The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

21

It had been a hot day, the hotter end of a long warming trend. Downtown, Jammu twisted in her weary swivel chair, trying to shift some of her weight off the calluses that eight months of desk work had inscribed on her ass. She had a backache that neither standing up nor lying down nor even, she imagined, traction could relieve. At night now she was too tired to sleep or to get a kick from any sort of pills, stimulant, narcotic, or depressant. She could feel the chemicals turning and slipping, as if they were bolts and she a nut whose threads were stripped.

But she could function. She was running, at the moment, on the six hours of sleep she’d stolen on Wednesday night. She’d had Martin over to her apartment for fried chicken. As soon as her stomach was full her eyes had closed. She told Martin she had to lie down for a few minutes. She awoke three hours later, a little after midnight, to find him twisting the knob on her television set. She wasn’t sick, but she felt as if she’d been sweating out a fever while he sat by her side. Too weak to be embarrassed, she sent him home and slept another three hours, as long as the faint protective smell of his visit lasted. She dressed at 4:00, her heart pounding. There was so much work to do.

She wanted to sleep with him again, just sleep.

The soft air lolling in through the open windows carried with it some of the heat the streets had trapped during the day. Traffic was sparse for a Friday, engines passing singly down below, not in packs. The latest issue of Time lay on the floor to her right. Cover headline: THE NEW SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS. Beneath the headline was a picture of her. Her lips were tight and her eyebrows raised; Time gave bizarre expressions to figures it considered bizarre.

Adroit as Jammu has been in dissociating herself from her Subcontinental origins, a wave of immigrants from the urban centers of Bombay, New Delhi and Madras has washed ashore on the banks of the Mississippi in seeming pursuit of her. The ensuing slew of curry joints, saris, saffron robes, and especially the parade of exotics spotted in the company of Jammu have produced pangs of paranoia in many St. Louisans, including Samuel Norris, the fiery sovereign of St. Louis-based General Synthetics. “There’s nothing more dangerous than a political leader who pretends she’s not political,” says Norris. “Jammu is animated by a deep-seated and foreign socialism, and I see no reason to apologize for being concerned about a non-St. Louisan calling the shots around here.”

Jammu, for her part, sees no reason to apologize…

She imagined Brett Stone interviewing Norris for hour after hour, ripening him until at last he yielded one quote mature enough to meet the presses. She could remember when she’d felt a deep-seated and foreign animosity towards journalists. She could remember being a committed socialist, being passionate about a variety of intellectual issues, as Singh still was. She could see that as an adult she still bore the scars of a younger anger, could remember a time when this Time article would have delighted her, infuriated her, called up a flood of critical insights. It didn’t now. She’d read it twice and thrown it aside. She only wanted to finish her operation. Her unideological, unscientific, inconclusive, wholly personal operation.

“We would have been a normal family, I think, if there had been more of us. None of my father’s siblings survived adolescence, and my mother had only one sister, my maiden aunt, who was blind. The Army moved my father around until he retired and we settled in Kashmir. By then there was no extended family left at all — and no more Sikhs than there’d ever been in Kashmir. I had a younger brother who died when I was four. My older brother had no thought apart from becoming an officer, the fifth generation of the family to do so, and the last. He was gung-ho. He was sent to a military academy in Delhi while I went to school in town, so I was an only child of sorts. I weighed seventy-eight pounds on my fourteenth birthday. My diet was very rich in butterfat, but it didn’t help. My mother worried. I started at the university in 1960, and within three years there’d been martial law in Kashmir and a dismal war with China. My father never left the house. He wore a silk jacket with sleeves he had to roll up half a dozen times. When they were unrolled it looked like a straitjacket waiting to be tied. My brother became a cadet. I hardly remember if there were summers. The streets were cold, winter always seemed to be coming on, troops always freezing in their insufficient bedding up in Ladakh. And I would go home to see my parents and I would be wearing perfectly ordinary clothes, and my mother would chide me.

“Balwan, she would say, it’s cold out there. How long have you been clearing your throat like that? Ibraim Masood’s second son has tuberculosis of the spine, and you in nothing but flannel. The son spent himself with low women, and now instead of inheriting the rug business he’ll be lucky to see his twenty-first birthday. He’s been in bed since he lost the use of his legs, and they tried to move him and he bent in two, backwards, Balwan, like a rotten banana. It ruptured his lower bowel, which had to be removed, and now they have him on a plastic bag. And they consider themselves lucky to have that plastic bag! I heard him on Tuesday, twelve degrees of frost and he with his window open shouting to the boys in the street: Don’t make the same mistake I did! Don’t spend yourself with low women!

