Strong Motion (28 page)

She loaded a camera on a tripod, turned out the lights, and began to shoot images while Terry’s few seconds with the laser printer stretched into an hour at a console just outside the picture window. Like any good chaperon, he pretended to mind his own business. Louis listened gamely to Renée’s explanations of the images, which were in rainbow colors and consisted mainly of reconstructed cross sections of a “slab” of rock 3,000 kilometers long and 650 kilometers wide and maybe 50 kilometers thick that was descending into the earth beneath a chain of islands running south from the Fijis through Tonga and the Kermadecs to a point not far above New Zealand. Earthquakes of all sizes and fault orientations accompanied the slab’s descent at every depth, and her thesis, she told Louis, had “advanced the study” of what happened to the brittle rock as it fell deeper and deeper into the molten, pressurized goo of the mantle, and what finally became of it at the depth of 670 kilometers, below which depth no earthquake had ever been recorded anywhere.

“Did you get to go to these islands?”

“I thought geophysics would get me outdoors, compared to math or something. Six years later I’ve hardly left this room.”

“You’re very lucky.”

“You think so.” She squeezed the cable release.

“You’ve got something you’re really good at, and it’s really interesting, and it doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“When you look at it that way. I guess. It has its frustrations.”

“I wish I could be an academic.”

“Who said you can’t?”

“I wish I could be
anything
.”

“Who said you can’t?”

“I hate this country. I hate the piggishness. Everywhere I look I see pigs.”

The glance Renée gave Louis in the blue light was tentative, or sad; distanced, like a mother’s. “They’re not all pigs,” she said. “Think about the people who make the subways run. Think about nurses. Mailmen. Lobbyists for good causes. They’re not all pigs.”

“But I can’t be those people. They just seem pitiful to me. They seem like dupes. Things are so fucked up it seems pathetic to try to be a useful citizen. Like if you’re going to play the game why not go all the way and sell out completely. But if you’re too disgusted to sell out, the only other options are to escape or try to tear things down. And I can’t even escape into academics, because I had to watch my father be a professor. Every marxist I know has a life where it’s think by day and drink by night. How could I choose a thing like that? I watch your fingers and your eyes and I feel so envious. You’re in this position where you’re really good at what you do. But I’m here and I can’t imagine moving.”

“We’re going to have to do something about you.”

“An island. An island.”

♦

Strong golden light lit the rooftops of Boston and formed a clear, free space in the air above them, an arena enclosed in the east by a shell of evening maritime mist and within which, to a distance of miles, were visible with perfect clarity billboards and green trees and overpasses on fire with the hour, and minor clouds the color and shape of moles. Jets above Nahant hung with no discernible movement in the blue-gray firmament to which their own engines bled contributions. On Lansdowne Street the faithful were entering the shadow of the temple, marching in a hush past carts selling icons and inspirational literature, past the worn façades of the shrines along the way, with their pre-game specials, their big dollar signs and tiny .
95
s.

Inside the gate Renée made a small green offering to the Jimmy Fund and its fight against cancer in children and showed no embarrassment when her more cynical companion reacted with a double take. A white charge of light was visible through the portal above them, and as they walked up the stairs the whiteness grew into a green field and thirty thousand fans, all with the skin tones of actors. Suited men were raking dirt. Royals and Red Sox in their dugouts. Keen smells of cigarettes and mustard. Henry Rudman’s seats, halfway up the third-base line and ten rows back, were more than adequate. On either side of them, Rudmanesque individuals exuding pleasure were folding back their scorecards. At seven-thirty, when everyone in Fenway stood, Renée’s eyes darted warily, and Louis, unable for once to change the channel, gritted his teeth and suffered through the hymn.

Few things bring happiness like good seats do. The Somervillians sat with their arms around each other’s shoulders, Renée as rapt and radiant as Louis had ever seen her. She’d brought her baseball glove and she kept her hand in it. Earlier in the day they’d played catch, and he’d learned that she could sting his fingers, right through leather, with her throws.

For five innings the score remained 1-1. There was a fatness, a fullness, a pleasing lack of abstractness to the motion of the ball as it sprang off a bat and hissed through the infield grass, found the center of the third baseman’s glove and received fresh kinetic energy and overtook the runner at first base. Louis later had no trouble understanding why he’d been so slow to see the other thing going on in front of him, the thing three rows down and a few seats to his left.

It was the hand he noticed first. A large, red male hand. With an intentness verging on urgency it was kneading a bare female shoulder, and the tanned neck above it, and the area behind her ear, and the ear itself, taking the skin and flesh in its fingers, taking for the purpose of having. Returning to the shoulder. Advancing in snake-like contractions under the narrow strap of her black dress, knuckles nudging the strap slowly out over the smooth globe of the shoulder and down the arm a little, palps of fingers indenting the skin there, palm molding and squeezing and possessing. Idly, with the hand she wasn’t using to hold her beer, the girl pulled the strap back onto her shoulder. She shook her dark mane back and twisted around in her seat, chancing to look straight at Louis. She was twenty and soft and tough, the kind of equine and unintrospective beauty that star outfielders go for. The hand gathered her in again, her hair and shoulders and attention, and dipped under the back of her dress and stayed there. Only then did Louis realize the hand belonged to a fifty-year-old man whose face he knew.

Renée was hunched forward, chewing a nail. The tag of her T-shirt stood up on her freckled neck. Apparently things were happening on the field, things good for the Royals and bad for the Sox. Louis followed the hand’s creeping progress under the black fabric and around under bimbo’s arm and saw the fingertips halt as close to her breast as propriety allowed, maybe even a centimeter closer. Bimbo whispered into her companion’s ear, mouth lingering, lips dragging across his cheek and meeting his. The obscene red hand squeezed her and released her. The plate umpire roared and punched a batter out. The pigs cheered. The organist noodled. Dimly Louis saw his graying girlfriend’s smile fade and her mouth open: “What’s wrong?

