The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (11 page)

Bhandari rolled off. The sheet clung to his damp back and followed him, exposing her right shoulder and right arm. She let her hand remain between her legs. For the moment she was a refractory adolescent again, at home with the autoerotic. She stared at the ceiling, on which the bedside lamp cast a conic section of light pierced by odd spokes of shadow, projections of the crossbars of the lampshade.

Stirring in his sleep, Bhandari brushed her flank. She was filled with the unpleasant conviction that when in Maman’s house, when called upon, he made talkative and charming love.

But tomorrow Jammu would be free again, and the particles of her past, roused to flame by Bhandari, would grow cool and dim as she made her way back into the darkness, into her scheme, into the distance of St. Louis. Her shuddering came and went unnoticed.

Asha was due at 1:00. Jammu looked at her watch, her only clothing. It was 12:20. She trailed a hand along the floor, found underwear and swung her legs out of bed.

Someone knocked on the door.

She stumbled to her feet and ripped the sheet off Bhandari, who lay like a beached whale, flippers half buried in percale sand. She shoved his head. “
Up
,” she said. “She’s here.”

He rose dreamily, gazing at her chest.

The knocking grew fierce and the doorknob rattled. This didn’t sound like Asha. Jammu could hardly turn her blouse right side out. She zipped up her skirt. Bhandari was tentatively knotting the
belt of his robe. “Get the goddamned door,” she hissed, heading into the bathroom. After a moment she heard him shuffling to the door and unlocking it. There was a squeal, his. “What are
you
doing here?”

Jammu turned away from the sink. Singh was standing close to her in the bathroom doorway. He stared at her in blank distress, and she was pleased to see a man whom she was still capable of injuring straightforwardly. She rolled her shoulders, flaunting her dishevelment.

“Indira is dead,” he said. “Shot.”

“What?”

“They shot her.”

“Sikhs!” Bhandari said. He had come up behind Singh, and in an anti-Sikh fury he swung his fist at the younger man. With grace, almost delicacy, Singh threw him against the wall and choked him with his forearm. He let up, and Bhandari looked around vacantly. Then he ran to the phone by the bed.

“Operator. Operator.”

“I thought you’d want to know,” Singh said to Jammu.

“Romesh?” Bhandari’s voice shook. “Romesh, it’s you? Listen to me. Listen. All files,
all
files—you’re listening
—all
files marked C—C as in Chandigarh—all files marked C. Listen to me. All files—”

Something was mechanically wrong with Jammu’s mouth. A hard combination of tongue and palate held it open and kept air from reaching or escaping her lungs. She felt a bullet in her spine and couldn’t breathe.

“Barbie?”

“Hi. I was going to call you.”

“Are you in the middle of something?”

“No, I haven’t started yet. I have to bake a cake.”

“Listen, did the package come?”

“Yeah, on Monday.”

“You know, the receipt’s in the box.”

“She’ll like it, Audrey. She saw something similar the other day at Famous that she liked.”

“Oh good. Do you have any special plans for tonight?”

“Lu’s going over to a friend’s after dinner to spend the night.”

“On a week night?”

“It’s her birthday. Why would she want to stick around here?”

“I just thought. You used to do special things. I just thought—How are you feeling?”

“Well, I’m tired. My cold kept me awake last night. I could hear myself starting to snore—”

“Snore!”

“I’ve always snored when I’ve had a cold. It used to drive Martin crazy. That terrible infection I had, whenever it was, the three-month infection, I remember he’d wake me up in the middle of the night with this completely crazed look on his face and he’d
say something like IF YOU DON’T STOP SNORING—Dot dot dot.”

“Then what?”

“Then he’d go sleep on the couch.”

“That’s
funny
.”

Dropping the receiver into its stirrup, disposing of Audrey for another couple of days, Barbara rested in a kitchen chair. It was the first of November, and she had a spice cake to bake before Luisa came home. Although she was going out after dinner, Luisa had a keen sense of responsibility for juvenile ritual (a willingness to use hotel swimming pools, to eat the chicken drumsticks) and she might insist on doing something traditional as soon as Martin came home, something like watching home movies of herself (there were no other home movies) or even (conceivably) playing Yahtzee. At the very least she would demand (and receive) a cocktail, and Martin would bring down the gift Barbara had bought for him to give (a typewriter) and add it to the boxes from relatives and to Barbara’s own more ordinary (more motherly) contributions (socks, sweaters, tropical-colored stationery, Swiss chocolate, a silk robe, the much-discussed set of birdsong recordings, hardcover Jane Austen and, for the hell of it, softcover Wallace Stevens) which Luisa, demanding a refill (and receiving it) would unwrap. Then the three of them would make formal conversation as if Luisa were the adult which the gifts at her feet, their ready enjoyability, indicated she had not yet become. Grandparents would have helped tonight. But Barbara’s parents had just left for a month’s vacation in Australia and New Zealand, and even before Martin’s mother died she never left Arizona for anything but funerals. Martin himself would not help tonight. He’d been on the outs with Luisa lately. On Monday night he’d come home deep in thought (about the Westhaven project, he said), and at the dinner table, still thinking, still off in his world of timetables and work crews, he’d begun to grill Luisa on what she wanted to major in at college. The grilling went on for ten minutes. “English? If somebody with a degree in English comes to me looking for a job, I just shake my head.” He cut a neat rhombus of veal. “Astronomy? What do you want to do that for?” He speared a bean. Luisa stared hopelessly at the candles. Barbara said:

“Leave her alone, Martin.”

