Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

You feel it?

We couldn’t, here .

Are you calling me a liar?

The time was 7:10. Louis called directory assistance and to the question of what city, said: Ipswich. The instrument he was using was drenched with a cologne to which he might have been allergic, so denaturing was its effect on his nasal membranes. He let Rita Kernaghan’s number ring eight times and was about to hang up when a man answered and said in a dead, low, institutional voice: “Officer Dobbs.”

Louis asked to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan.

Eunuchs, cologne, fetus. Dobbs. “Who’s calling.”

“This is her grandson.”

Over the line came the wa-wa of palm on mouthpiece and a voice in the background, followed by silence. At length a different man spoke, one Sergeant Akins. “We’re going to need some information from you,” he said. “As you probably know, there’s been an earthquake up here. And you’re not going to be able to speak with Mrs. Kernaghan, because Mrs. Kernaghan was found dead a few hours ago.”

At this point the synthetic operator began to insist on more coins, which Louis fumbled to supply.

Like Rome, Somerville was built on seven hills. The apartment in which Louis had found a share opportunity was on Clarendon Hill, the westernmost of the seven and, by default, the greenest. Elsewhere in the city, trees tended to be hidden behind houses or confined to square holes in the sidewalks, where children tore their limbs off.

Earlier in the century Somerville had been the most densely populated city in the country, a demographic feat achieved by spacing the streets narrowly and dispensing with parks and front lawns. Clapboard triple-deckers encrusted the topography. They had polygonal bays or rickety porches stacked three high, and they were painted in color combinations like blue and yellow, white and green, brown and brown.

The streets of Somerville were lined solidly with cars that were less like cars than like mateless shoes. They trudged off to work in the morning or shuffled back and forth across the pavement under the pressure of twice-monthly street sweeping. Even in the early 1980s, when the Massachusetts economy was experiencing a Miracle, with billions of dollars flowing from the Pentagon into former mill towns in the Commonwealth, Somerville continued to house mainly the lowlier members of the footwear hierarchy. There were salt-stained Hush Puppies and scuffed two-tone pumps in unfortunate colors parked near the doors of the Irish and Italian middle class; well-worn Adidases in the driveways of single women; bovver boots and Salvation Army specials near the spaces of those who found the town perversely chic; laceless Keds up on blocks in the back yards of the waning counterculture; wide untapering leisure shoes with soft crinkly uppers and soles of rubber foam marking the homes of realtors and retirees; battered student Wallabees under the eaves of battered student houses; a few tasseled Gucci loafers in the City Hall parking lot; and shiny stud boots and flimsy dancing slippers and Flash Gordon — style athletic footwear in the driveways of parents who still had eighteen- and twenty-year-olds in the house.

Towards the end of the eighties, just before the nation’s arms buildup slowed and Massachusetts banks began to fail and the Miracle was shown to be not so much a Miracle as an irony and fraud, a new breed of car invaded Somerville. The new breed looked intrusion-molded. For just as Reebok and its imitators had finally succeeded in making real leather look wholly artificial, Detroit and its foreign counterparts had managed to make real metal and real glass indistinguishable from plastic. The interesting thing about the new breed, however, was its newness. In a town where for decades, when a car came home for the first time, its price had more often than not been written in yellow crayon on the windshield, one suddenly began to see the remains of stickers in rear left windows. Not being stupid, local landlords began to double rents between leases; and Somerville, too close to Boston and Cambridge to remain a renter’s heaven forever, came of age.

Louis had a room in a two-bedroom apartment on Belknap Street that was leased by a graduate student of psychology at Tufts. The student, whose name was Toby, had promised Louis, “Our paths will never cross.” Toby’s bedroom door was open when Louis came home from work, still open when he went to bed, and closed when he left in the predawn darkness. The shelves in Toby’s refrigerator were bisected vertically by slotted pine-wood panels. The bathmat was also made of pinewood, good for fungus control and stubbing toes. The living room contained two broad-beamed armchairs and one sofa, all upholstered in beige, plus a beige wall unit that was empty except for phone books, a Scrabble set, a glossy beige bud vase made of genuine mount st. Helens volcanic ash in a plastic suspension, and receipts for the wall unit and the furniture totaling $1,758.88.

Louis kept to his bedroom. The thirtyish couple in the apartment opposite his window owned a piano and often sang arpeggios while he ate his evening meal of sandwiches, carrots, apples, cookies, and milk. Later the arpeggios stopped and he read the Globe or The Atlantic laboriously, front to back, skipping nothing. Or he sat cross-legged in front of his television set and frowned as intently at baseball — even at the beer commercials — as he would have at war news. Or he stood in the harsh light of the overhead fixture and studied the beige walls and tiled ceiling and wood floor of his bedroom from every possible angle. Or he did the same in Toby’s room.

On Friday night, once the Ipswich police had finished with him on the telephone and he’d driven back to Somerville, he called Eileen. “You won’t believe what I just saw on the news,” Eileen said. What she’d just seen via live minicam was the ambulance that held their step-grandmother’s body. Eileen thought she’d felt the earthquake without knowing it while she was studying. She’d thought it was trucks. She said it was the second little earthquake she’d felt in Boston in two years.

Louis said he hadn’t felt it.

Eileen said their parents were flying into town on Sunday, because of Rita’s death, and staying in a hotel.

Louis said, “They’re spending money on a hotel?”

In the morning he went to the corner drugstore to buy newspapers. It had been raining all night and the rain clouds looked unspent, but the sky had brightened for a moment and the fluorescent light inside the drugstore was the same color and intensity as the light outside. The Saturday Herald had printed on its cover:

The earthquake had also made the front page of the Globe (tremor rocks cape ann; one dead), which Louis began to read as he headed home again. Absorbed, he was late in noticing a tall old man in a cardigan and unbuckled rubber boots who was rubbing his four-door American-made brogue with a hand towel. Spotting Louis, he stepped out to block the sidewalk. “Reading the paper, are ya?”

Louis did not deny it.

“John,” the old man goggled. “John Mullins. I see you live next door here, I saw you movin’ in. I live on the first floor right here, lived here twenty-three years. I was born in Somerville. John’s the name. John Mullins.”

“Louis Holland.”

“Louis? Lou? You mind if I call you Lou? You reading about the earthquake there.” Suddenly the old man might have bitten a lemon or a rotten egg; he made a face like the damned. “Terrible about that old woman. Terrible . I felt it, you know. I was at the Foodmaster, you know, round the corner here, it’s a good store. You shop there? Good store, but what was I, what was I. I was sayin’ I felt it. I thought it was me. I thought it was nerves, you know. But I was watching the news and wooncha know, it was a temblor. That’s what they call it, you know, a temblor. Thank God it wasn’t any worse. Thank God . What are you, a student?”