Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“KSLX is conducting a phone survey tonight,” he said, “and I think it will show the county opposed by two to one. But that stands to turn around once the issue is publicized and once the big guns — Jammu, Wesley, Stallhamer, the Hammakers — get involved in pushing it. In the case of Jammu and the Hammaker family, popularity transcends the city-county split. Jammu’s popular no matter how you slice the cake. To stand a chance of defeating the referendum, I’d say it will take more than the dollar contributions of your respective companies and the Republican Party. The cause is going to require a spokesman who’s widely known and absolutely trustworthy, someone to take your case before the public and give it some weight. Your side has to have a voice.”

All eyes were on Fellow Man.

Home, and turning to drive up the driveway, he was a little surprised to see that the house was dark. Usually Barbara left at least the kitchen light on. He parked the Lincoln by her BMW and activated the garage door, ducking out ahead of it. The wind, in the time it had taken him to drive home, had turned cruel. It had the brutality of a certain kind of bleeding, not the spurt of a severed artery, but the cold seep and puddling of a mangled limb. It dragged over the neighbors’ eaves and gables, rent itself on chimneys, carried sirens and a throbbing from the Mopac tracks to the north. Like a wind in Chicago or Boston, some city on open water, it brought more of an ache than a sting to his cheeks. He hurried into the house.

The kitchen was too warm.

He noticed it immediately. It was downright stifling for such a late hour. She never failed to lower the heat before she went to bed. Wasn’t she home? Was she sick? Hurt? Had she gone out? Was someone hurt? Was someone dead? Had she fallen in the tub? Choked? Electrocuted? Asleep in the wrong room? Dead? The ever-latent questions coalesced. He dispelled them, but the house was too warm. They came back.

He stopped in the living room to turn down the heat (yes, 70°) and climbed the stairs. Was she home? He heard nothing, smelled neither the soap nor the toothpaste that haunted the hallway near the bathroom door at night. Still he expected to enter the bedroom and find her, the bed mussed and her body raising the blankets, to accept her presence instantly and totally.

But the bed was smooth. He’d expected this as much as he’d expected to find her. She simply couldn’t sleep with the heat set this high. He bent his back, and his fingers found the switch on his nightstand lamp. Its light revealed an envelope on the pillows.

She’d cleaned the bedroom. Her sneaker prints dotted the freshly vacuumed carpeting in methodical angles. Against the wall by the television stood four paper grocery bags, from Schnucks, from Straub’s, full of clothes. A note was pinned to one of them. He crossed the room and read it. CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, it said.

Would she pin this note to remind herself? Of course not. Time itself was panic here. He’d been in the house only sixty seconds, and he was aware of the largest bite of experience he could safely swallow whole. This was just about the limit. He saw time as corporeal. He was a tube of man with a man-shaped cross-section, the one-dimensional squeezure from the kitchen to this point, where he paused in his heavy winter coat, in the heat, and then sat down on the bed. He picked up the envelope with a sportive flick of his wrist, as he might lift an envelope with happy contents: careful, it might contain a check. He played with its weight, its center of gravity, shrugged, and flipped it. Sealed. There was a trace of lipstick. She’d sealed the envelope. He slit it with his finger, sundering the BARBARA PROBST from the rest of the engraved return address.

Dear Martin,

This will seem so sudden to you that I hardly know where to begin explaining it, or whether I should even try. I’ve been seeing John a lot, practically every day. That’s where I was on Saturday afternoon. And most days, though you couldn’t know it. I know I told you I didn’t plan to make a habit of it, but it’s turned into a habit anyway. Which doesn’t mean you and I couldn’t keep hobbling along together for the rest of our lives, but every time I sit still I hear you telling me to shut up and I hear me telling you I don’t really love you, and I wonder what the point is anymore. I never intended to have a stupid life. I’m leaving for New York this afternoon. Maybe that’s stupid. If I thought this would kill you, if I thought it even might mess up your life for a while, I probably wouldn’t be doing it. But I don’t see you having a hard time without me. That’s almost reason enough for me to leave. I’m tired of taking care of you when you don’t even need me. I don’t want to sneak around like everyone else in this city. You hardly seemed to notice Lu was gone. You’ll hardly notice me gone either. You have your work. I’ll call you soon. I respect you, Martin. You deserve better than to have me meeting a lover in a hotel room. You deserve the truth, and this is it. Don’t expect me back.

Barbara

Probst stood up. His body leaned towards his dresser and his legs went along. He threw his wallet and keys onto it.

“Well, all right,” he said.

He put his hands in the pockets of his coat and drew it tight around his waist. His chest went in and out. “OK.”

After its moment of warm-up the television spewed rich laughter, the studio sounds of the Tonight Show . Probst turned it off just as the picture came slanting onto the screen. He turned on Barbara’s nightstand light. He turned on the ceiling light. Then the small reading lamp by the rocking chair seemed to give him offense. He closed in on it and turned it on. “You—”

His mouth made words, but few had sound. In a man who’d been speaking all day long, this was illogical.

He went to the study and turned on more lights. There was a hesitancy in his pacing. He’d strike out in one direction and then draw up, bouncing on the balls of his feet, arrested by some new consideration. At each light, too, he paused and turned his head to one side, as if cocking some internal trigger. Then he turned on the light. “I respect you?” He took the picture of Barbara from his desk and threw it against the wall. “I respect you?”

In the living room he turned on the spotlights aimed at the three still lifes. He circled the room, and the ceiling brightened. Each new source of light showed up remnants of cobweb or the traces of a spackled crack. The dust on bulbs rarely used gave the air a burnt taint. When all the lights were on — the lamps on the end tables, the lights embedded in the mantel, the chrome tube lamp in the corner, the antique banker’s lamp with the green glass shade, the sunken spots above the window seats, the small bulbs in the recessed bookcase — he left the room.

Dropping onto the sofa in the den, he dug the heels of his shoes into an embroidered pillow, but this didn’t seem to satisfy him. He swung his legs onto the coffee table. A magazine slid from the stack of them. Another followed. He kicked the rest onto the floor. “ You— ” The pitch of his voice wasn’t much lower than a woman’s. But then, men’s seldom really are. He drew his jaw back hard. Crowded by their neighbors, the middle two of his lower teeth overlapped somewhat. His skin, which had retained a taut uniformity for many years, was mottled and faulted, and covered with whiskers like dark sand, briny ocean sand which couldn’t be brushed off. By themselves, his eyes were gray and gentle. Eyes hardly age; they’re a window on the soul. But the face shut the window with an ugly convulsion, and Probst thanked his wife very much. The voice dropped into lower registers. “You stinking, stinking bitch,” he said. He looked at the writing desk across the room from him, he looked at the cubbyholes organized for long storage, he looked at the ashtray she had washed and dried. He looked, in his overcoat and misery, like a tramp.