The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (44 page)

“Evening, Ross.”

“Ross, for a while there I thought Mart and I’d be the only damn ones.”

“I said five,” Billerica said.

“It’s six,” Probst said.

“Horseshoes and handgernades. Tina, I’ve booked spots at Abernathy’s table for you and I with some other chapter presidents, Hoelzer, Herbert, Manning, DeNutto, Kresch, et cetera, et cetera. Martin, Hi’d sug-jahest you work the crowd a little and get yourself photographed.”

“That sounds fine, but maybe Tina should stay with me.”

“Go fish,” Billerica said.

“We’re missing John, we’re missing Rick, we’re missing Larry. This is yesteryear. This is a twilight zone, I mean it, I swear. I don’t know whose idea this was.”

“Habernathy’s sitting down.” Billerica led Tina away by the wrist, weaving through the crowd towards the food. Tina wandered back and forth like a towed sled as she followed.

Probst looked at his desert boots. He bit down on his cheeks.

Martin! Dave, sure, Dave Hepner. Yer looking real good. You too. I want you to meet Edna Hamilton, Martin Probst. I thought, no offense, I thought you were dead. (Through a window in the sport coats and pants suits Probst glimpsed Jammu in the midst of laughing faces, her cheeks flushed with the pleasure of a successful joke.) The Arch is growing on me. Me too, uh. Dave Nance, Shrewsbury. Super people really, super-duper. I’m sorry, I. Martin, pardon a sec, I’m sorry Dave, Martin, I wanted you to say hello to my son and his squirrel—Dave, this is Martin Probst. Of course. The Bison Patrol…

A local hush had fallen. Probst turned. Jammu was extending a hand, which he automatically took and shook. In her other hand she held the hand of a little girl no older than five. The girl was drawing on a drinking straw with all of her attention, dredging the ice in a cup. “Well!” Probst said.

“I’m S. Jammu, I’m glad to finally meet you, Mr. Probst.”

“Likewise, likewise.” He dropped her hand. “Who’s the little girl?”

“Her name’s Lisa. Quentin Spiegelman’s granddaughter. Lisa, you want to say hi to Mr. Probst?”

The girl’s cheeks collapsed around her straw. She seemed to be glaring.

“Nice crowd,” Probst said.

“Re-arc-shun-ary,” Lisa said.

“Kids.” Jammu smiled and took the cup and straw away from the girl. She was wearing a plain beige dress, lavender stockings, and black pumps. Probst felt underdressed. He felt a little dangerous. Jammu had the best of two worlds, the old pol trick of baby-kissing and the old female trick of caring for a child while a man stood waiting. He cleared his throat. “Well.”

“Don’t lose it, Mart,” said a voice, Tina’s, in his ear. “Oscar’s coming.”

Jammu looked up, and Probst put his arm around Tina. It was his turn. He put his nose in Tina’s hair. “I’m just about ready to write this one off,” he whispered.

“You’re Barbara?” Jammu asked Tina.

“Christina Moriarty. We just met.”

“Say,” Probst said. “Where’s Quentin? I’d like to
talk
to him.”

“I think he’s in line,” Jammu said.

“Re-arc-shun-ary.”

“Likewise, likewise.” Probst had no desire to confront Spiegelman. He turned Tina around by the clipboard and hustled her through the crowd. He had only one desire, and it was primal.

“Uh, Mart?”

“My name’s Martin, all right?” The desire was to get out. “You have a coat?” he asked, claiming his.

“Shouldn’t we head back? I left Ross holding my plate when I saw Oscar at the brownies.”

Probst frowned at her. “You need your coat because we’re leaving,” he said. “We’re going to go have dinner together.”

“You lost me somewhere.” She took her claim check from her purse and handed it to him as if she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She offered no further resistance.

For restaurants, of course, it was the busiest hour of the week. The Old Spaghetti Factory was mobbed. Probst and Tina each finished a pair of strawberry daiquiris in one of the Factory’s cat
acombs before the wall speakers brought the words, “Moriarty, party of two, Moriarty.” The hostess gave them a table next to a child’s birthday celebration. Probst objected, but Tina overruled him. She made him sing along when the child’s cake arrived.

