Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

She didn’t sound like his wife. She sounded like a different woman. Maybe the woman she’d always wanted to be. Maybe that was the idea.

As soon as he’d hung up, the phone rang yet again.

“Probst,” he said.

“Hello. Mr. Probst. George Snell. Newsweek . Sorry to bother you at home on a Sunday. Like to see if we can arrange an interview for tomorrow or Tuesday. Your press secretary indicated you’d be agreeable.”

“Well!” Probst said. “Certainly. My schedule’s plenty packed, but I’m sure we can arrange something.”

“Glad to hear you say that. Tomorrow?”

“We’d better say Tuesday. Breakfast time? Lunch time? After hours? It’s up to you.”

“Could you give me an hour in the middle of the day?”

Probst reached and parted résumés to find his appointment book. His recollection was that Tuesday was wide open, but—

A woman broke into the conversation. “This is the operator, I have an emergency call for 962-6605.”

“That’s me,” Probst said.

“Fine,” said George Snell. “If I don’t catch up with you, we’re listed. Newsweek .”

“Thanks, uh. George.”

He broke the connection and waited for the next call. It was John Holmes.

“Martin, I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning. I’ve got some very bad news.”

“What.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Ross is dead.”

Probst stared at Tuesday. “I see. An accident?”

“No. He was shot in his home last night, late last night. It looks like he interrupted a burglary.”

He wrote NEWSWEEK between noon and one o’clock as though this were his last chance ever to do so. “I can’t believe this, John.”

“None of us can.”

No one had witnessed it, but the house was half ransacked. A single shot had been fired, through Billerica’s throat, and this was all it took to make Probst love a man he’d never been able to stand, his death revealing all his faults and effronteries as mere symbols for the final, forgivable weakness. Billerica’s parents were handling the arrangements, but Holmes wanted Probst at Vote No headquarters. He wanted everyone there.

It began in August, in living color. He was looking out of a swimming pool into the face of an obese and idiot-eyed tabby whose paws rested on the pool’s concrete lip and whose tail lay flat and parallel to a single leg, a woman’s, on a lounger in the background. Two grade-school boys opened their lunchboxes on raised knees and showed him their contents, the apples red, the Twinkies orange. The faces were bleached to nostriled spectres with dried eyes and checkered teeth. And the city turned black and white. All was hilltop or valley now, the horizons, no matter how broken, falling away at the margins of his vision as if, out of sight, the remaining world were gathering like a storm. A black man gestured obscenely, an Indian tried to grope out from under the scope of what was seen, and distant boys played football, their feet planted in earth that seemed no more stable than a tilt-o-whirl. Luisa, in high contrast, smiled. Geese flew like happy thoughts at her shoulder. Under her shirt her breasts fell away from each other, rolling towards her locked elbows. Why was there danger in the smile she gave him? Three golfers, marked by their serene grayness and puffiness as retired, posed and mugged while a fourth golfer appeared, in the flatness of the vision, to swing his driver into their heads. The city lurked in the trees beyond the tee. In November the days fell thick and fast. Ghetto ten-year-olds straddled a chain-link fence as the cable of a wrecking ball went slack with the ball’s impact and a tenement teetered into the sky. The women were haggard. They looked like miniatures of themselves, three feet tall, package-laden and well-to-do. One was speaking to him, tossing him words with a flick of her head. The Plaza Frontenac parking lot died behind them at the edge of a flash, and neither the sky nor the windows of Shriners’ Hospital were lighted. He looked at a young policeman and saw nothing but face; above the bill of his cap, beyond his large pale ears, south of his receding chin, in the darkness behind his metal front tooth, in the material underneath the rays of his eyeballs, lay terra incognita. Ronald Struthers’s cheeks ballooned when he saw him, and his arms hung limp as a scarecrow’s over larger figures, one a balding apoplectic, the other a sad man in a lamé tunic and paisley robes. What was happening to the city? He saw Luisa’s naked back and paid as little attention to it as if it were a bathroom door; the funny ripples and blades turned livid as his stare lengthened in time and the snow falling outside the window faintly scuffed the nighttime. She was an object. This was what was happening. At the top of the Arch he captured the chubby hand of a baby stopped, by glass, from touching St. Louis. Chief Jammu and Asha Hammaker linked arms outside the Junior League, gl’amour, gl’amour, and Binky Doolittle, emerging through the door, sealed their union with a dirty look. A volunteer youth displayed a fistful of Vote No bumperstickers while a man in Fortrel climbed into a Cougar, hurriedly, to escape being pasted.

Probst was impressed. He lingered in the front corner of the gallery, alone behind the flats on which the pictures hung. Beyond the flats, coffee splashed, the guests of honor and assorted friends pattered, and Joanne, the gallery owner, dropped her r ’s. Probst didn’t look forward to sitting in a folding chair with no place to put his elbows. He glanced at the work of the young woman with whom Duane was sharing the gallery space. Duane was better, he decided.

It sounded like several new visitors had come in while Probst was behind the flats. “They’re the first thing I look for when I open the paper,” he heard a familiar voice say. He stepped into the area behind the last flat. The voice was Jammu’s.

“Do you mind if I ask how old you are?” She was sitting in a trench coat between Duane and Luisa, both of whom were twisting napkins on their laps.

“I’m twenty,” Duane said.

Luisa saw Probst peeking. He had to step out. “What do you think?” she said.

Jammu and Duane looked up.

“They’re excellent,” he told Duane. “I can see a lot of hard work.” To Jammu he said, “Hello.”

“I’ve just had the pleasure of meeting your daughter.”

Luisa turned away. Her dress was silk, dark purple and dark green, with tassels on the hem and cuffs. It looked secondhand. What was she doing with the money he sent?

“I think I’ll have a look.” Jammu touched Duane’s knee. “If you’ll excuse me.” Probst stepped aside to let her past, but with a jerk of her head she made him follow. “I’d like to talk to you.”

He gave Luisa and Duane a smile of distaste: business. Jammu had folded her coat over her arm. She was wearing a gray knit dress, surprisingly well cut for a woman he’d considered couturially drab, and a string of pearls. “Yes?” he said.

“As I mentioned the last time we met,” she said in a very low voice, “I think it’s ridiculous that in seven months we haven’t managed to speak to each other.”

“Yes, scandalous,” Probst replied. “We should be ashamed of ourselves.” She’d charmed the city and most of its leaders. She wouldn’t charm him.

“But I mean it,” she said. “I think we should talk.”

“Oh, certainly.” He turned his gaze to Duane’s pictures, encouraging her to do likewise so he could look at her. She was small, he saw, much smaller than news photos or television let on. Her body had an unusual prepubescence, as if she were a girl wearing adult clothes from a costume bin, and so her face, though normal for a thirty-five-year-old, looked sick with age. Casually, he predicted she’d be dead in ten years.