The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “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 good-byes, 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.

  It was strange that a tour group from Europe would want to see St. Louis. Then again, the people Luisa had met in France hadn’t seemed to know what a boring place it was. Even the grownups had thought she must have a great old time living in San Louie and listening to the blues every night on a riverboat. People in Europe were convinced that St. Louis was a really hot town.

  Spilling out along the front window of Dexter’s was a crowd of party people, loud people in their early twenties, people who instinct told Luisa weren’t professionals or good students. They clutched drinks. They laughed, their hairdos frosted flamingo pink by the glaring neon logo. Luisa looked in through the window. The place was packed. She hesitated, nervous, her hands in her pockets.

  A man in a white shirt like hers had stepped out of the crowd. He had a foreign face, she almost guessed Algerian, except he was too decent-looking. He raised his eyebrows as if he knew who she was. She gave him a feeble smile. He spoke. “Are you looking—”

  But her heart had jumped and she’d pushed through the doorway, hopping a little to keep her balance in the undergrowth of feet and shins. She squirmed and ducked laterally, listening for French. All she heard was English. Every word was a laugh. In every partying cluster there seemed to be one stocky woman, shorter and more flushed than the rest, who kept joking through her drink and almost spraying it. Near the blunt corner of the bar, where the crowd knotted up tightly, Luisa came to a dead stop. She wasn’t tall enough for a good view of the tables and booths, and she couldn’t move to reach them. And somebody hadn’t taken a shower this morning. She blocked her nose from inside and inched closer to the bar. Here she recognized a face in profile, but it wasn’t Paulette. It was a boy from high school. Doug? Dave? Duane. Duane Thompson. He’d graduated two years ago. He had both hands on the bar and a beer in front of him. He turned, suddenly, as if he felt her looking, and she gave him a feeble smile. His smile was even feebler.

  She stuck her elbow in a fat man’s midriff and forged into the sitting area. Now she could see all the tables and still no Paulette. A waitress came careening by. “Excuse me—” Luisa caught her arm. “Is there a group of French people in here?”

  The waitress opened her mouth incredulously.

  Luisa had that sinking stood-up feeling in her stomach. She figured it was time to go back home, and she would have left if the Algerian hadn’t had his face pressed up against the front window. He was still acting like he had something in particular to say to her. As creeps went, he was handsome. She turned back to the tables, and then to the bar. Duane Thompson was staring at her. All this attention! She pushed her way to the bar, ducked under a shoulder, and faced him. “Hi,” she shouted. “You’re Duane Thompson.”

  “Yes.” He nodded. “You’re Luisa Probst.”

  “Right. I’m looking for some French people in here. Have you seen any French people?”

  “I just came in a couple minutes ago.”

  “Oh,” she shouted. She cast a futile glance into the haze. When she was a sophomore, Duane Thompson had been a senior. He’d gone out with a girl named Holly, one of those artsy liberal types who wore brocaded smocks and no bra and didn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria. Duane had been blond, shaggy, thin. He’d had his hair cut since then. He was wearing a jean jacket, a preppy button-down, black Levi’s and white sneakers. Luisa also noticed that he had the yellowish remains of a black eye, which made her uneasy. If you didn’t see a person every day in the hall or cafeteria, you didn’t know what kind of life they had, what kind of problems.

  “Is there another room?” she shouted.

  Duane spun around, surprised. “You’re still here.”

  “Is there another room downstairs or something?”

  “No, this is it.”

  “Can I stand here with you?”

  He looked down his shoulder at her, smiling as he frowned. “What for?”

  Insulted and unable to answer, she took a step towards the door. The Algerian was hanging just outside, watching her. She gave him a vomitous look, took a step back, and plunked her elbow down on the bar. A bartender in a shiny shirt stopped in front of her. “I can’t serve you,” he said.

  “What about him?” Luisa cocked her head towards Duane.

  “Him? He’s a friend.”

  “You’re not twenty-one, are you?” she asked Duane.

  “Not exactly.”

  The bartender moved away. It was time for Luisa to leave. But she didn’t want to go home.

  “Are you waiting for somebody?” she asked Duane.

  “No, not really.”

  “You want to walk m
e to my car?”

  His expression grew formal. “Sure. I’ll be glad to.”

