The Twenty-Seventh City

by Jonathan Franzen

  “And if it gets cloudy it won’t matter anyway. Perfect. Ideal. We’ll begin with the living room.” He leaned into the living room but didn’t enter. He frowned at Barbara. “Dark!”

  “Yes, it’s not a light room,” she said.

  “Dark!” He snagged Vince, who was on his way back out. “Change the bulbs. Red wine, red roses. They’ve built a fire. You’ll want to light it.” Vince left, and Nissing addressed Barbara. “Have you had the house photographed before?”

  “Just for insurance.”

  “We have to change the time of day. I hadn’t realized the room was dark.” He could have been discussing human handicaps. I hadn’t realized the girl was lame. “If you’re busy…” he said.

  She shrugged and bounced on her heels. “I—no.” She made an empty gesture with her hands, yielding to an impulse to cover her sense of physical inferiority with a show of youth, to act like the disconcertable girl she never was. “This is interesting. I’ll enjoy watching.”

  “May I see the kitchen?” he said.

  “Sure. You can see the whole house.”

  “I’d relish that.”

  In the dining room, where she and Martin had eaten a birthday dinner in two shifts, Nissing commented on the splendid walnut moldings, and she apologetically explained that the best woodwork on the property was in Mohnwirbel’s rooms, above the garage. In the kitchen, where the radio was silent, the counters unpopulated and the windows crystalline, he described a mousse he’d prepared the night before, which caused her to shift him towards the more modern end of the sexist spectrum. In the breakfast room they watched Mohnwirbel grinding the blades of shears on a carborundum wheel at the bench he’d set up in the driveway; she pointed out the Tudor arches of his rooms. Passing the rear bathroom, the window of which Luisa had jumped from, they came to the den and cut white morning sunbeams, cast shadows on the faded-looking covers of her books. Nissing explained that his family was Iranian. In the sunroom, the repository for most of her Christmas presents, wrapped and otherwise, she took a good look at his face and decided he was significantly younger than she, possibly as young as thirty. They returned through the living room. Joshua was on his knees, blowing at a recalcitrant fire, and Vince was on a stepladder, increasing the wattage of the track lighting. Barbara’s circuit with Nissing seemed to have cleansed the house, taken it off her hands. They went upstairs.

  Nissing stopped to admire the guest bedroom, where Barbara had been sleeping since Tuesday (it didn’t show), and promptly asked if they’d recently had guests.

  “No.”

  “Funny. I can usually smell if a room has been used.”

  She showed him Luisa’s supernaturally neat bedroom, and was glad he wouldn’t go in. He did go into Martin’s study, taking slow steps, as if in a gallery. He asked what she did all day. She mentioned her job at the library and added, with a defensiveness ripened by time into glibness, “I read a lot. I see friends. I take care of my family.”

  He was staring at her. “That’s nice.”

  “It has its drawbacks,” she said.

  His eyebrows were raised and his face lit up as if he expected her to say more, or as if there were a major joke in the air that he was waiting for her to get.

  “Is something wrong?” she said, wishing, too late, that she’d just ignored him.

  “Nope!” Suddenly his face had filled her vision. “Nothing!” He backed away, and again seemed to shake the bizarreness out of his frame. “I’ve just heard a lot about you.” He walked into the hall and rested his hands on the stairwell railing. His skin was golden, not tanned, the native color revealed in the redness of his broad knuckles. Dark hair grew evenly on the back of his hands and fingers.

  Downstairs, Vince squealed.

  “This here is the master bedroom,” Barbara said, nodding Nissing into it. Martin hadn’t made the bed very well. Nissing went and sat on it. “Colossal bed,” he said, thumping the mattress. She was now sure he knew where she and Martin had been sleeping.

  “Where have you heard about me?” she said.

  “I think we picked the right rooms to photograph, where have I heard about you? Well, from a woman named Binky Doolittle, and one named Bunny Hutchinson,” he was counting them off on his fingers, “and one named Bea Meisner, and—hey! You’re Barbara. All these B’s! Is this something you’ve noticed? Was there some sort of advance planning involved?”

