Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

She smiled, seeing that Howard was flipping through her pictures. “The thing is I can’t just show pleasure and interest in the abstract. I have to talk to these girls. I have to have a relationship with them. With this two-and-a-half-year-old girl and these two babies who don’t speak a word yet. I start to say some clever thing, like I’m talking to a dog or something, but then I hear them all listening, and so I try to think of something sweet to say, and that’s even worse, I mean, it’s just a child , what do you say, what do you say? — ”

She paused, staring at the back wall of the closet, and Howard leaned to look inside it, almost believing there was someone in there listening to what she said.

“All I can hear is the incredible stupidity and lameness of the things I’m saying. And the girls know it. At least, the oldest one definitely knows it. She knows I’m not one of those women who think there’s nothing better in the world than having a child like her, and so of course she doesn’t like me, why should she. And there’s this little scene where she won’t come near me, and I hate her and she hates me, and the reason is that I’m more like her than I’m like any of the four parents, and she knows it.” She nodded positively. “I’m almost thirty years old, and I’m more like her than I am like them. And it’s one thing to be three years old and be a child, but to be me and still be so selfconscious— I could still stand it if they didn’t all so obviously pity me. They give me these pitying looks, and they actually have the gall to tell me that I can’t imagine what a grownup life is like — I can’t imagine how busy you are, and how little time to read the newspaper you have — because I don’t have children myself. As soon as I have children, I’ll understand. And what I want to say is, Let me tell you some of the things you don’t know about life and never will . But these women, it’s like they’ve been waiting all their lives for a chance to ignore a person like me, and now that they have their babies they’re allowed to. They’re allowed to be totally self-absorbed and totally rude to me, because they have children . As soon as you have children you’re allowed to close your mind. And no one can say you’re not grownup. And any kind of life that I might have, any different kind of life, any kind of life that could be envied — it’s obviously not working, because I’m still just this incredibly embarrassing adolescent. I can’t possibly compete with these twenty-four-year-old parents, all their narcissism and basic human decency. There’s just no contest.”

She fell silent, shaking her head and staring into the closet. Howard had begun to bounce on his toes with his hands in his pockets and elbows flapping. He raised a leg for balance and peered into the hall, as if he’d heard a sound. There had been no sound. When he turned back, Seitchek’s eyes were on him.

“And this is what I see,” she said bitterly. “In my free, exciting East Coast life. This is what I look up from the screen and see. This is the great alternative.”

He bounced on his toes. “Think I gotta go now,” he said. “Gotta see some people, think I better go.”

She smiled at him horribly. “What about your core cuts? Don’t you want your core cuts? Don’t you want to go poke your cow in the diveway?” She turned away in disgust. “See, I don’t even care what I say anymore. I don’t even care who’s listening.”

Howard continued to bounce, wandering and tilting like a top in the latter stages of its revolution, his vibrations jarring his hands out of his pockets. He veered close to Seitchek. When she looked up at him, he slapped her so hard that she fell back on her elbows.

They stared at each other. There was an odd, silent moment of discovery. It was as if the time of day had changed. Then Seitchek’s face twisted and she covered it with her hands. “Oh God. Oh God, I am so embarrassed.”

Already Howard was bending down, his hands in the neighborhood of her head. He patted her cheek and touched her ears and then patted her shoulders with both hands, not remorsefully but impatiently, as if he’d bumped a table and was rushing to right the stupid vases that had fallen. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

She hit him on the jaw with her fingernails. “Get away from me! Get away from me! Go dive your cow, get away from me.” She struck at his eyes, and he had to grab her wrists and pin them cruelly as she fought to break free. She struggled beneath him, gulping air and breaking into what he thought was sobs but turned out to be something more like laughter, because things were not at all the way he’d thought they were. Her fingers were in his hair. She was pressing his face into hers, and he squeezed his eyes shut, the short lashes interlocking like the stitches a rag doll has to see with, because he was not yet ready to look at the person underneath him and believe his luck in obtaining a girl like this, in a house like this, with four large bedrooms and a thirty-foot pool and a wet bar in the living room.

Earthquakes aren’t a man’s murder of his pregnant wife. They’re not court-ordered desegregation. They’re not Kennedys. For several weeks after the last network news crew packed up and left Boston, you could feel the city’s disappointment with the earth. Obviously, no one had been eager to be personally crushed by falling timbers or to see their possessions go up in flames, but for a few days in the spring Nature had toyed with the city’s expectations, and people had rapidly developed covert appetites for televised images of bodies under sheets of polyethylene, for the carnival-ride sensation of being tossed around the living room, for a Californian experience, for major numbers. A hundred dead would really have been something. A thousand dead: historic. But the earth had reneged on its promises, mutely refusing to reduce buildings to exciting, photogenic messes; and the death count never made it off the ground. For all the impact the numbers had on local viscera, the thirty-seven earthquake-related injuries could have been caused by boring car accidents, the $100 million of property loss by neglected maintenance, and Rita Kernaghan’s death by a boring heart attack. Journalistic aftershocks dwindled to an article or two per week. Local reporters still scoured Essex County in search of lives ruined by the disaster, but, to their dismay, they couldn’t find a single one. Homeowners were repairing walls and ceilings. Questionable structures were being inspected and reopened. It was all so morally neutral, so sensible.

Fortunately for everyone, the Red Sox began June by sweeping a series with the Yankees at Fenway and carrying a streak of seven wins on a trip to the American League West. No sane person believed the Sox would actually end up winning their division, but at the moment they could hardly be said to be losing ground, and what was one supposed to do? Boo in advance? Later in the summer there would be plenty of opportunities to revive the old hatred and envy — Bostonians’ hearts would pound and their throats would tighten at the very thought of baseball’s winners, their soporifically effective pitching staffs, the arrogant baby-cheeked sluggers whom God unbelievably permitted to hit homer after homer, and the horrible fair-weather fans, cheap euphoria smeared across their faces like the juice of sex and peaches, who thought that this was what baseball was about, that it was about winning and winning handily — but as long as the streak lasted, the city was full of heathen haves blissfully oblivious to the have-nots of the sports world, and in the absence of further tremors, the fear of death and personal injury had retreated to its rightful place, far to the rear of people’s minds.