Strong Motion. Jonathan Franzen
RENEE SEITCHEK blinked in the bright lights, her face still filling the screen, while the interviewer asked a final question: “If it’s not OK for the state to interfere in a woman’s decision about abortion, why is it OK to interfere with the church members’ decision to live in the Central Avenue apartment block?”
“Because Philip Stites made that decision for them.”
DR. RENEE SEITCHEK’S reply had apparently continued from here, but the sound was cut off as the reporter brought viewers back to Central Avenue in Chelsea, where a female member of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ was leaving a bleak yellow-brick apart ment complex that had sheets of weather-bleached plywood on its windows.
“The reason I live in this yere building,” the woman said. “Is that I trust in God more than I trust in scientists and engineers. This yere’s a building with NO PROTECTION. The unborn have NO PROTECTION. But if God will protect me here, I’ve got the power to protect the unborn.”
“One scientist I spoke to,” the reporter said, “claimed it was Reverend Stites’s persuasion that made you sign the waiver, rather than your own free will.”
The woman held up a placard reading THANKS MOM I ♥ LIFE. “The will that moves me,” she told the camera, “is the same will as moves the Reverend Stites, and that is the will of God.”
“How does it feel to go to bed at night knowing that even a small earthquake could send all these bricks down on top of you?”
“There’s no man in this world that wakes up in the morning but by the grace of our Lord.”
The television’s response to this avowal was a perfume ad. Libby Quinn shifted on the sofa, looking around the room selfconsciously, as if she thought Louis and Alec expected her to justify herself. She stood up suddenly. “I’m a mother, Louis. You know I have two girls in high school. And what that little Harvard girl doesn’t understand is that to a lot of these teenagers, an abortion’s like a trip to the dentist. I know for a fact that there’s no one out there telling kids that what they’re flushing into Boston Harbor is tiny babies.”
“Ah, yeah,” Louis said. “Although these prolifers aren’t just trying to educate some teenagers.”
“These prolifers,” Libby said pointedly, “think it’s important to take responsibility for your sexual behavior.”
“What do you sink, Louis?” Alec said. Libby might have been a controversial film they’d been watching. “You agree with her? Take your time! Your future at this station may be at stake.”
“Let me ask you this, Louis,” Libby said. “Why do you think the people who hate economic greed always want to be excusing sexual greed? Why do you think that is?”
Alec turned expectantly to Louis, sucking his lozenge of amusement, his eyebrows raised.
“Economic greed hurts other people,” Louis said.
Alec’s eyes followed the ball back into Libby’s court.
“Right,” she said with an unhappy smile. “Sexual greed doesn’t hurt anybody. Unless you happen to consider a fetus a victim.”
It was an exit line; she left the room.
“And what does Vanna have to say to that?” Alec asked, changing channels. “No, no, Vanna stands higher than such concerns.”
Louis was trembling. He didn’t understand what he’d done to make Libby turn against him.
Alec leaned back comfortably on the sofa to soak up Wheel-of-Fortune rays. “Libby,” he said, “is an unhappy person. You forgive her, eh? She raised two girls without a husband. The man was no good. He came back and married her when the older girl was two, then left again. Is a hard life for her, Louis. She made a mistake twice. One time, OK, but twice, is hard to live with.”
“She’s selling you out,” Louis said.
Alec shrugged. “I owe her back pay, she’s ambitious. She should have gone to college, but she had her babies. Is hard for her to see girls have abortions now. You forgive her.”
Louis shook his head. He went outside into the twilit parking lot. “Hey, Libby,” he said. She was getting in her car. “Libby!” he said again, but she had closed the door. He watched her drive away.
It may be that to understand is to forgive; but Louis was tired of understanding. Almost everyone he knew seemed to have good reasons for not being kind and polite to him, and he could see these reasons, and yet it didn’t seem fair that it was always him who had to understand and forgive and never them. It seemed like the world was set up so that the unhappy people who did rotten things—the abused child who became a child abuser, the injured Libby who injured Louis and Alec—could always be forgiven because they couldn’t help what they did, while the unhappy people who still refused to do rotten things got more and more hurt by the other people’s rottenness, until they’d been hurt so many times that they too stopped caring what they did to other people, and there was no way out.
“Why aren’t you speaking to me?” he’d asked MaryAnn Bowles, a week after the previous Easter. She was making pickled beets in a haze of vinegar.
“I’m surprised you have to ask that,” she said.
“Oh, I’ve got a theory. But I wanted to check.”
She stuck a fork into a purple chunk of beet. “Well, Louis,” she said. “I’m not blaming you. But I guess you must know that I am very, very hurt by what’s happened. I am very, very, very hurt.” The sound of her own words made her throat tighten and her face crumple up. “AII I can say is this has nothing to do with you. She was only trying to hurt me. And I guess you can see”—her words continued to affect her violently—”that she succeeded very well indeed.”
Louis despised the woman. He loathed her powdered face, her heavy breasts, her naked misery. And the more he loathed her, the more he had the feeling—a caffeinated, weightless feeling—that Lauren really had seduced him on the floor of his bedroom. He had no desire to set the record straight. He became a bad son, subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and party food, crashing in people’s off-campus apartments and returning to Dryden Street only when he needed to sleep twelve hours. The Bowleses raised no objections; they didn’t like him anymore.
After his final exams he moved into a two-room apartment in a poor black neighborhood off Holman Street and started work at KILT-FM, doing the board during drive hours and otherwise punching keys. On the day after Commencement he returned to Dryden Street one final time, to collect his books. It was a trip he’d delayed in the hope of running into Lauren, and he was rewarded by the sight of a white VW Beetle in the driveway, with a U of Texas parking sticker on the windshield.
He went into the silent, airconditioned, sun-filled house. The door to the laundry room was ajar, MaryAnn probably ironing underwear in there. Upstairs he almost passed Lauren’s bedroom by, it seemed so much the way he’d seen it last. But today there was an extra element, a woman in a white sundress sitting crosslegged on the bed and reading. She looked up from her book, squinting because the sun was in her eyes. He braced himself for a blast of mockery, but as soon as Lauren recognized him she dropped her head again, biting her lip and scowling at the book.
“Yeah, surprise surprise,” he said.
The book on her lap was a Bible. She hunched over it determinedly and pretended to read it, evidently hoping he would leave. He remained in the doorway.
“I didn’t think you were still living here,” she murmured.
“On my way out right now.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. Lucky you.”
Someone seemed to have pulled the plug on the electrified woman he’d met two months ago. Without makeup and without malice her face looked like an empty page. Her hair was pinned up with a barrette, in the style of a ten-year-old groomed for church. She said, “Is there something you want?”
He