The Twenty-Seventh City : A Novel

5

“Barbie?”

“Hi. I was going to call you.”

“Are you in the middle of something?”

“No, I haven’t started yet. I have to bake a cake.”

“Listen, did the package come?”

“Yeah, on Monday.”

“You know, the receipt’s in the box.”

“She’ll like it, Audrey. She saw something similar the other day at Famous that she liked.”

“Oh good. Do you have any special plans for tonight?”

“Lu’s going over to a friend’s after dinner to spend the night.”

“On a week night?”

“It’s her birthday. Why would she want to stick around here?”

“I just thought. You used to do special things. I just thought — How are you feeling?”

“Well, I’m tired. My cold kept me awake last night. I could hear myself starting to snore—”

“Snore!”

“I’ve always snored when I’ve had a cold. It used to drive Martin crazy. That terrible infection I had, whenever it was, the three-month infection, I remember he’d wake me up in the middle of the night with this completely crazed look on his face and he’d say something like IF YOU DON’T STOP SNORING — Dot dot dot.”

“Then what?”

“Then he’d go sleep on the couch.”

“That’s funny.”

Dropping the receiver into its stirrup, disposing of Audrey for another couple of days, Barbara rested in a kitchen chair. It was the first of November, and she had a spice cake to bake before Luisa came home. Although she was going out after dinner, Luisa had a keen sense of responsibility for juvenile ritual (a willingness to use hotel swimming pools, to eat the chicken drumsticks) and she might insist on doing something traditional as soon as Martin came home, something like watching home movies of herself (there were no other home movies) or even (conceivably) playing Yahtzee. At the very least she would demand (and receive) a cocktail, and Martin would bring down the gift Barbara had bought for him to give (a typewriter) and add it to the boxes from relatives and to Barbara’s own more ordinary (more motherly) contributions (socks, sweaters, tropical-colored stationery, Swiss chocolate, a silk robe, the much-discussed set of birdsong recordings, hardcover Jane Austen and, for the hell of it, softcover Wallace Stevens) which Luisa, demanding a refill (and receiving it) would unwrap. Then the three of them would make formal conversation as if Luisa were the adult which the gifts at her feet, their ready enjoyability, indicated she had not yet become. Grandparents would have helped tonight. But Barbara’s parents had just left for a month’s vacation in Australia and New Zealand, and even before Martin’s mother died she never left Arizona for anything but funerals. Martin himself would not help tonight. He’d been on the outs with Luisa lately. On Monday night he’d come home deep in thought (about the Westhaven project, he said), and at the dinner table, still thinking, still off in his world of timetables and work crews, he’d begun to grill Luisa on what she wanted to major in at college. The grilling went on for ten minutes. “English? If somebody with a degree in English comes to me looking for a job, I just shake my head.” He cut a neat rhombus of veal. “Astronomy? What do you want to do that for?” He speared a bean. Luisa stared hopelessly at the candles. Barbara said:

“Leave her alone, Martin.”

He looked up from his plate. “I was just trying to be helpful.” He turned to Luisa. “Was I bothering you?”

Luisa threw her napkin in the marsala sauce and ran upstairs. She’d lost her appetite this fall, and lost some pounds with which (in Barbara’s opinion) she could ill afford to part. At breakfast this morning she’d looked much older than eighteen. Barbara had just awakened from a dream where Luisa was a skeleton in a stained white gown, and where the hands reaching to comfort her, the mother’s hands, were gray bones.

“Can I make you some waffles?”

“Can I have some coffee?”

“Yes. And waffles?”

“All right. Please.”

