The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

12

At 11:00 on Christmas morning Luisa put on the red wool dress from her mother which she’d unwrapped an hour earlier, Duane put on his previously owned pinstripe suit and an iridescent blue necktie, and the two of them drove out in the Nova to Webster Groves. When Luisa saw the little stacks of gifts her parents had just opened she wasn’t exactly sad, but she did wonder what she’d been trying to prove by not coming home earlier, especially since her father had decided to be nice again. He was about as self-possessed around Duane as he’d be around the Pope. He shook Duane’s hand and bounded through the house, doing God knew what, and returned and sat with them in the living room for three minutes, and then he bounded to his feet and said they should go. At her grandparents’ there was a lot of drinking and casseroles. Her grandmother gave her a dirty look before pecking her on the cheek and wishing her a Merry C. Her grandfather gave her a real kiss, and she thanked him for the “present,” which was the only word for a $100 bill. Auntie Audrey told her twice how nice she looked, which was agreeable. She shook hands with her cousins and allowed herself to be appraised by her great-aunt Lucy and her great-uncle Ted. Uncle Rolf had despotically occupied the bamboo chair by the fireplace, his legs crossed at the knees, his brandy glass cupped in one hand like a royal orb. He showed Luisa lots of teeth and she smiled and nodded. Then her father moved into the picture. Technical difficulties. Please stand by. Her mother was introducing Duane to Auntie Audrey. “Yes, I have seen your pictures, yes.” Luisa wandered over and felt excluded, as always. Duane didn’t have to be so polite. But then he took her out into the hall and said, “Help, help.” They went together to see her grandmother in the kitchen. Her grandmother said everything was under control.

On the way home Duane sat with her mother in the back seat and started telling her the story of his getting hit in the head with a baseball bat while his parents were in Aruba. Daddy, instead of listening, spoke in a low voice to Luisa. He said he may have said some things on his birthday that he didn’t mean. He said he was under a lot of strain at work and Municipal Growth. He said he sincerely hoped they could see more of her and Duane, whom he liked.

“And Peter was out playing golf, so there was this unconscious eleven-year-old kid and no one knew who he belonged to, or who to call.”

Her mother laughed. “So…?”

“Did you have a good time today?” her father asked.

“Yeah, it was OK.”

“So I woke up in the hospital, and a nurse rushed over, and the first thing she said was What’s your name? Because none of the kids had even known my name. Somebody thought I might be ‘Don.’”

“You know, your grandmother hasn’t been well.”

“Oh, really? I guess she did seem kind of…” Luisa shrugged.

“I’d given them the wrong number. They kept calling and calling, and no one answered. So finally around ten in the evening they decided to look it up in the phone book. And of course we have an unlisted number.”

“Oh no.”

“And meanwhile, Peter is losing his mind, he’s so scared. He was supposed to look after me, and he has no idea, absolutely no idea—”

“And you understand that at her age she sees things rather differently from the way you or even I do. That is, I don’t think you should feel hurt if she doesn’t approve of your, your situation with Duane.”

“It’s OK, I understand.”

The headlights and highway lights began to reveal falling snow.

“But by now he’s not there anymore, he’s down at the police station.”

“Oh no, oh no.”

“Will you be all right driving home in Duane’s car?”

“We’ve got snow tires.”

“You’ve been driving it to school?”

“Sometimes.”

“And so finally it occurs to someone at the hospital to call the police—”

“What’s this?” her father asked over his shoulder.

The vacation week passed slowly. Duane said he liked her parents but he liked her better. They went out once with Sara and Edgar. They went skating. They went sledding, and got mashed together when they crashed. Then on the day before New Year’s Eve Duane went out to Webster to see two high-school friends of his, and Luisa stayed behind in the apartment to type up all her applications.

As soon as she saw Duane drive away she started walking back and forth through the kitchen and living room and bedroom. She’d never spent a whole day by herself in the apartment, and it was obvious that she wouldn’t be working on her applications. She remembered how when her parents used to leave her alone in the house she would feel a deep pang of boredom and irresponsibility the moment they were out the door, and before she could do any of the things she’d thought she would be doing, she had to rifle their drawers, or try their liquor, or fill the bathtub to the very brim and take a bath, which her father said was criminally wasteful.

