The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “Leave her alone, Martin.”

  He looked up from his plate. “I was just trying to be helpful.” He turned to Luisa. “Was I bothering you?”

  Luisa threw her napkin in the marsala sauce and ran upstairs. She’d lost her appetite this fall, and lost some pounds with which (in Barbara’s opinion) she could ill afford to part. At breakfast this morning she’d looked much older than eighteen. Barbara had just awakened from a dream where Luisa was a skeleton in a stained white gown, and where the hands reaching to comfort her, the mother’s hands, were gray bones.

  “Can I make you some waffles?”

  “Can I have some coffee?”

  “Yes. And waffles?”

  “All right. Please.”

  It was painful watching her stuff waffles into her mouth. She obviously wasn’t hungry. She had a lingering cold, and though she hadn’t stooped to admit it yet, she also seemed to have a new boyfriend, whom she’d apparently met when she’d gone to see the French girl two weeks ago. The French girl had not shown up. The boyfriend had taken the picture that appeared in last Saturday’s Everyday section. D. Thompson, the credit read, and the caption: Indian Summer. Luisa Probst of Webster Groves enjoys the fine weather in Washington State Park. Behind her is a flock of Canada geese. Martin had bought twenty copies of the paper, and Luisa had mentioned, rather belatedly, that Duane had been in the country with her and Stacy. Barbara really didn’t mind if Luisa tried to keep her feelings towards Duane a secret for a while. She herself had grown up under surveillance (the surveillance of both her mother and the Roman Catholic Church) and she’d hated it. Besides, with Luisa still spending so much time in Stacy’s company, how important could Duane be?

  Outside, it was cloudy. Two male cardinals, winter birds, hopped from peg to peg on the feeder by the breakfast-room window. Barbara could hear a slow scraping on the south side of the house as Mohnwirbel raked concrete. He was wearing his red wool jacket today, his winter plumage, his cardinal colors. He lived on the property, in the small apartment above the garage, and seemed a more native resident of Sherwood Drive, or at least a less self-conscious one, than Barbara could ever be.

  She swallowed some aspirin with a splash of scotch and put the glass directly in the dishwasher. She was wearing a full plaid skirt, a dark red silk sweater, slightly dated ankle boots (hand-me-ups from Luisa), a silver bangle on her wrist, and silver hoops. Every day, sick or not, she dressed well. In the spring and fall (retrospective seasons, seasons in which she married different men) she wore makeup.

  As she turned on the radio, which was always tuned to KSLX (“Information Radio”), Jack Strom was introducing today’s guest on the two-to-three segment of his afternoon talk show. The guest was Dr. Mickey McFarland. Physician. Professor. Disciple of Love…And author of the best-selling You and Only You. Barbara put an apron on.

  “Doctor,” Jack Strom was saying, “in your latest book you describe what you call the Seven Stages of Cynicism—a kind of ladder that a person climbs down on to middle-age depression—and then you discuss ways to reverse the process. Now, I’m sure it’s struck many of your readers that all the examples you chose involved middle-aged men. This was obviously intentional on your part, so I wonder if you might tell us how you see women fitting into this pattern of cynicism, which I believe you once called the Challenge of the Eighties.”

  “Jack,” McFarland rasped, “I’m glad you asked me that.”

  Always, always, they were glad Jack had asked.

  “As you may remember, when A Friend Indeed came out in ’79—as you may remember, it went to number one on the bestseller list—something I’ll never forget. Heh. I don’t know if anybody’s ever said this, but your first best-seller is like your first kid—you love it to death, you know, it’s always going to be your favorite. But anyway, as you may remember, in A Friend Indeed (in which, by the way, I spoke to the problem of feminine depression) I spoke there of the special role that women must play in meeting the Challenge of the Eighties.”

  “And what was that role?”

  “Jack, that role was a caring one.”

  “A caring role.”

