Читать книгу Strong Motion - Джонатан Франзен, Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Franzen - Страница 13

Louis’s job at WSNE had come to him by way of a Rice friend of his, a woman named Beryl Slidowsky who’d had a popular show on KTRU playing music like the Dead Kennedys and Jane’s Addiction. In February, at a point when the résumés and demo tapes he’d been sending to stations in a dozen northern cities had netted him all of two responses, both flatly negative, Louis called 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 it I fell down right on my bum. I couldn’t get up! God if I wasn’t scared. Girl upstairs here, the one that sings—nice girl. She told me she didn’t even feel it.”

“If there’s another earthquake,” Louis said, “you should try to stand in a doorway.”

The old man grimaced deafly. “What’s that?”

“I said you should try to stand in an interior doorway, or get under a table. They say it’s the safest place to be.”

“Oh yeah, huh. All right, Louie boy.” Mullins tottered back to his sponge. “Allll right, Louie boy.”

There was an envelope in the mailbox from the law firm of Arger, Kummer & Rudman. It contained two Red Sox tickets and Henry Rudman’s business card. In the rear window of Louis’s room a flowering white bush had appeared and was startlingly ablaze with sunlight, the ecliptic having swung around far to the north since the sun’s last appearance at dinnertime. He made a fried-egg sandwich and watched Hogan’s Heroes. He made another fried-egg sandwich and watched the network news. Midway through this informative half hour, NBC took a trip to Boston and discovered, to its astonishment, that a pair of earthquakes had occurred outside the city. Footage was run of broken plate glass and of supermarket aisles where solitary employees mopped up juice and jelly from fallen bottles. The correspondent related facts that were actually consistent with what Louis had been hearing hourly at WSNE: the Easter earthquake, which had measured 5.2 on the Richter scale and had been followed by several small aftershocks, had caused an estimated $12 million damage in three counties and resulted in fourteen injuries. (Almost all the injuries, as Louis had noted in the Globe, were due to panic, a surprising number of people having seriously bruised or cut themselves while fleeing their shaking homes, and one angler on a causeway north of Ipswich having put a fishhook in his eyelid during a dash to solid ground, and one motorist having steered his car into a ditch.) NBC viewers were then treated to a taste of history (“earthquakes are not unheard of in New England”) and an aerial glimpse of the nuclear power plant in Seabrook, followed by reassuring words from a power-company spokesman, an angry statement from a wine merchant (for him, apparently, nature was just another local with no appreciation of fine vintages), and finally a heartwarmingly inarticulate account of the earthquake from an Ipswich teenager, delivered with much incredulous head-shaking: “It started slow. Then bam!” The correspondent earned the right to say his own name in a low and earnest voice by first saying, in a low and earnest voice, that this earthquake “may not have been the last.” There was a brief, medium-distance shot of the NBC anchorman wearing a wry smirk (he was paid $34,000 a week not to yawn during these shots) before the scene changed to an old-time drugstore with an avuncular pharmacist behind the counter. America watched helplessly as the promotional drama unfolded. Not long ago, on late-night TV, Louis had seen this variety of commercial made fun of. The worried consumer returned to the drugstore and, instead of thanking the avuncular pharmacist for his advice, listed the grotesque disorders and hormonal imbalances induced by the recommended preparation, and ended up (a bit predictably maybe?) murdering him with a gun. This hard-hitting NBC satire had been followed by a real ad, for condoms.

After the news there was baseball, which Louis had been watching between nine and eighteen innings of per evening. While the Red Sox piled up an early 8—0 lead, he paged through the Globe, and for the second time in two weeks the paper gave him an uncanny feeling. It might have been a prank birthday issue with familiar names in it. The lead story in the business section was headlined Sweeting-Aldren Shares Take Another Beating. The woes suddenly besetting New England’s second-largest chemical producer were so numerous that a jump was required to page 67. The company’s latest quarterly report, released this morning, showed a sharp decline in profits, as sales remained flat and rising energy prices and a cyclical shortage of several key raw materials increased production costs. In light of this report, investors on Wall Street continued to react highly negatively to the news on Tuesday that Sweeting-Aldren’s facilities in Peabody might have suffered significant damage in Sunday’s earthquake; the company’s price per share had already fallen by 4.875 to 64.5—the largest two-day point drop in the company’s 48-year history, and the largest two-day percentage drop since August 11, 1972. Sweeting-Aldren press officer Ridgely Holbine emphatically denied that any production lines had been damaged in the earthquake, but speculation continued to be fueled by the discovery late Monday of large quantities of a greenish effluent in a culvert running through a residential development four hundred yards from a Sweeting-Aldren installation. Holbine said the company was investigating the “extremely remote possibility” of a connection between the facility and the effluent; according to one analyst, these remarks were immediately interpreted on Wall Street as a “virtual mea culpa.” Holbine stressed that Sweeting-Aldren was known to have “perhaps the best environmental record of any player in the industry.” He explained that its energy costs were high because of its commitment to “recycling, not dumping, toxic waste,” and noted that as recently as January, Forbes magazine had cited Sweeting-Aldren’s “established track record as the most profitable chem concern in America.” Nevertheless, the price of a share of the company’s stock had yesterday fallen by more than a point in the last thirty minutes of trading on the NYSE. The fear of further damaging earthquake activity north of Boston, and no less important, the specter of lawsuits raised by the discovery of the effluent, were combining to—

Louis looked up at the TV screen to see a baseball sailing into the visitors’ bullpen at Fenway. The Sox lead had been cut in half. In the kitchen, the telephone rang.