Outside again, on the cobblestones of Laclede’s Landing, he paused to plan the next stage of his campaign. Tina leaned back against a lamppost patiently, like a painting on an auction block. “Where to?” she said.

He considered. He knew he could never say the words, any of the words, that might seduce her. An elephant couldn’t speak. But if he simply drove to Sherwood Drive, she would have to come along. “Let’s go get the car,” he said.

In the narrow streets they passed laughing young couples with faces smudged by drinking. Warm eddies of spring air mingled with the hot burgery exhaust of local grills. “I’ve discovered,” Tina said, “that the only thing I can stomach on top of a dinner like that is straight Pernod on ice. Trouble is—” She skittered a little, and Probst decided not to put his arm around her. “It makes me ramble. I mean really ramble. I suggest you take me to a bar and buy me a straight Pernod with ice and then cut me off. Take me by the shoulders and say, No, Tina, no. Billerica has a drinking problem. You can file that away in that silent head of yours. The difference between you and her, incidentally, is that she’s still at the Arena. She’ll stick it out, speak the speeches. I’m in love with her. I think we all are. Just shut me up when you get sick of this. I pretend I don’t know I’m doing it but actually I do. I’ve been told, literally to my face, to shut up. So you’re not the first, just so you know.”

“Feel free to shut up,” Probst said, stopping at the trunk of the Lincoln.

“The thing is, I try, and then I think of all the things I’m not saying. On the other hand, I never talk to myself when I’m alone. Am I to understand that we’re to have a relationship?”

He closed his eyes and opened them. “Is it convenient for you?”

Tina’s lips rolled tightly under one another, and her black eyes sparkled. A waning moon the shape of a football was rising above Illinois. Its light rubbed off on the nap of the fabric of her coat and lost itself inside it where it parted. Probst held his breath. Barbara
had actually left him. He was actually free to do whatever he chose.

“To tell you the truth, Mart—”

His heart sank.

“I just don’t really feel like it.”

The room was evasive. On the first morning, Barbara had awakened from the drugging she’d received in the car to find herself on a standard-sized mattress, on a fitted bottom sheet with the kitty-litter smell of package-fresh linens, her face aching where he’d hit her, and her ankle bound. This was New York.

Or so she assumed. It could have been anywhere. The skylight diffused a light that seemed to fall, not shine, powdery and pure, free light, unreflected by a landscape. Her ankle was locked in a fetter, an iron ring attached by a ¾-inch cable to a tremendous eyebolt anchored in the wall. At the foot of the bed was a camping toilet, which she used, and then retched over, bringing up nothing.

When she awoke a second time she believed the light had changed, but only because that was the nature of light (to change) and the brain (to expect it). The carpeting had the color and texture of moss that hadn’t been rained on for a while. Her suitcase stood across the room from her, by the only door, in the center of which was a peephole. A small framed portrait of the dead Shah of Iran hung on one of the walls adjacent to hers. The fourth wall was bare. That was the catalogue of her medium-sized rectangular room, the sum of its contents and features. With anything more, it might have had a personality; with anything less, it would have been bare, and bareness, too, was a kind of personality. She could only assume that Nissing was insane.

But when he opened the door and said, “Breakfast of astronauts!” she began to wonder. He handed her a tray bearing raspberry Pop-Tarts and a tall glass of Tang. His pistol was stuck under the waist of his bluejeans, half buried in his shirt. Through the door, which he’d left ajar, she saw that a black curtain completely filled the outer door frame. She asked where she was. Captive, he said. What was he going to do with her? They’d see.

He brought her three meals a day, breakfast always Pop-Tarts and Tang with seconds and even thirds if she asked; lunches luke
warm soup and Saltines; dinners TV-dinners. He watched her eat, which didn’t really bother her. At 236 Sherwood Drive, in the bedroom, he’d had to drag her to her feet by her hair. But when he’d drugged her, in his car, her instincts of flight and resistance had gone to sleep, and they had not reawakened. The pain in her bedroom had been terrible to her. Nissing’s physical dominance was complete, monolithic. She was happy to believe that further resistance would only feed his sadism, because she didn’t want to feel that pain again.

