The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  Does it make any sense that what I nonetheless wanted most of all was to go to bed with her? But she went off somewhere, I really don’t know where, and Darshan offered to buy me a drink. I said sure. I’d never spoken to an Indian before. He was thirty maybe. When I said I was a student he said he was too. I was smoking Marlboros, he was smoking cloves & when I talked about the Phillips he understood, he knew it all, he drew my own conclusions. He liked me. He said: “That’s the center of it, isn’t it. People smoke cigarettes even though they are known to be dangerous.”

  When the bar closed we drove to his apartment, which was down in a bad neighborhood off Delmar. The streets in the rain were black and shiny. Inside, at the end of a long hall of closed doors, was a room with persian rugs on the floor, a rug on the wall & not much else. He went to the kitchen to make tea. I lay back on the rugs & sank into them. The radiator ticked as the heat came on. I remember concentrating on the ticking. I was fairly drunk, but the tea was good and suddenly, or maybe half an hour or an hour later, I was sinking into the rugs & my clothes were all off & the radiator was ticking again. Everything was one temperature.

  Luisa skimmed a few pages, her eyes just bouncing off the words. Her heart sounded like a heavy person tromping through the apartment upstairs.

  When each one ends I immediately want another. But that’s not right. When each one begins, before I even light it, I’m already wanting the next one. As much as I want to see him again.

  She skipped a few more pages.

  …I left at six sharp in the rain, I went down Delmar and up two flights of stairs and knocked on the door. I saw his twinkling eyes on the back of my hand like Marley’s ghost: knock knock knock (echoing the tick tick tick) but the door was unlocked. I walked right in. Six doors were wide open & every room was empty, stripped bare except for rolls of carpet. He was gone. I left the building but I hadn’t gotten very far, just a block in fact, when I met two people I knew like brothers from ten years of imagining them who wanted my wallet. Well, no wallet, no camera, no $20, nothing. They laughed little bitter laughs, turned away & then turned back & hit me twice, one in the mouth, two in the eye, & left me kneeling there not thirty steps from the bus stop of epiphanous fame, so embarrassed I almost wished they’d pulled a trigger to save me from standing up. But I stood up & I was thinking ONE THING, which was: Goodness gracious, I must trot home and write about this.

  Luisa put the notebook down and went and looked out the window at the street, where cars with black windows were parked crookedly between snowmounds. All the blood was draining from her head. She pictured Duane in the strong arms of a man, the dark arms of an Indian man. She could see it but she couldn’t believe it. Kissing a man, rolling naked on the floor with a man. It just didn’t seem like something the Duane she knew would do. But he’d done it. And that was why he’d gone to Dexter’s on the night Luisa met him: he was looking for the man. Not for her, not for anybody like her: for him.

  She thought about this for a while. Then she put the notebook back under the mattress and stirred some of her clothes into the blankets, and went and smoked another cigarette in the kitchen.

  The telephone rang. She knocked over the chair she was sitting on, but it was only her mother. Would she and Duane like to come out and have lunch with them tomorrow?

  “Sure,” Luisa said. “He’s out there now, but—But I’m not. So yes.”

  Three hours later she had the kitchen table covered with application materials. She didn’t think moviemakers arranged their scenes any more carefully than she’d arranged the one that was waiting for Duane at five o’clock when he came home. She couldn’t hide the fact that the applications weren’t done, but she knew exactly what she was going to say she’d watched on TV if he asked what she’d been doing all day.

  He didn’t ask. He was surprised she’d done as much typing as she had.

  For ten more minutes she moved and spoke as if all her expressions and gestures required the pulling of specific wires, wires with a lot of slack in them; her laughs were squeaks or groans and her steps were those of a bureau being walked across a room; but to Duane she was her same old boring self, and soon it wasn’t a matter of pretending. She really was herself again, and so was he.

