Jonathan Franzen - The Twenty-Seventh City

“Is Duane making you a nice dinner?”

“Yes. A chicken. He’s stuffing it.” Luisa swallowed. “In the kitchen.”

“We had a really nice talk last night—”

“That’s what he said.”

“He was really charming, I’d love to meet him sometime. I had—”

“I’ll call you back, OK?”

The line went dead.

Barbara looked around as if awakening, and it was morning, very bright. She hoisted the turkey back up onto its rubbery wings and found another tendon. The phone rang.

“Can I come and get some clothes tomorrow?”

Since parking promised to be a problem, Probst was walking to the football game. From the chimneys of houses on Baker Avenue, smoke rose a few feet and hooked down, as it cooled, to collect in bluish pools above the lawns. There was no light inside the little stores on Big Bend Boulevard—Porter Paints, Kaegel Drug, the sci-fi bookshop—to compete with the bright sunshine on their windows, but Schnucks, the supermarket, was still doing business. Probst stopped in to buy the pint of heavy cream that Barbara had asked for. Then he joined the stream of fans issuing from the bowels of Webster Groves.

There was a throng at the gates of Moss Field. The Visitors bleachers were packed with red-clad Pioneer fans, and the home stands, much larger, were also nearly full. Under the press box sat the Webster Groves Marching Statesmen, their brass bells and silver keys gleaming in the sun. Probst found a cozy seat near the south end of the stands, by the southern end zone, three rows from the top. To his right was a group of girls in tattered blue jeans, smoking cigarettes, and to his left was a rosy-cheeked couple in their forties, wearing orange. He felt anonymous and secure.

“Are you for Webster?” asked the woman on his left. Mrs. Orange.

“Yes.” Probst smiled courteously.

“So are we.”

He nodded in a manner indicating that he hadn’t come to the game to talk with strangers, and let the bag with the heavy cream in it slide between his hands and knees to the tier of concrete on which the bench rested. Up at the doors to the swimming pool locker rooms, where the teams were suiting up, students swarmed purposefully, as if some quality item were being handed out for free inside. Down by the field the Statesmen cheerleaders, a dozen girls in ivory-colored skirts and sweaters, began a cheer:

The Pi - o - neers Think they’re real - ly tall , But the bigger they are , The barder they fall .

Probst scanned the faces around him in search of Luisa, but he was certain she wasn’t here. He wondered if she might be at the Washington U. game, sitting with Duane Thompson. Barbara made much of the fact that Duane went to Washington U.; she liked to inflate the worth of whichever boy Luisa happened at the moment to hold stock in. Probst wasn’t fooled. It was clear to him that a girl who jumped out bathroom windows had a vision of her future radically different from the one he himself had entertained. As far as he was concerned, Thompson could be a total dropout.

A great roar greeted the Pioneers as they trundled, like Marines, down the stairs to the playing field. A greater roar erupted when the Statesmen followed. Mr. and Mrs. Orange leaped to their feet, fists clenched and arms outstretched. “All right!” they yelled. Everybody stood up. Probst stood up.

Kirkwood won the toss, and a Pioneer receiver, a loping black youth, took the kickoff at the 10-yard line. At the 35 one of the Statesmen tripped him from behind, sending him in a cartwheeling somersault to land, gruesomely, on his head. The ball squirted out of bounds.

“All right! All right! All right!” the Oranges yelled. There was a queasy silence in the Kirkwood stands. The trainer and coaches ran to look after the fallen runner, who writhed on his back.

“ALL RIGHT!” the Oranges bellowed. Probst gave them a critical glance. Coarse blond hair clung to their heads like wigs, and the orange Webster jerseys they were wearing heightened the impression of fakeness. The woman’s cheeks were scarlet, her lips blue and retracted. The husband’s head swiveled back and forth as the Statesmen cheerleaders started up a new chant—

That’s all right . That’s OK . We’re going to beat you Anyway

—an incongruous message, since the Pioneers had just lost one of their better players. The trainer and coaches were carrying him towards the sidelines on a stretcher.

After two losses and an incomplete pass, Kirkwood had to punt. The Statesmen took over at their own 20-yard line, and Probst was happy to immerse himself in the game, to count downs in his head and watch the line of scrimmage ebb and flow. He was happy not to be at home. At home, the night before, Barbara had given him the distinct impression that she expected him to take some kind of action regarding Luisa. He was an active businessman, wasn’t be? Be firm with her! Be hurt! Go get her! Or at least comfort your wife… But action was impossible. Luisa made him angry like a woman, not a daughter. As he lay awake in bed a single thought monopolized his mind: I have the strength not to be selfish and deceitful while she, apparently, does not. And it was clear that Barbara, lying next to him, didn’t want to hear about this. “She’s only known Duane a month,” she said. “I’m sure he’s OK, though. I can’t blame this on him. You know Luisa. She wouldn’t be there if she didn’t want to be … Oh Martin, this just tears me apart.”

Probst did not know Luisa. He began to stroke Barbara’s hair.

The Oranges sprang to their feet. “ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!”

A referee thrust his arms in the air and the Marching Statesmen struck up the school song. A touchdown. How wonderful.

Deducing that he loved her, or overlooking his gall in desiring her if he didn’t, Barbara had reached down with her cold, strong fingers and adjusted the angle of his penis, leading him in. “I’ll call Lu tomorrow,” he lied in a whisper. She turned her head away from him. Her mouth was opening. He increased his pressure, and then, glimpsing her teeth, he remembered a late afternoon in September. A Friday. A van with a bad muffler driving down Sherwood Drive. Dozer, his three-year-old retriever, chasing it. Dozer who never chased things. A thud and a yelp. The driver didn’t stop, probably didn’t even know he’d hit something. Probst knelt in the street. Dozer was dead, and his teeth, the incisors and canines and molars, were grinning in bitter laughter, and his body was hot and heavy, his splintered ribs sharp, as Probst picked him up. The embrace was terrible. He hurried to get home, pushing, pushing, pushing, but it was too late: Dozer had become evil, staring in a crazy angle at the ground, which rose up mechanically to meet his feet. He dropped him on the grass. Eventually Barbara lost her patience, shed him roughly, and rolled away.

The Statesmen were lined up for another kickoff. Mrs. Orange clutched her husband’s arm and looked around pugnaciously at Probst and the people behind him, as if they didn’t deserve to live in Webster if they wouldn’t even stand up for a kickoff.

Kirkwood took the touchback and started at the 20-yard line. On the very first play the stands exploded in confetti and streamers. A Statesman safety had picked off a pass and run it all the way back for a touchdown. Mrs. Orange seemed ripped by convulsions. “ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT! ALL RIGHT!”

Probst decided he’d had enough. He rose determinedly. “ALL RIGHT!” He pushed past knees and elbows, hurrying, “ALL RIGHT!” The cry was fainter now. He reached the end of the row and descended to the black cinder track. There he realized, from the lightness of his hands, that he’d left the heavy cream under the bench.