Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Your son?”

He unfolded a large wallet and handed her a picture. It showed him in a white shirt and blue V-neck sweater, with his arm around a skinny boy with large dark eyes. Both were smiling, but not at the camera. Parts of a white sofa and a blond wood floor were visible. It was probably Barbara’s imagination, but the lighting seemed to suggest a specifically Manhattan apartment, where high-rise living, through the proximity of a million similar apartments, became more natural and self-sufficient than it could elsewhere. She did know he came from New York.

“Who’s the lucky mother?” she said.

He put away the picture. “My wife died four years ago.”

“I’m sorry.” She watched him take one of her cigarettes. “What’s his name?”

“Terry.”

“He doesn’t look like a Terry.” She smiled kindly, waiting for the shadow of his wife’s death to pass.

“It’s a good American name,” he said. “We’re good Americans. I was born in Teheran and spent my first six years there, but I’ve lived here ever since. I went to Choate and Williams. I anglicized my own name. Don’t I qualify as an American?”

“Your accents are confusing.”

“That’s because I’m not very good at them. As you can see, my American is perfect—”

“Except for your h ’s.”

“Of course. Except for my initial h ’s. But to the Doolittles of the world, I have to be Omar Sharif.”

She was struck by the authenticity of his statement, by his awareness that in an ambitious non-American the desire to conform and the desire to be dazzling were painfully at odds. She could see how mastery of the social code might lag behind control of the American idiom. The overfamiliarity he’d been displaying was probably an accident. In her letters from Paris Luisa had complained that she couldn’t seem to stop offending M. and Mme Giraud, and Barbara had easily imagined how her sarcasm, common currency at home, might have seemed presumptuous abroad. And so she gave Nissing the benefit of the doubt. She took off her shoes.

“Your husband built the Arch.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Somehow I hadn’t quite made the connection.” He looked at her. “What do you know!”

“It’s the kind of thing you get tired of hearing about after twenty years.”

“But that’s an incredible structure,” he told her. “People who haven’t seen it in person just can’t imagine—”

“And this is the thing,” she went on. “My husband is a general contractor. He didn’t design the Arch. He had nothing to do with the design. He made use of two engineering innovations, neither of which were his own ideas, and he put the thing up. But to hear people talk, you’d think he was Saarinen.”

Nissing, saying nothing, stepped back, as it were, and let her words land between them and redound to her discredit.

“It is true that his name was heavily associated with it,” she said.

“There must be a reason for that.”

“Well, at the time, there was.”

“Uh huh.” Nissing glanced over his shoulder at the back yard and then looked again at Barbara. “I like St. Louis,” he said. “It’s an old town. Buildings sit well here. Almost too well, if you know what I mean. The city is such a physical ramification — the brick, the hills, the open spaces, the big trees — that the architecture and landscape completely dominate. I don’t say there aren’t people, but for some reason they seem to get lost in the larger visuals. Perhaps it’s only my outsider’s perspective. I try to get in touch with the genius of places, in the old sense of the word, the unity of place and personality. The advantage of this job is that if I like a place I can go and look inside it. I do, by the way, want to see those rooms—”

The telephone was ringing. Barbara excused herself. A sudden menstrual stitch slowed her down as she left the room. To Nissing it may have looked as if her legs had gone to sleep. The mailman came up the front walk with a handful of Christmas cards. In the kitchen Joshua was buffing the sugar canister. Vince cranked a tripod.

“Barbie?”

“Hi, Audrey.” She walked to the refrigerator. “Is this urgent?” She took out milk, but her pills, including her Motrin, had disappeared from their little shelf. Apparently abdominal cramps had no place in House .

“I’ll call back,” Audrey was saying. “The photographers must be there.”

“They are.”

“Are you OK?”

“I am.”

Hanging up, she asked Vince where the pills were.

“Dining-room table,” he said, intently cranking. “We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t smoke in the other room either.”

She stopped. “It wasn’t me.”

Vince didn’t answer.

Nissing was warming his back at the dying fire. “Don’t mind Vince,” he said. “Let’s go and see those rooms. I’m a real Tudor nut.”

Probst was jumped by Barbara before he even had his coat off. In his distraction he pulled one of the sleeves inside out.

“Martin listen,” she said, wringing her hands. “We have a real problem. I don’t know what to do. It’s Mohnwirbel.” She followed Probst to the closet. “This is just too — He has — Listen. He has pictures, photographs — big blow-ups — of me , he has them on the walls of his rooms.”

“He what?” Probst smoothed his coat onto a hanger. The crowded closet upset him, all the more so because all the coats were his.

“In his apartment. I had to take one of the photographers up there, he wanted to see — Well, you know, the woodwork. And Mohnwirbel, I don’t know where he’d gone. He was here this morning, and he’s here now, but he wasn’t there at lunchtime. I had to dig out our key. I was sure he wouldn’t mind if we just went up and looked in. And I got the door open and I was trying to get the key out — have we ever even used it? And I sent Nissing, the photographer, I sent him in. And finally I got the key out and he was staring — oh my God, I am so mortified. Martin. He’s a pervert or something. We have a pervert living over our garage.”

“What kind of pictures?” Probst said.

“You can imagine that I did not stay to look with a stranger—”

“Clothed pictures, though,” he said, trying to make her understand.

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“It makes no difference. It makes no difference. He’s fired.”

“I thought you liked him,” Probst pointed out. Why she couldn’t have waited a few minutes…

“The same as you. We didn’t dislike him. What’s to dislike? But he probably has corpses—”

“You’re not acting like yourself.”

She stepped back. “Well, I’m upset. Aren’t you?”

“Naturally.” But he’d meant what he said. She seemed like a different person. Even when she’d given him the news of Luisa’s departure, last month, she’d completed her sentences and related the events chronologically.

“Go and look,” she said. “Go and talk to him.”

“You haven’t spoken with him.”

“Me? Jesus! Of course not.”

“I see you still tolerate me when you need me.”

She shook her head ominously. “You wish.” And went and locked herself in the den.

Canadian bacon.

The stairs to Mohnwirbel’s rooms began at the back of the garage. Probst switched on the staircase light and started up. The air was cold and flavored with the decay of exposed wood and the mold that grew in caking dust. Patches of ancient linoleum clung to the blackened stairs. It had been several years since he’d climbed these stairs. Mohnwirbel exercised autonomy. They paid him by mail.

Past the middle landing the air grew heated. The top landing was lit by leakage from under the apartment door and through the curtains on the window in it. Probst’s heart beat as if he’d climbed twenty flights. He knocked, drawing footsteps. The door opened as far as the chain allowed.