Jonathan Franzen - Strong Motion - A Novel

“Eat, eat,” he said, sitting down. He wiped dust off the magazine and showed Louis the cover: the origin of petroleum. February 1986. “Your mother subscribes,” he said. “And I read.”

Louis eyed the magazine uneasily. The cover story was about the scientist Renée had mentioned, the one named Gold, who believed that petroleum originated deep inside the planet. It said something unflattering about Louis’s love of truth that he was afraid to open the magazine — afraid to risk seeing Renée’s theory contradicted. If she had to be wrong, he was happier not knowing it.

Bob took the magazine and paged through the cover story, running his finger down the columns. When he came to the end, he shook his head.

“Nix about Sweeting-Aldren. Which, believe me, I would have noticed when I read it. But — and really, I don’t want you to think I personally am not persuaded, because I am, because I know these people and it makes a lot of sense. But the impression you get from this article is that you don’t just drill the hole anywhere. There has to be a very special geology to collect the petroleum that’s coming up. I’m more than willing to believe the company sank a well to pump waste into, but I don’t think they’d go down any twenty thousand feet if five thousand would do. And unfortunately it sounds like your friend’s theory doesn’t hold up unless the hole is very deep. If the geology was correct in western Massachusetts, any hole that’s there should be deep. But if it’s in Peabody it can only be shallow.”

Louis was sure that Renée would have had an answer to this. “I guess they thought maybe they’d get oil anyway.”

“Come on, Lou.” Bob leaned forward challengingly. “It has to make sense in the details. If you send me this stuff as a paper to review, I’m going to jump all over you. Oil’s cheap in ’69. Deep holes are tremendously expensive. A shallow hole will do the trick for waste disposal. Your friend’s theory requires the hole to be deep. The Atlantic — which admittedly is not the Bible, but nevertheless — The Atlantic tells me the theory of deep petroleum wasn’t developed until the late seventies. It’s based on space probes from the early seventies. Even if somebody had a theory in 1969—when nobody cared about oil anyway, and Sweeting-Aldren by the way had earnings of better than four bucks a share annually — it must have been based on bad evidence.”

“Well, that’s what Renée said. It was a bad paper, but it still sort of anticipated the theory later on.”

“But a bad paper is a bad paper. How’s the company going to know the theory has a future?”

Louis squirmed like a failing student. “I don’t know. But everything else makes sense.”

“Do you remember the author’s name? It wasn’t Gold, was it?”

“Oh, please.” He pushed away his plate. “I know who Gold is. This was some guy named Krasner. Somebody who, he stopped publishing and we have no idea where he went.” He looked at hit father. “What’s wrong?”

Bob had risen from his chair. He was staring at the liquor cabinet, gravitating towards it. He was suddenly very pale.

“What’s wrong?”

Bob turned around as if responding to the sound of his voice, not the content. He looked at him vacantly. “Krasner.”

“You’re kidding. You’re going to tell me you know him.”

“Her.”

“Her?” A seed of fear sprouted in Louis’s stomach.

“Anna Krasner. A girlfriend of your grandfather’s.”

“How do you know that?”

Bob answered slowly, speaking to himself. “Because old Jack made sure I knew. There wasn’t a possession he had that he didn’t make sure I knew was his.”

“When was this?”

“Sixty-nine.”

“Was he married? I mean, to Rita?”

Bob shook his head. “Not yet. Not for another three years.” He was reading messages on the wall that Louis couldn’t see — worrisome messages, bitter messages. Then, abruptly, he came to himself and sat down. “You feeling OK?”

“Yeah, fine, drunk,” Louis said.

“I think I can find her for you, if you want.”

“That would be great.”

“You don’t remember Jack very well, do you?”

“Zero memories.”

“He was not your ordinary. not your ordinary human being. For example, Anna was a very pretty woman, about forty-five years his junior. When we found out he’d remarried, I was sure it was going to be her. But it turns out to be Rita, who everyone agreed was not a particularly attractive woman. Not to say an outright fright, although that was my opinion. We’d met her when she was at the girlfriend stage, when she was his secretary, but that was years earlier. I’d assumed she was long gone from the picture. And there are a lot of men where you wouldn’t have been surprised, but not Jack. He cared about how a woman looked, that and how old she was, more than anything.”

“Uh huh.”

A moth beat against the screen in the back door, unable to follow the smell of prairie that was creeping inside. Some small animal made the tall grass crackle. The cats crossed the kitchen, single file, and pressed their whiskers against the screen. Bob asked what Louis and Renée had planned to do with their information.

“I guess make sure the company pays,” Louis said. “We disagreed about the timing.”

“You’ll want to let your mother know in advance.”

“All right.”

“Had you thought of that?”

“I tried not to.”

Bob nodded. “That’s something else that was peculiar about Jack. Why he put all his money in Sweeting-Aldren stock. Because it wasn’t as if he earned it all in stock and then failed to spread it out. The records show a well-balanced portfolio until the early seventies, when he made his new will — I suppose after he’d married Rita. Then he retired from the company and systematically bought stock in it until that’s all there was. A piece of folly that’s already cost your mother a lot of money.”

“Boo hoo.”

“What we can’t figure out is why Jack did it. He was a company man, that’s where he made his fortune, and I don’t know how many times he told me it was the best-run corporation in the country. However many times I saw him in my life. A dozen times. But he loved money as much as he loved women, and he was anything but stupid. I simply can’t see him making emotional decisions. There must have been some greed involved, somewhere that I can’t see. This Canadian a while back, Campeau, the one who owned department stores. He sank all his money in his own company, and all his kids’ money too, to the tune of about five hundred million. Next thing he knew, the shares were nearly worthless. If you’re greedy, and you believe in yourself, I suppose you think, why put any money at all in things that won’t pay the maximum return?”

“Yeah, why not,” Louis said.

“Well. I’ll tell you why not. Because he bought shares at any price and any ratio. Every time something of his matured, he converted it to Sweeting-Aldren common, no matter what the price, and this was after he’d retired. Wouldn’t you call that a little irrational?”

“Sure, maybe, if I understood stocks.”

Bob leaned forward suddenly, resting his elbows on his knees, and focused his reddened, enthusiastic eyes on Louis.

“Jack’s girlfriend,” he said, “is a company chemist. The company drills a disposal well three or four times deeper than it has to be. The chemist disappears. Jack marries a fright. He converts all his assets to company stock at any cost. When he dies he leaves them in a trust fund for the fright. You don’t see anything there?” If the question had been put to Louis by anyone else, or at any other time in the last ten years, he would only have been irritated, figuring that if a person had something to say they should just go ahead and say it. What he felt now, though, was embarrassment for not seeing what his father saw. He was embarrassed to have to shake his head.