The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “You can’t take pictures here.”

  “Why not?”

  “We’re not supposed to be here.”

  All around them lay hasty piles of plywood pouring forms and bundles of reinforcing rods, knobby and sagging. Duane’s sneakers made soft pings on the undamped metal as he ran up a staircase. Luisa thought of her parents at the movies. They’d gone to see Harold and Maude. She imagined her mother laughing and her father watching stone-faced.

  Through the iron parallelograms above her she could make out the W of Cassiopeia. To the south, two vertical strings of TV-tower lights competed in the night like the stations they belonged to. Trucks rumbled by on Manchester Road, and Luisa swayed in the darkness, and drank her wine, her eyes on Duane.

  The next morning she woke up at seven o’clock. Her father was leaving for work and then tennis, his Saturday routine, and she could hear him whistling in the bathroom. The tune was familiar. It was the theme from I Love Lucy.

  In the kitchen she found her mother reading the stock-market pages of the Post, her coffee cup empty. She was chewing her nails as she had every morning for the last nine years in lieu of a cigarette. “You’re up early,” she said.

  Luisa dropped into a chair. “I’m sick.”

  “You have a cold?”

  “What else?” She reached for a waiting glass of orange juice and coughed decrepitly.

  “You were out pretty late.”

  “I was with this guy from school.” She explained, in sentence fragments, what had happened at the bar. She rested her face on her palm, her elbow on the checkered tablecloth.

  “Were you drinking?”

  “This is not a hangover, Mother. This is the real thing.”

  “Maybe you should go back to bed.”

  She didn’t want to. Her bed was burning hot.

  “Can I make you some breakfast?”

  “Yes please.”

  She was in her room watching Bullwinkle when her father returned from the courts. He was still whistling the theme from I Love Lucy. His face appeared at her door, pink with tennis. “Your mother tells me you’re sick.”

  She rolled onto her back and made an effort to be friendly. “I’m feeling a little better now.”

  “Getting up is always the worst.” Daddy was sententious.

  “Uh huh. Did you win?”

  He smiled. “Your uncle’s a very good player.” His eyes grew distant, his smile false. Uncle Rolf always beat him.

  “How was the movie?” she asked.

  “Oh, very funny. A good choice. Your mother loved it.”

  “What about you?”

  “I liked the Maude character. She was very well done.” He paused. “I’m going to take a shower. Will you be down for lunch?”

  Sick of records and TV, she spent the early afternoon simply kneeling by the window, her chin on the cleft between her clasped fingers. The trees were in motion, and puffy white clouds were in the sky. Mr. LeMaster across the street was doing his best to rake leaves. A man in a blue van threw the weekend Post-Dispatch into the driveway. Luisa went down to fetch it.

  Her father was on his business line in the study, ordering eighteen beef Wellingtons for some kind of meeting. Her mother was baking in the kitchen. Luisa heard the rolling pin click and the cadences of the three o’clock news.

  The air outside was both warm and cold, like fever and chills. Mr. LeMaster, who thought she was spoiled, did not say hello.

  She unsheathed the Post and left all of it at the foot of the stairs except for the big funnies and the Everyday section, which had the small funnies. These she took back up to her bedroom and lay down with. She started to turn to the small funnies, but a picture on the first page stopped her. It was a picture of a black man giving the photographer the finger. The credit read: D. Thompson/Post-Dispatch.

  Luisa shivered. How could they print a picture like that? And so quickly? Duane had said he hadn’t sold anything.

  A FOREST PARK SATURDAY was the page’s headline. Other pictures gave glimpses of anonymous revelers, and in the background of Duane’s picture some kids were playing football on the field by the Planetarium. The lips of the man in the foreground were parted in derision. His finger was aimed at the unseen photographer. Shirts and Skins in the Park, the caption read. Benjamin Brown, foreground, has been unemployed since last November. The man, right, was unidentified.

  The man, right, was a hawk-nosed Asian in a turban, a passerby. He was glancing aside so severely that his eyes were all whites. He looked like a blind man.