The first thing she did was smoke one of Duane’s cigarettes. The next thing she did was go to the bedroom and look for his journal. Usually he left it in his knapsack with some of his camera equipment, but today the knapsack was empty. She looked through all the books along the baseboard — the notebook had a gray spine like an ordinary book — but it wasn’t there either. She went through his drawers in their dresser, and then through all his prints and printing paper, and then through all the clothes in the closet. She even looked in his empty suitcases. The journal wasn’t anywhere. She had just about concluded that he’d put it in the car without her noticing, when, just to be sure, she lifted their mattress off the floor. And there it was.

The fact that he’d tried to hide it made it much more horrible and interesting that she was going to read it.

She lay down on the mattress and started looking for her name. She was immediately disappointed. The last dated entry was October 6, two weeks before she’d met him. After that there were only phrases and prices and doodles, picture ideas and sentences he’d copied down from bulletin boards and books. Her name wasn’t mentioned once.

She was glad he wasn’t there to see the look on her face. She was quite annoyed. Her reasons were different now, but she decided to keep reading. The first entries were from August.

Last night we saw “A Chorus Line” at the Muny Opera and sat with 5000 giants shaking half-pint cartons of limeade and lemonade and pushing straws out of the paper wrappers. Every last one of those people looked like an American tourist.

He wrote the way he talked. Or maybe he talked the way he wrote. There was a lot of stuff about starting school at Wash U. which Luisa only skimmed.

Connie didn’t sleep alone last night.

Connie? Who was Connie? Luisa looked at the previous entry and saw that Connie was someone in his dorm.

I heard the whole scene, all the many noises she made. Usually she speaks from her throat (when she condescends to speak to me at all) but last night the noises came from much lower down. (I don’t see what’s so wrong with me. I suspect she’d like me if I had a card that proved my age was 35.) The thumping went on forever. It was after midnight, the libraries closed. I went and knocked on Tex’s door. Nobody home.

There were pages and pages about his parents and some neighbor of theirs, and then a very long entry from October 1.

…I noticed Tex (his real name is Chris) in a corner with two girls whose eye make-up made them look like hornets. I could see he was thrilling them with his rattlesnake story, or the one about the Quaalude freak at the Van Halen concert:

Curled up inside the woofer and went to sleep.

Around eleven the music improved. They played a long string of songs in minor keys, “Born Under Punches,” “Computer Blue,” “Guns of Brixton,” plus that ten-minute Eurythmics thing. And when you’re dancing to a tape & the music is so loud that it’s the only sound in your ears, you wonder: where are these voices I bear? They aren’t in anyone’s throat, they aren’t in the speakers, they’re in your head & they sound like the voices of the dead. They make you pity yourself for being alive. They make you sad, these songs between your ears that could stop at the flip of a switch. Because the world itself could go out, like a light, at any moment. The whole world could die like a single person used to. That’s what the nuclear age is: the objectification of the terror of total subjectivity. You know you can die any day. You know the world can die.

Tex tapped me on the shoulder. “You know any of these people?”

I shook my head.

“Then let’s bag it.”

The two girls and I followed him upstairs and out into the rain. Their names were Jill & Danielle, seniors at John Burroughs. Tex put them in the back seat of his Eldorado, me in front. We drove to a bar called Dexter’s, where Jill wanted to dance, or try to & Tex obliged her. Danielle said her feet hurt, which I could believe. I saw some blood around the rim of one of her high heels. We were standing in a noisy crowd near the cash register. I told her I’d gone to school for a year in Germany. She told me she had a horse whose name was Popsy.

Does it make any sense that what I nonetheless wanted most of all was to go to bed with her? But she went off somewhere, I really don’t know where, and Darshan offered to buy me a drink. I said sure. I’d never spoken to an Indian before. He was thirty maybe. When I said I was a student he said he was too. I was smoking Marlboros, he was smoking cloves & when I talked about the Phillips he understood, he knew it all, he drew my own conclusions. He liked me. He said: “That’s the center of it, isn’t it. People smoke cigarettes even though they are known to be dangerous.”

When the bar closed we drove to his apartment, which was down in a bad neighborhood off Delmar. The streets in the rain were black and shiny. Inside, at the end of a long hall of closed doors, was a room with persian rugs on the floor, a rug on the wall & not much else. He went to the kitchen to make tea. I lay back on the rugs & sank into them. The radiator ticked as the heat came on. I remember concentrating on the ticking. I was fairly drunk, but the tea was good and suddenly, or maybe half an hour or an hour later, I was sinking into the rugs & my clothes were all off & the radiator was ticking again. Everything was one temperature.