  Jack Strom was hard on best-selling authors, shaming them with his extraordinarily mellifluous voice. He’d been hosting afternoon talk shows for as long as Barbara could remember, for twenty years easily, and his voice never changed. Did one’s face ever change?

  “…I’m glad you asked me that, too, Jack, because it so happens that I think the Fifth Amendment’s protection of religious freedom is this country’s most precious resource. I think what we’re witnessing in these cults is a cry for love on a mass scale. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this before, but at the center of every, and I mean every, religion, there’s a doctrine of caring, be it Eastern, be it Western, I don’t care. And I think—I truly believe—that there’s a middle ground we’re all striving to reach together.”

  Profound silence.

  “Dr. Mickey McFarland, author of You and Only You. We’ll get to the phone lines right after this message.”

  Mohnwirbel had stepped sideways into view in the back yard as he followed the ivy beds with his rake. There was enough ivy, enough property, to keep him raking all day long and the next day too. He’d had his finest hour a week ago, when photographers from House magazine had come to take pictures of the lawn and garden. It was the first time in eleven years that Barbara had seen Mohnwirbel agitated. He’d stood in the middle of the back yard like a dog amid angry bees, with an all-encompassing concern, menaced by squirrels that dropped sticks and trees that shed leaves.

  “Hello, you’re on the air.”

  Barbara measured butter.

  “Dr. McFarland?”

  “He’s listening. Go right ahead.”

  “Doctor, my name is Sally.”

  “…Do you have a question or comment for the doctor?”

  “I’m listening, Sally.”

  She opened the sugar bin. She was struck by the—what?—of white sugar. The futility. She applied the steel scoop.

  In an average week, she read four books. At the library she catalogued four hundred of them. She went out once to her exercise class, and three times to play tennis. In an average week she made six breakfasts, packed five lunches, and cooked six dinners. She put a hundred miles on the car. She stared out windows for forty-five minutes. She ate lunch in restaurants three times, once with Audrey and various fractions of twice with Jill Montgomery, Bea Meisner, Lorri Wulkowicz (her last good college friend), Bev Wismer, Bunny Hutchinson, Marilyn Weber, Biz DeMann, Jane Replogle, sundry librarians and many occasionals. She spent six hours in retail stores, one hour in the shower. She slept fifty-one hours. She watched nine hours of television. She spoke with Betsy LeMaster on the phone two times. She spoke with Audrey 3.5 times. She spoke with other friends fourteen times altogether. The radio played all day long.

  “Six three three, forty-nine hundred is our number. If you’re calling from Illinois it’s eight four two, eleven hundred. Hello, your question or comment for Dr. McFarland?”

  With the spatula she shaved smears of creamed butter off the sides of the mixing bowl. She shuttled buttermilk and eggs from the refrigerator to the counter and cracked the eggs into the smallest of the nesting bowls. Tossing the shells in the sink, she thought of Martin. He wouldn’t have discarded the shells so quickly. He would have run his index finger around the inside to loosen the last, clinging globs of white. She saw him do it when he scrambled the eggs on Sundays.

  In the first weeks of their marriage she’d dropped a twice-read newspaper into a wastebasket and he’d retrieved it. “These are useful,” he said.

  He never used them. He turned off the hot water while he soaped his hands. He put bricks in the toilet tank. The old house on Algonquin Place was lit largely by 40-watt bulbs. He burned the barbecue charcoal twice. If she threw out old Time magazines he sulked or raged. He pocketed matchbooks from restaurant ashtrays. When he watered the grass, he laid leaky hose
joints over shrubs, not concrete, so the shrubs would get a little drink.

  He conserved. But his conservatism was personal, perverse almost. When he was trying to keep his workers out of the unions twenty years ago, the city press could hardly believe that Barbara’s father had decided to represent him. At the time, everyone from the Teamsters to the roofers was striking Martin, and strikes were spiraling out into sympathetic businesses. Normally her father would never have touched a case like this (one of his specialties was workmen’s compensation), but it was difficult to say no to a company president who marched into paneled offices in boondockers and khaki work pants. Martin’s issue with the unions was personal, not ideological. He seemed astonished to be the cause of general havoc, and seemed to think it only natural when, with her father’s help, he won the suit. And when he turned up at her parents’ Fourth of July party, Barbara noticed him.