  Then it was New Year’s Eve. Stacy was having a party, but Luisa was mad at her for not having called during vacation until the morning of the party, and anyway, she and Duane had already made plans. They’d come back from her parents’ with decent food, more of her clothes, and a week’s worth of mail. Their apartment seemed tiny after 236 Sherwood Drive. The cranberries on their little tree had puckered, and the branches rained needles when she crossed the room to get the mail out of her purse. She was wearing a jean skirt and a white T-shirt.

  Duane had on the Hawaiian shirt she’d given him. He was trying to slice some of her parents’ salami with his Swiss Army knife. “I never use the little blade,” he said, “because I want to keep it really sharp for that Special Job. But it’s too short. I’m taking the tomato knife under advisement.”

  “How about a pair of scissors,” she said, opening an envelope.

  “Fittingly,” he said, “this is the one holiday my parents do know how to celebrate. My father used to buy cherry bombs—”

  “Brown has not received my application yet! Has not received it! They must think I’m applying or something.”

  An airmail envelope fell out of a glossy mailing from Baylor. The stamps were French. It was a Christmas card from the Girauds. Luisa tore it open. “This is so nice,” she said. “Everything but a subscription to Elle.” Mme Giraud had written a long note on the back. “But Duane—”

  “Ai ai ai ai ai!” He danced and sucked his finger.

  “Duane—”

  “This knife isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

  “Duane, Paulette Giraud, her mother says she spent this fall in England.”

  He looked at her, his finger in his mouth, his ears wiggling.

  “Listen. Étudié depuis septembre jusqu’à décembre en Angleterre!”

  “That’s peculiar.”

  “But she called me.” Luisa read the note again. Could Paulette have come to the States without her mother’s knowing it? No way. Paulette was too stupid to do anything that crazy. But if she wasn’t in St. Louis, then who had that been on the phone? Why would anybody want to say they were Paulette?

  “Maybe Stacy faked it,” Duane said.

  Luisa started to shrug, but then she shook her head. “She would have told me eventually. Anybody I know would have told me, because that’s when I met you. They’d want the credit.”

  “Hm. Right. Yeah.”

  “This is so weird,” she said.

  Duane began to clear the table, working around her.

  “This is so weird.”

  He set out some carrots and celery. He set out rye bread, French bread, cheddar cheese, dill pickles, Doritos, dip. He set out two glasses and took the champagne out of the freezer. He wrapped it in a towel, peeled back the foil, untwisted the wire, and popped the cork.

  It stuck in the ceiling.

  “Hey!”

  They both looked at the ceiling.

  “It went right through.”

  “It’s just paper or something up there.” As soon as he’d filled the glasses, Duane got up on a chair and probed the hole the cork had made. Plaster fell in his face, and then something dropped out of the hole, not the cork, something metal. Luisa picked it up. It was a heavy, shiny slug with pinpricks on one side, like a microphone, and a wire dangling from it. “What is this?”

  Duane took it from her. “Looks like a bug.”

  “What?”

  “A bug, don’t you think? The FBI or somebody. This was always a student place. Maybe there used to be some radicals here.”

  Luisa climbed onto the chair. The cork came loose, bouncing off her nose. “The paint’s fresh,” she said.

  “I wonder who lived here before me.”

  “We li
ve here now.”

  “I kno-o-ow we do. But we’re not subversive elements.”

  She looked down from the chair at Duane, the homebody, who was brushing bits of plaster off the tablecloth and picking flakes of paint off the dip. Then she stepped off the chair and sat down. She’d just remembered something else. At Dexter’s on the first night, the night she’d met Duane, she’d been spooked by someone she’d thought was an Algerian. But for all she knew he could have been Indian, and he was actually fairly cute. She remembered how he’d wanted to talk to her but wouldn’t come inside the bar. How many Indians could there be who hung around at Dexter’s?

  Duane lit the candles and turned out the light. “I mean it’s obviously weird,” he said. “But it’s also obvious that it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “What about me?”

  “Or with you.” He put the bug on top of the refrigerator. “We can take it apart or something after dinner.”

