Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“You simply couldn’t live with him anymore.”

She dialed the rest of Duane’s number.

“You lean back in my leather chair. It’s already a favorite.”

Duane answered.

“Hi Duane, it’s Barbara’s Probst.”

Nissing raised his eyebrows sharply at the slip. He held a monitor plug in his ear with the index finger of his left hand. In his other hand he held the gun. The safety catch, a metal flag, was off. In five days she’d learned when it was and when it wasn’t.

“She just went out,” Duane was saying. “Can you call back in an hour?”

Nissing nodded.

“Yes, of course. I’ll call back. How is everything?”

Nissing smiled with approval.

“Fine,” Duane said. “Nothing much changes. Things are pretty good. I, uh — you’re in New York?”

“Yes. I’m in New York. I guess Luisa must have spoken to her father. I—” The gun was shaking its muzzle. “I’ll call you back in an hour, then. You can tell her I called.”

“I will. She’ll be glad.”

“Thanks, Duane.”

Nissing took the receiver from her hand. “You’re disappointed,” he said. “You’d psyched yourself. Your hand stays poised, reflectively, on the phone, and while your adrenaline is up you decide to make that call to Martin you’ve been dreading. If it goes well, you’ll call Audrey, too. You feel sorry for Martin, not having your address. He’ll want to know where not to send letters.”

RC was cremating Clarence, he was in a groove, he was a juggernaut in gym shorts. As he took his sixth straight point with a fader in the corner, Clarence slapped his thigh and laughed: “What’s happening to me?” In reply, RC served a high hard one. Clarence pivoted and stumbled, flailing at the ball, letting the score advance to 9–1. RC drilled his next serve flat off the wall and back at Clarence, who threw up his arms to protect his face. “Time! Time!” RC bounced on his feet to keep his rhythm going and watched impersonally as his opponent dropped to his knees. “Your game,” Clarence gasped.

RC wasn’t even winded. He ripped the Vel off the Cro of his handball gloves and stretched his punished fingers. From the other courts came grunts and rumbles, heavy shuffling, the erratic ponk! Ponk! of racquetballs, squash balls, handballs. Clarence was still kneeling and shaking his head, as if heaping abuse on himself for losing could make him a winner. He rose resignedly. “Let’s get cleaned up, Off-sir.”

They climbed through the little door and walked down the passageway single file to the showers. You had to pay for fresh towels here. Clarence took two from the man in the cage and gave one to RC. There were red threads in his eyes. “Played a damn fine match,” he said. He turned back to the man in the cage. “My brother-in-law played a damn fine match, Corey.”

RC would have sworn the look he got from Corey was dirty.

He stepped under a shower head and faced the wall, as usual, to avoid the sight of Clarence’s layered back flesh and the profile of his hairy gut. As the hot water poured, he blinked and rotated his head, his vision like a movie where the cameraman dropped the camera, tumbling, blurring together glimpses of tiled floor and reaching steam, toes and elbows, a third man showering two heads over. The sound track was courtesy of Clarence, who was singing.

Today was the fourth day of February, which would make tonight the fourth night for RC and Annie in their new apartment in University City. They’d moved on Wednesday with one of Clarence’s trucks, and by now they’d emptied all the boxes except the ones with broken toys at the bottom, or summer equipment, the barbecue tools, the snorkel and fins. RC couldn’t complain about the new building itself. There was a nice mix of people in it. But the footsteps above him and the voices downstairs were busy and foreign, and the rooms were just rooms. He felt like a TV actor sitting at a table that was plunked down wherever, using forks and spoons from a box of props. His actions lacked smoothness, he couldn’t make things work the way they’d worked a week ago. Last night, when he and Annie were watching Saturday Night Live on the living-room couch, he’d reached over and taken off her glasses. Immediately the TV laughed, and Annie grabbed her glasses back and put them on crooked. She straightened them. “I can’t see .”

“What do you need to see for?” RC flopped onto the bare floor and stuck his head in the middle of the screen. “It’s me,” he said. “Live from U-City.”

Annie leaned to one side. “Richie get out of the way.”

“We have some very special guests tonight—”

“Get out of the way .” She sat tight in the gray light, her legs folded up underneath her and her arms crossed across her sweat-shirt. She’d been tired for two months, ever since she took a job with one of the new companies in the old neighborhood. She’d learned word processing. Words like: I’m fatigued, RC. There’s a psychological toll. We’re a two-career household now…. But if she was fatigued, RC was even more so. He’d come home at 10:00 after a long shift on patrol and two hours of desk work.

“So OK,” he said. “OK.”

“Richie don’t.”

“Hey, don’t mind me.”

He put on his coat. Annie kept watching the TV while they played games with the blame. She asked him where he was going, and he remembered that they weren’t in the old neighborhood anymore. They were in U-City. He didn’t know where he was going. “Walking,” he said.

Annie stuck her tongue out at him, and he almost laughed, which was the idea; his mouth twitched, but the laugh came out as a cough. “You get some sleep,” he said. “You get all nice and rested.”

Outside, he hurried up the street. After a few blocks, as the buildings grew larger, institutional, he started seeing students. In the few lighted windows there were test tubes, blackboards, gray enamel instruments, computer screens. Girls in jeans and long wool coats pulled a little closer together when they passed him. He veered down a path among trees, away from the buildings, and cut across the snow on the big front lawn that led down to Skinker. At the top of the hill, to his right, stood the crenellated towers you could see from the golf course when the leaves were down. He reached the walk that split the lawn in two, and stopped and leaned against a tree. The shower poured on him, the water so hot it felt cold. Clarence changed key.

RC was eighteen years old when he finally licked his older brother Bradley wrestling. They had a mat, a mattress they’d saved from a hide-a-bed broken by him and Bradley using it as a trampoline. It lay on the floor of the storeroom off the garage in their mother’s house. Bradley was a varsity wrestler at school and used the room as his workout salon. When he dropped out of school to be assistant manager at a Kroger, he kept the salon. Besides the mat, he had a set of barbells he’d found two-thirds complete by the side of a road, and a bench press he’d bought with the part of his paycheck he didn’t hand over to their mother. The room’s two windows, looking into the dark garage, were filled with his beercan collection. Under a loose floorboard was a Sterno can that never ran out of dope, and all around the baseboards ran a white dusting of DDT from a rotten cardboard can off a shelf in the garage. DD-Tox was the brand name. The dying bugs in the picture on the can were black with white eyes.