Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen
Concern became the woman better than amusement did. “I’m very sorry.”
“Yeah? I’m not. I hardly knew her.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“What you sorry about?” Howard asked her, coming up from the water.
The woman indicated Louis. “This … person’s grandmother was the one who died in the April 6 event.”
“Bad luck,” Howard said. “Usually, small earthquake like that, nobody dies.”
“Howard is an expert in shallow seismicity,” the woman said.
Howard squinted into the white sky as though wishing this description of him weren’t accurate. He had a hairstyle like half a coconut.
“What about you?” Louis asked the woman.
She looked away and didn’t answer. Howard slapped the dog on the muzzle and fled, taking crazy evasive action as the dog pursued him. The woman backed away from Louis, her smileyness assuming a leave-taking chill. When she saw that he was following her, a flicker of alarm crossed her face and she began to walk very briskly. He buried his hands in his pockets and matched her footsteps with his own. He had a faint predatory interest in this small-boned female, but mainly he wanted information. “There really was an earthquake?”
“Yes, uh-huh. There really was.”
“How’d you know it was up here?”
“Oh … instruments plus an educated guess.”
“So, and what’s causing these earthquakes?”
“Rupture of stressed rock along a fault a few miles underneath us.”
“Can you be a little more specific?”
She became smiley and shook her head. “No.”
“Are there going to be any more?”
She shrugged. “Definitely yes if you’re willing to wait a hundred years. Probably yes if you wait ten years. Probably not if you leave here in a week.”
“It doesn’t mean anything to get two earthquakes in a row like this?”
“Nope. Not particularly. In California it might mean something, but not here. I mean, of course it means something; but we don’t know what.”
She spoke as though she wanted to be precise for precision’s sake, not for his. “As a rule,” she said, “if you feel an earthquake around here, it’s happening on a fault that nobody even knew was there, at some peculiar depth, in the context of local stresses that are pretty much anybody’s guess. You have to be a fundamentalist minister to make predictions right now.”
The white hairs she had ran across the grain of the darker hair, lying on top of it rather than blending in. Her skin was cream-colored.
“How old are you?” Louis asked.
A pair of startled and unamused eyes came to rest on him. “I’m thirty, how old are you?”
“Twenty-three,” he said with a frown, as if a calculation had yielded an unexpected result. He asked her what her name was.
“Renée,” she said grimly. “Seitchek. What about you?”
In the parking lot Howard was stepping on the belly of a delighted Jackie and the bearded Caucasian was leaning against a ridiculous automobile, a low-slung late-seventies sedan with a bleached and peeling vinyl roof and rippling white flanks, gray patches of reconstruction, and no hubcaps. It was an AMC Matador. The bearded Caucasian had a long face and red lips. The lenses of his glasses were shaped like TV screens, and the cuffs of his jeans were tucked into the tops of brown work boots. Simply because she had stopped by his side, the half-full glass of Renée’s attractiveness became half-empty.
The Matador apparently belonged to Howard. “You need a ride someplace?” he said to Louis.
“Sure, maybe to my house.”
“If I were you,” the bearded Caucasian said, “I’d go back right away and make sure everything’s OK.”
Renée pointed at Louis. “That’s what he’s doing, Terry. He’s going right back.”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Terry said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
Renée looked away and made a face. Howard unlocked the car, and Louis and Terry got in the back seat, sinking ankle-deep into pizza cartons, Coke cans, and sportswear. The car radio came on with the engine. It was playing a Red Sox game.
“Where’s the dog?” Renée said.
Howard shrugged and put the car in reverse.
“Howard, wait, you’re going to run over it.”
They peered out their respective windows, trying to locate the dog. Louis took it upon himself to get out and look behind the car, the exhaust pipe of which was putting out blue-black clouds of the foulest smoke he’d ever smelled a car produce. It coated his res piratory tract like some poison sugar. He got back in the car, reporting no dog.
“This is Louis, incidentally,” Renée explained to Terry from the front seat. “Louis, this is Terry Snail and Howard Chun.”
“You’re all seismologists,” Louis said.
Terry shook his head. “Renée and Howard are the seismologists. They’re real high-powered.” There seemed to be a backhanded message here, Terry either not really believing the other two to be high-powered or else implying that to be high-powered was not the same as to be a worthwhile person. “Renée told me your grandmother died in last week’s earthquake,” he said. “That’s awful.”
“She was old.”
“Howard and Renée thought it was a nothing earthquake. They were saying it was no good. They wanted it to be bigger. That’s how seismologists think. I think it’s terrible about your grandmother.”
“Yeah, we don’t, Terry. We’re glad she died.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“What do you think he is saying, Howard?”
Howard turned the steering wheel obliviously, the car chugging and rumbling like a ferry boat. Louis looked out the back window, expecting to see the dog, but the lot the trash barrels guarded was completely empty now.
… Two balls and two strikes, the baseball announcer said.
“Two balls and one strike,” Renée said.
… The two-two pitch …
“The two-orae pitch,” Renée said.
Ball three, three and two. Roger had him oh and two and now he ‘s gone to a full count.
“One strike, airbrain. Three balls and one strike.”
… Scoreboard has it as three balls and one strike.
… Bob, the color man said, I think it is three and one.
Renée turned off the radio in disgust, and Terry remarked, ostensibly to Louis: “Nothing’s ever quite good enough for Renée.”
In the front seat Renée turned to Howard and made a gesture of utter bafflement.
“I wonder if they felt the earthquake at the ballpark,” Terry said.
“Yeah, I wonder,” Renée said. “They’re playing in Minnesota.”
“Left at the sign,” Louis told Howard. He hardly recognized the road they were on as the one down which he’d jogged.
“Where you wanna go next?” Howard asked generally. “Try Plum Island?”
“We