The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “There you are, sir, all set.” The woman with the green frost was humoring him. “Have a good day.”

  He tapped his card into its slot in his wallet as he left and slid the wallet into his pants as he entered the main hall. He had to get out of here. But he’d assured Barbara he wouldn’t barge in. He stopped in front of the little Johnston & Murphy store, where a salesman stood like a penguin in shiny black shoes. Neiman or Saks? That was the question. Saks was larger, but the path to it led past the woman in red boots. Well then, Neiman it was. He remembered Sam Norris’s striped cotton shirt.

  I love you, Barbara. I love you, Barbara.

  That was difficult, but ultimately he could manage it, because ultimately he could believe she was finite, ultimately he might see her on a stretcher and believe that she was dead.

  But I am Martin Probst? I am Martin Probst?

  There were limits—the speed of light, the moment of birth—and to pronounce his name to himself, to say it with conviction, was to pass the limit, split in two, and see himself being born. He disappeared in the crowd he saw around him. On his right was a rouged darling in sweat pants and pink running shoes and a long mink coat. On his left, two dowagers in blouses that buttoned at the neck were viewing with haughty distaste the places where they bought their gifts. Passing now, the pendular arms of a fat black man pumped affirmative glottals through his mouth. How easy it would be for a roving reporter, a Don Daizy or Cliff Quinlan, to stop these people one by one and say to each in turn, “I don’t want you to tell me your name, I want you to tell yourself who you are,” and for the camera to record the given face as the person did so, whatever surprise or discouragement crossed it as he or she confronted a world that was not a spherical enclosing screen on which pictures were projected, but a collection of objects to which the given person was dared to belong. It was a dreadful vision: in the mall and beyond, an infinity of carriers of latent awareness. The infection of the earth by seeing human beings.

  But Probst had reached Neiman-Marcus and entered the dappled silence produced by serious shopping. He took an escalator, careful with his hands this time. He looked at the people around him in a new way: as co-conspirators. The General was right. His vision was too crude, though; he could only think in literal terms, in listening devices and docudramatic subterfuges. There weren’t any bugs in Probst’s house.

  There were shirts galore. A line of rustic colors, woolly blends, by Ralph Lauren. Calvin Klein pastels. Outlandish Alexander Julians. Probst met the eyes of a deeply tanned man wearing frameless glasses. The eyes widened a little. There was suspicion between him and Probst. Suspicion of recognition. Probst looked for his size, which was medium in casuals and otherwise 15½–34.

  There weren’t any bugs. But there was worse, patterns too internal and personal to trace to a plotting human, too cohesive to be accident. It was a matter of simple arithmetic that Luisa should turn eighteen the same year Probst turned fifty. But why should this also have been the year that Jack DuChamp re-entered his life? Why not last year, or next year, or no year? Why had Barbara started smoking again after a decade of good health? Why had Dozer died? And Rolf Riplcy turned suddenly the soul of malevolence, and the whole city a thing of foreignness and menace? Why was it all happening at once?

  There was an answer. Silky plaids, six or eight variations on a red and yellow theme. They made him want to own them all and wear them all together, to do justice to the spectrum of the designer’s inventiveness. He glanced into the face of a girl Luisa’s age. She replaced the shirt she’d been feeling and glanced back. She could have been a Hatfield and he a McCoy…. Ugly shirts by Christian Dior which were made, as was clear on the shelf, for men with round manikin chests and wasp waists.

  There was an answer: if you looked for patterns, you found them. If you didn’t look, they weren’t there. Probst wasn’t born yesterday, after all. He knew there was no God, no conspiracy, no meaning; there was nothing whatsoever. Except shirts. By gravitation, seemingly, he’d found the shirts he wanted. They came in three colors, the maroon and black, a green and black, and a yellow and black. The latter two looked clownish, and another man already had his hands on them. The man had a mustache. It was Harvey Ardmore.

  They scrimmaged. Angry looks and mutters of surprise and consternation. They backed off.

