The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (33 page)

The phone rang itself out, remotely, twice.

The weather changed. It generally did.

He was just waking up, by and by, when she confessed to being somewhat sore. He suggested an alternative procedure. She
shook her head. He let the matter drop and resumed the staple position, beginning delicately but intending this time to nail her as he’d planned to. She said he was hollowing her out. That was the idea. But he didn’t want to hurt her. He let her turn with him, sideways, and as they rolled, complexly interlocked, he began to experience perceptual difficulties. He was not immune to them. He accepted them, as phenomena. The present difficulty was a TV ghost, a negative image, a woman with dark skin and dark hair and pale lips who hid in Barbara and matched her when she moved without self-consciousness, but who swerved into sight when she erred, and made the right move for her. The forms were united in the rhythm of the act and in the lathered point at which they fused with Singh, who was a fulcrum.

University song of his. He was losing objectivity, and spent a few minutes in no particular place. His return was purely the product of Barbara’s labors. When he looked again the negative image was gone, and now he knew how complete his success had been, how impressive the results. He had her and he wouldn’t let go. He had his arms across her hot back, fingers buried in her midsection, fingers jammed in her butt, teeth on her tongue, legs splinted to hers, and the remainder a great number of inches inside her, spanning cavities and crowding ridges, and he came another time, into a newfound void, what felt like gallons.

They stopped.

A look of pure, lucid wickedness popped into her face, like a jack from a box. “Bye,” she said. “Glad you came.”

“Bye-bye,” he answered, playing along.

It’s the night before Christmas. In the west, in a corner of the sky just blue enough yet to make treetops and chimneys silhouettes, Venus burns with utter whiteness. Perseus is dizzy at the zenith and pierced by jets; Orion is rising above television towers; the galaxy is performing its nightly condensation. Downtown, as the last stores close, the last shoppers drain quickly from the cold sidewalks into their cars. Bells toll from an empty church. Steam that smells of corroded pipes gushes from the backs of office buildings, and the boughs of the Salvation Army Tree of Light bow and tremble in the wind. In the living-room windows of apartment buildings—of Plaza Square, Mansion House, the Teamsters complex, Darst-Webbe, Cochran, Cochran Gardens—electric candles are lit, and strings of lights turn the four corners of window frames and shine like Hollywood squares. Blinds fall and curtains jerk. There’s a preoccupation, an apprehension, a thing to achieve. Most people are involved, but not all. Sheraton bellhops witness the departure of well-dressed out-of-towners and drink Cokes. Two veteran newsmen, Joe Feig and Don Daizy, have stopped in at the Missouri Grill to share a pitcher of Miller and enjoy their kinship with the bartender, who is watching the waning moments of the Holiday Bowl on the house TV.

Down on the Mississippi, the steamboat
McDonald’s
(“
RAY
KROC, CAPTAIN
”) is shuttered and dead. Icicles hang from its permanent moorings, and snowmounds nestle in its plastic finials, golden arches, fluted pipes. Floes beyond it revolve and bob. Barge traffic is very light. How far this evening is from the heat and thunder of summer, when at dinnertime the sun is high and hot, and Cardinals take batting practice, and visitors rub their necks at the feet of the Arch, dripping mustard from their hotdogs, and the air smells like tar; how far this silence, these indigo depths, these cobbled plateaux. The Switzer’s licorice plant has given up the ghost. On its barricaded doors a sign reads:

SWITZER’S OFFICE CENTER
FOR LEASE
OFFICE AND RETAIL SPACE

The lid from a paper cup skids on a railroad crossing, hampered by its straw. Tinsel window dressings, bleached by streetlights, could be decades old. The people who are out, by the river, are those who can’t see. Even the police, Officers Taylor and Onkly, have their eyes on their watches, their minds on dinner. They get off at 9:00. The only action they’ll see in three hours will involve drunks, either derelicts or drivers. They circle a block and play their searchlight on garbage cans. The static on the radio is unbroken. Earlier, the dispatcher sang two lines from a Christmas carol and then stopped with a laugh. It’s the season of weariness, sentiment, and duty, except for children, and there are no children on the streets downtown.

Circle south. Past the Pet Milk building and Ralston Purina, hardy gentry relax in the rehabilitated homes of LaSalle Park and Soulard and Lafayette Square. Here, safe behind rows of doubleparked cars, Andrew DeMann and his son Alex are playing with their computer while his wife Liz feeds their baby, Lindsay. Alex, growing tired, has begun to pretend that games don’t have rules. Andrew gets strict and goes down to the cellar for wine. He breathes and his heart beats. He selects a bottle.

