Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen

       3

      From the memorial service Louis drove his father to a cheap hamburger restaurant in Harvard Square, a place with the air of a selfconscious institution, and it was there, in a booth near the door, that he was introduced to a figure that took away what little appetite he had. His father named the figure while holding the top half of his hamburger bun in his palm like a calculator and spreading mustard on it. The figure was 22 million dollars. It corresponded to Louis’s mother’s new approximate net worth.

      Scarves and coat sleeves were brushing his head as various lunch hours were exhausted and the restaurant emptied out. Cold air blew in through the busy doors. He asked what his mother was going to do with so much money.

      His father looked a little bumlike in his ancient suit, with its narrow lapels overlapping as he hunched over his hamburger. “I don’t know,” he said.

      Louis asked if they were going to stay in the house in Evanston.

      “Where else would we go?” his father said.

      Was he thinking of retiring?

      “When I’m sixty-five,” his father said.

      Unequal to the asking of more questions, Louis watched in silence as his father cleaned both their plates and paid the check with a ten-dollar bill, leaving a tip of dimes and quarters.

      It was midafternoon when he got back to WSNE. The clouds were darkening further, deepening and collecting themselves for serious nighttime rain, and in the studios it might already have been midnight. All the lights were burning, the building’s various circulatory systems humming audibly, the phones in the advertising department as silent as always. Through the Studio A window he could see the afternoon announcer, an alcoholic-looking veteran named Bud Evans whose few cobwebs of hair were painstakingly arranged over his chapped, bald scalp. He was gazing uneasily over the boom mike at his guest, a gentleman with golden shoulder-length locks and a Hawaiian shirt. For five or six seconds neither spoke. It was like a pensive lull in conversation, except that they were on the air and the lull was being broadcast. Still feeling carsick, Louis went to the men’s room and leaned over the urinal with his forehead pressing into tile. His urine broke up a tarry wad of tobacco shreds. Moving like a person with a hangover, he sat down at the terminal in his cubicle and began to enter commercial logs. He did this for three hours, which at the wage he earned netted him somewhat under twelve dollars, assuming he eventually got paid. When he left Waltham, rain was dropping out of a sky the color of a TV set’s afterglow. On Clarendon Hill he went straight to the bathroom and vomited a clear ropy liquid into the beige toilet.

      Louis was, at twenty-three, a not entirely untroubled person. His relationship wath money was particularly tortured. And yet what he realized, when the import of the figure began to sink in, was that up until the moment he’d sat down in the burger joint with his father, he’d basically been content with his life and its conditions. A person accustoms himself to what he is, after all, and if he’s lucky he learns to hold in somewhat lower esteem all other ways of being, so as not to spend life envying them. Louis had been coming to appreciate the freedom a person gained by sacrificing money, and to pity or even outright despise the wealthy—a class represented in his mind, justly or not, by the various suntanned narrow-nosed boyfriends Eileen had sported over the years, up to and including Peter Stoorhuys. But now the joke was on Louis, because he was the son of a woman worth 22 million dollars.

      That night he had a lucid and unpleasant dream. The setting was a paneled boardroom or club room furnished with red leather chairs. His mother had leaned back on one of them and, raising the hem of her yellow dress, allowed a fully clothed Mr. Aldren to stand between her legs and pump semen into her while Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys looked on. When Mr. Aldren was done, Mr. Stoorhuys mounted her, only Mr. Stoorhuys had become an Irish setter and had to strain and prance on his hind legs to maintain an effective mating position. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott stood watching as she reached around to steady the eager dog between her legs.

      On Saturday Louis left two messages on Eileen’s machine. When she didn’t return them, he called his parents at their hotel and learned that they were driving to the Kernaghan estate the next morning, his mother to stay there for perhaps a week, his father only for the day, since classes at Northwestern resumed on Monday. “I’m going to be very busy,” his mother said. “But if you want to do something for me, you could take your father to the airport. The flight’s at seven.”

      Ignoring the hint, he set out for Ipswich at ten on Sunday morning. A humidity and stasis lay on Somerville. The rain had finally stopped in the night, but eaves and fenders and budding trees were still pregnant with it, there being not a breath of wind. Where sight lines opened, down streets and through the narrow prisms between houses, the humidity added up to a paling of the distance, a blurring of edges that affected even the tolling of a distant church bell, the separate strokes of which were almost lost in the intervening resonance. Louis steered awkwardly around a pair of Somerville patrol cars that had stopped in the middle of an intersection, driver’s window to driver’s window, as if they were insects and this was how they coupled and their need was urgent. Through the portal of an empty, lighted church he glimpsed banks of Easter lilies.

      The highways were deserted. From stretches of elevated grade, up through Chelsea and Revere and Saugus, he looked down on crabbed patchwork neighborhoods in which streets and driveways had hegemony. Many were half underwater now, with cars parked crookedly at their margins as if they’d been deposited by a flood.

      A different flood, a receding flood of dollars, had left countless new condominiums stranded in fields that were muddy and barren and rutted with Caterpillar tracks. The town house condos differed only in location; every one of them, without exception, was faced with pastel clapboard and had postmodern semicircles and triangles interrupting the roof lines. The high-rises, on the other hand, came in two varieties: the kind with plywood on their windows, and the kind with banners draped from the roof advertising incredible deals