  On the refrigerator door were black-and-white pictures of Luisa that Duane had taped up before she moved in with him. She looked away from them. Someone had faked a phone call and a postcard. She wasn’t making this up; there was a postcard, too. Maybe it was Duane’s man. Maybe he’d wanted her and Duane to get together because he could tell that Duane needed a girl, not a man. But then why was he hanging around outside the bar? And what was the bug in the ceiling for? Did the guy get thrills from listening to her and Duane eat? She was getting confused.

  “What’s wrong?” Duane said.

  She looked up at him. He had no idea what she knew about him, no idea what connections she was making in her mind. All at once his ignorance seemed terribly pathetic.

  “Nothing.” She said it with finality, and pulled her chair up to the table. “Are we going to have a toast?”

  “Sure. What do you want to toast?”

  “Chips. Nachos-flavored corn chips.”

  He raised his glass. “To chips,” he said.

  As soon as she raised her glass, she felt herself stop thinking. It was easy. Duane had told her once how a jetliner could lose power in two of its engines and still keep flying smoothly. Behind the curtains in the cockpit there was consternation, pilots pulling switches, yanking levers, but in the main cabin the passengers were finishing their dinners as if nothing had happened. They ate salami and compared their parents. Everything was ordinary as soon as you stopped thinking. There was no mystery about how they’d met and no magic in the candlelight on the silverware and no longer any heart-stopping difference between the sink in Duane’s kitchen and the sink in her parents’ kitchen. The food on the table was what people everywhere had to eat, and Duane loved her because she was smart and pretty and had come along at the right time, and she was just a girl who had lied to her parents and lied to her boyfriend and would do it all again if she needed to, the way she might sleep again and again on bloody sheets, because they were ruined. And then the plane landed safely, of course, and the passengers joined the crowds in the terminal and drove home to their ordinary houses, and never even stopped to think that just an hour earlier they’d been sitting on seats that were seven miles off the ground.

  13

  In the first days of the new year, a bitterly cold weather system had descended on St. Louis and established itself with a sequence of record low temperatures. The high on January 3 was zero degrees. On the fourth the high was 2. On the fifth the sky clouded and the temperature climbed into the teens to allow another half a foot of snow to fall, and then on the night of the sixth the mercury dipped to—19. For the next week, salt trucks alternated with snowplows on the streets, like gloom with anxiety. By the week of the thirteenth, more than three feet of snow was lying on the lawns of the suburbs and the urban construction sites and the levees overlooking the ice-covered Mississippi. The longer the bad weather lasted, the more aggressively it shouldered murders and politics out of the spotlight of the local news, out of the headlines, the lead-story slots. It exploited the advantage of all weather: its constant availability for comment.

  Barbara had at first followed the cold spell’s progress in a circus-going spirit, but eventually even she succumbed to the portents and began to believe that the reports all somehow pointed inwards, as a neighborhood’s concentration of freaks and deformities might point underground, to a reservoir of toxic waste. Wind-chill, degree days, inches of precipitation, former records, consecutive days below x degrees, below y degrees, integers positive and negative—the numbers infected minds. There were broken pipes in warehouse sprinkler systems. Termination of gas service, and outcries. Frozen stiffs in East St. Louis. Ice-locked barges. The heart attacks of shovelers. Stalled cars abandoned on freeways. And always the search for precedents, the delight in finding none, and the feeling of specialness, the growing conviction that attendance at such a winter certified a claim to unusual fortitude and vision. The city, on the news, in the news, behaved like a witness. There was a mood. The weather oriented itself along the polar lines of the previous six months’ political trends. All tendencies hung together. A peculiar watchfulness had descended on St. Louis in the first weeks of the new year.

  The sixteenth brought some relief, however, in the form of temperatures only just below freezing and a breeze from the south, off the Gulf, much attenuated. It was Tuesday. Though average for January, the weather felt relatively springlike, and Barbara was cleaning. In her closet she applied the Two Year Rule, throwing onto the bed every article of clothing she hadn’t worn since Christmas two years earlier. She made no exceptions, not for gifts from Martin, not even for her swankiest evening gowns. If she liked something, the rule ensured that she wore it at least once every twenty-four months. Her closet lodged no “dogs,” nothing unworn or unwearable, and she was in possession of far fewer clothes than Luisa or Martin, fewer clothes, undoubtedly, than anyone she knew.