“To which I would have to reply, Are you sure this is TB, Motherji?

“And she would say: That lump in your father’s abdomen is growing, I feel it every night when he’s snoring, and I can tell. The worst mistake I ever made in my life was sending him to that Anglo doctor Smythe. He wrote a ten-page report on your father’s health and it was all just words. But now your father has something to use against me, he waves that silly report in my face and says Smythe gave him a clean bill of health. And meanwhile, whatever it is he has in his stomach is only getting larger. I can feel it. I’m not stupid, no matter what your father says to you and I’m sure he says the worst. That man is very sick. And then there’s your brother’s growth.

“I would smile and say, Growth?

“In his mouth, she would say. He’s always had canker sores, you know, but this is something else. He wouldn’t open his mouth the last time I saw him because he doesn’t want to face the truth. Some fine, brave officer! He won’t even open his mouth for his mother. It’s the suicidal business that hurts me, Balwan. They refuse to take their problems seriously, and look what happened to Ibraim Masood’s son.

“But I didn’t spend myself with low women. My health has always been excellent. As has hers. She’s fading now, in the bitterness of justified fears, in the luxury of a fat Army pension. Her health remains good. My brother’s was also good, until a sniper shot him in Dacca in 1971. I believe he did have a benign form of herpes. My father’s tumor was benign. And still it killed him, in 1964, it hemorrhaged. The magic of suggestion, eh? Which could be your own Webster Groves, your own family. When there are no problems, the problems must be invented. I’m pleased to think my mother talked my father to death. I know she didn’t like him.”

She reached for the telephone, precognitively, grasped the receiver and raised it so quickly that she heard only one grain of its granular ring. “Jammu,” she said. The needle of the wiretap detector she’d installed on Monday rested calmly on the zero.

“Can I talk?”

“Yes, Kamala.”

“Well, there isn’t any sign of her. But I wondered about the house in St. Charles.”

“Gopal goes there regularly.”

“I have no more ideas then.”

“It’s not your concern. We’ll find her. You catch your plane.”

“I hate to go when—”

“Catch your plane.”

“Yes, all right.”

“And go see my mother when you’re back, first thing.”

“Yes.”

“Good-bye, Kamala.”

“Bye, Jammuji.”

And so the book on Allied Foods chairman Chester Murphy, opened in September, was closed at last. A visit from a Punjabi trade representative. A doctored X-ray at Barnes. A forged intra-hospital memo and two herbal poisons. And, finally, a desertion of Municipal Growth and the panicked purchase of South Side riverfront property. A neat job, to which Jammu had scarcely needed to pay attention.

Devi, on the other hand, had made a mess of her job. She’d called Jammu on Wednesday, spoken indirectly of blackmail, and hung up before Jammu could even think of having the call traced. She hadn’t called again. Jammu lacked the manpower to search every hotel and flophouse in greater St. Louis. She could only ask all her agents to keep their eyes open in the hope that Devi would turn up at one of the meeting places. Gopal periodically checked on the safe houses and the communications warehouse, and Suresh was slowly working through the more promising hotels. But their primary responsibility was to avoid capture themselves. Their caution slowed them down.

It was Singh who should have been hunting for Devi. But even though Martin had become Jammu’s ally, Singh continued to devote all his time to Barbara. He’d drawn a distinction between Jammu and the operation and declared his allegiance to the latter. He said Barbara posed a graver threat than Devi did. He said extreme care had to be taken in preparing Barbara for her release. (Jammu wondered what the fuck he was up to over there.) He seldom left that apartment now. He said the operation must culminate cleanly, he said Jammu’s assumption of power must be seamless. He said they could learn more from Martin’s reintroduction to Barbara than from anything else they’d done in St. Louis. He said all of this easily; his neck wasn’t on the line.

Jammu didn’t want Barbara reintroduced to Martin. She wanted Barbara to disappear and never return.

This was what Martin wanted, too.

But he might change his mind. He’d changed it once already.

