The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

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.”

“If it stays clear, it will,” Barbara said.

“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.

“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.

That one made Barbara hyperventilate, but she stayed on the phone. She begged. She pleaded. She offered Luisa complete freedom to come and go if she returned home; offered her a car; offered to keep Martin at bay. Luisa’s replies became duller and duller. Finally she made her bargain: Barbara could come and visit her whenever she wanted to, but she was in love with Duane and wanted to live with him for a while if that was OK.

She added: “I would have been leaving soon anyway.”

The weekend had passed. Depressed, with symptoms as clinical as they’d ever been, Barbara woke up at three in the morning in the guest room. The north wind shook the northern wall. She pressed it with her fingers to still it. A full moon spent itself in the frost on the western windows. In her mind this room in the corner of the house had come unmortared and was edging out of its slot, about to fall, with the clunk of the rejected, into the bushes.

She’d recovered from the first shock of Nissing’s discovery. On Saturday morning she’d spoken with Mohnwirbel and found him polite. He apologized formally, and later in the day, while Martin watched football, he came to the kitchen door with negatives and prints, dozens and dozens, in a shirt box. She asked him not to take any more, please.

He wouldn’t promise. “You should be appreciated right,” he said, showing perspicacity if not sanity. But Martin still wanted to prosecute or sue.

All weekend she’d felt as though she had cancer, as though she were ordering her life for a scheduled death. The shirt box of photos — which she couldn’t touch, let alone open or throw away — could have held the fatal X-rays. Household objects avoided contact with her, superstitiously. It would have been nice to have Dozer back to break the spell, to wander with a jangle from room to room, sniffing, yawning, spreading his sounds. But Dozer was dead.

And yet now, on Monday, she felt better. Rain poured on the windshield and roof as she inched down Euclid Avenue and pulled into a well-situated parking space. In a busy neighborhood, a free space was an omen. She put up the hood of her rain cloak and slid across the seat and released her umbrella and stepped out, directly into a stream of meltwater. So her foot was soaked, so? She pushed quarters into the meter and ran, every second step a squish, across the street and into Balaban.

John Nissing was checking his coat.

“Wonderful!” He peeled back her hood and held her shoulders. “You’re here!” He kissed her mouth as if compelled by the pure joy of seeing her again. They were given a corner table with reasonable privacy.

“I’m feeling extra specially good today,” he said when the Pouilly-Fuissé was splashing into their glasses. “A parcel which has been in the mail since 1979 and which I’d assumed was lost forever was waiting for me in New York on Friday night.”

He smiled complacently and waited. She waited. Suddenly he leaned towards her. “Jewelry! And jewelry, what’s more, with absolutely no sentimental value.” He reached into his jacket pocket. “This is for you.” He handed her a velvet box. “And the rest is for Christie’s.”

She opened the box. It contained two earrings: diamonds, a half carat apiece, in white-gold settings. She’d been wanting diamond earrings for Christmas.

“You can keep them, too,” he said. “And you don’t have to worry. They aren’t antiques.”

“I have a hundred questions about these,” she said.

Their waiter put two bowls of asparagus soup between them.

“Yes? What’s number one?”

“Where do you expect me to wear these?”

“In your ears!” He half stood, and did what she hadn’t thought men did, which was to remove earrings from women’s pierced ears. Her hands rose defensively, but fell back onto her napkin. He dropped her hoops into the box and, tongue curling with concentration, put in the diamonds. “You can tell your husband I gave them in appreciation of the Arch.”

He sat down. He looked at her soup. If she’d had anything in her stomach she might have thrown it up. But she picked up her spoon.

“And number two?” He cut into his soup with his own spoon and tasted it, his eyes connoisseurially unfocussed. With a hint of a nod, he came back. “Number two,” he answered, “is what do I expect in return.”

She let her eyes affirm this.

“A simple ‘Thank you’ will do.”

“Thank you.”

On the phone, he’d suggested a couple of restaurants in Clayton, but she’d asked to meet here at Balaban instead, knowing she’d feel more anonymous in the West End. In hindsight, though, she saw no reason to have avoided Clayton. People wouldn’t have thought anything of spotting her with Nissing, and what did she care if they did?

“Number three?”

Forget it. She shook her head. But she reconsidered. “Why me?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “But it was clear to me as soon as I saw you.”

