The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist)

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Who cares?” Singh disingenuous. “You have him now, and after Tuesday it won’t matter whether you do or don’t. Trying to keep him, in fact, is one sure way to guarantee that Barbara makes the connection between you and me.”

  He gloated. See how neatly it works out? How the operation prohibits selfish deviations? When Jammu was with Martin she was forever thinking: I can’t control Singh.

  Who cared?

  She did. She wanted Martin Probst, the genius of the place to which chance had brought her. She wanted his love and fealty. Martin still couldn’t see how she belonged in St. Louis, how she had the right and the means to make a place for herself. He was the key he couldn’t see. When he saw himself, if she could make him, then Barbara would be dead to him anyway.

  Luisa slammed the door behind her, slammed it again to make the bolt catch, and ran down the stairs to the street. Music was blaring in the building next door. Through a set of second-floor windows she could see a big party in progress, a crowd of people older than she but not much older, dancing with beer bottles. She walked up towards Delmar.

  Her fight with Duane hadn’t lasted long. For a while, in the cold part of the winter, the arguments had gone on for hours, from kitchen to bedroom to hallway; one time she’d had to sleep on the floor in the living room, under coats. Now the fights were short again, like they’d been in the first month or so when she was afraid a single yell would mean going back to her parents. Now a single yell was about all she could stand to invest.

  Tonight Duane thought he’d found the answer (he was always thinking he’d found some answer) to how to fight fascism (he didn’t know what fascism was; she’d asked him) in extrapolitical (he liked to make up words that weren’t in the dictionary) institutions like organized religion, because only a cultural extremism could combat the bourgeois (she told him he’d better stick to foreign languages he could pronounce) liberalism that could, if left unchecked, develop into the kind of nationalistic myopia that developed in Germany (what?? Suddenly he was talking about Germany in 1933, as if she knew all about it) and took the form of Nazism. She said she didn’t understand. He said it was no wonder when she kept interrupting him.

  The fight had started because it was Good Friday and he’d decided to give her a religious quiz after dinner. He felt he had the right to give her these quizzes because he was older and more learned. It was the Socratic Method. (He never exactly called himself her mentor, but whenever she wanted to whip up her dislike of him she’d repeat the word in her head: MEN-TOR, MEN-TOR, MENTORMENTORMENT.) Did she believe in God?

  “Give me a break, Duane.”

  Did she believe in the sanctity of human life?

  “Yes.”

  Why?

  “Because I’m alive and I like myself.”

  But that didn’t satisfy him. He hemmed and hawed and tried a different approach to making her say what he wanted to hear. (He wanted to hear her be an example of all the things wrong with boozh-wah Webster Groves.) And about three questions into the abortion quiz (it was going to turn out to be somehow hypocritical to be pro-choice) she threw a glass of milk at him. He sat there nodding, indulgent and furious, while she put her sweatshirt on.

  She went into Streetside Records. An oldie was playing on the store stereo (“Jackie Blue”?), and graying men in beards and army jackets were pawing through the bins. There used to be about twenty groups and singers whose records Luisa would check on whenever she went to record stores, to see if anything new or pirated or live had arrived. Now there were only about fifteen. She stayed away from the Rolling Stones because Duane admired their honesty and the integrity of their sound. She stayed away from the Talking Heads because Duane had interpreted all their lyrics for her, and from The Clash because whenever Duane played them he made her be quiet. She stayed away from the Eurythmics just because Duane liked them.

  Having picked out the new Elvis Costello record (in Duane’s opinion Elvis had gone seriously down the tubes) she decided she didn’t want to lug it around. She put it back and left the store and headed up Delmar in the good direction, towards Clayton. It was a night almost warm enough for a prom. She thought of the miniquiz Duane had conducted on the topic of deodorant use. She gave a little laugh. She took a Marlboro Light out of her purse and gave another little laugh. The laughs were really just twitches, something slipping, in her chest.

  Why couldn’t she have held out just a tiny bit longer?

