The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Page 26

“Yes, Martin, really,” Barbara loading her words with portent. He felt the concentration of her will on him, the reins of desire and threat. Her feet were on the floor. Her legs were somewhat spread.

  “Thank you. Should I open these?”

  They indicated that he should. He slid out a shirt box and popped the ribbon. A shirt. He thanked. Luisa went and fetched the pitcher of daiquiris, which Barbara said she’d made because she thought they would feel good on his throat.

  “They do,” he said. He placed the books wrapped in newspaper on his lap. “It’s a pair of shoes. No, it’s a lunchbox.” He smiled and read the label. To Daddy from Luisa and Duane. Tactful indeed. He’d never even met Duane. He thought of Dr. Thompson; why wasn’t his name here, too? And Pat, for that matter. To Daddy from Pat. He smelled roasting beef.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?” Luisa said.

  He’d returned it to the pile. “I’m saving it. Best for last.”

  “Why don’t you open it, Martin?”

  He put it back on his lap. It was pleasant taking orders from her. He often imagined how he could have arranged his life differently, been more of a dog when at home, and lived from her hand. “Well! Thank you.”

  “What is it?” Barbara asked, suddenly smoking a cigarette.

  Probst slid the books across the floor to her and slit an envelope from New York. The card fell out, a black-and-white Happy Birthday from Ginny and Hal, also Sara and Becky and Jonathan. They’d all signed, which was a nice touch. Ginny usually did things right.

  “Have you read these?” Barbara asked Luisa.

  “Yes,” Luisa said.

  Probst waved his fingers for the books. “Can I see ’em again?”

  Barbara slid them back to Probst and said, “For school?”

  Paterson, by William Carlos Williams. The Winter’s Tale, by Shakespeare.

  “Sort of. I’m writing my poetry paper on Paterson.” Luisa glanced at Probst. “Duane recommended them.”

  A receipt fell out of the Shakespeare. Paul’s Books, $3.95, plus $5.95, plus tax. $10.50. The waste of money hurt his throat. He put the newspaper in the fire.

  “I thought Daddy would like them.” She turned. “We thought you’d like them.”

  “I’m sure I will.”

  “The big box is from Audrey,” Barbara said.

  “Whose husband is trying to ruin me.”

  “What?” Luisa said, while Barbara shook her head and tried to be noticed.

  “It’s true,” he said. “Your Uncle Rolf has been doing his best to put me out of business.”

  “Why?”

  “You’d have to ask your mother about that.” His heart was pounding. As he lifted the next package onto his lap he tried to list reasons for controlling himself. All he came up with, literally the only item, was Barbara’s offer. Her whorish offer.

  “So are you home for a while?” he asked Luisa. “Or is this only a visit?”

  A dark hole opened across the room. It was Barbara’s mouth.

  “I hadn’t really thought about it,” Luisa said, apparently sincere.

  “Of course not,” Barbara said.

  “Of course not? Maybe you haven’t really thought about where you’ve been sleeping for the last three weeks either.”

  “I have, Daddy. You know I have.”

  “You know she has.”

  “You keep the hell out of this,” he said. The command, with Luisa watching, was like a sock in Barbara’s mouth, and she recoiled. “Have you considered apologizing to us?” he said. “Explaining? Promising not to do it again?”

  “This isn’t good and evil, Daddy. This is just what I’m doing right now, all right?”

  “No. I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “You’re just worried about how things look. You want things to look a certain way. You never called me, or anything. We’ve been—I’ve been waiting. You should apologize, too. How can I think something’s wrong if you don’t tell me?”

  “You should know. I shouldn’t have to tell you. I’m very, very, very disappointed in you.”

  “Well, what do you think I came home for today?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Because Mommy said you wanted me to. She said you loved me and you missed me. I love you and I miss you. So.”

  Why wasn’t she crying?

  “I can go if you want me to,” she said. “You want me to go?”

  Barbara spoke. “Don’t go. It’s your father who should go.”

  “I told you to shut up.”

  No answer.