  She’d just graduated from college, and she had a fellowship to study physics at Washington U. In less than a year, though, she’d given it up and married Martin. She didn’t need science to set her apart, not when she had Martin Probst. She liked to see him at symphony intermissions chatting with her old Mary Institute acquaintances. (“You see the trombones?” he’d ask. “I love trombones.”) She liked to see him rock-and-roll dancing with her college friends. At charity balls he searched out the practicing engineers and talked about box girders and revetments and concrete piles while chiffon and silk charmeuse swept insubstantially by. She liked to be around him.

  One Sunday afternoon about three years after they were married, he took Barbara on a tour of the Arch, which hadn’t opened to the public yet. He unlocked two gates, a metal door, another gate, another door, and stopped by a galvanized-iron control box. He was moving with a swagger that Barbara didn’t recognize, and casting disdainful glances at the work. He threw switches by the handful. In the receding triangular space above them, lights went up on stairways and cables and the inverted T’s that anchored the tram tracks to the walls. Martin didn’t look at her. He might have been an antebellum Southern gentleman losing his sweetness in a review of his slaves. Pulling hard on a railing, as if daring it to snap, he started up the stairs. She followed, hating him somewhat. She smelled cold grease, cold welds, thirsty concrete. Echoes lingered, buzzing, in the thin iron steps. When the stairs brought her close to the walls she ran her hand over the hard carbon steel, over drips of set concrete, over code numbers inscribed by hand, and saw a blue luster hiding in the burrs and ripples. Abruptly the stairway veered to the opposite side of the tram tracks, and veered back, adjusting to dreadful alterations of the vertical.

  “Do you collect if I fall here?”

  “Don’t fall,” he said curtly. It was an order, but she was happy to comply. Diagonal patterns—the crossties and trusses for the tracks, the guys and brackets for the stairs—were repeated at one level and then slowly gave way, element by element, to patterns more cramped and twisted. Looking down (accidentally) she could see some of the flights she’d climbed, but not nearly all of them. They zigzagged around like the spoor of a rectilinearity driven crazy by catenary logic. The colors were primitive, the rustproofing orange, the plastic wrappings a baby blue, the wirenuts red and yellow, the conduit green. Farther up, as the pace of the curve increased, she climbed long spiral staircases connected, top to bottom, by narrow gangways with flimsy rods for railings. She might have fallen if she’d stopped to think. She followed Martin. There was metal everywhere, its molten origin apparent in this sealed metallic enclosure, in the literal chill: she could see the steel’s enslavement to form. Threaded, it bit itself in a death grip, bit indefinitely. Gussets like the arms of frozen courtiers held up struts, and the struts held up the gangways, and the gangways Martin. In the past his power had been a reputation, a thing for her to play with. Now, at closer range, from a greater remove (the truth is unfamiliar), she loved him very much.

  Blue daylight appeared. They stepped out into the sunlit observation room. And after she’d appreciated the view east and west, after she’d selected a car driving by the Old Courthouse, a red station wagon, and followed its progress through the empty downtown streets, watched it popping in and out between buildings, and caught glimpses of it (she believed) on Olive Street all the way out to Grand Avenue; after she’d jumped on the floor to confirm its solidity; after she’d sat up on the window ledge, her back to the sun and her thighs on warm metal, after she’d kicked off her shoes and Martin had stood between her legs and kissed her: after she’d protested that people could see and he’d assured her that they couldn’t, he unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down. Then he did it to her on the floor. There were rows of chevrons on the cold steel plates. He mashed and maneuvered her while she tried again and again to sit up. Her shoulders, in spasms, resisted touching down. Did she know this man? She was almost ecstatic. The best thing was, he never smiled.