  If she hadn’t started to smoke after Christmas, when the cigarettes were around, she wouldn’t be doing it now; in a moment of health consciousness one day in February, Duane himself had quit. She could probably quit now, too, but she didn’t feel like it as long as she lived with him, and she wasn’t positive she’d feel like it afterwards either. She’d started because everything made her nervous, the fights, the whole situation. She was even more nervous now.

  In six months she’d be living in Stanford, California. If she hadn’t met Duane, if she’d only managed to negotiate her last year in high school without him, she’d be looking forward to college. Now she couldn’t. Duane had spoiled the mystique, spoiled it as surely as he’d be writing his own applications in the fall, ready to go have himself a good college experience or a good art school experience, as he’d probably never really doubted he would. He was flexible. He quit smoking and didn’t cheat. While he and Luisa were being sad and lonely together, he was also assembling an exhibition of photographs that everybody loved. He had attention left over to watch out for himself. He was strong because his family was supposedly happy and well adjusted (it didn’t matter that he and she both knew it was actually scary and diseased).

  While he was at it, he’d also guaranteed that Luisa wouldn’t find her dream man at college. She’d never find him. She didn’t believe in him anymore. And now that she’d lived on her own, in an apartment, that adventure was spoiled, too.

  Who would drive her to college? She’d probably take a plane.

  And no one in the world would understand. She didn’t rule out the possibility that someday she might be happy and successful, maybe even married, though right now she couldn’t begin to imagine how that would happen. But no one could ever know how different things might have been if she’d held out a tiny bit longer. She couldn’t even put her finger on what she’d had which was lost now. It had something to do with her parents, with her mother who’d trusted her, and with her father who’d tried in his own way to warn her about Duane. Her parents were separated now. Her mother had left town and seemed to have no intention of returning.

  I’m very, very, very disappointed in you.

  She threw the remains of the cigarette into a sewer. The world had changed, and it wasn’t just Duane’s spoiling of it. Suddenly she was living in a new world made for people like him, for people who could despise it and succeed in it anyway, and for people who could use computers (all the classes at school except the seniors were learning to use them; she’d probably learn at Stanford, but all her life she’d carry the knowledge that she’d learned late and that once upon a time computer-lovers were gross) and for people who couldn’t remember that downtown St. Louis had ever been anything but a place to shop and eat lunch, who didn’t care that once there’d only been an Arch which her father had built, for people who didn’t care enough to have fights.

  Somehow it was she who’d spoiled things.

  She could see the stoplight at the intersection with Big Bend, the road to Webster Groves. She wanted to go home. She’d changed her mind. But there was no home to go to. Her own parents had defected to the newness of it all. Her mother’s letters and phone calls were gay and uncritical. Her father had a harder time acting modern, but he was doing his best. She’d seen him leave the gallery with Chief Jammu, and the next thing she heard was newscasters talking about the new Martin Probst. She hated the smiles on his face. She hated everything the world seemed to love. She wished her father would yell at her again and let her cry.

  What interested Barbara
, as she lay awake missing her putative lover, was how very little was different. She’d exchanged one prison for another. She was still far from her daughter. John still loved her, and she still didn’t love him, not even after the conversion to honesty and ordinariness he’d undergone for her sake. She remained, yours painfully, Barbara. If ever there had been such a thing as kindred souls, then John was hers. So she liked him, for the likeness, not loving him, as she loved Martin, seldom liking him. Between heart and mind was a fracture not even sex, especially not sex, the push of cunt and cock, could mend.

  It would disappoint John. He seemed to be working under a self-imposed deadline, increasing the tempo of his disclosures and narratives almost hourly. Or maybe it wasn’t a deadline but a sense of dramatic climax which he believed she could share. She remembered how Martin used to work so conscientiously to make her come. He’d increase his speed, increasing it more when he thought she was almost there. If she was, it helped. If she wasn’t, it only hurt, as if nerves had no function beyond reporting contact and pain, heat and cold, pressure. She wanted to come, she had no earthly reason not to. But she couldn’t.