  He did want to leave. He was standing up. But Luisa beat him to it. She was already out in the hall, and then she was back, and to Probst’s relief and satisfaction she was screaming at Barbara, her fists clenched and body bent, while Barbara simply sat there. “Why don’t you make him shut up? Why don’t you make him? You let him say these things. Mommy! You let him do these things, you let him treat you—” She kicked Barbara in the ankle, and shrank, covering her face. “Oh,” she said. She ran upstairs and her bedroom door slammed.

  Doors could be identified by their resonance when slammed; the latches also had specific frequencies.

  There was a shriek, Luisa, probably some words overamplified. Her door opened, and after a pause a pile of magazines hit the bottom of the stairs, sliding over one another, rolling and flipping, right up to the front door. (Probst had been storing a few things in her room in her absence.) The door slammed again.

  Barbara shook her head.

  “I’m sorry I told you to shut up,” Probst said. “But you were teaming up on me.”

  She continued to shake her head.

  He was calm and tired. He headed upstairs to apologize. Barbara spoke:

  “My fault, huh?”

  He went upstairs and knocked. He knocked again.

  “Who is it?”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I don’t want to talk to you,” Luisa said.

  He tried the knob, but it was locked. His mouth was busy. I’m sorry. You’re my daughter. I love you. I’m sorry. To him, the words counted. But they wouldn’t come out, not without help, not when he was out alone in the hall, listening.

  Singh had told Jammu that Probst intended to visit her. When the visit failed to materialize by Thursday night, however, it was clear that he was in less of a hurry to see her than she was to reach a decision on his fate, and that she would have to decide without having personally inspected him. She was annoyed, feeling peculiarly stood up.

  The last doors and toilets in her building had fallen silent. Friday was already two hours old. In hers, the only sleepless cell, she was filing away Singh’s reports on the Probsts—wicked, gloating documents—and her own notes on the mayor. She locked a drawer and put on a red down jacket, a woolen stocking cap, and “wilderness” snowboots. She looked quite American in the mirror. This wasn’t her intent. Her intent was to stay warm and guard her health, although given the recent performance of her sinuses, her health was a lost cause. The few times she’d gone to bed this week, she’d gotten up again soon to pop Sinutabs.

  Outside, in the bitter air, she breathed through her mouth, spitting frequently. In November they had told her that Decembers were mild in St. Louis. But this year was hers; this December was not mild. A diminished moon was setting beyond the trees in Forest Park, casting light the color of the skim milk she’d been drinking by the quart. Most of the windows in the Chase-Park Plaza shared the milkiness, but lamps still burned in a few of the rooms. The discernibility of habitation at night in the city in a compartmentalized world, where floor plans show in the faces of the buildings, here the bedroom, here the kitchen, here the bath, this correspondence of windows to dwellings and dwellings to dwellers, of structure and humanity: this formed, tonight, a burden to Jammu.

  As she crossed Kingshighway she watched a tractor-trailer starting up from the Lindell intersection. It labored interminably in first gear, interminably in second, approaching at a crawl t
hat seemed to defeat momentum more than build it. Jumping a black bank of crud, she began to jog through the park in her boots of lead. This December wasn’t mild. At 2:15 on this winter morning, when bare trees drew wind like fossil bronchi, the rock of the continent was very visible to Jammu. Resistance to her operation had developed after all, a natural and predictable counterreaction on the part of the community, and it was precisely now and here that she had lost a sense of herself. She was worn out, feeling far from her motivating hatreds, farther still from her animating desires. Martin Probst was in her thoughts. He’d reacted to Wesley’s proposal with mindless hostility. At the Municipal Growth meeting six hours ago he’d demanded facts and assigned each of the remaining members the task of investigating a facet of Jammu’s agenda. And he hadn’t come to visit her this week.

