The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

16

Probst was glad to have landed in the thick of the anti-merger crusade, but he wasn’t glad enough to be willing to act as director of Vote No, Inc. Directing a campaign was an endless, thankless job. John Holmes had directed the Prop One fight a few years back, and towards the end he was putting in more than sixty hours a week as he attended to the last-minute minutiae singlehandedly (he did the voice-overs for television ads, personally fetched the Kentucky Fried dinners for phone-a-thon volunteers), because when the heat was on no responsible director could delegate responsibility, or even find anyone to delegate it to. The failure of Prop One had brought Holmes many pats on the back, many dewy-eyed shows of gratitude. (“You deserve a month of R and R in Acapulco, old buddy.”) A week later, his work was utterly forgotten. In the partisan world, dedication earned a man a salary, and success a sinecure. In the nonpartisan world, the world of Municipal Growth and its causes, the sole reward was the opportunity to run the next campaign. This was what happened to John Holmes. Probst made him the executive director of Vote No, Inc.

Even so Probst wasn’t safe. When the campaign grew more demanding and the volunteers quit, he’d still be around and would probably get touched for some particularly odious job, such as recruiting new volunteers. Caution dictated that he determine the boundaries of his role right away. He decided to see himself as a costly and essentially immobile fixture. He saw himself as an elephant.

Elephants weren’t very articulate. Probst did not participate in strategy sessions at Vote No, Inc. Elephants didn’t zip around, didn’t retrieve shotgunned ducks; Probst would not run errands for Holmes. Elephants were heavy, however, and Probst agreed to trample whatever influential needed trampling. When practicable, he did this by telephone, in the evenings, from his choice desk at Vote No headquarters on Bonhomme Avenue in Clayton. Often, though, he would rise majestically from his desk, nod across the room to Holmes (if Holmes wondered where he was going, he had to stand up and follow and ask, because Probst would not stop) and drive, at low speeds, to the home of the mayor of Richmond Heights, or the chancellor of Washington University, or the president of Seven-Up.

Since the night in January when Municipal Growth decided to fight it, Probst had become much more convinced of the wrongness of the merger. The driving economic force behind it — speculation — offended him profoundly. The North Side boom was built on paper, on being in the middle, on buying low and hoping, later, to sell high. The spirit of the renaissance was the spirit of the eighties: office space, luxury space, parking space, planned not by master builders but by financial analysts. Probst knew the kind of thing. And now that Westhaven had failed he could criticize.

He’d always spoken well when facing microphones, and he was at his best when he was angry. He alone, of all the faces on television, dared to mention the party aspects of the referendum. He alone employed elementary arguments. He described in calm detail the syndicate in which he’d chosen not to participate. (Grudgingly, the day after his statement, Mayor Wesley confirmed Urban Hope’s existence.) He stated that the referendum had been drafted far too hastily to allow a realistic assessment of its consequences. What was the rush? Why not postpone the election until a thorough study had been conducted? He stated that countyites should not trust the word of popular political figures. Did they believe that Jammu and Wesley cared personally about the quality of their lives? If so, where was the evidence? It was the Deplorable Question, the charm that silenced politics. There was nothing the reporters could do but change the subject.

Afterwards, while showering or eating, Probst would feel his heart leap a little: he was an anarchist!

John Holmes didn’t complain about his approach. The phone polls revealed a steady swing of public opinion towards the Vote No camp, and since it was too early for anything besides Probst’s appearances to have made an impact, too early for massive advertising and door-to-dooring to have begun, the swing could be attributed only to Probst. Still, Probst did not feel loved. He was something apart, the self-styled elephant. He didn’t fraternize with the volunteers as he once might have done, never made late-evening doughnut runs. He sat at his choice desk and read Time and Engineering News-Record and the city papers. The polls had proved his value and he was learning — it was never too late to learn — to ask for what he wanted (a choice desk and no responsibilities), to claim the rewards of his unique position and not feel so damn guilty about it.

He was glad to have two full-time concerns. His days he spent at his office, his dinners he ate at Miss Hulling’s or First National Frank & Crust, often with his vice president Cal Markham, and his evenings he spent in the rented space on Bonhomme Avenue. The Sherwood Drive house — he thought of it as the Sherwood Drive house now, as if he’d lost custody of it and only visited to sleep — was nearly always empty. His days were full. Barbara had judged rightly. He didn’t really miss her, not after the first week. When people asked about her, he said she was on vacation in New York and let them wonder. It was in her absence that he’d learned to follow her example and say no to what he didn’t want and to wear his crown unabashedly. He could have done without her weekly phone calls.

