Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“You’d think,” she said, “that in ten years he might have learned to make an r sound. I’m going to have a stroke if I hear him say ‘compyu pogam’ one more time. Compyu pogam. Compyu pogam.” Her voice was rushed and squeaky with malice. “I’m write me a compyu pogam cacawate weast squares.”

Howard’s eyes filled. He reeled out of his office blinking violently, scowling and jerking his head as if to clear it of an unwelcome hallucination. But it was no hallucination, and he knew it. Ten-plus years in America had done little to correct the crippling his language skills had suffered at the Queen Victoria Academy. The English instructor for the upper forms, Mrs. Hennahant, had taught phonetics on the principle that it was contagious, and she was curiously deaf to the immunity her students displayed. Day after day she repeated sentences like “ Hilary plays the clarinet ,” and then nodded sagely to the rhythm of the students’ voices as each in turn reproduced this as “Hirry prays crarenet.” After they’d all spoken she would nod and strut and try once again to hammer the hopelessly bent nail into their heads: “ Hilary plays the clarinet Hilary plays the clarinet . The alimentary— canal . The alimentary — canal . Henry?”

Back from London ten days later, Howard had just enough time to stop by the lab before flying on to San Francisco, where a different cousin was getting married. He removed several cubic feet of printouts from the line-printer basket and the counter next to it. Science had grown fifty kilos richer while he was touring Dublin and County Cork, and he added another hundred jobs to the batch queue to ensure that his time in California would be similarly productive.

Seitchek was sitting in their office with her feet up on a suitcase. He asked her if there had been any phone calls for him. Her “no” didn’t faze him. Sometimes she answered no and then, when she’d reconciled herself to being interrupted, changed her mind and reeled off several interesting phone messages.

“Edward’s looking for you,” she said at length. “He heard you were back from London.”

Edward was the name of Howard’s ultra-picky adviser.

“Oh yeah,” he said. The uppermost note from Sally on his desktop said FORGET IT!

“He wants to see you on Monday,” Seitchek said. “First thing in the morning. Something new on Alan Grubb, I think.”

He beamed. “Can’t come on Monday. Going to San Francisco.” He nodded at Seitchek’s suitcase. “What about you?”

“L.A.,” she said. “I mean Orange County. I’m going to see my parents and my little. nieces. It’s my every-third-year visit.”

“Oh yeah.” He had an uneasy feeling that this meant she’d finished her thesis while he was in Ireland. “Three years a long time,” he croaked politely.

“Not long enough.”

“You wanna ride to the airport?”

“No thanks,” she said.

“You wanna ride to the Square?”

“You’re very eager to have me ride in your car, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “I’m double-parked.”

In California, large lesions of greasy orange flame were eating up the ranges from Eureka to the San Gabriels. Even in the city the air smelled like burning houses. For the first time in the longest time, Howard was sorry to be traveling. Neither the wedding on Saturday afternoon nor the banquet the same night in Chinatown measured up to the nuptial festivities in London. For one thing, the median age of the wedding guests was less than twelve. Howard wore a zootish pinstripe suit and Dock-Sides, without socks; he was the tallest person present. Since his more important relatives had already cornered him in London and updated themselves on his brilliant career, he spent many minutes by himself, drinking beer from a can and wearing an expression of dignity and moderate discomfort as he gazed down on the wizened heads of great-great-aunts and the high-fashion hairstyles of the pre-adolescents. He was getting sick of weddings.

On Sunday morning he steered his rented car east towards the hills in which he planned to do some camping and casual inspection of fault scarps. There was a bromine-colored pall above the country he was entering, and soon he began to pass blackened fire fighters who had thrown themselves on the road embankment and were sleeping. Already the fires surrounded him on all sides. Changing his mind, he headed for the coast again, wondering if maybe the time hadn’t come to confront Alan Grubb. Grubb was a student at Scripps Institution in San Diego whose thesis was rumored to be identical in content to Howard’s own and two years closer to completion. Howard been told and told and told, by Edward and Seitchek and other stand-ins for his conscience, that he ought to give Grubb a call or try to see him at a convention, but until now he’d only blinked at their suggestions.

At a supermarket north of Santa Barbara he bought a three-pack of Latin disco tapes, and by midnight he was sleeping in his bucket seat on a side street in central San Diego. At nine the next morning he drove to Scripps. It was dead in the Labor Day sun. A watchman led him to a laboratory where, from a beachfront window, a dour post-doc told him that Alan Grubb would not be back from Italy until September 23. The moral was so plain that it might have been posted in institutional ceramic letters over the entrance to the lab: it pays to phone ahead.

Later in the day, after a productive tanning session, Howard invited himself to visit some friends of his oldest half sister who lived nearby in Linda Vista. He had decent barbecue there. As the afternoon aged, he slouched in his plastic chair and watched the ponderous plate-like migrations of the ice blocks his hosts cooled their pool with, his face almost purple from the martinis he’d been given, his spirits sinking at the thought of spending one more minute in a rented car or entering one more Wendy’s or logging one more frequent-flyer bonus mile. Burnt sesame seeds were falling from the chins of the hosts’ children. His own Mandarin small talk sounded whiny and bitchy to his Americanized ear. Compyu pogam, compyu pogam. He asked to use the telephone, and his hosts led him to it, urging him to stay in Linda Vista for as long as he liked; they hoped (indeed already planned) to take him deep-sea fishing and to Sea World.

Directory assistance had a single Seitchek listed in Newport Beach. As soon as he heard her voice, Howard began to shake his head emphatically. Seitchek, however, sounded happy to hear from him. She asked him how he was.

“Not bad,” he said. “See some friends, got some friends in Los Angeles, rent a car, not bad. It’s a vacation.”

“Are you going to come and see me?”

The invitation in her voice was so warm that he assumed there was a catch somewhere. He lunged at the curtains facing the street and looked out at a car driving by. It was just an ordinary car without any relation to him.

“No, really,” Seitchek said. “Did you call because you wanted to get together or something?”

“Sure, why not,” Howard said, as if it were entirely her idea.

The sky above Newport Beach the next afternoon was a brutal white the mere sight of which, in the single wide window of Seitchek’s, bedroom, negated the effect of the airconditioning and brought into the room the torpor of the young, full-bodied palms outside the window, and the white fire on the terra-cotta roofs beyond them, and the blazing monotony of the beaches in the distance. The walls of the room were bare except for a poster of Magic Johnson slam-dunking and a large acrylic seascape in the muted colors of upholstery. The closet door was open and on either side of it were Hefty trash bags and stacks of cardboard cartons, yellow ones, from Mayflower moving.