Strong Motion (32 page)

“This morning. About nine, nine-thirty. I was readin’ the paper. I told her you’re not around much in the day.”

“What did she look like?”

“Big girl. Said she was looking for you.”

“Fat girl with glasses?”

“No, no. Pretty girl. She had a suitcase.”

Louis went inside. Almost immediately he came back out and looked at the car, trying to remember what he had to do. He touched the car once, on the hood, and went inside directly to his room and walked in circles. Renée packed plangently in the kitchen, flatware hitting skillet, the carton grunting as its flaps were folded under one another. He was supposed to pick things up and carry them to the car. However, everything he looked at with a view to carrying it seemed to be the wrong thing to carry at that particular moment. He kept walking around the room. He was like the person whose house is on fire who can’t decide what possession is most precious and so can rescue nothing. The only thing he knew for sure he wanted was to murder the soprano voice, which had begun to hold long, high notes and exaggerate the tremolo. But this voice, its incessancy, now seemed to him a fundamental property of the world that he was powerless to alter. He stood by his window facing the soprano where she sang behind her opaque screens. He was not unhappy or happy. The wave front advanced across the mountains, changing the landscape as it came, and then he was in it, he was in it. That was all.

Sooner than he’d expected, he heard voices in the front of the apartment. Female voices. Footsteps. Renée appeared, the carton in her arms. She spoke like a fugitive’s imperfectly deceived mother, when the police are at the door.

“There’s somebody here to see you.”

She stepped aside, opening the way past her, pointedly recusing herself from the difficulty. When instead of leaving he looked at her and tried to say something, she was compelled to add: “It’s your friend Lauren.”

“Oh,” he said. “Oh.”

He felt her eyes on him as he walked up the hall, felt tie whole weight of her possession of him, and so it was not entirely a surprise that the girl standing just inside the front door, by a small straw-colored suitcase with a black leather jacket draped over it, should strike him as a vision of liberation. Lauren was tan and fair-haired and taller than he remembered her. One glance made clear how busily his mind had been training itself to appreciate Renée—to see those parts of her that were cute and fresh and to overlook the larger fact, which was that she was thirty years old and not beautiful. He could recognize a bill of large denomination without reading the numbers on it, and he could recognize Lauren’s beauty without referring to her long, muscled twenty-two-year-old’s legs, her golden twenty-two-year-old’s skin, her silky twenty-two-year-old’s hair, now grown out nearly to her shoulders. She was wearing the same plaid ruffled miniskirt she’d had on the first time he saw her, similar black shoes and ankle socks, and a white tank top damp with sweat between her breasts.

The soprano, breaking off, had left an unwelcome stillness.

“Hi Louis,” Lauren said in a flat, unsteady voice, not looking at him.

“Hi, uh. What’s up?”

“Nothing. I just came to see you.”

“Where’s Emmett?”

She gave no sign of having heard him.

“Not here, obviously,” Louis said.

She bit her lips, still not looking at him.

“Where is he, Lauren?”

She raised her chin and said, “We’re not together anymore."

“Oh, I see. You left him. He left you. You’re separated. You’re divorced.”

These words caused her great discomfort. She looked at her shoes, inspecting either side of one of them. “I don’t know. Can I come in?”

“Maybe not.”

“I made a terrible mistake, Louis, a
terrible mistake
. Can I come in?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know if I’m too late. If I’m too late I won’t come in. Can I come in?”

Renée was now standing in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen. She and Lauren couldn’t see each other, but Louis could see them both.

“That was your girlfriend, wasn’t it,” Lauren said.

He turned to Renée as if he had to check about this. Renée’s face made it clear that she thought he ought to have been rid of the visitor by now. She gestured impatiently: Well? What are you waiting for! But as he continued not to speak, her impatience gave way to alarm, and then the alarm gave way to pain, and finally the pain gave way to an overwhelming disbelief, each of these stages visible and distinct.

“Oh, is she right there?” Lauren said with mock stupidity.

