Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

The fact that he’d tried to hide it made it much more horrible and interesting that she was going to read it.

She lay down on the mattress and started looking for her name. She was immediately disappointed. The last dated entry was October 6, two weeks before she’d met him. After that there were only phrases and prices and doodles, picture ideas and sentences he’d copied down from bulletin boards and books. Her name wasn’t mentioned once.

She was glad he wasn’t there to see the look on her face. She was quite annoyed. Her reasons were different now, but she decided to keep reading. The first entries were from August.

Last night we saw “A Chorus Line” at the Muny Opera and sat with 5000 giants shaking half-pint cartons of limeade and lemonade and pushing straws out of the paper wrappers. Every last one of those people looked like an American tourist.

He wrote the way he talked. Or maybe he talked the way he wrote. There was a lot of stuff about starting school at Wash U. which Luisa only skimmed.

Connie didn’t sleep alone last night.

Connie? Who was Connie? Luisa looked at the previous entry and saw that Connie was someone in his dorm.

I heard the whole scene, all the many noises she made. Usually she speaks from her throat (when she condescends to speak to me at all) but last night the noises came from much lower down. (I don’t see what’s so wrong with me. I suspect she’d like me if I had a card that proved my age was 35.) The thumping went on forever. It was after midnight, the libraries closed. I went and knocked on Tex’s door. Nobody home.

There were pages and pages about his parents and some neighbor of theirs, and then a very long entry from October 1.

…I noticed Tex (his real name is Chris) in a corner with two girls whose eye make-up made them look like hornets. I could see he was thrilling them with his rattlesnake story, or the one about the Quaalude freak at the Van Halen concert:

Curled up inside the woofer and went to sleep.

Around eleven the music improved. They played a long string of songs in minor keys, “Born Under Punches,” “Computer Blue,” “Guns of Brixton,” plus that ten-minute Eurythmics thing. And when you’re dancing to a tape & the music is so loud that it’s the only sound in your ears, you wonder: where are these voices I bear? They aren’t in anyone’s throat, they aren’t in the speakers, they’re in your head & they sound like the voices of the dead. They make you pity yourself for being alive. They make you sad, these songs between your ears that could stop at the flip of a switch. Because the world itself could go out, like a light, at any moment. The whole world could die like a single person used to. That’s what the nuclear age is: the objectification of the terror of total subjectivity. You know you can die any day. You know the world can die.

Tex tapped me on the shoulder. “You know any of these people?”

I shook my head.

“Then let’s bag it.”

The two girls and I followed him upstairs and out into the rain. Their names were Jill & Danielle, seniors at John Burroughs. Tex put them in the back seat of his Eldorado, me in front. We drove to a bar called Dexter’s, where Jill wanted to dance, or try to & Tex obliged her. Danielle said her feet hurt, which I could believe. I saw some blood around the rim of one of her high heels. We were standing in a noisy crowd near the cash register. I told her I’d gone to school for a year in Germany. She told me she had a horse whose name was Popsy.

Does it make any sense that what I nonetheless wanted most of all was to go to bed with her? But she went off somewhere, I really don’t know where, and Darshan offered to buy me a drink. I said sure. I’d never spoken to an Indian before. He was thirty maybe. When I said I was a student he said he was too. I was smoking Marlboros, he was smoking cloves & when I talked about the Phillips he understood, he knew it all, he drew my own conclusions. He liked me. He said: “That’s the center of it, isn’t it. People smoke cigarettes even though they are known to be dangerous.”

When the bar closed we drove to his apartment, which was down in a bad neighborhood off Delmar. The streets in the rain were black and shiny. Inside, at the end of a long hall of closed doors, was a room with persian rugs on the floor, a rug on the wall & not much else. He went to the kitchen to make tea. I lay back on the rugs & sank into them. The radiator ticked as the heat came on. I remember concentrating on the ticking. I was fairly drunk, but the tea was good and suddenly, or maybe half an hour or an hour later, I was sinking into the rugs & my clothes were all off & the radiator was ticking again. Everything was one temperature.

Luisa skimmed a few pages, her eyes just bouncing off the words. Her heart sounded like a heavy person tromping through the apartment upstairs.

When each one ends I immediately want another. But that’s not right. When each one begins , before I even light it , I’m already wanting the next one. As much as I want to see him again.

She skipped a few more pages.

…I left at six sharp in the rain, I went down Delmar and up two flights of stairs and knocked on the door. I saw his twinkling eyes on the back of my hand like Marley’s ghost: knock knock knock (echoing the tick tick tick) but the door was unlocked. I walked right in. Six doors were wide open & every room was empty, stripped bare except for rolls of carpet. He was gone. I left the building but I hadn’t gotten very far, just a block in fact, when I met two people I knew like brothers from ten years of imagining them who wanted my wallet. Well, no wallet, no camera, no $20, nothing. They laughed little bitter laughs, turned away & then turned back & hit me twice, one in the mouth, two in the eye, & left me kneeling there not thirty steps from the bus stop of epiphanous fame, so embarrassed I almost wished they’d pulled a trigger to save me from standing up. But I stood up & I was thinking ONE THING, which was: Goodness gracious, I must trot home and write about this.

Luisa put the notebook down and went and looked out the window at the street, where cars with black windows were parked crookedly between snowmounds. All the blood was draining from her head. She pictured Duane in the strong arms of a man, the dark arms of an Indian man. She could see it but she couldn’t believe it. Kissing a man, rolling naked on the floor with a man. It just didn’t seem like something the Duane she knew would do. But he’d done it. And that was why he’d gone to Dexter’s on the night Luisa met him: he was looking for the man. Not for her, not for anybody like her: for him.

She thought about this for a while. Then she put the notebook back under the mattress and stirred some of her clothes into the blankets, and went and smoked another cigarette in the kitchen.

The telephone rang. She knocked over the chair she was sitting on, but it was only her mother. Would she and Duane like to come out and have lunch with them tomorrow?

“Sure,” Luisa said. “He’s out there now, but — But I’m not. So yes.”

Three hours later she had the kitchen table covered with application materials. She didn’t think moviemakers arranged their scenes any more carefully than she’d arranged the one that was waiting for Duane at five o’clock when he came home. She couldn’t hide the fact that the applications weren’t done, but she knew exactly what she was going to say she’d watched on TV if he asked what she’d been doing all day.

He didn’t ask. He was surprised she’d done as much typing as she had.

For ten more minutes she moved and spoke as if all her expressions and gestures required the pulling of specific wires, wires with a lot of slack in them; her laughs were squeaks or groans and her steps were those of a bureau being walked across a room; but to Duane she was her same old boring self, and soon it wasn’t a matter of pretending. She really was herself again, and so was he.