SHE: You’re home.

HE:???

SHE: I called earlier and there was no answer.

HE: I wasn’t home.

SHE: That’s what I said. You weren’t home.

HE: No.

SHE: You’re still angry, aren’t you?

HE: What’s to be angry about?

SHE: Well, I mean is there any point in my calling?

HE: I wonder that myself. But it’s pretty quiet around here.

SHE: Do you see Luisa?

HE: We ate dinner on Thursday. She’s healthy. She’s into Stanford.

SHE: I know. It’s funny to think. Have you spoken with Audrey?

HE: They’re incommunicado, or whatever the expression. Rolf. gets to her first. It’s very complicated.

SHE: So he’s still trying to screw you? Well of course why wouldn’t he be.

HE: It’s very complicated.

SHE: This is strange, Martin.

HE: It’s very strange.

SHE: I mean talking like this. Isn’t it strange?

HE: Strange is the word all right.

Transcontinental hiss

SHE: Are you in the middle of something? It sounds like I’m interrupting—

HE: No. No. Very quiet around here.

But it was less quiet when he’d hung up, when he could talk to himself again. It was Saturday. Noon shadows cupped the potted plants on the kitchen windowsill. They were dying from the roots up. He’d directed Emerald to take care of them and she appeared to have overwatered.

He ate a large even number of Fig Newtons and two bananas. Then he drove to Clayton and sat at his desk, from which he had a view of Bonhomme Avenue to his right and a Formica partition at his back, screening him from the activities of the rank and file. There was no activity this afternoon. A male volunteer sat on the desk of a female volunteer, a paid secretary waited for the phones to ring. Probst worked through the messages that had accumulated since Thursday.

At 4:00 he drove to Eldon Black’s home in Ladue to beg another donation. At 4:30 Black wrote him a check.

By 5:00 he was back at the Sherwood Drive house and dressing. Earlier in the week he’d finally procured a black-and-red-striped shirt of Egyptian cotton, like the General’s, and while he was waiting for his receipt from the Neiman salesgirl, a pair of prewashed black denim jeans attracted him. They completed the ensemble. They fit him well, hugging his butt and thighs as no pants of his had for years. The difference was remarkable. He looked forty. Thirty-nine, even.

But he had no shoes to match. Lunging, on his hands and knees, he pulled dusty shoes off the back of the rack in his closet. Everything was leisure or oxford or rubber-toed or tasseled.

He went down to the cardboard carton in the basement and burrowed through sixty pairs of footwear, shoes, fins, skates, rubbers, thongs, mukluks. They smelled like a condemned house. Green mildew had erupted on the leather. Many of the soles had holes.

He climbed three flights of stairs to one of the storage closets on the top floor. He had to clear magazines and business gifts out of the way, but at length he found what he wanted: the Exotic Shoe Collection. There were white espadrilles from Spain, embroidered Oriental mules, painted shoes from Holland, the three sets of clogs he’d bought for the family in Sweden, moccasins from the Sioux Veneer store in South Dakota, straw sandals from Mexico, alligator shoes from some Caribbean stopover, ballet slippers he’d never set eyes on before, and, just as he’d remembered, a pair of suede desert boots from Italy. Perfect.

In the car, the fashionable clothes surrounded him with a thin layer of self-awareness, like a cushion of air that reduced both the friction and the precision of his movements. The boots insisted on depressing the gas pedal further than necessary. Soon he was approaching the Arena, and the vapor plumes above it, white against the deepening twilight, were blotting out an ever larger arc of sky. He parked. The vapor came from a long column of grills set up outside the Arena’s rear entrance. The grills were 55-gallon drums split in two and mounted on sawhorses. He read the plastic words on the marquee: FIRST ANNUAL GREATER ST. LOUIS LIONS CLUB BARBECUE AND FISH FRY.

Elephant, he told himself.

Tricolor bunting hung from the Arena’s rafters and the railings at the base of the seats. A portrait of a lion had replaced the scoreboard, and beneath it stretched a banner reading LIONS, each letter a capital with a lower-case tail, iberty, ntelligence, ur, ation’s, afety. On the floor, where Blues had lately skated, children and their parents sat eating at aluminum tables with white paper tablecloths. Well-barbered, well-shaven, well-fed men in dirty aprons moved back and forth through the rear doors like executive coolies, the inbound toting tubs heaped with brown food, the outbound holding empty tubs on their hips or thighs. LEMONADE, a banner at the serving tables declared. SOFT DRINKS. SLAW. At the foot of the podium beneath the giant lion a crowd of perhaps a thousand legs swished and mingled. Probst saw orange-and-yellow paper cups and a smattering of ceremonial hats. The noise was oddly subdued.

