Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Renée frowned. “I cut my hand.”

Louis found his glasses and crawled over to look. On her palm was a semicircle of loosened skin, a bluish fish scale surrounded by crimson trickles and orange smears. “Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you OK otherwise?”

She looked down at her ankles. “I can’t imagine a more degrading position to be caught in. But otherwise.”

They took turns washing in the bathroom, which was in antiseptic condition apart from the fact that in patching her hand Renée had unaccountably left a Curad wrapper in the sink. Louis opened her medicine chest and found expensive facial cleansers, the basic drugs, nonoxynol jelly, some dental floss.

She was opening beers in the kitchen. The fan had fallen from the window, unplugging itself; it was still on the floor. Louis started to turn on the radio. “Don’t,” she said.

“What do you have for music?”

“The radio. But I don’t want to hear about the earthquake. Not even — not even anything.”

“You don’t have any tapes?”

She leaned against the table and drank. “I have. no tapes.”

“What’s this?” He held up a tape.

She regarded it soberly. “That’s a tape.”

“But it’s not music?”

She tried several times to say something, and stopped each time. “You’re kind of nosy.”

“Forget I asked.”

“It’s one song. Which I never listen to. There’s no significance to this, it’s just a song. Do you want me to embarrass myself?”

“Yes. Yes. More than anything.”

She sat cross-legged on a chair and hugged herself, covering the nakedness that went through clothes. “It’s only that when I was seventeen. ”

“I was ten!”

“Thank you for pointing that out.”

Louis wondered what the awful confession would be.

“I was a punk fan,” she said. “Or should I say new wave? These words.” She hugged herself more tightly. “I can hardly make myself say them. But I was very happy at the time. And I still want people to know I saw Elvis Costello four times in ’78 and ’79. But there’s so much to explain about how he was different and I was different. I want people to be impressed but it’s just not impressive. I was sprayed by David Byrne’s saliva before he got blissy. I was right up against the stage. I got a pick from Graham Parker, I took it right from his hand.”

“Are you serious? Can I see it?”

“Exciting. It really was. I saw the Clash and the Buzzcocks and the Gang Of Four. It embarrasses me to even say the names now, but I saw them and I knew their lyrics, and they were all so good until eventually they all got so bad.”

“They were great,” Louis said. “I was kind of a ham operator, in high school? I used to trade Nick Lowe lyrics with this person in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, in Morse code. "She was a winner / That became the doggie’s dinner’? Di-di-dit, di-di-di-dit.?”

Renée seemed to assume he was joking. “I liked the attitude,” she said. “But I wasn’t really a punk. The real punks scared the hell out of me. They were violent and sexist, and they hardly even listened to the music.”

“Did you have a biker’s jacket?”

“Suede,” she said bitterly. “Which I was very happy with then and which is now a source of shame that will never die. A suede jacket sums me up completely. There were a lot of people like me at the concerts, although I think a difference between me and the others was that I thought this was it . I loved the music. I applied it to my life , but in a, what’s the word, hermetic way. The place where it all happened was in dorm rooms, where I had the lyric sheets. It kills me to think about how innocent and happy I was, even though at the time what I thought the whole message was was black humor and anger and apocalypse. You can be very innocent and happy about that stuff too. And it seemed so much safer than sixties and seventies music, because it wasn’t really happy or innocent or hopeful at all. It was tough and simple. I kept all the records, and I liked the records better and better . I kept on dressing the way bands dressed in ’78. The same way I dress now, which is like nothing, you know, jeans and T-shirts. But it got to be 1985, and it started to seem pathetic that the only records I listened to were these old records. But I didn’t like the new music or at least I wasn’t finding out about the good things, because I wasn’t in college anymore.”

She took the last two beers from the refrigerator. Louis had been observing that every time he drank from his bottle, she drank from hers.

“Meanwhile I stopped listening to more than a song or two at a time. I guess partly I was trying not to get tired of the things I loved, and partly I was so affected that it was too distracting to play a whole album, I couldn’t do any work, I mean, because the music was designed to rev you up, to make you anxious and angry and excited, and so it was very bad music to move on in life with, because it’s one kind of music that simply won’t function as background. But the biggest thing was just how embarrassed I was to see myself still listening to it.”

“You like the Kinks?”

“Never much.”

“Lou Reed? Roxy Music? Waitresses? XTC? Banshees? Early Bowie? Warren Zevon?”

“Some of them, yeah. I never really bought that many records, because I stopped taking money from my parents. But—”

“But so.”

“I started to pare down. I got rid of the really old stuff, the stuff I had from high school, and I got rid of the records that only had one or two good songs on them. Then I started taping the medium-good records, and keeping the good part. Then I decided it was stupid to have a big stereo, because I could get the same effect from the little tape player — you know, you’re the first person I’ve ever really talked about this with. I just wanted to say that.”

They looked at each other. The refrigerator shuddered and fell silent. “I like you too,” Louis said.

She pushed her hair around, doing a good job of seeming not to care. “But so I was left with about twenty tapes which I listened to less and less, just one or two songs every once in a while, when I needed to feel better. It used to make me feel better because it made me feel tough, and angry and lonely in a good way. But then without my even really noticing, it started to make me feel better because it made me feel young , the way ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ makes forty-year-olds feel young. When I finally noticed this I was even less inclined to play the tapes. And did I really ever need to hear ‘Red Shoes’ again?”

“No argument on that one.”

“Or any of Give ’Em Enough Rope? Or even any Pretenders?”

“Fine records. Keep ’em.”

“I got rid of everything. I pared it down to one song, one more or less arbitrary song, which I haven’t listened to in at least six months, if not more like a year. I don’t listen to it. But I also can’t bring myself to throw it away.”

“Can I play it?”

She shook her head. “Sure. Just be decent to me. I know you’re a radio person.”

Out of the little tape machine came the opening guitar line on Television’s first record.

“Oh,” Louis said, increasing the volume. “Fine song. You dance?”

“Are you kidding?”

“Me neither.”

“I could when I was twenty.”

Iunderstandall. ISEENO.

destructiveurges. ISEENO.

Itseemssoperfect. ISEENO.

I SEE. I SEE NO. I SEE NO EVIL

“You can turn it off.”

“Wait, doesn’t Verlaine have like a perfect riff in here? It would have been good to hear these people before they broke up. Or did you?”

“No.”