The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (35 page)
Read The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Online
Authors: Jonathan Franzen
Nearby, Jammu is studying assessment maps of North St. Louis. She is sick, but she has an idea. St. Louis streets are wide, and outside of downtown the blocks are small. In a six-by-one-block area the five enclosed cross streets can take up as much as 20 percent of the total acreage. As long as they provide access to individual homes, they have to be kept and maintained at considerable expense. But with larger developments replacing homes, developments like the Ripley complex and the Allied Laboratories and the Northway townhouses, the streets have in some cases become downright nuisances. The city can sell them. It stands to make millions.
Unfortunately, Jammu’s eyes are not functioning as they
should. The skewed streets are parallel in her eyes, the varied densities uniform. It’s an effect familiar to her from staring long and hard at something, when the mind tidies up the random patterns of reality. But now, no matter how she blinks or turns her head, no matter how close she brings her eyes to the map, all she sees are perfect crossword-puzzle grids.
It’s the cold. It’s the meth. It’s her exhaustion. It’s the dry weather, the barbed shafts shooting from her sinuses. When she inhales, her lungs crinkle and croak like waxed-paper milk cartons.
She shuts her eyes and leans back against the wall, stretching her legs until her feet are buried in the pillows. She has another dinner with the mayor tomorrow, and a meeting with Singh after that. In the meantime she has to get some sleep, to flush her mind of the hundred local faces she sees each week, faces lean, porky, greedy, lusting, humble, cold, the five hundred Americans who squeeze into a week of hers and demand a thousand answers, remedies and favors. But when she did manage to fall asleep this afternoon she immediately dreamed the phone was ringing. She opened her eyes and answered.
“Some bad news, Chief. On the surface of it.”
“Tell me.”
“Barbara Probst reacted negatively.”
“Maybe it’s temporary.”
“No. She means it. I tried a variety of approaches. She won’t see me again.”
Singh asked Jammu to check it out for herself, and though she was tired and had vowed never again to subject herself to the voice of Barbara Probst, she hooked into the modem at the recording center and listened to segments edited through 3:00 p.m. today. Singh was right. It sounded bad. The Probsts were having a putrid, corny, weepy holiday, God and sinner reconciled, and Barbara Probst more clearly than ever an agent for the Thought Police, appealing to her husband with a calculated tremolo, wearing down his resistance with her self-help honesty and putting him to sleep with the notion that everything was fine. The instrument of repression: “love.”
Jammu called Singh. “Nice going. They’re happier than they’ve been in years.”
“On the surface, yes. But I’ve thought it over—”
“Probst isn’t even arguably in the State and it’s almost January.”
“As I was saying, I’ve thought it over and I think we’re all right, because Probst will never trust her now. She pressed her luck, she mentioned me. She’s still nailed.”
Maybe. But with so much talent, so much investment, so much technique and theory trained on such a very few men in St. Louis, Jammu thinks it’s reasonable to demand resounding victories. She owns the scalps of Meisner, Struthers, Hammaker, Murphy, Wesley, Hutchinson, and she has liens on all the rest—except Probst’s.
Singh told her to cheer up. He read her a reference from a poem in
The New Yorker
:
For Gary Carter, Frank Perdue
,
Bono Vox and S. Jammu!
Then he hung up.
Tossing aside the assessment map, she goes to the bathroom and pisses a trickle. Her urine burns her as it leaves her. On the left-hand faucet of the bathtub a roach is simulating paralysis, unmoved by the funk beat coming down the pipes.
She flushes the toilet, and she is washing her hands, she is staring straight ahead into the mirror, when suddenly all the diffuse evil in the world has puckered into a single mouth and is blowing out of the mirror at her. The face looking back is a white one, a white face made up as an Indian. An American face is showing through the mask, and it crashes into the wall as she throws open the cabinet. Her fingers close on the thermometer. She’s burning up.
