Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“We’re missing John, we’re missing Rick, we’re missing Larry. This is yesteryear. This is a twilight zone, I mean it, I swear. I don’t know whose idea this was.”

“Habernathy’s sitting down.” Billerica led Tina away by the wrist, weaving through the crowd towards the food. Tina wandered back and forth like a towed sled as she followed.

Probst looked at his desert boots. He bit down on his cheeks.

Martin! Dave, sure, Dave Hepner. Yer looking real good. You too. I want you to meet Edna Hamilton, Martin Probst. I thought, no offense, I thought you were dead. (Through a window in the sport coats and pants suits Probst glimpsed Jammu in the midst of laughing faces, her cheeks flushed with the pleasure of a successful joke.) The Arch is growing on me. Me too, uh. Dave Nance, Shrewsbury. Super people really, super-duper. I’m sorry, I. Martin, pardon a sec, I’m sorry Dave, Martin, I wanted you to say hello to my son and his squirrel — Dave, this is Martin Probst. Of course. The Bison Patrol…

A local hush had fallen. Probst turned. Jammu was extending a hand, which he automatically took and shook. In her other hand she held the hand of a little girl no older than five. The girl was drawing on a drinking straw with all of her attention, dredging the ice in a cup. “Well!” Probst said.

“I’m S. Jammu, I’m glad to finally meet you, Mr. Probst.”

“Likewise, likewise.” He dropped her hand. “Who’s the little girl?”

“Her name’s Lisa. Quentin Spiegelman’s granddaughter. Lisa, you want to say hi to Mr. Probst?”

The girl’s cheeks collapsed around her straw. She seemed to be glaring.

“Nice crowd,” Probst said.

“Re-arc-shun-ary,” Lisa said.

“Kids.” Jammu smiled and took the cup and straw away from the girl. She was wearing a plain beige dress, lavender stockings, and black pumps. Probst felt underdressed. He felt a little dangerous. Jammu had the best of two worlds, the old pol trick of baby-kissing and the old female trick of caring for a child while a man stood waiting. He cleared his throat. “Well.”

“Don’t lose it, Mart,” said a voice, Tina’s, in his ear. “Oscar’s coming.”

Jammu looked up, and Probst put his arm around Tina. It was his turn. He put his nose in Tina’s hair. “I’m just about ready to write this one off,” he whispered.

“You’re Barbara?” Jammu asked Tina.

“Christina Moriarty. We just met.”

“Say,” Probst said. “Where’s Quentin? I’d like to talk to him.”

“I think he’s in line,” Jammu said.

“Re-arc-shun-ary.”

“Likewise, likewise.” Probst had no desire to confront Spiegelman. He turned Tina around by the clipboard and hustled her through the crowd. He had only one desire, and it was primal.

“Uh, Mart?”

“My name’s Martin, all right?” The desire was to get out. “You have a coat?” he asked, claiming his.

“Shouldn’t we head back? I left Ross holding my plate when I saw Oscar at the brownies.”

Probst frowned at her. “You need your coat because we’re leaving,” he said. “We’re going to go have dinner together.”

“You lost me somewhere.” She took her claim check from her purse and handed it to him as if she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She offered no further resistance.

For restaurants, of course, it was the busiest hour of the week. The Old Spaghetti Factory was mobbed. Probst and Tina each finished a pair of strawberry daiquiris in one of the Factory’s catacombs before the wall speakers brought the words, “Moriarty, party of two, Moriarty.” The hostess gave them a table next to a child’s birthday celebration. Probst objected, but Tina overruled him. She made him sing along when the child’s cake arrived.

Outside again, on the cobblestones of Laclede’s Landing, he paused to plan the next stage of his campaign. Tina leaned back against a lamppost patiently, like a painting on an auction block. “Where to?” she said.

He considered. He knew he could never say the words, any of the words, that might seduce her. An elephant couldn’t speak. But if he simply drove to Sherwood Drive, she would have to come along. “Let’s go get the car,” he said.

In the narrow streets they passed laughing young couples with faces smudged by drinking. Warm eddies of spring air mingled with the hot burgery exhaust of local grills. “I’ve discovered,” Tina said, “that the only thing I can stomach on top of a dinner like that is straight Pernod on ice. Trouble is—” She skittered a little, and Probst decided not to put his arm around her. “It makes me ramble. I mean really ramble. I suggest you take me to a bar and buy me a straight Pernod with ice and then cut me off. Take me by the shoulders and say, No, Tina, no. Billerica has a drinking problem. You can file that away in that silent head of yours. The difference between you and her, incidentally, is that she’s still at the Arena. She’ll stick it out, speak the speeches. I’m in love with her. I think we all are. Just shut me up when you get sick of this. I pretend I don’t know I’m doing it but actually I do. I’ve been told, literally to my face, to shut up. So you’re not the first, just so you know.”

“Feel free to shut up,” Probst said, stopping at the trunk of the Lincoln.

“The thing is, I try, and then I think of all the things I’m not saying. On the other hand, I never talk to myself when I’m alone. Am I to understand that we’re to have a relationship?”

He closed his eyes and opened them. “Is it convenient for you?”

Tina’s lips rolled tightly under one another, and her black eyes sparkled. A waning moon the shape of a football was rising above Illinois. Its light rubbed off on the nap of the fabric of her coat and lost itself inside it where it parted. Probst held his breath. Barbara had actually left him. He was actually free to do whatever he chose.

“To tell you the truth, Mart—”

His heart sank.

“I just don’t really feel like it.”

The room was evasive. On the first morning, Barbara had awakened from the drugging she’d received in the car to find herself on a standard-sized mattress, on a fitted bottom sheet with the kitty-litter smell of package-fresh linens, her face aching where he’d hit her, and her ankle bound. This was New York.

Or so she assumed. It could have been anywhere. The skylight diffused a light that seemed to fall, not shine, powdery and pure, free light, unreflected by a landscape. Her ankle was locked in a fetter, an iron ring attached by a ¾-inch cable to a tremendous eyebolt anchored in the wall. At the foot of the bed was a camping toilet, which she used, and then retched over, bringing up nothing.

When she awoke a second time she believed the light had changed, but only because that was the nature of light (to change) and the brain (to expect it). The carpeting had the color and texture of moss that hadn’t been rained on for a while. Her suitcase stood across the room from her, by the only door, in the center of which was a peephole. A small framed portrait of the dead Shah of Iran hung on one of the walls adjacent to hers. The fourth wall was bare. That was the catalogue of her medium-sized rectangular room, the sum of its contents and features. With anything more, it might have had a personality; with anything less, it would have been bare, and bareness, too, was a kind of personality. She could only assume that Nissing was insane.

But when he opened the door and said, “Breakfast of astronauts!” she began to wonder. He handed her a tray bearing raspberry Pop-Tarts and a tall glass of Tang. His pistol was stuck under the waist of his bluejeans, half buried in his shirt. Through the door, which he’d left ajar, she saw that a black curtain completely filled the outer door frame. She asked where she was. Captive, he said. What was he going to do with her? They’d see.