He checked his coat, laid a twenty on the ticket seller’s desk and walked away without waiting for his change. He wondered why the Lions hadn’t held their functions separately in their respective towns. There couldn’t possibly be many Chesterfielders willing to make the long trip in, especially with Route 40 out. It didn’t make sense.

It made sense. He was passing through the fringe of the standing group when he saw the reason: Jammu was here. She was sitting in the middle of a crescent of folding chairs occupied by Ronald Struthers, Rick Jergensen, Quentin Spiegelman, some men in uniform and some Lions in hats. Probst recognized Norm Hoelzer, president of the Webster Groves chapter.

Turning away, he searched the crowd around him for a friendly face and found one in Tina Moriarty, the press secretary at Vote No. His palms moistened. Tina stood embracing a clipboard and craning her neck. She was a dark, pretty woman in her late twenties, somewhat prone to an anchorwomanly glibness, perhaps, but humanized by her paid efforts on behalf of Vote No (the underdog) and by her knees. It didn’t show when she walked or wore pants, but when she wore a skirt and stood still, her kneecaps became concavities and the backs projected. She approached Probst sideways and began to speak without looking at him.

“You’re here,” she said. “For a while I thought I’d be the only damn one. You see Jammu beat us here. It’s going to make things more difficult. You haven’t met her, have you? I just did. I’ll never wash this hand again. John was supposed to come at five and I haven’t seen him. Literally, I thought I’d be the only damn one. These affairs are obsolete, Mart. I swear they don’t affect the standings. This is not the press. This is not the public. This is the Lions. Goes to show how much I know, I thought the Lions were a carnival. Ringling Brothers, literally, a carnival. You understand my confusion. This is where the circuses come when they come, the Arena, formerly the Checkerdome, formerly the Arena. I guess maybe I saw one at some stadium once, the Shriners. At Wash U., the field there. That’s a nice shirt.”

“What are we going to do?” Probst said. After criticizing Jammu on TV he was more reluctant than ever to meet her.

“Press some flesh,” Tina said. “Wait, wait.” She held his shirtsleeve. “Don’t go anywhere yet. I don’t want to lose you. Oscar’s here somewhere, but I lost him. He’s got his equipment, so at least we’ll get some pix out of this. Butch Abernathy, he’s the organizer. President of the Hazelwood chapter? He was sitting with Jammu but he isn’t now. Be forewarned about the food, by the way. They’re heavy-handed in terms of salt. It’s a wonder these women aren’t literally blimps if they eat like this all the time. Let me write your name down, I’m getting paid for this. Probst. I love monosyllables for names. East meets west. At least you dress better than she does. But my hand, my God, I’ll never wash it. The weird thing is there’s nothing wrong with them. People talk about double-jointedness, but the word has no meaning. I’ve asked. It means literally nothing. This is one extreme within the range of normal. What you see is a hundred ninety degrees. Most are a hundred seventy. It’s a natural variation.”

A large hand gripped Probst’s left deltoid and drew his head towards Tina’s. Ross Billerica stuck his face between them and kissed her cheek. After scanning the crowd he inclined his head confidentially. “We’ve got our work cut out for us, kiddos.”

“Evening, Ross.”

“Ross, for a while there I thought Mart and I’d be the only damn ones.”

“I said five,” Billerica said.

“It’s six,” Probst said.

“Horseshoes and handgernades. Tina, I’ve booked spots at Abernathy’s table for you and I with some other chapter presidents, Hoelzer, Herbert, Manning, DeNutto, Kresch, et cetera, et cetera. Martin, Hi’d sug-jahest you work the crowd a little and get yourself photographed.”

“That sounds fine, but maybe Tina should stay with me.”

“Go fish,” Billerica said.

“We’re missing John, we’re missing Rick, we’re missing Larry. This is yesteryear. This is a twilight zone, I mean it, I swear. I don’t know whose idea this was.”

“Habernathy’s sitting down.” Billerica led Tina away by the wrist, weaving through the crowd towards the food. Tina wandered back and forth like a towed sled as she followed.

Probst looked at his desert boots. He bit down on his cheeks.

