Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

Then it was New Year’s Eve. Stacy was having a party, but Luisa was mad at her for not having called during vacation until the morning of the party, and anyway, she and Duane had already made plans. They’d come back from her parents’ with decent food, more of her clothes, and a week’s worth of mail. Their apartment seemed tiny after 236 Sherwood Drive. The cranberries on their little tree had puckered, and the branches rained needles when she crossed the room to get the mail out of her purse. She was wearing a jean skirt and a white T-shirt.

Duane had on the Hawaiian shirt she’d given him. He was trying to slice some of her parents’ salami with his Swiss Army knife. “I never use the little blade,” he said, “because I want to keep it really sharp for that Special Job. But it’s too short. I’m taking the tomato knife under advisement.”

“How about a pair of scissors,” she said, opening an envelope.

“Fittingly,” he said, “this is the one holiday my parents do know how to celebrate. My father used to buy cherry bombs—”

“Brown has not received my application yet! Has not received it! They must think I’m applying or something.”

An airmail envelope fell out of a glossy mailing from Baylor. The stamps were French. It was a Christmas card from the Girauds. Luisa tore it open. “This is so nice,” she said. “Everything but a subscription to Elle.” Mme Giraud had written a long note on the back. “But Duane—”

“Ai ai ai ai ai!” He danced and sucked his finger.

“Duane—”

“This knife isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Duane, Paulette Giraud, her mother says she spent this fall in England.”

He looked at her, his finger in his mouth, his ears wiggling.

“Listen. Étudié depuis septembre jusqu’à décembre en Angleterre!”

“That’s peculiar.”

“But she called me.” Luisa read the note again. Could Paulette have come to the States without her mother’s knowing it? No way. Paulette was too stupid to do anything that crazy. But if she wasn’t in St. Louis, then who had that been on the phone? Why would anybody want to say they were Paulette?

“Maybe Stacy faked it,” Duane said.

Luisa started to shrug, but then she shook her head. “She would have told me eventually. Anybody I know would have told me, because that’s when I met you. They’d want the credit.”

“Hm. Right. Yeah.”

“This is so weird,” she said.

Duane began to clear the table, working around her.

“This is so weird.”

He set out some carrots and celery. He set out rye bread, French bread, cheddar cheese, dill pickles, Doritos, dip. He set out two glasses and took the champagne out of the freezer. He wrapped it in a towel, peeled back the foil, untwisted the wire, and popped the cork.

It stuck in the ceiling.

“Hey!”

They both looked at the ceiling.

“It went right through.”

“It’s just paper or something up there.” As soon as he’d filled the glasses, Duane got up on a chair and probed the hole the cork had made. Plaster fell in his face, and then something dropped out of the hole, not the cork, something metal. Luisa picked it up. It was a heavy, shiny slug with pinpricks on one side, like a microphone, and a wire dangling from it. “What is this?”

Duane took it from her. “Looks like a bug.”

“What?”

“A bug, don’t you think? The FBI or somebody. This was always a student place. Maybe there used to be some radicals here.”

Luisa climbed onto the chair. The cork came loose, bouncing off her nose. “The paint’s fresh,” she said.

“I wonder who lived here before me.”

“ We live here now.”

“I kno-o-ow we do. But we’re not subversive elements.”

She looked down from the chair at Duane, the homebody, who was brushing bits of plaster off the tablecloth and picking flakes of paint off the dip. Then she stepped off the chair and sat down. She’d just remembered something else. At Dexter’s on the first night, the night she’d met Duane, she’d been spooked by someone she’d thought was an Algerian. But for all she knew he could have been Indian, and he was actually fairly cute. She remembered how he’d wanted to talk to her but wouldn’t come inside the bar. How many Indians could there be who hung around at Dexter’s?

Duane lit the candles and turned out the light. “I mean it’s obviously weird,” he said. “But it’s also obvious that it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“What about me?”

“Or with you.” He put the bug on top of the refrigerator. “We can take it apart or something after dinner.”

On the refrigerator door were black-and-white pictures of Luisa that Duane had taped up before she moved in with him. She looked away from them. Someone had faked a phone call and a postcard. She wasn’t making this up; there was a postcard, too. Maybe it was Duane’s man. Maybe he’d wanted her and Duane to get together because he could tell that Duane needed a girl, not a man. But then why was he hanging around outside the bar? And what was the bug in the ceiling for? Did the guy get thrills from listening to her and Duane eat? She was getting confused.

“What’s wrong?” Duane said.

She looked up at him. He had no idea what she knew about him, no idea what connections she was making in her mind. All at once his ignorance seemed terribly pathetic.

“Nothing.” She said it with finality, and pulled her chair up to the table. “Are we going to have a toast?”

“Sure. What do you want to toast?”

“Chips. Nachos-flavored corn chips.”

He raised his glass. “To chips,” he said.

As soon as she raised her glass, she felt herself stop thinking. It was easy. Duane had told her once how a jetliner could lose power in two of its engines and still keep flying smoothly. Behind the curtains in the cockpit there was consternation, pilots pulling switches, yanking levers, but in the main cabin the passengers were finishing their dinners as if nothing had happened. They ate salami and compared their parents. Everything was ordinary as soon as you stopped thinking. There was no mystery about how they’d met and no magic in the candlelight on the silverware and no longer any heart-stopping difference between the sink in Duane’s kitchen and the sink in her parents’ kitchen. The food on the table was what people everywhere had to eat, and Duane loved her because she was smart and pretty and had come along at the right time, and she was just a girl who had lied to her parents and lied to her boyfriend and would do it all again if she needed to, the way she might sleep again and again on bloody sheets, because they were ruined. And then the plane landed safely, of course, and the passengers joined the crowds in the terminal and drove home to their ordinary houses, and never even stopped to think that just an hour earlier they’d been sitting on seats that were seven miles off the ground.

In the first days of the new year, a bitterly cold weather system had descended on St. Louis and established itself with a sequence of record low temperatures. The high on January 3 was zero degrees. On the fourth the high was 2. On the fifth the sky clouded and the temperature climbed into the teens to allow another half a foot of snow to fall, and then on the night of the sixth the mercury dipped to—19. For the next week, salt trucks alternated with snowplows on the streets, like gloom with anxiety. By the week of the thirteenth, more than three feet of snow was lying on the lawns of the suburbs and the urban construction sites and the levees overlooking the ice-covered Mississippi. The longer the bad weather lasted, the more aggressively it shouldered murders and politics out of the spotlight of the local news, out of the headlines, the lead-story slots. It exploited the advantage of all weather: its constant availability for comment.