The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

17

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Can’t wait, y’old turdbrain.”

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

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

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

“Good evening, my love.”

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

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

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

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

“Why did you call me?” he said.

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

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

“Don’t be angry with me, Rolf. I’m a weak woman, but things will be better soon, just the way you want them to be. I’ve left Martin. The whole world knows it. Oh, the years I wasted with him! Just waiting. I was missing something, I knew I was missing what other women had, and, well, I’ve left him now. And the way he yelled at me I couldn’t ever go back.”

“Accent.”

“The way he yelled at me I could never go back. And you complain when I call you at the office.” She curled her lip. The likeness was uncanny. Rolf dropped to his knees and pressed his cheek against her chest, and bit with his lips, like a toothless baby. Sweat filled his eyes.

“Just think,” she said, “if Martin could see you doing this to me.”

Began to roll on Christmas Eve when Buzz was toiling at his office and the lobby guard called to inform him that Mrs. Sidney Hammaker would like to see him. “Send her up,” Buzz said. While he waited, he ran a systems check on himself and found red alert lights flashing in every sector, his moral processor spewing error messages across the screen — FLOATING POINT DIVISION BY ZERO AT 14000822057G — broken ventilators in the power regulator, a board out in the vocalization unit, and his whole program TERMINATED BY A SUPERIOR PROCESS, FATAL AOS ERROR, DO YOU WISH A SYSTEM DUMP? He unplugged the telephone and checked his hair in the green plotting screen, the convexity of which doubled the scale of his double-barreled nose and oval mouth and made his head outrageously round. He was a green-faced monster.

Asha tapped on the open door. She hoped she wasn’t disturbing him. He said heck no, Christmas Eve, shouldn’t be working anyway. She perched on the table by his console. The dot on her forehead seemed suspended somewhere just beneath the surface of her clear, cool skin, like the decimal point in an LCD.

In the minutes and hours that followed her arrival, her skirt began to creep upwards with a life of its own, a pace independent of their conversation. It revealed more and more of her legs, steadily raising the line at which shadows deepened the color of her sheer charcoal nylons from gray to black. The skirt would halt its upward journey and camp for half an hour, forty-five minutes, as if it planned positively to go no farther. Then Buzz would look and another inch of thigh had come to light.

Asha, it turned out, knew her way around tensor analysis. She listened actively to Buzz’s presentation of his iterative method, and as the December sun went down on the North County snowfields, she spotted a redundancy in his tensor, a hidden symmetry, and suggested he collapse it and add new variables. She was trying, she said, to bring Hammaker into line with the times. Only the cola companies could rival Hammaker’s success and originality in marketing, but even Hammaker hadn’t, so far, faced up to the most fundamental mystery of the day: did advertising work? Sales proved little. Market testing — pools of randomly selected TV-viewing drinkers surveyed in soundproofed conference rooms — was pure shamanism. Asha shuddered at the terrific overkill implicit in blanket advertising, the shameful waste of resources. She longed to attain a god’s-eye perspective from which she would see at a glance the formula that would make Hammaker the beer of everyone’s choice, not the choice of 37 percent or 43 percent or even 65 percent, but of everyone. The formula would have to consist of more than a single slogan or tactic, of course, because those would inevitably be copied by Hammaker’s two major rivals. It would be an infinite series which took into dialectical account all counterattacks, and overcame them automatically. This was where Buzz came in. Asha had read his papers on n-variable tensor simulation of meteoro-dynamics. She wanted to apply his method to selling beer.

