Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

She stepped off the curb. “FIRST QUESTION: WHAT ELSE—” A car honked. “WHAT ELSE CAN I TELL YOU?

“ANSWER: MY ADDRESS IS NUMBER 7 PLEASANT AVENUE, SOMERVILLE. MY TELEPHONE NUMBER IS 360-9671. MY BLOOD TYPE IS 0. MY MIDDLE NAME IS ANN. MY INCOME LAST YEAR WAS $12,000. I STEAL OFFICE SUPPLIES FROM MY EMPLOYER. I LIKE TO MASTURBATE. MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER IS 351-40-1137. I USED TO DO DRUGS WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE. I JUST DID SOME MORE LAST WEEK.”

A stream of workers leaving their offices had swelled the crowd. Cars were pulling over to the side of the street. Lindsay from the Herald was holding out her cassette recorder while Stites shook his head. Renée aimed the megaphone at him.

“QUESTION: HOW OLD WAS THE FETUS I JUST ABORTED?

“ANSWER: APPROXIMATELY FIVE WEEKS. I’M NOT POSITIVE, BECAUSE I’VE ALWAYS HAD IRREGULAR MENSTRUAL PERIODS .

“QUESTION: WHO WAS THE FATHER?

“ANSWER.” She took a deep breath. She had to tell one lie here. “ANSWER: I’M NOT SURE. I’VE HAD INTERCOURSE WITH MORE THAN ONE MAN IN THE LAST TWO MONTHS.

“QUESTION: WHY?

“ANSWER: BECAUSE I WAS LONELY AND UNHAPPY AND I WANTED TO FEEL GOOD. I WAS ALSO IN LOVE WITH ONE OF THE MEN. I WANTED TO MARRY HIM AND HAVE CHILDREN WITH HIM.

“QUESTION: WHAT WERE THE MEN’S NAMES?

“ANSWER: THAT’S PRIVATE. THEY’RE MEN THEY HAVE THE OPTION OF KEEPING THEIR PRIVACY.”

Here she heard two or three young female voices cheer. Unable to tell what direction the cheers had come from, she continued to aim the megaphone at Stites, who had taken off his glasses and was massaging the inner corners of his eyes.

“QUESTION: WHAT KIND OF BIRTH CONTROL DO I USE?

“ANSWER: I USE A DIAPHRAGM. IT WAS WHOLLY MY RESPONSIBILITY, AND WHEN IT FAILED, IT FAILED ME .

“QUESTION: HOW DO I FEEL NOW?

“ANSWER: I FEEL VERY, VERY SAD. I FEEL SAD FOR MYSELF AND SAD FOR ALL WOMEN, BECAUSE A MAN WILL NEVER HAVE TO COME TO A PLACE LIKE THIS, NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS. BUT THIS SADNESS BELONGS TO ME , AND NO MAN CAN HAVE IT, AND I AM GLAD TO BE A WOMAN.”

There was another roll of thunder. A wave of paper litter swept down the street. Renée, blushing, and doubling over with a cramp, set the megaphone on the curb and walked as fast as she could into the wind. She had no idea, no interest in knowing, how many people besides Stites and Lindsay had even listened to her.

Howard’s great white car was waiting at the intersection of Hampshire and Broadway, aimed in the direction of Harvard. In a fully paved neighborhood like this, with no green foliage in sight, the dark sky looked like a winter sky. Renée waited for a blue Cressida and a gray Accord and a black Infiniti and a silver Camry to pass. As soon as she crossed the street and got in the car, Howard stepped on the gas pedal. She slouched down so far that her eyes were even with the bottom of the window. She kicked aside Coke cans and a championship-size frisbee, rubbing her abdomen with her fist.

“You feeling OK?” Howard said.

“Could be worse.”

“OK if I stop by the lab?”

“Why don’t you take me home first.”

“Just for a second, OK? Gotta get a rope for Somerville Lumber.”

“What are you getting at Somerville Lumber?”

“Wall unit.”

She laughed emptily. “Are you going to want me to help you with that?”