  “Mickey McFarland, author of You and Only You. Doctor, we’re glad you could stop by this afternoon, I’m sure you have a busy schedule—”

  “Oh, KSLX has a special place in my heart.”

  “We appreciate your coming in. I’m Jack Strom. From three to four I’ll be talking to Dr. Ernest Quitschak, a seismologist who’s going to tell us about three of the biggest earthquakes in American history and the next big earthquake, which could happen any—day—now, right here in Missouri, KSLX-Radio, Saint Louis, it’s—three o’clock.”

  Bong.

  She slid the three pans onto the top rack of the oven, set the timer, and slumped into a chair. She was bushed. Her ears rang. Mohnwirbel had gone off someplace, leaving the rake in the ivy, tines down.

  In New Delhi today Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was among hundreds of thousands of—

  At the news of Mrs. Gandhi’s death on Monday Barbara had thought immediately of Jammu, the police chief. Jammu patterned her peremptory glamour so clearly on Mrs. Gandhi’s that Barbara was sure the assassination would leave her harrowed. But when Jammu appeared on KSLX-TV last night to discuss ramifications of the murder, she spoke with her usual poise. “It’s amazing the woman survived as long as she did. She didn’t lack enemies.” The cold smile she gave the interviewer disgusted Barbara.

  “You can’t judge from this,” Martin said. “Who knows what she thinks in private.”

  Yes, there was no denying no one knew. Barbara would even grant the possibility that Martin, in private, now that his hair was turning gray, feared death. But she would never know. The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.

  She remembered the election night party they’d had in their house on Algonquin Place, on the night Humphrey lost. The Animals raging in the living room, the undergraduates dancing in the front hall. Barbara had been upstairs checking on Luisa. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Martin talking with Biz DeMann’s young brother-in-law Andrew, a plump law-school student in blazer and tortoiseshell glasses.

  “Harvard,” Martin was saying. “…Harvard. Somehow I thought it was a restaurant.”

  Young DeMann: “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it.”

  “Listen, Andrew.” Martin put his arm around Andrew’s shoulders and drew him close. “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Maybe you can help me. What does alma mater mean?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Something like Our Mother.”

  Martin frowned. “Whose mother?” He was doing his dumb act.

  “Metaphorically. Like: Harvard is my alma mater.”

  “I see. It’s your Our Mother.”

  Andrew smiled indulgently. “Sure. Why not.”

  “Why not?” Martin took Andrew by the collar and tossed him against the front door. “Because it means nurturing mother, you asshole!”

  Barbara, turning white, dragged Martin int
o the dining room. “Martin, Martin, Martin—”

  “I ask the kid where he went to school,” he told her in a caustic whisper. “I’m pretty sure he went to Harvard, I’m just being polite. He tells me: ‘Oh, a little school near Boston.’” He pulled away. “Lemme go kick his head.”

  “He’s a guest, Martin.”

  She dragged him out to the back patio and sat him down. She realized he wasn’t drunk at all. “All these people,” he said. “All these people, worrying about the poor. They don’t have the faintest idea what it’s like to be poor…All these people studying. It makes me uncomfortable. It seems so…so small. I mean, how do they justify themselves? All these people. All these people. They’ve never in their lives had to work a job they didn’t like.”

  All these people were Barbara’s people.

  If she stopped trying, she and Martin wouldn’t see them anymore.

  She stopped. The parties stopped. She stayed at home; she got a sinus infection. Men were circling the moon, and she sat and rested in a kitchen chair, wishing she could taste. It was the worst infection of her life. In the shower she licked the soap off her lips and found it sweet, like one of the more congenial poisons. Cooking was a chemistry lab. Heated beef turned gray, heated chicken white. Bread had low tensile strength. A liquid could be extracted from an orange, it was volume in a glass, it was 150 milliliters.