“Instead of passively viewing this pressure system on your plotter,” she licked her lips, “imagine a war game. Imagine the system in the hands not of random global climatic patterns but of you yourself, and your mission is to create temperate low-humidity conditions in St. Louis 365 days a year, with, let’s say, a single drenching rain every six days from six to eight in the evening.” And Buzz said, “You’re describing a monopoly.” And the Princess said, “Nine tasters in ten can’t distinguish us from our competitors. Competition only encourages saturation marketing, which adds a dollar a six to our product.” And Buzz said, “Psychological laws are notoriously unabsolute.” And she said, “You’d be surprised. They may be a lot more absolute than you think.” The room was dark, the screen’s hatchmarked toroids so green and bright they seemed to dance, and as she leaned to switch on a lamp, her elbow on the table, Buzz caught a brief white glimpse of lace under her skirt.

Audreykins was playing cards at the antiqued writing table in her boudoir. She wore a pink ribbed robe. Before he spoke, Rolf paused for a moment and watched her indulgently. She held the club 7, her hand hovering as if she were trying to present her Platinum Card to a distracted salesclerk. She placed the club on the heart 8, then snatched it back. She looked up over her shoulder, blank-eyed, a female clown in cold cream.

“You’re up late,” Rolf said.

She absorbed this and turned her attention to the game. She laid the club firmly on the heart, dealt another card, a diamond queen, and transferred a number of cards in rapid, intricate fashion.

“Coming out nicely for you, what?”

Again the merest twitch of acknowledgment. Her head moved back and forth in search of further plays. Rolf chewed the ingrowing whiskers at the corners of his mouth. Particularly mellow after the evening’s intercourse, he gave it another go.

“Couldn’t sleep, I guess?”

“Spade ten,” she murmured.

A few moments such as these were enough to make Rolf regard more seriously Devi’s prattling about a rearrangement of legal ties. Almost immediately, however, he remembered the old logic — joint trusts, half the stock, both the houses, half the bonds, the lots in Arizona, Oregon, St. Thomas, Jesus Christ, at least twenty million dollars — which of course was no logic at all. Never marry a lawyer’s daughter.

“Probably worried sick about Barbie, what? No sooner does your little head hit your little pillow than you think of her spreading for a handsome stranger.”

She pinched a card from the discard pile.

“You shouldn’t cheat, Audrey, honestly it takes all the fun out of it. Not to mention the eight hundredth commandment, thou shalt not cheat at solitaire. I’ve no doubt Father Warner would be most distressed to hear of it.”

He found a pair of bird-beak shears on her vanity and tidied up a bit at the corners of his mouth. In the mirror he saw her not looking at him. Heat began to rustle in the register above her bed.

“Very comfy in here, incidentimente. Let’s remember Martin for a moment. Shall we bow our heads? Think of him all alone, in that big house, with those lovely furnishings, and nobody to talk to. Think of it.” Rolf saw jolly Martin kicking the furniture in voiceless cuckolded rage, or playing solitaire in the middle of his bed. Because the brat had left him, too! Mr. Right had been caught at last with his pants down, losing his virtuous girls and making a perfect ass of himself campaigning against a foregone referendum.

Audreykins had turned. Her expression was frank but cordial.

He smiled. “Hm?”

“You’re insane, Rolf,” she said. “You’ve gone out of your mind.”

Buzz’s work began to suffer and he rationalized it. No one could expect him to be producing original ideas at his age, so anything he did manage to do, even if it was less than what he’d been accomplishing a few months earlier, was still pure, untaxed pudding. The work provided a pretext, too. Every day he instructed his secretary not to disturb him for any reason. At night he interposed an answering machine between the world and his inner sanctum. His weather research, he informed Bev, had entered a stage demanding his full powers of concentration. She didn’t believe him. He didn’t expect her to.

Leaving the inner sanctum uninhabited, he rode the spacious freight elevator down to the ground floor. While his employees in the service hindquarters of headquarters lifted boxes or pushed brooms, he briefly passed the time of day and always mentioned that it was imperative that no one know of his comings and goings. He dropped dark hints of supersecret high-level business dealings. He shouldered open the heavy rear doors and stepped off the loading dock. Asha was waiting in her Corvette, in the afternoon or in the night, usually the night.

