Strong Motion (20 page)

“I was hardly listening.”

“Because that’s definitely not what they’re saying in the paper. In the paper they’re talking about zero gallons.”

“My sister wants to marry this guy.”

“He’s the boyfriend?” Another gust rocked the car. “I didn’t realize.”

“For richer and for poorer.”

“But I actually kind of liked him. He wouldn’t be my first choice as a brother-in-law, but he’s not stupid. Just a type.”

Louis leaned over the hand brake and kissed her.

She let him walk right into the warm vestibule of her mouth. It might have been a minute’s journey from the enamel rill between her front teeth to either of the elastic dead ends to which her lips came; an hour’s journey down her throat. He took her hair in his fists, pressing her head into the seatback with his lips.

Headlights turned up the street. She pulled away, flattening her offended hair with one hand. “I was just about to say I can’t stand sitting around in cars.”

Inside the house they were greeted by a baying from the large lungs of several dogs in the ground-floor apartment. “Dobermans,” Renée said. The air was hot and canine. It was fresher on the second-floor landing, and when she stopped to take a key down from a ledge, Louis kissed her again, backing her into a wall covered with paper that smelled like a used-book store. The baying downstairs subsided into frustrated gnashings, and she tried to pull away even as her mouth kept pressing into his. Suddenly a baby started crying, it seemed like right behind the door beside them. They went up a set of steeper stairs to her apartment.

It was a bare, clean place. There was nothing on the kitchen counter but a radio/cassette player, nothing in the dish rack but a plate, a glass, a knife, and a fork. That the light was warm and the four chairs around the table looked comfortable somehow made the kitchen all the more unwelcoming. It was like the kitchen of the kind of man who was careful to wash the dinner dishes and wipe the counters before he went into the bedroom and put a bullet in his brain.

A large room opposite the bathroom contained a bed and a desk. Another large room contained an armchair and bookshelves and many square yards of blond floorboards. When Renée came out of the bathroom she stood with her back to the woodwork between the doors to these two rooms and faced the kitchen, her hands clasped behind her. “Do you want something to eat, or drink?”

“Nice place,” Louis said simultaneously.

“I used to share it with a friend.”

She didn’t move, didn’t lean aside even a little bit, as he went into the bedroom. He put his feet down as quietly as he could. Everything about the place made him feel intrusive, as though even loud footsteps might disturb things. (When police detectives arrive at the scene of a crime, aren’t there often some respectful, meditative moments before attention is turned to the body on the floor?) The desk lamp had been left burning over a stack of 11 x 17 fanfold computer paper, on the top sheet of which a program in Fortran was being revised in black ink. (Until the moment of the crime, yes, work had been in progress, it had been an ordinary evening . . . ) Above the desk hung a bathymetric map of the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It was spattered with thousands of dots in different colors, many grouped in dense elongated swarms like army-ant columns; beneath them, barbed line-segments were applied like war paint to the ocean. Continuing to tread carefully, as he had when he first entered Rita Kernaghan’s living room, Louis returned to the kitchen. Renée was still standing with her hands behind her back. She might have been a missionary at a stake, with her hands tied, unable to cover her nakedness, unable to cross herself or shield her face from the flames that would soon be leaping up, but like that missionary she stared straight ahead. She did flinch discemibly when Louis touched her shoulders (even the greatest saints must have flinched when the first flames licked their skin), and despite the way she’d kissed him on the landing he was surprised by her unhidden look of need.

The wind whistled on the dormers in the bedroom. It rose without falling, consuming more and more of the roof, finding further timbers in the house to bend and further panes to rattle, further expanses of wall to lean on. It seemed to be doing the work for Louis as he parted and lifted the two sides of Renée’s cardigan, which slid easily off her shoulders and, falling to the floor, unbound her hands. She put her wrists around his neck.

It was still dark when he woke up.
DR. RENEE SEITCHEK
, whose internal anatomy he imagined had been rearranged in the escalating violence of their union, and whose hands had proved no less articulate than the rest of her in showing his own hands how best to bring her the releases he couldn’t deliver otherwise (he liked and admired the silent and perspiring and possessed way she came), now lay next to him and slept so heavily that she looked like she’d been struck unconscious by a blow to the head. There were sparse flocks of freckles on her shoulders. Through a crack between a shade and a window frame Louis could see tree boughs, lit by streetlight from below and blanketed with blackness, rocking in the wind. This wind tonight, she’d told him during a lull, had reminded her of an earthquake she’d seen in the mountains once. She’d been hiking in the Sierra Nevada with a high-school group. “And all of a sudden there was something happening in the country to the east. We could see for forty or fifty miles, and what it was like was when you’re by a perfectly calm lake, and you can see the wind coming the way you could hear it on the street tonight, the way the leading edge roughs up the water when it comes. That’s exactly what this event was like. It was this
thing
coming across the mountains, this visible rolling wave, and then suddenly we were in it. We definitely knew we were in it because there were little rockslides and the ground shook. But it wasn’t like the other events I’ve felt, because there was this visual connection.” She had actually seen the wave they were feeling. It hadn’t come out of nowhere. It had looked like nothing on God’s earth. And he wanted then, again, to
take possess have take possess possess
the body in which this memory resided.

The alarm clock showed twenty to four. He slipped out of bed and went to the bathroom. When he returned, Renée was kneeling in the center of the bed. He said, “Hi,” and she backed towards the bottom of the bed, dragging the sheet along with her. She looked terrified.

“What’s wrong?”