  “No. Actually. Where have you been meeting these women?”

  “In their homes, of course. In the homes we will feature in a sumptuous article in May. The homes of the filthy filthy rich in St. Louis. Homes like yours. I’m grateful for tips. Your home received many mentions, from these women and from others.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It’s very so. It’s remarkably so. The name Probst was on the tip of everyone’s tongue, at least in October.”

  “I had no idea our house—”

  “Oh, not the house. No. That was not my impression. Or not just the house. It was the home. I was told that if I was in St. Louis I simply must see the Probsts’ home.” From the bed he glared at her. “So we added you to the list.”

  “Do you sleep with a lot of your subjects?” she said.

  “Most of my subjects are architectural.”

  “But Binky? Bunny? I bet they love you.”

  “Possibly. But I have a living to make.”

  Downstairs, she watched the three of them doctor the front room. She was asked not to smoke. In a notebook Nissing took down data on the room for captions and copy. Once they started working the cameras, it was over very quickly, and she was surprised to find it noon already. Vince and Joshua began to walk tripods and cables into the kitchen. Nissing moved Barbara farther into the living room. On the spruced-up table stood a vase of roses, an open bottle of Beaujolais and two long-stemmed glasses. The vase and glasses were hers, the wine his. He poured liberally. “I’m not really a photographer,” he said. “I teamed up with Vince on a freelance job, and one thing has led to another. It’s easy money. I suppose I ought to have more ambition, but I’ve appreciated having extra time to spend with my son.”

  “Your son?”

  He unfolded a large wallet and handed her a picture. It showed him in a white shirt and blue V-neck sweater, with his arm around a skinny boy with large dark eyes. Both were smiling, but not at the camera. Parts of a white sofa and a blond wood floor were visible. It was probably Barbara’s imagination, but the lighting seemed to suggest a specifically Manhattan apartment, where high-rise living, through the proximity of a million similar apartments, became more natural and self-sufficient than it could elsewhere. She did know he came from New York.

  “Who’s the lucky mother?” she said.

  He put away the picture. “My wife died four years ago.”

  “I’m sorry.” She watched him take one of her cigarettes. “What’s his name?”

  “Terry.”

  “He doesn’t look like a Terry.” She smiled kindly, waiting for the shadow of his wife’s death to pass.

  “It’s a good American name,” he said. “We’re good Americans. I was born in Teheran and spent my first six years there, but I’ve lived here ever since. I went to Choate and Williams. I anglicized my own name. Don’t I qualify as an American?”

  “Your accents are confusing.”

  “That’s because I’m not very good at them. As you can see, my American is perfect—”

  “Except for your h’s.”

  “Of course. Except for my initial h’s. But to the Doolittles of the world, I have to be Omar Sharif.”

  She was struck by the authenticity of his statement, by his awareness that in an ambitious non-American the desire to conform and the desire to be dazzling were painfully at odds. She could see how mastery of the social code might lag behind control of the American idiom. The overfamiliarity he’d been displaying was probably an accident. In her letters from Paris Luisa had complained that she couldn’t seem to stop offending M
. and Mme Giraud, and Barbara had easily imagined how her sarcasm, common currency at home, might have seemed presumptuous abroad. And so she gave Nissing the benefit of the doubt. She took off her shoes.

  “Your husband built the Arch.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Somehow I hadn’t quite made the connection.” He looked at her. “What do you know!”

  “It’s the kind of thing you get tired of hearing about after twenty years.”

  “But that’s an incredible structure,” he told her. “People who haven’t seen it in person just can’t imagine—”

  “And this is the thing,” she went on. “My husband is a general contractor. He didn’t design the Arch. He had nothing to do with the design. He made use of two engineering innovations, neither of which were his own ideas, and he put the thing up. But to hear people talk, you’d think he was Saarinen.”

  Nissing, saying nothing, stepped back, as it were, and let her words land between them and redound to her discredit.

  “It is true that his name was heavily associated with it,” she said.

  “There must be a reason for that.”