  Emptied hangers stabilized on the bar. The usable skirts and blouses she slid to the left impatiently. She was looking for victims, and she found one in a foolish winter suit she’d bought four months ago. She’d never worn it.

  Out it went, flapping its pleats as it flew to the bed. It was followed by a linen skirt too big in the waist, a brown dress she didn’t love, and an $80 pair of shoes, accessories to a crime of impulse.

  She moved to her dresser and dropped to her knees. She took a last look at the Christmas present from Audrey, the sweater. She’d worn it once, at lunch last week. Once was enough. Poor Audrey. Out it went.

  Via the charitable conduit of the Congregational Church, these clothes would end up in the inner city or the Missouri Bootheel. Barbara imagined driving into some tiny town southeast of Sikeston and seeing all the decade’s fashions, all of her mistakes and all of Audrey’s and Martin’s modeled on the dirt streets by poor black women. But the clothes could have been bound for a landfill for all she cared. She deposited an armload of gifts and badly stained underwear on the bed.

  The house was quiet. Mohnwirbel had driven away after lunch and not returned. A busy bee he was. Martin had dropped the idea of suing him, and the box of unclean pictures had found its way into one of Martin’s storage lairs, where it would probably stay until it molded. Barbara yearned to go beyond her strikes on his study and closets, to hit the third floor and the basement and attack those hard-core bunkers of junk. She envisioned a life untyrannized by objects, a life in which she and Martin would be free to leave at any time and so by staying prove the choice was freely made. In truth, she hoped that even death might become bearable if everything she still wanted to own when it came could fit in two suitcases; because sometimes the airlines lost your suitcases, and by the time you realized they were gone you’d reached your destination.

  She added a sheaf of receipts to the piles of paper she would take downstairs to process at her desk. A little sun shone on the carpeting. Second-story branches nutated in the windows, seeking gaps in the soft assault of the southern wind, paths back to their natural positions. Squirrels paused. The house was ver
y quiet.

  As she opened her box of everyday jewelry a pair of earrings caught her eye, the earrings John had given her. She hadn’t even thought to return them. With a feeling of uneasiness she glanced into the mirror. The eyes that met hers weren’t her own.

  She gasped. John was standing in the bathroom doorway. She stamped on the floor, trying to stamp out her fright. “How did you get in here?”

  “Door’s unlocked!” he said.

  “I told you. Go away. I told you.”

  “Yes, yes.” He swept into the room and sat down on the bed. “I know what you told me.” He crossed his legs and looked up at her engagingly. “You persist in treating me like a substance that comes out of a faucet that you can turn off with your gentle smile or your firmness and maturity, no no, John, please. You’re very sweet John but.—And yet I find you here with my little gift…”

  “I can do the same to you,” Barbara said hotly. It no longer took any effort not to like him. “I can do exactly the same to you. I can say you’re a creep and a jerk. You may be articulate, but you can’t make me feel comfortable around you. You can just go to hell, in fact. Get out of here. Take your damned earrings. You shouldn’t walk in people’s back door. Your manners are lousy. Who do you think you are?”

  He sighed and put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. “You aren’t entirely wrong,” he said. “But there’s a fine line between effrontery and simple persistence.”

  “Get out.” She picked up the earrings and reached and dropped them over his hand into one of his pockets. She reeled back. Her ears roared. There was a gun in his pocket. She took deliberate steps towards the bathroom.

  “Stop.”

  She turned back and saw the gun pointing at her. He was a total stranger.

  “Get down a suitcase,” he said.

  “Listen—”

  “The middle-sized leather bag will be ideal. Take your black silk dress, the green dress with copper threads, and another winter dress. A pair of jeans, and your gray corduroys. T-shirts. You’ll want T-shirts. Six changes of underwear, a swimsuit, a nightgown, and your light robe. Am I going to have to do this for you?”