“That’s not really good enough. I’m afraid that won’t do.”

The table behind her was empty, but he lowered his voice until she could hardly hear. “I see then,” he said, “that I’m required to explain my motivations while you are not, because you live in a castle and are self-explanatory, while I fly in planes and am not. I do my dance, and the lady clap a little? She is moved? She is not moved? You have a tired superiority, Barbara, and it doesn’t suit you well. If I made assumptions about you the way you’ve made them about me, I’d go so far as to guess you’ve never had an affair since you were married. This makes you a prize? At forty-three? This gives you the right to demand explanations?” He glanced over her shoulder and then looked back into her eyes. “You know you don’t speak like other people. Everyone around you is utterly reified. You know that. You speak a different language. You flaunt your sadness. You know damned well you’d like to fall in love with someone like yourself. Am I making myself at all clear?”

“Fairly clear, yes,” she said. “But we’d better talk about something else, or I’m not going to eat any lunch.”

Nissing had just paid the check, an hour later, when he mentioned that he had a plane to catch at 3:45. The news stung for a moment, but then she was glad. She was wiped out.

Outside, in a drizzle, she left him without a kiss, just a smile and a close-range wave. She didn’t believe everything he’d said, but she did believe she had him on a string.

At the first traffic light she removed her earrings. She had to go home for Luisa’s presents, the bulk of which she was bent on delivering this afternoon. The task looked easier in the light of that lunch, but it was a pity to drive all the way out to Webster Groves and back; Duane’s apartment was less than a mile away from where she’d parked.

Singh rose well before dawn, performed an abridged version of his calisthenics, took a freezing shower, and shaved. On Wednesday he’d had his hair cut radically, close in back and on the sides. To change appearance was to exaggerate the passage of time, to elude past claims of ownership, to seem to own himself. He chose his clothes with a similar end. Barbara had seen him in natty woolens, so today he would wear black denim, cancel the conservative button-downs with a sea-blue collarless. He ate a bagel with butter and brushed his teeth.

Day came, melting the opacity of the skylights into a blue translucence. There wasn’t much in the refrigerator. Singh threw it all away. He had an extra plate and two too many forks. He threw them away. He threw away superfluous socks and an illfitting shirt. He read through the Probst file and shredded ninety percent of it. He knew the essence now as he hadn’t two months ago; he was narrowing in. On the top sheet of the notes he was shredding he glimpsed spent phrases: tired superiority, in love with someone like herself. He took the garbage to the elevator and down to the alley and came back up with the building’s vacuum cleaner. He sucked what little dust there was from the green carpeting, what crumbs from the cooking zone, what hair balls from the bathroom. He telephoned Barbara, and then for a second time he listened to the conversations she’d had in the last four days, complete through the previous evening. Her composure was flawless, but that said everything; a week ago she hadn’t been composed.

AR: Where were you all day?

BP: Oh, I took some presents down to Luisa.

AR: I kept calling…

BP: I did hear the phone once or twice. I was trying to sleep. I haven’t been sleeping.

AR: I thought you might be working.

BP: No, I work all day tomorrow.

He erased the tape. Pigeons clustered. On the telephone he exchanged polysyllables with Jammu. Recently Jammu had had a mild attack of scruples, an allergic reaction to messing with lives, but she’d recovered now, and in a very few hours Singh would have the pleasure of pinning Martin Probst’s wife to a mattress.

He drove a freshly rented Pontiac Reliant to his Brentwood pied-à-terre and went in to collect his portfolio. The pictures of 236 Sherwood Drive were cautious and strangely murky, like the house itself, but apparently just what the editor wanted. Singh had paid off Joshua and Vince and sent them back to Chicago. His House days were over. He ignited a clove cigarette but thought better of smoking it. He flushed it down the toilet and left the apartment.

The Probsts’ helpful gardener was chopping ice off the front walk when Singh arrived. He returned Singh’s greeting with a piercing look and silence. Singh rang the doorbell and Barbara let him in. He observed her to see how his altered appearance affected her, and he saw that she had changed her own. She’d put up her hair with a barrette and dressed in a close-fitting T-shirt and close-fitting pants, shifting the emphasis from her body’s stalkiness to its maturity. Their mirrored strategies amused him. He forgot his line for a moment. He remembered. “Got some pictures for you.”

