Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Entrez-vous,” Chuck Meisner said, holding open the storm door. Probst entered stomping, scuffing snow into the rug. Even on a Sunday morning the Meisner living room seemed freshly vacuumed, freshly dusted, the cushions freshly plumped. Chuck was wearing shapeless country clothes, corduroy and wool.

“Can I get you something? Coffee? Bloody Mary?”

“Nothing, thanks, Chuck.” His body was primed. He needed nothing.

“Is this — something you want to talk about upstairs?”

“Yes. That would be good.”

Probst and Barbara had seen quite a lot of the Meisners this fall. Chuck was president of the First National Bank and a director at First Union and Centerre. If people had been withholding facts from Probst, for whatever reason, then Chuck was likely one of them. Of course in private Chuck had always been as tight-lipped about professional matters as a funeral-home owner. And Probst did all his banking at Boatmen’s, the Hammaker bank, which, his regard for Chuck notwithstanding, he’d long felt was the best managed in St. Louis. He didn’t believe in socializing with bankers. Pure money, like pure sexuality, was an evil demon in friendship. Other contractors in St. Louis tended to bank incestuously with brothers or brothers-in-law and they often had highly flexible credit lines, which were legal but rather unethical; Probst did not. He enjoyed seeing Chuck because Chuck was a Democrat, and Probst liked oddities, men who ran against the grain a little. A Democratic banker — it was a mild sensation, like fresh papaya.

Chuck planted himself behind the massive antique desk in his study and indicated the correct chair for Probst. Outside the window, a cloud of windborne snowflakes, marvelously tiny, a heavenly host, swirled in the sunlight. The walls creaked in the wind. Probst hoped Chuck assumed he’d come for personal advice, an investment question, a tax shelter, a sewage bond. He didn’t like to mislead a friend, but the confrontation with Rolf yesterday had made him leery of stating his business prematurely. Now he was ready to come straight to the point. He began by taking a good look at his friend, and he got no further than this.

Chuck looked terrible.

He knew it, too. He met Probst’s eyes expectantly, with the guilt, the sad candor, of a man detected engaging in a vice. His eyelids were puffed and folded, the whites a solid pink. There was a purple crack in his upper lip. His hair was lifeless.

“I don’t look so great, do I?”

“Have you been sick?”

“I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in over two months.”

Probst recognized the controlled fury in Chuck’s voice. Over two months . The phrase was cruel self-propaganda, a complaint spoken silently again and again, an inner goad (You know, that den smells like Canadian bacon) until the complaint became so meaningful, so powerful, that voicing it could only lessen it, and having it was defeat.

“I don’t remember you seeming that tired,” Probst said.

“Sometimes I’m OK.” Chuck closed his eyes. “You think you’re getting by. And then one bad night.” He shook his head.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yes. I have pills. And amino acids. Last week I saw a hypnotist. Bea has me started with an analyst. And the result is, I slept about twenty minutes last night. On Tuesday I got six hours. The next night, zero.” It seemed to tax Chuck to speak at any length. It took an ugly effort.

“Do they know what the problem is?” Probst said.

“I tried cutting out booze, coffee. I didn’t eat meat for a while. I went all-protein for a while. I switched beds, which actually helped, but only for one night. I did all right at the ABA conference in San Francisco, but that was only three days, I came back, and wham. I tried meditation. Yoga, jogging, no jogging, hot baths. Warm milk, bedtime snacks, lots of Valium. I’m totally unconscious, I’m in a stupor, but the sleep part of me, Martin—” He raised his hands and, with his fingers, caged what he was describing. “The sleep part of me is wide awake.”

“What do you think it is?”

“That’s the thing. Everything seems like it might be important. The side of the bed I sleep on. Working too hard. Not working enough. Do I need to get angry? Or do I need to stay calm? Weekend versus week night, red wine versus white. You know? Because there’s got to be a reason for this, and any part of my life, anything I do every day — There are so many variables, so many combinations. I can’t pinpoint the important ones by any process of elimination. What if the reasons I can’t sleep are eating sugar, going to bed too early, and watching sports on the weekend? I could never isolate that. But I lie there for hours turning over the variables. I can’t remember when I ever slept well. As if my whole life had been this way.”

Probst was stuck now. This was no time for a confrontation, no matter how friendly. He cleared his throat and remembered the box in his pocket. He lifted it out and set it on his knee.

“What’s that?” Chuck said.

“A toy I got yesterday.” Probst pressed the Test button. Red light. The red light! Had he damaged it?

“What is it?”

Probst rose and circled his chair. As he passed the window, the box began to squeal like a quartz alarm clock. He backed away from the window, and the squeal faltered. “I think this room is bugged,” he announced. He scanned the wall to the left of the window, playing games with the squeal, to locate the center of the electronic irritation. At waist level he found a spot on the wall where the paint was a shade lighter than the rest. He tapped on the spot. Hollow. He punched his finger right through. It was stiff gauze, glued over a hole and painted to match the wall. He tore it away. The hole was an inch in diameter and half an inch deep. In the center, its legs embedded in rough plaster, was a bug. He opened his penknife and pried it free. A hair-thin wire, eight or ten inches long, peeled away from under the fresh paint. He dumped it on Chuck’s desk.

“Did you know this was here?” Chuck said.

“Of course not. But I think you should know that Sam Norris found a bug identical to this one in his office.”

“Oh did he?” The sharpness of Chuck’s reply surprised him. “Are you sure he really found it?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning are you sure he didn’t just get it from a friend and say he found it?” Chuck’s croaking was repellent. “Sam Norris, as you call him, has been courting the hell out of Bobby Caputo and Oscar Thorpe at the FBI. My first reaction to this thing here”—Chuck swept the bug off the desk onto the Persian rug—“is the name Hoover. Norris doesn’t trust me anymore. My behavior is suspect . And since when are you on good terms with him? I thought you weren’t even speaking.”

“Well…”

“You’re surprised I mention the FBI. So I don’t suppose you heard Norris flew a private investigator to Bombay to dig up muck on Jammu, either. Or that he’s a handshake and two signatures away from outright buying the Globe-Democrat, because nobody prints him anymore.” Chuck sighed and rocked in the stationary chair. He waved his arms weakly. “So there’s a bug in here. I don’t imagine it’s the first time. But what Norris doesn’t know, what the FBI doesn’t know, is that not everyone is a sneak like them. I have nothing to hide.”

Except from me and Barbara, Probst thought. You hid your exhaustion. “Then tell me what’s going on in North St. Louis.”

“Nothing more than what’s in the papers every night.” Chuck raised his voice, as if many stupid people had been asking him this very question. “Nothing more than business as usual. The public invests more than just money in us, Martin. It invests its trust, and that’s a pretty important thing. We’ve a responsibility to our investors to use that money — that trust — in the most productive way possible. We’d be negligent not to. Now, to my knowledge, there’s been no excessive speculation on the North Side. Property values have risen, and the various institutions I serve have seen fit to protect their future and the future of the depositor — the little man, Martin — by making some selected and I believe wise purchases in the area. To add to what we already had. And, of course, to replace what we’d sold before we properly assessed the market’s strength. There’s some very choice property down there, and it’s about time the city made something of it. We’re in the business of encouraging development. It’s part of our public trust. I think the time is coming. We’re certainly quite satisfied with the crime situation at present.”