Further. On the Hill, a late-afternoon party in the home of Area I commander Lieutenant Colonel Frank Parisi is approaching the pinnacle of merriness. Chief Jammu has phoned in her best
wishes. Fifty policemen and their families are packed into five small rooms. Luzzi, Waters, Scolatti and Corrigan are bellowing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” in two-and-a-half-part harmony at the piano. Parisi is stirring fresh eggnog in the kitchen, admiring the fat swirls of rum. The card marked
Spiked
has sustained repeated dunkings. Young faces glow. The noise is perfect. More than a dozen squad cars are parked out in front, their windows ablaze with all the colored lights of the happy street, brilliant points melting halos into the snow around them on the bushes and gutters. Shouts ring out and large cars cruise. From overhead the neighborhoods look like streams of luminous plankton, twinkling in patches and encompassing dark islands of service and storage and repose. Cars speed along the sinuous drives in Forest Park. There’s a danger in exposure tonight. Everyone wants to be somewhere. Just past the city limits, a dented red Nova with the lower half of a pine tree projecting from its trunk is slowing on Delmar to make a left turn. It parks. Duane Thompson jumps out and unlashes the trunk latch and hauls out the tree. They’re to be had for a dollar at this hour of this day. With a spring in his step, a determined lightness, he carries the tree up the stairs to his apartment. Inside, Luisa is still on the phone. She was on the phone an hour ago when he left. She waves with her fingers. He returns to the car for the popcorn and cranberries.

Immediately to the north and east, in what the county imagination makes out to be the darkest, most crowded corner of the city, Clarence Davis sees terrible spaces and light. He was one of the last shoppers downtown. The
Messiah
plays on his radio, and the rabbit’s foot hanging from the mirror jumps at every pothole. From the top of unweathered aluminum standards, electric light the color of frost falls in brittle rays and shatters his windshield again and again. Spaces open up on either side of him where houses have been punched out of rows. Block after block, the light goes on without a tinge of yellow, without a tinge of fire. It overpowers the traffic lights, brave Jamaican colors, beneath which a year ago even on Christmas boys gathered, holding bottles, looking evil, and closed in the street a little. The groups are gone. In half a mile Clarence has passed three squad cars. They’re guarding nothing. No pedestrians, no businesses, just dogs and stripped vehicles. And
property. High fences run along the street guarding bulldozed tracts and plywood windows. Is it such a tragedy? Not many people had to leave to make this place a desert; maybe the city can absorb those people. But Clarence is scared, scared in a mental way nothing like the gut fear of murder he once might have felt down here. It’s the scope of the transformation: square
miles
fenced and boarded, not
one
man visible, not
one
family left. The hand that has cleaned this place is no American hand. No American, no Idaho supremacist, no Greensboro Klansman, could have gotten away with this. These miles are the vision of a woman’s practicality. This is her solution. And she’s getting away with it, and how can Clarence complain with his back seat full of gifts and these not even half of it? How can anybody complain? Only those with no voice have much to complain of. And by daylight, on a day not a holiday, these acres look different. White men and black men wearing hardhats and holding prints peer between houses, drive stakes, and confer with surveyors. Clarence has recognized faces. Brother Ronald, having trouble with his hat. Cleon Toussaint rubbing his hands. City government people pointing at future parking lots, future drinking fountains, future projects. Bigshots, the board members and figureheads, drinking working-class coffee from thermoses. Oh, plenty of activity down here. To some eyes it must even look pretty, oh, pretty damned good. Clarence crosses the line into a neighborhood. He sees more cops, but humans, too. He presses up his street and slides the car into the garage. Stanly and Jamey are still out shooting baskets in the light from the kitchen.

The city heaves north. Flashing strings of lights become jets as they drop to plowed runways. The Lambert Airport crowd is thinning fast. Hugs happen, opening like sudden flowers, in concourses, at gates and checkpoints, a blossoming of emotion. Flight attendants wheeling luggage are crabby. Taxis are leaving without fares. From her room the addict looks out on the air traffic with the uncritical gaze of someone viewing a nature scene, cows grazing, trees shedding leaves, jets rising, falling, banking. She lights a cigarette and sees her last one still burning in the ashtray. From a shoebox shrine she takes a long letter dated December 24, 1962, and reads it for the twentieth time while she waits for Rolf, who might, she thinks, arrive any moment.