At 11:00 on Christmas morning Luisa put on the red wool dress from her mother which she’d unwrapped an hour earlier, Duane put on his previously owned pinstripe suit and an iridescent blue necktie, and the two of them drove out in the Nova to Webster Groves. When Luisa saw the little stacks of gifts her parents had just opened she wasn’t exactly sad, but she did wonder what she’d been trying to prove by not coming home earlier, especially since her father had decided to be nice again. He was about as self-possessed around Duane as he’d be around the Pope. He shook Duane’s hand and
bounded
through the house, doing God knew what, and returned and sat with them in the living room for three minutes, and then he
bounded
to his feet and said they should go. At her grandparents’ there was a lot of drinking and casseroles. Her grandmother gave her a dirty look before pecking her on the cheek and wishing her a Merry C. Her grandfather gave her a real kiss, and she thanked him for the “present,” which was the only word for a $100 bill. Auntie Audrey told her twice how nice she looked, which was agreeable. She shook hands with her cousins and allowed herself to be appraised by her great-aunt Lucy and her great-uncle Ted. Uncle Rolf had despotically occupied the bamboo chair by the fireplace, his legs crossed at the knees, his brandy glass cupped in one hand like a royal orb. He showed Luisa lots of teeth and she smiled and nodded. Then her father moved into the picture.
Technical difficulties. Please stand by. Her mother was introducing Duane to Auntie Audrey. “Yes, I
have
seen your pictures, yes.” Luisa wandered over and felt excluded, as always. Duane didn’t have to be
so
polite. But then he took her out into the hall and said, “Help, help.” They went together to see her grandmother in the kitchen. Her grandmother said everything was under control.
On the way home Duane sat with her mother in the back seat and started telling her the story of his getting hit in the head with a baseball bat while his parents were in Aruba. Daddy, instead of listening, spoke in a low voice to Luisa. He said he may have said some things on his birthday that he didn’t mean. He said he was under a lot of strain at work and Municipal Growth. He said he sincerely hoped they could see more of her and Duane, whom he liked.
“And Peter was out playing golf, so there was this unconscious eleven-year-old kid and no one knew who he belonged to, or who to call.”
Her mother laughed. “So…?”
“Did you have a good time today?” her father asked.
“Yeah, it was OK.”
“So I woke up in the hospital, and a nurse rushed over, and the first thing she said was
What’s your name?
Because none of the kids had even known my name. Somebody thought I might be ‘Don.’”
“You know, your grandmother hasn’t been well.”
“Oh, really? I guess she did seem kind of…” Luisa shrugged.
“I’d given them the wrong number. They kept calling and calling, and no one answered. So finally around ten in the evening they decided to look it up in the phone book. And of course we have an unlisted number.”
“Oh
no
.”
“And meanwhile, Peter is losing his mind, he’s so scared. He was supposed to look after me, and he has no idea, absolutely no idea—”
“And you understand that at her age she sees things rather differently from the way you or even I do. That is, I don’t think you should feel hurt if she doesn’t approve of your, your situation with Duane.”
“It’s OK, I understand.”
The headlights and highway lights began to reveal falling snow.
“But by now he’s not there anymore, he’s down at the police station.”
“Oh no, oh no.”
“Will you be all right driving home in Duane’s car?”
“We’ve got snow tires.”
“You’ve been driving it to school?”
“Sometimes.”
“And so finally it occurs to someone at the hospital to call the police—”
“What’s this?” her father asked over his shoulder.
The vacation week passed slowly. Duane said he liked her parents but he liked her better. They went out once with Sara and Edgar. They went skating. They went sledding, and got mashed together when they crashed. Then on the day before New Year’s Eve Duane went out to Webster to see two high-school friends of his, and Luisa stayed behind in the apartment to type up all her applications.
As soon as she saw Duane drive away she started walking back and forth through the kitchen and living room and bedroom. She’d never spent a whole day by herself in the apartment, and it was obvious that she wouldn’t be working on her applications. She remembered how when her parents used to leave her alone in the house she would feel a deep pang of boredom and irresponsibility the moment they were out the door, and before she could do any of the things she’d thought she would be doing, she had to rifle their drawers, or try their liquor, or fill the bathtub to the very brim and take a bath, which her father said was criminally wasteful.