It was Eileen. Nearly a week had passed since Louis had left a string of increasingly sarcastic messages on her machine, but she was not apologetic. She just wanted to say that she and Peter were having a big party at Peter’s on the twenty-eighth. “It’s a disaster theme party,” she said. “You have to wear a costume to get in, OK? You have to. And it has to have something to do with disasters. It won’t be any fun if people don’t dress up, so you really have to.”

Louis was looking down at yesterday’s Globe, which he’d dropped on the outgoing stack after relieving it of its comics. Plain as day the headline on page one: Quake Aftermath: Large Chemical Spill in Peabody.

“Just come, all right?” Eileen said. “You can bring people if you want to, but they have to have a costume too. Let me give you the address.”

Louis took the address. “Why do you want me at this party?”

“Don’t you want to come?”

“Oh, definitely maybe. Just I’m not sure why you happened to invite me.”

“ ‘Cause it’s going to be a lot of fun and lots of people are coming.”

“Are you saying you enjoy my company?”

“Look, if you don’t want to come, don’t come. But I have to get off now, OK? So I’ll see you on the twenty-eighth, maybe.”

According to the Globe, the greenish effluent had first been noticed by residents of a Peabody subdivision on Monday morning, eighteen hours after Sunday’s earthquake fourteen miles to the northeast. A four-year-old boy and his two-year-old sister were playing by a swale adjacent to the subdivision and returned home with “a substance resembling Prestone antifreeze” on their clothing. In the course of the afternoon, homeowners observed that the swale, still filled with runoff from recent heavy rains, was turning green. A cloying organic odor, “like magic marker,” was noticed. As of Wednesday evening the odor had largely dissipated. State environmental officials had so far not succeeded in isolating the source of the effluent but were focusing their investigation on a fenced and wooded property owned by Sweeting-Aldren Industries, and an adjacent five-acre wetland drained by the polluted swale. Ridgely Holbine of Sweeting-Aldren repeated his claim that the company had not discharged significant quantities of industrial waste in Peabody for nearly twenty years. He said the property in question housed a milling facility and a number of small holding tanks for “intermediate processes,”none of which showed any signs of earthquake damage. Meanwhile one Peabody resident, Doris Mulcahey, told reporters that her husband and eldest daughter had both died of leukemia within the last seven years, and that she had not been aware until now that the wooded property four hundred yards from her home belonged to Sweeting-Aldren. “I’m not saying they caused it,” Mulcahey said. “But I sure as heck don’t rule it out.”

The ball game ended sadly for Sox fans.

Early the next morning, moments before his alarm would have rung, Louis had his dream again. A door in the Bowleses’ house on Dryden Street had led him back into the room with the red leather chairs, and here he found that in all these days his mother had not gone anywhere. She was still perched on a chair, the hem of her yellow dress still raised almost to her hips. But now there was only one man in the room. Louis recognized him from the painting above the fireplace. The neat, bald skull, the lusting black eyes. Catching sight of Louis, he at once turned away and did something to his pants, adjusted something in front. This was when Louis realized that the entire room was slick with semen, greenish white semen deep enough to cover the soles of his shoes, and he woke up quaking violently. He succeeded in not examining this dream later on, though he did not quite forget it either.

Birds were awakening while he ate his Cheerios. As happened every morning, when he passed by his roommate Toby’s beige furniture ensembles—the big sofa and chairs emerging from the unpeopled night into another day of being stationary, of being big, of weighing a lot and occupying volume—his sense of the unreality of life hit a sharp peak.

The time it took him to drive to work, down the Alewife Brook Parkway and onto Route 2 past the Haiku Palace Chinese Restaurant and the Susse Chalet motel, up the milelong grade which every day two or three unfit automobiles failed to make, and out through historical suburbs where the strengthening light made the headlights of eastbound cars and semis seem funereal, was the same amount of time his juice and coffee needed to percolate down through kidneys and bladder and send him straight to the men’s room at WSNE. Alec Bressler was shaving at the mirror, his decrepit kit bag balanced on the sink. “You spent the night here again,” Louis observed, peeing.

Alec palpated his blue neck. “Mm—hm!”

At the studio board Louis sat down with a chocolate cruller purchased from Dan Drexel and glanced over the log printout for the six-to-seven slot. Drexel, using his palm to ram a 150-degree arc of doughnut into his mouth, changed places in the booth with the night announcer and read through his copy of the printout. There would be powdered sugar in Drexel’s lumberjack beard until his bathroom break at eight. (To the listener, few radio announcers sound bearded. But many radio announcers are.) Louis loaded Cart 1 with a 30-second Cumberland Farms spot, let it roll at 5:59:30, and cued Drexel. Morning Rush Hour News with a Twist began.

They were in the midst of a Bob Newhart Festival. “We’re playing every comedy recording,” Drexel reminded the audience, “that the Button-Down Mind ever made and WSNE ever purchased. In just one moment we’ll hear what must be an all-time favorite Newhart act, but first a roundup of world news.”

Louis cued up the fourth cut on Side Two of Behind the Button-Down Mind while Davidson Chevy-Geo talked financing.

“You have sugar in your beard,” he told Drexel.