  Outside, after all the smoke, the air tasted like pure oxygen. The Algerian had left, probably to hide in the back seat of Luisa’s car. She and Duane walked in silence down Euclid. She wondered whether he was attached to someone.

  “So,” she said, “do you, like, live around here?”

  “I have an apartment near Wash U. I just moved out of a dorm.”

  “You go to school there?”

  “I did, but I dropped out.”

  He didn’t look like a dropout, but she was cool enough to say only, “Recently?”

  “A week ago Tuesday.”

  “You really dropped out?”

  “I barely even matriculated.” He was slowing down, perhaps wondering which of the cars parked on Euclid was hers.

  “Don’t you love that word?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, not sounding like he loved it. “They gave me sophomore standing for my year in Munich—I was in Munich last year.”

  “I just got back from Paris.”

  “Was it fun?”

  “Oh, non-stop, non-stop.” Luisa nodded him into the alley.

  “This is your car?”

  “Sorry, but. It’s my mother’s.” She stuck her hands in her back pockets and looked into his face. There was a meaningful pause, but it went on too long. Duane was very cute, his eyes deepset and blackened in the dim light. She remembered the bruise. “What’d you do to your eye?”

  He touched his eye and turned away.

  “Or shouldn’t I ask.”

  “I ran into a door.”

  He said this as if it was a joke. Luisa didn’t get it. “Well, thanks for walking me here.”

  “Sure, you bet.”

  She watched him head back up the alley. What an obtuse person. Luisa would have jumped at the chance to jump in a car with someone like herself. She unlocked the door and got in, started the engine, gunned it. She was quite annoyed. Now she had to drive home and sit around and watch TV and be bored. She hadn’t even explained what she was doing down here in the first place. Duane probably thought she’d come looking for a fun time and was going home disappointed. She drove up the alley and turned onto Euclid and pulled up towards the bar.

  Duane was on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. Luisa pressed the button for the passenger-side window. “You need a ride someplace?” she yelled.

  He reacted with such surprise that the cigarette sprang sideways from his hand and hit a building, showering orange sparks.

  “You need a ride someplace?” she said again, stretching painfully to keep her foot on the brake while she leaned and opened the door.

  Duane hesitated and then got in.

  “You scared me,” he said.

  She stepped on the gas. “What are you, paranoid or something?”

  “Yeah. Paranoid.” He leaned back in the seat, reached out the open window, and adjusted the extra mirror. “My life’s gotten kind of weird lately.” He pushed the mirror every which way. “Do you know Thomas Pynchon?”

  “No,” Luisa said. “Do you know Stacy Montefusco?”

  “Who?”

  “Edgar Voss?”

  “Just the name.”

  “Sara Perkins?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you knew who I was?”

  He stopped playing with the mirror. “I knew your name.”

  Well then. “I remembered you and what’s-her-face.” Luisa held her breath.

  “Holly Cleland? That was years ago.”

  “Oh. Hey, where are we going?”

  “Take a left at Lindell. I live right off Delmar in U-City.”

  So she was driving him home. They’d see about that.

  “I didn’t pay for my beer,” Duane said.

  She decided to let him live with that remark. She drove augustly, queen of the road, up Lindell. The silence crept along the floor between them. A minute went by.

  “So are you still paranoid?” she said.

  “Only around doors.”

  “What?”

  “Doors.”

  “Oh.” She wasn’t following.

  Duane cleared his throat. “What kinds of things are you taking?”

  “Taking?” she said coolly. They were in downtown University City now, riding a wave of green lights.

  He cleared his throat more strenuously. “At school.”

  “Are the open windows bothering you?”

  “No.”

  “We can close them.”

  “No.”

  “I was kind of mad about the frost last week.” She just tossed this out. “It destroyed most of the bugs you can catch with a net. Basically I’m a net person. I mean, when I’m collecting. I had entomology last fall, and if you’re good with nets you can really prosper. But Mr. Benson started thinking I was his protégée or something. He came up to me in April and he asked me if I wanted to go collecting larval stages with him. Larvull stages. I’d hardly talked to him since first quarter. He thought it was some kind of treat. He was asking me to go collecting larval stages, because of my special interest in bugs.”

  Duane craned his neck.

  She guessed they were passing his street. “So we go out at about six in the morning to this pond near Fenton, and the first thing I think is oh god he’s going to molest me and dump me in the pond. He’s kind of creepy-looking to begin with. I could just see the headlines, you know, BUGGER BUGGERS BUGGER, DROWNS HER IN LAKE.”

