Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Fuck,” he said, “never mind. But I do like it.”

“So do I,” she said flatly, throwing him a quick, smiley glance.

When they reached Pleasant Avenue he set the brake and turned the engine off. Renée stared penetratingly at the rear window of the car in front of them, its corroded chrome frame and Celtics decal. On the sidewalk to the left of Louis lay a copper-tone range, the oven door uppermost and asterisked with guano. “This party totally depressed you, didn’t it.”

A gust of wind rocked the car.

“I was going to ask you,” she said, ignoring his question, “if you thought it was true what that person was saying about Sweeting-Aldren. The thing about a million gallons of effluent every year.”

“I was hardly listening.”

“Because that’s definitely not what they’re saying in the paper. In the paper they’re talking about zero gallons.”

“My sister wants to marry this guy.”

“He’s the boyfriend?” Another gust rocked the car. “I didn’t realize.”

“For richer and for poorer.”

“But I actually kind of liked him. He wouldn’t be my first choice as a brother-in-law, but he’s not stupid. Just a type.”

Louis leaned over the hand brake and kissed her.

She let him walk right into the warm vestibule of her mouth. It might have been a minute’s journey from the enamel rill between her front teeth to either of the elastic dead ends to which her lips came; an hour’s journey down her throat. He took her hair in his fists, pressing her head into the seatback with his lips.

Headlights turned up the street. She pulled away, flattening her offended hair with one hand. “I was just about to say I can’t stand sitting around in cars.”

Inside the house they were greeted by a baying from the large lungs of several dogs in the ground-floor apartment. “Dobermans,” Renée said. The air was hot and canine. It was fresher on the second-floor landing, and when she stopped to take a key down from a ledge, Louis kissed her again, backing her into a wall covered with paper that smelled like a used-book store. The baying downstairs subsided into frustrated gnashings, and she tried to pull away even as her mouth kept pressing into his. Suddenly a baby started crying, it seemed like right behind the door beside them. They went up a set of steeper stairs to her apartment.

It was a bare, clean place. There was nothing on the kitchen counter but a radio/cassette player, nothing in the dish rack but a plate, a glass, a knife, and a fork. That the light was warm and the four chairs around the table looked comfortable somehow made the kitchen all the more unwelcoming. It was like the kitchen of the kind of man who was careful to wash the dinner dishes and wipe the counters before he went into the bedroom and put a bullet in his brain.

A large room opposite the bathroom contained a bed and a desk. Another large room contained an armchair and bookshelves and many square yards of blond floorboards. When Renée came out of the bathroom she stood with her back to the woodwork between the doors to these two rooms and faced the kitchen, her hands clasped behind her. “Do you want something to eat, or drink?”

“Nice place,” Louis said simultaneously.

“I used to share it with a friend.”

She didn’t move, didn’t lean aside even a little bit, as he went into the bedroom. He put his feet down as quietly as he could. Everything about the place made him feel intrusive, as though even loud footsteps might disturb things. (When police detectives arrive at the scene of a crime, aren’t there often some respectful, meditative moments before attention is turned to the body on the floor?) The desk lamp had been left burning over a stack of 11 x 17 fanfold computer paper, on the top sheet of which a program in Fortran was being revised in black ink. (Until the moment of the crime, yes, work had been in progress, it had been an ordinary evening.) Above the desk hung a bathymetric map of the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It was spattered with thousands of dots in different colors, many grouped in dense elongated swarms like army-ant columns; beneath them, barbed line-segments were applied like war paint to the ocean. Continuing to tread carefully, as he had when he first entered Rita Kernaghan’s living room, Louis returned to the kitchen. Renée was still standing with her hands behind her back. She might have been a missionary at a stake, with her hands tied, unable to cover her nakedness, unable to cross herself or shield her face from the flames that would soon be leaping up, but like that missionary she stared straight ahead. She did flinch discemibly when Louis touched her shoulders (even the greatest saints must have flinched when the first flames licked their skin), and despite the way she’d kissed him on the landing he was surprised by her unhidden look of need.

The wind whistled on the dormers in the bedroom. It rose without falling, consuming more and more of the roof, finding further timbers in the house to bend and further panes to rattle, further expanses of wall to lean on. It seemed to be doing the work for Louis as he parted and lifted the two sides of Renée’s cardigan, which slid easily off her shoulders and, falling to the floor, unbound her hands. She put her wrists around his neck.

It was still dark when he woke up. dr. renee seitchek, whose internal anatomy he imagined had been rearranged in the escalating violence of their union, and whose hands had proved no less articulate than the rest of her in showing his own hands how best to bring her the releases he couldn’t deliver otherwise (he liked and admired the silent and perspiring and possessed way she came), now lay next to him and slept so heavily that she looked like she’d been struck unconscious by a blow to the head. There were sparse flocks of freckles on her shoulders. Through a crack between a shade and a window frame Louis could see tree boughs, lit by streetlight from below and blanketed with blackness, rocking in the wind. This wind tonight, she’d told him during a lull, had reminded her of an earthquake she’d seen in the mountains once. She’d been hiking in the Sierra Nevada with a high-school group. “And all of a sudden there was something happening in the country to the east. We could see for forty or fifty miles, and what it was like was when you’re by a perfectly calm lake, and you can see the wind coming the way you could hear it on the street tonight, the way the leading edge roughs up the water when it comes. That’s exactly what this event was like. It was this thing coming across the mountains, this visible rolling wave, and then suddenly we were in it. We definitely knew we were in it because there were little rockslides and the ground shook. But it wasn’t like the other events I’ve felt, because there was this visual connection.” She had actually seen the wave they were feeling. It hadn’t come out of nowhere. It had looked like nothing on God’s earth. And he wanted then, again, to take possess have take possess possess the body in which this memory resided.

The alarm clock showed twenty to four. He slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom. When he returned, Renée was kneeling in the center of the bed. He said, “Hi,” and she backed towards the bottom of the bed, dragging the sheet along with her. She looked terrified.

“What’s wrong?”

She backed off the bed and fled to the far corner of the room, one hand raised vaguely to ward him off. Standing up showed the complexity of her nakedness, how the legs had to connect with the torso, how peculiarly narrow the female waist, how much more delicate the shoulders than the hips, how detached and attention-demanding a woman’s breasts. “I don’t have it,” she said to him in a loud voice that wasn’t bright or merry.