The first thing she did was smoke one of Duane’s cigarettes. The next thing she did was go to the bedroom and look for his journal. Usually he left it in his knapsack with some of his camera equipment, but today the knapsack was empty. She looked through all the books along the baseboard—the notebook had a gray spine like an ordinary book—but it wasn’t there either. She went through his drawers in their dresser, and then through all his prints and printing paper, and then through all the clothes in the closet. She even looked in his empty suitcases. The journal wasn’t anywhere.
She had just about concluded that he’d put it in the car without her noticing, when, just to be sure, she lifted their mattress off the floor. And there it was.
The fact that he’d tried to hide it made it much more horrible and interesting that she was going to read it.
She lay down on the mattress and started looking for her name. She was immediately disappointed. The last dated entry was October 6, two weeks before she’d met him. After that there were only phrases and prices and doodles, picture ideas and sentences he’d copied down from bulletin boards and books. Her name wasn’t mentioned once.
She was glad he wasn’t there to see the look on her face. She was quite annoyed. Her reasons were different now, but she decided to keep reading. The first entries were from August.
Last night we saw “A Chorus Line” at the Muny Opera and sat with 5000 giants shaking half-pint cartons of limeade and lemonade and pushing straws out of the paper wrappers. Every last one of those people looked like an American tourist.
He wrote the way he talked. Or maybe he talked the way he wrote. There was a lot of stuff about starting school at Wash U. which Luisa only skimmed.
Connie didn’t sleep alone last night.
Connie? Who was Connie? Luisa looked at the previous entry and saw that Connie was someone in his dorm.
I heard the whole scene, all the many noises she made. Usually she speaks from her throat (when she condescends to speak to me at all) but last night the noises came from much lower down. (I don’t see what’s so wrong with me. I suspect she’d like me if I had a card that proved my age was 35.) The thumping went on forever. It was after midnight, the libraries closed. I went and knocked on Tex’s door. Nobody home.
There were pages and pages about his parents and some neighbor of theirs, and then a very long entry from October 1.
…I noticed Tex (his real name is Chris) in a corner with two girls whose eye make-up made them look like hornets. I could see he was thrilling them with his rattlesnake story, or the one about the Quaalude freak at the Van Halen concert:
Curled up inside the woofer and went to sleep.
Around eleven the music improved. They played a long string of songs in minor keys, “Born Under Punches,” “Computer Blue,” “Guns of Brixton,” plus that ten-minute Eurythmics thing. And when you’re dancing to a tape & the music is so loud that it’s the only sound in your ears, you wonder:
where are these voices I bear?
They aren’t in anyone’s throat, they aren’t in the speakers, they’re in your head & they sound like the voices of the dead. They make you pity yourself for being alive. They make you sad, these songs between your ears that could stop at the flip of a switch. Because the world itself could go out, like a light, at any moment. The whole world could die like a single person used to. That’s what the nuclear age is: the objectification of the terror of total subjectivity. You know you can die any day. You know the world can die.
Tex tapped me on the shoulder. “You know any of these people?”
I shook my head.
“Then let’s bag it.”
The two girls and I followed him upstairs and out into the rain. Their names were Jill & Danielle, seniors at John Burroughs. Tex put them in the back seat of his Eldorado, me in front. We drove to a bar called Dexter’s, where Jill wanted to dance, or try to & Tex obliged her. Danielle said her feet hurt, which I could believe. I saw some blood around the rim of one of her high heels. We were standing in a noisy crowd near the cash register. I told her I’d gone to school for a year in Germany. She told me she had a horse whose name was Popsy.
Does it make any sense that what I nonetheless wanted most of all was to go to bed with her? But she went off somewhere, I really don’t know where, and Darshan offered to buy
me a drink. I said sure. I’d never spoken to an Indian before. He was thirty maybe. When I said I was a student he said he was too. I was smoking Marlboros, he was smoking cloves & when I talked about the Phillips he understood, he knew it all, he drew my own conclusions. He
liked
me. He said: “That’s the center of it, isn’t it. People smoke cigarettes even though they are known to be dangerous.”
