stites.”

“Somebody has to say these things,” Louis said, piloting the car onto I-93.

“It’s so disgusting. This idea of a single-purpose church, the Church of Hating Women, which typically it’s mostly women who’ve been joining. And they’re all nesting in that slime pit of a building in Chelsea, which as you probably know is kind of a slime pit itself.” She lowered her head and with a pensive sneer followed the movements of other cars changing lanes, eyeing them like enemies. A strong gust of wind made the Civic shy and a line of winter sand slide sideways through the headlight beams.

“I talked to your mother again,” Renée said, as if to change the subject.

Louis concentrated on the road. A pack of headlights had filled the rearview mirror and begun to pass him on the right; the car shied again in the wind. It took Renée a while to realize that he was ignoring what she’d said. Slowly, with one finger, she pulled a dark, pointed tongue of hair off her temple. “I said I talked to your mother again.”

“Yeah, I have no comment.”

“Oh. I see.” She made a face. “She called me, you know.”

“For professional advice.”

“Yes.”

“You should bill her.” He looked over his shoulder, pushing on the brake pedal. There was a car in his right-side blinid spot, cars passing him on the left and swerving in front of him, earn crowding and plunging like lemmings down a curved ramp. He played essentially no part in bringing the Civic through a rotary and onto Storrow Drive.

Renée asked him if he was a student or what. It transpired that she’d actually heard of WSNE and had even, on occasion, listened to it. She said it was like a college station that had gotten lost in the AM band. “That’s us,” he said.

“Do you like living in Boston?”

“I have a neighbor who keeps asking me that. Kind of a pathetic old guy. He’s very concerned about whether I like Somerville. Keeps asking me if I think I’m gonna like it here.”

“What do you tell him?”

“I tell him, Aw fuck you, old man. Ha-ha.”

“Ha-ha.”

“But what about you?” Louis said. “You like it? You like it here in Boston?”

“Sure.” Renée smiled at some hidden irony. “It’s where I always wanted to live. The east coast in general, Boston in particular.”

“This was during your childhood in Waco?”

“My childhood in Chicago. My childhood and adolescence.”

“Where in Chicago?”

“Lake Forest.”

“Ah, Lake Forest , Lake Forest .” The words had a Pavlovian effect on his blood pressure. “That’s where I wanted to live when I was a kid in Evanston. You have one of those places right on the lake?”

“You’re from Evanston?”

“Whether you had one of those places right on the lake, is what I asked.”

“No. We did not.”

“That’s what I call easy livin’. One of those places right on the lake. Did you have a boat?”

Renée crossed her arms and kept her mouth closed. She was clearly not enjoying Louis’s company.

“We were talking about Boston,” he said.

She looked out her window tiredly. It didn’t seem to be sociability that made her go on and say: “Squantum. Mashpee. Peebiddy. Athol. Braintree. Swumpscutt. Quinzee.”