As always, Drexel brushed at the wrong spot. The ad was ending, and he cozied up to the boom mike with a lusting cat’s unconscious simper. “Nineteen sixty-three,” he crooned. “And the Button-Down Mind takes on the surprising world of children’s TV.” On the word “TV” his pointing finger came to rest on Louis, who removed his thumb from the turntable and let it spin.

Four hours later the talk-show announcer Kim Alexander took over the studio board. Outside in the midmorning sun, Louis sat down by a willow tree on part of the grassy expanse that made the Crossroads Office Park a park. The lawn was one of those familiar suburban places where the concrete of the enclosing curbs hasn’t lost its white film of lime yet, and the agreeably nose-curdling smell of junipers hangs heavy, and there’s no litter, not even cigarette filters (or maybe one single piece of artful litter, in the Japanese style), and no one, but no one, ever picnics. Louis didn’t understand these spaces. Why astroturf and plastic trees weren’t used instead.

He watched a new Lincoln Town Car with smoked side windows round the cul-de-sac and ease to a stop opposite the WSNE entrance to Building III. Its vanity plate read: PROLIFE 7. Libby Quinn debouched from the passenger side and hurried into the studios. The Lincoln’s engine surged like a powerful man sighing: PROLIFE 7. Louis shrugged and lay back on the warm new grass, letting the sun saturate his optic nerves with orangeness.

It can make a person dizzy to lie in hot sun. For several seconds he thought the funny thing happening to him was due to a loose wire in his nervous system, some spazzing synapse, and not, as the chorus of car alarms from the parking lot suddenly indicated was the case, to an earthquake.

He lost several seconds scrambling to his feet. By the time he was upright the event was ending, the ground now moving almost imperceptibly, like a diving board when a person stands motionless at the very end of it, above a swimming pool.

Traffic on 128 was unruffled. Louis looked challengingly at the air around him, as though daring the physical world to do that again when his back wasn’t turned, just daring it. But the only disturbance remaining was the marginal instability of his own body, the swaying of legs through which blood was being pumped with less than perfect smoothness (even great mimes and palace guards can’t be statues). The ground itself was still.

Inside, as he approached Alec’s office, he heard the owner quarreling with Libby in the inner sanctum. Someone less attracted to fights might have retreated, but Louis stationed himself on the threshold of the outer office, which contained a ten-inch black-and-white Zenith and a sofa with folded bedding and unironed shirts on the armrest.

“I won’t return this man’s calls,” Alec said. “I refuse to know this man. But my station manager has breakfast with him? My station manager who I told, no, we don’t deal with this type person? I understand he’s a very goodlooking young man. Very moral, very char-is-ma-tic. It compromises you to have lunch, yes, or cocktails, or dinner. But breakfast—is a very moral meal!”

“Closing your eyes won’t make him go away, Alec. Not unless you can also find a couple hundred thousand dollars to buy him off with. He’s already filed the challenge.”

“So? Last time we renewed—”

“The last time we renewed, nobody challenged it and the station wasn’t gutted.”

“They don’t take away licenses so easily.”

“Plus Philip Stites hadn’t paid Ford & Rothman to study our audience.”

“So—blackmail! A very moral sing!”

“Face it. He wants a station.”

“And you’re going to work for this man? You’re going to be his station manager?”

“When you won’t let me collect on dead accounts? When all you can broadcast during drive hours is Somalian war news and Phyllis Diller?”

“People love Phyllis Diller!”

“One point seven percent at 8 a.m. That’s the March figure. I think it speaks for itself.”

“OK, we do some local noose. We do the war on drugs. We do airplane crashes. OK. All-new programming, as of today. We tell FCC, new programming, very noose-oriented—”

“Alec, there’s nobody to do the news, besides me.”

“Maybe we get Slidowsky back—”

“You know very well what I think of that girl.”

“I can do it. Louis can do it. We listen to the other stations and copy it down. We can hire a student, I can sell—”

“What can you sell?”

“I sell my car. When do I use this car? I don’t need this car.”

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“But sink about it. Libby. Sink about it. I sell my station to Philip Stites, against my principles. Do you respect me for this?”

“I respect a man who does the responsible thing. And I think the responsible thing to do here is sell the station while you still might come out in the black.”

Alec muttered something vaguely, something about sinking.

“Do you need me?” Libby said to Louis, coming through the outer office.

Louis assumed a preoccupied air. “You feel the earthquake?”

She patted her bun and smiled demurely. “I guess I didn’t.”

“Ersequake?” Alec wore the expression of metaphysical amusement that came from sucking a nicotine lozenge. “Just now?”

“Yes. You feel it?”

“No … I was busy.” He beckoned Louis into his sanctum, where two cigarettes of different lengths were burning in a heaping ashtray. His shortwave was set up by the window, and along the wall were piled packing cartons. It was beginning to appear that these rooms were the only place he had to live.

“Two things,” he said. “Sit please. First thing, I thought again—is maybe not so bad to do those collections. If they won’t pay immediately, say we settle for half if they pay right away. It must be right away.” He selected the shorter of the burning cigarettes, killed it, and drew on the longer one, still rotating the lozenge in his mouth. “Other thing: honest answer. Do employees respect a boss who smokes?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“They appear weak. Smokers.”

“Are you talking about me or about Libby?”

Alec did a foreign thing with his upper lip, curling it like a vampire about to bite, behind a veil of smoke. “Libby.”

“I’m sure she respects you. Why wouldn’t she?”