It was she who placed the bets at Cahokia Downs, ate the chili at the 70–40 Truckstop, and drank the coffee in the urban diners. Buzz just accompanied her. He was amazed that all the hick locales she led him through, the pageant of spavined waitresses and dowdy bettors and cakes and pies revolving in slices, had survived the forty years since he was young and something of a hick himself. Even the roads could surprise him. Asha drove miles and miles north on state highways he’d never seen although he’d spent his whole life in eastern Missouri. After midnight on weekdays all traffic fled the roads to leave a ghostly undisturbed extinctness, suggesting neutron bombing. She’d top a hundred miles an hour on the flats.

But the custodial pool couldn’t keep a secret. Bev told Buzz that the husbands of her friends believed that he and Asha really were carrying on supersecret business discussions. The wives themselves, including Bev, believed they were simply carrying on.

Buzz was more or less innocent on both counts. He respected Asha too much and depended too heavily on her companionship to risk a physical involvement. And apparently the possibility never even occurred to her. They were just friends who occasionally chatted about business — a subject that Buzz would have been happy to avoid entirely. Whenever Asha tried to encourage him to develop his property on the North Side, he got confused. The responsibility for soundly managing Wismer Aeronautics devolved upon him personally. But he, personally, could no longer imagine life without Asha Hammaker. In the word “personally” two inimical curves jumped an asymptote. The result was chaos.

As February slid into March, his thoughts turned increasingly to Martin Probst, the other friend he believed in. Martin stabilized the curves, re-establishing the boundary conditions. Loyalty to Martin meant loyalty to Buzz’s reputation, to the honorable, gentle man the world had always considered him. Again and again Buzz telephoned him. “Listen,” he said, “anything you’ve heard about me and Mrs. Hammaker — I know there are rumors — it’s not like it seems. It’s purely social. Sidney might as well be there, or Bev, if she’d ever agree to come. There’s nothing shabby or fiscal — physical — or—”

Martin said he understood.

“And you’ve got to believe I’m on your side with the referendum. I know I haven’t been able to spare the time to help out with more than my pocketbook, but I’m firmly committed to the way things are. No merger for me, no sir. No sir. It makes no profit sense for me to move headquarters — you see, again, I don’t know what yort of, what sort of, rumors. I do feel some — well, some pressure to move just the headquarters — as I told you, we do have the land, have had it — but I’ve found it to be true that it’s vital to keep management close to the technical center, and I certainly couldn’t move that—”

“Buzz, really. Don’t bother. You’ve told me what your plans are. I trust you.”

“No! I want you to believe what I’m saying, specifically.”

“Sure. It makes perfect sense. That’s why I’m involved in this campaign. The technical center, it makes perfect sense. I believe you.”

Rolf dallied at the mirror, teasing his hair with a silver comb. Insane indeed. His chest hair, clean and fluffy, buoyed a golden chain which rose and dipped over the individual tufts like exquisite roller-coaster tracks, disappearing, at his neck, in the collar of his ruby red robe. Craggy, rugged, his face was quite unlike all the Charlie Brown mugs of the rest of the St. Louis crowd. He wiggled Captain Caterpillar, the name which Mara as a wee lass had given to his mustache. The memory of the make-believe pinned her to her years of innocence.

He went to the door and opened it. Across the hall, honey-toned light flowed through the chinks around Audreykins’s door. Combing her tresses. Every time he happened to look across the hall at night, no matter how late the hour, he saw light, and the phrase wandered into his mind. Imagination was a wonderful thing. Combing her tresses.

He tore the late Telex printouts from the printer by his laundry hamper, poured himself a snifter of The Glenlivet, and went to bed. The time, half past one, nearly lost itself in his Gübelin’s maze of gilt.

In the morning he would oversleep himself a bit, tool over to Lambert, and fly to San Antonio to confer with the president of Gelatron, a plastics concern he was in the process of acquiring. He walked his fingers down the closing quotations his broker had forwarded.

