Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Need some help with dinner?” Louis asked her in a cartoon voice.

He followed her to the kitchen, where she continued to glance balefully in the direction of Renée and Peter.

“So,” he said. “You’re all done. You passed all your exams.”

“Yeah.” From the refrigerator she took Russian dressing and a green salad big enough for twelve. “You want to toss this?”

She put her head in the oven. Hearing nothing from the other room but a rustling paper, Louis imagined that Peter and Renée’s mouths had already found each other, Peter squeezing her breasts and stifling her cries. His feelings had acquired such a physical bite that he could hardly believe he’d ever been in bed with her before, had ever tasted or touched any more of her than the mere idea: a voice, a willingness, a head, an older person — anything but the woman he now imagined in the other room. And it was a great thing, jealousy. It was a drug that charged up the nerve endings and delivered a first-class rush. On the minus side, it damaged his control over the salad he was tossing, which goaded by fork and spoon was surging from the bowl, cucumber disks splatting on the counter; and underneath the rush (which was great) he suspected he did not feel well at all.

Hands in thermal mitts, Eileen gazed dispassionately at the mess he was making. “Did I tell you what happened the night we had our finals party?”

“No.”

She pulled her hair behind her ears with quilted paws. “It was so funny. It was so, so funny. My friend Sandi’s dad owns this limousine company, and he was supposed to let us use three stretch limos, as a graduation present, and we were going to have this road party and end up in Manhattan and have dinner and go dancing at the Rainbow Room?”

“Uh huh.”

“But so these limos come to pick us up, and we’re all dressed and it’s raining, but there are only two of them? And there are eighteen of us?” Briefly she doubled over with the funniness of her memories. But we all pile into these two limos and we start having champagne and caviar, and we’re watching this video that this other friend found in the library which what it’s about is management training in the dairy industry? It’s all these cows and milking machines and guys with clipboards and crew cuts talking to the guys who work the machines. And slapping the cows and looking at cheeses and lobbying in Washington? It’s totally fifties, there’s this long shot of the Capitol Building, where they’re going to be lobbying for milk subsidies? ”

“Uh huh.”

“Hoo ha ha,” she laughed. “But so we’re somewhere in Connecticut, out in the middle of nowhere, and this horrible thing happens to the other limo — not the one I’m in, the other one — somehow all the radiator fluid ends up on the highway and none of it’s in the radiator, and the driver won’t drive it anymore? And there are eighteen of us and it’s pouring rain and we only have one limousine to get to New York in, and the driver says he won’t take more than ten, and of course nobody wants to volunteer not to go.”

“Of course.”

“But we can just barely see this truck stop, down in the valley, it’s this huge truck stop, with about a million trucks out in front of it and nothing else around, just woods. So we all decide, who needs Manhattan, we’re just going to have our party right here. So we all go in, and there are about a thousand of these big red-faced truckers , they’ve all got tattoos and they’re smoking and eating this greasy food. And we’re totally dressed up, the guys are all in black tie, and Sandi’s in this Oscar de la Renta dress that’s cut like—!” The neckline Eileen drew across her chest indicated nipple exposure on Sandi’s part. “But we all walk right in anyway, and of course everybody’s staring at us, we’re carrying our champagne glasses, the tall kind, and the guys are carrying the bottles—”

“Was Peter there?”

“No, this was just from our class, we had to limit it. But we went to this room that had a jukebox, and, well. It was so much fun. We were surrounded by all these truckers and making all these jokes and listening to all these oldies and country music. Sandi called her dad and had him send an extra limo, but it was like midnight before it came and by that point the other limo driver had gone to Hartford for more champagne. Sandi was dancing with this trucker that she linked arms with and drank champagne? Everybody was really getting into it. But it was so much fun. We got back about six in the morning, we were all totally plotzed. Everybody asked us how New York was, and when we said where we’d been, nobody would believe us. They just couldn’t believe we’d spent the night in a truck stop.”

“It is amazing,” Louis said.

She nodded, removing garlic bread from the oven. “You want to tell them we’re going to eat?”

He went to the living room. The look Renée gave him as she headed for the dining room was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was just miles away.

“Something smells very good,” she said to Eileen, encouragingly, when they’d all sat down. Louis grunted in agreement. This was right before he realized that the sauce oozing from his slab of moussaka was full of ground beef. Appalled, he looked across the table at Renée, but she was now leagues away and filling her plate with salad. Raising a slice of eggplant with his fork, he uncovered a veritable ants’ nest of beef granules.

“Did I tell you what happened the night of the last earthquake?” Eileen paused and with her eyes made an approval-seeking connection between Renée’s plate and Renée herself. Renée, however, was occupied with raising fortifications, handling her hands and flatware with such absorption and willed inconspicuousness that although she was as nakedly in view as the other three, Louis could look straight at her and still not see what was happening to her moussaka or how she felt about it. He understood this to mean he shouldn’t make an issue of it.

“It was so funny,” Eileen said. “Last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics gave a talk at school, and afterward this professor of mine had him over to dinner with some of his students. He’s got this gr-r-reat house in Nahant, with about three acres overlooking the water—”

“Nahant,” Peter said. “Major Mafia neighborhood.”

Renée nodded and smiled, her eyes on her napkin.

“It’s not all Mafia, Peter. Because Seton lives there, and he’s not Mafia.”

“You got some kind of proof of that?”

“He’s not! He’s not Mafia. He’s a — a Harvard professor!”

“Ohhhh,” Peter said, smirking for Renée’s benefit. “I see.”

“He’s not Mafia,” Eileen assured Louis. “He’s an adjunct professor. But the Nobel guy, he’s Japanese. I can never get his name right. I know it when I hear it but I can’t remember it. Do — you remember?”

Louis’s jaw dropped. “You’re asking me if I remember the name of last year’s Nobel Prize winner in economics?”

“See, neither do I. But anyway, he’s this funny little guy with round glasses, and we were having cognac after dinner in Seton’s living room, and people were starting to leave, and suddenly there was this earthquake. I was standing by the fireplace and I started screaming, because it was really an earthquake, I mean it was really strong.” She blushed a little, realizing she had everyone’s attention now, even Peter’s. “Stuff was falling off the mantel, and the floor was — it was like being on the T. Peter, that’s what it was like. It was like standing up on the T, you had to hold on to something or you’d lose your balance. It only lasted a couple seconds, but everyone was shouting and glasses were breaking and the lights were flickering. But then it stopped, and like one after another we all started noticing — Hakasura? Haka—? Hakanaka? Shoot. But anyway, we started noticing that he was still sitting in his corner of the sofa and talking about econometric inversions . He hadn’t even noticed the earthquake! Or he’d noticed it but he’d kept right on talking. He was holding on to the girl’s arm to keep her from standing up, the girl he was talking to, and finally he sees that we’re all standing there looking at him. He finishes his sentence and he looks up and he asks, ‘Is someone hurt?’ (but in his accent which I can’t do), and we say, ‘No,’ and he goes, ‘Well then. We have a saying in Japan—’”