He looked up from his plate. “I was just trying to be helpful.” He turned to Luisa. “Was I bothering you?”

Luisa threw her napkin in the marsala sauce and ran upstairs. She’d lost her appetite this fall, and lost some pounds with which (in Barbara’s opinion) she could ill afford to part. At breakfast this morning she’d looked much older than eighteen. Barbara had just awakened from a dream where Luisa was a skeleton in a stained white gown, and where the hands reaching to comfort her, the mother’s hands, were gray bones.

“Can I make you some waffles?”

“Can I have some coffee?”

“Yes. And waffles?”

“All right. Please.”

It was painful watching her stuff waffles into her mouth. She obviously wasn’t hungry. She had a lingering cold, and though she hadn’t stooped to admit it yet, she also seemed to have a new boyfriend, whom she’d apparently met when she’d gone to see the French girl two weeks ago. The French girl had not shown up. The boyfriend had taken the picture that appeared in last Saturday’s Everyday section.
D. Thompson
, the credit read, and the caption:
Indian Summer. Luisa Probst of Webster Groves enjoys the fine weather in Washington State Park. Behind her is a flock of Canada geese
. Martin had bought twenty copies of the paper, and Luisa had mentioned, rather belatedly, that Duane had been in the country with her and Stacy. Barbara really didn’t mind if Luisa tried to keep her feelings towards Duane a secret for a while. She herself had grown up under surveillance (the surveillance of both her mother and the Roman Catholic Church) and she’d hated it. Besides, with Luisa still spending so much time in Stacy’s company, how important could Duane be?

Outside, it was cloudy. Two male cardinals, winter birds, hopped from peg to peg on the feeder by the breakfast-room window. Barbara could hear a slow scraping on the south side of the house as Mohnwirbel raked concrete. He was wearing his red wool jacket today, his winter plumage, his cardinal colors. He lived on the property, in the small apartment above the garage, and seemed a more native resident of Sherwood Drive, or at least a less self-conscious one, than Barbara could ever be.

She swallowed some aspirin with a splash of scotch and put
the glass directly in the dishwasher. She was wearing a full plaid skirt, a dark red silk sweater, slightly dated ankle boots (hand-me-ups from Luisa), a silver bangle on her wrist, and silver hoops. Every day, sick or not, she dressed well. In the spring and fall (retrospective seasons, seasons in which she married different men) she wore makeup.

As she turned on the radio, which was always tuned to KSLX (“Information Radio”), Jack Strom was introducing today’s guest on the two-to-three segment of his afternoon talk show. The guest was Dr. Mickey McFarland. Physician. Professor. Disciple of Love…And author of the best-selling
You and Only You
. Barbara put an apron on.

“Doctor,” Jack Strom was saying, “in your latest book you describe what you call the Seven Stages of Cynicism—a kind of ladder that a person climbs down on to middle-age depression—and then you discuss ways to reverse the process. Now, I’m sure it’s struck many of your readers that all the examples you chose involved middle-aged men. This was obviously intentional on your part, so I wonder if you might tell us how you see women fitting into this pattern of cynicism, which I believe you once called the Challenge of the Eighties.”

“Jack,” McFarland rasped, “I’m glad you asked me that.”

Always, always, they were glad Jack had asked.

“As you may remember, when
A Friend Indeed
came out in ’79—as you may remember, it went to number one on the bestseller list—something I’ll never forget. Heh. I don’t know if anybody’s ever said this, but your first best-seller is like your first kid—you love it to death, you know, it’s always going to be your favorite. But anyway, as you may remember, in
A Friend Indeed
(in which, by the way, I spoke to the problem of feminine depression) I spoke there of the special role that women must play in meeting the Challenge of the Eighties.”

“And what was that role?”

“Jack, that role was a caring one.”

“A caring role.”

Jack Strom was hard on best-selling authors, shaming them with his extraordinarily mellifluous voice. He’d been hosting afternoon talk shows for as long as Barbara could remember, for twenty
years easily, and his voice never changed. Did one’s face ever change?

“…I’m glad you asked me that, too, Jack, because it so happens that I think the Fifth Amendment’s protection of religious freedom is this country’s most precious resource. I think what we’re witnessing in these cults is a cry for love on a mass scale. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this before, but at the center of every, and I mean every, religion, there’s a doctrine of caring, be it Eastern, be it Western, I don’t care. And I think—I truly believe—that there’s a middle ground we’re all striving to reach together.”

Profound silence.

“Dr. Mickey McFarland, author of
You and Only You
. We’ll get to the phone lines right after this message.”