She backed off the bed and fled to the far corner of the room, one hand raised vaguely to ward him off. Standing up showed the complexity of her nakedness, how the legs had to connect with the torso, how peculiarly narrow the female waist, how much more delicate the shoulders than the hips, how detached and attention-demanding a woman’s breasts. “I don’t have it,” she said to him in a loud voice that wasn’t bright or merry.

He hardly noticed the erection he was rapidly and in full view of her reacquiring. “You’re dreaming,” he said.

“Leave me ALONE. Leave me ALONE.”

“Sh-sh-sh.” He sat down on the bed, showing her his empty palms. This seemed to scare her all the more. Without taking her eyes off him, she edged along the wall. Then she made a break for the door but curved towards him as she ran, her hands outstretched as if she were falling, and he saw how just before she reached him she seemed to crash through a sheet of glass or some similar planar discontinuity. She took hold of his shoulders and said, “Oh, I was having such a bad dream.”

The house swayed in the wind. She sat on his thighs and let herself be held. Strong, low-pH fumes rose from between them. Experimentally, he tried to put his penis back inside her.

She clutched his shoulders, pain cutting streaks into her face. “This is a little much.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re not sore?”

“What do you think?”

“Oh, well, in that case.” She used her whole weight to impale herself on him. His nerves were screaming
harmful! harmful!
She rolled her hips angrily. “Hurt?”

“Yes!”

After a while the pain diffused into a large zone of ache, a pool of melted sulfur with little blue flames of pleasure flickering across the surface. Then the flames became scarcer and then disappeared altogether, and the sulfur began to crystallize into a column of hard, dry, sharp chunks. He might have been rubbing against broken bone. Renée’s eyes and cheeks were wet, but she didn’t make any sound.

When they stopped he was bleeding enough to leave marks on the sheets. Renée sat on the edge of the bed and rocked with her knees pressed together. He just assumed he wouldn’t die because of this, a few years down the line.

5

H
E WENT TO THE HOUSE
with the pyramid on top. The front lawn was a metallic green now and the grass lay down and shivered as if under a running tide, some large-scale flow of invisible matter related to the brilliant wrongness of the light, which was messing up the colors, throwing some of the black of the tree trunks into the blue heaven and some of the white of the clouds into the trees. For the person who hasn’t slept, what makes the new day strange and fills it with foreboding is that the setting sun is in the east and not setting; all day the light is like the light in dreams, which comes from no direction.

“Louis, my God,” Melanie said, clutching the lapels of her dressing gown and peering out over a new brass door chain. “It’s nine in the morning, I’m not even up. I have to catch a plane.”

“Unchain the door?”

“You didn’t call! If you’d come two hours later—”

“Unchain the door?”

An alarm-system number pad had been installed in the entryway. In the living and dining rooms the broken plaster had been repaired, and Rita Kernaghan’s books and decorative objects, including the portrait of Melanie’s father, had given way to a more standard opulence, suitable for a luxury hotel suite—Japanese lithographs, sheer curtains, gold brocade.

“I meant to call you,” Melanie said. “I just flew in on Thursday and there’s been so much to do.”

“I bet,” Louis said. He walked into the living room and stepped onto a silk-upholstered sofa and stamped from one end to the other, listening to the twangs of its internal injuries.

“Louis! For God’s sake!”

He crossed to the coffee table. In good soccer style, using his instep, he penalty-kicked a cut-glass bowl into the fireplace. “I understand you’re handing out money to your children,” he said, stepping back onto the sofa. “I’m here for my share.”

“Get down off the sofa. That is not your sofa.”

“You think I’d do this to a sofa that was mine?”

“I told you. I’m not going to talk about money. If you want to talk about something else, all right, but—”

“Two million.”

“But not money. I never expected I would have to—”

“Two million.”

Melanie placed her hand on the side of her head she got her headaches on.

“How much did you give Eileen?”

“Nothing, Louis. I gave her nothing.”

“So where’d she get the condo?”

“It’s a matter of a loan.”

“Oh, I see. How about you
lend
me two million?”

Melanie’s hand slid forward to cover her face, two fingertips pressing on her eyelids.

“I’ll never bother you again, Mom. Promise. Two million and we’re quits. I’d say that sounds like quite a deal. You know, maybe I’ll even pay you back.”

“I can no longer consider this a joke.”

“Who’s joking? I need the money. There’s this radio station I have to buy. Two million’s the figure I had in mind, but I could do a fair amount of good with two hundred thousand. That would stabilize things till you come through with the rest.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about Philip Stites. You’ve heard of him, the antiabortion guy. I want to make him a present of two hundred thousand dollars. Just to aid his cause, you know. Ever since we all got so rich I’ve become a very Christian person, Mom, you’re not aware of this, of course, because you never call me or—”

“And you never call me!”

“Oh, and Eileen does, and that’s why she gets rewarded with cash gifts?” Louis stepped up onto the shoulders of the sofa and tipped it over backwards, alighting just before the thud. “Why is it that everybody but you can see she only calls you to get money out of you? You think she cares about you? She hates you till you give her money and then she rewards you by not hating you until she needs some more. Haven’t you ever noticed this? It’s called being spoiled.”

His mother turned away as if the conversation didn’t interest her. The sudden sharp tremor that made her whole body jerk and brought tears to her face seemed to take even her by surprise. She made a coughing, gulping noise. Louis might have had more sympathy if he hadn’t felt that her tears and Eileen’s tears always came at his expense, and if he hadn’t suspected that in his absence they were basically happy.

“I’m trying to do you a real favor here,” he said. “I mean, just think. You give me two million, and for the rest of your life you can consider me a selfish jerk. You’ll never have to feel guilty again. No more tears, no more evasions. Plus you’ll still have your twenty million to play games with Eileen with.”