Alec nodded very slowly, lip still drawn, eyes on an odd corner of the room. “Do those collections,” he said.

Louis returned to his cubicle and reopened the files, but his first call was to the Harvard University switchboard. After one ring he was speaking to Howard Chun, who with an unpromising grunt went to try to find Renée Seitchek. When her voice came over the line she sounded neither surprised nor pleased.

“I felt the earthquake,” Louis said.

“Uh-huh. So did we.”

“Where was it? How big?”

“Outside Peabody, smaller than Sunday’s. This we get from the radio, incidentally.”

“The reason I’m calling is to see if you want to go to a party my sister is giving on the twenty-eighth. Not that this is an idea I personally endorse, but supposedly it’s an earthquake-oriented party. A costume party. Will it be fun, I have no idea. But that’s what I’m calling for.”

He bent his head and listened extra-closely to what came out of the receiver.

“The twenty-eighth.”

“Yes.”

“Well—OK. But I’m not going to wear any costume.”

He released his breath, which he’d been holding. “Let me suggest that you wear some token costume. Like maybe a Band-Aid. Not that I personally—”

“All right. I’ll wear a token costume. Where’s this party going to be?”

He arranged to pick her up in his car. It turned out that she lived in Somerville herself. She gave him her home telephone number and said it was better not to call her at work. He hung up with a bad taste in his mouth, feeling unwanted.

A week of uneasiness ensued. After a couple of lucky collections Louis had begun to run into stonewalling receptionists, dilatory assistants, and a few outright ogres. He was also having trouble finding funds for postage. Once he’d exhausted the little caches of one- and two- and five-cent stamps from various abandoned desks, he had to draw on petty cash, which was kept in the owner’s wallet.

More and more often Alec could be found watching the little Zenith in his office. At dinnertime, alone or not, he provided running oral glosses on TV news and advertising; otherwise he liked to watch Westerns and war films.

“TV noose and noosepapers,” he told Louis, “are the enemy. For eight years we had a U.S. President with subnormal intelligence. Every day he does horrible harm to language, the future, the truth. Every single sinking person in the country knows this, except not the networks and noosepapers. Is suspicious, no? Or is maybe Stupid People now also minority group we don’t say bad things about? Let’s go all the way, let’s have a retarded President. And noose conference, and President is bellowing and drooling, and his advisers say, he has interesting new program, and CBS says, the President drooled tonight, and we have five analysts here to talk about his interesting new program and also perhaps about is he drooling less than last time? And New York Times prints a transcript of noose conference, is all drool drool bellow bellow, also one coherent sentence, and on page one they print the one coherent sentence! I guess they don’t want to offend retarded people by saying is bad to have a retarded President.

“Still, OK, fine, is their prerogative. But isn’t it the responsibility also of every sinking person in the country to say to networks and noosepapers: You are my enemy now. You betrayed me. You are not really on my side. You are on side of money and I see through you now and is the end. No more! You are out! I’ll find a good magazine and radio station, sank you!

“But it’s a horrible venal world. Sinking people—artists and intellectuals, the good reporters—must write for Times and talk to CBS, otherwise their enemies will. And so with blackmail the big noose media buy writers and intellectuals. Personally the media don’t give a fuck, Louis, they don’t give a fuck about truth. They’re just businesses that must always be making money, never stop making money and never offend any group.

“Now Mr. Pro-Life wants to buy my station because not enough people listen. Am I angry? Yes I am angry. But not politically angry. I wall not say,? disagree with these people’s politics.’ Because all politics is the same. Left, right, is the same! Exactly the same! But noosepapers must have readers and networks must have viewers, and without politics everyone could see this emperor of culture has no clothes on, so everything is politics! The far right gets nowhere if the media talk about what is beautiful and what is true and what is just, instead of what is politically feasible. The far right is not beautiful and not true and not just. Is their very good fortune only to be looked at politically …”

Though he was paid for only eight hours, Louis seldom left Waltham before six in the evening. He was surprised, one night at the end of the week, to find Libby Quinn sitting on the sofa in the TV room, breathing Alec’s smoke. Usually at this hour Libby was home with her daughters.

“Louis,” Alec said in greeting. “We have special programming tonight. A portrait of the man who—”

“Sh, sh, sh, sh, sh,” Libby said.

“I was just going to tell Louis—”

Louis ignored him. He was transfixed by the television. It drew him closer. He turned it up loud.

“We’re talking about a building,” the image of DR. RENEE SEITCHEK said, “that was condemned three years ago by the Chelsea city manager and that’s sitting on completely unconsolidated landfill. It’s hard to imagine a building more prone to damage in an earthquake, and to me it’s just insanity to allow 250 church members to be living in it, even if every one of them signed a waiver.”

“So you believe there could be further earthquakes,” an unseen male interviewer said.

“You can’t rule it out. Not after what happened in Peabody on Friday.”

“Dr. Axelrod at?G? told me he thinks the odds of a damaging earthquake in central Boston in the next twelve months are still less than one in a thousand.”

“They could be one in a million, there still shouldn’t be people living in that building.”

“I take it you’re not in agreement with Reverend Stites on the issue of abortion.”

As DR. RENEE SEITCHEK struggled to reply to this irrelevant question, the camera zoomed in on her until the tiny freckles around her eyelids could be seen. In her right ear she wore three small silver hoops in separate holes. Out-of-focus leaves and sunshine played in the window behind her.

