Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen
Beryl and asked about the radio scene in Boston. She had been at WSNE for about three months; it so happened that she was about to quit. The owner, she hastened to say, was great, but the person who managed the station was literally giving her an ulcer. She was happy to put in a good word for Louis, however, if he wanted. Wasn’t he sort of, like, generally fairly tolerant? Hadn’t he survived an entire year with those ghastly Bowleses?
The cause of Beryl’s peptic distress turned out to be a female in her late thirties named Libby Quinn. Libby had come aboard as a receptionist eighteen years earlier, when the station was still located in Burlington, and although she’d never even finished high school she had made herself indispensable to WSNE. She did all the programming and much of the administration, wrote and recorded spots for local non-agency advertisers, and, with Alec Bressler, lined up guests for the talk shows. She had rosy Irish cheeks and dark blond hair that she wore in a braid or a bun. She favored the English Country look—heather-colored skirts and car digans, knee socks, lace-up shoes—and was seldom seen without a mug of herbal tea. She seemed utterly innocuous to Louis.
At the beginning of his second week of work, Libby appeared at the door of his cubicle and beckoned to him with a single index finger. “Come to my office?”
He followed her up the corridor. In her office there were multiple photos of two blondes in their late teens; they were awfully old to be her daughters, but they looked just like her.
She handed Louis a dog-eared stack of printouts. “There’s an uncollected ninety-five thousand here. It’s only people who don’t do business with us anymore. How would you feel about trying to collect some of it?”
“Love to.”
“I’d do it myself, but it’s really more of a man’s job.”
“Oh.”
“It’s easy. You just call them up and say, ‘You owe us money, pay it.’ Will you do that for me?”
He took the printouts, and Libby smiled. “Thanks, Louis. One other thing, if you don’t mind—I’d like this to be our secret. Just you and me. All right?”
In radio, especially in a tough market like Boston, there is no such thing as an exciting or rewarding entrylevel job. Even at a place like WSNE, Louis knew he’d have to do shit work for several years before he could hope to get any meaningful air time, and so he was grateful to Libby for asking him to do collections. The work was more fun by far than anything he’d done at KILT in Houston. It allowed him to be as obnoxious as he dared. He devoted every spare minute to it.
A few days after Easter, Alec Bressler dropped into his cubicle while he was generating threatening letters on his printer. The station owner frowned at the output through his generic eyeglasses. “What’s this?”
“Delinquent accounts,” Louis said.
Alec’s curiosity deepened into concern. “You’re trying to collect?”
“Trying, yes.”
“You’re not put-ting—pressure on them?”
“Actually, yes, I am.”
“Oh, don’t do that.”
“Libby’s orders.”
“You mustn’t do that.”
“I tried to keep it from you.”
Just then Libby herself passed by the cubicle. Alec arrested her. “Louis tells me he’s doing collections using pressure. I thought we didn’t do this.”
Libby lowered her chin contritely. “I’m sorry, Alec.”
“I thought we didn’t do this. Really, am I wrong?”
“No, of course, you’re right.” She gave Louis a conspirator’s wink. “We’ll have to stop.”
“If I can interject something,” Louis said. “It’s netted us like forty-five hundred dollars in the last ten days.”
“You men discuss it,” Libby said. “I’m on the air in ninety seconds.”
“What’s this? Where’s Bud?”
“Bud has a little problem with his paycheck, Alec, if you’ll excuse me.”
“A little problem? What? What?” Alec followed her into the hall. “What problem? What problem?” The studio door at the far end of the corridor was heard closing. Alec pushed all his fingers into his hair, rapidly achieving frenzy. “I pay this woman! And she won’t tell me what problem!”
He continued to stare down the empty corridor. Louis watched him locate and make sooty and finally ignite a Benson & Hedges entirely by feel. “So, yes,” he went on, capturing wayward pennants of smoke with deft, sharp inhalations, “you don’t do this with the pressure anymore. Why burn the bridges, eh? Put things away. Did you grade contest entries? Inez has hundreds. Think of it— hundreds!”
In Somerville, meanwhile, it was springtime. In one sunny day, while no one was looking, fully grown grass had appeared all over the seven hills, shaggy patches of it suddenly occupying every lawn and traffic island. It was like some garish chlorophyll-colored trash that had been dumped on top of the town’s more indigenous ground cover, which, around the time the last snow melted, reached its peak of richness and variety. As always, there were black leaves, cigarette butts, and dog logs. But on any blocklong stretch of parking strip even the casual hiker could also expect to spot fabric-softener squares; snow-emergency cinders; Christmas pine needles and tinsel; solo mittens; bluish glass dice from vandalized car windows; compacted flyers from Johnny’s Foodmaster and the Assembly Square Mall; marvelously large wads of gum; non-returnable wine-cooler and premixed-cocktail bottles; sheets of gray ruled paper on which were copied crudely in pencil simple sentences containing backwards P’s and h’s; rotten Kleenexes resembling cottage cheese; rubber blades and choked filters; exhausted lighters; foody leakages from trash bags torn in transfer to garbage trucks, orange peels and tuna cans and ketchup-bottle lids set down on the ground by dwindling snowbanks; and maybe, if the hiker was lucky, some of Somerville’s more singular specimens as well, such as the magnificent wall unit that for many months had been lying face down on an island in the Alewife Brook Parkway, or the supply of Monopoly money that was spreading up side streets from its release point on College Avenue—yellow tens, blue fifties. This was the kind of congenial and ever-changing profusion of objects which Nature, “the great litterer,” had once again trashed up with stunted weeds and plastickylooking daffodils and finally, in a moment when people’s backs were turned, a thousand cells of alien green grass. No foreign power could have been more sly and zealous than spring in its overnight infiltration of the city. The new plants stood out with a brazenness akin to that of the agent who, when his life is at stake, acts even more native than his native interrogators.
When Louis got home he found his neighbor John Mullins swabbing his car with a large brown bath sponge. The car never seemed to get driven past the end of the driveway, where Mullins washed it. It also never seemed dirty. Fleshy tulips now filled the bed below the porch of the triple-decker the old man lived in; their heavy purple and yellow heads leaned aside at various casual angles, as if specifically avoiding Louis’s eyes.
“Hey there, Louie boy,” Mullins said, leaving the sponge on the windshield and intercepting him. “How are things? You likin’ it here? You likin’ Somerville? What do you think of this weather? I don’t think it’s gonna last. I just listened to the weather, always listen at 5:35. Tell me something. You feel the earthquake there on Sunday?”
Louis had been shaking his head to this question for several days.
“Golly it scared me. You think we’re gonna get any more of these? I hope to God we don’t. I’ve got a little heart condition—a little heart condition. Little heart condition.” Mullins patted himself rapidly on the breast, calling Louis’s attention to the heart in there. “I’m not supposed to get scared like that.” He laughed hollowly, real fear in his eyes. “I tried to get outside and would you believe