The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) Page 39

  “This is very clever, John, but I’m trying to eat.”

  “Is it my fault your story isn’t new? That piece of fried chicken is your prime rib. The last time you had prime rib—it must have been January fourth at the Port of St. Louis.”

  All his statements about her were true. From the very first moments of their new relationship, when he’d given her a typewritten letter to Martin for her to copy onto her stationery, he’d displayed—flaunted—a criminal familiarity with her private life. He knew exactly what had happened on Martin’s birthday, three days before she’d even met him. She asked him how he knew. He reminded her that since they’d seen each other nearly every day in early January, she’d had plenty of time to tell him the story of her life. She asked again: how did he know what had happened on Martin’s birthday? He reminded her that they’d met in October when he came to photograph the garden. He reminded her that they’d necked and petted like schoolchildren in the leaves behind the garage.

  “After the waiter takes our plates, I reach across the table with a velvet box for you. You think of your first lunch with me, my first gift. I say Happy Valentine’s Day. This time, you’re gracious. You open the box. This time, it’s a watch, a Cartier, with a silver band.”

  He dropped a silver watch on her lap. The hands showed ten of two, the jeweler’s magic hour. She put it on her wrist.

  “This time, you’re gracious, and you’re prepared. You give me a black silk tie you bought secondhand on East Eighth Street. We order champagne. We are the paragons of ostensible romance. But we’re ruthless, almost trembling with cynicism as we go through the motions of an extramarital affair, the motions that every modern man and woman craves. Self-expression. Individuality. The youth that hasn’t seen or read it all before. The dousing of the fires of doubt with bucket after bucket of dollars. We’re united in pain—”

  “This watch doesn’t work.”

  “Dead? Dead? Dead?”

  Nissing leaped to his feet and fired. Barbara saw black, smelled smoke, felt a peppery burn on her neck, and sound returned; she heard the bang. Nissing had shot the wall behind her head. She touched the hole in the plaster. It was hot.

  “Back at the apartment, we make savage love.”

  He couldn’t fool her. She saw how all his sudden pirouettes and shouting, the Hamletesque free associations, were merely steps towards madness and not at all the thing itself. She’d taken those kinds of steps herself when she was younger and feeling “crazy” and trying to impress her friends with her complexity and danger. His steps were the same, only a little larger. Obviously no one could formulate an airtight definition of sanity, but he met all of her intuitive requirements. So why had he stalked her and kidnapped her? The question might never have come up if he’d kept his mouth shut. But he opened it and she heard a mind like her own. The question clung. She nursed it. She tried to keep her mind clear. It was the perfect time, she joked, for her to read The Faerie Queene and Moby-Dick. Then John came in and fed her and told her what they’d done that day in New York. If she got bored, she began her evening sit-ups and leg-lifts before he finished.

  She found it impossible to think about Martin. He was locked in their past, rattling the bars of conditions that now never got an update, pacing between walls of activities and scenes that aged like inorganic matter, fading rather than changing. Their weekly conversations confirmed this. It was the conclusion reached by some students of the supernatural: you could speak to the dead, but they had nothing to say.

  At first she’d believed that captivity couldn’t alter her if she developed a routine and kept her mind active. But it altered her. Towards the end of the first week she noticed she’d begun to wring her hands in the darkness. She was shocked. And increasingly often she fell into a deep confusion, in the small light of her lamp, about the time of day. Was it early morning or was it late evening? She couldn’t remember. But how could a person not remember what she’d been doing one hour earlier? And then the spatial disorientations. Nissing freed her ankle only on the nights she showered. The cable, about six feet long, allowed her some play but not enough to move far from the mattress or reverse herself on it. She therefore slept and read and ate always with her head closer to the wall with the Shah’s portrait. She’d come to associate this wall with East. Suddenly it would be West, when all she’d done was turn a page. The frightening thing was that she cared which way was East. Trying to jostle her internal compass needle back to its correct setting, she’d pinch herself, blink, bang her head on the wall, kick her legs in a frenzy.

  “Sunday morning,” Nissing said, entering with the telephone and folding chairs. “I’m out for my morning run in the park. You haven’t talked to Luisa for a while.”

  “And I don’t feel like it this morning. I just wrote her a letter.”

  “I’m afraid that letter was lost in the mail.”

  She threw aside her book. “What the hell was wrong with that letter?”

  Nissing blinked. “Nothing!”

  “Then why did it get lost in the mail?”

  He unfolded the chairs. “I don’t control the mails, my darling. That’s the postmaster’s job. I’m sure if you asked him he’d tell you that a certain percentage of articles, a low percentage of course, do get lost, inevitably, in the mail. Perhaps a machine tore the address off. Perhaps the letter blew into a sewer while the postal service employee was emptying the box on Fifth Avenue, honey, where you mailed it.”

  “You just never get tired of yourself, do you?”

  “Our first quarrel!”

  “FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.”

  “It’s becoming inescapable that you call Luisa. After a fight like this? You get tired of my steady talking, my steady self-confidence, and we quarrel. I lose my cool a bit. Yes, I do. I shout. Why don’t you go back to your husband, someone you can subjugate? And then I slam the door and go out running. You think of me and my concern with bodily perfection, the joyous agony on my face as I enter the fourth mile of my run. You’re heaving. Sunday morning. February 18.”

