Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

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.”

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.