All week Jammu had teetered on the brink of picking up the phone and giving Singh the order. It was true, of course, that America could change one’s perspective. In a sparsely populated country the individuality of the victim glared, as did the extremity of the sentence, since death seemed almost an anomaly here. But Jammu had long ago shed her scruples. The old murders hadn’t kept her from playing the enlightened leader of St. Louis, and a new one wouldn’t keep her from continuing to play the desirable woman Martin felt her to be. She was only afraid that if she gave the order, Singh would not obey.

She couldn’t quite see herself doing the job with her own hands. Her role was to stay at her desk, the constant center of the operation. Singh and only Singh had the time, information and imagination to plan an unsuspicious death. But Singh wouldn’t do it. Barbara had taken him away. Next Wednesday he would set her free. Then she’d take away Martin as well, and Singh would return to India, and Martin would return to his old life.

“Who cares?” Singh disingenuous. “You have him now, and after Tuesday it won’t matter whether you do or don’t. Trying to keep him, in fact, is one sure way to guarantee that Barbara makes the connection between you and me.”

He gloated. See how neatly it works out? How the operation prohibits selfish deviations? When Jammu was with Martin she was forever thinking: I can’t control Singh.

Who cared?

She did. She wanted Martin Probst, the genius of the place to which chance had brought her. She wanted his love and fealty. Martin still couldn’t see how she belonged in St. Louis, how she had the right and the means to make a place for herself. He was the key he couldn’t see. When he saw himself, if she could make him, then Barbara would be dead to him anyway.

Luisa slammed the door behind her, slammed it again to make the bolt catch, and ran down the stairs to the street. Music was blaring in the building next door. Through a set of second-floor windows she could see a big party in progress, a crowd of people older than she but not much older, dancing with beer bottles. She walked up towards Delmar.

Her fight with Duane hadn’t lasted long. For a while, in the cold part of the winter, the arguments had gone on for hours, from kitchen to bedroom to hallway; one time she’d had to sleep on the floor in the living room, under coats. Now the fights were short again, like they’d been in the first month or so when she was afraid a single yell would mean going back to her parents. Now a single yell was about all she could stand to invest.

Tonight Duane thought he’d found the answer (he was always thinking he’d found some answer) to how to fight fascism (he didn’t know what fascism was; she’d asked him) in extrapolitical (he liked to make up words that weren’t in the dictionary) institutions like organized religion, because only a cultural extremism could combat the bourgeois (she told him he’d better stick to foreign languages he could pronounce) liberalism that could, if left unchecked, develop into the kind of nationalistic myopia that developed in Germany (what?? Suddenly he was talking about Germany in 1933, as if she knew all about it) and took the form of Nazism. She said she didn’t understand. He said it was no wonder when she kept interrupting him.

The fight had started because it was Good Friday and he’d decided to give her a religious quiz after dinner. He felt he had the right to give her these quizzes because he was older and more learned. It was the Socratic Method. (He never exactly called himself her mentor, but whenever she wanted to whip up her dislike of him she’d repeat the word in her head: MEN-TOR, MEN-TOR, MENTORMENTORMENT.) Did she believe in God?

“Give me a break, Duane.”

Did she believe in the sanctity of human life?

“Yes.”

Why?

“Because I’m alive and I like myself.”

But that didn’t satisfy him. He hemmed and hawed and tried a different approach to making her say what he wanted to hear. (He wanted to hear her be an example of all the things wrong with boozh-wah Webster Groves.) And about three questions into the abortion quiz (it was going to turn out to be somehow hypocritical to be pro-choice) she threw a glass of milk at him. He sat there nodding, indulgent and furious, while she put her sweatshirt on.

She went into Streetside Records. An oldie was playing on the store stereo (“Jackie Blue”?), and graying men in beards and army jackets were pawing through the bins. There used to be about twenty groups and singers whose records Luisa would check on whenever she went to record stores, to see if anything new or pirated or live had arrived. Now there were only about fifteen. She stayed away from the Rolling Stones because Duane admired their honesty and the integrity of their sound. She stayed away from the Talking Heads because Duane had interpreted all their lyrics for her, and from The Clash because whenever Duane played them he made her be quiet. She stayed away from the Eurythmics just because Duane liked them.

