Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ brown branches and crooked flagstones, for dripping faucets, squeaky floorboards, sticky doors, torn screens and dirty windows. His hammers and saws and clippers hung on pegboards with each tool outlined in black magic marker. He didn’t seem to have any friends or hobbies. He liked to explain to Louis how things were done in his house. He rationalized in detail every aspect of his wife’s cooking, relating how she had come to steam vegetables instead of boiling them, how a creamier mashed potato was achieved, and how, over the years, with his own input, she had reached the decision not to serve meat more than twice a day. He outlined ergonomic methods of stacking dishes and reading a newspaper. A recurrent theme was their water softener and its manifold virtues. Louis listened to these discourses with a compassion bordering on horror.

      “Look at the look he’s giving you,” MaryAnn said. “Jerry. Look at the way Louis is looking at you.”

      “Is something wrong?” asked a potentially miffed Mr. Bowles.

      “Maybe he’s heard enough for now about soft water,” said MaryAnn.

      “I’m sorry,” Louis said, shaking his head as if to clear it of cobwebs. “I was thinking about—something else.”

      MaryAnn twinkled. “Like maybe some blueberry pie à la mode?”

      MaryAnn was younger than her husband. She wore shawls and sandals and floral print dresses cut low to highlight her large and blue-veined bosom. She could often be found, silent, silent, in the corner of the gleaming laundry room where she ironed shirts and pillowcases and underpants. The house was full of places where she sat and rested. She kept books near all these places and could sometimes be seen setting one aside (Sigrid Undset, Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence), but the bookmarks never seemed to advance. The lunches she packed for Louis were heartbreaking: sandwiches on stone-ground wheat bread, carrot sticks, watermelon pickles, Bartlett pears, slabs of homemade yellow cake. The lunches he’d made himself in Evanston generally consisted of baloney on white bread, a banana, Twinkies when in stock, and a package of Del-Mark potato chips. In his entire life he’d never seen Del-Mark potato chips anywhere but in his mother’s kitchen.

      He was tactful enough to wait four whole days before telling MaryAnn that he didn’t plan to be eating his dinners on Dryden Street. He said it would be best if he packed both lunch and dinner in a bag to take to campus.

      MaryAnn had clearly been expecting this. “I’ll pack them,” she said sadly. “Although I can’t really feed you very well from a paper bag.”

      It wasn’t, Louis said, that he wouldn’t enjoy eating dinner at home. But he had his senior thesis and his duties as station manager at KTRU to consider.

      “Well,” said MaryAnn. “Maybe on Sundays you’ll have dinner here with us? And any other day you feel like it.”

      This would not be the last time that he reviewed the logic: (1) he needed to be polite because (2) he was getting a good deal here and (3) thereby avoiding debt. “Sundays, sure,” he said. “That’s fine.”

      It had been fifteen years since anyone had regularly made breakfast for him, and he had never in his life seen anything like the breakfasts MaryAnn made. He got fresh biscuits, fresh oat-bran muffins, fresh corn muffins, slab bacon. He got berry pancakes, veal-and-fennel sausages, french toast and cheese soufflés and steak and eggs. He got eggs scrambled with chives and sour cream, eggs Benedict, whole-grain hot cereals with cream and brown sugar, broiled grapefruit, homemade cinnamon-raisin bread, winter peaches topped with vanilla ice cream, honeydew quarters with strawberries in their hollows. After she had served the food, MaryAnn sat down and quietly drank coffee, showing him her profile, her jutting breasts. The terms of the moral problem were vivid to him each time he came to the table: It would be better not to accept this food. But he was hungry and the food looked very good. He continued to eat the breakfasts even when his pity for MaryAnn began to give way to something closer to alarm. It was a bad moment when he discovered that she’d been darning his socks. It was an even worse moment when a DJ at KTRU opened Louis’s sack dinner and found the tupperware pie-slice container which he’d repeatedly declined to carry, and a note from MaryAnn that read: Maybe you can buy some ice cream for the pie?

      One Friday night in January he came home at midnight with a head full of tequila and found MaryAnn on her knees in the dining room, unpacking her collection of Wedgwood teacups and saucers from the breakfront. “How’s my acolyte?” she said. She thought his eternal white shirt and black pants made him look like an acolyte. She told him to sit down. He did so, his body leaning in the direction he wanted to go: upstairs. She took out piece after piece of china, murmuring that she ought to get rid of it all, sell it, what a stupid lot of cups, she’d had no idea how many there were. Finally she was kneeling in the midst of the entire collection, the tassels of her shawl fanned around her. “Take some.” she said angrily, dumping a cup and saucer on Louis’s lap. “Take a couple, take four. Who on earth would want these? You don’t want those.”

      “Sure I do.” Louis was pale and perspiring. “They’re handsome.”

      “You know,” she said, “I used to be in love with England. The whole country. I used to think I’d be considered pretty there, or prettiness wouldn’t matter. Like it was some wonderful old minor league I’d shine in.”

      “You are pretty,” the tequila said.

      MaryAnn shook her head. “When I got my master’s in English I was in New York. I went to work for the Duncan McGriff Agency, it was a big literary agency. I suppose we had some famous clients, but the way we really earned our money was by charging reading fees. I wasn’t a reader. I was the person who took the readers’ reports on manuscripts and turned them into personalized letters from Duncan himself. I had a sheet with about twenty different ways to personalize them, to say how he’d read the manuscript while he was sitting at home by his swimming pool where his three dear children were frolicking. Or how he’d read the manuscript on a mountaintop while watching a glorious sunset. This is literally what I had to write. But the sad thing was, no matter how bad a manuscript was, I always had to say that the work showed great promise but was not yet in commercially salable form. And there were various degrees to this, because there were people out there —innocent people out in Nebraska—who would send in their manuscripts again and again, and pay the full fee every time, and we could never say yes, and never say no. Which was also how Duncan was with me, although that’s a different story. I worked there for five years. I was still sitting there in my little chair at my little desk the day the Justice Department came and closed us down for an even worse thing we were doing. And Louis, I was twenty -eight then. It was like I’d been stabbed! It’s funny, twenty-eight still seems an old age to me, like I was never an older maid than I was that year. I couldn’t believe it, I mean, what had happened to those years. But so anyway, I married Jerry, and that’s when I really started to panic, because the feeling didn’t go away. The feeling that I’d missed my chance to have the life I wanted. Everything still eluded me, except now it was worse, because now I was married. It wasn’t so much that Jerry—well, you know him. It wasn’t his fault. I knew what he was like and I married him. It was my fault. And do you know, once you’ve started to think about something, once you’ve gotten it in your head that you have insomnia, it makes it all the harder to fall asleep?”

      Louis was drifting in a slow spin towards the center of his empty teacup. MaryAnn gave him a glance full of hurt and worry, as though it were he, not she, whom she felt sorry for. “Well,” she said in a lower voice, “when I saw how nothing changed when I got married, I got it in my head that nothing ever would. I made Jerry hate me and then I said to myself: I have a husband who hates me. Do you see? There’s an aloneness you can catch like a disease and not get rid of. A wrongness—a wrongness you can never fix. And it was the same thing when we adopted Lauren. Like everything else, it was my idea. I СКАЧАТЬ