“I don’t think a woman who terminates a pregnancy needs Philip Stites to tell her the significance of what she’s done.”

“Think again,” Libby murmured. “Think again.”

DR. 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 stepped inside the room and shut the door. “Can I talk to you?”

“You’re not mad at me?”

“No.”

Her head drooped several inches lower. “I thought you’d be mad at me. I guess you must be a nice person.” She extended her left arm, spreading her fingers as though admiring them. She’d tied a piece of thin white string around her wrist. “You see I gave Emmett his ring back. Emmett’s been thinking about you all the time. I think he wants to kill you.”

Louis looked at her steadily.

“Actually that’s a lie,” she conceded, her eyes still cast down. “But he didn’t seem to think too highly of you. He didn’t think too highly of me either. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. You know what MaryAnn did? She told me she thought I needed counseling. I just told her she was jealous. She acted like she didn’t know what I meant.” Lauren’s lip curled evilly.

“What are you doing this summer?” Louis said.

“I don’t know yet. Staying at home. Trying to be nice.”

“Can I see you?”

She looked up at him with something like terror. “What do you want to see me for?”

“Why does anybody want to see anybody?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“‘Cause I told Emmett I wasn’t going to see anybody. He’s working for his dad in Beaumont.”

“So you’re like engaged but not engaged. Fun arrangement.”

She shook her head. “It’s just I already made him so sick. He’s really a nice person, you know, not as smart as you.”

“Yeah, this is another thing. Where do you get the idea I’m so smart?”

“Well I only spent a whole vacation here at Christmas. I only heard how smart you are a couple hundred times. And you see how well I turned the other cheek.” She paused, appearing to consider her own history. “You know what, though? This semester, I got at least a? in every class. And I went swimming every day and I studied on Saturday night. I was on academic probation my whole sophomore year. It was like I’d go into the classroom and lie for an hour. Lie, lie, lie.” She looked up at Louis again and saw his skepticism; her eyes fell. “So anyway. I’m trying to read the Bible.”

“Congratulations?”

“I’m still more at the point where I like how I feel sitting here reading than where I’m actually reading. I go through the laws till I get to the sex laws. The punishment’s always stoning the person until they’re dead. That’s what you get for sodomy. Sodomy’s nice! But it’s an abomination unto the Lord.”

Louis sighed. “What’s with the new costume?”

“What do you mean?”

“The white dress. The, uh, Shirley Temple thing in your hair.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“What’s wrong with it, nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just, like, no offense, but are you on some kind of medication?”

She shook her head and smiled lamely. “No.”

“Lithium? Valium?”

His words sank in. Her eyes grew dark and she straightened her back. “What kind of question is that?” “You’re just very different,” he said.

“I’m the way I want to be. So you can leave me alone, all right? Get out of my room!”

Louis, gratified by her response, was about to apologize when he was struck in the ear by the spine of a flying Bible. He leaned his head on the door and held his hurt ear. Lauren hopped off the bed and picked up the floppy Bible by one corner, as if it were a pelt, and sat down with it again. “Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t been very nice to you, have I? I guess I must have a problem with you. I must not like you or something.”

He laughed sadly.

“It’s not personal. You’re obviously a nice person. But it’s better if you just keep away from me, don’t you think? So goodbye, OK?”

Louis felt exactly like a casual lover being discarded.

Later, though, after he’d driven home with his books and drunk a beer, he decided that the only explanation for how she’d acted was that she recognized his existence and had strong feelings about him. His logic was confirmed empirically the following week, when she called him on the telephone. Again there was a curious lack of connection between present and immediate past. She just started telling him what she was doing, which was mainly that she’d enrolled in a couple of summer-session courses at U of Houston. She wanted to graduate after one more semester in Austin and so she was taking a course about the Incas and the Mayas and also Introductory Chemistry, the latter because she’d gotten an F in high-school chemistry and she wanted to try to do something really hard now, as penance. She didn’t ask Louis about his own life, but at one point she did stop talking long enough for him to suggest they get together sometime. There was a silence. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t care. Just not at my house.”

He was waiting outside the physical sciences building at the U of H after her first chemistry lecture. A thousand grackles were conversing in the quadrangle, and there was an alien, a freak, among the students leaving the building. It was Lauren. She’d cut her hair off and shaved her head.

She was glaring at every student who looked at her. Her head was small and very white, almost as white as her dress, and the half-moons of bruise-colored pigment beneath her eyes seemed darker. She asked Louis, in a nasty voice, how she looked.

“Like a pretty girl who shaved her head.”

She turned away, disgusted. “You think I care what you think?”

As they walked to the parking lot he almost hoped some man passing by would be rude to her so he could knock him down. When they got inside her Beetle she didn’t start it right away. She twisted her head around as if she needed to feel its bareness. Her knuckles, on the steering wheel, were white. “Do you still want to sleep with me?”

“When you put it like that?”

“It’s what you wanted, right? I’ll do it if you want me to. But it has to be now.”

“I only want to if you want to.”

“Well I’m never going to want to, ever. So this is your chance.”

“Well so I guess that means no.”

She nodded, not taking her eyes off the windshield. “Don’t forget, OK? You had your chance.”

On the stoops in the neighborhood north of U of H, not much more than a mile from downtown, middle-aged men drank beer from quart bottles and listened to low-volume hip-hop on twenty-year-old transistors. The hoods of rusted yellow, orange, green wingtips were raised in the driveways of shotgun shacks that squatted in the sandy mud. The early evening air was still and smelled like the black hamlets at the end of gravel roads in backwoods Mississippi.