It was painful watching her stuff waffles into her mouth. She obviously wasn’t hungry. She had a lingering cold, and though she hadn’t stooped to admit it yet, she also seemed to have a new boyfriend, whom she’d apparently met when she’d gone to see the French girl two weeks ago. The French girl had not shown up. The boyfriend had taken the picture that appeared in last Saturday’s Everyday section. D. Thompson, the credit read, and the caption: Indian Summer. Luisa Probst of Webster Groves enjoys the fine weather in Washington State Park. Behind her is a flock of Canada geese. Martin had bought twenty copies of the paper, and Luisa had mentioned, rather belatedly, that Duane had been in the country with her and Stacy. Barbara really didn’t mind if Luisa tried to keep her feelings towards Duane a secret for a while. She herself had grown up under surveillance (the surveillance of both her mother and the Roman Catholic Church) and she’d hated it. Besides, with Luisa still spending so much time in Stacy’s company, how important could Duane be?

Outside, it was cloudy. Two male cardinals, winter birds, hopped from peg to peg on the feeder by the breakfast-room window. Barbara could hear a slow scraping on the south side of the house as Mohnwirbel raked concrete. He was wearing his red wool jacket today, his winter plumage, his cardinal colors. He lived on the property, in the small apartment above the garage, and seemed a more native resident of Sherwood Drive, or at least a less self-conscious one, than Barbara could ever be.

She swallowed some aspirin with a splash of scotch and put the glass directly in the dishwasher. She was wearing a full plaid skirt, a dark red silk sweater, slightly dated ankle boots (hand-me-ups from Luisa), a silver bangle on her wrist, and silver hoops. Every day, sick or not, she dressed well. In the spring and fall (retrospective seasons, seasons in which she married different men) she wore makeup.

As she turned on the radio, which was always tuned to KSLX (“Information Radio”), Jack Strom was introducing today’s guest on the two-to-three segment of his afternoon talk show. The guest was Dr. Mickey McFarland. Physician. Professor. Disciple of Love…And author of the best-selling You and Only You. Barbara put an apron on.

“Doctor,” Jack Strom was saying, “in your latest book you describe what you call the Seven Stages of Cynicism — a kind of ladder that a person climbs down on to middle-age depression — and then you discuss ways to reverse the process. Now, I’m sure it’s struck many of your readers that all the examples you chose involved middle-aged men. This was obviously intentional on your part, so I wonder if you might tell us how you see women fitting into this pattern of cynicism, which I believe you once called the Challenge of the Eighties.”

“Jack,” McFarland rasped, “I’m glad you asked me that.”

Always, always, they were glad Jack had asked.

“As you may remember, when A Friend Indeed came out in ’79—as you may remember, it went to number one on the bestseller list — something I’ll never forget. Heh. I don’t know if anybody’s ever said this, but your first best-seller is like your first kid — you love it to death, you know, it’s always going to be your favorite. But anyway, as you may remember, in A Friend Indeed (in which, by the way, I spoke to the problem of feminine depression) I spoke there of the special role that women must play in meeting the Challenge of the Eighties.”

“And what was that role?”

“Jack, that role was a caring one.”

“A caring role.”

Jack Strom was hard on best-selling authors, shaming them with his extraordinarily mellifluous voice. He’d been hosting afternoon talk shows for as long as Barbara could remember, for twenty years easily, and his voice never changed. Did one’s face ever change?

“…I’m glad you asked me that, too, Jack, because it so happens that I think the Fifth Amendment’s protection of religious freedom is this country’s most precious resource. I think what we’re witnessing in these cults is a cry for love on a mass scale. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about this before, but at the center of every, and I mean every, religion, there’s a doctrine of caring, be it Eastern, be it Western, I don’t care. And I think — I truly believe — that there’s a middle ground we’re all striving to reach together.”

Profound silence.

“Dr. Mickey McFarland, author of You and Only You. We’ll get to the phone lines right after this message.”

Mohnwirbel had stepped sideways into view in the back yard as he followed the ivy beds with his rake. There was enough ivy, enough property, to keep him raking all day long and the next day too. He’d had his finest hour a week ago, when photographers from House magazine had come to take pictures of the lawn and garden. It was the first time in eleven years that Barbara had seen Mohnwirbel agitated. He’d stood in the middle of the back yard like a dog amid angry bees, with an all-encompassing concern, menaced by squirrels that dropped sticks and trees that shed leaves.

“Hello, you’re on the air.”

