The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  But the operation had turned out to be a repeat of her performance in Bombay, where, as a member of the People’s Reading Group, she’d infiltrated the Indian Police Service and penetrated to the depths of its bureaucracy, becoming the police commissioner in India’s largest city and receiving along the way the active financial support of Indira and her party, and then turned her back on the entire country. She’d sold her work, all her chances, for a job in St. Louis. And here again she’d ridden history at a velocity that seemed miraculous to the unthinking. And here again velocity undid her. She loved it for its own sake, obsessively, with a modern desperation that tied her progress to the ghetto, which was also modern and obsessed with speed. The sudden trends, the sudden deaths. And where she’d had perhaps the only opportunity ever to arise in latter-day St. Louis to bring a small revolution to its black residents, she’d subverted subversion instead. She was on the wrong side of the law. Poverty, poor education, discrimination and institutionalized criminality were not modern. They were Indian problems, sustaining an ideology of separateness, of meaningful suffering, of despairing pride. In the ghetto, just as in the Indian ghettos of caste, consciousness would come slowly and painfully. Jammu had no patience. She’d hauled the big industrial guns into the inner city and called it a solution, because ultimately it was far easier to change the thinking of a rich white fifty-year-old or to deflect the course of his eighteen-year-old daughter than it was to give a black child fifteen years of decent education. Jammu had lied to the blacks, swindled them out of their homes, bribed and cajoled their own advocates into betraying them, and all in the name of speed. Of appearing to solve the problem quickly. Of seizing power while it could still be seized.

  Still, Singh had no ready-made category for her. She was too self-conscious, too protean, too amateur and peculiar for him to dismiss her. But at least he could see now that she and her methods weren’t what he’d hoped, her methods not the fuse of any revolution anywhere, and she not the entclechy he’d imagined he’d beheld when she was sixteen and wanted to have intercourse on gravel and in boats and to make people obey her laws. He could see now. America was the seat of her atavism. She was just like her mother. All the subtle countertrends that had nagged him from the first days in Srinagar—her lack of direction, her indifference to suffering, the patness of her utterances—had culminated in St. Louis. Senseless St. Louis. She would stick here, permanently associated, her methods sound enough to vanquish the locals but too fancy to take her further. She’d use Probst because she thought she cared for him and then discard him soon enough, for behaving like a human being. Singh was glad to have seen the changes she’d wrought, the spectacle of speed, and to have achieved momentary fulfillment in his handling of the living Probsts. He’d enjoyed the ride, and he’d be glad in a month when he was gone.

  ELIGIBLE NO MORE? Chief Jammu, the world’s most eligible police officer, has been seen of late on the streets of St. Louis in the company of wealthy contractor Martin Probst (glimpsed here climbing into the Chief’s private squad car). The match-up is rumored to have estranged Probst from his wife of twenty years. But, insists Jammu, “we’re only friends.”

  When Barbara had studied the picture to Singh’s satisfaction he took the copy of People away from her. “It was idle,” he said, moving his chair close to her mattress. “You were in the check-out line at the tiny A & P and paging through the magazine rack. You just happened to see the picture and the caption. But it sends you reeling, if that’s not too strong a phrase. First his talk of divorce, and now this. He’s anticipating you. You can hardly stand it. He’s chipping away at the trenchancy and originality of what you’ve done. You were never in control and you still aren’t in control.”

  She lay back on her pillows. The eye he’d blackened on the fourth had healed. It no longer stared out autonomously. “My husband is weak, John. But he usually manages to redeem himself.”

