Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

In the brick house on Marlborough Street, at the door of the Stoorhuys-Holland residence, he watched stress do extreme and painful things to Eileen’s face and Renée’s face as they squeezed through the moment of hellos. Then he handed over a bag of beer. Eileen was wearing an oversized black karate outfit, with her hair fanned on her back and shoulders. The effect was stylish and reminded him of borzois, dogs which when he passed them on the street always seemed like they’d be happier running around in jeans and sneakers but couldn’t, because their owners were rich.

He figured Eileen was entertaining them tonight because she’d lacked the skills to escape his self-invitation, but it was possible that she was also curious about Renée. She led them into the living room — empty of partygoers, it had some dignity now, was less of a station, more of a room — and explained that Peter had been helping one of his little sisters set up a new computer and was due home at any minute. She asked “you guys” if they’d had trouble parking. She hoped “you guys” didn’t mind eating so late. She offered “you guys” beer or wine or beer or. whatever. She hoped “you guys” liked moussaka. Having thus exhausted the possibilities for addressing them collectively, she jumped out of her chair and said, “Where is my boy? ”

They listened to her phoning in the kitchen, her voice getting higher, its girlish tone stretching thin as the irritation underneath it swelled. When she returned to the living room she slipped into her chair as though she didn’t want to interrupt the conversation. However, there was no conversation. Her guests merely looked at her, and at length she pretended to wake out of a trance. “He’s coming,” she averred.

Renée spoke. “You— You’re in business school?”

Eileen nodded rockingly, not looking at her. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

“You must be about done, though,” Louis said.

“Oh, yeah.” She nodded and rocked, some aspect of the stereo holding her attention. “I’m all done, actually.”

“Where will you be working?” Renée asked.

“Um.” She rocked. “Bank of Boston?”

There was a long silence. Shyness had paralyzed Eileen, shyness of the kind that makes a five-year-old bury her face in her mother’s arms when a stranger asks too many questions.

“What kind of thing will you be doing there?” Renée said gently.

“Um. commercial loans?”

“And. what kind of thing does that entail?”

Blank-eyed, Eileen turned to Louis, who frantically indicated that it was her question to answer, not his.

“Commercial lending,” she said. “It’s, you know, helping corporations finance things. Capital improvements. Acquisitions, takeovers. Development. It’s — really not very interesting.”

“It sounds like it would be very interesting,” Renée said.

“Oh, well, it is interesting. To me, it’s very interesting. But I think Louis said that you’re a scientist?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, yeah, well. It’s not interesting in that way. It’s more of a people kind of job, you know, where you have to deal with different kinds of people. That’s sort of where the interest is.”

Here Eileen ran out of gas. No matter how Renée tried to draw her out, she could think of nothing else to say about the work she would be doing. What puzzled Louis was that she didn’t take the obvious escape route, which would have been to ask Renée about her work, or him about his lack of it. She just squirmed and let the gruesome silences accrete.

It was almost nine when Peter breezed into the apartment, wearing a Harvard sweatshirt and carrying two boxes of floppies. Instantly Eileen became voluble again and launched into a more detailed account of Peter’s day, beginning with his little sister’s visit to the Computer Factory. When he returned from the kitchen, a tumbler of amber liquid in his hand, she tried to rope him into the narrative by smiling up at him, this her boyfriend, the topic of her conversation, her very words made flesh. “Did you get everything set up?” she asked.

Peter let the question lie on the floor a few seconds before he squashed it with an impatient “Yeah.” To Louis he doled out a small and hollow “how’s it going.” Renée, however, he joined on the sofa and regaled with a long and thorough inspection of her head and arms and lap and head, smiling slyly all the while, as if they shared some secret. He dangled his whiskey glass between his knees and hunched over it like an ice fisherman peering through his hole. He said it was good to see her here again. He remembered she’d come to the party in mourning, very cool. He lamented that they hadn’t had a chance to talk more at the party. He focused on Renée, saying one thing after another to her, as if Louis and Eileen were conversing separately and not listening. Or as if he were the host of the Tonight Show, forgetting the audience in his fascination with this special guest, appropriating our fantasies of leaning close to her. Renée, thoroughly confused, began to smile at her knees the way you smile at a pretty good joke told by a person you’re not sure about. She gave no reply at all when Peter asked her if she’d seen yesterday’s Globe .

“You’re kidding,” he said, “you didn’t see it?”

She shook her head, still smiling. Peter looked over his shoulder at Eileen. “We still have that paper, don’t we?”

Eileen shrugged crossly.

“It’s gotta be in the kitchen,” he said. “You want to get it?” Louis was very sorry to see his sister unfold herself from her chair and silently obey the order. When she returned, Peter took the newspaper from her hands without looking at her.

“See this?” Peter let everything but the Metro/Region section slide to the floor. “Right here? Lead story? ‘Pro-Choice Advocates Decry Mail and Phone Harassment.’ And a fetching little picture of you? Courtesy of Channel 4 news. And here and here and here?” Inevitably, condescension had crept into his voice. “How about that? You’re all over the place.”

“We didn’t get a paper,” Renée vaguely said to Louis, as if this were his fault.

“Dr. Renée Seitchek, Harvard University seismologist—”

She turned again to Louis, with a dark and vindicated look. “This TV show, I didn’t see that. Sounds pretty wild.”

“It wasn’t wild. It was stupid.”

“Right.” Peter nodded as if he’d said it himself. “Like even worse than stupid. You express an opinion and next thing you know you’re getting hate mail and you can’t even use your own telephone. You know what?” He put his hand on his hip and leaned away so he could see her better. “I think you’re being very brave. To speak up like this. I think that’s awfully damn brave. Private citizen branded an abortionist for expressing an opinion on TV? It’s like the ultimate nightmare.”

She leaned over his lap and squinted at the paper. Louis was dismayed to see how readily she tolerated Peter’s attention, and how pretty her flushing cheeks had made her, and how close her neck and shoulders were to Peter’s face. Peter, for all his faults, appreciated what an interesting and sexy and brave person Renée was; odious, immature Louis only said unpleasant things to her and criticized her. How could she fail to notice the contrast? The worst of it was that Louis didn’t know himself which way he wanted things, whether it was better to have a sad and twisted girlfriend who needed him so much that he could say whatever he wanted to her, or to be involved with a real woman who could attract other men and fill him with anxiety and forget him.

Eileen looked even less pleased than Louis. While the two thirty-year-olds huddled on the sofa in their faded jeans, she sat in her goofy silk pajamas and leveled on Renée the same evil stare she’d been using for twenty years whenever something she felt was rightfully hers was being denied her, even momentarily.