The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (28 page)

Born in the very pit of the Depression, he had groped and bullied his way into some kind of light, demolishing and steam-rolling and building higher, building the Arch, building developments of the most youthful and prosperous nature, the golden years
of Martin Probst. Inside, though, he was sick, and the city was sick on the inside too, choking on undigested motives, racked by lies. The conspiracy invaded the city’s bloodstream while leaving the surfaces unchanged, raged around him and in him while he sat apparently unseen, uncounted, uninvolved, and it was right here, in this identity of his life with the city’s life, that he could see himself disappearing. The more he was a figure, the less he was a person. The more complete the identity, the more completely it excluded him. There were two Probsts, it seemed, and always had been; who else had run the camera in the delivery room, and who else was sitting thinking on this bench right now? But the personal Probst was disappearing. As his head had appeared fifty years ago, so he was disappearing now. He was a conspirator himself, as responsible for his disappearance as anyone else was. He let a childhood friend pester him, an old struggle with Barbara wear him down, he let anything and everything distract him, and meanwhile bugs were falling out of walls, personalities collapsing in the space of weeks, and everywhere Indians—planting bombs, teasing executives, dazzling the press and transferring stock and stopping traffic, like harbingers and furies both, storming back up the trail from the old Indian Territory, from which the Osage Warriors were telling him now there was no permanent escape.
I’ve no use for cliques
. It was a phrase of his father’s. The son should have said:
I don’t have any use for
. Nothing was safe from his xenophobia now, not even his own heart, not even the heart of his own city.

He heard a splash of water.

It was the old woman in red boots. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all,” she sang. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all.” She was swinging her legs, her coat spread open, and in a pale splashing flood she was urinating through the slats of the bench onto the polished parquet floor, gushing urine as if she’d been punctured. Probst staggered to his feet. “Lit-tle Miss Know-it-all!” She swung her legs, still splashing when he finally got out of earshot.

He wound up in Crabtree & Evelyn, a gift box of a store wrapped in subdued colors and drenched with scents that blended in an almost caustic potpourri. Unlike Barbara, Probst seldom lost his sense of smell. He saw brushes and sponges. Soap lozenges. Pink crystals. He was shaking all over.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Yes, I’d like to buy some bath oil.”

A woman with a greenish frost was smiling, trying to help. She looked simple and good. “What sort of thing did you have in mind?”

Probst allowed himself to be shown around. Usually he wasn’t so humble with sales help, but he wanted to be led. He answered questions about Barbara’s preferences. He took four different bottles, ridiculously many, but they were all flavors he’d seen at one time or another on the shelf by the tub. The more bottles he took, the more solicitous the woman became. Buying, he was calming down.

“This will be plenty,” he said pleasantly.

“Oh, I did want to show you one—”

“Thanks. This will be all.” He accompanied her to the cash register. Payment was an agreeable business. He used American Express. The woman spoke of snow. Much, he agreed. It would melt soon enough, however. As she handed him the form to sign, the telephone rang. She excused herself.

He stared at the words he had made. As always, he’d formed each letter individually, printing it. There were twelve of them, six letters in each name. The date was 12/12. Luisa was born on 11/1 and Barbara on 4/8. “Luisa” had five letters and “Barbara” had seven. Martin, born on 12/12, was both the average and the sum, and he was disappearing in the sudden blaze of schemes. Here the schemes were so perfect that there was no remainder at all, nothing left for him to do but die, his life explained.

“There you are, sir, all set.” The woman with the green frost was humoring him. “Have a good day.”

He tapped his card into its slot in his wallet as he left and slid the wallet into his pants as he entered the main hall. He had to get out of here. But he’d assured Barbara he wouldn’t barge in. He stopped in front of the little Johnston & Murphy store, where a
salesman stood like a penguin in shiny black shoes. Neiman or Saks? That was the question. Saks was larger, but the path to it led past the woman in red boots. Well then, Neiman it was. He remembered Sam Norris’s striped cotton shirt.

I love you, Barbara.
I love you, Barbara
.

That was difficult, but ultimately he could manage it, because ultimately he could believe she was finite, ultimately he might see her on a stretcher and believe that she was dead.

But I am Martin Probst?
I am Martin Probst?

There were limits—the speed of light, the moment of birth—and to pronounce his name to himself, to say it with conviction, was to pass the limit, split in two, and see himself being born. He disappeared in the crowd he saw around him. On his right was a rouged darling in sweat pants and pink running shoes and a long mink coat. On his left, two dowagers in blouses that buttoned at the neck were viewing with haughty distaste the places where they bought their gifts. Passing now, the pendular arms of a fat black man pumped affirmative glottals through his mouth. How easy it would be for a roving reporter, a Don Daizy or Cliff Quinlan, to stop these people one by one and say to each in turn, “I don’t want you to tell me your name, I want you to tell yourself who you are,” and for the camera to record the given face as the person did so, whatever surprise or discouragement crossed it as he or she confronted a world that was not a spherical enclosing screen on which pictures were projected, but a collection of objects to which the given person was dared to belong. It was a dreadful vision: in the mall and beyond, an infinity of carriers of latent awareness. The infection of the earth by seeing human beings.

But Probst had reached Neiman-Marcus and entered the dappled silence produced by serious shopping. He took an escalator, careful with his hands this time. He looked at the people around him in a new way: as co-conspirators. The General was right. His vision was too crude, though; he could only think in literal terms, in listening devices and docudramatic subterfuges. There weren’t any bugs in Probst’s house.

There were shirts galore. A line of rustic colors, woolly blends, by Ralph Lauren. Calvin Klein pastels. Outlandish Alexander Julians. Probst met the eyes of a deeply tanned man wearing frameless
glasses. The eyes widened a little. There was suspicion between him and Probst. Suspicion of recognition. Probst looked for his size, which was medium in casuals and otherwise 15½–34.