When the bar closed we drove to his apartment, which was down in a bad neighborhood off Delmar. The streets in the rain were black and shiny. Inside, at the end of a long hall of closed doors, was a room with persian rugs on the floor, a rug on the wall & not much else. He went to the kitchen to make tea. I lay back on the rugs & sank into them. The radiator ticked as the heat came on. I remember concentrating on the ticking. I was fairly drunk, but the tea was good and suddenly, or maybe half an hour or an hour later, I was sinking into the rugs & my clothes were all off & the radiator was ticking again. Everything was one temperature.
Luisa skimmed a few pages, her eyes just bouncing off the words. Her heart sounded like a heavy person tromping through the apartment upstairs.
When each one ends I immediately want another. But that’s not right. When each one
begins
, before I even
light it
, I’m already wanting the next one. As much as I want to see him again.
She skipped a few more pages.
…I left at six sharp in the rain, I went down Delmar and up two flights of stairs and knocked on the door. I saw his twinkling eyes on the back of my hand like Marley’s ghost: knock knock knock (echoing the tick tick tick) but the door was unlocked. I walked right in. Six doors were wide open & every room was empty, stripped bare except for rolls of carpet. He was gone. I left the building but I hadn’t gotten very far, just a block in fact, when I met two people I knew like brothers from ten years
of imagining them who wanted my wallet. Well, no wallet, no camera, no $20, nothing. They laughed little bitter laughs, turned away & then turned back & hit me twice, one in the mouth, two in the eye, & left me kneeling there not thirty steps from the bus stop of epiphanous fame, so embarrassed I almost wished they’d pulled a trigger to save me from standing up. But I stood up & I was thinking ONE THING, which was: Goodness gracious, I must trot home and write about this.
Luisa put the notebook down and went and looked out the window at the street, where cars with black windows were parked crookedly between snowmounds. All the blood was draining from her head. She pictured Duane in the strong arms of a man, the dark arms of an Indian man. She could see it but she couldn’t believe it. Kissing a man, rolling naked on the floor with a man. It just didn’t seem like something the Duane she knew would do. But he’d done it. And that was why he’d gone to Dexter’s on the night Luisa met him: he was looking for the man. Not for her, not for anybody like her: for him.
She thought about this for a while. Then she put the notebook back under the mattress and stirred some of her clothes into the blankets, and went and smoked another cigarette in the kitchen.
The telephone rang. She knocked over the chair she was sitting on, but it was only her mother. Would she and Duane like to come out and have lunch with them tomorrow?
“Sure,” Luisa said. “He’s out there now, but—But I’m not. So yes.”
Three hours later she had the kitchen table covered with application materials. She didn’t think moviemakers arranged their scenes any more carefully than she’d arranged the one that was waiting for Duane at five o’clock when he came home. She couldn’t hide the fact that the applications weren’t done, but she knew exactly what she was going to say she’d watched on TV if he asked what she’d been doing all day.
He didn’t ask. He was surprised she’d done as much typing as she had.
For ten more minutes she moved and spoke as if all her expressions and gestures required the pulling of specific wires, wires with
a lot of slack in them; her laughs were squeaks or groans and her steps were those of a bureau being walked across a room; but to Duane she was her same old boring self, and soon it wasn’t a matter of pretending. She really was herself again, and so was he.
Then it was New Year’s Eve. Stacy was having a party, but Luisa was mad at her for not having called during vacation until the morning of the party, and anyway, she and Duane had already made plans. They’d come back from her parents’ with decent food, more of her clothes, and a week’s worth of mail. Their apartment seemed tiny after 236 Sherwood Drive. The cranberries on their little tree had puckered, and the branches rained needles when she crossed the room to get the mail out of her purse. She was wearing a jean skirt and a white T-shirt.