Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Yes.”

“Are you going to make a habit of it?”

“No.” She might have said: What if I do? He wished she had. “Are we quits?” she said.

“You’ve been lying to me all weekend. You’ve been acting.”

“That’s not true. I just want this to be over, I’m sick of fighting you. You’ve been stranger than I have. I know you’re still in there. I want you to come out.”

He stood. “We’ll see.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going for a walk.”

“Can I come along?”

“I’d like to be alone.”

“I don’t want you to be alone. I want to be with you. I laaah.”

“You can’t say it. I can’t say it.”

“I love you.”

She said it in room after room, at his elbow, at his throat. The more she said it, the more he pitied her. But she wouldn’t leave him alone. When he put on his coat, she put on hers. She stayed within a foot of him, and finally, as they were heading up the front walk moments after heading down it, he succumbed. “All right,” he said, glancing over his shoulder. George LeMaster was replacing a colored bulb on his front railing. Probst led Barbara inside and shut the door. “All right. I love you, too.”

She kissed his hand, but he pulled it away. He was beginning to feel betrayed. Barbara had defected to the world at large, to its optimisms, its smooth mechanisms of love and remorse, and like everyone else now she wanted to have Probst in her camp.

“You would have done the same thing in my shoes. I know you, I know you better than anyone. I know you would have.”

“So you say,” he said.

“Look at me and tell me you believe in perfect faithfulness. I dare you.”

Instead he went upstairs and changed his clothes, came down and built a fire, and opened the front door. It was 3:30. Guests were arriving, all their favorite people, as if at a clap of Barbara’s hands. She’d timed her announcement well. Probst had no choice but to appear himself when he let the Montgomerys in. Jill and Bob bubbled. The dining-room table was laden with interesting cookies, fruits and vegetables, tiny sandwiches of Gruyère and roast beef. Barbara popped into view with her arms full of liquor bottles. Bob made a crack, turned to Probst, and started in with a story about a flat tire he’d had at midnight on the outer belt two nights ago.

The doorbell rang again and again. Cal Markham with a new girl named Nancy, Barbara’s college friend Lorri Wulkowicz, Barbara’s parents, both very tan. Sally and Fred Anderson and Probst’s secretary Carmen and her husband Eddie, who grinned and stammered. Peter Callahan, the widowed chief engineer, and his seventeen-year-old daughter Dana. More engineers, the Hoffingers, the Foxxes, the Waltons, the Joneses. Two of Barbara’s library coworkers and their husbands. People clustered around the fire, around the laughing Barbara and the smiling Probst. Small packages accumulated on the mantelpiece. The windows darkened. Cal volunteered to fetch more firewood, and Nancy joined Probst and Dana and Lorri Wulkowicz in the chairs by the piano. Lorri in particular warmed to Probst. She still wore the little round wireframed glasses she’d worn in the sixties. He watched her eat five Gruyère sandwiches between pulls on a bottle of Heineken. She’d recently been made chairman of her English department. It was a long time since she’d been in this house.

Good-bye and Merry Christmas. Probst retrieved coats and saw guests to the door. He kept returning to Lorri, who had gotten him started on the current political situation in the city. The phone rang. Barbara went to answer it and did not come back.

Now, towards six o’clock, only Lorri remains. Probst can hear Barbara in the kitchen on the phone. Lorri sits Indian style on the floor rolling her first cigarette of the afternoon. “That frumpy charisma,” she says. “She still seems totally Third World to me. The stupidest platitudes mean something, you know, they’re vital truths where she comes from. She’s got the imprimatur of struggle. And the ambiguities. On the one hand she has this naïve socialism. On the other hand she’s probably a closet mobster like her cousin Indira.”

“Cousin?”

“Fifth? Eighth? Twelve times removed? You and I are cousins twelve times removed.”

“People romanticize her,” Probst says. “I romanticize her, too. What did you say — her charisma. A week ago I had myself completely convinced.” He shakes his head.

“No, go on.”

“I thought it meant something that she was an Indian, something to do with American Indians—”

“The so-called terrorists.”

“But superstitiously, too.” He explains.

Lorri tells him it’s simply literate behavior. “You can do numerology tricks, assign a number to each letter of your name. Birthplace, birth date, sign. I’m always rationalizing attractions—”

“I’m so-o-o-o sorry,” Barbara says, returning at last.

Lorri puts on her coat, which she has dropped on the floor behind a chair, kisses Probst and Barbara, and leaves with an invitation to return for dinner sometime after New Year’s.

“I like her,” Probst says.

“She likes you. She always has.”

Silence has fallen on the used glasses and sugared plates. For the first time in eighteen Christmas Eves the Probsts can do whatever they want. The traditional activity at this hour is Luisa’s opening of the gifts that come to Probst from his suppliers. “Maybe we should open some boxes,” he says.

The boxes are stacked against the southern wall of the den. He turns on the TV and waits for Barbara. The lead story on the KSLX local news is a visit to a North Side soup kitchen.

Barbara comes in wiping her hands. “Luisa and Duane are going to be at Mom and Dad’s tomorrow.”

“And it took you all that time to persuade them.”

“Yep.” She sits. “You don’t mind, I hope.”

“Why should I mind?”

“Minnie Sanders is sixty-three. Her only child, Leroy—”

“Duane’s parents are in St. Croix.”

Probst sniffs. “Is it my imagination, or is there something wrong with them?”

She doesn’t answer. He looks. Tears are streaming down her cheeks.

“It’s not the end of the world,” he says. “We’ll see her tomorrow.”

She shakes her head.

“You want me to call her?”

She stares at the TV, her hands on her lap, her face lined and wet. How very few tears she will have shed, Probst thinks, between growing up and dying. One cupful. Distantly the furnace comes to life.

Cliff Quinlan’s face is gray. Outdoor light shows up his gash-like dimples in high relief. “I’m standing on the southern city limits of St. Louis, behind me is the River des Peres, and beyond that, a quiet residential neighborhood in what is Bella Villa. In my first report I examined the dilemmas that the regional law-enforcement community faces in dealing with threats such as the ‘Osage Warriors.’ It was very close to where I stand now that the group crossed the river and escaped into the county. They are still at large.” Quinlan consults his text. “In my second report we saw how borders such as this one enable lawbreakers to enter and leave suburban neighborhoods with relative impunity, and how difficult it is to trace these lawbreakers in a county which is currently a hodgepodge of more than fifty independent police forces. The burglary rate in St. Louis County stands at an all-time high. However, for the last four months the city rate has been dropping steadily. Tonight: prospects for change.”

Probst turns off the TV. Barbara cries. He knows what’s on her mind, the whole matrix of Christmases with Luisa at eight, ten, twelve, sixteen. One girl who came in every size and every mood. He will grow sentimental and sorry for himself. On the floor between him and Barbara is a box of graphic imaginings: how she acted with John Nissing. Nissing’s vulgar language, his insinuating laughter. Who touched whom when. Whether Nissing was better. How much better.