Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City - A Novel

“I don’t know, I just did it.”

“Well, you can see why I wonder who you really are.”

“I don’t know. Who do you think I am?”

“I don’t know.”

They stared at each other. The problem had become impersonal.

“I don’t ask,” she said. “I just do things. I wanted the city to go places. I did everything I could. Why don’t you understand? You’ve been rather successful here yourself.”

“I was born here. I skipped college.” Probst’s voice trembled at the drama of his life. “I worked fourteen-hour days for ten years, and I didn’t change anything. I just made do with what was already there.”

“And it sounds to me as if you therefore feel a necessary attachment to what was already here. You’re a little bit in love with troubles. Isn’t it so? Isn’t that what’s behind these questions? A bankrupt, crime-ridden inner city is fundamental to your outlook as an old St. Louisan, and you don’t want it to change.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“I don’t mean to imply that you’re heartless. You’re just a pessimist, that’s all. You give to UNICEF, but you don’t believe it will stop African governments from letting their children starve. You build these bridges in St. Louis but not because you think it will make the people who drive their cars over them any less odious to you—”

“Or to you.”

“Am I right? Isn’t this how you feel?”

“You are saying I’m selfish.”

“Only insofar as you deny the validity of what I’ve done for the city. If you’d just accept that things have changed, you’d support the referendum. I can see you on television saying, Yes, I, Martin Probst, have changed my mind. I believe this can be a great city if everyone works together. If we all share the burden, the burden disappears.”

She was sitting up straight, her eyes questing for the good, the brave, and the true. Probst was embarrassed for her.

“Who’s John Nissing?” he said abruptly.

“John—” She frowned. “Nissing. The writer.”

“You know him, then.”

“Yes. He wrote the article for Sunday’s PD Magazine, which he’d hoped the New York Times Magazine would take but didn’t. I haven’t seen the piece, but it should be everything you wanted — oh, you know. All that crap about my mother and the sweltering streets of Bombay. I gave him too many interviews earlier in the year.”

“He’s from India?”

“No. I hadn’t heard that. Not American, but I don’t believe Indian. But he’d been to Bombay and bombarded me with facts. A real cosmopolitan, independently wealthy. A snob and a know-it-all. He kept weaving in all the places he’d seen, Antarctica, the Ryukyus, Uganda, that sort of thing.” Jammu bit her thumbnail. “And forty-six of the fifty states. Why do you ask?”

“Just wondered. He photographed my house for an architectural magazine.” A snob and a know-it-all: exactly Barbara’s type. “He looked Indian,” Probst added recklessly.

“I’d say more like Arab.”

Later that night he watched her take off her clothes. Her hair hung over her face in ebony blades as she supervised her fingers, her short square hands, which were fighting with the catch on her puckered bra. The blinds were raised. Snow fell outside. Probst couldn’t believe he was going to see it all now. She was even thinner than she looked in clothes, and when she lowered her underpants, the fabric taut between her fingers like a string game, his jaw felt as if it were dropping open down to his waist. There was no hair between her legs. There was just a crater with a plumped rim, a second navel. She was a virgin. She looked at him. “This is it,” she said. Where the bullet entered.

Probst was the bullet.

The room was full of moonlight. He’d been dreaming on his back, half sitting, propped on both the pillows, his and Barbara’s. The moon was full. He couldn’t remember its ever having filled the room this way. Its light flooded in through the western windows so brightly that it made the room seem small and portable. The bed extended nearly to the walls on all sides. Probst shut his eyes and tried to return to where he’d been, to the dream, to Jammu, and deflower her.

He opened them again. There was something on his lap, under the blankets and bedspread. He peeled them back and felt a claw, a tiny claw, and the weight of something warm on his pajamas at his hip.

It was a kitten. There was a kitten in his bed. Furry and imploring, its small paw reached up towards his face.

This time he really woke up. He was lying on his stomach, his eyes shielded by pillows. He’d ejaculated in his sleep. Nudging aside a pillow, he saw moonlight, in the eastern window, not the western, slipping in below the bottom of the heavy shade, which he hadn’t quite pulled down all the way. It was different from the moonlight he’d dreamed. It was hard and modest, just a bluish glare on the sill.

When he went to work at Vote No in the morning, the fun was gone. As usual, the volunteers brewing coffee offered him a share of the first pot. While he waited, he savored his mild hangover, the vestige of the long evening that seemed, now, to have leeched the wicked pleasure from his elephant act. Holmes and the others had made him the repository of the cause’s rightness and purity, and he despised them for it. He waved away his coffee when it came.

Feathered shafts of tobacco smoke pierced the air. At the highrise Holiday Inn across the street the revolving doors worked like ventricles, admitting tubby travelers with baggage, ushering out others with showered hair and pink faces and baggage less sleek. The spectacle had decadence. The participants in the purchasable pleasures of hotel stays, room service and ice machines, a pool on the roof, were interchangeable. The doors revolved.

To fly on a jet was a nice thing. (Millions thought so.) To stay in a hotel was a nice thing. To dine out was a nice thing. (Not many citizens of India dined out.) Vote No had assigned Probst the task of fashioning sentiments to sway the great plane-taking, hotel-utilizing, restaurant-going middle classes. To vote no was a nice thing. To vote yes was a nice thing. Did it really matter? Both arguments ran like tops. (To own a Buick was a nice thing.) This was decadence.

Sometimes Probst thought immediate action must be taken to rid the world of nuclear arms lest a war accidentally start. At other times he thought the only path to safety lay in constructing more arms, a deterrent so frightening that neither side dare accidentally start something. He only knew he was frightened. He could argue both sides. He didn’t want to argue. He found it ludicrous and burdensome that the Post-Dispatch and maybe thousands of other people cared what he thought. Those people adored Jammu, and he had been with her. People had stared in the Palm Beach Café. She cast a silver light on him. In his mind she was a silver chain he couldn’t stop pouring back and forth between his hands. Barbara had her cosmopolitan lover and her new, liberated version of herself. Luisa had her malleable artiste boyfriend. Probst had something coming to him, too.

Excitedly the volunteers were heading from the main office room into the conference room. Holmes was showing a red-hot video, a series of two-minute campaign ads they’d be running on prime time over the next three weeks. Tina tapped Probst on the shoulder. “Showtime, Mart.” He gave her a look devoid of expression. She turned on her heel. (To get laid was a nice thing.) What a state he was in.

“There’s a man.”

“No.”

“I can hear it in your voice, Essie. A mother can tell.”