The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “All right, Martin.”

  “I think Luisa got more fun out of this than I do.”

  Her skin smells wet with tears and sweet with booze when he kneels at her feet and leans towards her. She comes down off the sofa and puts her mouth on his and pushes, strokes, bites. He shuts his eyes. It’s last year. It’s no year. He touches her ribs and shoulder blades, and feels both comforted and alarmed by the ease with which he can control his behavior, by the arbitrariness of attitude. When they have nothing to fight over, nothing to strain against, necessity flags. What does it matter what they’ve done? What does it matter what they do? The evening is free.

  An hour later there’s a carol outside the windows. The house transmits the tremors of footsteps from the front walk up to the bedroom. The doorbell rings. Probst kisses Barbara’s hair and stays to kiss her nose and eyes and fingertips.

  Downstairs all the lights are shining on the remains of someone’s party. The chorus of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” is fading, losing hope, but when he opens the door the singers take heart. He recognizes none of the faces, young and old, smiling up at him. As they break into “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” Barbara joins him in her robe. Even the children must know what the Probsts have been doing.

  Although the streets of Webster Groves connect with those of its neighbors, and aside from Deer Creek in the north the town has no natural boundaries, its residents experience it as an enclosure, an area where Christmas can occur in safety. It’s a state of mind. A few people leave Webster Groves for the holidays, but many more come to it, by plane or train or car. And landscape recapitulates personality. There are no open fields, no high-rises or trailer parks or even shopping malls, no zones of negative potential into which spirit can drain. All houses are bright, and none stands alone. All streets interlock. Webster Acres, Webster Forest, Webster Ridge, Webster Hills, Webster Gardens, Webster Downs, Webster Woods, Webster Park, Webster Knolls, Webster Terrace, Webster Court. The air is full of woodsmoke, but the sky is clear. Born lucky, residents guess. This is a home that feels like home.

  Even in the home of the Thompsons, Duane’s parents, creatures are stirring. They are burglars. They empty drawers onto floors, rip mattresses off beds, shoot flashlights into closets and cupboards. They have located the silver. They have spied a VCR. A heavy coin collection has come to light.

  Watson Road, né U.S. 66, is neither crowded nor empty. Oldsmobiles and other stately forms move along it at discreet intervals. Stopped at the Sappington Road intersection, by a Crestwood Plaza just lately closed for the night and tomorrow, drivers in neckties smile at other drivers in neckties, or do not, depending. As it happens, Jack DuChamp does not. He is musing. Elaine sits in the front seat with him, and Laurie and Mark and Janet are in back. They’re driving to Elaine’s parents’ for supper. At midnight they will go to church; Laurie sings in the choir. Jack thinks how it’s only a short drive down Sappington Road into Webster. He thinks it might be a nifty idea, between activities, to pay a short surprise visit to Martin, even though Martin has said they’d have family in town. The house must be full of relatives. Still, a quick surprise visit…The five DuChamps could act like wassailers, sing a song on the stoop: a joke. Maybe get invited in. Or did Martin and Barbara (God bless her) open their presents on Christmas Eve and not Christmas morning? Jack can’t remember. He has a great reluctance to disturb anyone opening presents.

  “Green light, Dad.”

  Jack steps on the gas.

  At this moment more than half the human bodies in St. Louis have alcohol in their bloodstream. The city/county average body temperature is 98.63°F. Lipid counts are seasonably high. Three babies have been born in the last hour (two of them will be named Noel) and five adults have died, three of natural causes.

  In a West End bar called Dexter’s, Singh has had two nervous drinks with a strapping young German on his way from Lübeck to Santa Barbara. Stefan is wearing a fisherman’s sweater and pants with leopard spots, a purple scarf and a cowboy hat. His hair is golden and the length of Jesus’s. He and Singh get acquainted in German, French, English, German; they like the rapid changes. But Singh can’t concentrate effectively in a place where he is too well known. He suggests a change of scene to Stefan, who repositions his hat and says sure. They obtain hot pastrami sandwiches at the 24-hour deli around the corner, and Singh soon has Stefan in his third apartment, fed and stripped. He takes the phone off the hook. He takes off his clothes. A quarter falls from his pants pocket. He flips it, and while it flashes in the smoky lighting, falling towards the carpet, he says “Heads or tails?” and Stefan giggles.

  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.

  12

  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.