You can hurt me. A little. You can bite me, or
—

He was aware of making a mistake, but he had no control. He was fascinated by the pain in Renée’s face. He was finally seeing her. She was finally naked, and he kept looking at her, thinking
I am a rapist too. I am a sadist too
as he hurt her for his pleasure, doing it with his silence and understanding now what people meant when they talked about how a penis can rule a man, because that was exactly how it felt. But she was a person, just a decent person, and not interested in taking this. With terrible dignity she walked through the dining room and living room. She stepped around Lauren, who leaned aside as if avoiding a stranger on the sidewalk. Renée knocked the leather jacket off the suitcase, barely managing not to trip on it as she hurried out the door.

“Oh boy,” Louis murmured, to the empty space she left behind. He couldn’t believe all the blood on his hands.

Lauren closed the door and hung her jacket on the knob. “She was your girlfriend, wasn’t she. You can tell me.”

“Oh boy,” he murmured again. He hadn’t quite been sober enough to realize that what he was doing to Renée was the worst thing anyone could do to her. But he knew her and he knew this was the worst thing. It was the very worst thing. And though he hadn’t “realized” this, he’d known it perfectly well.

“I figured you might have one,” Lauren said, slouching almost horizontal on the beige sofa. “It was a risk I was taking. But I knew I could always turn around and go right back.”

The fact that she would have to walk to her apartment now. The pride with which she’d walk the two and a half miles. And the dogs wouldn’t howl, and she’d take the stairs two at a time in her sneakers and jeans and T-shirt, and lock the door behind her, and would she cry? Only once had he seen her cry, and that was from physical pain, and as soon as she’d locked the door, in his mind’s eye, it became difficult to see her.

“You want me to go?” Lauren said. “She’ll forgive you if you explain things. Just tell her the truth and she’ll forgive you.” She spread her fingers and studied her nails. “You know, because I don’t want to butt in, if she’s your girlfriend. She is your girlfriend, isn’t she. I could tell by the way she looked at me. She’s your girlfriend.”

“Yeah.”

“So do you love her?” Lauren swung her head nervously, not wanting to hear the answer. “I can leave right now.”

“No! No. Just . . . let me lock my car.”

Renée wasn’t waiting by the car or anywhere close to it. He looked at the empty air above the sidewalk down which she necessarily had walked, since she was no longer in sight. Logic insisted that she’d traversed this distance even if no one had seen her do it. It further insisted that at this very moment she was somewhere between here and her apartment, not on just any block but on some particular block, walking forward, visible to all. It insisted that ail observer in a balloon could have followed every step she took between leaving here and arriving on Pleasant Avenue and climbing the four crumbling concrete stairs to the door of her house and disappearing inside it.

Louis thought: I hate her.

As soon as he was inside again, Lauren stood up, stretched her arms luxuriantly, and smiled as if it were morning and she’d slept divinely and she knew that he, of all people, would be happy to know this. Freed of the burden of seeing her through Renée’s eyes, he was now properly amazed to have in Toby’s beige apartment this pretty and complicated girl he’d loved so much. She came to him and put her face against his, bending back for a moment to snatch his glasses off. Not kissing him, but with her eyes staring into his with the astonishment and goofy emptiness that eyes take on at point-blank range, and with her nose pressed against his and her words making his lips vibrate, she said, “I am in love with you, I am in love with you, Louis, I’ve been thinking about you every minute of the day, I am in
love
with you, I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.”

She caught her breath, her pupils and milky gray-green irises still centered in his vision. She kissed him, placed his hands on various parts of herself, curled up her own hands and pressed her knuckles on his chest. She twisted her head back and forth beneath his mouth, as if he were a shower she was taking. Her perfume was so integrated with her sweaty face-smell that his nose couldn’t find the border between them, it was all one nice Laureny smell.

“I promise you,” she said. “I’ll do
anything
for you. I’ll stay, I’ll go away, I’ll stay with Emmett, I’ll leave Emmett, I’ll marry you, I’ll have babies for you, I’ll work for you, I’ll marry you, I’ll live with you without being married to you. I’ll do anything. I’ll stay for as long as you want me to and I’ll leave whenever you say, you can own me, you can throw me away or keep me, you can do anything but sell me, anything, anything, anything.”

