Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

There weren’t any bugs. But there was worse, patterns too internal and personal to trace to a plotting human, too cohesive to be accident. It was a matter of simple arithmetic that Luisa should turn eighteen the same year Probst turned fifty. But why should this also have been the year that Jack DuChamp re-entered his life? Why not last year, or next year, or no year? Why had Barbara started smoking again after a decade of good health? Why had Dozer died? And Rolf Riplcy turned suddenly the soul of malevolence, and the whole city a thing of foreignness and menace? Why was it all happening at once?

There was an answer. Silky plaids, six or eight variations on a red and yellow theme. They made him want to own them all and wear them all together, to do justice to the spectrum of the designer’s inventiveness. He glanced into the face of a girl Luisa’s age. She replaced the shirt she’d been feeling and glanced back. She could have been a Hatfield and he a McCoy…. Ugly shirts by Christian Dior which were made, as was clear on the shelf, for men with round manikin chests and wasp waists.

There was an answer: if you looked for patterns, you found them. If you didn’t look, they weren’t there. Probst wasn’t born yesterday, after all. He knew there was no God, no conspiracy, no meaning; there was nothing whatsoever. Except shirts. By gravitation, seemingly, he’d found the shirts he wanted. They came in three colors, the maroon and black, a green and black, and a yellow and black. The latter two looked clownish, and another man already had his hands on them. The man had a mustache. It was Harvey Ardmore .

They scrimmaged. Angry looks and mutters of surprise and consternation. They backed off.

The man was not Harvey Ardmore. Probst turned on his heel and left Plaza Frontenac.

Substantial ramparts of snow ringed the parking lot. In the west the sun was setting, and to the south the lights were coming on in the windows of the Shriners’ Hospital for Crippled Children.

After he’d stashed the packages in his study he returned to the kitchen. “I thought maybe I should go and see S. Jammu,” he said.

“Jammu?” Barbara compared opposite sides of the cake she was frosting. “What for?”

Probst reinflated all the little sacs in his lungs and tried, without success, to form words with the air he blew back out. In the warm kitchen, in the persevering warmth of Barbara today, he couldn’t begin to reconstruct the patterns he’d seen at Plaza Frontenac. He couldn’t think in this house.

“Would you like to lick the bowl?” Barbara asked.

“I’ll see.”

“Did you have the radio on in the car?”

“No.”

“I wondered if you’d heard about the attack.”

“No.”

“I think it was out in Chesterfield, at three or something. The Indians. You can turn the radio back on. I got tired of the repetitions.” She spun the cake, apparently finished with it. “Somebody was hurt but nobody was killed. It was at some kind of telephone installation. Rockets. Hand-held…rockets. I guess I wasn’t really listening.”

“Huh.” With a spoon Probst scraped frosting from the side of the bowl. Barbara was peeling strips of foil out from under the cake. She didn’t think much of Jammu. Sometimes it seemed like she didn’t think much of anyone. “I’m working on the agenda for Municipal Growth in February,” he said. “I thought we might invite Jammu. She’s done surprisingly well.”

“Surprisingly?” Barbara licked her thumb. “You mean, ‘for a woman’?”

“For anyone. But yes, especially for a woman. She’s very able.”

Able . It was another inherited usage, and Barbara turned to him. If he’d become self-conscious, it was largely her doing.

“By all means go and see her, then.” She patted his cheek and pushed his hair off his forehead. “How are you feeling?”

“I think I’ll do just that. She’s remarkably communicative from what I hear.”

Barbara waited a second. “Is it still in your throat?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if she goes a long way here,” he continued. “She certainly shows us up a little.”

“You’ll probably want to shower and change,” Barbara said. “We might have visitors.”

“I guess she comes from a place where women do this sort of thing.”

“I want to wash a few of these dishes, and then I’m going to get cleaned up myself.”

“It’s hard to believe she’s only thirty-five.”

“Martin.” She pinned his cheeks between her thumb and fingers and made him look at her. “Just shut up, all right?”

He wrenched free.

“ Please go take a shower or whatever you need to do.”

He tapped the edge of a counter thoughtfully, preparing to leave the kitchen, content to let the danger pass. But it was too late. Barbara was pacing in a fury, snatching dishes and dumping them in the sink, unknotting her apron and balling it up. What was wrong with him? (She wondered.) He was turning into a monster. (She claimed.) She could tolerate his thick head, she could tolerate the silences, but she would not be insulted like this; she was sorry to act this way on his birthday, but there came a point where she couldn’t help it. (She explained.) Why was he standing there? Why didn’t he go change? (She asked.) Get out of here.

Probst frowned. “What did I say? I don’t remember what I said.”

“You don’t remember what you said?” She moved closer. “You don’t remember what you said? You don’t remember what you said?”

Come on. He’d heard her the first time. He smiled a little, and perceived that this worked to his detriment. The style of her pacing changed. She circled the kitchen with her hands behind her back, her brows knitted, her shoulders hunched, like Peter Falk’s Columbo. She stopped and stared at him. “Why do you treat me like such shit?”

“I simply said,” he said, “that it might be a good idea to go and see Jammu. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. Just simply as a matter of civic responsibility.”

“Oh jesus.” She fell, sideways, into a chair.

“Now, what? I don’t understand.”

“Go take a shower. Go, go, go, go, go.”

He was not an insensitive person. If he thought for a moment, as he was doing now, he could locate the solid logical underpinnings of his actions. When he’d praised Jammu he hadn’t meant it nicely. He just didn’t want to be treated like a baby, to have his face patted. Barbara was “nice” to him, so that when the explosion occurred anyway he would be the one to take the blame. He wasn’t as nice as she was, but he wasn’t sneaky either.

“I never asked you to spend all day in the kitchen,” he said.

At this, her hands reached into the space around her, closing on invisible things. She caught something finally, and her fists dropped to her knees. “My life is in order, Martin.” She paused. “Sometimes I try to do things to make people happy. I don’t ask that they actually be happy, I only want a little credit for the effort, like any first-class citizen.”

“I’m still not clear on what the issue here is.”

“I’ve been saying for two months that I don’t like that woman, and you come home — you’re always coming home, you notice that? You come home and you act like you’ve just discovered her. Like the world was created on Monday, and you’re the first to notice. She acts like she’s the first one. She oh forget it. You’re hopeless.” Barbara’s eyes scanned the kitchen table, her head faintly echoing their movement as they followed the scurrying invisible things. Outside, a dog started barking. “But you know what, Martin?” She looked up with a puzzled smile, her eyes moist and bright. “I really like myself.” It was a different woman speaking now, a Barbara much younger. She smoothed her skirt across her lap, gathering the slack under her thighs. Then she sobbed. “I really love myself.”