  Without Martin Probst, the resistance would have had a very feeble core, consisting of Sam Norris, County Supervisor Ross Billerica, and assorted extremists. But with Probst aboard, they no longer seemed like a minority. If St. Louis public life was the court of a Mogul, then Probst was the elephants. Jammu had to steal him. But in losing herself she was also losing the capacity to view others as mere characters. Some at least were people, and the knowledge oppressed her. She couldn’t muster the resolve to give Singh the final go-ahead for continuing the assault on the Probsts. It wasn’t fear that stopped her, it was a thing more like awe, the unasked-for awe of the saboteur who, in some corporate vault, comes face to face with an instrument whose very complexity or delicacy acts as a charm against damage. In this context, any tampering at all, no matter how sophisticated, becomes an act of violence.

  She ran, avoiding ice. Her running confused her, this activity of her childhood, this helter-skelter dash along a road. It did not become a chief. Her foot fell on ice—black ice.

  She went flying through the air. She twisted and landed hard on her shoulder in the clean snow beyond the road. It was more than a foot deep. She realized she was warm.

  She moved her arms. She flapped them, packing down the snow and making wings. Twenty-five years ago in Kashmir her mother had taken her skiing where few Indians went. They’d seen American children on their backs in the snow, and Maman, the expert on all things American, informed Jammu that they were making butterflies; but to Jammu they looked more like angels, Christian angels, with skirts and wings and halos, fallen from the sky.

  The image pleased her. She felt restored to herself, indomitable again. Just after three o’clock she rang Singh out of bed and told him to go ahead with the job.

  “Thanks, Chief,” he said. “It’ll be a piece of cake. Candy from a baby.”

  10

  Earlier that Thursday night, Luisa and Duane had spent some quiet time in the laundromat. Luisa had woefully inadequate supplies of underwear and socks; she could wash them once in the sink, but she drew the line at twice. And sheets and towels required a machine. By nine o’clock, the last students and singles had packed up and gone, bequeathing Luisa and Duane a luxury of available dryers. Duane was reading messages on the board by the door. Luisa, her French notebook open on her lap, was looking out through the beaded window at Delmar Boulevard, closing one eye and then the other. This fall, her eyesight had gone from not-the-best to needing-correction. Duane’s father had recommended an ophthalmologist, and yesterday after school she’d had her appointment, and let them dilate her pupils, and felt burdened with responsibility when Dr. Leake kept changing lenses and asking her, “Is it better this way…Or this? Now…Or now?” She finally asked him to define “better.” He laughed and told her just to do her best. She told his secretary to send the bill to her parents. When she bought glasses she could use American Express. Duane gave her a hard time about the card, he called it antiseptic, but she personally didn’t see anything wrong with using it.

  Outside, a bus plunged past. Duane, minus both his sweaters, was copying something from the message board into his journal. Whenever Luisa saw his journal she felt lonely. One time, right after they’d gotten together, she’d asked if she could read it. He’d said no; if he knew she was going to be reading it, he’d be too self-conscious to use it. She was hurt, but she didn’t say anything more.

  In the second dryer, one of their green sheets had fallen against the round window and seemed in its invertebrate way to be struggling back over the socks and towels to reach the center of the bin. They only had one set of sheets. Kelly green was the first color Luisa saw when the alarm clock rang at 6:30. She said he didn’t have to, but Duane always got up and ate breakfast with her.

  He sat down in the bucket chair next to hers and zipped his journal into the outer pocket of his knapsack. “How’s the essay?”

  “Unwritten,” she said.

  “You want a job? There’s an ad there. It’s a widow who needs her house cleaned once a week.”

  “I don’t know how to clean houses.” She shut her notebook on an unfinished sentence. “How do you know she’s a widow?”

  “It says. There’s another ad from a retired army colonel who’s selling a Nova. A 350.”

  She rested her hands on his shoulder and held his bare upper arm with both her hands, rubbing her cheek on his neck and taking in his smell. At close range, his ear was funny. She slung her arm around his neck, and lifted a leg and lowered it over his knee, and watched the dryers.

  Cold air flooded into the laundromat. The newcomer was a thin black man in brilliant yellow pants and a red leather jacket. He tossed a duffel bag onto the nearest row of washers and looked around slowly and theatrically, aware that they were watching. He wore a ruby stud in his ear.

