Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Sunday morning,” Nissing said, entering with the telephone and folding chairs. “I’m out for my morning run in the park. You haven’t talked to Luisa for a while.”

“And I don’t feel like it this morning. I just wrote her a letter.”

“I’m afraid that letter was lost in the mail.”

She threw aside her book. “ What the hell was wrong with that letter ?”

Nissing blinked. “Nothing!”

“Then why did it get lost in the mail?”

He unfolded the chairs. “I don’t control the mails, my darling. That’s the postmaster’s job. I’m sure if you asked him he’d tell you that a certain percentage of articles, a low percentage of course, do get lost, inevitably, in the mail. Perhaps a machine tore the address off. Perhaps the letter blew into a sewer while the postal service employee was emptying the box on Fifth Avenue, honey, where you mailed it.”

“You just never get tired of yourself, do you?”

“Our first quarrel!”

“FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.”

“It’s becoming inescapable that you call Luisa. After a fight like this? You get tired of my steady talking, my steady self-confidence, and we quarrel. I lose my cool a bit. Yes, I do. I shout. Why don’t you go back to your husband, someone you can subjugate? And then I slam the door and go out running. You think of me and my concern with bodily perfection, the joyous agony on my face as I enter the fourth mile of my run. You’re heaving. Sunday morning. February 18.”

“I asked you a question.” She stood and wrung her hands. “I asked you what was wrong with that letter.”

“Don’t try to reason with a madman, honey.”

“You aren’t any madman.”

“Oh yes I am!” He shoved her into the wall. “Oh yes I am! I’m madder than the arms race!” His free hand reached out of space and closed below her jaw and squeezed. She smelled clove smoke on his fingers. They tightened on her throat. She couldn’t swallow, and then he squeezed harder. “You’re a piece of meat. I’d kill you right now and enjoy it but not as much as I will when you’re fat and ripe and I beat the life out of you and you’re mooing for more.”

Her certitude wavered, but she held on to the words of the assertion in her head. “No you won’t,” she squeaked. “ ’Cause you’re not.”

He let go. She fell, coughing, to her knees.

“ ’Cause you have to work these things up,” she said. “You have to do exercises. You have to find the impulse ’cause it isn’t in you. I know you. You cannot be. Credit me with some sense. Of human personality.”

“Oh, credit you. You think I have to stand here and argue with you?”

“Yes.” She coughed. “I think that. You’re doing it. Aren’t you.”

“Do your gagging and then speak normally.”

She looked up at him. “You can’t prove—”

“Because when you’re dead, dear, when you’re a pile of garbage, you won’t be around to have it proved to. You don’t know what goes on behind that door, what goes on in me. You may think otherwise, because I am pleasant, to a degree, in this room with you, you may have a ‘sense’ of me, a ‘gut feel’ for my sanity, but you only get what I give you on this side of the door.”

His eyes were black and tan, his skin tanned deeper, from underneath, from a brightness inside him. He looked like a well-read Mediterranean beach bum. If she could prove him rational then she could begin to figure out why he’d done this. She remembered Dostoevsky, and the willed wildness of students. She thought of the Iranian students. But was he even Iranian? The picture of the Shah had been seeming more and more like a joke. John was a nihilist, not a royalist. Could he have dared himself to kidnap her? As an experiment in evil? In revolution? Oh! This was the worst pain of all, that the world seethed with motives she could never grasp. Even if this captivity were clearly political she still wouldn’t understand it, how a political demon or even ordinary pragmatism could lead a person to take risks like this. And politics stood for all the other motives she couldn’t grasp.

“Why did you single me out?” she said.

“Out of all the women I’ve met? I guess it’s natural you think you’re the first.”

And the small mystery — it was large to her but small in the larger scheme — merely stood for the larger mystery, the unconditional ignorance: why had she been born?

“Time for a phone call.”

“No.”

“Aw honey. Will you promise to do it later?”

He was trying to look drowningly pathetic. But he couldn’t make his face as wild as his words, which didn’t count as proof of insanity, because anyone could learn to speak wildly. And what did he care, anyway, whether she believed him insane? The question led into briars.

“Be nice to me, John,” she said.

“It isn’t me, it’s the postal service. Soon this becomes a motto of our home. We make up and we make love, savage love.”

“Be nice to me.”

She was clean again, odorless, a spiritual wife. At the bathroom mirror, in a robe that came untied and fell farther and farther open the longer her hands were raised, she was sharpening the edges. “Ow, damn it,” she said, because it hurt. But then maintaining appearances always hurt. “Ow, damn it.” She allowed herself an oath for every pluck. Rolf had called her plucky. On the bottom shelf of the medicine chest, in a bed of crud composed of dust and baby powder and leaked creams and the white flakes from the mouth of the Colgate tube, there were Q-Tips, a medical thermometer, hypos in their aseptic sleeves, the various therapies. “Ow, damn it.” She wasn’t exactly healthy, of course, but Rolf, without knowing it, had taught her that three martinis would relieve most afternoon flu symptoms, and though the flu still hurt a little, the pluck proved her a respectable woman. Already, after only ten weeks of economizing (Mamaji used to say that men couldn’t economize because they were made in the true image of profligate gods), she had tucked away more than an ounce of prevention for the future. “Ow, damn it.” She had faith in a divine closed-circuit television which monitored her every move, her every economy and respectable impulse, and which Mamaji would one day find time to view. She was a witness to maya but kept faith. Jammu gave her small credit for self-respect, but she was no addict, no fallen creature, as much as she might have seemed that way at certain times. “Ow, damn it.” Jammu held her down, didn’t care about her but gave her a pound of cure every week which she did use half of, because the lot of woman was hard. All women did things in the bathroom that no one knew anything about. All women. And Jammu was especially easy to fool because she was busy and she thought the very worst of Devi, believing Devi depended on her. But the other she would have her revenge, except it wouldn’t be revenge, just something for Rolf (and one day maybe Mamaji) to see. “Ow, damn it.” She practiced her accent for the day the scales fell and she stepped forth with Rolf to be his. All that remained was to prove to him that she could manage, could manage a household with independent means and economize.

It was finished. She checked her work and smoothed the raw skin with isopropyl on a cotton swab which smarted, and rinsed the little hairs down the drain. She was coming down with the afternoon flu. A sudden horrid chill made her hands tremble and drop the eye-shadow box in the sink and it got wet and its plastic lid fell off. It gummed up her fingers, made them all gray. She sat down on the toilet lid to recover, thinking it was horrible how the robe kept falling open. She could tie it tight but the silk knots loosened inopportunely unless they were square, and square knots broke nails. She wasn’t frowsy. The button on the bathroom door was a navel, locked. Press me. A fine way to demonstrate her capacity to manage, to sit here in the bathroom with gray fingers and tiny pricks of blood (“Accent”) pricks of blood above her eyes, and shaking. Rolf never said so but sometimes, more and more, he refused to see that there were two of her. She wanted to explain, The rent’s too high here! and, It isn’t my job to clean up, I’m supposed to manage! She was running a fever not a home. But good managers didn’t make alibis. She had to try very hard to be good a little longer, possibly even clean things up herself, until there were, if possible, two ounces of prevention. Then she could pay her own way. Pay her own way! But it hurt, because skimping was almost worse than starving, and she didn’t want to smell like martinis every time Rolf came.