Rolf is sleeping off a pair of drinks in his favorite chair at home. He’s dreaming of sewers. Endless, spacious sewers. Upstairs, Audrey has wrapped the sweater she’ll give Barbie at their parents’ tomorrow. She loves Christmas. With a scissor blade she pulls a curl into each of the ribbons and, humming a little, reviews her work.

Nearly everyone lives within two miles of the Ripleys. Sam Norris, his large house full of children and grandchildren, is moving from group to group touching them with his hands, placing them, and radiating satisfaction while Betty browns meat. Three streets over, Binky Doolittle is in the bathtub talking on the telephone. Harvey Ardmore staggers across his back yard with a huge Yule log, Chet Murphy pours pink champagne, the Hutchinsons watch the CBS Evening News in separate rooms, Ross Billerica throws darts with his brother-in-law from downstate. The home of Chuck Meisner, however, is dark. Chuck is in St. Luke’s West with a bleeding peptic ulcer. He’s been sleeping like a baby since he was rushed here three days ago.

On Friday Probst worked until 8:00 in the evening, and coming home he found Barbara looking hot, in light clothes, though the house wasn’t very warm. She served him dinner. While he ate it and read the notes on Christmas cards, she left the kitchen and returned. She moved along the counters and left again. She did this several times.

“What are you looking for?” he finally asked.

“What?” She seemed surprised he’d noticed her.

Distracted and small, she circulated for the rest of the evening, coming to rest only after he’d turned out his nightstand light, when she returned from her guest-room exile in a pale flannel nightgown, childishly large for her, and lay down on her side of their bed without a word of explanation. In the morning she made him French toast and juiced a quartet of blood oranges she’d picked up at a fancy new grocery in Kirkwood. The froth was pink, the coffee strong. She kept smiling at him.

“What is it?” he finally said.

“Monday’s Christmas,” she said.

“Don’t tell me. Luisa is coming over.”

“No. She isn’t. Uh-uh.”

“Then what?”

“Can’t I smile at you?”

He shrugged. She could if she wanted.

In the afternoon they played tennis together. His finger was healing; he hardly noticed it. Barbara horsed around on the court, laughed big hooting laughs when she missed a shot. She didn’t miss many. They were evenly matched, and he felt a pang when he thought of how much this little fact had meant to him over the years. But she wasn’t interested in lovemaking when they got home. She wanted to eat out and see a movie.

“Sure,” he said.

Halfway through dinner at the Sevens she began to give him a talking-to. It had the coherence of a prepared message, and she delivered it mainly to her broiled flounder. Luisa, she said, was eighteen now. After all. And just like some other people in the family, Luisa was stubborn. If these other people would only be a little more charitable, she’d be charitable in return, although she still might insist on living at Duane’s. She was OK. She’d written outstanding essays for her applications. She would probably have her pick of colleges. She was only eighteen, for goodness’ sake.

Probst was appalled by the crudity of Barbara’s optimism.

After breakfast Sunday morning they trimmed the tree. She did the lights, and he, who had a fondness for certain old ornaments from his mother’s collection, did the rest. For lunch there was beer, sardines, Wasa bread, cheese and deluxe Washington State apples. She played games with the paper wrappers. The sardines were Bristling at the suggestion that they opposed handgun legislation. The apples were Fancy and gave themselves to strangers for a price. Horse-radish was either a folk etymology or a false etymology, the distinction being one of those niceties Barbara had never mastered. She drained her glass and looked at Probst.

“Yes?” he said.

“I went to bed with the photographer on Friday.”

He saw that suddenly her hands were shaking. “Is this something you do all the time?”

“You know it isn’t, Martin.”

The horseradish sauce was edged with yellow oil. The news
was true but hadn’t registered in him; these were moments of freefall, during which his words were neither under his control nor under the control of a coordinating emotion, like jealousy or rage, that would have connected his tongue to his will, his brain to his blood. “Was it fun?” he was saying.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to make a habit of it?”

“No.” She might have said: What if I do? He wished she had. “Are we quits?” she said.

“You’ve been lying to me all weekend. You’ve been acting.”

“That’s not true. I just want this to be over, I’m sick of fighting you. You’ve been stranger than I have. I know you’re still in there. I want you to come out.”

He stood. “We’ll see.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going for a walk.”

“Can I come along?”

“I’d like to be alone.”