Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Heinrich, hi,” Probst said. “Can I talk to you?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to come in.”

Through the doorway came a sigh with some voice in it, and Mohnwirbel said, “You want to come in.”

“I want to see the pictures of my wife.”

Eyelids covered and uncovered the small black eyes. “All right.”

There were many pictures, but for a moment only their existence registered in Probst, not their content. He paced along the walls of the exhibition. It was true: these were the finest rooms on the property. The ceilings were high, the woodwork extravagant, the kitchenette antiquated but adequate. Through the eastern window, the glowing windows of 236 itself could be seen, and Probst experienced a mild epiphany as he felt his way, by means of this perspective, into another life. He never saw his own house from this angle. Mohnwirbel had lived here for decades.

A second thought intruded. With Mohnwirbel out of the way, they could rent this space for at least four hundred a month.

By the bedroom door he saw a nude profile, a telephoto of Barbara in the bathroom. The guilty cameras hung on a peg near the closet where Mohnwirbel, face blank, stood watching.

Barbara was clothed in the other dozen or so pictures, her hair cut in the various styles she’d tried in the last three or four years. She’d stood twice in the kitchen, once in the sunroom, and the rest of the time outdoors. All but the kitchen shots shared the perspective Probst had now, and they looked, every one of them, like shots from the National Enquirer of Jackie Onassis or Brigitte Bardot on their beaches, boats, or estates. The graininess, the candidness, the flatness of the telephoto field gave Barbara glamour.

“So what’s the meaning of this, Heinrich?”

“You saw them, now get out.” Mohnwirbel was wearing a plaid wool woodsman’s jacket and unusual pants. They were black tuxedo pants, greatly worn.

“I own these rooms,” Probst said.

“In point of law, you do not. I don’t rent. I have domicile.”

This might be true, Probst realized. “You’re fired,” he said.

“I resign.”

“How much will it cost me to get you out of here?”

“I don’t leave. I have nowhere to go.” He presented this as a fact, not a sentiment. “Perhaps I can speak with the lady of the house.”

Probst went icy. “The lady of the house does not wish to speak with you .” He tore the nude profile off the wall and into quarters. “This is filth, this is perverted, you hear me?”

“It’s your wife,” said Mohnwirbel.

Probst tore another picture off the wall, sending thumbtacks scattering on the sere Orientals. He reached for a third, and Mohnwirbel, seizing his elbow, levered him against the wall. “I throw you down the stairs if you touch another one, Martin Probst.” His breath had a powerful ethyl stink. “I want to tell you, Martin Probst, you are the most arrogant man I ever knew. You have categories of normal and pervert, right and wrong, good bad. Like the lady’s tits don’t heat you up when she picks up her towel. You call that filthy and you got no God. You think she never looks at another man? Then what am I? Come on, Martin Probst. Don’t say I’m pervert.”

“One way or another, you’re going to leave here, mister. You’re going to hear from the police, you’re going to hear from our attorney—”

“Sentimental, Martin Probst. You go your way, I go mine. You stand in a room of pleasure.” A plaid arm swept the air inclusively. “What pleasure you got? You don’t have the house, you don’t have the woman, you don’t have the grass on the ground.” Mohnwirbel looked aside, seemingly distracted. “I don’t like your daughter,” he remarked.

“I’m sure she doesn’t like you either.” Probst broke the grip on his elbow and fell a few steps towards the windows. He looked down on the shoveled driveway.

“We see if you can put me in jail, Martin Probst.”

Through the thin reaches of a dogwood he saw Barbara, in their kitchen on the telephone, with both hands on the receiver.

It was Luisa. She wanted to move more things out of the house. Barbara asked if she was sure. Yes, she was pretty sure. It wasn’t fair to Duane not to.

That one made Barbara hyperventilate, but she stayed on the phone. She begged. She pleaded. She offered Luisa complete freedom to come and go if she returned home; offered her a car; offered to keep Martin at bay. Luisa’s replies became duller and duller. Finally she made her bargain: Barbara could come and visit her whenever she wanted to, but she was in love with Duane and wanted to live with him for a while if that was OK.

She added: “I would have been leaving soon anyway.”

The weekend had passed. Depressed, with symptoms as clinical as they’d ever been, Barbara woke up at three in the morning in the guest room. The north wind shook the northern wall. She pressed it with her fingers to still it. A full moon spent itself in the frost on the western windows. In her mind this room in the corner of the house had come unmortared and was edging out of its slot, about to fall, with the clunk of the rejected, into the bushes.

She’d recovered from the first shock of Nissing’s discovery. On Saturday morning she’d spoken with Mohnwirbel and found him polite. He apologized formally, and later in the day, while Martin watched football, he came to the kitchen door with negatives and prints, dozens and dozens, in a shirt box. She asked him not to take any more, please.

He wouldn’t promise. “You should be appreciated right,” he said, showing perspicacity if not sanity. But Martin still wanted to prosecute or sue.

All weekend she’d felt as though she had cancer, as though she were ordering her life for a scheduled death. The shirt box of photos — which she couldn’t touch, let alone open or throw away — could have held the fatal X-rays. Household objects avoided contact with her, superstitiously. It would have been nice to have Dozer back to break the spell, to wander with a jangle from room to room, sniffing, yawning, spreading his sounds. But Dozer was dead.

And yet now, on Monday, she felt better. Rain poured on the windshield and roof as she inched down Euclid Avenue and pulled into a well-situated parking space. In a busy neighborhood, a free space was an omen. She put up the hood of her rain cloak and slid across the seat and released her umbrella and stepped out, directly into a stream of meltwater. So her foot was soaked, so? She pushed quarters into the meter and ran, every second step a squish, across the street and into Balaban.

John Nissing was checking his coat.

“Wonderful!” He peeled back her hood and held her shoulders. “You’re here!” He kissed her mouth as if compelled by the pure joy of seeing her again. They were given a corner table with reasonable privacy.

“I’m feeling extra specially good today,” he said when the Pouilly-Fuissé was splashing into their glasses. “A parcel which has been in the mail since 1979 and which I’d assumed was lost forever was waiting for me in New York on Friday night.”

He smiled complacently and waited. She waited. Suddenly he leaned towards her. “Jewelry! And jewelry, what’s more, with absolutely no sentimental value.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “This is for you.” He handed her a velvet box. “And the rest is for Christie’s.”

She opened the box. It contained two earrings: diamonds, a half carat apiece, in white-gold settings. She’d been wanting diamond earrings for Christmas.

“You can keep them, too,” he said. “And you don’t have to worry. They aren’t antiques.”

“I have a hundred questions about these,” she said.