  The man was not Harvey Ardmore. Probst turned on his heel and left Plaza Frontenac.

  Substantial ramparts of snow ringed the parking lot. In the west the sun was setting, and to the south the lights were coming on in the windows of the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children.

  After he’d stashed the packages in his study he returned to the kitchen. “I thought maybe I should go and see S. Jammu,” he said.

  “Jammu?” Barbara compared opposite sides of the cake she was frosting. “What for?”

  Probst reinflated all the little sacs in his lungs and tried, without success, to form words with the air he blew back out. In the warm kitchen, in the persevering warmth of Barbara today, he couldn’t begin to reconstruct the patterns he’d seen at Plaza Frontenac. He couldn’t think in this house.

  “Would you like to lick the bowl?” Barbara asked.

  “I’ll see.”

  “Did you have the radio on in the car?”

  “No.”

  “I wondered if you’d heard about the attack.”

  “No.”

  “I think it was out in Chesterfield, at three or something. The Indians. You can turn the radio back on. I got tired of the repetitions.” She spun the cake, apparently finished with it. “Somebody was hurt but nobody was killed. It was at some kind of telephone installation. Rockets. Hand-held…rockets. I guess I wasn’t really listening.”

  “Huh.” With a spoon Probst scraped frosting from the side of the bowl. Barbara was peeling strips of foil out from under the cake. She didn’t think much of Jammu. Sometimes it seemed like she didn’t think much of anyone. “I’m working on the agenda for Municipal Growth in February,” he said. “I thought we might invite Jammu. She’s done surprisingly well.”

  “Surprisingly?” Barbara licked her thumb. “You mean, ‘for a woman’?”

  “For anyone. But yes, especially for a woman. She’s very able.”

  Able. It was another inherited usage, and Barbara turned to him. If he’d become self-conscious, it was largely her doing.

  “By all means go and see her, then.” She patted his cheek and pushed his hair off his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

  “I think I’ll do just that. She’s remarkably communicative from what I hear.”

  Barbara waited a second. “Is it still in your throat?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes a long way here,” he continued. “She certainly shows us up a little.”

  “You’ll probably want to shower and change,” Barbara said. “We might have visitors.”

  “I guess she comes from a place where women do this sort of thing.”

  “I want to wash a few of these dishes, and then I’m going to get cleaned up myself.”

  “It’s hard to believe she’s only thirty-five.”

  “Martin.” She pinned his cheeks between her thumb and fingers and made him look at her. “Just shut up, all right?”

  He wrenched free.

  “Please go take a shower or whatever you need to do.”

  He tapped the edge of a counter thoughtfully, preparing to leave the kitchen, content to let the danger pass. But it was too late. Barbara was pacing in a fury, snatching dishes and dumping them in the sink, unknotting her apron and balling it up. What was wrong with him? (She wondered.) He was turning into a monster. (She claimed.) She could tolerate his thick head, she could tolerate the silences, but she would not be insulted like this; she was sorry to act this way on his birthday, but there came a point where she couldn’t help it. (She explained.) Why was he standing there? Why didn’t he go change? (She asked.) Get out of here.

  Probst frowned. “What did I say? I d
on’t remember what I said.”

  “You don’t remember what you said?” She moved closer. “You don’t remember what you said? You don’t remember what you said?”

  Come on. He’d heard her the first time. He smiled a little, and perceived that this worked to his detriment. The style of her pacing changed. She circled the kitchen with her hands behind her back, her brows knitted, her shoulders hunched, like Peter Falk’s Columbo. She stopped and stared at him. “Why do you treat me like such shit?”

  “I simply said,” he said, “that it might be a good idea to go and see Jammu. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Just simply as a matter of civic responsibility.”

  “Oh jesus.” She fell, sideways, into a chair.

  “Now, what? I don’t understand.”

  “Go take a shower. Go, go, go, go, go.”