  22

  The national press arrived in a stream that widened from a trickle on Thursday to a flood on Saturday, in numbers hitherto seen only in Octobers when the Cards had reached the World Series. CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and NPR had sent big names. All the nation’s major papers found reporters to spare for St. Louis that weekend, and many minor papers did, too. The Wichita Eagle-Beacon and the Toledo Blade, the Little Rock Gazette and the Youngstown Vindicator. Internationally, the Toronto Star and L’Express of Paris had correspondents on hand, and a German crew from Norddeutscher Rundfunk stopped in long enough to be counted and, laughing, to unpack a video camera at one of the baggage-claim carrousels in Lambert Airport.

  The network crews were hosted and herded by their local affiliates. The men and women from the large-circulation dailies, all of whom had covered events in St. Louis before, claimed the interviews they’d reserved in advance and set about writing stories from premeditated angles.

  The lesser newspeople weren’t sure what to do. They’d been assigned to cover the goings-on in St. Louis. But what was going on? All anyone could say for sure was that the police chief was a female of Indian extraction named S. Jammu.

  Cradling this knowledge and hoping for a chance to talk to her, small units of reporters began to appear in the dim cubical vestibule of police headquarters, where the guard, austerely denying them entry to the elevator, directed them to the information officer down the dim hall to their right. After the first twenty inquiries, it dawned on this officer that special circumstances were the order of the weekend; he phoned upstairs and received instructions to send the visitors across the street to the PR director’s office at City Hall. There they helped themselves to stacks of press releases and three-color brochures on glossy paper, free coffee and doughnuts, a twenty-minute documentary film on the reorganization and current practices of the St. Louis Police Department, unlimited access to Jammu’s right-hand officer Rollie Smith, and lottery blanks for the drawing to be held on Sunday morning to determine which thirty-six reporters, in groups of twelve, would be granted twenty-minute interviews on Monday morning with the great lady herself.

  As a consolation prize the others would get passes to the press conference she was holding on Monday evening.

  The PR director, noting what a marvelously vital and multifaceted place St. Louis had become, urged the out-of-towners to wander about, acquaint themselves with the city’s layout, and sample such pleasures and edifications as appealed to them. Interested parties were told which bars and restaurants the local press corps frequented. To the younger female reporters the word was dropped that senior Post-Dispatch editor Joe Feig was throwing a Tex-Mex fiesta on Saturday night in his Webster Groves home, nothing formal, come as you are, byob, strictly private, but feel free to crash.

  The real newshounds could refer to a three-page list of special events scheduled for the upcoming days and plan to cover whatever they considered most newsworthy. The list included the grand opening of a string of boutiques and bistros in the exciting Laclede’s Landing area; a nonstop Lasarium program at the Planetarium entitled “The City and the Stars” a pops concert in the fine all-purpose Stadium featuring music by Missouri composers; the maiden voyage on Sunday of the completely rebuilt Admiral, St. Louis’s unique and enormous aluminum-plated Mississippi-cruising pleasure palace; the third and final referendum debate between Mayor Peter D. Wesley and Citizen John Holmes; the opening at 3:00 p.m. Tuesday of an Election Information Center at Kiel Auditorium, free admission to all holders of press cards; and, finally, St. Louis Night.

  St. Louis Night was a gala extravaganza to be held from 6:00 until midnight on Tuesday. All of downtown St. Louis would be lit up in celebration of itself. Three soundstages would provide continuous live music and laughter, including appearances by Bob Hope, Dionne Warwick, and the pop group Crosby, Stills & Nash. A dixieland band and an oompah band would rove the streets, spreading good cheer. Favorite sports personalities from the Cardinals, Blues and Big Red would hold autograph sessions. Fifteen of the city’s top restaurants would open sidewalk cafés and also booths at which their wares could be sampled by the spoon or by the cup. At midnight a Grucci family fireworks display would cap the festivities. St. Louis Night would unfold regardless of the outcome of the special election. In the event of rain, tents would be erected on the Mall.