  Eight hours later she and Duane were necking in the rain in Blackburn Park. When the rain got too heavy they went and necked in his mother’s silver Audi, which he’d borrowed for the evening. The windows fogged up solid. People walking by on Glendale Road couldn’t see a thing inside the car.

  Luisa was running a temperature, maybe a hundred or a hundred one, but she didn’t feel the least bit sick. It was Duane who kept asking if she had to get home. When she did get home, the house was dark; she was happy she was only an hour late. But as soon as she closed the front door her father ambushed her. First he scared her and then he was horrible to her. She couldn’t understand how anyone could get so pissed off about an hour either way. Before she fell asleep she decided to keep Duane to herself for a while, even if she had to lie.

  When she woke up in the morning the sun was shining and the air near her bedroom windows was much warmer than it had been the night before. After breakfast she told her mother she was going out birding with Stacy. She told her father she thought his pants were too short. Then she drove over to University City and picked up Duane, and phoned Stacy from a gas station and asked her to cover for her.

  In the middle of the big field in Washington State Park she spread a blanket and lay down. Half a mile away, further up the Big River valley, smoke was uncoiling from dying fires. Campers were pouring water on the coals, packing tents into trunks. For them it was the hour of damp sleeping bags and desolation, their thoughts turning to tomorrow’s practicalities while Luisa beamed in the sun. Her new boyfriend’s eyes were bright. He’d slept well, he said. He’d brought a camera, a larger one, a Canon.

  “Psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Birds like it,” she said. “Psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh. Psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh.”

  “What birds?”

  “All birds. They get curious. They wonder what it is. Look!” She pointed to a red-and-white flash in the willow grove.

  “What?”

  “Rufous-sided towhee. It’s one of my favorites.”

  “How many—”

  “Sh! Sh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh-shh.”

  “How many species do you know?” Duane whispered.

  “I’ve seen a hundred twelve this year. I’ve got about a hundred and fifty on my lifetime list. Which isn’t very many, really.”

  “It sounds like a lot.”

  “Does it?” She leaned into him and toppled him. “Does it? Does it?” Sickness and medicine made her feel spread out, a warm smothering blanket. “Does it? Does it?” She spread her arms and legs to mirror his. His hard-on pressed on her hipbone. They lay still for a long time. Luisa could see herself and how she lay and looked from a perspective that would have been impossible if her parents had known who she was with. At this very minute in Webster Groves her mother was working on dinner and her father was watching football. They expected her back before long.

  “Listen!” Duane shifted beneath her.

  Geese were honking. She rolled over and saw a V of Canadas heading south. She sneezed from the sun and wool dust.

  “Sit up for a second,” Duane said. He was screwing a stumpier lens onto the camera.

  “You mean gesundheit.”

  He lay on his stomach and took half a dozen pictures. “What kind of geese are those?”

  She turned to double-check.

  “Don’t look. Smile. Wipe that mustache off your face.
”

  She smiled at the receding geese. “Am I going to be in the paper?”

  “Smile. You’re a dream. At me.”

  “At you?” She stopped smiling and looked at him. “What for?”

  “So nobody gets the idea they’re looking at anything but a picture. I want there to be an implied photographer.”

  “I guess you’ve got it all figured out,” she said.

  “I guess I do.”

  “Is that what you told the Post-Dispatch?”

  “I didn’t tell them anything. I went down there with some prints and they gave me the runaround. And then yesterday morning, like, you’re putting me on the payroll? I thought they were going to say they’d lost my pictures.”

  “You’re really lucky.”

  “I know. You’re my lucky star. I can pay the rent now.”

  Rent? What a bizarre concept. Pay the rent. What a boring concept.

  “Do you like me?” she said.

  “What do you think?”

  “Why do you like me?”

  “Because you’re smart and you’re pretty and you came along at the right time.”

  “Do you want to go back to your apartment?”

  “Later maybe.”

  “Let’s go now. I have to be home at six.”