  He was not an insensitive person. If he thought for a moment, as he was doing now, he could locate the solid logical underpinnings of his actions. When he’d praised Jammu he hadn’t meant it nicely. He just didn’t want to be treated like a baby, to have his face patted. Barbara was “nice” to him, so that when the explosion occurred anyway he would be the one to take the blame. He wasn’t as nice as she was, but he wasn’t sneaky either.

  “I never asked you to spend all day in the kitchen,” he said.

  At this, her hands reached into the space around her, closing on invisible things. She caught something finally, and her fists dropped to her knees. “My life is in order, Martin.” She paused. “Sometimes I try to do things to make people happy. I don’t ask that they actually be happy, I only want a little credit for the effort, like any first-class citizen.”

  “I’m still not clear on what the issue here is.”

  “I’ve been saying for two months that I don’t like that woman, and you come home—you’re always coming home, you notice that? You come home and you act like you’ve just discovered her. Like the world was created on Monday, and you’re the first to notice. She acts like she’s the first one. She oh forget it. You’re hopeless.” Barbara’s eyes scanned the kitchen table, her head faintly echoing their movement as they followed the scurrying invisible things. Outside, a dog started barking. “But you know what, Martin?” She looked up with a puzzled smile, her eyes moist and bright. “I really like myself.” It was a different woman speaking now, a Barbara much younger. She smoothed her skirt across her lap, gathering the slack under her thighs. Then she sobbed. “I really love myself.”

  Probst no longer felt the least bit sick. When she sobbed, he got erections. “I do, too,” he said.

  “No you don’t!” She leaped to her feet and kicked backwards, shoving the chair into a cabinet. “How dare you compare that woman to me? How dare you compare Luisa?”

  Frightened, he pressed his back against the refrigerator. She was advancing on him with an index finger raised and her head turned to one side, as if he were flames or a bitter wind. “You better not try it again,” she said. “You better watch out. You better start appreciating that girl because if you don’t I’m getting out of here and I’m taking her with me. I love you, too, but—” She drew back. “Not as much.”

  “I’m glad we’re clear on that.”

  “You’re going to hold that one against me, aren’t you? I can see it in your face. You’re going to save that.”

  “Well, what if I do?” The volume of his voice surprised him. “You know I have a cold. I didn’t come home to fight with you. I won’t fight with you. You play as dirty as you say I do. You tell me to go. What, the pain is too great? Something like that. You’re like your sister. It’s all an act. I won’t try to figure out what you pretend you mean. I won’t play that game. You’re just daring me to go upstairs. I’m damned if I do, damned if I don’t. This is your fault. You were just asking for it.”

  “Well, for God’s sake, the oracle speaks! The sphinx has spoken!”

  “You cunt.”

  “Is this dignified?”

  He stamped on the floor. “You cunt.”

  Something hard, a penny or an acorn, struck the outside of the window above the sink, and Barbara shrieked. She grabbed his arm and half pushed, half pulled him towards the door. “Go, go, get upstairs, go.”

  He resisted. “Oh, I’m interrupting something?”

  Another object struck the window.

  “Go upstairs, come down, and be civil, or—” She looked at her hands. “Or I’m going to stick a knife in you.”

  “If I don’t kill you first.”

  They looked at each other.

  “Go!”

  He went. He heard her opening the back door and guessed it was Luisa, coaxed home for his birthday, maybe Duane too, and he bolted up the steps two and three at a time.

  Calmer after his shower, he took his time dressing. The registers poured heat into the bedroom and carried a faint smell of childhood, of early winter evenings when he was sent upstairs before the pinochle guests arrived. He felt chastened and young. He worked on his shoelaces. The floorboards were alive with the sound of news downstairs; he should have been watching it, to stay informed.

