Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

He found her naked in the sheets. Full of desire, he stripped and came to her, but even in the midst of his anticipation, even as he clambered into her arms and rested his weight on her volume and felt the uniform warmth of her skin and took her head in his hands, he wondered how she always worked it so he came to her, rather than vice versa. He wondered why he had to feel so alone when they made love, so alone with her pleasure as he propelled the long wave train that led to her satisfaction (on the green plotting screen in the computer room she’d shown him what a large and distant earthquake looked like as it registered on the department’s digital seismograph: a flat, bright line faintly rippled by the primary wave, settling down for a moment and then swinging more violently as the secondary wave arrived, and more violently still as more and more shock waves bounced off the earth’s outer core and inner core and crust, the sS and ScS and SS and PP and PKiKP, until finally the line went totally haywire in the grip of tremendous, rolling surface waves, the Love waves and Rayleigh waves that demolished bridges and leveled buildings and tore the earth up everywhere). It wasn’t that they didn’t fit together or come enough; it just seemed as if at no point, not even in this most typical of acts between sexes, did she ever present herself or give herself or even let him see her as a woman. Even before jealousy had sharpened his interest, he’d been telling himself to stop and look at this woman the next time they made love, and each time they made love he forgot, and remembered only afterward. There was something like an earthquake’s own shyness in the way she tricked his eye, so that he could be with her and feel the presence of everything but those very qualities his imagination called up when he was alone and pictured a Woman. Always it seemed to suit some obscure purpose of hers to have the two of them be the same sex, excitable through matching nerves and satiable through matching stimulation. Some principle of seduction, some acknowledgment of difference, was missing. And it seemed as if whenever she sensed that he felt an absence she started talking, in a voice orgasm-drunk and lulling — pro-him, pro-them, pro-sex.

So he turned the lights on. It was two in the morning. “I want to look at you,” he said.

She squinted in the brightness. “We don’t need all these on.”

He turned on one further light and stood by the bed looking down, intending, once and for all, to really see this woman. The game was up; she couldn’t hide; she didn’t try. In the glare of the lights, he saw: the blackness of hair and eyelids. The red smudge of mouth and nipples. Wry labia distended and flecked with foam. An ear with metal in it. The loll of untensed muscles beneath grayish skin. Dull, puckered areas of dried or drying semen. Dark fuzz on upper lip and wrists. The fetal mashedness of a tired face. All the qualities laid out like organs for sale in a French butcher’s meat case. This was the warm body he’d been holding? This was his girlfriend, Renée?

He’d been tricked yet again. He’d seen an angel floating on thermals high above him, and not believing in it had shot it down and found it to be nothing but a feathered and lumpy piece of meat. The report of the gun echoed off into space like the laughter of the angel that had escaped.

Suspiciously uncurious about what he was standing there for, Renée pulled the sheet over her shoulders. He supposed it was possible that she was just very sleepy. He crawled into bed, craving her desperately.

On Sunday the Globe ran an endless article on the recent earthquakes, the long columns flanked by the usual escort of photos and graphics and boxes. Renée wasn’t mentioned in the main text, but she did get quoted in a box headlined EARTHQUAKES: GOD’S WILL, EARTH SPIRITS, OR CHANCE PHENOMENA?

For Harvard University seismologist Renée Seitchek, the line between science and religion has proved particularly tortuous. Seitchek, who in the April 27 broadcast denounced efforts by Stites to link the abortion issue to the temblors, has become a target of illegal telephone and mail harassment directed at clinics and physicians who perform abortions and other pro-choice advocates in greater Boston.

Stites and other COAIC leaders deny responsibility for the harassment, but Seitchek believes the barrage of hate mail she has received constitutes an attempt by the religious right to stifle free and accurate expression of scientific views.

“The science of earthquakes is a science of uncertainties,” Seitchek said. “By admitting this uncertainty we run the risk of appearing to allow room for superstition, and yet if a scientist tries to forestall this and draw a sharp line between scientific debate and moral debate, she apparently is running the risk of being harassed by Philip Stites.”

According to the box, Stites’s “successful prediction” of the recent earthquakes had attracted dozens of new followers to his church, which was still housed in the shaky tenement in Chelsea. The church claimed to have suffered “no real damage” since moving in, though by now nearly every home north of Cambridge had had a few dishes broken or walls cracked.

Cumulative property damage, in fact, had reached an estimated $100 million, with more than 80 percent of it due to the most recent pair of quakes near Peabody. On a sheet of paper marked their fault, Louis wrote:

April 20, Peabody $3,400,000

May 10–11, Peabody $80,000,000 +

It gave him great satisfaction to carry all the zeroes out.

In her spare moments, Renée was continuing to develop the scientific case against Sweeting-Aldren, studying every documented instance of induced seismicity. Louis was glad to see her working, but he was in no hurry for her to finish. The longer they delayed taking action against the company, the more time the earth had to shudder again under Peabody and cause further damage and run the company’s tab to still more satisfying heights. In his view, Sweeting-Aldren’s management were slimes and enemies of nature, and he wanted to see them bankrupt, if not in jail. He felt suspense almost erotic in intensity as he waited, day after day, for the next large earthquake. To occupy himself, he began to read basic seismology texts while Renée was away at work.

Late in the afternoon on Wednesday she came back to the apartment with a new manila folder filled with photocopies. She’d been at Widener reading old newspapers.

“Some interesting things here,” she said.

He opened the folder greedily, but she stopped him. “Let’s get your stuff. I’ll tell you later.”

It was summer again. Heat coiled off car roofs in the no man’s land of Davis Square, the marquee of the Somerville Theater trembling in the giddy swirl of gas fumes. Louis and Renée had been going to the theater at night for cheap double features and free airconditioning.

On Belknap Street the soprano had her windows open and sounded near death. The voice seemed to come from everywhere. It was a sound so wide that it didn’t seem capable of having issued from as narrow a thing as a human mouth. “I would like to make this person selfconscious,” Renée said. Louis put her to work in the kitchen, the room farthest from the hell of melodious torments. The soprano screamed and screamed. The tortured ear could not believe that no person of authority was coming with a needle or a gun to stop the misery, for humanity’s sake. Louis slid the catch down the front storm door’s piston and got some rope out of the Civic. The futon was going to ride on top.

“Hey, Lou. Lou! Where you been?” John Mullins came down his porch stairs angrily. He planted his feet in the driveway with his head thrust forward like a desert prophet’s. A cyst-like glob of sweat was hanging on his chin. “People been lookin’ for you, Lou,” he said, all opprobrium. “Where you been? Where you been? Oh my God, you’re not movin’ out, are you? Lou? You’re not movin’ out? Whatsa matter, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you like it around here?”