Having picked out the new Elvis Costello record (in Duane’s opinion Elvis had gone seriously down the tubes) she decided she didn’t want to lug it around. She put it back and left the store and headed up Delmar in the good direction, towards Clayton. It was a night almost warm enough for a prom. She thought of the miniquiz Duane had conducted on the topic of deodorant use. She gave a little laugh. She took a Marlboro Light out of her purse and gave another little laugh. The laughs were really just twitches, something slipping, in her chest.

Why couldn’t she have held out just a tiny bit longer?

If she hadn’t started to smoke after Christmas, when the cigarettes were around, she wouldn’t be doing it now; in a moment of health consciousness one day in February, Duane himself had quit. She could probably quit now, too, but she didn’t feel like it as long as she lived with him, and she wasn’t positive she’d feel like it afterwards either. She’d started because everything made her nervous, the fights, the whole situation. She was even more nervous now.

In six months she’d be living in Stanford, California. If she hadn’t met Duane, if she’d only managed to negotiate her last year in high school without him, she’d be looking forward to college. Now she couldn’t. Duane had spoiled the mystique, spoiled it as surely as he’d be writing his own applications in the fall, ready to go have himself a good college experience or a good art school experience, as he’d probably never really doubted he would. He was flexible. He quit smoking and didn’t cheat. While he and Luisa were being sad and lonely together, he was also assembling an exhibition of photographs that everybody loved. He had attention left over to watch out for himself. He was strong because his family was supposedly happy and well adjusted (it didn’t matter that he and she both knew it was actually scary and diseased).

While he was at it, he’d also guaranteed that Luisa wouldn’t find her dream man at college. She’d never find him. She didn’t believe in him anymore. And now that she’d lived on her own, in an apartment, that adventure was spoiled, too.

Who would drive her to college? She’d probably take a plane.

And no one in the world would understand. She didn’t rule out the possibility that someday she might be happy and successful, maybe even married, though right now she couldn’t begin to imagine how that would happen. But no one could ever know how different things might have been if she’d held out a tiny bit longer. She couldn’t even put her finger on what she’d had which was lost now. It had something to do with her parents, with her mother who’d trusted her, and with her father who’d tried in his own way to warn her about Duane. Her parents were separated now. Her mother had left town and seemed to have no intention of returning.

I’m very, very, very disappointed in you.

She threw the remains of the cigarette into a sewer. The world had changed, and it wasn’t just Duane’s spoiling of it. Suddenly she was living in a new world made for people like him, for people who could despise it and succeed in it anyway, and for people who could use computers (all the classes at school except the seniors were learning to use them; she’d probably learn at Stanford, but all her life she’d carry the knowledge that she’d learned late and that once upon a time computer-lovers were gross) and for people who couldn’t remember that downtown St. Louis had ever been anything but a place to shop and eat lunch, who didn’t care that once there’d only been an Arch which her father had built, for people who didn’t care enough to have fights.

Somehow it was she who’d spoiled things.

She could see the stoplight at the intersection with Big Bend, the road to Webster Groves. She wanted to go home. She’d changed her mind. But there was no home to go to. Her own parents had defected to the newness of it all. Her mother’s letters and phone calls were gay and uncritical. Her father had a harder time acting modern, but he was doing his best. She’d seen him leave the gallery with Chief Jammu, and the next thing she heard was newscasters talking about the new Martin Probst. She hated the smiles on his face. She hated everything the world seemed to love. She wished her father would yell at her again and let her cry.

What interested Barbara, as she lay awake missing her putative lover, was how very little was different. She’d exchanged one prison for another. She was still far from her daughter. John still loved her, and she still didn’t love him, not even after the conversion to honesty and ordinariness he’d undergone for her sake. She remained, yours painfully, Barbara. If ever there had been such a thing as kindred souls, then John was hers. So she liked him, for the likeness, not loving him, as she loved Martin, seldom liking him. Between heart and mind was a fracture not even sex, especially not sex, the push of cunt and cock, could mend.

It would disappoint John. He seemed to be working under a self-imposed deadline, increasing the tempo of his disclosures and narratives almost hourly. Or maybe it wasn’t a deadline but a sense of dramatic climax which he believed she could share. She remembered how Martin used to work so conscientiously to make her come. He’d increase his speed, increasing it more when he thought she was almost there. If she was, it helped. If she wasn’t, it only hurt, as if nerves had no function beyond reporting contact and pain, heat and cold, pressure. She wanted to come, she had no earthly reason not to. But she couldn’t.