Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ “I didn’t have faith! I didn’t have faith! The whole time we were dealing with the agency, I felt cold and dead inside. I tried to rationalize it. I said to myself, everything will change the instant I get to hold her (or him, we didn’t know). But in my heart, in my heart, all I thought was: Maybe this won’t work either. Maybe I’m the woman who even motherhood won’t change. This is what I felt, in my heart, and I still didn’t stop the process. Even though I was sick to my stomach every time we communicated with the agency. Sick for a week, from guilt and the strain of pretending to feel something I didn’t. And then when she came— well, it was already a bit of a disappointment that she was eight months old. You know, of course I’m the one who gets the eight-month-old baby.”

      She pressed her crossed arms into her breasts and rocked a little. Louis dimly wondered what was so wrong with a baby being eight months old, but—

      “But it was either that or nothing at all, and you know Jerry and I don’t discuss things, we just blame each other afterward. But that wasn’t the worst thing. The worst thing was that Lauren knew. Even when she was tiny she could feel me doubting myself. She could feel how I didn’t really believe I was her mother. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get us to believe in me. And how could I blame her then for all the things she did to me? For biting me like an animal? For the gutter language? For all the worry and the dread when she wouldn’t come home? How could I feel anything but guilt? Guilt, Louis, was the biggest thing of all. That this was our life, our only life, and this was what I’d done to it. I was not going to get another chance. Do you see?”

      She looked up at him beseechingly, leaning forward, seeming to want to pour her breasts out at his feet. She must have forgotten who she was talking to. She must somehow have been thinking that when she looked up at him he would take her in his arms and rescue her. But all she saw was a drunken college boy swallowing a yawn. “Oh God.” She turned away, furious with herself. “Why, why, why do I ever speak?”

      After that night, things were more straightforward between them, more like they were between Louis and his own mother, more realistic. MaryAnn didn’t watch him eat his breakfast anymore; having explained herself to him, she could afford to be anywhere in the house. He was part of the family now—family meaning action at a distance, invisible fields that pass through walls. He began to count the weeks until he was free of Dryden Street.

      During Easter vacation the Bowleses urged him to bring someone over to dinner to help finish up the rack of arctic caribou a colleague of Mr. Bowles’s had brought them back from Elsemere Island. Louis invited a girl he was friends with, a DJ at KTRU from whom he’d been learning about Wagner and Richard Strauss and with whom, in a mutuality of opportunism, he’d been spending some afternoons in a dormitory bed. MaryAnn seemed to have intuited this circumstance. Over the braised caribou she patronized his friend relentlessly, harping in particular on the beauty of her hair, as if it were understood that lookswise her hair was all she had going for her. Afterward, as he walked her home, the friend said she didn’t think Mrs. Bowles was very nice. “She’s crazy,” Louis said. “They’re both crazy.” Nevertheless, the idea had been planted in his head that this friend wasn’t necessarily worthy of him, and he soon began to patronize her himself and then avoided her entirely.

      The next morning he woke up very late with a queasiness he associated with the questionable taste of the caribou. When he stepped into the hall, in his gym shorts and gray T-shirt, it took him a moment to notice the girl standing against one wall of the alcove beyond the stairwell. It was like the moment when you realize there’s a bird inside your house which happens to be still now but could fly into your face at any second. The spot in the alcove where the girl stood was just the kind of meaningless random spot where a bird in its confusion lands, and where Louis himself, in Evanston, could frequently be found. The girl was wearing a tight black tank top and a gray-and-white plaid miniskirt; she had a bimboish cumulus of dark blond hair, long bare legs, green ankle socks, and shiny shoes. Her fists were clenched and her jaw was set. Her chest was heaving with what appeared to be rage. She gave Louis a white-hot look, and his heart jumped as violently as if suddenly wings were flapping along walls and claws and a beak veering past his eyes.

      He escaped to the bathroom. He washed his hair in the shower but forgot to wash the rest of himself. He stood naked and stared at the Bowleses’ Water Pik for several minutes and then mechanically began to take another shower. He washed his hair again and again forgot to wash anything else. It was as if he’d suddenly found himself on the brink of a deep, dark pool marked LAUREN and said What the hell, and let himself fall in.

      An hour later, at the bottom of the stairs, he exchanged helios with another new face, a Texan youth with open, honest features and a military haircut who was reading the paper in the living room.

      “Your lunch is on the table, Louis,” MaryAnn said quietly in the kitchen.

      Louis stared at her. How could someone so irrelevant exist? Where was Lauren? Was he going to have to eat lunch with Lauren? He pointed vaguely east. “I need to get to the station,” he said.

      “You want me to wrap it up for you? We were about to sit down.”

      He felt a hand between his shoulder blades, Mr. Bowles propelling him towards the kitchen table. “You’ve got ten minutes, sit down a minute and prime that engine.”

      “Aren’t you off the air this week?” said MaryAnn.

      Cut in two diagonally, a caribou sandwich on a plate awaited him. The elder Bowleses attacked their own sandwiches with unusual appetite, ignoring the voices in the living room and the heavy footsteps on the stairs, gnawing at their food with tilted heads like starved and nervous animals driven into one corner of the house by a daughter who, with a loose gait and no apparent selfcon-sciousness, entered the kitchen just as a tough slab of gamey meat slid into the no man’s land between Louis’s sandwich and his mouth.

      “Lauren, this is Louis. Louis, our daughter, Lauren.”

      “Mumph,” Louis said.

      “Hi nice to meet you,” Lauren said in a monotone. She was nothing like the mess or terror that MaryAnn had led him to expect. Her all-season tan, her turquoise earrings, her Mickey Mouse watch and the lazy way she turned one hip out all marked her as a mainstream good-times disaffected Texas college girl. She had smooth skin, a wide mouth, and permanent-looking bruises the color of iodine beneath her eyes. She’d written something in pen on the back of her hand. She told her parents that she and Emmett were driving to the beach at Galveston for the afternoon. Before she left the room she paused to take in Louis fully—his aviator frames, his thinning curls, his gutted sandwich, his searing blush. Her face became simply empty.

      “We have a very open relationship with Lauren,” Mr. Bowles explained when she was gone.

      “Emmett’s her fiancé,” Mr. Bowles added.

      “We didn’t think she was coming down,” Mr. Bowles explained.

      “She’s a wayward sprite,” Mr. Bowles said.

      “God! Full of energy. Full of life,” Mr. Bowles reflected.

      MaryAnn sank her teeth into her last piece of sandwich.

      “I hope Emmett doesn’t let her drive,” Mr. Bowles concluded.

      When Louis came home that night, the three Bowleses and Emmett were eating ice cream in the dining room. MaryAnn headed silently for the kitchen to get him dinner. “I’ve eaten,” he said, already on the stairs. At the top of them he stopped long enough to hear Lauren say:

      “I guess he СКАЧАТЬ