Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

In her house, a Doberman whined pleadingly behind the hallway door. One floor up, the baby was crying and its parents were yelling at each other, as they’d done so often before the baby came. They had Ph.D.s and quarreled, for example, about the comparative labor value of keeping the refrigerator stocked and keeping the car running. Renée had heard the husband shout, “You want to switch? You want to switch? You want to do the car and I’ll do the shopping? ” They were in their mid-thirties.

There was an open package of whole-wheat bread on her kitchen table. In the sink an eggy frying pan and stacks of plates and glasses. Wine bottles and fruit peels on the counter. Clothes in the hallway, clothes in piles in both main rooms, a brown ring and splashed barf in the toilet, towels on the floor by the sink. Shoes and newspapers and dust mice everywhere. Withered strands of spaghetti near the burners of the stove.

She took the cassette tape marked dance in her fingers and bent it until the plastic shattered in a shock whose pulse of high-frequency vibrations stung her skin. She did the same to her other tape, the one with the single song on it. Suddenly there was a new silence in the apartment, as if until this moment music had been playing for so long that she’d ceased to be aware of it, and heard it only after it had stopped.

She took off her clothes and lay face down on the kitchen floor, which was sticky and hot to the touch. Fragments of cassette dug into her elbows and ribs. She cried for a long time.

In her jeans again, she swept the whole apartment and washed and dried all the dishes and put them away. Every thing she’d bought in the previous week, even the leather jacket, she stuffed into Hefties which she carried down to the sidewalk. She kept stopping to cry, but eventually she got the apartment as clean and bare as it was the night she first slept with Louis Holland.

She opened the manila envelope and looked at her paper, wondering why she’d written it. Simply to make money? She sat on her tightly made bed and read the “AGREEMENT, made this 12th day of June” between Melanie Rose Holland of Evanston, Illinois, and Renée Seitchek of Somerville, Massachusetts. The agreement was printed on laser bond paper. She tore it into narrow strips. She tore the strips into squares which she held cupped in her hands for a full minute, as if she’d thrown up into her hands and couldn’t think of an appropriate receptacle. The toilet was where she finally dumped it.

Again she looked at her paper, trying to gauge its meaning to her now. Her eyes followed the words, but all the reader in her mind would say was You’re tripping on a romance. You’re tripping on a romance . After a while she found that she had put the paper back in its envelope and was holding it against her chest. She hugged it, rocking, grieving. She shivered and didn’t know what to do. She stood up and went to her desk, still cradling the thin envelope in both arms. She stuffed all her related photocopies inside it and began to wind brown plastic wrapping tape around the thick packet. She unrolled more and more tape, until the packet was completely covered, no envelope showing at all. Then she buried it in the bottom drawer of the desk. She looked at the closed drawer and hugged herself, grieving.

Later in the morning she took a shower and drove to Kendall Square. Her doctor at Harvard had referred her to a clinic called New Cambridge Health Associates, which occupied part of an old red-brick factory recently converted into offices, many of them high-tech MIT offshoots. She’d passed the clinic many times, on the way to seminars at MIT, without ever noticing it for what it was.

A Japanese noodle place, popular for lunch, blanketed the street with its breath of broth and scallions. In a parking space directly in front of the clinic, behind yellow police tape strung between two parking signs, five COAIC women stood in the strong midday sun holding the usual photographs. Bebe Wittleder looked at Renée. Renée looked at her. Bebe watched, wide-eyed and mute, as Renée pushed open the metal door.

A handsome counselor, fiftyish, with graying blond hair in a braid, took the envelope her doctor had given her.

“Renée Seitchek,” she said.

“I know who you are.”

“Yeah. So do the people outside.”

“Oh dear. This is an unfortunate coincidence for you.”

“Uh huh. I guess I think it isn’t.”

The counselor leaned back against a chart of reproduction, Fallopian tubes and ovaries framing her too-compassionate face. “Do you want me to ask you what you mean by that?”

“Well, I wonder. ” Renée wrinkled her forehead. Her skin was stiff from lack of sleep. “I wonder if the last few months have seemed strange to you.”

“Which months?”

“The last two or three. With the earthquakes, and what Stites is doing. To me they’ve been very strange, and all of a piece. But it occurs to me that not everyone feels what I do.”

The counselor clearly didn’t feel what Renée did. “It’s been. very interesting,” she said with a blank smile.

“Well. Anyway. I got angry. And when you get angry you get sloppy. You know, because men can be sloppy and nothing happens to them. And then I guess I got unlucky. I mean, within the context of my sloppiness. Within the context of my thinking it’s not a matter of luck at all.”

“You’re talking about contraception.”

“Yes. My diaphragm.”

She watched the counselor fill a space on her form with the word “diaphragm.” Somehow she managed to remain polite and humble while the counselor discussed its correct use and told her where she’d fallen short. She knew very well where she’d fallen short.

“Before we go any further,” the counselor said, “I want you to know we can easily refer you to a facility without picketers. We fully understand the threat to your privacy if you stay with us.”

“If I’m making things worse for you, I’ll go wherever you want me to.”

“Never. Never for our sake. But for yours?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Then I’ll need you to fill this out.” She passed a letter of informed consent across her desk. “And we ask that you pay before the procedure. I guess you know we don’t take checks.”

Renée took three hundreds from her pocket. A technician drew blood from her arm. The counselor led her to a hallway in the basement so that she could leave through a different door.

All day on Wednesday she thought and wrote about deep seismicity in Tonga. When she came home in the evening she found an envelope from Louis Holland in her mailbox. It had a Boston postmark and no return address. She neither opened it nor threw it away.

The baseball game she listened to after dinner went into extra innings, the Red Sox finally losing after midnight on a two-base throwing error.

“Howard,” she said. “Can I see you a second?”

It was steaming outside. Even in the shade of the big oaks on the lawn of the Peabody Museum the heat had grounded most winged insects. The squirrels were very listless. Howard put his hands in the pockets of his yachting pants and bounced on his toes. “What?”

“I’m having an abortion today. I want you to pick me up afterwards.”

“OK.”

She told him where to be. He nodded, hardly listening. She told him again where to be. She said it was very important that he be there.

“Yep.”

“So I’ll see you sometime between four-thirty and five-thirty.”

“Yep.”

“You don’t mind doing this?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head.

“And you’ll definitely be there,” she said.

“Yep.”

“At four-thirty.”

“Yep.”

“OK, then.” The shock waves from a helicopter passing overhead made her lungs vibrate. “Thank you.”