  “Well, at the time, there was.”

  “Uh huh.” Nissing glanced over his shoulder at the back yard and then looked again at Barbara. “I like St. Louis,” he said. “It’s an old town. Buildings sit well here. Almost too well, if you know what I mean. The city is such a physical ramification—the brick, the hills, the open spaces, the big trees—that the architecture and landscape completely dominate. I don’t say there aren’t people, but for some reason they seem to get lost in the larger visuals. Perhaps it’s only my outsider’s perspective. I try to get in touch with the genius of places, in the old sense of the word, the unity of place and personality. The advantage of this job is that if I like a place I can go and look inside it. I do, by the way, want to see those rooms—”

  The telephone was ringing. Barbara excused herself. A sudden menstrual stitch slowed her down as she left the room. To Nissing it may have looked as if her legs had gone to sleep. The mailman came up the front walk with a handful of Christmas cards. In the kitchen Joshua was buffing the sugar canister. Vince cranked a tripod.

  “Barbie?”

  “Hi, Audrey.” She walked to the refrigerator. “Is this urgent?” She took out milk, but her pills, including her Motrin, had disappeared from their little shelf. Apparently abdominal cramps had no place in House.

  “I’ll call back,” Audrey was saying. “The photographers must be there.”

  “They are.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “I am.”

  Hanging up, she asked Vince where the pills were.

  “Dining-room table,” he said, intently cranking. “We’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t smoke in the other room either.”

  She stopped. “It wasn’t me.”

  Vince didn’t answer.

  Nissing was warming his back at the dying fire. “Don’t mind Vince,” he said. “Let’s go and see those rooms. I’m a real Tudor nut.”

  Probst was jumped by Barbara before he even had his coat off. In his distraction he pulled one of the sleeves inside out.

  “Martin listen,” she said, wringing her hands. “We have a real problem. I don’t know what to do. It’s Mohnwirbel.” She followed Probst to the closet. “This is just too—He has—Listen. He has pictures, photographs—big blow-ups—of me, he has them on the walls of his rooms.”

  “He what?” Probst smoothed his coat onto a hanger. The crowded closet upset him, all the more so because all the coats were his.

  “In his apartment. I had to take one of the photographers up there, he wanted to see—Well, you know, the woodwork. And Mohnwirbel, I don’t know where he’d gone. He was here this morning, and he’s here now, but he wasn’t there at lunchtime. I had to dig out our key. I was sure he wouldn’t mind if we just went up and looked in. And I got the door open and I was trying to get the key out—have we ever even used it? And I sent Nissing, the photographer, I sent him in. And finally I got the key out and he was staring—oh my God, I am so mortified. Martin. He’s a pervert or something. We have a pervert living over our garage.”

  “What kind of pictures?” Probst said.

  “You can imagine that I did not stay to look with a stranger—”

  “Clothed pictures, though,” he said, trying to make her understand.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “It makes no difference. It makes no difference. He’s fired.”

  “I thought you liked him,” Probst pointed out. Why she couldn’t have waited a few minutes…

  “The same as you. We didn’t dislike him. What’s to dislike? But he probably has corpses—”

  “You’re not acting like yourself.”

  She stepped back. “Well, I’m upset. Aren’t you?”

  “Naturally.” But he’d meant what he said. She seemed like a different person. Even when she’d given him the news of Luisa’s departure, last month, she’d completed her sentences and related the events chronologically.

  “Go and look,” she said. “Go and talk to him.”

  “You haven’t spoken with him.”

  “Me? Jesus! Of course not.”

  “I see you still tolerate me when you need me.”

  She shook her head ominously. “You wish.” And went and locked herself in the den.

  Canadian bacon.

  The stairs to Mohnwirbel’s rooms began at the back of the garage. Probst switched on the staircase light and started up. The air was cold and flavored with the decay of exposed wood and the mold that grew in caking dust. Patches of ancient linoleum clung to the blackened stairs. It had been several years since he’d climbed these stairs. Mohnwirbel exercised autonomy. They paid him by mail.