  4

  Behind the first tee of the 18-hole Forest Park golf course, the starter emerged from his hut and called two names.

  “Davis and White?”

  RC White and his brother-in-law Clarence Davis rose from a bench and retrieved their cards.

  “Twosome,” the starter said, disapproving. He fixed his eyes on his left shoulder. He had no left arm.

  “We play slow,” RC averred. “We’re patient men.”

  “Uh huh. Just wait till the kids up there hit again.”

  “We appreciate it,” Clarence said.

  Five or six groups milled behind them waiting to tee off. It was Saturday morning, the air already steamy though the sun wouldn’t clear the trees for another half an hour. RC popped the tab on a can of Hammaker, sampled the contents, and tucked the can under the strap on his cart. He removed the mitten from his driver and took some colossal warm-up swings.

  “You watch that,” Clarence said, wiping the spray of dew and grass off his arm. He wore black chinos, a tan sport shirt, and bearded white golf shoes. RC was in jeans and sneaks and a T-shirt. He squinted down the fairway, from the various corners of which the members of a young white foursome were eyeing one another. The first green floated far and uncertain in the par-four distance, like a patch of fog that the foursome was trying to stalk and pin down.

  Clarence was wagging his hips like a pro. He was RC’s wife’s oldest brother. He’d given RC his old set of golf clubs two Christmases ago. Now RC had to join him in a game every Saturday.

  “You go on and hit,” RC said.

  Clarence addressed his ball and drew his driver back over his head with a studied creakiness. Everything by the book, RC thought. Clarence was like that. When he was fully wound up, he uncoiled all at once. His club whistled. He clobbered the ball and then nodded, accepting the shot like a personal compliment.

  RC planted tee and ball, and without a practice swing he took a swipe. He staggered back and looked skyward. “Shit.”

  “Sucker’s a mile high,” Clarence said. “You got great elevation, say that for you.”

  “I got under it. Under it is what I got.”

  The ball landed sixty yards from the tee, so close that they could hear its deadened impact. They slid their drivers into their bags and strode off the tee. It turned out Clarence had caught a bunker. Good with his irons, RC reached the green in three. They had to kick sycamore leaves out of the way before they could putt. Already RC’s feet were soaked. When he putted, his ball resisted with the hiss of a wet paint roller, throwing spirals of water droplets off to either side.

  On the next hole they played through the kids ahead of them and took bogies. Finding a fivesome camped on the third tee, they sat down on a bench. The hole, a par three, required a long drive over a creek and up a steep, bald hill. The fivesome was pounding ball after ball into the hazard. Clarence lit a cigar and observed them with a very eloquent suppression of a smile. He had drooping, kindly eyes, skin about the color of pecan shells, and eyebrows and sideburns dusted with gray. RC admired Clarence—which was a way of saying they were different, a way of excusing the difference. Clarence owned a demolition business and had plenty of contracts. He sang in a Baptist choir, he belonged to the Urban League, he organized block parties. His wife’s brother was Ronald Struthers, a city alderman who one day would be mayor; the connection didn’t hurt Clarence’s business any. His oldest boy, Stanly, was a star high-school halfback. His wife Kate was the prettiest lady RC knew, prettier than his own wife Annie (Clarence’s kid sister) though not half as sexy. Annie was only twenty-six. In the three years since RC married her, Clarence had been “making an effort” with him. Sometimes, like when he gave RC his golf clubs, his friendliness seemed premeditated, a little too aware that RC had lost his only real brother in Vietnam. But Annie told RC not to flatter himself, because Kate would have vetoed new clubs if Clarence still had his old ones.

  “Hear about Bryant Hooper?” Clarence puffed serenely on his cigar.

  “What about him?”

  “Got shot in the head,” Clarence said. “Thursday morning.”

  “Aw, Jesus.” Hooper was a police detective. Drug squad. “Dead?”

  “No, he’ll make it. Lost a cheek and teeth, ugly ugly wound, but it could’ve been worse. I was by the hospital last night.”

  “How’d it happen?”

