The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (61 page)

Probst drove aimlessly, following the path of least resistance—straight through green lights, right at red ones, left when he found a left-turn lane empty—while he waited for the turmoil in his head to condense into thought and resolution. The defroster circulated strange perfume through the car. A feeling of deep evil had descended on him as soon as he’d written his wife’s name on the check. The feeling intensified his longing for Jammu. He was her accomplice, and he missed her. He loved that she had lied to him about Devi Madan, because it meant she shared the evil. At the same time he wondered if she’d really lied. Maybe she hadn’t realized the extent to which Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. That was it. Rolf had perverted the girl. Yes. And if Jammu was innocent, Probst would love her for that, too. Her childlike purity.

Way up north, on Riverview Drive, where rain blew like blue sand off the flat Mississippi and collected in puddles on the empty bicycle path, he turned on the radio. The many voices of the city urged him south again. He was guilty. He’d betrayed his city. Jack DuChamp had been right to hang up on him on Maundy Thursday. Now at last he felt that it was necessary to go to Jack’s house, to pay that long-deferred visit, to hear Jack’s judgment on him and see if it was final. He almost hoped that Jack could not forgive him.

A woman’s place was in the home. A gray Tuesday afternoon, the gutters gulping quietly, swallowing rain. Cigarettes burned in several ashtrays. A cookbook fell open to a cake recipe, everything in its place. Martin would be home, upset, at dinnertime. Men spent half their lives thinking women were a nuisance and the other half thinking they were special. Right now she had to bake him a special treat. The rest of dinner would come in good time. Men liked to come home and smell something baking and hear little splashes upstairs, a sensuous woman in the tub.

She opened all the cabinets and took out the spices and the
silver teaspoons and tablespoons and a colander for sifting. She found a bag of potatoes. They were covered with big white sprouts. Just like men, they couldn’t help it—they were
supposed
to act that way—but it could still be disgusting. She looked in every cabinet for the flour. Would wheat germ be OK? She unscrewed the lid and sniffed it and saw some tiny beige worms in the germ. Germs made you sick. She put the jar back and looked everywhere. What did flour come in? Every minute counted if she wanted the cake baking when he came home.

She ran down to the basement, where it seemed she kept many extras, but all the coffee cans were empty. There were piles of boxes spilling onto rows of plastic bags, metal wardrobes, wooden filing cabinets. Spiders grew on the walls, unmoving, like mildew. So many things to digest!

She opened a flat box of pictures in which she looked rather stern. She frowned sternly. The pictures were a manual on how to act if you lived in Webster Groves. How to hold your head when you got out of the car. How to kneel when you cut fresh roses from the garden. How to be a perfect wife. How to take a bath! How to frown in concentration when you baked a cake! How to smoke cigarettes. She had to practice right away. She ran upstairs and came back down with a package. She shook all the cigarettes out and looked into a nearby mirror.

When school let out, Luisa saw her friends Edgar Voss and Sara Perkins walking south on Selma, the way they did every day. She hurried to catch up with them. She was going to Clark School to vote.

“Wow, that’s right,” Sara said. “You’re old.”

Sara and Edgar were still seventeen, and to prove their irresponsibility they started grilling each other. Sara asked what Afghanistan was. Edgar said it was a territory in Risk, sort of an olive green. He asked her who the state senator from Webster Groves was. She couldn’t even make an educated guess. Edgar didn’t know either. Luisa didn’t know. But a ninth-grader in copper-framed glasses who was passing them on the sidewalk said, “Joyce Freehan,” and hiked up his books in embarrassment.

This sounded correct. “He’s her son,” Edgar told Luisa in a stage whisper. The kid jogged a few steps to put some space between them.

They wanted Luisa to come along with them to Edgar’s house to watch
Gilligan’s Island
and drink lime Kool-Aid, two activities that seemed to have come into vogue since she stopped spending time with them. She wondered what else was in vogue. Group sex? Riflery? They gave no hint of disappointment when they turned up a side street off Glendale Road and she kept on towards Clark. She watched them shoving each other, playing chicken with the puddles, and not looking back at her. It was just like the day before, when no one at school would comment on her hair, not even Stacy. In a bleak mood on Saturday she’d had it cut very short, shorter than she’d ever worn it before. She was positive everyone had noticed—she looked like a punk where three days earlier she’d looked like Stanford material—and it hurt her that they should be so freaked out they couldn’t say anything at all. Maybe they were being delicate because they thought she had emotional problems. But she couldn’t have had emotional problems if she tried.