At a Vietnamese restaurant up the street from the King of Glory HOLINESS CHURCH, Louis ordered pork with lemon grass. It came with sticky, translucent rice pancakes which when wrapped around the meat and lettuce and mint and bean sprouts bore an uncanny resemblance to condoms. Lauren looked at them with grim amusement. She’d ordered coffee that she wasn’t drinking. She tore the tops off sugar packets and made them wink at her. Finally, reluctantly, miserably, she said, “What’s an electron?”

“An electron?” It was as if she’d mentioned the name of Louis’s best friend. “A subatomic particle. It’s the smallest unit of negative electric charge.”

“Oh thanks.” She was disgusted again. “That really helps me. I have a dictionary.”

“You can also think of it as kind of an imaginary construct—”

“I’m sorry I asked. I am very sorry.” She looked around wildly, as if she wanted to walk out on him. “What is it about this stuff? It’s like the smart people aren’t really learning about science, they’re just learning how to sound like assholes.”

“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.

“I don’t understand what the thing is. I don’t understand what it looks like. What’s it for?” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to understand it.”

“I can help you understand it.”

She sneered. “I bet you can.”

“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”

She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”

“Yeah, but … who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”

“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”

“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”

She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.

“Right,” she said. “You’re nice, I keep forgetting. But don’t forget, all right? I’m not going to owe you anything.”

As the days got hotter and the nights got longer, Louis watched Lauren’s hair grow back and saw the string on her wrist turn gray and shiny. She wasn’t shy about asking him for help. One night she spent almost four hours in his kitchen refusing to understand gram-molecular weights. Every statement in her chemistry book was like a nerd she specifically despised, and it wounded her pride to have to consort with it as a true and accurate reflection of physical reality. What she hated most of all, though, was Louis’s explanations. She didn’t want to hear about page 61 or page 59 if the problem she was having was on page 60. She claimed to understand everything except the one thing she wasn’t understanding right then. She just wanted him to tell her the answer. When she was especially provoked, she accused him of sounding like her father. But she always ended up thanking him for his help, and as the summer aged he believed he could see it getting harder for her to leave his apartment without touching his hand or kissing him goodbye. She had to bite her lip and bolt.

One night in late July he met her outside the chemistry lab, which smelled strongly of pickles, and he almost had to run to keep up with her as she marched to her car and yanked the door open. When they got to his apartment she ransacked his impoverished cabinets and opened his bottle of gin.

“You’re upset,” he hazarded from the kitchen doorway.

She burped rippingly and drank a glass of water. “We were supposed to make aspirin today.”

“I remember making aspirin.”

“I bet you do. But the Clown decided to have a little contest.” She wiped her mouth. “We all got certain amounts of chemicals and we were all going to weigh our yields at the end and whoever had the biggest yield would win. Just win, you know, whatever that means. These teachers, Louis, they set things up to be so good for people like you and so shitty for everybody else. The best person wins, and the people in the middle don’t, and the worst person loses. Well, Jorryn and me, we always finish last anyway. But we’re real careful to follow the recipe, even though we already know we’re going to be the worst because that’s what we’re there for. Meanwhile everybody else is bringing their aspirin up on filter paper—it’s this clump, like a potato after you chew it? And it gets weighed, and the Clown writes the names and percentages on his chalkboard, and things get louder and louder. The guys are all roaring, about, you know, a difference of half a percent: WO-HO! WO-HO!” Lauren savagely mocked the guys. “And there comes this point where you’re supposed to cool the stuff down and filter it, and there you have your aspirin. Well, we do this, Louis. We follow the instructions. And what happens is it all goes through the filter paper. There’s nothing there at all. And so then comes the Inquisition, like what did we do Wrong this time? Everybody’s staring at us, they’re standing there while the Clown reads my notebook. And he can’t figure it out! He goes, Did we observe this temperature rise? And we go, Yes! Yes! And did we scratch the flask to make it crystallize? And we go, Yes! Yes! And I’m thinking he’s going to say it’s all right, he’s going to tell us not to feel too bad. I’m feeling pretty bad already, although Jorryn’s standing there with her hand like this, you know, not my problem, man.” Lauren laughed at the thought of Jorryn. “But you know what he did? He got totally pissed off. He said we must have done something wrong. Because you cannot put these three things together and heat them up and cool them down and not, get, aspirin. And Jorryn and me throw our hands up in the air and we’re going, We did! We did! And there’s no aspirin! It just didn’t work this time! But the Clown he’s getting totally worked up and he goes, You’re going to get an F in this lab unless you redo the experiment and show me at least three grams of aspirin. He says he’s going to keep the lab open till midnight if that’s how long it takes us. Well, Jorryn starts shaking her head, like, fuck this shit—and she walks out. But I didn’t even have the heart to leave. I just sat there while everybody was writing up their final reports at the front, I sat there at the lab table all by myself, just sitting there all by myself being punished because I didn’t get any aspirin. And I followed the instructions. And there was NOTHING THERE.”

Lauren, leaning with both hands on Louis’s kitchen card table, began to cry more loudly than he’d known a person could. Fat staves of grief shuddered up through her chest and left her mouth. The voice was her own, voice the way it is before it becomes words: a bath of red sound. Louis put his arms around her and held her head against his shoulder. It fit in his hands. It was as if this were all there was to her, this crying head. He didn’t know why he loved her so much, he only knew he wanted admittance to her grief, to her whole damaged self, as he’d wanted it since the first time he saw her. He kissed her bristly hair and kissed behind her ear. For this liberty, she slapped him so hard that his glasses were bent and the plastic pad cut his nose and bruised the bone.