  “You think, with condescension. When hatred ceases to suffice, you can always condescend. Anything to prove you special, to give you purpose, to show yourself the only thing you’ve ever lacked is appreciation. You push open the doors of our building and take the elevator up and for the first time, honey, for the first time, you see our love nest as it really is. You wonder about the furniture. Is it fashionable? And if it is, then whose fashion? Which year’s? Time has never been less on your side. You notice the smell, the smell of all high-rise apartments with low ceilings and climate control, from the odd pockets of organic things that cross-ventilation can’t reach. You see the photograph of my pretty dead wife and you begin to remember how, when you first met me, before I swept you off your feet and taught you the true nature of sexual love, how you pitied me. You see the blank notebook from that afternoon at the Modern. Still just a T in there. Estranged wife. His wife of twenty years. It’s a dark Sunday night. I’ve been away all weekend, since we got back from Paris. You put the few groceries in the refrigerator and sniff. The box of baking soda isn’t really doing its job anymore. The tandoori chicken left over from our night out before our vacation is red and blue like a tropical fish. You throw it away, and roaches dive for cover in the trash can. Cars honk outside. You glance at the Van Gogh weekly desk calendar on our kitchen table. It’s the eighteenth. You’ve been away for two months.”

  “Get to the crazy stuff,” she said loudly. “You know that’s what I live for.”

  “You mean those nightmares you were having the first few weeks you slept here? That I was a psychopath? The Great Unknown? You’re good at dreams, you know those were just drama, psychic ways around the plain old-fashioned ordinariness of what I am.”

  She laughed. “Oh, that’s real good.” She reached for the cigarettes he’d brought her.

  “You stand bitterly in the kitchen, smoking. Your husband and that arrogant new bitch of a police chief! And—”

  “Why not believe her? Maybe they’re only friends. He certainly thinks highly enough of her.”

  “You say that aloud and hear the jealousy. Of course they’re more than friends. Your husband’s weak and Jammu is strong. And no one will guess, because your husband is the man. You picture them together. Laughing. Strolling. Smooching. Holding hands. The darlings of your hometown. While you and I hang on in the eastern provinces, trying only to uphold each other’s sanity. But you love me. You do love me, Barbara, like you never loved him.”

  She scraped ash on the hem of her jeans and rubbed it in.

  “Because what have you done with your life? How did you reach forty-three without noticing your delusion in following him? He never appreciated what he had in you for twenty years. What’s worse, he never will. What happened at the side of your cradle or behind the scenes at your Catholic confirmation that doomed you to live in the shadow of a powerful man you respected and admired and found amusing and condescended to but never loved? How were you damaged? That you’ll live your whole life as his victim. His sacrificial victim. That you could appear in the pages of People as the wife from whom his affair with Jammu had estranged him. It’s you you feel sorry for in me. I’m out grubbing up another story, another check to pay another month’s rent. Except I’m not. You hear a noise in the hall and you turn, and it’s me. I say, Surprise! You jump a little, and I kiss you.”

  Singh dropped to his knees and kissed her mouth, his eyes on the lengthening ash. Her lips didn’t move beneath his. “Like that,” he said through a frog in his throat, and rose.

  “You’re too strange,” she said. She turned her head away from him to bring her lips to the stained filter. “I mean that seriously.”

  “So we aren’t in the mood.” He sat down again. “We’re in the mood for soul-baring and stories. We sit down at the table and I tell you one. I tell you I was born in the hills. I grew up in the hills and I went to school in the hills. I was a radical student—”

  “In India.”

  “Of course. In Kashmir. I was a radical student, and there came a time when it was important to me to establish my
credentials. I rode up into the hills—”

  “On a horse?”

  “On a motor scooter, with a young female radical student also on a motor scooter. We were nearly at the border when we came to a game preserve overlooked in the far distance by a charming little castle. We parked our scooters and walked deep into the preserve. We found a broad meadow surrounded by fir trees and sat down in it. We sat there for four days. We slept, and ate pakoras. Otherwise we mortified the flesh. The owner of the preserve wasn’t a prince or a nobleman, but he owned all sorts of land and his tenants suffered greatly. As you may have heard, non-princes seldom feel a bond with their tenants. At least this one didn’t.