Mohnwirbel had stepped sideways into view in the back yard as he followed the ivy beds with his rake. There was enough ivy, enough property, to keep him raking all day long and the next day too. He’d had his finest hour a week ago, when photographers from
House
magazine had come to take pictures of the lawn and garden. It was the first time in eleven years that Barbara had seen Mohnwirbel agitated. He’d stood in the middle of the back yard like a dog amid angry bees, with an all-encompassing concern, menaced by squirrels that dropped sticks and trees that shed leaves.

“Hello, you’re on the air.”

Barbara measured butter.

“Dr. McFarland?”

“He’s listening. Go right ahead.”

“Doctor, my name is Sally.”

“…Do you have a question or comment for the doctor?”

“I’m listening, Sally.”

She opened the sugar bin. She was struck by the—what?—of white sugar. The futility. She applied the steel scoop.

In an average week, she read four books. At the library she catalogued four hundred of them. She went out once to her exercise class, and three times to play tennis. In an average week she made six breakfasts, packed five lunches, and cooked six dinners. She put a hundred miles on the car. She stared out windows for forty-five minutes. She ate lunch in restaurants three times, once with Audrey
and various fractions of twice with Jill Montgomery, Bea Meisner, Lorri Wulkowicz (her last good college friend), Bev Wismer, Bunny Hutchinson, Marilyn Weber, Biz DeMann, Jane Replogle, sundry librarians and many occasionals. She spent six hours in retail stores, one hour in the shower. She slept fifty-one hours. She watched nine hours of television. She spoke with Betsy LeMaster on the phone two times. She spoke with Audrey 3.5 times. She spoke with other friends fourteen times altogether. The radio played all day long.

“Six three three, forty-nine hundred is our number. If you’re calling from Illinois it’s eight four two, eleven hundred. Hello, your question or comment for Dr. McFarland?”

With the spatula she shaved smears of creamed butter off the sides of the mixing bowl. She shuttled buttermilk and eggs from the refrigerator to the counter and cracked the eggs into the smallest of the nesting bowls. Tossing the shells in the sink, she thought of Martin. He wouldn’t have discarded the shells so quickly. He would have run his index finger around the inside to loosen the last, clinging globs of white. She saw him do it when he scrambled the eggs on Sundays.

In the first weeks of their marriage she’d dropped a twice-read newspaper into a wastebasket and he’d retrieved it. “These are useful,” he said.

He never used them. He turned off the hot water while he soaped his hands. He put bricks in the toilet tank. The old house on Algonquin Place was lit largely by 40-watt bulbs. He burned the barbecue charcoal twice. If she threw out old
Time
magazines he sulked or raged. He pocketed matchbooks from restaurant ashtrays. When he watered the grass, he laid leaky hose joints over shrubs, not concrete, so the shrubs would get a little drink.

He conserved. But his conservatism was personal, perverse almost. When he was trying to keep his workers out of the unions twenty years ago, the city press could hardly believe that Barbara’s father had decided to represent him. At the time, everyone from the Teamsters to the roofers was striking Martin, and strikes were spiraling out into sympathetic businesses. Normally her father would never have touched a case like this (one of his specialties was workmen’s compensation), but it was difficult to say no to a com
pany president who marched into paneled offices in boondockers and khaki work pants. Martin’s issue with the unions was personal, not ideological. He seemed astonished to be the cause of general havoc, and seemed to think it only natural when, with her father’s help, he won the suit. And when he turned up at her parents’ Fourth of July party, Barbara noticed him.

She’d just graduated from college, and she had a fellowship to study physics at Washington U. In less than a year, though, she’d given it up and married Martin. She didn’t need science to set her apart, not when she had Martin Probst. She liked to see him at symphony intermissions chatting with her old Mary Institute acquaintances. (“You see the trombones?” he’d ask. “I love trombones.”) She liked to see him rock-and-roll dancing with her college friends. At charity balls he searched out the practicing engineers and talked about box girders and revetments and concrete piles while chiffon and silk charmeuse swept insubstantially by. She liked to be around him.

One Sunday afternoon about three years after they were married, he took Barbara on a tour of the Arch, which hadn’t opened to the public yet. He unlocked two gates, a metal door, another gate, another door, and stopped by a galvanized-iron control box. He was moving with a swagger that Barbara didn’t recognize, and casting disdainful glances at the work. He threw switches by the handful. In the receding triangular space above them, lights went up on stairways and cables and the inverted T’s that anchored the tram tracks to the walls. Martin didn’t look at her. He might have been an antebellum Southern gentleman losing his sweetness in a review of his slaves. Pulling hard on a railing, as if daring it to snap, he started up the stairs. She followed, hating him somewhat. She smelled cold grease, cold welds, thirsty concrete. Echoes lingered, buzzing, in the thin iron steps. When the stairs brought her close to the walls she ran her hand over the hard carbon steel, over drips of set concrete, over code numbers inscribed by hand, and saw a blue luster hiding in the burrs and ripples. Abruptly the stairway veered to the opposite side of the tram tracks, and veered back, adjusting to dreadful alterations of the vertical.