He stood there for a while trying to straighten the frames.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” she announced when she came back from his bathroom, her fist full of toilet paper. “But you said you weren’t going to do that. It’s not fair of you.”

She blew her nose.

At midnight they were still watching TV in his kitchen. When Lauren finally turned it off there was a delicious moment when he didn’t know what was going to happen next. What happened was she raised a window and said, “It’s cooled off.”

They went for a walk. Somehow a mild, damp Gulf breeze had banished summer to the north, restoring April. It seemed as if it were the breeze, not the hour, that had emptied the streets and sidewalks of everything but skidding leaves. The cars that did pass were less like cars than like waves breaking gently, like gusts of wind; the humidity sucked them back into itself as soon as they went by. In Houston, a city that accommodated nature, every patch of dirt could smell like beach or bayou. Louis loved the dense live oaks, where purple male grackles and tan female grackles sang irresponsible songs and mewed and moaned and laughed. He loved the squirrels, which were like Evanston squirrels wearing fake long ears; it was an insultingly transparent disguise.

In Hermann Park, he and Lauren climbed the man-made hill and circled the man-made lake with a railing around it. They sat down on some miniature railroad tracks running through a meadow. Lauren lit a cigarette, awakening a grackle that began to speak in tongues.

“Louis,” she said. “Do you really love me?”

“Is this a trick question?”

“Just answer.”

“Yes, I really do.”

She bowed her head. “Is it that thing I did?”

“No. It’s just the way you are.”

“You mean the way I supposedly am. You think I’m some way that’s like you. But I’m not. I’m stupid.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“You go to Rice and get A’s and I go to Austin and get D’s, but I’m not stupid. I’m exactly like you.”

“Yep.”

She shook her head. “ ‘Cause I’m smarter than you are too. I’ve never really loved anybody, so I can’t put a whole lot of weight on love. What if it doesn’t let you see what’s best for me? Emmett loves me too, is one thing, and he doesn’t think I should see you at all. So it’s like love doesn’t necessarily tell the truth. I can’t trust anybody but myself. And the thing is, there are two ways to be.”

She stood up. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain this without sounding like a total dipshit even to myself. I want to try real hard to explain this, Louis. Let’s say you had to study for a test, but you said before I study I’ll watch an inning of Cubs.”

He smiled. This was apt.

“Well, there are two ways. You either turn it off after an inning and a half, or you watch the whole game and feel terrible. But say you’re just very unhappy and you really love baseball. That means the two ways are either to watch the whole game, or none of it at all. Because you know you’re so unhappy you’ll watch it all if you watch any. And it’s very hard not to turn it on at all. Because you’re so unhappy, why shouldn’t you at least be allowed to watch baseball? But don’t you know, if you try hard even for five minutes not to watch it, you feel something good in you? And you can imagine, I’d feel really good if I could always say no. But you never can because you’re so unhappy you always end up saying what the hell. Or, I’ll stop watching baseball tomorrow. And the same thing happens the next day? Why can’t I explain this right?”

With rigid fingers she tried to wrench substance out of the air in front of her.

“Because, see, it seems so uncool to give something up. Other people don’t, so why should you? Or the people who do are disgusting and seem like they’ve only given something up because they didn’t like it to begin with. It seems like all the really interesting and attractive people in the world just go on doing whatever they want. It seems like this is how the world works. Plus, remember, it’s so hard to give something up. And that’s why you go all around today and it seems like there aren’t really two ways, there’s only one way. Maybe sometimes you still get little glimmering feelings of what it’s like to be a good person. But the BIG GLOWING THING just doesn’t seem like a real option. I used to do something good because I liked how it felt, but then the rest of me just wanted to use that good feeling as a ticket for getting wasted. It started feeling like feeling clean was just another useful feeling, the same as being drunk, or having money. But you know what? You know what I thought of one day? It was before Christmas, I was with these guys in Austin that I’d met, and I was noticing how instead of not drinking at all that day, like I’d promised myself the night before, I was having some Seagram’s for lunch. And it came to me: it was literally possible not to drink today. Or fuck, or even smoke.”

“Like Nancy Reagan,” Louis said. “Just say no.”

Lauren shook her head. “That’s just bullshit. That makes it sound easy, and it’s the hardest thing in the world. But that’s not the thing I figured out. What I figured out is: you have to have faith. That’s what I’d never understood before. That faith isn’t stupid buddhas, or stupid stained glass, or stupid Psalms. Faith is inside you! It’s white, and thin, it’s this thing—this thing—” She clutched the air. “That the miracle of doing something so impossible … would be so beautiful … would be so beautiful. The reason I can’t describe this, Louis, is because it’s so thin I keep losing sight of it. It’s that there’s no trick to giving up bad things. No method. You can’t use willpower, because not everybody has that, which means that if you do have some of it, you can’t really take credit for it, it’s just luck. The only way to truly give something up is to feel how totally impossible it is, and then hope. To feel how beautiful it would be, how much you could love God—if the miracle happened. But so you can guess how popular I was last semester, which is when— Hey! Hey! Oh shit, Louis, don’t walk away from me. Oh shit …”

Walking is broken falls, the body leaning, the legs advancing to catch it. Lauren caught up with Louis in a rush of slapping soles and heavy breaths, stopped, then ran some more because he wouldn’t stop. “Louis, just let me finish—”

“I already get the idea.”

