Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City

The next day the three of them went shopping, which in French meant Luisa plodded in and out of dressing rooms while the sisters pulled item after item off the racks. They were good salespeople. Luisa bought 2,700 francs’ worth of clothes. Back at home, Mme Giraud took one look at all the boxes and suggested that Luisa go take a bath. At the top of the stairs, Luisa sniffed her armpits. Did Americans smell bad to the French? She thought she’d locked the bathroom door, but no sooner had she stripped and stepped into the tub than Mme Giraud came bustling in with a towel for her. Luisa cowered. She already had a towel. Mme Giraud told her that usually they didn’t fill the tub so full. Then she told her she’d help her return all her purchases tomorrow. Then she asked her how she’d slept the night before. Did she still have zhet leg? Luisa checked her legs. Oh. Jet lag. Then Mme Giraud wanted to know whether Luisa ate liver. It was like the French Inquisition: manges-tu le foie? By the time she left, the water was tepid. Luisa scrubbed her pits exhaustively. At supper, over thick slices of liver, M. Giraud asked what business her father was in.

“Mon papa,” she said happily, “il est un constructeur. Un grand constructeur, un—”

“Je comprends.” M. Giraud pursed his lips with satisfaction. “Un charpentier.”

“Non, non, non. Il bâtit ponts et chemins, il bâtit maisons et écoles et monuments—”

“Un entrepreneur!”

“Oui.”

She hated France. Her mother had urged her to go. Her father had urged her to go humbly, with the Experiment. She’d got what he paid for. So she was a snob; so what? She was bored with the Girauds. She should have been sitting in cafés with guys and colored drinks. Mme Giraud wouldn’t let her go out alone after dark. Paulette and Gabrielle were drafted to show her a good time, and they took her to an empty bar in the Latin Quarter where campy disco played on a jukebox. They watched her with eyes as hard and shiny as stuffed-animal eyes. Fun? Are you having fun? On Sundays the elder Girauds drove her places like St. Denis and Versailles. On weekdays she helped Mme Giraud with the garden and shopping, which was more than her own daughters ever did. Luisa even helped her with her subscriptions until M. Giraud got wind of it. She accompanied the family to a rented house in Brittany for two weeks and gained five pounds, mainly on cheese. She grew pimples in patches, little archipelagos. She missed her parents, her real ones. It rained in Brittany. In a field near the Atlantic, a sheep tried to bite her.

She was bored in August, bored in September, and bored in October now, too. It was another Friday afternoon. She walked out the high-school door into the sunlit dust raised by football practice across the street. The weather was fine because a harvest moon was coming, but Stacy Montefusco, her best friend, had been home for a week with bronchitis. Sara Perkins was getting a cold and was irritable. Marcy Coughlin had sprained her ankle in gymnastics the day before. No one felt like going birdwatching. No one felt like doing anything at all. Luisa walked home.

The kitchen radio was playing the four o’clock news when she came in. She took her mail from the table and went upstairs. The door to the sundeck was open. Her mother, around the corner on the lounger, cast a shadow across the graying rattan mat. Luisa shut her bedroom door behind her.

In her mail was a postcard of the Statue of Liberty. It was from Paulette Giraud.

LOUISA,

I AM IN THE UNITED-STATES! I AM COMING

I THINK TO ST. LOUIS! OUR GROUP STAYS

ONE NIGHT. ARE YOU HOME ON OCTOBER 20?

I WILL CALL YOU!

ALL MY LOVES,

Paulette

October 20? That was tonight. She threw the card aside. Mme Giraud must have told Paulette to call. Luisa didn’t want to see her. She put on some music, did a back-drop onto her bed, tuck and fall, and looked at the rest of her mail. There was another letter from Tufts and a thick packet of material from Purdue. She opened the letter from Tufts, and her mother knocked on the door. Luisa spread her arms like Jesus on the cross and stared at the ceiling. “Come in.”

Her mother was wearing one of her father’s white shirts, with the front tails knotted. She held her place in a book with her finger. “You’re home early.”

“There’s no one to do anything with.”

“Come again?”

Luisa raised her voice. “Everybody’s sick.”

“Who’s the postcard from?”

“You didn’t read it?”

“It wasn’t addressed to me,” her mother said. She had disgustingly good manners.

“It’s from Paulette Giraud. She’s coming to town today.”

“Today?”

“That’s what she says.”

“We should have her over for dinner.”

“I thought you and Daddy were going out.”

“We were thinking of going to a movie, but it’s not important.”

“I don’t want to have her over.”

“All right.” Her mother’s interest in the conversation withered: she seemed to sigh inaudibly, her shoulders going slack. “Suit yourself.” From a pile near the closet she snagged two dirty blouses. “I’ve got to change for tennis. Will you be home till dinner?”

“Maybe.” Luisa kicked her calculus book onto the floor. “Does Daddy have any other old shirts like that?”

“Daddy has fifty other shirts like this.”

Luisa turned up the stereo and waited for her mother to come back with a shirt or two. Ten minutes later she heard the BMW whirring down the driveway. No shirts. Had her mother forgotten? She went to her parents’ bedroom, and there, lying folded on the bed, were three of the shirts she’d had in mind. She struggled out of her sweater and put a white one on, knotting the tails and rolling up the sleeves. In front of her mother’s mirror she unbuttoned the second and third buttons and flipped back the collar. She had a good chest complexion. The shirt worked for her. She spread her hands on her hips and shook her hair back. Then she pulled down her lower eyelids and made blood-rimmed Hungarian eyes. She pulled on the corners and made Chinese eyes. She smiled at the mirror. She had nicer teeth than her mother.

At 7:30, just after her parents had sung their chorus of goodbyes, the telephone rang. A voice, Paulette’s, floated above the sounds of a noisy bar or restaurant. “Louisa?”

“Bonjour, Paulette.”

“Yes, yes, it is Paulette. Did you—receive my card?”

“Oui, Paulette. Aujourd’hui. A quatre heures . Merci beaucoup.”

“Yes, yes. Em, I am on Euclid Avenue?”

“You’re where?”

“Em, Euclid Avenue? It is close?”

“Um, no, that’s not very close. I don’t live in the city.”

“I am at a bar? Yes?”

“You can speak French,” Luisa said.

“This bar is called Deckstair?”

“Well, could you – Do you have any way of getting out of the city?”

“No. No. You would come to the bar, Deckstair? Yes?”

Luisa didn’t remember her English being even this good. But then, they’d hardly ever spoken it.

“Yes?” Paulette repeated.

Maybe her mother had made her promise to call. But she still could have broken the promise.

“Oh, all right,” Luisa said. She knew where Dexter’s was. “Will you be there in twenty minutes?”

“Yes! Yes, right here. Deckstair.” Paulette laughed.

Luisa tried to call Marcy Coughlin to see if she wanted to come along, but the line was busy. She tried Edgar Voss and Nancy Butterfield. Their lines were busy, too. The busy signals sounded faint, like the phone was out of order, but it obviously wasn’t. She wrote a note for her parents and gave them the name of the bar.

It was almost 8:30 when she reached the Central West End, the home of a variety of up-to-the-decade bars and restaurants and specialty stores. Luisa parked the BMW in the Baskin-Robbins loading zone and crossed the alley towards Euclid Avenue. Dumpsters yawned disagreeably. In the apartment windows above her the shades were drawn down so far that they buckled and gaped.