Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

By the Red Line escalators, young punks were drinking vodka and kicking beanbags. Hare Krishnas in robes the color of orange sherbet drummed and juggled in front of the Coop. Lauren swung her shoulders as she walked, undaunted by the scene. The pedestrians in the side streets, the men with scrubbed faces and narrow little shoes, the women with thin hair and small mouths and ultra-sexy shades, posed no threat to her confidence. She put her hand in Louis’s back pocket. A year ago this had been all he wanted, just to walk down the street with her and be her man.

They stopped outside a slightly worn Tex-Mex establishment. He shied from the door — the clientele was what Renée would have called “the implicating people” and what he considered “the Eileen’s-friends kind of people”—but Lauren towed him in. She had them seated in the smoking section, explaining in a low voice that she still smoked and drank a little, because she’d realized that it was impossible to make yourself perfect all at once. “The only time I haven’t been a mess was last summer, when I was seeing you. That’s the only time in my whole life I haven’t felt like a mess. You helped me so much. And I was so bad to you.”

She leaned back to allow room on her lap for a menu. Louis asked what she was doing for money. She said she was using her American Express card, which Emmett’s parents paid the bills for. “It’s pretty rotten of me, isn’t it? To fly up here like that.”

“Are you going to pay them back?”

She shrugged. “They’re real well off.”

“You should pay them back as soon as you can.”

She nodded obediently. “OK.”

He cast a benign smile on the loud students at neighboring tables. What a convivial and pleasant thing it could be to be normal and eat in a cheerful restaurant surrounded by other young people doing the same, and how especially pleasant to do it in the company of a pretty girl who had just declared her love. His towering resentment of the likes of the all-befouling Mr. Aldren dwindled to an irritation he could take or leave. It was true that when Lauren left him and their fajita dinners alone even for one minute, while she went to the bathroom, the fires in him reignited, and he began to burn holes in the heads of a table of male and female law students who kept making their harried waitress banter with them. A cake with candles came, and, being very original, four of the five men sang harmony instead of melody. By the time they were singing Dear Nico-ole , the fifth man had decided to be creative and original too, and so only the females were left to do the melody. But when Lauren returned and said maybe they could go dancing, Louis calmed down immediately. He gave her credit card a wistful look. He was pretty close to broke.

Cool lawns and cigarette smoke, a warm June night. It had now been five hours since Renée walked away; she’d now had five hours to be thinking by herself. Louis bought a Phoenix and Lauren picked out a club across the river which, when they got there, he was amazed to think had been operating probably every night he’d been in Boston, providing fun for a crowd whose median age was roughly his own. They put their hands out to get them stamped, the buckles and wrist strap on Lauren’s jacket dangling. He didn’t mention that the only time in his life he’d ever consented to dance was at a May Day party in Nantes, among Algerians. Fortunately the club was already crowded and it was mostly a matter of bumping and clutching anyway, and except for some rap cuts the music was abhorrent and difficult to move to, the rhythm “shallow,” as restaurant reviewers sometimes say of spice in chili, it had a “searing, superficial heat” rather than the “deep burning heat” that comes from careful cooking and good ingredients. But with Lauren in his arms he could taste the joys of being uncritical.

They drove up Soldiers Field Road with the windows down and her hair billowing and migrating towards her inside shoulder, the river moving against the lights of MIT and Harvard, the lights moving against the six northern stars visible in the muggy night. That it was one-thirty meant Renée had now had nearly eight hours to be alone and think, but he computed the figure only out of habit, because he could no longer imagine her so well.

In his apartment they lay down in their clothes on his futon and Lauren tried his glasses on. “This is what you’re like,” she said, crawling over him, the glasses sliding down her nose and her hair hanging on his ears. It had been a long time since he’d seen anyone as happy as she was. She was full of sport and it suited both their needs to be like teenagers, enjoying the clothes that kept them separate, taking very small steps down the carnal road, enjoying the countryside along the road, its season and smells, and remembering when a season was so long that you forgot that other seasons followed it, and a smell was a smell and a sound was a sound, sensations not yet clogged with memories. At length, when they heard his roommate Toby’s printer starting up, they took some clothes off. Lauren handed her breasts over casually, like surplus charms she was glad to donate to the needy. But when he put his hand in her underpants she stopped him, saying,

“Don’t.”

“Don’t you—?”

“I don’t need it,” she said, very hoarse.

He lay on his back, needing it very much.

“If we did that now,” she said, bending over him and tickling his chest with hers. “We’d just be pigs.”

He pictured Renée alone in her apartment and thought he might as well have been a pig already.

“Don’t you think?” Lauren whispered.

“Don’t you think we should just start right now trying to be strong and do the right thing? Don’t you think there are certain things we shouldn’t do if we’re not going to stay together? Can’t we just be happy like this?” Louis seriously doubted there was any way at all for him to be happy. He knew that if he promised to love her, she’d take off her underpants and let him come inside her, and that somehow it would be easy then for him to dump her and go back to Renée. What stopped him wasn’t the fear of hurting her. It was that he had always been good to her, and he believed she really loved him now, and he couldn’t stand the idea of killing her precarious faith in a human being’s goodness. All he could do was lie still and hope she’d fuck him anyway, faithlessly, out of a pity he didn’t deserve. Then he could be rid of her.

“Don’t you believe I love you?” She rested her chin on his thigh. “You have to. You have to give me time to show you how much I love you. You have to give me chances, because I do love you, Louis. I adore you. I adore you.” She kissed his penis through fabric; it rocked stormily. “I’ll do anything for you, if you just give me a chance. But if you really think you might still love me, but you’re not sure, you won’t ask me to do certain things yet.”

“Your ticket,” he said. “Do you have an open date of return?”

“I flew one-way.”

“God, the Osterlitzes will really love you for that.”

“No, I flew standby. I flew standby.”

“Well, I think you should try to get a flight back on Sunday.”

“And stay where?”

“You’ve got to have some friends you could stay with.”

“Can’t I go to Chicago with you?”

“No. I have to think.”

“But you’ll come back here, and she’ll be here. And even if you see her just to tell her you want to break up with her you’ll forget me and you’ll want to stay with her. And I’ll be hanging around in Austin waiting to hear from you, and then I’ll have to come up here again, but you’ll already have decided you love her more.”

He didn’t know what to say to this.