The chugging of the car’s engine was like the noise of a window fan in a heat wave, keeping her discomfort within tolerable limits. When Howard turned it off, in the reserved-only parking lot outside the computer-room door, she felt weak and ill and slouched down even farther.

A gust of warm wind blew through the open front-seat windows. Tires squealed. A gray Cressida swung into the lot and stopped behind the car, blocking it in. A young Oriental woman in a business suit and sneakers jumped out and ran and pounded on the door to the computer room. It was Howard’s so-called fiancée, Sally Go. Someone let her in.

Beyond the green hedge and bank of mulch there was motion on Oxford Street, action within three independent frames of reference, the blurred whiz of car roofs, the floating by of bicyclists with their heads and shoulders high off the ground and their bikes obscured by the hedge, and the bouncing gait of pedestrians, students and working people heading home with noticeable haste because the trees were now showing the white undersides of their leaves and the boughs of the tallest ones were beginning to heave with some violence. The wind carried fragments of distant sounds. The thunder was increasing, booming like the earth in a New England earthquake. Renée half sat and half lay with her hand on her abdomen, drawing some of the cramp pain out into her fingertips. Already she could not have said how long she’d been waiting in the car.

Behind her, in a part of the sky that she was too enervated to turn to see, an eclipse-like darkness gathered. The trees were in constant motion, all the sounds from Oxford Street landing in pieces well to the north, but still the ground was dry, and people in dry clothes were on the sidewalk, and the air was warm and filled with petals and green leaves. She thought she’d never breathed more beautiful air. She felt badness draining out of her. The weather, which was nature’s, had taken over the green spaces and paved spaces between buildings. The air smelled of midsummer and late afternoon and thunder and love, and its temperature was so exactly the temperature of her skin that being in it was like being in nothing, or meeting no boundary between her self and the world. She could hear lightning static on the radios of passing cars. She felt the poignancy of cars and hot asphalt and brick buildings and radio transmissions, all the things that human beings had made, as the weather swept over them. How deeply they were immersed in the world, how deeply she was. Life not on the world’s skin but deep inside it, in the sea of atmosphere and churning trees, with a deep, vaulted ceiling of black cloud above it, electrons rising and descending on white ladders. She wanted to embrace it all by breathing it, but she felt that she could never breathe deeply enough, just as sometimes she thought she could never be close enough physically to a person she loved.

She wondered: what exactly did she love here? Thunder echoed and leaves followed spiral tracks into the dark green sky. Watching her mind from a safe ironic distance, she formed the thought: Thank you for making me alive to be here . It rang false, but not completely false. She tried again: Thank you for this world .

Half serious, half not, she tried again and again. She was still trying when the computer-room door flew open and Sally Go came running out. Sally pushed her tear-streaked face through Renée’s open window.

“I saw you!” she said. “I work right there, and I saw you! Me and my friends, we saw you!” She had one of those no-stick city voices. “I hate this kind of shit you’re pulling. He was supposed to marry me. You’re crazy. I hate you! I hope you die! I hate you so much.”

Renée opened her mouth to speak, but the girl was already in her car. She backed out with a screech and drove away.

Howard returned with a hank of nylon rope.

“Was that your girlfriend?”

He shrugged, starting the engine. By now the wind had blown most of the cars and people off the streets. A black curtain was hanging at the end of Kirkland Street, a November twilight.

“You’re going to get your wall unit wet,” Renée said.

“Got some plastic,” Howard said.

She remembered the letter from Louis and, without thinking, put her hand under the flap of her leather bag and tried to open it surreptitiously, but Howard looked at her. She slowly drew her hand out. Beneath the Dane Street bridge the wind was flattening stands of ragweed and cattail. The first drops of rain scored the windshield. She was coming home to Somerville, in her jeans and sneakers, with her emptied womb. The brown and yellow and white and blue clapboard had never looked so beautiful as in the green light of the beginning storm. She could already feel the overheatedness of her apartment, smell the rain on the hot slates outside the kitchen window, hear the water on the roof. She was so impatient to be home that when Howard stopped on Pleasant Avenue she hardly thanked him. She jumped out and slammed the door.