Gelatrn 7 2061 8¼ 65/8 8¼ + 15/8

So the cat was out of the bag, and the response was favorable, a solid vote of confidence in Ripleycorp. In a few months San Antone would be losing a few jobs, as Gelatron pulled up stakes and headed for the north side of Saint Louis. Wholly owned subsidiary. The words, in combination with the whiskey, added warmth to Rolf’s post-acquisitional glow. He reached for his cordless for a chat with his favorite wholly owned subsidiary, but corrected himself in time. He called her far too often. His indiscreet little wholly owned…

He made his last trip to the jerry. The stillness on Audreykins’s side of the hall seemed a tribute to him. He was at the top of his game now. Never again would he fear a Probst, never again endure an evening with them, nor would Audreykins find refuge in the kitchen with Barbie. For a moment, as the tinkling started in the bowl, he found himself believing, unaccountably, that Barbie was dead. It didn’t disturb him. He had Devi, and Martin had no one. The best man had won. He flushed. In the window a pane vibrated with the drone of a late-night small plane.

“Don’t you think we should have had some, uh, radio contact?”

Past Ladue now, Asha closed the throttle and took the Cherokee into a shallow dive, straightening her out at 1,800 feet over University City. “At this hour I think it’s safe not to,” she said. “Visibility’s excellent. I like flying without a flight plan once in a while. It’s like skinny-dipping.”

She was taking them due east into the city. In New York or Chicago they would have been scraping high-rises, but St. Louis lay low, and desolate, its street intersections strange laneless crosses the color of bone. Lone cars pushed pale pools of light along in front of them. If this were a bombing mission…Night flight brought out a special proneness in American cities, or so it seemed to Buzz, who was thinking how America, St. Louis, had never been bombed and now never would be by anything short of nuclear warheads. The lack of an intermediate experience sharpened his feel for the frailty of the continent, whose population had no cultural memory of black plagues or air raids. A splendid illusion, this North America, gave rise to the most pitiful dread, the dread of a man who, like Buzz, had never so much as spent a night in a hospital but who, unlike him, now faced a certain, grisly death.

“Heading right over downtown, eh?”

“I thought we’d have a look,” Asha said.

“It’s kind of eerie this late. I’m getting to like this sort of thing.”

“I know you are. It’s exciting for me, too. The shapes are still so alien to me. That a city looks like this. Could find reasons to look like this.”

Losing altitude, they followed the Daniel Boone Expressway east. Like all the major roads, it led to the waterfront, to the Arch. It was the Arch that made St. Louis lie down. Buzz watched it with naïve fascination, an unthinking delight in its unlikely size, its reaching three-dimensionality, its steady sweep along the Illinois horizon. It stood nearly as high as they were flying. It transformed the downtown area into an indoor space, and Buzz and Asha into birds, wheeling through it. Martin! To be above the city but also in it: Buzz felt suddenly his kinship with his other friend, in whose speech and carriage and stature all the plasticity of the actual St. Louis found expression. Then he heard the engine grow quiet. He saw Asha pull the control column back and realized what was about to happen.

“Asha, don’t,” he said.

A city ordinance prohibited flying through the Arch. Asha concentrated. The colorful stadium opened up black and white beneath them.

It was already happening. Undangerously, with a speed proportional to theirs, the Arch spread its legs to permit them. Wharf Street was a gutter into which they were falling. For an instant Buzz could almost have touched the sharp steel inner angle. Then they were through. Asha pulled them into a steep climb.

I couldn’t, he told himself. I’m firmly committed to the way things are. No merger for me, no sir, no sir. It makes no profit sense for me to move I’ve found it’s vital close to the technical center much that—

“You saying prayers?” Asha said.

“Was I—?”

“I can’t quite hear you.”

Below them the Mississippi receded, swung down with East St. Louis, where Buzz glimpsed the yellow flares of tiny fires.