Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

It was a declaration. Louis looked at the face of the person who had made it, the face with the pretty eyes and upturned nose and acne, and realized that this person had somehow become literally the only thing in the world he could even marginally count on.

“I love you,” he said unexpectedly, but meaning it. He didn’t see the fan behind him grin and wink at Renée and so didn’t entirely understand why she bounced back in her seat so abruptly and gave her attention to the game, which was ending.

There’s a specific damp and melancholy ancient smell that comes out in Boston after sunset, when the weather is cool and windless. Convection skims it off the ecologically disrupted water of the Mystic and the Charles and the lakes. The shuttered mills and mothballed plants in Waltham leak it. It’s the breath from the mouths of old tunnels, the spirit rising from piles of soot-dulled glass and the ballast of old railbeds, from all the silent places where cast iron has been rusting, concrete turning friable and rotten like inorganic Roquefort, petroleum distillates seeping back into the earth. In a city where there is no land that has not been changed, this is the smell that has come to be primordial, the smell of the nature that has taken nature’s place. Flowers still bloom, mown grass and falling leaves and fresh snow still alter the air periodically. But their smells are superimposed; sentimental; younger than those patiently outlasting emanations from the undersides of bridges and the rubble of a thousand embankments, the creosoted piers in oil-slicked waterways, the sheets of Globe and Herald wrapped around furry rocks in drainage creeks, and the inside of every blackened metal box still extant on deserted right-of-way, purpose and tokens of ownership effaced by weather, keyhole plugged by corrosion: the smell of infrastructure.

It was out in force when Louis and Renée came up Dartmouth Street from the Green Line stop at Copley Square. They walked in silence. The windy brake-lit night when they’d driven these streets searching for a parking place seemed buried in the past by much more than the month it actually had been. Again it was a weekend night, but this time the neighborhood was peaceful and sober and untrafficked, as though by some circadian coincidence all the residents had left town or were staying home with family. The twilight sky was like a painted blue backdrop hanging directly behind the row houses and their domestic yellow lights.

Eileen had been suspicious when Louis called. He’d found it necessary to fire a salvo of apologies at her, attributing his recent meanness to the fact that he’d lost his job. His remorse was just authentic enough to make her sentimental. She said it was “really tough luck” that he was unemployed. She expressed a vague interest in having him over sometime, to which non-invitation he insltantly responded: “Great! How about Friday night?” She said she’d check with Peter. He said he and Renée would plan to come around eight. She said, but she had to check with Peter. He said one thing he should mention was that Renée didn’t eat red meat or poultry. “Oh, that’s OK,” Eileen said, her voice brightening. “I’ll just make some vegetarian thing.”

Once the date had been set, the difficult task turned out to be persuading Renée to lie.

“A mathematician?” She’d gaped at him. “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but what’s Peter going to think when a seismologist starts asking him about waste disposal? He’s going to think earthquakes. Do we want him thinking earthquakes? Mentioning to his dad that there’s this seismologist who’s curious about the company? You told me you were a math person, before you went into geophysics.”

“I’m not even going to discuss this with you.”

“Why? Why? All you have to do is say it. I mean assuming anyone’s polite enough to ask about your work, which I doubt they will. You just say, whatever, applied mathematics. Isn’t that what seismology is anyway?”

“It’s a lie. I blush when I lie.”

“Uh! You’re so exemplary I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, and I wonder if you appreciate that. I’m really beginning to wonder.”

“Lying is a social skill,” he said patiently. “Everybody has to lie. And this particular lie is like totally benign.”

“Misrepresenting myself, manipulating two people who’ve invited us to dinner in good faith, trying to get some time alone with one of them so I can extract information on the pretext of idle curiosity? This is a benign lie?”

It was in moments of frustration like this one that Louis thought of Lauren. He was convinced that Lauren would have lied for him. Lauren would have known what to do.

“Look,” Renée said. “If the subject comes up naturally, in the course of a conversation, and I don’t have to lie, fine. Otherwise, I know you’re angry at these people, I know you feel like you’ve been stepped on. But they’re still people, and to go there in total cynicism, which is what you’re doing — I find it very worrisome that you’d consider doing this.”

“Oh, come on,” he said. She was getting on his nerves. “Things aren’t so black-and-white. For one thing, I actually had a not-bad talk with Eileen. It’s not like I’m blaming her the way I blame my mother. You know, she’s a victim too. You think I’d go there in total cynicism?”

“I’m saying I can see you beginning to think you can treat people whatever way you want to, because you’re so angry. And the reason this matters to me is that I care about you.”

He filled his lungs with air. He let it out slowly. The idea that Renée so fully understood his shortcomings was almost more than he could stand.

“OK, OK, you’re right,” he said, more temperately. “But it’s like you’re killing everything by thinking too much. I’m not asking you to be diabolical. I’m just saying let’s go and have a good time and try to get what we want. It’s like you do so much thinking that it’s impossible for you to have dinner with people under any circumstances. The only way you can stay exemplary is to stay by yourself. Because you’re never going to really respect the people you’re with, and the music they like, and the food they eat, and the clothes they wear, and the less than totally intense thoughts they have—”

“I said I would go.”

“And that’s morally wrong , right? It’s deceptive . To act like you’re on the same level they are, when inside you feel more exemplary and aware and everything. It turns you into a false person, with a false smile and no friends, which is ultimately—”

“Fuck you, Louis. You really do abuse me.”

“Which is ultimately very sad. Because underneath you’re a very lovable person, and you want to be liked and have fun.”

He was perplexed by her stubbornness. He honestly believed that she’d be a happier person if she could loosen up a little; but all he got for his pains was the feeling that he was an odious Male. Of course, maybe he was an odious Male. The odious Male seeking control over a virtuous and difficult woman won’t scruple to exploit whatever weakness he can find in her — her age, her mannerisms, her insecurity, and her loneliness above all. He can be as cowardly and cruel as he wants to as long as logic is on his side. And the woman, yielding to his logic, can do no more to save her pride than demand his fidelity. She says, “You’ve humiliated me and won me now, so you’d better not hurt me.” But hurting her is precisely what the man is tempted to do, because now that she has yielded he feels contempt for her, and he also knows that if he hurts her she’ll become virtuous and difficult again. These archetypes forced entry to the apartment on Pleasant Avenue like vulgar relatives. Louis wanted to turn them away, but it’s not so easy to slam the door in your relatives’ faces.