  “Good evening,” he said, bowing slightly to Duane. Then he bowed to Luisa and said it again: “Good evening.” She bowed a tiny bit herself. The only thing worse than being mocked was being mocked by a person who scared you. She untangled herself from Duane.

  The man unzipped his duffel and pulled out a pair of bright purple pants and a purple sweatshirt. He put them in a washer and moved to the next. That was all? He dropped in another pair of pants and another sweatshirt, both orange, and continued down the line, whipping out matched clothes, green, red, black, and blue with the flourish of a magician producing scarves, until he’d divided twelve articles among six washing machines. With spidery fingers he unscrewed a jar of blue powder and tapped a little into each machine, like a chef with salt. Then he filled the machines with quarters and started them all up. Water jets rushed in unison as he zipped the empty jar into his bag, shouldered the bag and headed for the door. He stopped. He took three quick steps to his right and snapped his fingers, explosively, right under Luisa’s nose.

  She squeaked. Her ears burned. He was already gone.

  Duane buried his face in a book, a Simenon mystery, keeping his palm on the spine and four fingers curled over the top to hold the pages open. With his other hand he smoothed Luisa’s hair and rubbed her neck.

  One of the dryers stopped. She went to check. “Duane, these are soaking.”

  “What’s it set at?” he called, turning a page.

  “Argh.” She turned the selector to Normal and added money. They’d be here all night. She walked around and around the core of washers, deliberately stubbing her rubber toes. “I don’t like it here,” she said, in passing.

  “You should find a laundry service that takes Amex.”

  She turned. “Fuck you.”

  His eyes rose calmly from his book. “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said it’s awful here.”

  “Then why don’t you go and get some more clothes from your house?”

  She didn’t have an answer. She started crying. Then she stopped. They were in a laundromat. There was nothing she could do but go out to Webster Groves and clean out her drawers. Being with Duane wasn’t as much fun as she’d thought it would be—a lot of times it wasn’t fun at all—but after what had happened on her father’s birthday she couldn’t imagine going back home.

  The door blew open in Barbara’s hand. She
fell through the entering breeze towards a man prepared, it was clear at once, to catch her. The day was warm, an instance of the weakness of winter, its willingness to turn to spring. She swayed a little.

  “Mrs. Probst?”

  A pair of light brown eyes was appraising her figure unashamedly. She was too surprised to do anything but stare back.

  “I’m John Nissing.”

  She knew, she knew. She took his hand. He nodded at the van in the driveway, where the two photographers who’d come in October were unloading aluminum cases. He let go of her hand. “We have a lot of equipment to bring in.”

  He strode back down the front walk, his overcoat billowing and coasting, his tweed pants wrapping muscles in his calves and thighs. Barbara had just finished her coffee. Her face looked bad, but she hadn’t expected it to matter. She always held her own. She had nothing to prove, and no one to prove it to, or slay. It was too cruel, after a week of ugly strife with Martin, to meet John Nissing. Her resentment steadied her. She inhaled the sweet, dishonest air.

  A case in each hand, Nissing hastened up the walk. She observed how carefully he wiped his shoes at the door. “This will take a fair portion of the day,” he said, setting down his equipment. “I assume we aren’t disrupting anything.” He had a faint accent to match his Arab looks.

  “No.”

  “Outstanding.”

  “You’re not American?” she said curiously.

  “Yes I am!” He swung his head and raised his eyebrows. She staggered back. “Oh yes I am! I am red, white and blue!” he said, without a trace of accent. His face relaxed again, and with a twist of each shoulder he removed his coat. “But I wasn’t born here.”

  Barbara took the warm coat and held it.

  “You’ve met Vince and Joshua,” Nissing reminded her as Vince and Joshua marched in with more cases. “Vince, are you going to say hello?”

  “Hello,” said the Latin Vince.

  “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Probst,” said the youthful Joshua.

  Nissing beamed. “Vince informs me that the kitchen gets the afternoon light.”