Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

Barbara had at first followed the cold spell’s progress in a circus-going spirit, but eventually even she succumbed to the portents and began to believe that the reports all somehow pointed inwards, as a neighborhood’s concentration of freaks and deformities might point underground, to a reservoir of toxic waste. Wind-chill, degree days, inches of precipitation, former records, consecutive days below x degrees, below y degrees, integers positive and negative — the numbers infected minds. There were broken pipes in warehouse sprinkler systems. Termination of gas service, and outcries. Frozen stiffs in East St. Louis. Ice-locked barges. The heart attacks of shovelers. Stalled cars abandoned on freeways. And always the search for precedents, the delight in finding none, and the feeling of specialness, the growing conviction that attendance at such a winter certified a claim to unusual fortitude and vision. The city, on the news, in the news, behaved like a witness. There was a mood. The weather oriented itself along the polar lines of the previous six months’ political trends. All tendencies hung together. A peculiar watchfulness had descended on St. Louis in the first weeks of the new year.

The sixteenth brought some relief, however, in the form of temperatures only just below freezing and a breeze from the south, off the Gulf, much attenuated. It was Tuesday. Though average for January, the weather felt relatively springlike, and Barbara was cleaning. In her closet she applied the Two Year Rule, throwing onto the bed every article of clothing she hadn’t worn since Christmas two years earlier. She made no exceptions, not for gifts from Martin, not even for her swankiest evening gowns. If she liked something, the rule ensured that she wore it at least once every twenty-four months. Her closet lodged no “dogs,” nothing unworn or unwearable, and she was in possession of far fewer clothes than Luisa or Martin, fewer clothes, undoubtedly, than anyone she knew.

Emptied hangers stabilized on the bar. The usable skirts and blouses she slid to the left impatiently. She was looking for victims, and she found one in a foolish winter suit she’d bought four months ago. She’d never worn it.

Out it went, flapping its pleats as it flew to the bed. It was followed by a linen skirt too big in the waist, a brown dress she didn’t love, and an $80 pair of shoes, accessories to a crime of impulse.

She moved to her dresser and dropped to her knees. She took a last look at the Christmas present from Audrey, the sweater. She’d worn it once, at lunch last week. Once was enough. Poor Audrey. Out it went.

Via the charitable conduit of the Congregational Church, these clothes would end up in the inner city or the Missouri Bootheel. Barbara imagined driving into some tiny town southeast of Sikeston and seeing all the decade’s fashions, all of her mistakes and all of Audrey’s and Martin’s modeled on the dirt streets by poor black women. But the clothes could have been bound for a landfill for all she cared. She deposited an armload of gifts and badly stained underwear on the bed.

The house was quiet. Mohnwirbel had driven away after lunch and not returned. A busy bee he was. Martin had dropped the idea of suing him, and the box of unclean pictures had found its way into one of Martin’s storage lairs, where it would probably stay until it molded. Barbara yearned to go beyond her strikes on his study and closets, to hit the third floor and the basement and attack those hard-core bunkers of junk. She envisioned a life untyrannized by objects, a life in which she and Martin would be free to leave at any time and so by staying prove the choice was freely made. In truth, she hoped that even death might become bearable if everything she still wanted to own when it came could fit in two suitcases; because sometimes the airlines lost your suitcases, and by the time you realized they were gone you’d reached your destination.

She added a sheaf of receipts to the piles of paper she would take downstairs to process at her desk. A little sun shone on the carpeting. Second-story branches nutated in the windows, seeking gaps in the soft assault of the southern wind, paths back to their natural positions. Squirrels paused. The house was very quiet.

As she opened her box of everyday jewelry a pair of earrings caught her eye, the earrings John had given her. She hadn’t even thought to return them. With a feeling of uneasiness she glanced into the mirror. The eyes that met hers weren’t her own.

She gasped. John was standing in the bathroom doorway. She stamped on the floor, trying to stamp out her fright. “How did you get in here?”

“Door’s unlocked!” he said.

“I told you. Go away. I told you.”

“Yes, yes.” He swept into the room and sat down on the bed. “I know what you told me.” He crossed his legs and looked up at her engagingly. “You persist in treating me like a substance that comes out of a faucet that you can turn off with your gentle smile or your firmness and maturity, no no, John, please. You’re very sweet John but. — And yet I find you here with my little gift…”

“I can do the same to you,” Barbara said hotly. It no longer took any effort not to like him. “I can do exactly the same to you. I can say you’re a creep and a jerk. You may be articulate, but you can’t make me feel comfortable around you. You can just go to hell, in fact. Get out of here. Take your damned earrings. You shouldn’t walk in people’s back door. Your manners are lousy. Who do you think you are?”

He sighed and put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. “You aren’t entirely wrong,” he said. “But there’s a fine line between effrontery and simple persistence.”

“Get out.” She picked up the earrings and reached and dropped them over his hand into one of his pockets. She reeled back. Her ears roared. There was a gun in his pocket. She took deliberate steps towards the bathroom.

“Stop.”

She turned back and saw the gun pointing at her. He was a total stranger.

“Get down a suitcase,” he said.

“Listen—”

“The middle-sized leather bag will be ideal. Take your black silk dress, the green dress with copper threads, and another winter dress. A pair of jeans, and your gray corduroys. T-shirts. You’ll want T-shirts. Six changes of underwear, a swimsuit, a nightgown, and your light robe. Am I going to have to do this for you?”

“John.”

“Pick three sweaters, three shirts, and a pair of decent shoes. The ones you’re wearing will be adequate. Canvas shoes, too, space permitting. I have the feeling you aren’t even listening to me.”

She turned again to try to leave, and she heard only one footfall before he punched her in the face. He hit her in the stomach. She fell to her knees. He kicked her in the collarbone and knocked her over backwards. She felt the pressure of his heel on her throat. It was gratuitous. He was getting even.

“I’ll be ever so happy to shoot you in the knees if you try to run,” he said. “And in the spinal cord if you make a fuss when we’re outside. You understand I mean this.”

The heel went away. She heard him slide her suitcase off its shelf in the closet, and heard him packing. She heard the clink of cologne bottles, and the click of a latch.

What was left of Municipal Growth hardly filled the conference room at the offices of Probst & Company. Seventeen of the thirty-two active members had jumped ship without so much as offering Probst an explanation. Quentin Spiegelman, St. Louis’s premier financial guardian, a man whose name appeared on the dotted lines of a thousand wills, had twice assured Probst that he wouldn’t miss a meeting, and twice now he’d missed one. His lies were so childish that only an implicit hatred could explain them. Probst had not thought he was Quentin’s enemy. But he was willing to think so now. He was the chairman, and felt personally betrayed.