Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

He brought her three meals a day, breakfast always Pop-Tarts and Tang with seconds and even thirds if she asked; lunches lukewarm soup and Saltines; dinners TV-dinners. He watched her eat, which didn’t really bother her. At 236 Sherwood Drive, in the bedroom, he’d had to drag her to her feet by her hair. But when he’d drugged her, in his car, her instincts of flight and resistance had gone to sleep, and they had not reawakened. The pain in her bedroom had been terrible to her. Nissing’s physical dominance was complete, monolithic. She was happy to believe that further resistance would only feed his sadism, because she didn’t want to feel that pain again.

For a while she lived by natural light and natural time. When darkness fell she sat or lay or did exercises in darkness. She asked for a lamp and a clock. He said no. But when she asked for books and he brought them, new Penguin paperbacks, he brought a reading lamp, too. She asked for magazines, a newspaper. He said no. She asked to take a bath or a shower, and on the third night, a few hours after darkness fell, he came in, unlocked the fetter, and tied a black hood over her head. He led her through two rooms that she could tell were empty from the way his voice twanged in the corners. He unhooded her in a newly redone bathroom and sat on the toilet, gun in hand, while she undressed, showered, and put on clean clothes. He led her back and refastened her fetter. She was allowed to do this every three days. Every two days, after she complained about the smell of the porta-potty, Nissing took it away and returned it clean. Eventually she realized it was more than clean; each time, it was brand-new.

“We’re at Sardi’s, a ‘whim’ of yours, a kind of tourist thing. Those peas you’re eating are escargots in garlic butter. I’m savoring pâté with toast points. Three tables over, you can see Wallace Shawn waving his fork over a plate of spaghetti and talking with his mouth full. It’s Valentine’s Day. You spent the afternoon at the Modern on a bench facing a Mondrian. On your lap was a spiral notebook. In your hand was a black felt-tip pen. Everyone wants to be an artist. The thought was on your mind and it paralyzed you, the problem of originality, of individuality qua commodity. You’d thought you could start small, start concrete, describe a painting on a wall in the museum. You were thinking about the roots of modern writing, both literature and the other sort, my sort. Liberated men and women confronting the new art and learning new methods of vision. But the only thing you were able to write was the letter T. A capital T. At the top of the page. You didn’t dare scratch it out, but what would it become? This? The? They? Today? Tomorrow? You felt the problem. You were thinking about me and my sort of writing, my facile typewriting in the study, in that favorite chair of yours. I was the problem. I had liberated you. You hadn’t done it yourself. An hour passed. In a stupor you watched the postures and paces of the visitors. A guard told you a little-known fact about that particular Mondrian and walked on. Now that a guard had spoken to you, you couldn’t stay.”

“This is very clever, John, but I’m trying to eat.”

“Is it my fault your story isn’t new? That piece of fried chicken is your prime rib. The last time you had prime rib — it must have been January fourth at the Port of St. Louis.”

All his statements about her were true. From the very first moments of their new relationship, when he’d given her a typewritten letter to Martin for her to copy onto her stationery, he’d displayed — flaunted — a criminal familiarity with her private life. He knew exactly what had happened on Martin’s birthday, three days before she’d even met him. She asked him how he knew. He reminded her that since they’d seen each other nearly every day in early January, she’d had plenty of time to tell him the story of her life. She asked again: how did he know what had happened on Martin’s birthday? He reminded her that they’d met in October when he came to photograph the garden. He reminded her that they’d necked and petted like schoolchildren in the leaves behind the garage.

“After the waiter takes our plates, I reach across the table with a velvet box for you. You think of your first lunch with me, my first gift. I say Happy Valentine’s Day. This time, you’re gracious. You open the box. This time, it’s a watch, a Cartier, with a silver band.”

He dropped a silver watch on her lap. The hands showed ten of two, the jeweler’s magic hour. She put it on her wrist.

“This time, you’re gracious, and you’re prepared. You give me a black silk tie you bought secondhand on East Eighth Street. We order champagne. We are the paragons of ostensible romance. But we’re ruthless, almost trembling with cynicism as we go through the motions of an extramarital affair, the motions that every modern man and woman craves. Self-expression. Individuality. The youth that hasn’t seen or read it all before. The dousing of the fires of doubt with bucket after bucket of dollars. We’re united in pain—”

“This watch doesn’t work.”

“Dead? Dead? Dead?”

Nissing leaped to his feet and fired. Barbara saw black, smelled smoke, felt a peppery burn on her neck, and sound returned; she heard the bang. Nissing had shot the wall behind her head. She touched the hole in the plaster. It was hot.

“Back at the apartment, we make savage love.”

He couldn’t fool her. She saw how all his sudden pirouettes and shouting, the Hamletesque free associations, were merely steps towards madness and not at all the thing itself. She’d taken those kinds of steps herself when she was younger and feeling “crazy” and trying to impress her friends with her complexity and danger. His steps were the same, only a little larger. Obviously no one could formulate an airtight definition of sanity, but he met all of her intuitive requirements. So why had he stalked her and kidnapped her? The question might never have come up if he’d kept his mouth shut. But he opened it and she heard a mind like her own. The question clung. She nursed it. She tried to keep her mind clear. It was the perfect time, she joked, for her to read The Faerie Queene and Moby-Dick . Then John came in and fed her and told her what they’d done that day in New York. If she got bored, she began her evening sit-ups and leg-lifts before he finished.

She found it impossible to think about Martin. He was locked in their past, rattling the bars of conditions that now never got an update, pacing between walls of activities and scenes that aged like inorganic matter, fading rather than changing. Their weekly conversations confirmed this. It was the conclusion reached by some students of the supernatural: you could speak to the dead, but they had nothing to say.

At first she’d believed that captivity couldn’t alter her if she developed a routine and kept her mind active. But it altered her. Towards the end of the first week she noticed she’d begun to wring her hands in the darkness. She was shocked. And increasingly often she fell into a deep confusion, in the small light of her lamp, about the time of day. Was it early morning or was it late evening? She couldn’t remember. But how could a person not remember what she’d been doing one hour earlier? And then the spatial disorientations. Nissing freed her ankle only on the nights she showered. The cable, about six feet long, allowed her some play but not enough to move far from the mattress or reverse herself on it. She therefore slept and read and ate always with her head closer to the wall with the Shah’s portrait. She’d come to associate this wall with East. Suddenly it would be West, when all she’d done was turn a page. The frightening thing was that she cared which way was East. Trying to jostle her internal compass needle back to its correct setting, she’d pinch herself, blink, bang her head on the wall, kick her legs in a frenzy.