Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

He hardly noticed the erection he was rapidly and in full view of her reacquiring. “You’re dreaming,” he said.

“Leave me ALONE. Leave me ALONE.”

“Sh-sh-sh.” He sat down on the bed, showing her his empty palms. This seemed to scare her all the more. Without taking her eyes off him, she edged along the wall. Then she made a break for the door but curved towards him as she ran, her hands outstretched as if she were falling, and he saw how just before she reached him she seemed to crash through a sheet of glass or some similar planar discontinuity. She took hold of his shoulders and said, “Oh, I was having such a bad dream.”

The house swayed in the wind. She sat on his thighs and let herself be held. Strong, low-pH fumes rose from between them. Experimentally, he tried to put his penis back inside her.

She clutched his shoulders, pain cutting streaks into her face. “This is a little much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sore?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, well, in that case.” She used her whole weight to impale herself on him. His nerves were screaming harmful! harmful! She rolled her hips angrily. “Hurt?”

“Yes!”

After a while the pain diffused into a large zone of ache, a pool of melted sulfur with little blue flames of pleasure flickering across the surface. Then the flames became scarcer and then disappeared altogether, and the sulfur began to crystallize into a column of hard, dry, sharp chunks. He might have been rubbing against broken bone. Renée’s eyes and cheeks were wet, but she didn’t make any sound.

When they stopped he was bleeding enough to leave marks on the sheets. Renée sat on the edge of the bed and rocked with her knees pressed together. He just assumed he wouldn’t die because of this, a few years down the line.

He went to the house with the pyramid on top. The front lawn was a metallic green now and the grass lay down and shivered as if under a running tide, some large-scale flow of invisible matter related to the brilliant wrongness of the light, which was messing up the colors, throwing some of the black of the tree trunks into the blue heaven and some of the white of the clouds into the trees. For the person who hasn’t slept, what makes the new day strange and fills it with foreboding is that the setting sun is in the east and not setting; all day the light is like the light in dreams, which comes from no direction.

“Louis, my God,” Melanie said, clutching the lapels of her dressing gown and peering out over a new brass door chain. “It’s nine in the morning, I’m not even up. I have to catch a plane.”

“Unchain the door?”

“You didn’t call! If you’d come two hours later—”

“Unchain the door?”

An alarm-system number pad had been installed in the entryway. In the living and dining rooms the broken plaster had been repaired, and Rita Kernaghan’s books and decorative objects, including the portrait of Melanie’s father, had given way to a more standard opulence, suitable for a luxury hotel suite — Japanese lithographs, sheer curtains, gold brocade.

“I meant to call you,” Melanie said. “I just flew in on Thursday and there’s been so much to do.”

“I bet,” Louis said. He walked into the living room and stepped onto a silk-upholstered sofa and stamped from one end to the other, listening to the twangs of its internal injuries.

“Louis! For God’s sake!”

He crossed to the coffee table. In good soccer style, using his instep, he penalty-kicked a cut-glass bowl into the fireplace. “I understand you’re handing out money to your children,” he said, stepping back onto the sofa. “I’m here for my share.”

“Get down off the sofa. That is not your sofa.”

“You think I’d do this to a sofa that was mine?”

“I told you. I’m not going to talk about money. If you want to talk about something else, all right, but—”

“Two million.”

“But not money. I never expected I would have to—”

“Two million.”

Melanie placed her hand on the side of her head she got her headaches on.

“How much did you give Eileen?”

“Nothing, Louis. I gave her nothing.”

“So where’d she get the condo?”

“It’s a matter of a loan.”

“Oh, I see. How about you lend me two million?”

Melanie’s hand slid forward to cover her face, two fingertips pressing on her eyelids.

“I’ll never bother you again, Mom. Promise. Two million and we’re quits. I’d say that sounds like quite a deal. You know, maybe I’ll even pay you back.”

“I can no longer consider this a joke.”

“Who’s joking? I need the money. There’s this radio station I have to buy. Two million’s the figure I had in mind, but I could do a fair amount of good with two hundred thousand. That would stabilize things till you come through with the rest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Philip Stites. You’ve heard of him, the antiabortion guy. I want to make him a present of two hundred thousand dollars. Just to aid his cause, you know. Ever since we all got so rich I’ve become a very Christian person, Mom, you’re not aware of this, of course, because you never call me or—”

“And you never call me!”

“Oh, and Eileen does, and that’s why she gets rewarded with cash gifts?” Louis stepped up onto the shoulders of the sofa and tipped it over backwards, alighting just before the thud. “Why is it that everybody but you can see she only calls you to get money out of you? You think she cares about you? She hates you till you give her money and then she rewards you by not hating you until she needs some more. Haven’t you ever noticed this? It’s called being spoiled.”

His mother turned away as if the conversation didn’t interest her. The sudden sharp tremor that made her whole body jerk and brought tears to her face seemed to take even her by surprise. She made a coughing, gulping noise. Louis might have had more sympathy if he hadn’t felt that her tears and Eileen’s tears always came at his expense, and if he hadn’t suspected that in his absence they were basically happy.

“I’m trying to do you a real favor here,” he said. “I mean, just think. You give me two million, and for the rest of your life you can consider me a selfish jerk. You’ll never have to feel guilty again. No more tears, no more evasions. Plus you’ll still have your twenty million to play games with Eileen with.”

His mother was shaking her head. “You don’t understand. You don’t understand. I’ve lost—” A strong aftershock rocked her shoulders. “I’ve lost—” Another aftershock. “I’ve lost—”

“Money?”

She nodded.

“How much?”

She shook her head; she couldn’t say.

“So you’ve lost money. Amazing. Eileen gets to you in time to get an apartment out of this, but I’m a little late. Amazing the way these things work out.”

Still trembling, Melanie parted a sheer curtain and looked out at the false-color daylight, the fair-weather clouds grazing the top of the last hill before the ocean. “Your request is not reasonable.”

He tested the heft of a crystal objet from an end table. “You’re saying this place of hers cost substantially less than two hundred thousand dollars?”

“Your request,” she repeated, “is not reasonable. Eileen will be starting a very fine job at the Bank of Boston when she graduates in June. She’ll have an excellent income and she’ll pay me interest on the loan. This is not particularly your business, I’m only telling you so you understand. The condominium was a reasonable investment for both of us. There is simply no equating her financial position with yours.”