Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

The clerks smiled when Luisa stepped up to their tables. She was the only citizen voting in the gym. When they paged through the rolls and found her name, she could see that her father had been checked off as voting while her mother, of course, had not.

Cakes could be confusing. The directions called for cream, but there wasn’t any in the list of ingredients or in the refrigerator. And she couldn’t see how to mix the sticks of butter in with the sugar and spices and wheat germ. She decided to melt them, leaving them in their paper so they wouldn’t drip into the stove element. She wasn’t really thinking clearly. She was starting to care again. She needed to make a trip to the ladies’ room. She needed to step out for a minute. She needed to excuse herself for just one sec. She had to make a call. She could use a breath of fresh air. She had to fix her face. She required a moment to compose herself. The directions called for cream, but there wasn’t any in the list of ingredients or in the refrigerator. She went upstairs.

All through the house something rustled like dogs in autumn leaves. She opened her purse and looked for a vein, and started to regret undertaking a cake, if only because the smoke was so bad. But in a minute she’d forget all about it. She’d take a luxurious bath. Splash, splash. When Martin came home. Splash, splash. The many bottles of colorful fluids suggested their own scents, orange blossom, musk, and nature’s pure honey. The sensuous woman knew how to please her husband when he came home from work. She’d seen it in a book. A peignoir could be very sexy.

When Jack DuChamp came home from work, Elaine was studying in the living room. “Did you vote?” she asked.

“No.”

“Oh, for pete’s sake.”

“It’s too crowded at the polls.”

“It sure wasn’t crowded when I went,” she said. “You better go.”

Jack opened the closet door and smiled bitterly. “You mean for Martin’s sake?”

“Jack,” Elaine said. “How come everything always has to be so personal?”

Singh left Barbara lying in the corner while he carried the dresser and chairs into the room and arranged her clothing and jewelry. He’d patched and repainted the bullet hole in the wall a month ago. He’d taken the lock and peephole off the door a week ago. All that remained was the cable by the bed. With a screwdriver he removed the cable anchor from the electrical box to which it had been bolted, and replaced the original outlet, wiring it nervously, as blue sparks popped on the tips of the live wires. He raised his pants leg and fastened the fetter around his calf; it was the only article besides the needle kit that he had to take with him. The cable he left coiled tightly in the cupboard with the household tools.

He reflected on how fortunate Jammu was. He doubted there were five thousand people in the entire world conscientious enough to have prepared the apartment for evacuation as he’d prepared it.

Taking Barbara on a slow trip through the three rooms and the kitchen, he applied her fingerprints to walls, dishes, fixtures, ashtrays, handles. He plucked hairs from her head and distributed them. Using her extra shoes he dotted the carpeting with footprints. A bachelor pad nevermore. He was just putting her back to bed, along with his own pillow, when Indira called him. “Well?” she said.

“Throttled. Clearly at the hands of a strong and passionate man.”

He heard a sigh of relief.

The fire had begun in the basement when a forgotten cigarette, losing its ash, lost its balance and fell into the excelsior in which a Christmas fruitcake had been packed. The pine shavings and wrapping paper burned fiercely, igniting adjacent boxes. They were good sturdy boxes. Some of them were more than ten years old.

Strengthened by a diet of magazines, books and clothing, the fire had climbed up the paneled walls and burned out a window, venting smoke on the front side of the house. Given fresh air, the flames sprawled in all directions, consuming the stairs and within minutes the ceiling above them, rupturing into the staircase between the first and second floors and developing, then, an intense circular draft which carried them on up to the third-story rooms. At this juncture it still seemed a peculiarly selective fire, having started in the first of Probst’s storage areas and traveled by the shortest route to the second. Box after box of unlabeled Kodak slides fed the flames. His collection of restaurant menus from around the world, from each of the countries he’d had the privilege of visiting, sets of towels and linen given as gifts and worn out but not thrown away, board games and books that Luisa had outgrown, World Series and World’s Fair ticket stubs, twenty sets of anniversary cards, small Halloween costumes, Salvation Army paper roses, it was the thin organic matter that was burning, the ephemera.

But at approximately the same time Betsy LeMaster called the fire department, the blaze became a storm, indiscriminate and unstoppable. Probst’s passport burned in an instant. Flames engulfed Luisa’s bed, eating the dust ruffle and searing the mattress with a wolfing sound. Barbara’s letters to Probst disappeared in a yellow flash. Portraits of the family continued to smile up until the last moment, when a wave of ash-in-progress crossed their faces. Oil paintings blistered like marshmallows, blanched, and hung until the wires tore loose from their burning frames. Luisa’s old orthodontic retainers melted into pink plastic pools which boiled and took fire, the wires within them white hot. Barbara’s underwear burned, Probst’s favorite pajamas, Luisa’s two formal dresses, the toilet paper in the bathroom, the toothbrushes and bath mats, Paterson and The Winter’s Tale , the book of erotic verse hidden and forgotten in Luisa’s nightstand, the ribbons in the family typewriters, the pasta in the kitchen, the gum wrappers and sales slips beneath the sofa cushions. In a third-floor window, an Indian woman screamed in a low unnatural voice, a contralto, a word that began but didn’t end. Mohnwirbel staggered, drunk, from the garage and thought he saw Barbara.

Luisa heard the sirens as she was walking down Rock Hill Road to catch the bus. By the time she crossed the Frisco tracks they were coming from every direction. She’d never heard so many all at once. They mounted from behind the horizon and rang from every house, in jarring keys and rhythms, punctuated by the difficult speeding of fire trucks. Two pumpers roared past her and headed down Baker.

To the right of the front door was a grooved oblong button. Probst pressed it, hoping he’d found the right house. He hadn’t been here in nearly fifteen years.

The door was opened by a woman with silvering hair and tiny burst capillaries in her cheeks. He identified her tentatively as Elaine DuChamp. “Martin?” He was dawning on her. “Why, come in!”

They clasped hands and brushed cheeks, a form of greeting for which they’d both grown old enough in fifteen years. Probst caught a glimpse of a girl running down the hall to the bedrooms. A door closed sharply. Ground beef and onions were cooking in the kitchen, imparting a mildly nauseating atmosphere to the living room, where notebooks and notecards were spread out on the floor. Elaine sidled away from him, untying her apron in back. “This is sure a surprise,” she said, not unkindly. She dropped to her knees and with a few swift strokes gathered the notes into a pile.

“I was in the neighborhood,” Probst said. “I thought I’d stop in and see Jack — see all of you. I’ve had to pass up your invitations lately, but the campaign’s over, the—”