Martin! Dave, sure, Dave Hepner. Yer looking real good. You too. I want you to meet Edna Hamilton, Martin Probst. I thought, no offense, I thought you were dead. (Through a window in the sport coats and pants suits Probst glimpsed Jammu in the midst of laughing faces, her cheeks flushed with the pleasure of a successful joke.) The Arch is growing on me. Me too, uh. Dave Nance, Shrewsbury. Super people really, super-duper. I’m sorry, I. Martin, pardon a sec, I’m sorry Dave, Martin, I wanted you to say hello to my son and his squirrel — Dave, this is Martin Probst. Of course. The Bison Patrol…

A local hush had fallen. Probst turned. Jammu was extending a hand, which he automatically took and shook. In her other hand she held the hand of a little girl no older than five. The girl was drawing on a drinking straw with all of her attention, dredging the ice in a cup. “Well!” Probst said.

“I’m S. Jammu, I’m glad to finally meet you, Mr. Probst.”

“Likewise, likewise.” He dropped her hand. “Who’s the little girl?”

“Her name’s Lisa. Quentin Spiegelman’s granddaughter. Lisa, you want to say hi to Mr. Probst?”

The girl’s cheeks collapsed around her straw. She seemed to be glaring.

“Nice crowd,” Probst said.

“Re-arc-shun-ary,” Lisa said.

“Kids.” Jammu smiled and took the cup and straw away from the girl. She was wearing a plain beige dress, lavender stockings, and black pumps. Probst felt underdressed. He felt a little dangerous. Jammu had the best of two worlds, the old pol trick of baby-kissing and the old female trick of caring for a child while a man stood waiting. He cleared his throat. “Well.”

“Don’t lose it, Mart,” said a voice, Tina’s, in his ear. “Oscar’s coming.”

Jammu looked up, and Probst put his arm around Tina. It was his turn. He put his nose in Tina’s hair. “I’m just about ready to write this one off,” he whispered.

“You’re Barbara?” Jammu asked Tina.

“Christina Moriarty. We just met.”

“Say,” Probst said. “Where’s Quentin? I’d like to talk to him.”

“I think he’s in line,” Jammu said.

“Re-arc-shun-ary.”

“Likewise, likewise.” Probst had no desire to confront Spiegelman. He turned Tina around by the clipboard and hustled her through the crowd. He had only one desire, and it was primal.

“Uh, Mart?”

“My name’s Martin, all right?” The desire was to get out. “You have a coat?” he asked, claiming his.

“Shouldn’t we head back? I left Ross holding my plate when I saw Oscar at the brownies.”

Probst frowned at her. “You need your coat because we’re leaving,” he said. “We’re going to go have dinner together.”

“You lost me somewhere.” She took her claim check from her purse and handed it to him as if she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She offered no further resistance.

For restaurants, of course, it was the busiest hour of the week. The Old Spaghetti Factory was mobbed. Probst and Tina each finished a pair of strawberry daiquiris in one of the Factory’s catacombs before the wall speakers brought the words, “Moriarty, party of two, Moriarty.” The hostess gave them a table next to a child’s birthday celebration. Probst objected, but Tina overruled him. She made him sing along when the child’s cake arrived.

Outside again, on the cobblestones of Laclede’s Landing, he paused to plan the next stage of his campaign. Tina leaned back against a lamppost patiently, like a painting on an auction block. “Where to?” she said.

He considered. He knew he could never say the words, any of the words, that might seduce her. An elephant couldn’t speak. But if he simply drove to Sherwood Drive, she would have to come along. “Let’s go get the car,” he said.

In the narrow streets they passed laughing young couples with faces smudged by drinking. Warm eddies of spring air mingled with the hot burgery exhaust of local grills. “I’ve discovered,” Tina said, “that the only thing I can stomach on top of a dinner like that is straight Pernod on ice. Trouble is—” She skittered a little, and Probst decided not to put his arm around her. “It makes me ramble. I mean really ramble. I suggest you take me to a bar and buy me a straight Pernod with ice and then cut me off. Take me by the shoulders and say, No, Tina, no. Billerica has a drinking problem. You can file that away in that silent head of yours. The difference between you and her, incidentally, is that she’s still at the Arena. She’ll stick it out, speak the speeches. I’m in love with her. I think we all are. Just shut me up when you get sick of this. I pretend I don’t know I’m doing it but actually I do. I’ve been told, literally to my face, to shut up. So you’re not the first, just so you know.”

“Feel free to shut up,” Probst said, stopping at the trunk of the Lincoln.

“The thing is, I try, and then I think of all the things I’m not saying. On the other hand, I never talk to myself when I’m alone. Am I to understand that we’re to have a relationship?”

He closed his eyes and opened them. “Is it convenient for you?”

