Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

Huge raindrops were falling on the honeysuckle. Howard pulled away but had driven no more than thirty feet when, directly across the street from Renée, the driver-side window of a black Infiniti was powered down, and an arm reached out and shot her in the back with a small revolver and let fly four more bullets as she fell down the crumbling stoop. Howard hit the brakes. In his mirror he saw the Infiniti fishtail onto Walnut Street and disappear.

No one ever had trouble finding the Hollands’ house on Wesley Avenue. It was the one with fourteen adolescent white pine trees crammed into its narrow front yard. Bob had planted the trees in the spring of 1970 and then watched approvingly as, over the years, they killed the ground cover with their acidic droppings and enveloped the yard in gloom. Every weekday morning before he biked to campus, he policed the forest floor for gum wrappers and Whopper boxes. On weekends he pulled wind-blown trash from the treetops with a long-handled rake, the pines swaying like shaggy dogs submitting mutely to a brushing. They writhed when he turned a hose on them to rinse sulfuric air pollutants off.

In the back yard, behind a high fence protecting the cheerful lawns of an engineer and an assistant athletic director, Bob had allowed the land to regress into the Illinois prairie that had predated (he never tired of explaining this) the arrival of the Europeans’ wasteful and destructive agriculture practices. Resident amid the chest-high growth were moles, snakes, mice, blue jays, and lots and lots of hornets. There were also lawn-mower traps, in the form of steel stakes hidden in the undergrowth and projecting four inches above the earth. Bob had planted these in 1983 after Melanie, discovering mice in the bedrooms, paid a neighbor boy to destroy the prairie with a mower and a hoe. Now the prairie was sequestered from the house by a low chain-link fence, and any small animals that crossed the border were eaten by the Hollands’ specially appointed cats, Drake and Cromwell. Periodically Bob put on gloves and ventured in among the hornets to uproot maple saplings and other broad-leafed intruders.

The house itself, of which only the roof and third-floor dormer still stood above the pine trees, was unusual in having a half-circular living room and, directly above, a half-circular master bedroom. These rooms, plus the dining room and front porch, belonged to Melanie. She kept them reasonably neat, and visitors to the house never saw the Bronze Age kitchen or the Stone Age basement, where there were piles of laundry whose bottom strata dated from the mid-1970s. Bob stayed mainly in his study, which was the only room on the third floor. Nowadays, for months at a stretch, the children’s rooms were visited by nothing but airborne dust. The doors were always open, though, exposing the furnishings like the unburied dead — granting them no rest.

As Louis came up Davis Street from the El stop a dry wind from the west was blowing in his face. The flat, unwatered lawns were as brown now in June as they used to be in August. House after house stood deserted-looking in a deep post-graduation silence, a desolation which the charcoal smoke creeping around from one solitary family’s back yard made all the more complete.

It was cooler among his father’s pine trees. Yellow beams slanted through suspended yellow pollen, the sun hanging in the branches as if it hadn’t moved in twenty years. The smell of resin was sharp and suppressive of insect motion. (Melanie often said she felt like she lived in a cemetery.) Taped to the front door was a message in Bob’s hand that said Louis, I’m at the Jewel .

He went straight upstairs to his room, dropped his bag, and fell down on the waiting bed, overcome by the heat and the lifelessness of the neighborhood and the fact that he was home. He didn’t know why he’d let himself come home. He shut his eyes, wondering, Why, why, why, as if the word alone could carry him over the next five days to the moment his return flight left. But the thought of the return flight led to the thought of Boston. He rolled onto his stomach, pulling at his face with his hands. He tried to think of something, anything, that had made him happy in the past, but no trace of pleasure remained from the days he’d spent with Lauren, and although there was something about Renée that had had some happiness attached, it was nothing he could remember now.

Telephones rang. Mechanically he rose and answered in his parents’ bedroom.

“Louis?” Lauren said. She sounded next door. “I miss you.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Atlanta, at the airport. Did you have a good trip?”

“No.”

“Louis, I was thinking, I just had this thought. You know how you said you couldn’t see living in this country? Well, I was thinking we really could go to some island. We could both work and save some money, and we could go and start a restaurant or something. Just the two of us. We could have some kids, and go to the beach, and then we’d work in the restaurant.” She paused, awaiting a response. “It sounds so stupid when I say it, but it’s not stupid. We really could. I’ll be everything for you, and anywhere we go is fine with me.”

Louis listened to the breath coming out of his nose at regular intervals.

“You think it’s stupid,” Lauren said.

“No. No, it sounds nice.”

“You didn’t want me to call.”

“It’s OK.”

“No, I’m going to hang up right now and not call anymore. I’m sorry. Just pretend I didn’t call. Will you promise to pretend I didn’t call?”

“Really, it’s OK.”

“The other thing I wanted to say”—she lowered her voice—“is I want to make love with you. I really, really, really want to. I wanted to say I’m sorry we didn’t when we had a chance. As soon as I was on the plane I started crying because we hadn’t. And now”—her voice was becoming squeaky—“now I don’t know if we ever will. Louis, I mess everything up, don’t I. When I’m with you, I’m so happy, I try to have everything be perfect . But when I’m alone — when I’m alone I only want things your way.”

There was a very long pause, with respiratory sounds at either end of the line.

“Be tough,” Louis said.

“OK. Goodbye.”

He wanted to be off the phone, but he hated the sound of this “goodbye.” The word accused him of not loving her. If he loved her, wouldn’t he tell her not to say goodbye yet?

“’Bye,” he said.

“All right,” Lauren said, hanging up. Another charge had registered on her credit card.

Having heard the modest but penetrating ticking of a ten-speed’s freewheel in the driveway, he went down to the kitchen and found his father unstrapping a knapsack from his back.

“Hi Dad.”

“Howdy, Lou, welcome home.”

There was no sign of any $22 million in the kitchen. The linoleum was still torn in front of the sink and back door, the fruit bowl still held, as always, one moribund banana and one obese and obviously mealy apple, there was still the same archaic dishwasher with the words worn off its buttons and dried drools of detergent below the leaky door, still the dirty windows with the storms on, cobwebs and pine needles in the corners, still the old drainer with its rusty ulcerations, still the economy-size bottle of generic dish soap with a pink crust around its nozzle, and still the old father, nattering in his mildly entertaining way about the local drought and its probable global causes. Bob was dressed like a lawn-care-service employee — cuffed blue stay-press trousers, Sears work shoes, and a Greenpeace T-shirt dark with perspiration. Louis watched with an irritation verging on contempt as the man crouched womanishly by the refrigerator and transferred vegetables from the knapsack to the crisper. The beers on the top shelf were still Old Style. Louis took one, reaching over the hair that would now always be thicker than his own, smelling the armpits to which deodorants had long been strangers.