“No thanks,” she said, reaching up with weightless arms and kissing him. He hadn’t expected this yet. His surprise showed. She pushed away. “I’m going to go lie down, all right?”

She turned and climbed three steps and paused, facing away from him.

He leaned the portfolio against the oak chest in the hallway. He considered sitting down in the living room to watch what would happen, how long it would take her to join him. Why not. Her earnest grandeur bored him. He lowered himself onto the sofa and picked up some coffee-table reading, a book of pictures of the Arch by Joel Meyerowitz. It hadn’t been here last time. He thumbed. The advantage was his. In addition to her many reasons for being “unfaithful” to Martin, she had the heart of a bourgeoise and was eager to please. Less virtuous women would have hesitated when he’d called on Monday; less intelligent women would have flirted and dallied more brilliantly; Barbara, humorless, merely said yes and named a restaurant.

She appeared at the coffee table. “You came here to lay me, right?”

He filtered patience into his sigh. “I had a rough flight,” he said. “Do you want to sit down with me for a while?”

She perched on the edge of the sofa.

“Relax, hey?” He slouched deeply. “Why not.”

“Because it’s too damn tawdry. Why don’t you stop telling me what to do.”

“No thanks,” he said. “I had something on the plane.”

Barbara pressed her knees together, her hands flat between them. “You’re sweet, John. You’re very sweet,” she said. “But I don’t want to sit and talk to you like we’re dating. You’re very funny, but I don’t want to hear it now. You said you loved me. You knew me. So please.”

She’d bought it, then.

“Let’s go upstairs,” she said.

“But it’s such a nice sofa.”

“I don’t want to. He’ll see.”

“Oh.” Singh glanced at the rear windows. “Of course.”

She’d drawn the curtains in the guest room. He peeled back the bedspread and let her undress him. He looked down. Everything fine. Not that there had been much doubt. She removed her shirt and stood in her jeans and shoes, with her hands on her hips, assessing him. He felt a strain. She straddled him and pushed him onto his back, and kissed all around his mouth. The strain increased. He’d anticipated it, but still the leap had to be made. He sat up, and she followed. Here was the critical point, out of range of his charm, the point beyond which it was too dangerous to fake. He caught her wrists and focussed his eyes on the flesh lipping at the waist of her pants. It was over in a second. He loved her a little, and his chest heaved into her pinkness, ribs to ribs, stomach to stomach. His backup censor would now let almost anything past: she was soft. She was the best woman in the world. He reached and unzipped her, strained further, sliding his fingers through her slippery curls. She took off her pants and, with an exclamation that seemed to come from her whole upper body, made room for him inside. He fought her onto her back, working them up into the pillows. She made no sound. Her nails on his back spurred him into her. The work came easily to him, and though it seemed to take her an awfully long time, she finally stopped moving her hips and grew rigid. Her ribs bounced against his. She gasped and smiled with lips already mashed into asymmetry.

The phone rang itself out, remotely, twice.

The weather changed. It generally did.

He was just waking up, by and by, when she confessed to being somewhat sore. He suggested an alternative procedure. She shook her head. He let the matter drop and resumed the staple position, beginning delicately but intending this time to nail her as he’d planned to. She said he was hollowing her out. That was the idea. But he didn’t want to hurt her. He let her turn with him, sideways, and as they rolled, complexly interlocked, he began to experience perceptual difficulties. He was not immune to them. He accepted them, as phenomena. The present difficulty was a TV ghost, a negative image, a woman with dark skin and dark hair and pale lips who hid in Barbara and matched her when she moved without self-consciousness, but who swerved into sight when she erred, and made the right move for her. The forms were united in the rhythm of the act and in the lathered point at which they fused with Singh, who was a fulcrum.

University song of his. He was losing objectivity, and spent a few minutes in no particular place. His return was purely the product of Barbara’s labors. When he looked again the negative image was gone, and now he knew how complete his success had been, how impressive the results. He had her and he wouldn’t let go. He had his arms across her hot back, fingers buried in her midsection, fingers jammed in her butt, teeth on her tongue, legs splinted to hers, and the remainder a great number of inches inside her, spanning cavities and crowding ridges, and he came another time, into a newfound void, what felt like gallons.

They stopped.

A look of pure, lucid wickedness popped into her face, like a jack from a box. “Bye,” she said. “Glad you came.”

“Bye-bye,” he answered, playing along.