Luisa skimmed a few pages, her eyes just bouncing off the words. Her heart sounded like a heavy person tromping through the apartment upstairs.

When each one ends I immediately want another. But that’s not right. When each one begins, before I even light it, I’m already wanting the next one. As much as I want to see him again.

She skipped a few more pages.

…I left at six sharp in the rain, I went down Delmar and up two flights of stairs and knocked on the door. I saw his twinkling eyes on the back of my hand like Marley’s ghost: knock knock knock (echoing the tick tick tick) but the door was unlocked. I walked right in. Six doors were wide open & every room was empty, stripped bare except for rolls of carpet. He was gone. I left the building but I hadn’t gotten very far, just a block in fact, when I met two people I knew like brothers from ten years of imagining them who wanted my wallet. Well, no wallet, no camera, no $20, nothing. They laughed little bitter laughs, turned away & then turned back & hit me twice, one in the mouth, two in the eye, & left me kneeling there not thirty steps from the bus stop of epiphanous fame, so embarrassed I almost wished they’d pulled a trigger to save me from standing up. But I stood up & I was thinking ONE THING, which was: Goodness gracious, I must trot home and write about this.

Luisa put the notebook down and went and looked out the window at the street, where cars with black windows were parked crookedly between snowmounds. All the blood was draining from her head. She pictured Duane in the strong arms of a man, the dark arms of an Indian man. She could see it but she couldn’t believe it. Kissing a man, rolling naked on the floor with a man. It just didn’t seem like something the Duane she knew would do. But he’d done it. And that was why he’d gone to Dexter’s on the night Luisa met him: he was looking for the man. Not for her, not for anybody like her: for him.

She thought about this for a while. Then she put the notebook back under the mattress and stirred some of her clothes into the blankets, and went and smoked another cigarette in the kitchen.

The telephone rang. She knocked over the chair she was sitting on, but it was only her mother. Would she and Duane like to come out and have lunch with them tomorrow?

“Sure,” Luisa said. “He’s out there now, but — But I’m not. So yes.”

Three hours later she had the kitchen table covered with application materials. She didn’t think moviemakers arranged their scenes any more carefully than she’d arranged the one that was waiting for Duane at five o’clock when he came home. She couldn’t hide the fact that the applications weren’t done, but she knew exactly what she was going to say she’d watched on TV if he asked what she’d been doing all day.

He didn’t ask. He was surprised she’d done as much typing as she had.

For ten more minutes she moved and spoke as if all her expressions and gestures required the pulling of specific wires, wires with a lot of slack in them; her laughs were squeaks or groans and her steps were those of a bureau being walked across a room; but to Duane she was her same old boring self, and soon it wasn’t a matter of pretending. She really was herself again, and so was he.

Then it was New Year’s Eve. Stacy was having a party, but Luisa was mad at her for not having called during vacation until the morning of the party, and anyway, she and Duane had already made plans. They’d come back from her parents’ with decent food, more of her clothes, and a week’s worth of mail. Their apartment seemed tiny after 236 Sherwood Drive. The cranberries on their little tree had puckered, and the branches rained needles when she crossed the room to get the mail out of her purse. She was wearing a jean skirt and a white T-shirt.

Duane had on the Hawaiian shirt she’d given him. He was trying to slice some of her parents’ salami with his Swiss Army knife. “I never use the little blade,” he said, “because I want to keep it really sharp for that Special Job. But it’s too short. I’m taking the tomato knife under advisement.”

“How about a pair of scissors,” she said, opening an envelope.

“Fittingly,” he said, “this is the one holiday my parents do know how to celebrate. My father used to buy cherry bombs—”

“Brown has not received my application yet! Has not received it! They must think I’m applying or something.”

An airmail envelope fell out of a glossy mailing from Baylor. The stamps were French. It was a Christmas card from the Girauds. Luisa tore it open. “This is so nice,” she said. “Everything but a subscription to Elle.” Mme Giraud had written a long note on the back. “But Duane—”

“Ai ai ai ai ai!” He danced and sucked his finger.

“Duane—”

“This knife isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

“Duane, Paulette Giraud, her mother says she spent this fall in England.”

He looked at her, his finger in his mouth, his ears wiggling.

