Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

When the call came, he was ready to leave. The destination — St. Louis, Missouri — hardly seemed to meet the requirements of an Archimedean fulcrum. But Jammu said the specifics shouldn’t make any difference. (Especially when it was clear that no matter what she did, stay or leave, the Bombay police would be rioting by mid-autumn.) She said that in every social entity, even a quiet mid-American city, there were inequalities that could be parlayed into subversion. (Subversion! Constantly, in her innocence, she took corruption for subversion.) She said she was impatient with India. She wanted to leave her mark on a place, on a culture, and she knew it wouldn’t be Bombay. It had taken her nearly fifteen years with the Bombay police to reach this conclusion, which Shanti had been drawing for her all along. Of course she maintained she’d planned from the beginning to use her police work merely to launch her to America. That was a lie. She said she was bored and restless. This, Singh believed. He followed her. He was interested in attacking the United States.

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.”