  She’d thought this up in April. Duane laughed.

  “But instead he just gives me these special rubber boots that are about forty sizes too big for me, and then we start wading into this gloop with his special device for collecting larvae. He dips down in the water—I mean, it’s absolute gloop, I think no wonder it’s full of bugs. He dips down and the first thing he drags up is this disgusting little organism, I don’t know, some rare gadfly larva, which he shoves in my face and says, ‘Would you like to have it?’ Special treat, see. I’m about to woof it. I say, ‘That?’ I’ve probably mortally offended him, which is fine with me because it means he’ll never invite me again. With larvae and me, it’s no thank you. The first thing he’d said was, he’d said, ‘I think this will be very interesting for you. To pursue entomology properly you have to collect all the stages.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s exactly why I’ll never pursue entomology.”

  “What about caterpillars?”

  “They’re larval. They squish.”

  The frosty glow of a Hammaker Beer sign flashed by on the right, trailing a liquor store. Luisa pulled over and braked to a hard stop by a hydrant. “Buy some wine?” she said.

  Duane looked at her. “What color?”

  “Blanc, s’il vous plaît. Something with a screw cap.”

  She turned the car around and met him across the street. In a bag in the back seat there were big paper cups. She poured some of the Gallo into two of them and handed one to Duane. He asked where they were going.

  “You tell me,” she said. Traffic sounds filled the car, the continuous kiss of tires and asphalt.

  “My decision-making apparatus is paralyzed.”

  “You talk funny.”

  “I’m nervous.”

  She didn’t want to hear about it. “What happened, you run into another door?”

  “I’m not used to being out with people like you.”

  “What kind of people am I?”

  “Ones who go to dances.”

  She blinked, unsure whether this was meant as a compliment, and put the car in gear. They’d go hit the warehouse site.

  “What schools are you applying to?” Duane cleared his throat as though the question had left junk in it.

  “Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Amherst, and—what? Swarthmore. And Carlton. Carlton’s my safety.”

  “Do you know what you’ll study?”

  “Biology maybe. I guess I wouldn’t mind being a doctor.”

&nbs
p; “Both of my parents are doctors,” Duane said. “And my brother’s in med school.”

  “My father built the Arch.”

  Ulp.

  “I know,” Duane said.

  “Did people talk about it at Webster?”

  He turned to her and smiled blandly. “No.”

  “But you knew.”

  “I read the paper.”

  “Is that why you remembered me?”

  “You just never let up, do you?”

  For a second she didn’t breathe. She made a right turn onto Skinker Boulevard, feeling agreeably mortified, like when her mother criticized her.

  A cigarette lighter rasped.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” she said.

  “Clearly.” Duane flicked sparks out the window. “I haven’t been smoking long. Like a month and a half. I came back from Germany and got grossed out by how conceited people are about their health. My family especially. I figure as soon as I’ve gotten Webster Groves out of my system I’ll kick the habit. In the meantime it’s kind of entertaining. These keep me company when I’m alone.”

  “Then what are you smoking one now for?”

  He threw it out the window. Luisa followed an Exxon truck onto Manchester Road. To the right, ambiguous amber signals glowed along railroad tracks on an elevated grade. Four blocks further east she swerved off the road. Gravel flew up and hit the chassis of the car. She drove back between a pair of metal sheds.

  “Where are we?” Duane asked.

  “Construction site.”

  “Hey.”

  She cut the lights. The chalky moonlit whiteness of the area leaped into prominence. On black trailers beyond the chain-link fence, tall red letters spelled out PROBST. Duane took a small camera pouch from his jacket pocket and got out of the car. Luisa followed with her paper cup of wine. “What’s the camera for?”

  “I’m sort of a photographer.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since, I don’t know. Since a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying to sell some things to the Post-Dispatch.”

  “Have you had any luck?”

  “No.”

  There was enough slack in the chain on the gate to let them slip through easily. They walked down a set of wooden steps to the warehouse skeleton, which was three hundred feet long and nearly that deep. Vertical steel members punctuated the structure every twenty feet or so, and here and there a prefabricated staircase rose pointlessly to the top plane of beams. Light bulbs were strung on posts above the foundation.