Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ how much you could love God—if the miracle happened. But so you can guess how popular I was last semester, which is when— Hey! Hey! Oh shit, Louis, don’t walk away from me. Oh shit …”

      Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it. Lauren caught up with Louis in a rush of slapping soles and heavy breaths, stopped, then ran some more because he wouldn’t stop. “Louis, just let me finish—”

      “I already get the idea.”

      “Oh, this is the thing, this is the thing. People hate you if you try to be good—”

      “Yeah, hate, that’s the problem here.”

      “I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I thought we could be friends. Louis. I thought we could be friends! And you said I wasn’t going to owe you anything! Why am I so stupid? Why did I do this to you? I shouldn’t have ever called you, I made everything so much worse. I’m so stupid, so stupid.”

      “Not half as stupid as me.”

      “And but you’re not being very nice either. You’re trying to make me feel guilty so I’ll do something I don’t want to do because I am trying to stop feeling like such shit. Can’t we just decide you were unlucky?”

      “Yeah, great.”

      “You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. Nobody’s such a mess like I am.” She was crying. “I am such garbage. I am not worth it.”

      It did seem unfair that Louis, who wanted nothing more than to stay with her, was the one who had to shut up and walk away; that she was so neutral towards him that even the job of getting rid of him had to be done by him. But as a final act of kindness, and knowing he’d never get any thanks for it, he let her have the last word. He let her say she wasn’t worth it. They walked out of the park and into summer, which was regrouping as suddenly as it had retreated two hours earlier, and again bound together in its humid matrix the million voices of its airconditioners. Lauren got in her car and drove away. In the predawn silence Louis could hear the Beetle’s tweeting engine and the shifting gears for maybe twenty seconds before he lost it, and already in those twenty seconds he had difficulty comprehending that she was doing without him, that she was shifting the gears and working the pedals of a car and a life that didn’t include him; that she didn’t just stop existing when she drove out of sight.

      As the days passed and he went to work at KILT and came home to baseball, he was conscious that every hour that passed for him was passing for her too somewhere; and as the days became weeks and he remained just as conscious of how the hours were mounting up, it began to seem more and more incredible that never in all these hundreds of hours, these millions of seconds, did she call him.

      October came, November came, and he was still waking up in the morning looking for some loophole in the logic of his self-restraint that could justify his calling her. He wanted her terribly; he’d been good to her; how could she not want him? He felt like there was a rip in the fabric of the universe which it had been his misfortune to blunder through without possibility of return, as though even if he wanted to love somebody else now he wouldn’t be able to; as though love, like electricity, flowed in the direction of diminishing potential, and by coming into contact with Lauren’s deep neutrality he’d grounded himself permanently.

      Christmas in Evanston was ridiculous. Eileen thought he was a computer scientist. As soon as he returned to Houston, he made a demo tape and began to send out query letters. This was the only thing he’d been able to think of doing when, among the mail that had accumulated in his absence, he’d found an announcement of a wedding, Jerome and MaryAnn Bowles formally sharing the news that on the Friday after Thanksgiving their daughter Lauren had married Emmett Andrew Osterlitz of Beaumont, and the sender appending a note in blue ink on the back of the card: Merry Christmas! Don’t make yourself a stranger. —MaryAnn B.

      

      

      To reach Renée Seitchek’s apartment, he had to drive the entire length of Somerville’s east—west axis. In failing light he passed a bank that looked like a mausoleum, a hospital that looked like a bank, an armory that looked like a castle, and a high school that looked like a prison. He also passed the Panaché beauty salon and the Somerville City Hall. The most prominent breed of teenaged girl on the sidewalks had frizzed blond hair, a huge forehead, and a sixteen-inch waist; the other prominent breed was overweight and wore pastel or black knitwear resembling children’s pajamas. Twice Louis was honked at from behind for stopping to allow surprised and suspicious pedestrians to cross in front of him.

      With the help of some recent Globes, he had brought himself up to date on the doings and sayings of the Reverend Philip Stites. Stites’s “actions” in Boston were attracting hundreds of concerned citizens from around the country, and to house those citizens who wished to participate in further “actions,” he had acquired (for the sum of $146,001.75) a forty-year-old apartment block in the town of Chelsea, directly north across the water from downtown Boston, on the Wonderland subway line. The building, which Stites immediately christened as world headquarters of his Church of Action in Christ, happened to have been condemned three years earlier, and soon after Stites’s flock had moved in and hung ABORTION IS MURDER banners from the windows, the Chelsea police paid a visit. Stites claimed to have converted the officers on the spot; this was later disputed. Under murky circumstances, a compromise was reached whereby every church member who entered the building had to sign a three-page waiver to protect the town from lawsuits. (A Globe editorial suggested that the mayor of Chelsea was in fundamental(ist) sympathy with Stites.) The condemned building apparently had almost no lateral stability and was liable to collapse even without the help of an earthquake.

      “What the state condemns,” Stites said, “the Lord will save.”

      A Globe cartoon showed a newsstand where nothing but dubious waivers were on sale.

      Renée lived on a narrow street called Pleasant Avenue, on the easternmost of Somerville’s hills. Her house was a shingled triple-decker with a slate-covered mansard roof. The branches of what appeared to be honeysuckle had engulfed the chain link fence in front of it, and Louis was almost through the gate before he saw Renée. She was sitting on the concrete stoop, leaning forward with her hands clasped, hugging to her shins the hem of an antique black dress. Its scooped lace neckline was half covered by the black cardigan she was wearing.

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