Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“What for?” Renée said rudely. “I mean — that’s very nice of you.”

“Wonderful. You’ll come.”

“No. No, I won’t come. I mean, I can’t.”

“Oh, well, I’m not wedded to the day and hour, if you had other plans. We could brunch on Sunday, have dinner tomorrow night. Tonight even. It would be so nice if you would.”

“What is it that you want to talk to me about?”

“Everything and nothing. I think it would be very good for both of us to get acquainted. I’m calling you as a friend. Please have lunch with me, Renée.”

She frowned so hard it hurt. “What for? ”

“Oh, really, let’s not be silly. Can I take you to lunch tomorrow or can’t I? Yes or no. It would mean a great deal to me. Tell me one good reason why you shouldn’t let me.”

Melanie could make her voice beautiful when she chose. It was like a brook in a valley running in and out of the sunshine and pooling among willows, the clear kind of brook you want to plunge your hands into and drink from and forget about the deer carcasses and feedlots upstream, which may not even be there anyway.

“Let me get back to you,” Renée said.

“I know. You’re busy busy busy. Do I need to be blunt? There is no one in the world more interested in seeing you than I am. No one in the world. Please come to lunch with me.”

Renée wandered dizzily around the chairman’s office, gripping the telephone. “Won’t you tell me what this is about?”

“Tomorrow. Is twelve-thirty fine with you? The restaurant’s called Aujourd’hui.”

Beyond thin lines of rain joining and breaking apart and descending on the window, a knot of Japanese tourists beneath identical umbrellas approached the entrance to the Peabody Museum, whose gorgeous collection of glass flowers, created a hundred years earlier by German glassblowers to reveal the structure and variety of the world’s flora to Harvard botany students, was the most popular tourist attraction in Cambridge. Renée had never seen it. The Japanese umbrellas stooped to the level of the sign on the museum door; rotating uncertainly, they conferred and scattered. Others surged up to the sign, which said that owing to recent earthquake damage the glass flowers were in storage until a safer means of displaying them could be found. To console themselves, the Japanese photographed one another by the sign, the white of their flashes lighting the wet asphalt and nearer trees. Two lung-shaped patches of breath and above them a fainter fog outline of a forehead stayed on the chairman’s window for several minutes after Renée had gone back downstairs.

For three semesters she’d shared her apartment with a seismologist named Claudia Guarducci, a thin, pouty, bored, and very smart Roman doing postdoctoral work for pay at Harvard. They cooked together, saw movies together, deplored colleagues together, accepted or declined dinner invitations together. Claudia bought a motorcycle and gave Renée rides to work on it. They never shared secrets.

When Claudia returned to Italy they kept in touch with laconic postcards. Missing the smell of her Merit Ultra Lights, Renée went out of her way to stand near smokers. She inquired about postdocs in Rome, thinking that if she went there she could call up Claudia and mention, merely mention, her current whereabouts. The future she wanted would begin in good earnest if she could live in Italy and be best friends with a Roman woman.

In hindsight it would seem as if all she ever did in life was lay foundations for future towers of shame and self-hatred. Some trusting, autonomous part of herself kept constructing uncool mid-western dreams: European evenings with Claudia Guarducci; domestic tranquillity with Louis Holland; a big pat on the back from the EPA and the citizens of Boston.

She was finishing her thesis when Claudia informed her, in a two-line postcard, that she had married her old boyfriend at the Istituto Nazionale.

Renée was amazed by how betrayed she felt. She couldn’t bring herself to write to Claudia again, and the months went by and Claudia didn’t write either. What hurt was knowing that she wasn’t jealous of the man for having Claudia but of Claudia for having a man. This, and knowing what a difference it made that she was female.

She was sure that if it had been a case of Renée and Claudio, good heterosexual friends, Renée wouldn’t have felt so betrayed. Men who’d gotten married or found girlfriends didn’t drift away from their single male friends, at least not as often as women did. Obviously, men were nobler spirits than women. It came of belonging to the default gender. If both men and women considered their relationships with men inviolable, then men inevitably remained true to their gender while women, equally inevitably, betrayed their own. Men’s moral superiority was structurally guaranteed.

However, Renée did not wish she were a man.

A man, if he was your college boyfriend, still “wanted to be friends with” you after he’d dumped you. His male faith in friendship was so unshakable, in fact, that he believed that you would welcome an invitation to his wedding.

A man, if he was your younger brother, fresh out of college, was realistic at the dinner table about how “women are simply not identical to men, they have different priorities,” speaking glibly and self-servingly this truth that it had taken you thirty years to learn, bolstered in his arrogance by a twenty-three-year-old wife who had “decided not to put off having children” and so considered herself more mature than you.

A man was a creature who thought it was a sympathetic portrayal of himself to say, “I love women.”

A man could not admit to a woman that he was wrong and remain a man. He would sooner cry and abase himself and beg forgiveness like a baby than admit to error as a man.

A man took for granted a woman’s understanding of his penis but congratulated himself for understanding the clitoris and its importance. He smiled inwardly at his superiority to all the men, past and present, who had not penetrated this female secret. He felt proud of his enlightenment and goodness when he quizzed a woman about whether she had come. The perfect gift for the man who had everything was a quarter-ounce bottle of feminism.

Inescapably immersed in a history made by people of his own sex, a man could never be as selfconscious as a woman: could never feel as much shame. Even a thoughtful man lacked a radical appreciation of how it was only luck, a pairing of X and Y, that had made his life straightforward. At some level he would always still believe that the ease of his life implied a moral superiority; this belief made him ridiculous.

Women knew their husbands were ridiculous. Therefore married women, especially ones with children, could be friends with each other. The shame of being wedded to a blunt instrument, a lovable but limited creature, and of bearing his children and enduring his superiority, was eased by intercourse with other women similarly burdened or with women whose most fervent wish was to be so burdened.

Renée, however, wasn’t married. She also believed that even if she were, the sorority of childbearers wouldn’t welcome her. It seemed to her that the sorority’s most successful members — professional women still managing to raise families — developed such steel-clad egos in coping with their lives that they had little imagination to spare for a complicated case like her. Mothers with less demanding jobs were defensive and tended to fear and despise her, because of her ambition. Mothers with no jobs at all attracted her — she felt, in fact, a particular tenderness towards unselfconscious women — but she could not be friends with them either, because they didn’t understand her, and to the extent that they did begin to understand her, they would be confused and hurt by her refusal to be like them.