  “Oh, very routine, RC. Very routine. Some dealer dude with a weapon. Some ex-dude.”

  “Yeah?”

  “They slaughtered him.” Clarence shut his eyes. “And there was seven others in the building. This a place just north of Columbus Square. An ex-place.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Owner requested a raid, and after Hoop got hit his buddies fired tear gas. Place burned to the ground before anyone quite noticed.” Clarence turned to RC. “You wonder what the point is?”

  RC shrugged.

  “The point is Ronald Struthers owned that building.”

  “He got insurance?”

  “Naturally. Good deal for him. Something for nothing.”

  “Sounds like an accident,” RC said, finishing his beer.

  “Sure. It was an accident. But part of a pattern, brother. Part of a pattern.”

  The group on the tee beckoned to Clarence. He laid the cigar on the bench, picked up his 7-iron, and thanked them. After a few gentle practice swings he lofted a perfect shot up onto the green.

  The image of smooth Alderman Ronald Struthers in a three-piece disturbed RC’s control. He shut his eyes on his downswing and—under it, baby—hit a line drive. But the ball cleared the hazard and bounded up the hill. Clarence sank his putt for a birdie. RC missed his first putt by a mile. He missed his second putt. He missed his third. Clarence stood with the flag pin clutched to his breast, his expression as sad and abstracted as if he were watching another man drown puppies. Members of the fivesome cleared their throats. RC felt lawless. The rising sun was in his eyes, and his beer buzz made his arms feel about eight feet long. He topped his fourth putt. Once he was on the wrong side of par, once deep in bogey country, he started rushing, pressing, choking, and he cared less and less. When Clarence got in trouble he bore down. RC just said bag it.

  His ball was still two feet from the hole when Clarence said, “I’ll give you that one.” RC kicked it off the green.

  No fewer than eight golfers were standing around on the fourth tee. Clarence led RC off behind some overgrown evergreens. “RC, man,” he whispered. “You’re closing your eyes.”

  RC closed his eyes. “I know.”

  “Head down, eye on the ball. That’s standard.”

  RC spat. “I know. I just gotta settle down. You wait.” With a tee, he scr
aped strings of hardened grass pulp out of the grooves on the face of his driver. Shouldn’t be any grass on a driver.

  “Head down. It’s worth twenty strokes a round.”

  “So what about Struthers?” RC said.

  Clarence relit his cigar and inspected it professionally. Tiny pearls of sweat hung on his sideburns. “Ronald,” he said, “is much changed.”

  “He’ll never change.”

  “He’s changed,” Clarence said. “He belongs to our new chief of police.”

  “Where do you get that from?”

  “From the way he talk and the way he be. He’s like a robot, RC. He’s a hollow man. He’s got money from somewhere. The little office on Cass? Gone. He rented a whole floor in that place by the Adventists. He’s put on nine new employees since the first of October, and he ain’t making no secret about it. And I say to him, Hey there, Rondo, you win somebody’s lottery? And he get all stiff and say to me, It’s just commissions, Clarence, I’n breakin’ no laws.”

  RC nodded.

  “That’s right,” Clarence said. “As if I was accusing him of something. That’s OK, though. I got thick enough skin. But then I say, you know, your standard polite question: Who’s buying what property? All right? And he give me this look.” Clarence, demonstrating the look, squinted meanly. “And he go, Certain parties. Like I’m from the IRS, not from his own extended family. So I go, OK, Rondo, be seeing you, but he go, Wait a minute there, Clarence—and this is not the Ronald Struthers that’s trying to save Homer Phillips Hospital—he go: They be razing buildings something fierce next month. I go: That so? And he go: Yep. And I go: Who’s they? And he go: Folks that don’t like questions. And I go: I don’t like working for that kind. And he go: You’ll learn to love ’em before this year is out.”

  “Tell him to shove it,” RC said.

  Clarence shut his eyes and licked his lips. “I hesitate, brother. I hesitate. I got four growing kids. And you didn’t ask me about Jammu.”