Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Seismologist at MIT. He’s good. He’s — fine.”

“Concern focusing on disruption of production lines. Company operating near capacity, blah blah. If all production shut down more than three weeks, losses in neighborhood of million dollars a day. Further worry regarding lawsuits arising from release of greenish effluent containing biphenyls and other halogenated hydrocarbons. suspicion that hazardous wastes are being stockpiled rather than incinerated as company claims. (Ha.) Fear also of spillage in event of large earthquake, includes chlorine, benzene, trichlorophenol, and other highly volatile and poisonous or carcinogenic substances. Company insured against damage to capital investments, is ‘looking into the details’ of its liability coverage, undoubtedly meaning coverage is insufficient. However, considering strong revenue history, moderate long-term debt burden, and relatively low risk of a major earthquake, three out of four analysts polled on Friday considered Sweeting-Aldren a good buy at Thursday’s closing price.”

Renée took his glasses off and joined him on the business section. As they kissed, he began to scratch the thick denim seam between her legs, below the zipper.

Two quick outs here in the seventh inning .

“I don’t know where you came from. You just crashed in.”

“I thought you were interesting. I pursued you.”

“Is that what happened?” She raised her head from his chest, a god’s face appearing in a cloud above the horizon of his rib cage. “What we did in the hall, after the earthquake. It was just like it’s supposed to be.”

“Lucky thing I came over, huh?”

“I love sex. It’s almost the only thing I’m not embarrassed to like.”

Good effort by Greenwell to hold him to a single .

“You make me want to be a woman,” Louis said.

After the weekend the heat gave way to weather from Canada. The air smelled washed and sweet and full of oxygen, and the trees on Pleasant Avenue drooped pregnantly in the sudden overfullness of their foliage. The public library, on the last hill of Somerville, was like the bridge of a sailing ship, the emptiness of ocean sky commencing directly beyond the parking lot; air flavored with the sound of hammers and forklifts flowed up and over Louis’s face as he and his girlfriend looked out over flat roofs and brick warehouses at the sky-blue span of the Tobin Bridge, and beyond it to the dusk-colored haze over Lynn and Peabody, and the prow of Cape Ann.

The music he’d been happy to eat sandwiches with and the TV he’d been happy to bury evenings under both began to seem shrill and irrelevant. There was a silence on Pleasant Avenue that belonged to Renée, and he wanted to be in it. One morning he borrowed her Harvard ID and for two hours assumed the identity of René Seitchek, visiting Frenchman. He returned from Widener Library with a backpack of Balzac and Gide. He felt like he’d been flung seismically out of a career in radio, a career he might very well have enjoyed and derived a sense of purpose or safety from, into a state where he not only didn’t know what to do with himself but also doubted that it mattered much. Similar upheavals and subsidences were occurring in the landscape of his memory, familiar landmarks dropping out of sight, replaced by remembered scenes of a nature so radically different that he was almost surprised to realize that these things, too, had had a place in his life. A kind, wry Rice alumnus delivering a Commencement address that Louis no less than the other graduates had had to sit through, and reminding the graduates of a thing called social justice. The entire semester he’d spent in Nantes, the couscous he’d eaten with a group of Algerian students there, the students telling him: things are really bad in the country we were born in, and we as French citizens feel torn. His fourteenth birthday, the buck knife in a sheath Eileen had bought and given him. Also Marcel Proust, for whom he’d held a mental door open long enough to be overjoyed by the discovery that Swann was married to Odette and that the wretched painter at the Verdurins’ had grown into the great artist Elstir; the door had fallen shut under the pressure of four five-page papers, each to be written in French, but not before a splinter of joy had slipped through, a splinter that it was evident now was still inside him, like a self-contained and frightening djinn.

Every evening as he listened to the real Seitchek’s footsteps on the stairs he felt a mounting anticipation and curiosity that were not, however, in any way satisfied by the person who after making some noises in the kitchen came into the room where he’d been reading. He saw her with a dreamlike clarity that was the same as a dreamlike inability to really see her. Instead of a face he saw a mask, a sign grasped directly: the image of the woman he slept with. She looked much the same whether his eyes were closed or open. Strangely or not, his presence in her apartment seemed to disturb her less and less. She listened to his tapes while she made dinner and hypnotized him with the precision and methodicality of her cooking, and afterward, while he washed the dishes, she watched his TV and read the paper and didn’t appear to notice any change in him, not even the way he dried all the dishes and put them away and swept the floor and then for another fifteen or twenty minutes stood in the kitchen doing absolutely nothing but avoiding going in to join her on the bed. It was as if, in nuclear terms, the configuration of forces had changed and he was no longer an oppositely charged particle attracted to her from a great distance but a particle with like charge, a proton repelled by this other proton until they were right next to each other and the strong nuclear force came into its own and bound them together.

“You can hurt me a little.”

“What?”

“You can slap me, or bite me. A little. You can pinch me. It’s something you could do, if you want.”

She lay on top of him, the field emanating from the large-eyed steadiness of her gaze bearing down. “Would you do it?”

He twisted his head away. “No!”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think a man should hit a woman.”

“Not even in bed, if the woman asks?”

“Better not to.”

“OK.”

Her voice was so small only the K was audible. She rolled away and stared at the wall; her shoulder threw his hand back when he touched it. There were silences. Demurrals and qualifications, silences. It took hours to turn the clock back thirty seconds. Long after the last car had driven down Pleasant Avenue, at a time of night when actions and sensations had the moral weightlessness of dreams, he finally let her have her way with him.

The next night, for the first time, she returned to work after dinner. He was allowed to come along. In the computer room, consoles with bubble-shaped chassis like the busts of moon walkers were arrayed in a double row on a Formica-topped bench swamped by equipment manuals and used paper. A plate-glass window gave into a bright room filled with dryer-sized pieces of hardware and a throbbing, all-night white noise of NORAD-style vigilance. Ocean maps like the one in Renée’s apartment hung on the walls, some with drooping corners tipped with squares of sticky stuff. The telephone, which sat on a radiator, had been unplugged, and the room’s atmosphere of transience or abandonment was heightened by a lack of things to sit on. Renée said she hadn’t been on hand when a shipment of new chairs arrived, and that students and assistant professors from the rest of the building had dropped in and helped themselves, and thrown their old chairs in a dumpster, because she hadn’t been on hand.

“I did most of my work in this room. The computer’s a Data General. We have a lot of Sims now too. They speak UNIX.”