  “After four days, we heard horses, as my companion knew we would. I stood behind a tree while she waited in the hot alpine sun. Into the meadow rode the landowner and his bodyguard. He felt the need for a bodyguard, you see. The men dismounted and spoke to her as if they knew her. The bodyguard helped her to her feet, and she stuck a knife in his throat. I stepped out from behind the tree, and with a bayonet—just the simple bayonet, a family heirloom, you understand, a metal symbol—I cut open the landowner’s abdomen. I had to use both hands, but the blade was sharp. He doubled over, and I lost my hold on the blade. I pushed him into the grass, and my companion bent over him and smiled and said, ‘We’re the People’s revenge.’ He was so terrified that I couldn’t look at his face. But she could. She could. He tried to double over again by sitting up, and I pulled the bayonet out and pushed it in again further up his chest, this time towards the heart. There was a fair amount of resistance, about like cutting up a raw chicken. His head fell back, and blood and also clear mucus came out of his mouth and ran into his nostrils. I remember wanting to blow my nose. In fact I sniffled the whole time we were riding our scooters back down to where we lived. I feel strongly about many ethical issues, as you know, but existence and nonexistence aren’t among them. You don’t deserve to live and you don’t deserve to die. This landowner had lived forty-three years—about the average for his tenants, though of course below average for his own family. He didn’t deserve to die. It was merely that a lifetime of his actions had begged a violent response. And on our side of the Danube you see a great many violent responses. You become inured, but that isn’t the right word for it. You become a little less afraid, or a little more jungly, and if you really thought about this you might decide that by your standards, though I now lead a civilized life in Manhattan, I’m insane after all. As I might decide you are passively insane because you’re unable to look down at your body, at your belly, which has swelled to allow Luisa but never been cut open, and at your breasts, which I’d venture to guess you’ve always felt were rather OK as breasts go, and at your legs, which like the Third World you can’t seem to devote much serious consideration to—you can’t look down on this and see it entirely as yourself. Maybe, I don’t know, if people’s heads were where their feet are, they would respect the body more, looking up to it. You’re amazed that you contain hot blood in quantity, organs, flesh, gray brains—you can imagine Luisa after a car accident, imagine her pretty head split in two but not your own, and so you think I’m a little too strange to be loved. A little too—honest? Crude?”

  “Tiresome.”

  “If you talked more I’d talk less.”

  20

  Probst had been black and white the last time he’d appeared in Time magazine; his lapels and necktie were narrow, and his hair was as short as an astronaut’s. For a caption the editors had paraphrased a line from the article: more than a monument. The St. Louis skyline then consisted of an Arch rising from a bald, bleached riverfront, a handful of high-rises surviving from the 1930s, and some low apartment buildings, dull fugues on a theme by Mies van der Rohe. The city looked to have awakened from the darker part of the century to find the hour not dawn but midday, with the Missouri sun beating mercilessly on the vacated areas, whiting out the faces of its structures. Under its crewcut and all around, the city’s scalp was pale.

  Twenty years later, in the space of twelve months, the city had undergone a contemporary styling, become a shopper’s mecca and a commercial force rising and expanding in steel and stone. Color was making a comeback, and this apparently was pleasing to Time; it had chosen St. Louis as its cover-story subject for its April 2 issue.

  With his electric Remington Probst shaved the evening shadows off his cheeks and neck. Red patches of irritation formed immediately. A Time reporter, Brett Stone, was coming to interview him at eight o’clock, which was less than an hour away. Stone hadn’t mentioned a photographer, but Probst expected one. He leaned close to the bathroom mirror, craning his neck and examining the line of his jaw with his fingers. Downstairs, the stereo boomed out a major-league symphony. He hadn’t had the stereo on since Barbara left, and the classical sounds that came out of its speakers now seemed to be picking up where they’d left off two months ago, when she had listened. Stringed instruments were sawing all over the house, cellos rumbling in the rafters, trumpets leading a charge up the stairs into the bathroom. Beethoven, if that was who it was, could make washing your face feel like a momentous act.