Barbara measured butter.

“Dr. McFarland?”

“He’s listening. Go right ahead.”

“Doctor, my name is Sally.”

“…Do you have a question or comment for the doctor?”

“I’m listening, Sally.”

She opened the sugar bin. She was struck by the — what? — of white sugar. The futility. She applied the steel scoop.

In an average week, she read four books. At the library she catalogued four hundred of them. She went out once to her exercise class, and three times to play tennis. In an average week she made six breakfasts, packed five lunches, and cooked six dinners. She put a hundred miles on the car. She stared out windows for forty-five minutes. She ate lunch in restaurants three times, once with Audrey and various fractions of twice with Jill Montgomery, Bea Meisner, Lorri Wulkowicz (her last good college friend), Bev Wismer, Bunny Hutchinson, Marilyn Weber, Biz DeMann, Jane Replogle, sundry librarians and many occasionals. She spent six hours in retail stores, one hour in the shower. She slept fifty-one hours. She watched nine hours of television. She spoke with Betsy LeMaster on the phone two times. She spoke with Audrey 3.5 times. She spoke with other friends fourteen times altogether. The radio played all day long.

“Six three three, forty-nine hundred is our number. If you’re calling from Illinois it’s eight four two, eleven hundred. Hello, your question or comment for Dr. McFarland?”

With the spatula she shaved smears of creamed butter off the sides of the mixing bowl. She shuttled buttermilk and eggs from the refrigerator to the counter and cracked the eggs into the smallest of the nesting bowls. Tossing the shells in the sink, she thought of Martin. He wouldn’t have discarded the shells so quickly. He would have run his index finger around the inside to loosen the last, clinging globs of white. She saw him do it when he scrambled the eggs on Sundays.

In the first weeks of their marriage she’d dropped a twice-read newspaper into a wastebasket and he’d retrieved it. “These are useful,” he said.

He never used them. He turned off the hot water while he soaped his hands. He put bricks in the toilet tank. The old house on Algonquin Place was lit largely by 40-watt bulbs. He burned the barbecue charcoal twice. If she threw out old Time magazines he sulked or raged. He pocketed matchbooks from restaurant ashtrays. When he watered the grass, he laid leaky hose joints over shrubs, not concrete, so the shrubs would get a little drink.

He conserved. But his conservatism was personal, perverse almost. When he was trying to keep his workers out of the unions twenty years ago, the city press could hardly believe that Barbara’s father had decided to represent him. At the time, everyone from the Teamsters to the roofers was striking Martin, and strikes were spiraling out into sympathetic businesses. Normally her father would never have touched a case like this (one of his specialties was workmen’s compensation), but it was difficult to say no to a company president who marched into paneled offices in boondockers and khaki work pants. Martin’s issue with the unions was personal, not ideological. He seemed astonished to be the cause of general havoc, and seemed to think it only natural when, with her father’s help, he won the suit. And when he turned up at her parents’ Fourth of July party, Barbara noticed him.

She’d just graduated from college, and she had a fellowship to study physics at Washington U. In less than a year, though, she’d given it up and married Martin. She didn’t need science to set her apart, not when she had Martin Probst. She liked to see him at symphony intermissions chatting with her old Mary Institute acquaintances. (“You see the trombones?” he’d ask. “I love trombones.”) She liked to see him rock-and-roll dancing with her college friends. At charity balls he searched out the practicing engineers and talked about box girders and revetments and concrete piles while chiffon and silk charmeuse swept insubstantially by. She liked to be around him.

