Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen
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 studies all the time, huh?”
“He’s a good worker,” Mr. Bowles affirmed.
“Gosh, that’s great,” Lauren said.
This was all he heard. Mouth wide open, eyes staring, he shut his door and dropped to the floor and stretched out on it. He didn’t get tired of being there. In his fever he heard Lauren and Emmett go out to a movie and return at twelve. He heard a Hide-A-Bed being opened for Emmett in Mr. Bowles’s study, and then a fever dream of voices, music, footsteps and opening and closing doors that seemed to last all night and involve dozens of people.
The next morning, at the Soundwaves branch on Main, he was rummaging through the Thelonious Monk LPs on station business when he became aware that Lauren Bowles was standing in the next aisle. She had her back to him. She was wearing a man’s shirt and was faintly pushing her head forward to the drum-machine-driven beat of optimistic British pop on the store stereo. She dropped a pair of CDs in their longboxes among JAZZ ARTISTS —B—, and flipped through Coleman, Coltrane, Corea. Then she leaned into the B’s again. Twice she made a short fierce movement with her shoulder, as if out of his sight she were wringing the necks of small animals, and then already she was leaving, glancing at crates of new releases near the cash registers.
Outside, Louis watched her drop to one knee and retie a sneaker between parked cars. Quarry seldom lets a hunter come as close as he came to her then. He was twenty feet behind her when she unbuttoned the lowest button of her shirt and gave birth to the pair of stolen CDs, which fell neatly into her purse. She flipped the flap down over them and crossed the street through traffic.
It was the Saturday before Easter. Everything at Rice was closed. Louis returned to Dryden Street with his purchases and found MaryAnn making toffee, a big soup pot of it that filled the house with a caustic smell of butter and sugar. Up in his room he opened Volume II of Flaubert’s collected letters on his desk. He hadn’t read a word of them when, some fifteen minutes later, the door behind him opened and closed.
Lauren was standing with one hand lingering on the doorknob, the lowest button of her shirt still unbuttoned, her eyes sweeping the room with a planning kind of thoughtfulness. After a moment she sat down on his desk and, shifting laterally, lowered herself onto Flaubert. The book’s spine broke audibly. “It’s Mister Dean’s List,” she said. “That’s your name, isn’t it?” For a moment she monitored Louis closely for a reaction.
“Where’s Emmett?” he said.
She leaned back on outstretched arms and knocked a jar of pens over. “He’s in Bay City visiting his grandfather. He asked me if I wanted to go, which was like real appealing when they keep talking about how his grandfather’s as yellow as a carrot. He’s got some disease.”
“Jaundice.”
“Wow. You must know everything.”
Louis kept his eyes on hers and hers avoided his.
“See my ring?” She dangled her left hand in his face. “It cost three thousand dollars. It’s a three-quarter-carat diamond. Do you like it?”
“No.”
“You don’t like it? What’s wrong with it?”
“The ugly little prongs here, to begin with.”
“Oh.” She took her hand back and breezily inspected the ring from various unilluminating angles. She had small, even spaces between her teeth. “They are, kind of, aren’t they. You’re pretty observant, I guess.”
Forgetting about the ring, she twisted around to take a book off a shelf, her knees rising for balance. “What’s this book?” She opened a critical study so far that its front and back covers touched and a chunk of pages fell on Louis’s lap. “Oops. Sorry. Hey, it’s French! You read French? Can you say something to me in French?”