Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Some bad news, Chief. On the surface of it.”

“Tell me.”

“Barbara Probst reacted negatively.”

“Maybe it’s temporary.”

“No. She means it. I tried a variety of approaches. She won’t see me again.”

Singh asked Jammu to check it out for herself, and though she was tired and had vowed never again to subject herself to the voice of Barbara Probst, she hooked into the modem at the recording center and listened to segments edited through 3:00 p.m. today. Singh was right. It sounded bad. The Probsts were having a putrid, corny, weepy holiday, God and sinner reconciled, and Barbara Probst more clearly than ever an agent for the Thought Police, appealing to her husband with a calculated tremolo, wearing down his resistance with her self-help honesty and putting him to sleep with the notion that everything was fine. The instrument of repression: “love.”

Jammu called Singh. “Nice going. They’re happier than they’ve been in years.”

“On the surface, yes. But I’ve thought it over—”

“Probst isn’t even arguably in the State and it’s almost January.”

“As I was saying, I’ve thought it over and I think we’re all right, because Probst will never trust her now. She pressed her luck, she mentioned me. She’s still nailed.”

Maybe. But with so much talent, so much investment, so much technique and theory trained on such a very few men in St. Louis, Jammu thinks it’s reasonable to demand resounding victories. She owns the scalps of Meisner, Struthers, Hammaker, Murphy, Wesley, Hutchinson, and she has liens on all the rest — except Probst’s.

Singh told her to cheer up. He read her a reference from a poem in The New Yorker :

Then he hung up.

Tossing aside the assessment map, she goes to the bathroom and pisses a trickle. Her urine burns her as it leaves her. On the left-hand faucet of the bathtub a roach is simulating paralysis, unmoved by the funk beat coming down the pipes.

She flushes the toilet, and she is washing her hands, she is staring straight ahead into the mirror, when suddenly all the diffuse evil in the world has puckered into a single mouth and is blowing out of the mirror at her. The face looking back is a white one, a white face made up as an Indian. An American face is showing through the mask, and it crashes into the wall as she throws open the cabinet. Her fingers close on the thermometer. She’s burning up.

At 11:00 on Christmas morning Luisa put on the red wool dress from her mother which she’d unwrapped an hour earlier, Duane put on his previously owned pinstripe suit and an iridescent blue necktie, and the two of them drove out in the Nova to Webster Groves. When Luisa saw the little stacks of gifts her parents had just opened she wasn’t exactly sad, but she did wonder what she’d been trying to prove by not coming home earlier, especially since her father had decided to be nice again. He was about as self-possessed around Duane as he’d be around the Pope. He shook Duane’s hand and bounded through the house, doing God knew what, and returned and sat with them in the living room for three minutes, and then he bounded to his feet and said they should go. At her grandparents’ there was a lot of drinking and casseroles. Her grandmother gave her a dirty look before pecking her on the cheek and wishing her a Merry C. Her grandfather gave her a real kiss, and she thanked him for the “present,” which was the only word for a $100 bill. Auntie Audrey told her twice how nice she looked, which was agreeable. She shook hands with her cousins and allowed herself to be appraised by her great-aunt Lucy and her great-uncle Ted. Uncle Rolf had despotically occupied the bamboo chair by the fireplace, his legs crossed at the knees, his brandy glass cupped in one hand like a royal orb. He showed Luisa lots of teeth and she smiled and nodded. Then her father moved into the picture. Technical difficulties. Please stand by. Her mother was introducing Duane to Auntie Audrey. “Yes, I have seen your pictures, yes.” Luisa wandered over and felt excluded, as always. Duane didn’t have to be so polite. But then he took her out into the hall and said, “Help, help.” They went together to see her grandmother in the kitchen. Her grandmother said everything was under control.

On the way home Duane sat with her mother in the back seat and started telling her the story of his getting hit in the head with a baseball bat while his parents were in Aruba. Daddy, instead of listening, spoke in a low voice to Luisa. He said he may have said some things on his birthday that he didn’t mean. He said he was under a lot of strain at work and Municipal Growth. He said he sincerely hoped they could see more of her and Duane, whom he liked.

“And Peter was out playing golf, so there was this unconscious eleven-year-old kid and no one knew who he belonged to, or who to call.”

Her mother laughed. “So…?”

“Did you have a good time today?” her father asked.

“Yeah, it was OK.”

“So I woke up in the hospital, and a nurse rushed over, and the first thing she said was What’s your name? Because none of the kids had even known my name. Somebody thought I might be ‘Don.’”

“You know, your grandmother hasn’t been well.”

“Oh, really? I guess she did seem kind of…” Luisa shrugged.

“I’d given them the wrong number. They kept calling and calling, and no one answered. So finally around ten in the evening they decided to look it up in the phone book. And of course we have an unlisted number.”

“Oh no .”

“And meanwhile, Peter is losing his mind, he’s so scared. He was supposed to look after me, and he has no idea, absolutely no idea—”

“And you understand that at her age she sees things rather differently from the way you or even I do. That is, I don’t think you should feel hurt if she doesn’t approve of your, your situation with Duane.”

“It’s OK, I understand.”

The headlights and highway lights began to reveal falling snow.

“But by now he’s not there anymore, he’s down at the police station.”

“Oh no, oh no.”

“Will you be all right driving home in Duane’s car?”

“We’ve got snow tires.”

“You’ve been driving it to school?”

“Sometimes.”

“And so finally it occurs to someone at the hospital to call the police—”

“What’s this?” her father asked over his shoulder.

The vacation week passed slowly. Duane said he liked her parents but he liked her better. They went out once with Sara and Edgar. They went skating. They went sledding, and got mashed together when they crashed. Then on the day before New Year’s Eve Duane went out to Webster to see two high-school friends of his, and Luisa stayed behind in the apartment to type up all her applications.

As soon as she saw Duane drive away she started walking back and forth through the kitchen and living room and bedroom. She’d never spent a whole day by herself in the apartment, and it was obvious that she wouldn’t be working on her applications. She remembered how when her parents used to leave her alone in the house she would feel a deep pang of boredom and irresponsibility the moment they were out the door, and before she could do any of the things she’d thought she would be doing, she had to rifle their drawers, or try their liquor, or fill the bathtub to the very brim and take a bath, which her father said was criminally wasteful.

The first thing she did was smoke one of Duane’s cigarettes. The next thing she did was go to the bedroom and look for his journal. Usually he left it in his knapsack with some of his camera equipment, but today the knapsack was empty. She looked through all the books along the baseboard — the notebook had a gray spine like an ordinary book — but it wasn’t there either. She went through his drawers in their dresser, and then through all his prints and printing paper, and then through all the clothes in the closet. She even looked in his empty suitcases. The journal wasn’t anywhere. She had just about concluded that he’d put it in the car without her noticing, when, just to be sure, she lifted their mattress off the floor. And there it was.