For a while she lived by natural light and natural time. When darkness fell she sat or lay or did exercises in darkness. She asked for a lamp and a clock. He said no. But when she asked for books and he brought them, new Penguin paperbacks, he brought a reading lamp, too. She asked for magazines, a newspaper. He said no. She asked to take a bath or a shower, and on the third night, a few hours after darkness fell, he came in, unlocked the fetter, and tied a black hood over her head. He led her through two rooms that she could tell were empty from the way his voice twanged in the corners. He unhooded her in a newly redone bathroom and sat on the toilet, gun in hand, while she undressed, showered, and put on clean clothes. He led her back and refastened her fetter. She was allowed to do this every three days. Every two days, after she complained about the smell of the porta-potty, Nissing took it away and returned it clean. Eventually she realized it was more than clean; each time, it was brand-new.

“We’re at Sardi’s, a ‘whim’ of yours, a kind of tourist thing. Those peas you’re eating are escargots in garlic butter. I’m savoring pâté with toast points. Three tables over, you can see Wallace Shawn waving his fork over a plate of spaghetti and talking with his mouth full. It’s Valentine’s Day. You spent the afternoon at the Modern on a bench facing a Mondrian. On your lap was a spiral notebook. In your hand was a black felt-tip pen. Everyone wants to be an artist. The thought was on your mind and it paralyzed you, the problem of originality, of individuality qua commodity. You’d thought you could start small, start concrete, describe a painting on a wall in the museum. You were thinking about the roots of modern writing, both literature and the other sort, my sort. Liberated men and women confronting the new art
and learning new methods of vision. But the only thing you were able to write was the letter T. A capital T. At the top of the page. You didn’t dare scratch it out, but what would it become? This? The? They? Today? Tomorrow? You felt the problem. You were thinking about me and my sort of writing, my facile typewriting in the study, in that favorite chair of yours. I was the problem.
I
had liberated you. You hadn’t done it yourself. An hour passed. In a stupor you watched the postures and paces of the visitors. A guard told you a little-known fact about that particular Mondrian and walked on. Now that a guard had spoken to you, you couldn’t stay.”

“This is very clever, John, but I’m trying to eat.”

“Is it my fault your story isn’t new? That piece of fried chicken is your prime rib. The last time you had prime rib—it must have been January fourth at the Port of St. Louis.”

All his statements about her were true. From the very first moments of their new relationship, when he’d given her a typewritten letter to Martin for her to copy onto her stationery, he’d displayed—flaunted—a criminal familiarity with her private life. He knew exactly what had happened on Martin’s birthday, three days before she’d even met him. She asked him how he knew. He reminded her that since they’d seen each other nearly every day in early January, she’d had plenty of time to tell him the story of her life. She asked again: how did he know what had happened on Martin’s birthday? He reminded her that they’d met in October when he came to photograph the garden. He reminded her that they’d necked and petted like schoolchildren in the leaves behind the garage.

“After the waiter takes our plates, I reach across the table with a velvet box for you. You think of your first lunch with me, my first gift. I say Happy Valentine’s Day. This time, you’re gracious. You open the box. This time, it’s a watch, a Cartier, with a silver band.”

He dropped a silver watch on her lap. The hands showed ten of two, the jeweler’s magic hour. She put it on her wrist.

“This time, you’re gracious, and you’re prepared. You give me a black silk tie you bought secondhand on East Eighth Street. We order champagne. We are the paragons of ostensible romance.
But we’re ruthless, almost trembling with cynicism as we go through the motions of an extramarital affair, the motions that every modern man and woman craves. Self-expression. Individuality. The youth that hasn’t seen or read it all before. The dousing of the fires of doubt with bucket after bucket of dollars. We’re united in pain—”

“This watch doesn’t work.”

“Dead? Dead? Dead?”