There weren’t any bugs. But there was worse, patterns too internal and personal to trace to a plotting human, too cohesive to be accident. It was a matter of simple arithmetic that Luisa should turn eighteen the same year Probst turned fifty. But why should this also have been the year that Jack DuChamp re-entered his life? Why not last year, or next year, or no year? Why had Barbara started smoking again after a decade of good health? Why had Dozer died? And Rolf Riplcy turned suddenly the soul of malevolence, and the whole city a thing of foreignness and menace? Why was it all happening at once?

There was an answer. Silky plaids, six or eight variations on a red and yellow theme. They made him want to own them all and wear them all together, to do justice to the spectrum of the designer’s inventiveness. He glanced into the face of a girl Luisa’s age. She replaced the shirt she’d been feeling and glanced back. She could have been a Hatfield and he a McCoy…. Ugly shirts by Christian Dior which were made, as was clear on the shelf, for men with round manikin chests and wasp waists.

There was an answer: if you looked for patterns, you found them. If you didn’t look, they weren’t there. Probst wasn’t born yesterday, after all. He knew there was no God, no conspiracy, no meaning; there was nothing whatsoever. Except shirts. By gravitation, seemingly, he’d found the shirts he wanted. They came in three colors, the maroon and black, a green and black, and a yellow and black. The latter two looked clownish, and another man already had his hands on them. The man had a mustache.
It was Harvey Ardmore
.

They scrimmaged. Angry looks and mutters of surprise and consternation. They backed off.

The man was not Harvey Ardmore. Probst turned on his heel and left Plaza Frontenac.

Substantial ramparts of snow ringed the parking lot. In the west the sun was setting, and to the south the lights were coming on in the windows of the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children.

After he’d stashed the packages in his study he returned to the kitchen. “I thought maybe I should go and see S. Jammu,” he said.

“Jammu?” Barbara compared opposite sides of the cake she was frosting. “What for?”

Probst reinflated all the little sacs in his lungs and tried, without success, to form words with the air he blew back out. In the warm kitchen, in the persevering warmth of Barbara today, he couldn’t begin to reconstruct the patterns he’d seen at Plaza Frontenac. He couldn’t think in this house.

“Would you like to lick the bowl?” Barbara asked.

“I’ll see.”

“Did you have the radio on in the car?”

“No.”

“I wondered if you’d heard about the attack.”

“No.”

“I think it was out in Chesterfield, at three or something. The Indians. You can turn the radio back on. I got tired of the repetitions.” She spun the cake, apparently finished with it. “Somebody was hurt but nobody was killed. It was at some kind of telephone installation. Rockets. Hand-held…rockets. I guess I wasn’t really listening.”

“Huh.” With a spoon Probst scraped frosting from the side of the bowl. Barbara was peeling strips of foil out from under the cake. She didn’t think much of Jammu. Sometimes it seemed like she didn’t think much of anyone. “I’m working on the agenda for Municipal Growth in February,” he said. “I thought we might invite Jammu. She’s done surprisingly well.”

“Surprisingly?” Barbara licked her thumb. “You mean, ‘for a woman’?”

“For anyone. But yes, especially for a woman. She’s very able.”

Able
. It was another inherited usage, and Barbara turned to him. If he’d become self-conscious, it was largely her doing.

“By all means go and see her, then.” She patted his cheek and pushed his hair off his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

“I think I’ll do just that. She’s remarkably communicative from what I hear.”

Barbara waited a second. “Is it still in your throat?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes a long way here,” he continued. “She certainly shows us up a little.”

“You’ll probably want to shower and change,” Barbara said. “We might have visitors.”

“I guess she comes from a place where women do this sort of thing.”

“I want to wash a few of these dishes, and then I’m going to get cleaned up myself.”

“It’s hard to believe she’s only thirty-five.”

“Martin.” She pinned his cheeks between her thumb and fingers and made him look at her. “Just shut up, all right?”

He wrenched free.

“
Please
go take a shower or whatever you need to do.”

He tapped the edge of a counter thoughtfully, preparing to leave the kitchen, content to let the danger pass. But it was too late. Barbara was pacing in a fury, snatching dishes and dumping them in the sink, unknotting her apron and balling it up. What was
wrong
with him? (She wondered.) He was turning into a monster. (She claimed.) She could tolerate his thick head, she could tolerate the silences, but she would
not
be insulted like this; she was sorry to act this way on his birthday, but there came a point where she couldn’t help it. (She explained.) Why was he standing there? Why didn’t he go change? (She asked.) Get
out
of here.

Probst frowned. “What did I say? I don’t remember what I said.”

“You don’t remember what you said?” She moved closer. “You don’t remember what you said? You
don’t remember
what you said?”

Come on. He’d heard her the first time. He smiled a little, and perceived that this worked to his detriment. The style of her pacing changed. She circled the kitchen with her hands behind her back, her brows knitted, her shoulders hunched, like Peter Falk’s Columbo. She stopped and stared at him. “Why do you treat me like such shit?”

“I simply said,” he said, “that it might be a good idea to go and see Jammu. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Just simply as a matter of civic responsibility.”

“Oh jesus.” She fell, sideways, into a chair.

“Now, what? I don’t understand.”

“Go take a shower. Go, go, go, go, go.”

He was not an insensitive person. If he thought for a moment, as he was doing now, he could locate the solid logical underpinnings of his actions. When he’d praised Jammu he hadn’t meant it nicely. He just didn’t want to be treated like a baby, to have his face patted. Barbara was “nice” to him, so that when the explosion occurred anyway he would be the one to take the blame. He wasn’t as nice as she was, but he wasn’t sneaky either.