  Past the middle landing the air grew heated. The top landing was lit by leakage from under the apartment door and through the curtains on the window in it. Probst’s heart beat as if he’d climbed twenty flights. He knocked, drawing footsteps. The door opened as far as the chain allowed.

  “Heinrich, hi,” Probst said. “Can I talk to you?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to come in.”

  Through the doorway came a sigh with some voice in it, and Mohnwirbel said, “You want to come in.”

  “I want to see the pictures of my wife.”

  Eyelids covered and uncovered the small black eyes. “All right.”

  There were many pictures, but for a moment only their existence registered in Probst, not their content. He paced along the walls of the exhibition. It was true: these were the finest rooms on the property. The ceilings were high, the woodwork extravagant, the kitchenette antiquated but adequate. Through the eastern window, the glowing windows of 236 itself could be seen, and Probst experienced a mild epiphany as he felt his way, by means of this perspective, into another life. He never saw his own house from this angle. Mohnwirbel had lived here for decades.

  A second thought intruded. With Mohnwirbel out of the way, they could rent this space for at least four hundred a month.

  By the bedroom door he saw a nude profile, a telephoto of Barbara in the bathroom. The guilty cameras hung on a peg near the closet where Mohnwirbel, face blank, stood watching.

  Barbara was clothed in the other dozen or so pictures, her hair cut in the various styles she’d tried in the last three or four years. She’d stood twice in the kitchen, once in the sunroom, and the rest of the time outdoors. All but the kitchen shots shared the perspective Probst had now, and they looked, every one of them, like shots from the National Enquirer of Jackie Onassis or Brigitte Bardot on their beaches, boats, or estates. The graininess, the candidness, the flatness of the telephoto field gave Barbara glamour.

  “So what’s the meaning of this, Heinrich?”

  “You saw them, now get out.” Mohnwirbel was wearing a plaid wool woodsman’s jacket and unusual pants. They were black tuxedo pants, greatly worn.
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  “I own these rooms,” Probst said.

  “In point of law, you do not. I don’t rent. I have domicile.”

  This might be true, Probst realized. “You’re fired,” he said.

  “I resign.”

  “How much will it cost me to get you out of here?”

  “I don’t leave. I have nowhere to go.” He presented this as a fact, not a sentiment. “Perhaps I can speak with the lady of the house.”

  Probst went icy. “The lady of the house does not wish to speak with you.” He tore the nude profile off the wall and into quarters. “This is filth, this is perverted, you hear me?”

  “It’s your wife,” said Mohnwirbel.

  Probst tore another picture off the wall, sending thumbtacks scattering on the sere Orientals. He reached for a third, and Mohnwirbel, seizing his elbow, levered him against the wall. “I throw you down the stairs if you touch another one, Martin Probst.” His breath had a powerful ethyl stink. “I want to tell you, Martin Probst, you are the most arrogant man I ever knew. You have categories of normal and pervert, right and wrong, good bad. Like the lady’s tits don’t heat you up when she picks up her towel. You call that filthy and you got no God. You think she never looks at another man? Then what am I? Come on, Martin Probst. Don’t say I’m pervert.”

  “One way or another, you’re going to leave here, mister. You’re going to hear from the police, you’re going to hear from our attorney—”

  “Sentimental, Martin Probst. You go your way, I go mine. You stand in a room of pleasure.” A plaid arm swept the air inclusively. “What pleasure you got? You don’t have the house, you don’t have the woman, you don’t have the grass on the ground.” Mohnwirbel looked aside, seemingly distracted. “I don’t like your daughter,” he remarked.

  “I’m sure she doesn’t like you either.” Probst broke the grip on his elbow and fell a few steps towards the windows. He looked down on the shoveled driveway.

  “We see if you can put me in jail, Martin Probst.”

  Through the thin reaches of a dogwood he saw Barbara, in their kitchen on the telephone, with both hands on the receiver.

  It was Luisa. She wanted to move more things out of the house. Barbara asked if she was sure. Yes, she was pretty sure. It wasn’t fair to Duane not to.