“Listen. Étudié depuis septembre jusqu’à décembre en Angleterre!”

“That’s peculiar.”

“But she called me.” Luisa read the note again. Could Paulette have come to the States without her mother’s knowing it? No way. Paulette was too stupid to do anything that crazy. But if she wasn’t in St. Louis, then who had that been on the phone? Why would anybody want to say they were Paulette?

“Maybe Stacy faked it,” Duane said.

Luisa started to shrug, but then she shook her head. “She would have told me eventually. Anybody I know would have told me, because that’s when I met you. They’d want the credit.”

“Hm. Right. Yeah.”

“This is so weird,” she said.

Duane began to clear the table, working around her.

“This is so weird.”

He set out some carrots and celery. He set out rye bread, French bread, cheddar cheese, dill pickles, Doritos, dip. He set out two glasses and took the champagne out of the freezer. He wrapped it in a towel, peeled back the foil, untwisted the wire, and popped the cork.

It stuck in the ceiling.

“Hey!”

They both looked at the ceiling.

“It went right through.”

“It’s just paper or something up there.” As soon as he’d filled the glasses, Duane got up on a chair and probed the hole the cork had made. Plaster fell in his face, and then something dropped out of the hole, not the cork, something metal. Luisa picked it up. It was a heavy, shiny slug with pinpricks on one side, like a microphone, and a wire dangling from it. “What is this?”

Duane took it from her. “Looks like a bug.”

“What?”

“A bug, don’t you think? The FBI or somebody. This was always a student place. Maybe there used to be some radicals here.”

Luisa climbed onto the chair. The cork came loose, bouncing off her nose. “The paint’s fresh,” she said.

“I wonder who lived here before me.”

“We live here now.”

“I kno-o-ow we do. But we’re not subversive elements.”

She looked down from the chair at Duane, the homebody, who was brushing bits of plaster off the tablecloth and picking flakes of paint off the dip. Then she stepped off the chair and sat down. She’d just remembered something else. At Dexter’s on the first night, the night she’d met Duane, she’d been spooked by someone she’d thought was an Algerian. But for all she knew he could have been Indian, and he was actually fairly cute. She remembered how he’d wanted to talk to her but wouldn’t come inside the bar. How many Indians could there be who hung around at Dexter’s?

Duane lit the candles and turned out the light. “I mean it’s obviously weird,” he said. “But it’s also obvious that it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”

“What about me?”

“Or with you.” He put the bug on top of the refrigerator. “We can take it apart or something after dinner.”

On the refrigerator door were black-and-white pictures of Luisa that Duane had taped up before she moved in with him. She looked away from them. Someone had faked a phone call and a postcard. She wasn’t making this up; there was a postcard, too. Maybe it was Duane’s man. Maybe he’d wanted her and Duane to get together because he could tell that Duane needed a girl, not a man. But then why was he hanging around outside the bar? And what was the bug in the ceiling for? Did the guy get thrills from listening to her and Duane eat? She was getting confused.

“What’s wrong?” Duane said.

She looked up at him. He had no idea what she knew about him, no idea what connections she was making in her mind. All at once his ignorance seemed terribly pathetic.

“Nothing.” She said it with finality, and pulled her chair up to the table. “Are we going to have a toast?”

“Sure. What do you want to toast?”

“Chips. Nachos-flavored corn chips.”

He raised his glass. “To chips,” he said.

As soon as she raised her glass, she felt herself stop thinking. It was easy. Duane had told her once how a jetliner could lose power in two of its engines and still keep flying smoothly. Behind the curtains in the cockpit there was consternation, pilots pulling switches, yanking levers, but in the main cabin the passengers were finishing their dinners as if nothing had happened. They ate salami and compared their parents. Everything was ordinary as soon as you stopped thinking. There was no mystery about how they’d met and no magic in the candlelight on the silverware and no longer any heart-stopping difference between the sink in Duane’s kitchen and the sink in her parents’ kitchen. The food on the table was what people everywhere had to eat, and Duane loved her because she was smart and pretty and had come along at the right time, and she was just a girl who had lied to her parents and lied to her boyfriend and would do it all again if she needed to, the way she might sleep again and again on bloody sheets, because they were ruined. And then the plane landed safely, of course, and the passengers joined the crowds in the terminal and drove home to their ordinary houses, and never even stopped to think that just an hour earlier they’d been sitting on seats that were seven miles off the ground.