Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“You had a bad time,” Louis said.

“Yeah. I had a bad time. I had a very bad time, but it was my fault.”

“It’s your fault my sister gives you a plate of beef?”

“I can eat a little beef. It doesn’t kill me. I mean, yes it does kill me: I can’t eat it . But it’s not like it makes me sick. It’s only me. It’s only my problem with it.”

“I was the one,” he objected slowly, “who made you go. The whole thing was my idea.”

“Do you know why I stopped eating meat?” She was staring straight ahead. A damp breeze full of infrastructure dragged sickles of her hair across her forehead. “It’s not for — moral superiority. Just so you know that. It’s only because I don’t want to forget. I refuse to say OK, I’ll forget this is a cow. It’s nothing noble, it’s nothing compassionate. It’s only me and my problems.”

Across the street a Camry had found a parking place and was swinging in happily, rump first. Louis decided this was a good time to say nothing.

The trolley snaked and groaned beneath the center of the city. Riders spoke quietly, and flattered by their deference the enveloping silence grew glutted and despotic. They were nearly at Lechmere before Louis dared ask if Renée had gotten anything out of Peter.

She shook her head. “He was very cautious, when I brought it up. He seemed surprised when I told him what he’d said at the party. He said he must have been very drunk. I said it must be true, though, what he’d said. And he said, yeah, his dad says the company doesn’t do any dumping, but he’s pretty sure they do. I asked him why he thought so, and he said he’d heard some things, but it wasn’t anything he could prove. That was all I could get him to say, without seeming like I really cared.”

“Did he ask you what’s causing the earthquakes? I was noticing you—”

“Yes. I lied, exactly the way you wanted me to. I sat there and told him a lie.”

Louis collared her and pulled on her ear, but she was very unhappy. He waited until they’d crossed Cambridge Street and were in his car before he said, “Aren’t you going to ask what I found out from Eileen?”

“Did you find something out?”

“Nah. Only that Peter’s parents had earthquake insurance for their house. A special rider.”

He watched his words sink in. “You’re kidding,” she said.

“She volunteered it. I didn’t even ask.”

“Nobody. Nobody around here buys earthquake coverage.”

“So I gather.”

“Oh wow.” She pressed her head into the headrest. “Wow.” She took his hand and squeezed it hard, hitting her thigh with it. He gave her a kiss and she snapped it off like a grape from its stem.

“Are you mine?” he said.

“Yes!”

They drove home to Pleasant Avenue. On the kitchen table were the United Airlines tickets that had come in the mail that morning. Apparently Louis’s father had purchased a Boston-Chicago round trip in Louis’s name, without telling him, after a bad conversation they’d had on the previous weekend.

“These,” he said tiredly.

“I still don’t understand why he sent them.”

He drank a glass of water. “It’s this von Clausewitz side of him. We have this conversation where I basically hang up on him, and he turns around and buys me plane tickets. Because now it’s my fault if he loses three hundred bucks because I don’t go.”

“You could just say you have to work.”

“You mean, tell a lie? Funny you suggest it. Unfortunately, I already told him I’m unemployed. And the thing is, it’s a nice thing. I was totally rude to him, and he turns the other cheek and gives me three hundred bucks’ worth of tickets, because in his own pot-headed way he’s trying to hold the family together. I told you he called me because he’d found out about my little run-in with my mother, up in Ipswich. He’s like, You want to trash her sofa? That’s cool, Lou, but you should consider her feelings too. Which has only been his refrain for about twenty years, you know, that I should consider her feelings too. Which is exactly what he’s going to tell me if I go out there. And so, like, why go? I’ve already heard it.”

Renée put her chin on his shoulder and her hand on his crotch and squeezed him. “ I won’t object if you don’t go.”

“The person who should go is you, not me. You and him would really hit it off.” He dropped into a chair, and she sat down on his lap. He slid his hands up under her T-shirt. “I guess we’ll just see how we feel next Sunday.”

“When are we going to move you in?”

“I don’t know. Sometime before then. Wednesday?”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime. ” He pulled her shirt up slowly, bunching it above her black bra.

“I have to do some work. Plus the system backup on Monday, which will take all night.”

He unhooked her bra and freed her breasts, these female things that it had seemed, tonight, that he had never seen before. They were soft and animate little scones. He was just beginning to take a good, hard look at them when—

“Mm!”

She jumped to her feet, pulling down her shirt, and crossed her arms and faced the wall. He thought she’d gotten tangled up in her selfconsciousness again. Once she’d fixed her bra though, she apologized and said it was only the raccoon, the raccoon at the window, it had been looking straight at her.

He hadn’t seen this raccoon yet. He went to the window, but with the kitchen lights on, all he could make out through the screen was some rear porch lights in the trees, and a length of white gutter at the bottom of the piece of roof outside the window.

“Listen,” Renée said.

There was a strange huffing, almost too faint to credit.

“He’s right around the corner,” she said. “He gets nervous and goes around the corner, but then he gets more interested and comes back. I say he, but I’m not sure about that. Which is interesting, how an animal without gender, I always say he. Default gender: male. We should get away from the window, though. It—”

“I know what you’re going to say.”

“What?”

“It’s like an earthquake. It only comes if you’re not looking.”

“That’s right.”

“But it does come. I mean, there really is a raccoon.”

“Yes! You think I’m lying to you?”

They sat down at the table. Louis cheated, pretending not to watch the window but continually stealing peeks, and still it came as a complete surprise when he realized that the screen had stopped being blank. At what moment, exactly, had the dun-colored snout and perspicacious leather nose and shiny eyes appeared?

This time when he went to the window the raccoon retreated only as far as the gutter. From there it gave him a hurt look, over its shoulder, like a doubtful suicide on a ledge. It was a big animal, ring-tailed and bandit-eyed, larger than a cat. The moment Louis turned to glance at Renée, the raccoon returned to the window. It paced back and forth, a dark blur of fur for the most part, but now and again (and each time surprisingly) it pushed its nose against the screen and looked at Renée.

“Oh, it still has its sore,” she said, concerned.

“This is great. Do you feed it?”

“Sometimes I put stuff out. It usually doesn’t eat much. I don’t see it very often. Sometimes it comes two or three nights in a row, and then I won’t see it for a month. Three months, once. I thought it was gone. A dog got it, a car got it. Rabies.”

Louis watched it climb up a drainpipe, hunching its furry and powerful shoulders like a cat, extending an arm like a monkey and then, as it put its chin on the gutter and heaved itself onto the roof, looking more like a person than anything else. The ceiling creaked, once, under its weight. With a smile, he turned to make a comment to Renée; but the room was empty.