Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

She’d nearly fainted. On her next try, she stood up in increments, raising her head gradually, as if placing it atop the statue of her body. She crossed the room and opened the door. The lock she’d heard turn so many times was gone. And now, where for all the weeks she’d been led to the bathroom she’d heard the unmistakable echoes of vacancy, she was walking through an apartment very much like the New York apartment John had been forcing her to imagine.

Books of hers lay on the arms of Scandinavian chairs. She’d hung lingerie up to dry in the bathroom. On a desk in the dining room, above a pack of her Winstons and a dirty ashtray, she’d filed away her letters from Luisa and Audrey in a set of modular shelves. She’d stocked the refrigerator with her preferred brands of yogurt, diet chocolate soda, martini olives. (She was starving for real food, but she didn’t touch anything.) She’d written a grocery list and left it on the counter. On the floor near the outer door she found a scrap of white paper.

Bhimrao Ambedkar

Barrister at Law

Chowpatty, Bombay

The nurses, orderlies and candy stripers gave Buzz a wide berth. In the waiting area on the ICU floor at Barnes he sat hunched and trembling, a small, hungry old man. He hadn’t eaten anything since his Reuben sandwich at noon. What the intercoms were saying he didn’t understand. A nurse manipulated jumbo file cards and a telephone pealed electronically. A thin, even layer of scar tissue covered the walls and floors, the residue of the artificial light that had been falling twenty-four hours a day for twenty years.

The chief neurologist had told Buzz that any brain damage would not become evident until Bev regained consciousness, but that he should begin to prepare himself for a long and arduous recovery period. Asha had told him, when he finally got in touch with her, that she wouldn’t be able to see him tonight because she’d made a commitment to appear at the election festivities downtown. And Martin’s phone wasn’t working.

Strain was building in his throat and behind his nose when he heard a familiar voice. He stifled a sob, looked up and saw his urologist strolling with another doctor at a conversational pace. Both of them peeled off green caps and massaged their scalps. Buzz raised his head further and uncrossed his arms to let himself be recognized and spoken to. They didn’t speak to him. Dr. Thompson said, “Kids get side-aches.”

The other doctor said, “Kids eat candy.”

Dr. Thompson said, “Candy causes side-aches.”

Both men laughed and walked onto the elevator, which had opened for them as they approached it.

Tired of driving but not of moving, Probst parked the Lincoln in one of the Convention Center garages, counted five other cars on the entire Lemon level, and set out from there on foot. It was nine o’clock. He’d spent two hours at the police station in Webster Groves, speaking to Allstate, thanking firemen, accepting coffee and condolences from Chief Harrison, and giving information to a series of lesser officers who transferred his statements onto dotted lines. He was told there would soon be a body to identify. He was left by himself in a corridor to wait, gratefully, on a carved walnut bench. Then an officer called his name: he was wanted on the telephone. It was the second summons, and again he walked away, got in his car, drove east.

Rock music, so loud it could only be live, reverberated inside the Convention Center and through the walls across the plaza. The song’s chorus seemed to go, You love you won you win . Maybe the Center was packed with young people dancing and waving their arms above their heads, but maybe not; the plaza and surrounding streets were barren of stragglers. Pairs of policemen in mackintoshes turned their heads back and forth with an air of defensiveness. They stamped their feet and blew on their hands. Probst crossed Washington Street in the middle of a block and didn’t see a car coming in either direction. The downtown streets, of course, were off limits to private cars tonight. Pedestrians were expected to carry the party into every square yard of the area. But there were fewer pedestrians in sight than on an ordinary Tuesday night.

A dixieland band was playing beneath a plastic awning in front of the Mercantile Tower, next to the chromium sculpture, which gleamed cheaply, a household knickknack grossly enlarged. Three teens in ski jackets stood listening to the music. The washboard player took a short solo, hunkering down and giving a vigorous rub to the slats of his instrument. He winked at the kids.

At the empty sidewalk cafés on 8th Street, waiters sat smoking, dozing, playing cards. Rain pelted the canopies, which shivered in each gust of wind like dogs that had evacuated. Probst stepped up to the sampling booth for Jardin des Plantes and ordered a slice of quiche from a short man with a bullet-shaped head.

“Five.”

“Five dollars?”

“It’s a benefit.”

He bolted the quiche before it got too cold to stomach, crunching the bean sprouts and miniature shrimps embedded in it, squeezing the oils through his mouth and down his throat.

In another booth, above a tank of water, in a seat connected by springs to a bull’s-eye at which passersby could pay to throw tennis balls, Sal Russo sat reading the Post-Dispatch . Sal was a city alderman from the ward in which Probst & Company were located. He looked quite toasty, his hair dry and styled, between a pair of radiant heaters. “Hey, Martin.”

“Hi, Sal.” Probst turned to the attendant. “How much?”

The attendant pointed to a sign. “Five bucks a throw. Sir. Or ten for three. It’s a benefit.”

He bought six balls, and then six more. Before Sal could surface in the tank, Probst had hastened around the corner onto Market Street. Here he stopped in his tracks, shocked by the Arch.

Colored lights were playing on the stainless steel, mottling it garishly. They shifted, the reds and greens and yellows intermingling on the flat integral sections. It wasn’t Probst’s Arch anymore. It was the National Park Service’s.

Games and German sausages, clowns and unicyclists, raffles, accordionists, and elected representatives waited for a throng of visitors who, since they hadn’t come by 9:00 in the evening, would surely not come at all. Probst himself had come only to seek necessity, to let himself be guided to Jammu. The Arch blushed as red lights rose and deepened to purple. He walked east, down the center of the Mall, under the eyes of lone policemen with billies.

Beneath the largest tent on the Mall, Bob Hope was speaking to a meager gathering with a peculiar demographic profile. It consisted entirely of youngish men. Probst couldn’t find a single woman in it, nor any man under twenty or over forty. Two hundred rather small young men in London Fogs and Burberrys, in white shirts with tab collars and neckties of median width, in brown walking shoes with crepe soles, laughed on cue. Pete Wesley and Quentin Spiegelman and other dignitaries stood in a phalanx on the stage behind Hope, who was saying, “No, seriously, folks, I think it’s just great to see what’s been done in St. Louis. When you think what it looked like thirty years ago — of course, I only know from pictures. I was still a teenager in California.”

The youngish men erupted in laughter, clapped their hands and nodded to each other.

“You know, I was in Washington the other day—”

Barbara hadn’t meant to leave. She’d picked up the Bombay address from the floor and stepped into the hall, intending to explore the building, find a window and figure out where she was, and then return to the apartment and try some numbers besides her old one, which seemed to be out of order. She had to know the address before anyone could come and get her. But the apartment door had fallen shut behind her, locking.