“Is something wrong?"

“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong?”

He made his hand a pistol, braced his wrist and took a bead on the man’s head. “CEO of Sweeting-Aldren. Right there.”

Conceivably despite the cheering these words had carried into Mr. Aldren’s ears; he swung around and briefly scanned all the seats less good than his own, allowing his pouchy and inflamed face and narrow eyes to make their impression on Renée.

“Slime ball,” Louis said, his arm recoiling from the shot he’d let fly.

“I guess I see what you mean.”

“Check out his pinky ring.”

His own hands were cold and white, all his blood boxed up in his heart and temples. Not even a Sox rally and a screaming eighth inning could pry his eyes from the spectacle of fondlement unfolding three rows down. Maybe to her credit, maybe from dim-wittedness, the girl seemed oblivious to the liberties the hand was taking and to the confident, possessing leer that Aldren trained alternately on her and on the players at their feet. She was following the game. And it was not implausible, Louis thought, that she would retain partial possession of herself later on as well, when Aldren took her off to some overfurnished room to penetrate her warm orifices in privacy, the same privacy in which even now, in all probability, his other effluents were being pumped into the yielding earth.

“He sure can’t keep his hands off her,” Renée observed.

“It’s more like
she
can’t keep his hands off her.”

“But listen.” She touched Louis’s face and made him look at her. “Don’t be so angry. I don’t like it when you’re angry.”

“I can’t help it.”

“I wish you’d try, if only for my sake.”

It was a declaration. Louis looked at the face of the person who had made it, the face with the pretty eyes and upturned nose and acne, and realized that this person had somehow become literally the only thing in the world he could even marginally count on.

“I love you,” he said unexpectedly, but meaning it. He didn’t see the fan behind him grin and wink at Renée and so didn’t entirely understand why she bounced back in her seat so abruptly and gave her attention to the game, which was ending.

6

T
HERE’S A SPECIFIC DAMP
and melancholy ancient smell that comes out in Boston after sunset, when the weather is cool and windless. Convection skims it off the ecologically disrupted water of the Mystic and the Charles and the lakes. The shuttered mills and mothballed plants in Waltham leak it. It’s the breath from the mouths of old tunnels, the spirit rising from piles of soot-dulled glass and the ballast of old railbeds, from all the silent places where cast iron has been rusting, concrete turning friable and rotten like inorganic Roquefort, petroleum distillates seeping back into the earth. In a city where there is no land that has not been changed, this is the smell that has come to be primordial, the smell of the nature that has taken nature’s place. Flowers still bloom, mown grass and falling leaves and fresh snow still alter the air periodically. But their smells are superimposed; sentimental; younger than those patiently outlasting emanations from the undersides of bridges and the rubble of a thousand embankments, the creosoted piers in oil-slicked waterways, the sheets of
Globe
and
Herald
wrapped around furry rocks in drainage creeks, and the inside of every blackened metal box still extant on deserted right-of-way, purpose and tokens of ownership effaced by weather, keyhole plugged by corrosion: the smell of infrastructure.

It was out in force when Louis and Renée came up Dartmouth Street from the Green Line stop at Copley Square. They walked in silence. The windy brake-lit night when they’d driven these streets searching for a parking place seemed buried in the past by much more than the month it actually had been. Again it was a weekend night, but this time the neighborhood was peaceful and sober and untrafficked, as though by some circadian coincidence all the residents had left town or were staying home with family. The twilight sky was like a painted blue backdrop hanging directly behind the row houses and their domestic yellow lights.

Eileen had been suspicious when Louis called. He’d found it necessary to fire a salvo of apologies at her, attributing his recent meanness to the fact that he’d lost his job. His remorse was just authentic enough to make her sentimental. She said it was “really tough luck” that he was unemployed. She expressed a vague interest in having him over sometime, to which non-invitation he insltantly responded: “Great! How about Friday night?” She said she’d check with Peter. He said he and Renée would plan to come around eight. She said, but she had to check with Peter. He said one thing he should mention was that Renée didn’t eat red meat or poultry. “Oh, that’s OK,” Eileen said, her voice brightening. “I’ll just make some vegetarian thing.”

Once the date had been set, the difficult task turned out to be persuading Renée to lie.

“A mathematician?” She’d gaped at him. “That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Yeah,” he said, “but what’s Peter going to think when a seismologist starts asking him about waste disposal? He’s going to think earthquakes. Do we want him thinking earthquakes? Mentioning to his dad that there’s this seismologist who’s curious about the company? You told
me
you were a math person, before you went into geophysics.”

“I’m not even going to discuss this with you.”

“Why? Why? All you have to do is say it. I mean assuming anyone’s polite enough to ask about your work, which I doubt they will. You just say, whatever, applied mathematics. Isn’t that what seismology is anyway?”

“It’s a lie. I blush when I lie.”

“Uh! You’re so exemplary I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, and I wonder if you appreciate that. I’m really beginning to wonder.”

“Lying is a social skill,” he said patiently. “Everybody has to lie. And this particular lie is like totally benign.”

“Misrepresenting myself, manipulating two people who’ve invited us to dinner in good faith, trying to get some time alone with one of them so I can extract information on the pretext of idle curiosity? This is a benign lie?”

It was in moments of frustration like this one that Louis thought of Lauren. He was convinced that Lauren would have lied for him. Lauren would have known what to do.