Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Hey there, Louie boy. Taking the day off?”

“Yes.”

“Hall right. Good for you.”

“I was fired from my job.”

John Mullins was aghast. “They fired you? What for?”

“I’m not sufficiently Christian.”

“You know for a second there I believed you.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Ha. You had me fooled there for a second.”

By the time the post office closed, Louis was ready with eleven query letters. He had only two copies of his demo tape and he hoped he wouldn’t have to pay for more. His monthly expenses came to about $720, which included rent, food, utilities, car expenses, and payments on a college loan. With the $500 Alec had given him, his life savings came to $1,535.

In the evening he stood to one side of his window and looked out of it over his shoulder, like a man under siege. Couples in their early thirties were ringing the doorbell next door and emerging in the yellowly lit living room opposite his window. The soprano carried a frosty pitcher of water and wore a jumper with wide shoulder straps. She had auburn hair and matching freckles and fleshy white upper arms. Louis imagined he could see her vaccination mark, deep and annular, unpigmented. At the piano sat her husband, a blond, athletic frog with a crooning mouth. All the male visitors wore short-sleeved shirts with collars; all the females had bare calves and wore sandals or hard shoes. They began to sing hymns. It was like an old-time sing-along except that every voice was trained. They smiled as they sweated, eyes meeting across the room and glinting at each meeting like a distant photo flash or a diamond catching sunlight. Louis shut his window to keep the heat of all these bodies out.

Thursday night a serious amateur who’d advertised in the Globe came and took away all the radio equipment in a station wagon for $380 cash. Louis had initially asked six hundred.

On Saturday and Sunday, roughly every two hours, he dialed Renée’s home number and work number. There was no answer at either. He decided that she had no interest in seeing him again. The thought maddened him and he began to dislike her, because he wanted to use her body and was fully prepared to like her, if that was what using it required.

In the studios of WOLO-AM in downtown Boston, in a glass tower across the tracks from North Station, a sea-captain type wearing white dungarees and red kerchief was being ushered from the vestibule. Moments later the man was heard speaking on the house monitor, extolling a balloon race scheduled for the weekend.

WOLO’s receptionist returned to her desk behind the counter, warded Louis off with one arm, and pounded on her keyboard. She was a dark-haired jumbo girl, about the same age as he and ridiculously pretty. Her thighs were crossed and her tight skirt was bunched into exciting rills. At length she stopped typing, squinted at her screen, and delicately touched a function key. The screen went blank. She clapped her hands to her cheeks in horror and stared. She turned to Louis, eyes and mouth round. “I don’t know where it went! I don’t know where it went!”

“I’m supposed to see a Mr. Pincus?”

“He was in.” She put a finger on a new key and pulled it away as if stung. “But he went out.”

“Is he coming back?”

“You’re Holland, Louis, right? Why don’t you leave your name. I can’t deal with you. The manual for this printer was generated on the same printer for quote heuristic reasons unquote and the one sentence I could care less about ends with the phrase, I’ve got this memorized, ‘not to the not to.’ Ends with it.”

“I thought I had an eleven o’clock appointment.”

“Definitely not looking good in terms of seeing Mr. Pincus.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“Why don’t we start with where did he go? Hey? He went to the airport. Unlikely thing that’s his final destination. What’s his final destination? ‘Not to the not to.’ You follow me?”

“Maybe I could make a new appointment.”

“I’d love to reschedule you, but for reasons of blankness of screen and total unresponsiveness to keyed commands that’s not possible. Why don’t you write your name and number down, and I’ll give him the message, Holland, Louis. I’ll tape it to His screen.”

She unrolled eight or ten inches of Scotch tape and stuck one end to Louis’s memo and the other to the doorway leading from her cubicle. From a drawer in her work station she removed a cantaloupe-sized red apple and made a tiny white notch in it with her teeth.

“Do you want to have lunch with me?” Louis said.

She held the apple up and wiggled it. “Not to the not to!”

“How about a drink after work?”

She shook her head and took a larger bite of apple and munched in a glum, blank-minded way, staring at an electrical outlet. Jackhammers rattled in the distance, at some unguessable compass point; cars honked plaintively, as though calling to their young. With a whack the girl bit a slab off the apple. Clearly it would take her another five minutes to reach the core (each bite reinforcing the superfluity of lunch) and another three minutes after that to suck her teeth clean and readjust her mouth, checking its perimeter with the tip of her tongue and then patting it with the back of her wrist. Her screen was still blank.

“Are you free on the weekend?” Louis said.

“This person,” she complained.

“We could have dinner.”

“Do I know this person? Why am I talking to this person?”

In the help-wanteds there were thousands of boring jobs and no interesting jobs. Until you opened the help-wanteds it was possible to forget the essence of the average person’s job, which was: you perform this soul-killing “data entry” or “telemarketing” or “word-processing” function and we will reluctantly give you money.

The help-wanteds were even sadder than the personals. “Very attractive benefits package,” some promised, (stunning blue-eyed SWF, fortyish but looks 25, seeks.) Was there anyone in the world who was independent, highly motivated, creative, and possessed of a minimum five yrs exp w/T-ls, SDLC, HDLC and 3270 BISYNC? And if such a dream candidate did exist, would it not be suspicious in the extreme if he or she were looking for a job? Ads like these seemed to have been placed as bitter ceremonial reminders, lest anybody think that corporations did not, like everyone else, have needs and desires that could not be satisfied.

At the other end of the scale were the laconic one-liners seeking watchmen or receptionists and mentioning no benefits or wages; ads like ugly prostitutes who, on the plus side, didn’t ask much.

Running a business was clearly nothing but unpleasant trouble. Companies wanted good employees and did not want bad employees. But the bad employees were eager to stay and take the companies’ money, while the good employees were eager to leave and work for competitors. To Louis all the thousands of jobs listed in the paper seemed like noxious effluents that the companies were trying to pay people to take off their hands. How they hated to have to pay so much and offer such juicy “benefits” to be rid of these noxious duties! How they wished it weren’t so! He could feel their anger at the expense of disposing of all this garbage. The top executives dumped the problem on the personnel department, and the people in personnel wore plastic suits easily mistaken for faces and personalities. Their job was to handle the poisonous but inevitable employment by-products without letting them come in contact with their skin. Their cordiality was guaranteed non-stick. It was 100 percent impermeable.

“What are you, on vacation, Lou?”

“No, I told you. I was fired.”