Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Stites scrambled to his feet and went into the bathroom. He came back with a glass of water, but Renée was no longer there. She’d gone into the hall.

“I guess I’m going to leave,” she said.

“I want to help you.”

“You can’t help me.”

He set the water on the crossbeam of a pillory and took her bare arms in his hands. “You’re you,” he said. “You’re only you. And you’ve been you since the moment you were conceived. Your whole history was there when you were one minute old. And the hurt you feel is holy. It’s an inch away from being the truest happiness.”

Her face was an inch away from his. She stood on her toes and opened her mouth, planting the softest part of her lips on the sharp stubble around his mouth. The next thing she knew, an entire glass of water had been poured over her head.

“Fuck!” she cried, bouncing on her feet, throwing the water off in gobs. She backed up the hallway, fists clenched at her hips. “Fuck you!”

He’d disappeared into his office. People were coming up the stairwell behind her, and already some of the pillories were occupied, big female duffs in sweats hanging out, rolls of fat visible above some of the waistbands. Metal creaked as other pillories were activated.

Stites had sat down at his desk and begun to read the Bible in the light of a bare ceiling bulb. The window at his shoulder was dark now. He didn’t look up when Renée appeared in the doorway, one side of her hair matted, dissolved mascara pooling under one eye.

“I hate you,” she said. “I hate your church, I hate your religion. You’re nothing but hatred yourself. It’s just like you said. It’s all negative. You hate women, you hate sex, and you hate the world as it is.”

There were bare lightbulbs in his eyes. “I feel a love for you, Renée. You’re not a cold person. You’re full of emotion and need, and you came here, and just from an hour with you I feel a love for you. It’s a Christian love, but the Light gets filtered through the fact that I’m a man, and so I’d love to have you in my arms. I’d like to take you. All right? I’m telling you this because you seem to think it’s easy for me. I want you to know: I’m a man. I’m not made of stone. And you damn well better respect me.”

“I’d respect you if you went ahead and did it.”

He closed the Bible and leaned back in his chair. “You know, what I read about every day is what a tough life women have in today’s society. How they have to make all these hard choices, how they have to take so much responsibility for their families. They have to be mothers and they have to be working men too, if liberal society’s gonna function.”

“It’s not just women,” Renée said. “Men have to change too.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Except you don’t hear so much about men complaining and men being caught in a bind. Do you? Men still have the choice, right? They have job satisfaction, and if they want to, they can feel good about parenting too. It’s like life is getting better for men, they’re getting options in a positive sense, while women are getting all these extra options in a negative sense. Wouldn’t you call this sort of the major paradox of the age? That the better things get for women liberal-politically, the worse things get in reality?”

“The fact that I sort of agree with you only makes me angrier, because I know what you’re going to say.”

“What? That the one thing people never seem to suspect is that it’s the politics itself that’s to blame? Because of course this society doesn’t understand things like ‘joy.’ The joy a mother feels. This society only understands ‘jobs,’ and ‘statutes,’ and especially ‘money.’”

“And that women are first-class citizens. That joy isn’t worth much if it’s forced on you. And that it’s better to have painful options than no options.”

“I was just going to say I don’t deny there are women like you. Our Lord tells us that some people are born eunuchs and some people are made into eunuchs along the way.”

“Well fuck you too.”

“But the fact is, most women want to have children. But society needs them for other stuff, you know, to make more money and more profits, so it has to kinda lure them away with their vanity and pride and greed. Which women have every bit as much of as men do.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“But if a woman’s left to her own better instincts, she don’t need a big-shot job to make her feel good about herself.”

“Her rightful place is in the home.”

“That’s right. The church understands this about women. It understands the joy of motherhood.”

“Well then tell me one thing about this God of yours.” Renée took a step towards Stites. “Just one thing. If women aren’t supposed to have the same kind of life as men have, tell me why your God gave us the same kind of consciousness.”

Stites lunged forward like a trap springing closed. “He didn’t! He gave all people the commandment: Be fruitful, and multiply! And you yourself was the one who said this ‘consciousness’ doesn’t survive the birth of a woman’s first child. That she’s ‘just a woman’ then, right? See what I’m saying? The woman who’s unhappy because she’s got a man’s consciousness is the woman who has disobeyed the word of the Lord. The Lord promises you salvation if you obey His word. And this kind of consciousness problem you’re talking about vanishes in a woman who’s got a baby, just like the covenant says it will. She becomes an instinctive mother, just like you say, and just like the church knows she will. It’s a fact!”

She nodded impatiently. “But the fact remains that women are given consciousness only to have it taken away again. They get shown what they could have — if they were male — and then it’s denied them. And you can say, well, most women aren’t like me. But even if there was only one of me, which I can’t believe at all, I’m stuck with a nasty choice, and the only way you can justify it is to say we’re paying for Eve’s sin or some such garbage. And I’m telling you that’s a hole in your religion you can drive a truck through: the fact that life basically shits for women and always has.”

“And always will, Renée. As it ultimately shits for every person on earth. And so the real choice you have is either suffer for no reason, suffer and be bitter and bring evil to the lives around you, or else find a way to God through your suffering. And I think the Bible might agree with me that there are a lot more women in heaven than men. Just for the suffering they’ve endured and the pride they’ve swallowed. Because the last will be first and the first will be last.”

“If there is a heaven.”

“It’s at hand. It’s starin’ you in the face. That’s what you’re here for. You know your name means ‘born again’?”

“Oh my God,” Renée said, utterly disgusted.

Stites stood up and walked around his desk. “Will you at least come again? I won’t ask if I can pray for you, because you can’t stop me. But can I call you?”

She shook her head very slowly. She was staring at him, inscribing his image in her mind so that she’d always be able to find it there: the tired eyes behind the round tortoiseshell glasses, the yellow tie that now had a spot of bean juice on it, the male hips, the stubble on his cheeks.

“You’ve helped me enough already,” she said. “You’ve helped me incredibly.”

The raccoon woke up hungry and unrefreshed. There was hardly a glimmer of light on the still water beneath the ledge he’d slept on. Rats were waddling along the walls and through the filth on the narrow, rock-strewn mud flats, migrating as they did every evening from City Hall to the dumpsters of Union Square. The raccoon rose and yawned and stretched, chin low to the ground, like a Moslem praying.