Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

He ate a large even number of Fig Newtons and two bananas. Then he drove to Clayton and sat at his desk, from which he had a view of Bonhomme Avenue to his right and a Formica partition at his back, screening him from the activities of the rank and file. There was no activity this afternoon. A male volunteer sat on the desk of a female volunteer, a paid secretary waited for the phones to ring. Probst worked through the messages that had accumulated since Thursday.

At 4:00 he drove to Eldon Black’s home in Ladue to beg another donation. At 4:30 Black wrote him a check.

By 5:00 he was back at the Sherwood Drive house and dressing. Earlier in the week he’d finally procured a black-and-red-striped shirt of Egyptian cotton, like the General’s, and while he was waiting for his receipt from the Neiman salesgirl, a pair of prewashed black denim jeans attracted him. They completed the ensemble. They fit him well, hugging his butt and thighs as no pants of his had for years. The difference was remarkable. He looked forty. Thirty-nine, even.

But he had no shoes to match. Lunging, on his hands and knees, he pulled dusty shoes off the back of the rack in his closet. Everything was leisure or oxford or rubber-toed or tasseled.

He went down to the cardboard carton in the basement and burrowed through sixty pairs of footwear, shoes, fins, skates, rubbers, thongs, mukluks. They smelled like a condemned house. Green mildew had erupted on the leather. Many of the soles had holes.

He climbed three flights of stairs to one of the storage closets on the top floor. He had to clear magazines and business gifts out of the way, but at length he found what he wanted: the Exotic Shoe Collection. There were white espadrilles from Spain, embroidered Oriental mules, painted shoes from Holland, the three sets of clogs he’d bought for the family in Sweden, moccasins from the Sioux Veneer store in South Dakota, straw sandals from Mexico, alligator shoes from some Caribbean stopover, ballet slippers he’d never set eyes on before, and, just as he’d remembered, a pair of suede desert boots from Italy. Perfect.

In the car, the fashionable clothes surrounded him with a thin layer of self-awareness, like a cushion of air that reduced both the friction and the precision of his movements. The boots insisted on depressing the gas pedal further than necessary. Soon he was approaching the Arena, and the vapor plumes above it, white against the deepening twilight, were blotting out an ever larger arc of sky. He parked. The vapor came from a long column of grills set up outside the Arena’s rear entrance. The grills were 55-gallon drums split in two and mounted on sawhorses. He read the plastic words on the marquee: FIRST ANNUAL GREATER ST. LOUIS LIONS CLUB BARBECUE AND FISH FRY.

Elephant, he told himself.

Tricolor bunting hung from the Arena’s rafters and the railings at the base of the seats. A portrait of a lion had replaced the scoreboard, and beneath it stretched a banner reading LIONS, each letter a capital with a lower-case tail, iberty, ntelligence, ur, ation’s, afety. On the floor, where Blues had lately skated, children and their parents sat eating at aluminum tables with white paper tablecloths. Well-barbered, well-shaven, well-fed men in dirty aprons moved back and forth through the rear doors like executive coolies, the inbound toting tubs heaped with brown food, the outbound holding empty tubs on their hips or thighs. LEMONADE, a banner at the serving tables declared. SOFT DRINKS. SLAW. At the foot of the podium beneath the giant lion a crowd of perhaps a thousand legs swished and mingled. Probst saw orange-and-yellow paper cups and a smattering of ceremonial hats. The noise was oddly subdued.

He checked his coat, laid a twenty on the ticket seller’s desk and walked away without waiting for his change. He wondered why the Lions hadn’t held their functions separately in their respective towns. There couldn’t possibly be many Chesterfielders willing to make the long trip in, especially with Route 40 out. It didn’t make sense.

It made sense. He was passing through the fringe of the standing group when he saw the reason: Jammu was here. She was sitting in the middle of a crescent of folding chairs occupied by Ronald Struthers, Rick Jergensen, Quentin Spiegelman, some men in uniform and some Lions in hats. Probst recognized Norm Hoelzer, president of the Webster Groves chapter.

Turning away, he searched the crowd around him for a friendly face and found one in Tina Moriarty, the press secretary at Vote No. His palms moistened. Tina stood embracing a clipboard and craning her neck. She was a dark, pretty woman in her late twenties, somewhat prone to an anchorwomanly glibness, perhaps, but humanized by her paid efforts on behalf of Vote No (the underdog) and by her knees. It didn’t show when she walked or wore pants, but when she wore a skirt and stood still, her kneecaps became concavities and the backs projected. She approached Probst sideways and began to speak without looking at him.

“You’re here,” she said. “For a while I thought I’d be the only damn one. You see Jammu beat us here. It’s going to make things more difficult. You haven’t met her, have you? I just did. I’ll never wash this hand again. John was supposed to come at five and I haven’t seen him. Literally, I thought I’d be the only damn one. These affairs are obsolete, Mart. I swear they don’t affect the standings. This is not the press. This is not the public. This is the Lions . Goes to show how much I know, I thought the Lions were a carnival. Ringling Brothers, literally, a carnival. You understand my confusion. This is where the circuses come when they come, the Arena, formerly the Checkerdome, formerly the Arena. I guess maybe I saw one at some stadium once, the Shriners. At Wash U., the field there. That’s a nice shirt.”

“What are we going to do?” Probst said. After criticizing Jammu on TV he was more reluctant than ever to meet her.

“Press some flesh,” Tina said. “Wait, wait.” She held his shirtsleeve. “Don’t go anywhere yet. I don’t want to lose you. Oscar’s here somewhere, but I lost him. He’s got his equipment, so at least we’ll get some pix out of this. Butch Abernathy, he’s the organizer. President of the Hazelwood chapter? He was sitting with Jammu but he isn’t now. Be forewarned about the food, by the way. They’re heavy-handed in terms of salt. It’s a wonder these women aren’t literally blimps if they eat like this all the time. Let me write your name down, I’m getting paid for this. Probst. I love monosyllables for names. East meets west. At least you dress better than she does. But my hand, my God, I’ll never wash it. The weird thing is there’s nothing wrong with them. People talk about double-jointedness, but the word has no meaning. I’ve asked. It means literally nothing. This is one extreme within the range of normal. What you see is a hundred ninety degrees. Most are a hundred seventy. It’s a natural variation.”

A large hand gripped Probst’s left deltoid and drew his head towards Tina’s. Ross Billerica stuck his face between them and kissed her cheek. After scanning the crowd he inclined his head confidentially. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, kiddos.”

“Evening, Ross.”

“Ross, for a while there I thought Mart and I’d be the only damn ones.”

“I said five,” Billerica said.

“It’s six,” Probst said.

“Horseshoes and handgernades. Tina, I’ve booked spots at Abernathy’s table for you and I with some other chapter presidents, Hoelzer, Herbert, Manning, DeNutto, Kresch, et cetera, et cetera. Martin, Hi’d sug-jahest you work the crowd a little and get yourself photographed.”

“That sounds fine, but maybe Tina should stay with me.”

“Go fish,” Billerica said.