  “I asked you a question.” She stood and wrung her hands. “I asked you what was wrong with that letter.”

  “Don’t try to reason with a madman, honey.”

  “You aren’t any madman.”

  “Oh yes I am!” He shoved her into the wall. “Oh yes I am! I’m madder than the arms race!” His free hand reached out of space and closed below her jaw and squeezed. She smelled clove smoke on his fingers. They tightened on her throat. She couldn’t swallow, and then he squeezed harder. “You’re a piece of meat. I’d kill you right now and enjoy it but not as much as I will when you’re fat and ripe and I beat the life out of you and you’re mooing for more.”

  Her certitude wavered, but she held on to the words of the assertion in her head. “No you won’t,” she squeaked. “ ’Cause you’re not.”

  He let go. She fell, coughing, to her knees.

  “ ’Cause you have to work these things up,” she said. “You have to do exercises. You have to find the impulse ’cause it isn’t in you. I know you. You cannot be. Credit me with some sense. Of human personality.”

  “Oh, credit you. You think I have to stand here and argue with you?”

  “Yes.” She coughed. “I think that. You’re doing it. Aren’t you.”

  “Do your gagging and then speak normally.”

  She looked up at him. “You can’t prove—”

  “Because when you’re dead, dear, when you’re a pile of garbage, you won’t be around to have it proved to. You don’t know what goes on behind that door, what goes on in me. You may think otherwise, because I am pleasant, to a degree, in this room with you, you may have a ‘sense’ of me, a ‘gut feel’ for my sanity, but you only get what I give you on this side of the door.”

  His eyes were black and tan, his skin tanned deeper, from underneath, from a brightness inside him. He looked like a well-read Mediterranean beach bum. If she could prove him rational then she could begin to figure ou
t why he’d done this. She remembered Dostoevsky, and the willed wildness of students. She thought of the Iranian students. But was he even Iranian? The picture of the Shah had been seeming more and more like a joke. John was a nihilist, not a royalist. Could he have dared himself to kidnap her? As an experiment in evil? In revolution? Oh! This was the worst pain of all, that the world seethed with motives she could never grasp. Even if this captivity were clearly political she still wouldn’t understand it, how a political demon or even ordinary pragmatism could lead a person to take risks like this. And politics stood for all the other motives she couldn’t grasp.

  “Why did you single me out?” she said.

  “Out of all the women I’ve met? I guess it’s natural you think you’re the first.”

  And the small mystery—it was large to her but small in the larger scheme—merely stood for the larger mystery, the unconditional ignorance: why had she been born?

  “Time for a phone call.”

  “No.”

  “Aw honey. Will you promise to do it later?”

  He was trying to look drowningly pathetic. But he couldn’t make his face as wild as his words, which didn’t count as proof of insanity, because anyone could learn to speak wildly. And what did he care, anyway, whether she believed him insane? The question led into briars.

  “Be nice to me, John,” she said.

  “It isn’t me, it’s the postal service. Soon this becomes a motto of our home. We make up and we make love, savage love.”

  “Be nice to me.”

  17

  She was clean again, odorless, a spiritual wife. At the bathroom mirror, in a robe that came untied and fell farther and farther open the longer her hands were raised, she was sharpening the edges. “Ow, damn it,” she said, because it hurt. But then maintaining appearances always hurt. “Ow, damn it.” She allowed herself an oath for every pluck. Rolf had called her plucky. On the bottom shelf of the medicine chest, in a bed of crud composed of dust and baby powder and leaked creams and the white flakes from the mouth of the Colgate tube, there were Q-Tips, a medical thermometer, hypos in their aseptic sleeves, the various therapies. “Ow, damn it.” She wasn’t exactly healthy, of course, but Rolf, without knowing it, had taught her that three martinis would relieve most afternoon flu symptoms, and though the flu still hurt a little, the pluck proved her a respectable woman. Already, after only ten weeks of economizing (Mamaji used to say that men couldn’t economize because they were made in the true image of profligate gods), she had tucked away more than an ounce of prevention for the future. “Ow, damn it.” She had faith in a divine closed-circuit television which monitored her every move, her every economy and respectable impulse, and which Mamaji would one day find time to view. She was a witness to maya but kept faith. Jammu gave her small credit for self-respect, but she was no addict, no fallen creature, as much as she might have seemed that way at certain times. “Ow, damn it.” Jammu held her down, didn’t care about her but gave her a pound of cure every week which she did use half of, because the lot of woman was hard. All women did things in the bathroom that no one knew anything about. All women. And Jammu was especially easy to fool because she was busy and she thought the very worst of Devi, believing Devi depended on her. But the other she would have her revenge, except it wouldn’t be revenge, just something for Rolf (and one day maybe Mamaji) to see. “Ow, damn it.” She practiced her accent for the day the scales fell and she stepped forth with Rolf to be his. All that remained was to prove to him that she could manage, could manage a household with independent means and economize.