He held her, remembering her specific dimensions and how her back had felt when she’d cried in his kitchen in Houston and he’d put his arms around her.

“Oh Louis,” she said, crying and smiling. “You were so good to me, and I was so bad to you. But I’m going to make it up to you. If you let me, I’ll make it up to you.”

“Although of course you’re married now.”

“Oh, that.” A familiar guilty, sullen look crossed her face. “You know, I’m still trying to be a good person. I’m trying to love God and be a Christian, and I’m here in Boston seeing you. Marriage is a holy sacrament and I’m here seeing you. It’s like I’m the same old person, right? Everything I touch turns into garbage. And the thing is you’re the only person I’ve ever met who thinks I’m worth something. The only person. Remember when I told you I’d never really loved anybody?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it was true. It was true. But it’s not true now, because as soon as I couldn’t see you anymore, I felt this thing. I guess I thought it was guilt or something, but I wanted to see you and talk to you, just to hear your voice a little, but I’d already told you we couldn’t, and I thought you must hate me, or that you wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

She sat on the sofa and frowned as if something didn’t quite make sense. “You see,” she said, “but there was Emmett too, and I felt sorry for him because he’d always been so incredibly patient with me, plus his family really seemed to like me. They gave me all this stuff when we got engaged, his grandmother gave me these beautiful pearls and his mother gave me this inlaid box that was like a hundred and fifty years old and had been in the family forever. But then I slept with some other guys and I also said I’d slept with you that time, right under his nose, and I gave him his ring back but I never even had the courage to give the other stuff back. And then when we started to get back together they were all still incredibly nice to me. They treated me like I’d been sick but now I was well, and I just felt so sorry for them, and really grateful too, and I thought, you know, This is the sacrifice I’m going to make. Because all I wanted was to be a
good person
. And it’s so clear that if you want to be good you have to sacrifice things. Plus I thought, they’re all so nice to me, it’s not even that much of a sacrifice. And my parents wanted me to get married because they think Emmett’s really great, which he is, I guess, except I don’t love him. I only love you.”

Louis closed his eyes.

“But so. We got married.” Lauren chewed her lip, her eyes on some remembered scene or ceremony. He thought she was going to go on, but apparently this was all she had to say.

“So then what. It turns out he’s a brute.”

She shook her head.

“Yes? No?”

Perched on the edge of the sofa, she stared sullenly at a silver radiator. She tossed her head, flipping her hair off her shoulders. Her face was tough and uncaring. “I was unfaithful to him.”

“Right. Of course.”

“Aren’t I a great person, Louis? Aren’t I just the greatest? But there was this guy I knew from before, and it was like I had so much more in common with him than with Emmett, you know, he’d fuck anybody, you know that kind of person, and I just didn’t care. I could tell I’d made too big a sacrifice, and it was like I needed to do some rotten stuff to make up, you know, and balance things. I don’t know. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess what I finally realized was that I wanted him to throw me out again because there was this thing in me. And what the thing was, was that I was in love with another person who used to be in love with me until I hurt him, and I loved him so much, and I missed him.” Tears came to her eyes again and she lowered her chin, as though trying to burp, still staring at the radiator. “I mean, Emmett’s real nice and all. But he treats me like this sick baby, and after a while I can’t stand it, so I go and do this horrible shit to him, but that just makes it all the more clear that I’m this sick baby, you know. And finally I just don’t believe anymore that somewhere inside him behind all his niceness he doesn’t really just hate my guts and wish I was dead.”

There was a long silence. Louis felt panic at the thought of Renée, who during these minutes when he hadn’t been thinking about her had doubtless made it all the way back to her apartment. Time was passing in her life even as it was standing still in his. She was getting all this time to think while he was not.

A question in a low voice crossed the room: “What’s her name?”

“Who? Oh. Renée.”

“That’s a pretty name.”

“She hates it.”

“She does?”

“So she says.”

“Is she in love with you?”