Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“Instead of passively viewing this pressure system on your plotter,” she licked her lips, “imagine a war game. Imagine the system in the hands not of random global climatic patterns but of you yourself, and your mission is to create temperate low-humidity conditions in St. Louis 365 days a year, with, let’s say, a single drenching rain every six days from six to eight in the evening.” And Buzz said, “You’re describing a monopoly.” And the Princess said, “Nine tasters in ten can’t distinguish us from our competitors. Competition only encourages saturation marketing, which adds a dollar a six to our product.” And Buzz said, “Psychological laws are notoriously unabsolute.” And she said, “You’d be surprised. They may be a lot more absolute than you think.” The room was dark, the screen’s hatchmarked toroids so green and bright they seemed to dance, and as she leaned to switch on a lamp, her elbow on the table, Buzz caught a brief white glimpse of lace under her skirt.

Audreykins was playing cards at the antiqued writing table in her boudoir. She wore a pink ribbed robe. Before he spoke, Rolf paused for a moment and watched her indulgently. She held the club 7, her hand hovering as if she were trying to present her Platinum Card to a distracted salesclerk. She placed the club on the heart 8, then snatched it back. She looked up over her shoulder, blank-eyed, a female clown in cold cream.

“You’re up late,” Rolf said.

She absorbed this and turned her attention to the game. She laid the club firmly on the heart, dealt another card, a diamond queen, and transferred a number of cards in rapid, intricate fashion.

“Coming out nicely for you, what?”

Again the merest twitch of acknowledgment. Her head moved back and forth in search of further plays. Rolf chewed the ingrowing whiskers at the corners of his mouth. Particularly mellow after the evening’s intercourse, he gave it another go.

“Couldn’t sleep, I guess?”

“Spade ten,” she murmured.

A few moments such as these were enough to make Rolf regard more seriously Devi’s prattling about a rearrangement of legal ties. Almost immediately, however, he remembered the old logic — joint trusts, half the stock, both the houses, half the bonds, the lots in Arizona, Oregon, St. Thomas, Jesus Christ, at least twenty million dollars — which of course was no logic at all. Never marry a lawyer’s daughter.

“Probably worried sick about Barbie, what? No sooner does your little head hit your little pillow than you think of her spreading for a handsome stranger.”

She pinched a card from the discard pile.

“You shouldn’t cheat, Audrey, honestly it takes all the fun out of it. Not to mention the eight hundredth commandment, thou shalt not cheat at solitaire. I’ve no doubt Father Warner would be most distressed to hear of it.”

He found a pair of bird-beak shears on her vanity and tidied up a bit at the corners of his mouth. In the mirror he saw her not looking at him. Heat began to rustle in the register above her bed.

“Very comfy in here, incidentimente. Let’s remember Martin for a moment. Shall we bow our heads? Think of him all alone, in that big house, with those lovely furnishings, and nobody to talk to. Think of it.” Rolf saw jolly Martin kicking the furniture in voiceless cuckolded rage, or playing solitaire in the middle of his bed. Because the brat had left him, too! Mr. Right had been caught at last with his pants down, losing his virtuous girls and making a perfect ass of himself campaigning against a foregone referendum.

Audreykins had turned. Her expression was frank but cordial.

He smiled. “Hm?”

“You’re insane, Rolf,” she said. “You’ve gone out of your mind.”

Buzz’s work began to suffer and he rationalized it. No one could expect him to be producing original ideas at his age, so anything he did manage to do, even if it was less than what he’d been accomplishing a few months earlier, was still pure, untaxed pudding. The work provided a pretext, too. Every day he instructed his secretary not to disturb him for any reason. At night he interposed an answering machine between the world and his inner sanctum. His weather research, he informed Bev, had entered a stage demanding his full powers of concentration. She didn’t believe him. He didn’t expect her to.

Leaving the inner sanctum uninhabited, he rode the spacious freight elevator down to the ground floor. While his employees in the service hindquarters of headquarters lifted boxes or pushed brooms, he briefly passed the time of day and always mentioned that it was imperative that no one know of his comings and goings. He dropped dark hints of supersecret high-level business dealings. He shouldered open the heavy rear doors and stepped off the loading dock. Asha was waiting in her Corvette, in the afternoon or in the night, usually the night.

It was she who placed the bets at Cahokia Downs, ate the chili at the 70–40 Truckstop, and drank the coffee in the urban diners. Buzz just accompanied her. He was amazed that all the hick locales she led him through, the pageant of spavined waitresses and dowdy bettors and cakes and pies revolving in slices, had survived the forty years since he was young and something of a hick himself. Even the roads could surprise him. Asha drove miles and miles north on state highways he’d never seen although he’d spent his whole life in eastern Missouri. After midnight on weekdays all traffic fled the roads to leave a ghostly undisturbed extinctness, suggesting neutron bombing. She’d top a hundred miles an hour on the flats.

But the custodial pool couldn’t keep a secret. Bev told Buzz that the husbands of her friends believed that he and Asha really were carrying on supersecret business discussions. The wives themselves, including Bev, believed they were simply carrying on.

Buzz was more or less innocent on both counts. He respected Asha too much and depended too heavily on her companionship to risk a physical involvement. And apparently the possibility never even occurred to her. They were just friends who occasionally chatted about business — a subject that Buzz would have been happy to avoid entirely. Whenever Asha tried to encourage him to develop his property on the North Side, he got confused. The responsibility for soundly managing Wismer Aeronautics devolved upon him personally. But he, personally, could no longer imagine life without Asha Hammaker. In the word “personally” two inimical curves jumped an asymptote. The result was chaos.

As February slid into March, his thoughts turned increasingly to Martin Probst, the other friend he believed in. Martin stabilized the curves, re-establishing the boundary conditions. Loyalty to Martin meant loyalty to Buzz’s reputation, to the honorable, gentle man the world had always considered him. Again and again Buzz telephoned him. “Listen,” he said, “anything you’ve heard about me and Mrs. Hammaker — I know there are rumors — it’s not like it seems. It’s purely social. Sidney might as well be there, or Bev, if she’d ever agree to come. There’s nothing shabby or fiscal — physical — or—”

Martin said he understood.

“And you’ve got to believe I’m on your side with the referendum. I know I haven’t been able to spare the time to help out with more than my pocketbook, but I’m firmly committed to the way things are. No merger for me, no sir. No sir. It makes no profit sense for me to move headquarters — you see, again, I don’t know what yort of, what sort of, rumors. I do feel some — well, some pressure to move just the headquarters — as I told you, we do have the land, have had it — but I’ve found it to be true that it’s vital to keep management close to the technical center, and I certainly couldn’t move that—”