  It was finished. She checked her work and smoothed the raw skin with isopropyl on a cotton swab which smarted, and rinsed the little hairs down the drain. She was coming down with the afternoon flu. A sudden horrid chill made her hands tremble and drop the eye-shadow box in the sink and it got wet and its plastic lid fell off. It gummed up her fingers, made them all gray. She sat down on the toilet lid to recover, thinking it was horrible how the robe kept falling open. She could tie it tight but the silk knots loosened inopportunely unless they were square, and square knots broke nails. She wasn’t frowsy. The button on the bathroom door was a navel, locked. Press me. A fine way to demonstrate her capacity to manage, to sit here in the bathroom with gray fingers and tiny pricks of blood (“Accent”) pricks of blood above her eyes, and shaking. Rolf never said so but sometimes, more and more, he refused to see that there were two of her. She wanted to explain, The rent’s too high here! and, It isn’t my job to clean up, I’m supposed to manage! She was running a fever not a home. But good managers didn’t make alibis. She had to try very hard to be good a little longer, possibly even clean things up herself, until there were, if possible, two ounces of prevention. Then she could pay her own way. Pay her own way! But it hurt, because skimping was almost worse than starving, and she didn’t want to smell like martinis every time Rolf came.

  With 41 percent of the corporation under his direct control, Buzz Wismer was, on paper, one of the twenty wealthiest men in the country. But Wismer had never diversified in the classical sense, since aerospace was already sufficiently diversified to adapt to a changing market, and the company’s cash assets, though comfortable, were relatively small. A high proportion of its other assets took the form of accounts receivable, primarily from the airlines. Buzz’s wealth was therefore not the wealth of the speculator or oil tycoon who spent in panics. It was tied up in the firm, and he’d tailored his tastes accordingly. He liked good company, virgin land, peace and quiet. Salty foods, cool drinks. He came from a large heartland family in rural Missouri. One of the pities of his life was that he’d never become the head of such a family. His three marriages had brought him two daughters, one of whom would probably remain in therapy for life. Unlike Martin Probst, Buzz had been too busy and too constitutionally flawed to enjoy ordinary family pleasures. The older he grew, the more acutely he experienced the lack. After the fire on his land, he threw himself obsessively into his computer work. Like a splayed beetle clinging to a great globe of wealth and importance, he tried to hang on. Then the globe began to roll.

  “Deviiiii?” The hinge squealed slowly. Uncle Rolf cased his head past the jamb and the key from the door. “Dev—iiiii?” He crept in on tippy-toe.

  Something clattered behind the bathroom door, but whatever sounds followed were lost in the thunder of a rising jet. It was frightfully loud; he saw she’d left a window open. The room felt and smelt like a train platform. Crossing to close the window, Rolf glimpsed a face reflected from the telly. The face was Martin’s, in a flock of microphones. The thunder exhausted itself in the time it took Rolf to reach the set.

  “…I’m not saying we’ve ruled it out, but it is indicative of their entire approach. Debates don’t resolve issues, they never have. They’re personality contests, and that’s precisely the kind of confusion about the referendum I’m interested in seeing eliminated.”

  “Oh it is, is it?” Rolf smeared Martin’s face with his palm. The screen was hot. “Poophead! Fart!”

  “We’ll have a definite answer on Thursday.”

  “Can’t wait, y’old turdbrain.”

  Rolf had never much liked Martin Probst, but he’d never known until this winter how deep a revulsion lay buried in his bosom. Tittering, he zapped him off the screen.

  As he leaned to shut the casement it caught a gust of wind and swung out of reach. He braced himself on the sill and stretched after it. Above him, on a shelf cut into the exterior wall above the window, he noticed a small box wrapped in plastic. He closed the window and latched it. He stroked his mustache. Small box. Hm. Wrapped in plastic. He opened the window again and leaned out—but best not to inquire, eh? An uninspected pet was the only kind worth having. He shut the window just as she emerged from the bathroom.

  “Evening, Rolf,” she said with coy flatness.

  “Good evening, my love.”

  She was wearing new glasses modeled after Barbie’s reading specs, flat black mules to pl
ay down her height, blue Levi’s, and a large white shirt. Rolf hadn’t seen the genuine article in more than two months, not since the holidays, and his blood pressure rose. Five months into the relationship she could still reduce him to a knock-kneed juvenile. Her hands approached. He stood fascinated as they slowly closed in, nudging aside the lapels of his jacket, brushing along the sweater beneath his arms, and the rest of her following, to begin an embrace in slowest motion. He lived for this. He coughed.

  The look crossed her face. He pushed her roughly aside and gagged on another cough, his ears popping.

  “I’m sorry.” She went limp on the sofa.

  He saw the little band-aid on her forearm, the dry makeup. He didn’t care what she did when she was by herself, but when her control lapsed in his presence…

  “Why did you call me?” he said.

  She looked up and made him love her again with the perfect half-ironic smile. “Rolf,” she said, “I’m totally dependent on you. I can’t survive a day without hearing your voice. After all these years, every day counts, every minute. Don’t you see? We’ve waited so long for each other.”

  He cupped his hand and pushed a small cough into it.