Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“But you’re right,” Lauren said. “You’re right, but you have to look me in the eye and swear to God you won’t forget about me. You have to promise you’re going to think about me.”

“Not a problem.”

“Because I don’t want you if you don’t really want me. I don’t want you to always be thinking you made the wrong decision, like I had to. I don’t want you to be unhappy. I’ll go, Louis. I’ll go to Austin, because I love you so much. But you have to promise me you’ll think about me.”

“That’s not going to be a problem.”

“I love you so much. I love you so much. I love you so much. ”

Over and over he dreamed that he was missing his flight. He was in waiting rooms with Lauren and she was cold to him; he had to beg her for a smile and a kind word. Over and over he realized that it was a day earlier than he’d thought and that he hadn’t missed the flight at all. But this proved to be a delusion every time. It was Sunday and he saw a wall clock and realized he had three seconds to get to the other end of the airport. He could already see the plane being pushed back from its gate.

They were awakened by the buzzing of afternoon insects. Summer days that you wake into the middle of are angry with you, branches and dusty leaves tossing in a hot southern wind, air-conditioners working hard. Louis was speaking to Toby on the phone when Lauren emerged from her shower. “It’s like Houston,” she said. “I thought it was supposed to be cold up here.”

Late in the evening they drove to Pleasant Avenue. Although he knew it was an evil thing, he let her brush aside his objections and come along with him. She waited in the car while he went inside. The Dobermans threw themselves against their door, but the lock held. Upstairs, taped to Renée’s door, he found an envelope with his first name written on it in her principled hand. It contained his plane tickets and nothing else. Two DeMoula’s bags were standing on the landing, his dirty clothes in one of them. The clean clothes had been folded and bagged with his tapes and miscellany. His TV set stood to one side.

Through the landing window he saw an immense white Matador parked across the street. It was Howard Chun’s. Cigarette smoke, ghostly in the cigarette-smoke-colored streetlight, was rising from Louis’s Civic.

He put his eye to the keyhole; the kitchen light was on. He put his ear against the door; there was no sound but the ear itself rustling against wood. Then the Civic’s horn honked, and he gathered up the bags and television and ran down the stairs, almost forgetting to drop his key into the mailbox.

The anglicizing of Howard Chun began when he was nine years old and his family enrolled him at the Queen Victoria Academy in suburban Taipei, an outpost of the Anglican Church where the letters of the English alphabet, each holding the hand of its lowercase daughter, paraded around the third-grade classroom between the chalkboards and the color head shots of Jesus, and instruction in Chinese was elective in the upper forms. By rights Howard ought to have become his class’s Henry, since his given name was Hsing-hai, but there was a rival boy named Ho-kwang whose parents had done a better job than Howard’s mother of pre-programming their son to demand what was due him for the 30,000 Taiwanese dollars that a year in Queen Victoria’s lower school then cost. Ho-kwang grabbed Henry when the English names were being apportioned, and Hsing-hai, blinking back tears as he glared at the hoggish Henry né Ho-kwang, was given the less pleasing and regal Howard, his dispossession ordained and sealed by the Church of England before he’d even grasped what was happening.

Howard’s mother was a screen actress. She’d lived one of those colorful lives engendered by the union of war and money. She had no great acting talent, but as a girl she’d made a medium-sized splash in Beijing’s bourgeois cinema, most notably in the title role in Maple-Tree Girl , an otherwise forgettable film containing one immortal sequence in which Maple-Tree Girl is pursued by a rug merchant with immoral aims through the great Wuhan flood of 1931, eleven stupendous minutes of this chaste beauty staggering through ever deeper and dirtier water and more menacing locales, clutching her rent garment to her throat, her round eyes radiating unmodulated terror and anguish for the entire fifteen thousand frames. In the mid-forties, Miss Chun and a director old enough to be her father lived in fashionable exile in Singapore and ate up the pretty nest egg she’d set aside, making it necessary for her and her three young children to join her relatives in Taipei as soon as the Nationalists were back in the movie business. For a while she was prized by casting directors in need of “the less pretty older sister,” and she subsequently spent many lucrative years playing a wicked stepmother on a soap opera called “Hostages of Love.” At least once in every installment of “Hostages” the camera caught her baring her teeth and rolling her eyes, to remind viewers of her evil, scheming nature. In real life she was vague and good-natured and selfish, and mainly lived for eating sweets. When Howard came home from Queen Victoria on days when she wasn’t filming, he would find her sitting up in bed, chewing in slow motion on some piece of candied fruit, frowning as though the flavor were a message trickling into her head by telegraph, which she had to strain to catch each word of.

Howard was her fifth and youngest child and the only one she’d had by a man of whom nobody in the family, including her, could furnish a satisfactory account. She indicated in a general way that the man was a war hero, “a noble spirit commanding troops in the struggle for freedom,” though by the time Howard heard this, the Nationalists had been out of combat for twenty years. Occasionally he tried to picture his male parent up in the sky someplace, a marshal in the mile-thick tropical clouds above the Yellow Sea, at an altitude where hostilities hadn’t ceased, but the picture was ridiculous and he made himself think about other things.

Howard’s aunts and great-aunts were a philosophical bunch, willing to wink at the lapses in his mother’s personal morality for the sake of the income she provided. They huddled and rustled in hallways, managing income; one was never sure in whose canvas neckbag her savings passbook could be found. Howard much preferred his aunts’ realism to his mother’s reveries, and consequently grew up feeling more like a pampered houseguest than a child. He never really adolesced. After his mother died, he adopted an easy, overfamiliar manner with his elders, hanging around the kitchen with them like a middle-aged man between jobs, the kind of family friend or much-removed relative who dropped in for dinner every day for a year and then was never heard from again. Altogether, though he was the brightest child in the house and no reasonable expense was spared in educating him, he wasted vast amounts of time; and whenever an aunt descanted on the brightness of his future he would leer at her strangely, as if this Hsing-hai of whom she spoke were a pathetic figment who only he, Howard, was privileged to know had no intention of inhabiting the future she foresaw.

One day he announced that he was going to college in America. His eldest half brother was a wing captain in the Nationalist Air Force and could have opened doors for him there, but he saw no reason to donate three years of his life to the military if it could possibly be avoided. He had long legs, and his visions of manned flight focused on nip-sized whiskey bottles, swizzle sticks shaped like propellers, and roomy first-class seats.