Wet weather didn’t stop cigarettes from burning. In war footage soldiers smoked through the muddiest of battle scenes. Luisa wondered if anyone passing in a car now, any of her mother’s friends, would recognize her with her glasses and her hair like this, and the cigarette. It wasn’t really her friends who hurt her. She herself, when she got home on Saturday and locked herself in the bathroom, had almost cried at the sight. Her scalp showed white all over. Her lenses were coated with soapy light. She looked so strange and old and unhappy. But what really hurt was that the new style matched the inside of her. This was how she’d look on the inside, too, if anyone could see in there.

Worst of all was that Duane had come home with his cameras and said she looked great. She more or less agreed. She wasn’t stupid. She wouldn’t get a haircut that destroyed her looks. It just seemed unfair that the person who sympathized with her the most was someone she didn’t even get along with anymore.

“Light rain is falling,” Nissing said to Barbara in a calm, accessible voice. “We sit in this room like two lifelong friends, having this last conversation.”

Last? She raised herself onto two elbows. “What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you, but you should know by now. Can’t you feel? In this room that could be anywhere in the world when the rain falls and the afternoon is dark? You’ve said it yourself. You’re still as lonely as you were when you left your husband. Some things can’t be changed, and it seems that you are one of them. It was a happy dream for a while, when you’d broken free and everything was new, living in Manhattan or wherever it was, living with a man who understood you. It was fun while it lasted, until the problem of originality put an end to it and you became, conceptually, what you’d actually been all along: just another forty-three-year-old woman who’d left her home for a younger man and a life of more complete self-expression. Just another victim of the age, with too little youth remaining in you to dismiss your entire past as a prelude and then fashion another life. Maybe other women are braver than you, maybe their stories at this point are the stories of looking bravely to an uncertain and difficult future. But other women aren’t Barbara Probst, and you don’t want to be those other women. And if nothing else you’ve recognized that the apparent novelty of taking up with me and leaving Webster Groves hasn’t been novel at all. The emancipation will begin when you go home. You’re telling me, as we sit here, that you’ve decided to return to St. Louis. Admit it. That’s what you’ve wanted to do all along.”

“But not for any reasons like this.”

He slowed his words even more. “Are you saying you don’t miss your husband and daughter?”

She shook her head. “I hate this game. But if I’d been doing all the things you say I have, I don’t think I’d be making this decision.”

“While I’m saying it’s the easiest decision you’ve ever made.”

“Because you’re making it for me.”

“Leave me out of this. These are thoughts you might think. If my presentation isn’t perfect you should blame it on my not being in your head. I don’t believe I’m that far off the mark.” He
stood up and fished in the pocket of his sport coat. He came up with a syringe and a glass bottle with a silver cap.

“What’s that,” she said dully.

“It is immaterial. We continue to talk in our quiet room.” He knelt by her bed and laid the syringe and bottle on the carpeting. He ripped open a small packet, grasped her left forearm, and wiped a patch of skin with an antiseptic swab. She didn’t resist—but she did remember that if anyone had tried to shoot something foreign into her before she’d done time in this cell she would have gone down biting and kicking. Hadn’t she tried to run from him when he kidnapped her? Hadn’t she screamed when he drugged her?

Had she?

“Everyone has secrets,” he said, plunging the needle into the bottle’s cap. “They’re good for the soul. They’re a form of nourishment for the grimmer days. I have a feeling that for the sake of your pride you will recall only the brighter days we’ve spent together, and let Martin believe you’ve had the best time a woman could have had.”

She felt the needle enter. “You’re letting me go?”

“That’s right.” He held her hand ominously. “I’m giving you your freedom, though it hurts us both. There’s no place like home. A funny notion. There’s no place like home. You say it.”

Her blood ran cold. “What are you doing to me?”

“There’s no place like home.”

Already the room was turning. There’s no place like home. He was speaking from the other side, and a pounding heart moves poisons all the faster. This was her last thought.

“…Jack Strom. We’re very pleased to have as our guest Dr. Carl Sagan on the topic of nuclear winter. We have time for just a few more calls from our listeners. Hello, you’re on the air—”

“Thank you, Jack. I wonder if I could ask Dr. Sagan whether he thinks that publicizing this issue might not force the U.S. and Russia to invest more heavily in weapons like the, the neutron bomb. That is, instead of making war unthinkable, whether your research might actually be putting even more stress on destroying soft targets instead of on weapons that would, you know, start fires. Uh?”