“Oh, this is the thing, this is the thing. People hate you if you try to be good—”

“Yeah, hate, that’s the problem here.”

“I didn’t know it would turn out this way. I thought we could be friends. Louis. I thought we could be friends! And you said I wasn’t going to owe you anything! Why am I so stupid? Why did I do this to you? I shouldn’t have ever called you, I made everything so much worse. I’m so stupid, so stupid.”

“Not half as stupid as me.”

“And but you’re not being very nice either. You’re trying to make me feel guilty so I’ll do something I don’t want to do because I am trying to stop feeling like such shit. Can’t we just decide you were unlucky?”

“Yeah, great.”

“You’ll be lucky next time. I swear you will. Nobody’s such a mess like I am.” She was crying. “I am such garbage. I am not worth it.”

It did seem unfair that Louis, who wanted nothing more than to stay with her, was the one who had to shut up and walk away; that she was so neutral towards him that even the job of getting rid of him had to be done by him. But as a final act of kindness, and knowing he’d never get any thanks for it, he let her have the last word. He let her say she wasn’t worth it. They walked out of the park and into summer, which was regrouping as suddenly as it had retreated two hours earlier, and again bound together in its humid matrix the million voices of its airconditioners. Lauren got in her car and drove away. In the predawn silence Louis could hear the Beetle’s tweeting engine and the shifting gears for maybe twenty seconds before he lost it, and already in those twenty seconds he had difficulty comprehending that she was doing without him, that she was shifting the gears and working the pedals of a car and a life that didn’t include him; that she didn’t just stop existing when she drove out of sight.

As the days passed and he went to work at KILT and came home to baseball, he was conscious that every hour that passed for him was passing for her too somewhere; and as the days became weeks and he remained just as conscious of how the hours were mounting up, it began to seem more and more incredible that never in all these hundreds of hours, these millions of seconds, did she call him.

October came, November came, and he was still waking up in the morning looking for some loophole in the logic of his self-restraint that could justify his calling her. He wanted her terribly; he’d been good to her; how could she not want him? He felt like there was a rip in the fabric of the universe which it had been his misfortune to blunder through without possibility of return, as though even if he wanted to love somebody else now he wouldn’t be able to; as though love, like electricity, flowed in the direction of diminishing potential, and by coming into contact with Lauren’s deep neutrality he’d grounded himself permanently.

Christmas in Evanston was ridiculous. Eileen thought he was a computer scientist. As soon as he returned to Houston, he made a demo tape and began to send out query letters. This was the only thing he’d been able to think of doing when, among the mail that had accumulated in his absence, he’d found an announcement of a wedding, Jerome and MaryAnn Bowles formally sharing the news that on the Friday after Thanksgiving their daughter Lauren had married Emmett Andrew Osterlitz of Beaumont, and the sender appending a note in blue ink on the back of the card: Merry Christmas! Don’t make yourself a stranger. —MaryAnn B.

To reach Renée Seitchek’s apartment, he had to drive the entire length of Somerville’s east—west axis. In failing light he passed a bank that looked like a mausoleum, a hospital that looked like a bank, an armory that looked like a castle, and a high school that looked like a prison. He also passed the Panaché beauty salon and the Somerville City Hall. The most prominent breed of teenaged girl on the sidewalks had frizzed blond hair, a huge forehead, and a sixteen-inch waist; the other prominent breed was overweight and wore pastel or black knitwear resembling children’s pajamas. Twice Louis was honked at from behind for stopping to allow surprised and suspicious pedestrians to cross in front of him.

With the help of some recent Globes, he had brought himself up to date on the doings and sayings of the Reverend Philip Stites. Stites’s “actions” in Boston were attracting hundreds of concerned citizens from around the country, and to house those citizens who wished to participate in further “actions,” he had acquired (for the sum of $146,001.75) a forty-year-old apartment block in the town of Chelsea, directly north across the water from downtown Boston, on the Wonderland subway line. The building, which Stites immediately christened as world headquarters of his Church of Action in Christ, happened to have been condemned three years earlier, and soon after Stites’s flock had moved in and hung ABORTION IS MURDER banners from the windows, the Chelsea police paid a visit. Stites claimed to have converted the officers on the spot; this was later disputed. Under murky circumstances, a compromise was reached whereby every church member who entered the building had to sign a three-page waiver to protect the town from lawsuits. (A Globe editorial suggested that the mayor of Chelsea was in fundamental(ist) sympathy with Stites.) The condemned building apparently had almost no lateral stability and was liable to collapse even without the help of an earthquake.

“What the state condemns,” Stites said, “the Lord will save.”

A Globe cartoon showed a newsstand where nothing but dubious waivers were on sale.

Renée lived on a narrow street called Pleasant Avenue, on the easternmost of Somerville’s hills. Her house was a shingled triple-decker with a slate-covered mansard roof. The branches of what appeared to be honeysuckle had engulfed the chain link fence in front of it, and Louis was almost through the gate before he saw Renée. She was sitting on the concrete stoop, leaning forward with her hands clasped, hugging to her shins the hem of an antique black dress. Its scooped lace neckline was half covered by the black cardigan she was wearing.