Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

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.

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.