Read Online Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen - Free Book Online

suntanned narrow-nosed boyfriends Eileen had sported over the years, up to and including Peter Stoorhuys. But now the joke was on Louis, because he was the son of a woman worth 22 million dollars.
    That night he had a lucid and unpleasant dream. The setting was a paneled boardroom or club room furnished with red leather chairs. His mother had leaned back on one of them and, raising the hem of her yellow dress, allowed a fully clothed Mr. Aldren to stand between her legs and pump semen into her while Mr. Tabscott and Mr. Stoorhuys looked on. When Mr. Aldren was done, Mr. Stoorhuys mounted her, only Mr. Stoorhuys had become an Irish setter and had to strain and prance on his hind legs to maintain an effective mating position. Mr. Aldren and Mr. Tabscott stood watching as she reached around to steady the eager dog between her legs.
    On Saturday Louis left two messages on Eileen’s machine. When she didn’t return them, he called his parents at their hotel and learned that they were driving to the Kernaghan estate the next morning, his mother to stay there for perhaps a week, his father only for the day, since classes at Northwestern resumed on Monday. “I’m going to be very busy,” his mother said. “But if you want to do something for me, you could take your father to the airport. The flight’s at seven.”
    Ignoring the hint, he set out for Ipswich at ten on Sunday morning. A humidity and stasis lay on Somerville. The rain had finally stopped in the night, but eaves and fenders and budding trees were still pregnant with it, there being not a breath of wind. Where sight lines opened, down streets and through the narrow prisms between houses, the humidity added up to a paling of the distance, a blurring of edges that affected even the tolling of a distant church bell, the separate strokes of which were almost lost in the intervening resonance. Louis steered awkwardly around a pair of Somerville patrol cars that had stopped in the middle of an intersection, driver’s window to driver’s window, as if they were insects and this was how they coupled and their need was urgent. Through the portal of an empty, lighted church he glimpsed banks of Easter lilies.
    The highways were deserted. From stretches of elevated grade, up through Chelsea and Revere and Saugus, he looked down on crabbed patchwork neighborhoods in which streets and driveways had hegemony. Many were half underwater now, with cars parked crookedly at their margins as if they’d been deposited by a flood.
    A different flood, a receding flood of dollars, had left countless new condominiums stranded in fields that were muddy and barren and rutted with Caterpillar tracks. The town house condos differed only in location; every one of them, without exception, was faced with pastel clapboard and had postmodern semicircles and triangles interrupting the roof lines. The high-rises, on the other hand, came in two varieties: the kind with plywood on their windows, and the kind with banners draped from the roof advertising incredible deals on 1 & 2 BRS.
    Thorn bushes and stunted trees filled the flat, exhausted land north of Danvers. In the mist outside Ipswich, near Ipswich Ford, Louis braked to let a shaggy drunk no older than thirty reel across Route 1A. He left the town on Argilla Road, passing widely spaced houses with BMWs and Volvos and tremendous oak trees planted outside them. Soon he came to a stone gate marked KERNAGHAN . A driveway bordered with spruce trees wound up a hill through rolling unmown pastures. At the top of the hill was a gracious white house with symmetrical wings, a domed portico, and, squatting among its dormers, a pyramid made of white aluminum siding. It was easily fifteen feet tall. The effect was of a well-dressed woman wearing a plastic garbage pail on her head.
    He stood for a moment on a hemp mat stenciled with a black yin and yang and peered in through a narrow window beside the front door. He saw a tiled entry hall and a living room