Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“I suppose I’m still inclined to think there is.”

“Really.” She pulled Melanie closer and kissed her on the mouth, the way any woman might kiss the person who’d wooed her over lunch with pearls and wine.

Melanie wrenched free and dusted herself off. “I’m going to have to reconsider this, Renée. We’ll assume you’ve had a little too much to drink. But I’m afraid I’m still going to have to reconsider.”

“Sliding scale. Security. Immediate terms.”

“I’ll talk to you on Tuesday morning.”

“See you then.”

The rain had turned to a fine warm mist, agreeable to the skin. As soon as Renée was in a cab, she stretched out on the seat.

“You OK there?” the Haitian driver said.

“Yes,” she said loudly.

Water trickled and made lenses on the window above her, a twisted aspect of the city in every droplet. The soaked façades upside down, the utility wires dipping and dividing. She was feverish. Three in the afternoon, drunk off her ass and lying in a cab. Romance, romance. Three in the afternoon, the warm rain, she’s coming home from seeing herself. She can still feel her warmth inside her and on her skin. She can smell her own nose, she can taste her own mouth.

“That’s twelve dollars, sixty cents.”

“Go up the hill here on Walnut.”

Her stomach upset by the carpaccio and wine, she lay on her bed until the windows stopped getting darker and became a little lighter and the rain turned to steam and silence. It was as if a tent had descended on the street, its damp canvas flaps coming to rest behind the houses; as if the street were a film lot hosed down for a nighttime shoot, with a loud, busy world beyond the houses. A near neighbor was cooking waffles. Girls and boys on the porch across the street turned on a heavy-metal anthem. It might have been playing in the next room, not outside. She plugged in her telephone and dialed a number. “Howard Chun, please.”

“He not here,” came the answer.

She changed her clothes and went down to the street. One of the porch girls — the fat one; there were also two skinny ones — turned up the music. Maybe they thought she was going to complain about it. She mounted the stairs. “Does somebody here have a joint I could buy?”

They turned the radio down, and she repeated the question, looking from skeptical face to skeptical face. The younger boy was ten or eleven. “Are you Jewish?” he said matter-of-factly.

“No.”

“What’s your last name?”

She smiled. “Smith.”

“Bernstein,” the boy countered.

“Greenstein,” said a girl.

“Shalom!”

Renée waited.

“How long you been living there?” the fat girl asked.

“Five years,” she said. “How long have you been here?”

“Where’s your Chinese boyfriend?”

“She’s got a bald one.”

“Hey. Hey . You got any beer?”

She crossed her arms. “How old are you guys?”

The older boy, silent until now, rose stiffly from a broken Adirondack chair. His puffy high-tops were carefully unlaced. “You gotta buy us some beer,” he said.

“All right. How much?”

The girls conferred, the older boy taking pains to appear uninvolved. “Ten, but they gotta be taw-boys,” the fat girl announced positively.

“They have to be what?”

“Taw-boys.”

“Taw-boys?” Renée smiled, not understanding.

“TAW BOYS. THE BIG CANS.”

“The sixteen-ounce cans!”

“The fucking taw cans!”

“Doy, doy, doy.”

“You know what sixty-nining is?”

“Steven, shut up, you little jerk.”

“Doy, doy, doy.”

Standing apart, the older boy rolled his eyes. Renée descended the steps to cries of Shalom! A smell of infrastructure was stealing from the bushes, and she could hear her own telephone ringing, another pro-lifer calling.

When she came back from Highland Avenue, the older boy led her into the front room of the first-floor apartment and broke two cans off one of the six-packs she’d bought, returning them to the paper bag. He showed her his dope. “It’s very fresh,” he said earnestly. “Steven, close the fucking door.” The door closed. “Which one you want? Take the big one. My name’s Doug.”

“How old are you?”

“Almost sixteen. I’m gonna get my license. You go out with me sometime?”

“I don’t think so.”

On her kitchen table she set out the joint, a pack of matches, and a saucer. She positioned a chair in front of them and turned off all but one light. She had a cassette marked dance that had been broken for five years. Training her desk light on it, she opened it up and spliced out the mangled stretch with Scotch Magic tape and nail scissors.

The dope tasted like April in college; like the music on the tape. She danced to “London’s Burning” and “Spinning Top” and “I Found That Essence Rare,” her arms and legs mixing the last faint banks of smoke into a haze. She thought she was crying when “Beast of Burden” played, but when she opened her eyes there were no tears and it seemed that she’d only imagined it.

Outside the kitchen window she lay down on the wet, sloping shingles. They were made of real slate.

In the morning she tracked down a mineralogy professor who liked her and had lent her one of his cars several times before. She also appropriated a departmental camera, with a zoom telephoto lens. The sun was blazing on Route 128. As methodically as she could, she drove every road and street in Danvers, western Peabody, northern Lynn, and South Lynnfield, stopping often to trace her route on a map with a red pencil. There were zero cars in the parking lot of Sweeting-Aldren corporate headquarters, a white Monticello-inspired structure set into a green hillside. From a Boston & Maine railroad bridge, from the back of an unfinished office complex, and from the rear corner of a cemetery, she surveyed company installations — regiments of horizontal tanks like giant caplets, towers with iron vines with iron tendrils spiraling up them. The corrugated siding of the major buildings was a certain pale blue she didn’t think she’d ever seen; on a color chart, the shades all around it were probably pleasing, but this particular blue was not. Dreamy fumes of acetone were native to the place.

By Monday the heat had reached full, white force. She dressed in cutoffs, sandals, and a tank top that she’d never worn except to sleep in. At the Peabody City Hall, on the ground floor outside the Assessor’s Office, she found listings for eight smaller, noncontiguous parcels of land owned by Sweeting-Aldren. The six of them that she could tour by car had nothing more interesting than horses on them; she didn’t try to reach the others. She was driving as fast as she dared, and still it was almost four o’clock by the time she got to Beverly airport.

A girl in the coffee shop was lifting a wire basket of french fries out of oil. She told Renée to talk to a man named Kevin in the hangar.

“I should just go right in?”

“Yeah, you’ll find him.”

As soon as she went through the hangar door someone whistled at her, but all she could see at first was a blinding square of white sky at the far end. Near where she stood, the cowlings had been removed from a Cherokee and from an eight-seat turboprop with a boxy grasshopper body. Two grease-blackened twosomes in blue coveralls were working on their shiny guts, reaching up with tools. Asked about Kevin, they pointed to a young man on a ladder by a baby jet farther down. He was spraying aerosol cleaner on the jet’s windshield.

“Are you Kevin?”

“That’s right.” He was in his early twenties, had sky-blue eyes, a crew cut, and straight-arrow posture. Across the corridor, the inside of another baby jet was being vacuumed, country music wafting out and an extension cord dangling from the door.