  When he did go down he found Luisa sitting in the den watching The $10,000 Pyramid. From the hall, while the television filled her eyes and ears, he had a moment to observe her unobserved. She was leaning to the left on the sofa, in a shallow slouch, with her right leg partially crossed over the left, held in place by the friction of her black cotton pants, and her left arm folded up between her ribs and the cushion. She seemed to have been arrested in a fall towards the screen. If he startled her, she would assume a more comfortable position. She was wildlife, not a daughter; he was seeing in the flesh, in a natural habitat, some exotic antelope he’d hitherto known only from pictures in National Geographic. The studio crowd groaned. She shook her head, once, as if shaking water from her ear. Under the pressure of her unawareness, Probst cleared his throat and saw, as she turned to him, what falseness was expected of him now. He was supposed to act like Dad in a television movie, to let the seriousness show in his face when he said—the significant gesture—Mind if I watch, too? He stiffened. “Well!”

  “Happy birthday,” she said, without inflection.

  “Thank you.” He took the chair across the room from her. “Mind if I watch, too?”

  “I was going to turn it off.”

  “Yes. It’s a dumb show. Here.” He turned it off. Barbara was blending something in the kitchen.

  “Well?” Luisa said. “Are you surprised?”

  “Oh, very.” He smiled. “It’s a nice surprise. Is, uh, Duane coming, too?”

  “He’s working.”

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “St. Louis Magazine wants him to print some pictures. It’s for their January issue and they’re due tomorrow. He’ll be in the darkroom all night.”

  “Oh really. You want a beer or something?”

  Her face and bearing underwent a mild death, a loss of vitality characteristic of Barbara. “Not right now, thank you.” Soon, at any moment, she would leave the room, and with an air of reproach that extended to herself, because she didn’t really want to go.

  “So,” Dad said, “he’s working, is he? That’s good to hear.”

  She nodded. “He still doesn’t make much money, though.” (Money? Barbara gave her money, and she had a credit card, too.) “I guess I eat too much.”

  “Sure, you’re still growing.”

  From the smile she gave him he could tell this was a good line, though he couldn’t have said why. He asked her some easy questions about her grades, and calculus, and transportation, enticing questions to lure an antelope closer, to accustom her to a more domestic habitat. She gave him another smile, and he was feeling more and more like Marlin Perkins when Barbara’s voice pealed in the kitchen: “Lu, you want to give me a hand here?”

  She was gone like a shot.

  Not as much. For eighteen years, in battles more vicious than tonight’s, Barbara had managed to avoi
d saying that, and now, needlessly, she’d gone and done it. A sportsmanlike sympathy made him reluctant to damn her for the blunder. But she would do the same to him.

  Luisa reappeared. “Mommy says we should go in the living room.”

  Probst followed her down the hall. When she turned east he headed north into the kitchen. Barbara was pouring frozen daiquiris. She set the pitcher down and without meeting his eyes kissed him hard, raking his neck with her nails. Into his ear she said, “I want to make love after dinner.”

  So did he. He always did. But he hadn’t expected this, he’d expected instructions or an apology. This was a threat. This was the big gun, her attempt to save the evening. And certainly it was attractive bait.

  “I wouldn’t want to infect you,” he said.

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s the same thing I had.” She spun to the counter where the daiquiris stood. “Do you want to take the brie in?”

  There were many presents in the living room by the fire she had made. The uppermost gift, wrapped neatly in newspaper, was obviously books. Probst claimed the last daiquiri on the tray and sat down. Luisa stood warming her back, her glass already half empty. Barbara sat on the sofa in the watchful pose she used to adopt when they played Charades at parties. The silence was made possible by Luisa, who had graduated into self-consciousness and joined them; not long ago, she would have been chattering. She sipped her tropical drink. Track-mounted lamps cast spots on the primitive still lifes. On Sherwood Drive the Probsts were in the jungle, and the flames and shadows vaulted up the walls and gave them a mystic depth. There had never been a moment like this before. The family had changed, and this could be either. Either the last of the old groupings, the last gathering, or the first of the new ones, the first of many. To Probst it seemed the room hung by a thread, and twisted slowly, the flames slanting and stretching. He was dizzy.

  “SO HAPPY BIRTHDAY,” Luisa said, raising her glass.

  “Yes, Martin, really,” Barbara loading her words with portent. He felt the concentration of her will on him, the reins of desire and threat. Her feet were on the floor. Her legs were somewhat spread.