Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“I am tough.” She smiled startlingly, at a wall. “I’m just out of my element here. I’ve never — oh.”

“Never what,” he fished.

“I feel great, Martin. I do feel great.”

Her tone would not have been much different if she’d said she felt sick, Martin, she did feel sick. But he felt a little sick himself. The surrender to love, at his age, pulled certain muscles in the stomach and the neck, muscles connecting the will to the frame, because there was another, more final surrender which they’d already contracted to resist.

He cleared the table. In the kitchen he turned on the coffee maker and took the chocolate egg out of a cabinet. He brought it back to the table.

“Happy Easter,” he said.

“Happy Easter yourself.” She pushed a large brown envelope across the table to him. She tested the egg’s weight.

“Real imitation milk chocolate,” he said, raising the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. “This is the surprise?”

“Yes.”

He peered in and saw signatures, hundreds of signatures, and his name in capital letters.

“They’re yours if you want them,” she said. “The filing deadline is Friday noon. I think you should run.”

He was swept up in a rush of passion, pure transparent happy passion, as he drew the petitions from the envelope and read the hundreds of names in hundreds of handwritings, and one name, his own, at the top of every page. FOR THE OFFICE OF SUPERVISOR, ST. LOUIS COUNTY. The woman in the lavender cardigan was peeling foil off the egg. He drank her in small sips. He would run. With her helping him, he’d win. He’d marry her. And then see what Brett Stone had to say.

But after her second cup of coffee Jammu stood up and, leaving the dining room, said she had to go.

It was four o’clock. Rain was ticking on the storm windows.

“I can’t, Martin,” she was saying. “I really shouldn’t. You know the kind of schedule I have.”

She was fetching her trench coat from the closet for herself. She was putting it on. She was in the living room, speaking loudly for some reason. Probst hadn’t left the table. Each of his fifty years of unblemished right living hung from his limbs, his shoulders and his hands. This was how it felt to sit on heavy Jupiter. Where was the woman who would let him shed the weight?

She was bending over to kiss him good-bye.

At six, in a booth against which rain pelted steadily, Jammu placed a call. “It’s me,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Did you hear?”

“No. I told you it’s been no use listening. That mike has a range of two meters.”

“Well: forget the subjective correlative.”

“Poor you.”

“I’m only calling because I thought you wanted to know. For reasons of science. He switched on the merger, but not on Barbara. He’s running for supervisor but he won’t touch me.”

“You must not have tried very hard.”

“I tried hard enough. So now you know. It’s only a question of her release.”

“Yes. Tuesday after sundown. I’m driving her to New York. The world should begin hearing from her sometime Thursday morning.”

“Poor you.”

Jammu hung up. Martin’s semen was falling into her underwear. Cars wallowed by on Manchester Road, their taillights smearing in the glass of the booth. The plan was laid. She’d decided to do it herself. She was giving Singh the best reason he’d ever had for fleeing a country. And maybe it was the scientific sin of falsifying his data on the Probsts, or maybe her sudden betrayal of her lifelong partner in crime; but to look at her standing in the phone booth, twisting her hair and trembling, one might almost have thought she’d never killed anyone before.

Tuesday morning, eight o’clock. RC sat on the living-room sofa watching Today and eating Cheerios. Annie came out of the kitchen in a yellow rain slicker. Robbie wore a red Big Red poncho. They kissed RC good-bye.

Today was reporting live from St. Louis, from Webster Groves, no less. It focussed on a boxy Lincoln joining a line of parked cars in the playground of a red brick school. An umbrella got out of the car, followed by Martin Probst. Today zoomed in. Around Probst large cardboard yes’s and no’s bobbed on sticks. He seemed to recognize Today and went out of his way to meet it. Lesser men and women with cameras fell away behind him, the pros and cons craned their wooden necks, and out of Today came an all-weather microphone held by a hand with raw skin and purple knuckles. Probst made a joke. Smiles opened in the rain. And what about that rain? Probst didn’t think it would be much of a factor in the election. He excused himself; he had to perform his patriotic duty. The crowd parted for him and his umbrella, and Today ’s gaze lingered on him before shifting, by way of a short and zany interlude of visual static, to a nationally known face. The black Arch behind her had lost its crown in low clouds. What about that rain? The Chief’s joke was even funnier than Probst’s. And now back to New York.

RC turned off the set and stared at the screen, trying to shake the desolation of Today . He’d been feeling lonely and stunned on and off for two weeks now, ever since Clarence and Kate and the boys had left St. Louis. After more than forty years, they’d pulled up their roots and moved to Minneapolis, just like that. Clarence’s cousin Jerome had invited him to move north and buy into his contracting firm, and before he had a chance to say no or maybe not, the Gallo Company, his main South Side competition, offered to buy him out completely on advantageous terms. After six hours on the market his four-bedroom house was sold to a white family of three, and on the day between the third and fourth quarters he pulled the boys out of the St. Louis school district and whisked them north to suburban Edina. That rhymed with China. RC still couldn’t believe they were really gone for good.

He got up and washed the dishes, cleaned his revolver, got dressed and ate a strip of raw bacon (bad, bad habit of his) with some Townhouse crackers. Then he left to vote. He had an appointment at two o’clock to have a mole taken off his back, and then at three his patrol shift started. On the sidewalk in front of his building he passed a blond kid with a camera who looked vaguely familiar. RC got halfway through the word “Hello” before the kid’s swift “How’s it going?” cut him off.

All Sunday, all Monday, picking locks and scaling walls, they ran into the same phenomenon at every turn: a fresh scent, but the quarry vanished. They took fingerprints, but they’d never nail Jammu on fingerprints alone. They turned up weapons, food, clothing, hair dye, gas masks, burglar tools, traces of controlled substances, boxes of radio guts, a miniature forging kit, and some phony IDs: one hundred percent diddly-twat. They killed half of Sunday night staking out a ranch-style house on Highway 141 where lights went on and off behind the curtains and a television flickered, and when they finally broke in, the sum total of the house’s contents turned out to be timed lights and a television. The people had been there . But the people were gone, as surely as if they’d been warned of the imminence of Sam and Herb’s arrival. It didn’t seem to matter that Herb’s car was clean. It didn’t seem to matter that they were working through their catalogue randomly, doubling back and forth across three counties, taking twice as much evasive action as they had to, approaching some of the properties on foot from strange directions, changing course abruptly and returning to places they’d already raided. Despite all these precautions, the Indians were eluding them.