  He dressed to the second movement, adagio, and descended the stairs under a full escort of minor chords and worried glissandi. Turning the music off, he inspected the living room. He moved the latest issue of Time to the top of the coffee-table reading pile but reconsidered, burying it again. He sat down on the sofa. He sprang to his feet energetically. He went to the kitchen and drank some bourbon. He went upstairs and brushed his teeth, came back down and had another drink and said, “To hell with it.” Brett Stone wasn’t going to write about how his breath smelled.

  He’d been giving dozens of interviews, passing time with gentlemen and ladies from The New York Times, Newsweek, U.S. News, the Christian Science Monitor and all the lesser publications, but he hadn’t been this nervous since Christmas Day, when Luisa had brought Duane over for the first time. St. Louis was about to hit the cover of the magazine that had reserved the right to name the Man of the Year. Probst wanted to make the best possible impression. And, as always now, Jammu was on his mind. He hadn’t really enjoyed a calm moment in any of the eighteen days during which they’d socialized. The nervousness arose from the strain of waiting, each day, to see how long he would hold out without making contact with her. That he would make contact was inevitable. It was merely a matter of prolonging the suspense.

  He sat down at the breakfast-room table and put his feet up on a neighboring chair, reached over his shoulder to the telephone, and dialed her number.

  “Jammu.”

  “Probst,” he said. “Do you want to have dinner?”

  “I thought you were busy.”

  “I should definitely be done by ten. I’ll make sure I’m done by ten. I have my lines all memorized.”

  “‘It’s just not realistic.’”

  “That’s right.” He smiled. She made these jokes without a trace of malice; they were even fortifying. “And I’d say the answer is emphatically less. And who stands to gain by this.”

  “Seriously, Martin, you can say whatever you want about me. I won’t hold it against you if you feel you can’t contradict what you’ve said in the past.”

  “That’s very generous of you. Considering you’re going to be the cover girl.”

  She coughed. “Touché.”

  The receiver was shaking in his right hand. He switched it to his left, which for some reason was rock steady. “Why is this such an event?” he said. “What is it about Time that makes this seem so important?”

  “I think it’s the red border on their cover.”

  “The—? Oh. Uh huh.”

  “Congratulations, by the way, on your selection.”

  “You’re not supposed to know about that.”

  “It’s Chet Murphy who can’t keep a secret. But it is true, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. I get to wear the veil and the crown, hold the scepter and ride in a convertible and review the
debs. And make predictions, I guess, if I’m a Prophet. But it’s so unexpected. Most of the organization isn’t speaking to me. I haven’t even been going to the meetings.”

  “It sounds like they want to make you feel guilty and change your tune on the merger.”

  “They should know me better than that.” His right hand, recovered, took the receiver back. “Ess?”

  “What.”

  “Nothing.” He was just testing to see if her name worked. “I’m watching the second hand go around on the kitchen clock. We got four pages in Newsweek but not a cover. This will really do it for St. Louis. People are going to invest here like never before.”

  “It’s interesting to see you appropriating my optimism. It’s just what your campaign needs, less defense, more offense. But I do wish you were on my side.”

  “You want me to change my mind?” He asked because he had a peculiar feeling she didn’t. “You want me to make Stone’s day?”

  “Yes.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “You don’t sound like you mean it.”

  “I just don’t want you giving me anything. But I say yes to be honest with you, because I don’t think you’d have had anything to do with me if your heart were really in the merger fight. And it’s been at least a week since you told me about your, quote, intuitive distrusts.”

  For a while he’d been careful to keep in mind why he was seeing her: not to become friends with her, but to continue sounding her out, testing her story. But her story had passed the acid test. It was clear that if he’d been she he would have done almost exactly the same things in St. Louis. It made sense. And meanwhile, in a rush of mutual infatuation, they’d gotten to be friends.

  “You could be county supervisor, Martin.”

  “I’ve told you why that’s out.”

  “Not very persuasively. And if you were supervisor, or even if you were plain Martin Probst, and if you’d thrown your weight behind the referendum, and if it became law, then the region would be reunited in more ways than one. Admit you’d like to see that happen.”