Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“I love it here,” Louis said above the aria. “I’m just making sure all my things fit in the car.”

“Heh, little Hondacivic. You like this car? Oh, hey, Lou, that girl that was here looking for you, she ever find you? You know who I’m talking about? Pretty girl.”

The instinctive part of Louis, the part connected to blood pressure and stomach, not the cognitive part, asked Mullins, “When was this?”

“This morning. About nine, nine-thirty. I was readin’ the paper. I told her you’re not around much in the day.”

“What did she look like?”

“Big girl. Said she was looking for you.”

“Fat girl with glasses?”

“No, no. Pretty girl. She had a suitcase.”

Louis went inside. Almost immediately he came back out and looked at the car, trying to remember what he had to do. He touched the car once, on the hood, and went inside directly to his room and walked in circles. Renée packed plangently in the kitchen, flatware hitting skillet, the carton grunting as its flaps were folded under one another. He was supposed to pick things up and carry them to the car. However, everything he looked at with a view to carrying it seemed to be the wrong thing to carry at that particular moment. He kept walking around the room. He was like the person whose house is on fire who can’t decide what possession is most precious and so can rescue nothing. The only thing he knew for sure he wanted was to murder the soprano voice, which had begun to hold long, high notes and exaggerate the tremolo. But this voice, its incessancy, now seemed to him a fundamental property of the world that he was powerless to alter. He stood by his window facing the soprano where she sang behind her opaque screens. He was not unhappy or happy. The wave front advanced across the mountains, changing the landscape as it came, and then he was in it, he was in it. That was all.

Sooner than he’d expected, he heard voices in the front of the apartment. Female voices. Footsteps. Renée appeared, the carton in her arms. She spoke like a fugitive’s imperfectly deceived mother, when the police are at the door.

“There’s somebody here to see you.”

She stepped aside, opening the way past her, pointedly recusing herself from the difficulty. When instead of leaving he looked at her and tried to say something, she was compelled to add: “It’s your friend Lauren.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

He felt her eyes on him as he walked up the hall, felt tie whole weight of her possession of him, and so it was not entirely a surprise that the girl standing just inside the front door, by a small straw-colored suitcase with a black leather jacket draped over it, should strike him as a vision of liberation. Lauren was tan and fair-haired and taller than he remembered her. One glance made clear how busily his mind had been training itself to appreciate Renée — to see those parts of her that were cute and fresh and to overlook the larger fact, which was that she was thirty years old and not beautiful. He could recognize a bill of large denomination without reading the numbers on it, and he could recognize Lauren’s beauty without referring to her long, muscled twenty-two-year-old’s legs, her golden twenty-two-year-old’s skin, her silky twenty-two-year-old’s hair, now grown out nearly to her shoulders. She was wearing the same plaid ruffled miniskirt she’d had on the first time he saw her, similar black shoes and ankle socks, and a white tank top damp with sweat between her breasts.

The soprano, breaking off, had left an unwelcome stillness.

“Hi Louis,” Lauren said in a flat, unsteady voice, not looking at him.

“Hi, uh. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I just came to see you.”

“Where’s Emmett?”

She gave no sign of having heard him.

“Not here, obviously,” Louis said.

She bit her lips, still not looking at him.

“Where is he, Lauren?”

She raised her chin and said, “We’re not together anymore."

“Oh, I see. You left him. He left you. You’re separated. You’re divorced.”

These words caused her great discomfort. She looked at her shoes, inspecting either side of one of them. “I don’t know. Can I come in?”

“Maybe not.”

“I made a terrible mistake, Louis, a terrible mistake . Can I come in?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know if I’m too late. If I’m too late I won’t come in. Can I come in?”

Renée was now standing in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. She and Lauren couldn’t see each other, but Louis could see them both.

“That was your girlfriend, wasn’t it,” Lauren said.

He turned to Renée as if he had to check about this. Renée’s face made it clear that she thought he ought to have been rid of the visitor by now. She gestured impatiently: Well? What are you waiting for! But as he continued not to speak, her impatience gave way to alarm, and then the alarm gave way to pain, and finally the pain gave way to an overwhelming disbelief, each of these stages visible and distinct.

“Oh, is she right there?” Lauren said with mock stupidity.

You can hurt me. A little. You can bite me, or —

He was aware of making a mistake, but he had no control. He was fascinated by the pain in Renée’s face. He was finally seeing her. She was finally naked, and he kept looking at her, thinking I am a rapist too. I am a sadist too as he hurt her for his pleasure, doing it with his silence and understanding now what people meant when they talked about how a penis can rule a man, because that was exactly how it felt. But she was a person, just a decent person, and not interested in taking this. With terrible dignity she walked through the dining room and living room. She stepped around Lauren, who leaned aside as if avoiding a stranger on the sidewalk. Renée knocked the leather jacket off the suitcase, barely managing not to trip on it as she hurried out the door.

“Oh boy,” Louis murmured, to the empty space she left behind. He couldn’t believe all the blood on his hands.

Lauren closed the door and hung her jacket on the knob. “She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she. You can tell me.”

“Oh boy,” he murmured again. He hadn’t quite been sober enough to realize that what he was doing to Renée was the worst thing anyone could do to her. But he knew her and he knew this was the worst thing. It was the very worst thing. And though he hadn’t “realized” this, he’d known it perfectly well.

“I figured you might have one,” Lauren said, slouching almost horizontal on the beige sofa. “It was a risk I was taking. But I knew I could always turn around and go right back.”

The fact that she would have to walk to her apartment now. The pride with which she’d walk the two and a half miles. And the dogs wouldn’t howl, and she’d take the stairs two at a time in her sneakers and jeans and T-shirt, and lock the door behind her, and would she cry? Only once had he seen her cry, and that was from physical pain, and as soon as she’d locked the door, in his mind’s eye, it became difficult to see her.

“You want me to go?” Lauren said. “She’ll forgive you if you explain things. Just tell her the truth and she’ll forgive you.” She spread her fingers and studied her nails. “You know, because I don’t want to butt in, if she’s your girlfriend. She is your girlfriend, isn’t she. I could tell by the way she looked at me. She’s your girlfriend.”

“Yeah.”

“So do you love her?” Lauren swung her head nervously, not wanting to hear the answer. “I can leave right now.”

“No! No. Just. let me lock my car.”

Renée wasn’t waiting by the car or anywhere close to it. He looked at the empty air above the sidewalk down which she necessarily had walked, since she was no longer in sight. Logic insisted that she’d traversed this distance even if no one had seen her do it. It further insisted that at this very moment she was somewhere between here and her apartment, not on just any block but on some particular block, walking forward, visible to all. It insisted that ail observer in a balloon could have followed every step she took between leaving here and arriving on Pleasant Avenue and climbing the four crumbling concrete stairs to the door of her house and disappearing inside it.