Tina’s lips rolled tightly under one another, and her black eyes sparkled. A waning moon the shape of a football was rising above Illinois. Its light rubbed off on the nap of the fabric of her coat and lost itself inside it where it parted. Probst held his breath. Barbara had actually left him. He was actually free to do whatever he chose.

“To tell you the truth, Mart—”

His heart sank.

“I just don’t really feel like it.”

The room was evasive. On the first morning, Barbara had awakened from the drugging she’d received in the car to find herself on a standard-sized mattress, on a fitted bottom sheet with the kitty-litter smell of package-fresh linens, her face aching where he’d hit her, and her ankle bound. This was New York.

Or so she assumed. It could have been anywhere. The skylight diffused a light that seemed to fall, not shine, powdery and pure, free light, unreflected by a landscape. Her ankle was locked in a fetter, an iron ring attached by a ¾-inch cable to a tremendous eyebolt anchored in the wall. At the foot of the bed was a camping toilet, which she used, and then retched over, bringing up nothing.

When she awoke a second time she believed the light had changed, but only because that was the nature of light (to change) and the brain (to expect it). The carpeting had the color and texture of moss that hadn’t been rained on for a while. Her suitcase stood across the room from her, by the only door, in the center of which was a peephole. A small framed portrait of the dead Shah of Iran hung on one of the walls adjacent to hers. The fourth wall was bare. That was the catalogue of her medium-sized rectangular room, the sum of its contents and features. With anything more, it might have had a personality; with anything less, it would have been bare, and bareness, too, was a kind of personality. She could only assume that Nissing was insane.

But when he opened the door and said, “Breakfast of astronauts!” she began to wonder. He handed her a tray bearing raspberry Pop-Tarts and a tall glass of Tang. His pistol was stuck under the waist of his bluejeans, half buried in his shirt. Through the door, which he’d left ajar, she saw that a black curtain completely filled the outer door frame. She asked where she was. Captive, he said. What was he going to do with her? They’d see.

He brought her three meals a day, breakfast always Pop-Tarts and Tang with seconds and even thirds if she asked; lunches lukewarm soup and Saltines; dinners TV-dinners. He watched her eat, which didn’t really bother her. At 236 Sherwood Drive, in the bedroom, he’d had to drag her to her feet by her hair. But when he’d drugged her, in his car, her instincts of flight and resistance had gone to sleep, and they had not reawakened. The pain in her bedroom had been terrible to her. Nissing’s physical dominance was complete, monolithic. She was happy to believe that further resistance would only feed his sadism, because she didn’t want to feel that pain again.

For a while she lived by natural light and natural time. When darkness fell she sat or lay or did exercises in darkness. She asked for a lamp and a clock. He said no. But when she asked for books and he brought them, new Penguin paperbacks, he brought a reading lamp, too. She asked for magazines, a newspaper. He said no. She asked to take a bath or a shower, and on the third night, a few hours after darkness fell, he came in, unlocked the fetter, and tied a black hood over her head. He led her through two rooms that she could tell were empty from the way his voice twanged in the corners. He unhooded her in a newly redone bathroom and sat on the toilet, gun in hand, while she undressed, showered, and put on clean clothes. He led her back and refastened her fetter. She was allowed to do this every three days. Every two days, after she complained about the smell of the porta-potty, Nissing took it away and returned it clean. Eventually she realized it was more than clean; each time, it was brand-new.

“We’re at Sardi’s, a ‘whim’ of yours, a kind of tourist thing. Those peas you’re eating are escargots in garlic butter. I’m savoring pâté with toast points. Three tables over, you can see Wallace Shawn waving his fork over a plate of spaghetti and talking with his mouth full. It’s Valentine’s Day. You spent the afternoon at the Modern on a bench facing a Mondrian. On your lap was a spiral notebook. In your hand was a black felt-tip pen. Everyone wants to be an artist. The thought was on your mind and it paralyzed you, the problem of originality, of individuality qua commodity. You’d thought you could start small, start concrete, describe a painting on a wall in the museum. You were thinking about the roots of modern writing, both literature and the other sort, my sort. Liberated men and women confronting the new art and learning new methods of vision. But the only thing you were able to write was the letter T. A capital T. At the top of the page. You didn’t dare scratch it out, but what would it become? This? The? They? Today? Tomorrow? You felt the problem. You were thinking about me and my sort of writing, my facile typewriting in the study, in that favorite chair of yours. I was the problem. I had liberated you. You hadn’t done it yourself. An hour passed. In a stupor you watched the postures and paces of the visitors. A guard told you a little-known fact about that particular Mondrian and walked on. Now that a guard had spoken to you, you couldn’t stay.”

“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 out 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.”