Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Louis thought: I hate her.

As soon as he was inside again, Lauren stood up, stretched her arms luxuriantly, and smiled as if it were morning and she’d slept divinely and she knew that he, of all people, would be happy to know this. Freed of the burden of seeing her through Renée’s eyes, he was now properly amazed to have in Toby’s beige apartment this pretty and complicated girl he’d loved so much. She came to him and put her face against his, bending back for a moment to snatch his glasses off. Not kissing him, but with her eyes staring into his with the astonishment and goofy emptiness that eyes take on at point-blank range, and with her nose pressed against his and her words making his lips vibrate, she said, “I am in love with you, I am in love with you, Louis, I’ve been thinking about you every minute of the day, I am in love with you, I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.”

She caught her breath, her pupils and milky gray-green irises still centered in his vision. She kissed him, placed his hands on various parts of herself, curled up her own hands and pressed her knuckles on his chest. She twisted her head back and forth beneath his mouth, as if he were a shower she was taking. Her perfume was so integrated with her sweaty face-smell that his nose couldn’t find the border between them, it was all one nice Laureny smell.

“I promise you,” she said. “I’ll do anything for you. I’ll stay, I’ll go away, I’ll stay with Emmett, I’ll leave Emmett, I’ll marry you, I’ll have babies for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll marry you, I’ll live with you without being married to you. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay for as long as you want me to and I’ll leave whenever you say, you can own me, you can throw me away or keep me, you can do anything but sell me, anything, anything, anything.”

He held her, remembering her specific dimensions and how her back had felt when she’d cried in his kitchen in Houston and he’d put his arms around her.

“Oh Louis,” she said, crying and smiling. “You were so good to me, and I was so bad to you. But I’m going to make it up to you. If you let me, I’ll make it up to you.”

“Although of course you’re married now.”

“Oh, that.” A familiar guilty, sullen look crossed her face. “You know, I’m still trying to be a good person. I’m trying to love God and be a Christian, and I’m here in Boston seeing you. Marriage is a holy sacrament and I’m here seeing you. It’s like I’m the same old person, right? Everything I touch turns into garbage. And the thing is you’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks I’m worth something. The only person. Remember when I told you I’d never really loved anybody?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was true. It was true. But it’s not true now, because as soon as I couldn’t see you anymore, I felt this thing. I guess I thought it was guilt or something, but I wanted to see you and talk to you, just to hear your voice a little, but I’d already told you we couldn’t, and I thought you must hate me, or that you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

She sat on the sofa and frowned as if something didn’t quite make sense. “You see,” she said, “but there was Emmett too, and I felt sorry for him because he’d always been so incredibly patient with me, plus his family really seemed to like me. They gave me all this stuff when we got engaged, his grandmother gave me these beautiful pearls and his mother gave me this inlaid box that was like a hundred and fifty years old and had been in the family forever. But then I slept with some other guys and I also said I’d slept with you that time, right under his nose, and I gave him his ring back but I never even had the courage to give the other stuff back. And then when we started to get back together they were all still incredibly nice to me. They treated me like I’d been sick but now I was well, and I just felt so sorry for them, and really grateful too, and I thought, you know, This is the sacrifice I’m going to make. Because all I wanted was to be a good person . And it’s so clear that if you want to be good you have to sacrifice things. Plus I thought, they’re all so nice to me, it’s not even that much of a sacrifice. And my parents wanted me to get married because they think Emmett’s really great, which he is, I guess, except I don’t love him. I only love you.”

Louis closed his eyes.

“But so. We got married.” Lauren chewed her lip, her eyes on some remembered scene or ceremony. He thought she was going to go on, but apparently this was all she had to say.

“So then what. It turns out he’s a brute.”

She shook her head.

“Yes? No?”

Perched on the edge of the sofa, she stared sullenly at a silver radiator. She tossed her head, flipping her hair off her shoulders. Her face was tough and uncaring. “I was unfaithful to him.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Aren’t I a great person, Louis? Aren’t I just the greatest? But there was this guy I knew from before, and it was like I had so much more in common with him than with Emmett, you know, he’d fuck anybody, you know that kind of person, and I just didn’t care. I could tell I’d made too big a sacrifice, and it was like I needed to do some rotten stuff to make up, you know, and balance things. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess what I finally realized was that I wanted him to throw me out again because there was this thing in me. And what the thing was, was that I was in love with another person who used to be in love with me until I hurt him, and I loved him so much, and I missed him.” Tears came to her eyes again and she lowered her chin, as though trying to burp, still staring at the radiator. “I mean, Emmett’s real nice and all. But he treats me like this sick baby, and after a while I can’t stand it, so I go and do this horrible shit to him, but that just makes it all the more clear that I’m this sick baby, you know. And finally I just don’t believe anymore that somewhere inside him behind all his niceness he doesn’t really just hate my guts and wish I was dead.”

There was a long silence. Louis felt panic at the thought of Renée, who during these minutes when he hadn’t been thinking about her had doubtless made it all the way back to her apartment. Time was passing in her life even as it was standing still in his. She was getting all this time to think while he was not.

A question in a low voice crossed the room: “What’s her name?”

“Who? Oh. Renée.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“She hates it.”

“She does?”

“So she says.”

“Is she in love with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you guys really boy- and girlfriend?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think you might want to go out with me? I mean, right now?”

“Aren’t you tired?”

“Yeah, but I want to go out with you. That’s what I’ve wanted all day. I just have to go to the bathroom.”

They were getting in his car when John Mullins came lurching and paddling down the driveway from behind his house. He aimed his ghastly face at Louis, his mouth like a gunshot wound, and stared without a trace of recognition.

“Have you ever been up here?” Louis said.

Lauren shook her head. “It’s nice. It’s so different. We’ve been hearing about all the earthquakes. Were you in them? Were you scared?”

“Nah.”

The polygons of dirt between the footpaths in Harvard Yard had been seeded and roped off to fatten up the grass for the trampling pleasure of graduates and parents and alumni, later in June. For some reason a handful of women from the Church of Action in Christ were picketing the Holyoke Center, carrying large photographs of aborted fetuses. The colors were garish and oily, like Korean pickles. The messages were topical: QUAKES ARE GOD’S WRATH. CAMBRIDGE = EPICENTER OF BUTCHERY. PSALM 139.