  Highlights, tabulations and analyses of the special election would become available in printed form at the Election Information Center at 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday.

  Insiders could hardly fail to see the thinking behind all these activities. Tuesday’s election promised to be a laugher. The most conservative local pollsters projected that the merger would pass in the city by a four-to-one margin, and in the county by three to one or better, depending on which way the many undecideds went. At this stage of the game, only a public-relations catastrophe of the first order could alter the outcome.

  Yet an idle brain is the Devil’s workshop. Within hours of arriving, every reporter had fired off to his or her editors a story about the St. Louis equivalent of Amsterdam’s brothels or Berlin’s Wall. Chief Jammu is a woman driven and Chief Jammu is a woman with a vision were the two most common lead-paragraph disclosures greeting readers the next day, and as substantiation the reporter would offer his or her top choices from the sayings and confessions of Jammu collected in Handout #24 at City Hall. But after they’d cashed in this journalistic blue chip, the more bored reporters might have sent out feelers of their own, might have spoken with disgruntled cubs and searched back issues of the local papers for dissenting voices. Naturally, if the man from the Fresno Bee were to find anything, the news wouldn’t reach many ears. But if Erik Tannenberg of The New York Times, for example, began turning over large stones and discovered something ugly or even simply peculiar underneath one of them, the consequences for Jammu, the pro-merger campaign, and the city as a whole could be most painful.

  There was the little matter of the nine black families illegally occupying a pair of four-bedroom homes in Chesterfield. A removal agency in the employ of Urban Hope had displaced the families from their North Side homes without finesse or compassion. As restless and downtrodden Americans have been doing for two centuries, the families headed west. Construction on the Chesterfield homes had proceeded to the point of drywalling before the builder went bankrupt. Ownership had passed, by default, into the hands of a bank of which Chuck Meisner was director. Happily, the homes were situated in a remote corner of West County accessible only by way of Fern Hill Drive, the new street. Since no one yet lived on Fern Hill Drive, and since Meisner had financed the hasty installation of an eight-foot fence around the entire construction area, the families’ presence had not become public knowledge. They’d boarded up the windows and barricaded the doors. They appeared to have enough water to hold out for several weeks. They had plenty of food as
well, in the form of the sacks of flour and rice which the Allied Food Corporation had quietly been selling in East St. Louis at a large discount because of unacceptable levels of ethylene dibromide. Armed with shotguns, carbines and a small cannon, the squatters were being held under discreet siege by Missouri state troopers and St. Louis city police, the involvement of the latter rendered legal by direct orders from Missouri’s governor. Negotiations had proved fruitless. The families were offered firstclass housing in a public project, immunity from prosecution, and a sizable cash damages award. Incredibly, they declined. Their leader turned out to be Benjamin Brown, perennial 21st Ward aldermanic candidate on the Socialist Workers Party ticket. Brown refused to resume negotiations until he’d been given a chance to speak to the media. The siege force requested time to mull this over. It appeared likely that no decision would be reached before Wednesday. Meisner spent the weekend arranging new conduits for the inconveniently large campaign donations his banks wished to make to fund the last-minute pro-merger television blitz.

  There was also the little matter of East St. Louis, Illinois. The crime situation on that side of the river had gotten out of hand. It was, to be sure, common knowledge that under Jammu’s administration the city of St. Louis had grown markedly less hospitable to bookies, pimps, narcotics dealers and their victims, and that some of these individuals had moved east. The Globe-Democrat had printed an editorial lamenting the deterioration of law and order in East St. Louis (not that law and order had ever been that municipality’s long suit) and expressing the hope that those people might at last find the courage to face up to their very real problems. But no Globe reporter had actually seen the situation firsthand. Nor had any other reporters. People who went to East St. Louis often got shot, and this was a risk that members of the Missouri journalistic community were in no special hurry to take. Illinois was a totally different state, after all. An investigation could wait until after the election on the western side of the river had been covered and analyzed.