One Sunday afternoon about three years after they were married, he took Barbara on a tour of the Arch, which hadn’t opened to the public yet. He unlocked two gates, a metal door, another gate, another door, and stopped by a galvanized-iron control box. He was moving with a swagger that Barbara didn’t recognize, and casting disdainful glances at the work. He threw switches by the handful. In the receding triangular space above them, lights went up on stairways and cables and the inverted T’s that anchored the tram tracks to the walls. Martin didn’t look at her. He might have been an antebellum Southern gentleman losing his sweetness in a review of his slaves. Pulling hard on a railing, as if daring it to snap, he started up the stairs. She followed, hating him somewhat. She smelled cold grease, cold welds, thirsty concrete. Echoes lingered, buzzing, in the thin iron steps. When the stairs brought her close to the walls she ran her hand over the hard carbon steel, over drips of set concrete, over code numbers inscribed by hand, and saw a blue luster hiding in the burrs and ripples. Abruptly the stairway veered to the opposite side of the tram tracks, and veered back, adjusting to dreadful alterations of the vertical.

“Do you collect if I fall here?”

“Don’t fall,” he said curtly. It was an order, but she was happy to comply. Diagonal patterns — the crossties and trusses for the tracks, the guys and brackets for the stairs — were repeated at one level and then slowly gave way, element by element, to patterns more cramped and twisted. Looking down (accidentally) she could see some of the flights she’d climbed, but not nearly all of them. They zigzagged around like the spoor of a rectilinearity driven crazy by catenary logic. The colors were primitive, the rustproofing orange, the plastic wrappings a baby blue, the wirenuts red and yellow, the conduit green. Farther up, as the pace of the curve increased, she climbed long spiral staircases connected, top to bottom, by narrow gangways with flimsy rods for railings. She might have fallen if she’d stopped to think. She followed Martin. There was metal everywhere, its molten origin apparent in this sealed metallic enclosure, in the literal chill: she could see the steel’s enslavement to form. Threaded, it bit itself in a death grip, bit indefinitely. Gussets like the arms of frozen courtiers held up struts, and the struts held up the gangways, and the gangways Martin. In the past his power had been a reputation, a thing for her to play with. Now, at closer range, from a greater remove (the truth is unfamiliar), she loved him very much.

Blue daylight appeared. They stepped out into the sunlit observation room. And after she’d appreciated the view east and west, after she’d selected a car driving by the Old Courthouse, a red station wagon, and followed its progress through the empty downtown streets, watched it popping in and out between buildings, and caught glimpses of it (she believed) on Olive Street all the way out to Grand Avenue; after she’d jumped on the floor to confirm its solidity; after she’d sat up on the window ledge, her back to the sun and her thighs on warm metal, after she’d kicked off her shoes and Martin had stood between her legs and kissed her: after she’d protested that people could see and he’d assured her that they couldn’t, he unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down. Then he did it to her on the floor. There were rows of chevrons on the cold steel plates. He mashed and maneuvered her while she tried again and again to sit up. Her shoulders, in spasms, resisted touching down. Did she know this man? She was almost ecstatic. The best thing was, he never smiled.

“Mickey McFarland, author of You and Only You. Doctor, we’re glad you could stop by this afternoon, I’m sure you have a busy schedule—”

“Oh, KSLX has a special place in my heart.”

“We appreciate your coming in. I’m Jack Strom. From three to four I’ll be talking to Dr. Ernest Quitschak, a seismologist who’s going to tell us about three of the biggest earthquakes in American history and the next big earthquake, which could happen any — day — now, right here in Missouri, KSLX-Radio, Saint Louis, it’s — three o’clock.”

Bong.

She slid the three pans onto the top rack of the oven, set the timer, and slumped into a chair. She was bushed. Her ears rang. Mohnwirbel had gone off someplace, leaving the rake in the ivy, tines down.

In New Delhi today Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was among hundreds of thousands of—

At the news of Mrs. Gandhi’s death on Monday Barbara had thought immediately of Jammu, the police chief. Jammu patterned her peremptory glamour so clearly on Mrs. Gandhi’s that Barbara was sure the assassination would leave her harrowed. But when Jammu appeared on KSLX-TV last night to discuss ramifications of the murder, she spoke with her usual poise. “It’s amazing the woman survived as long as she did. She didn’t lack enemies.” The cold smile she gave the interviewer disgusted Barbara.

“You can’t judge from this,” Martin said. “Who knows what she thinks in private.”

Yes, there was no denying no one knew. Barbara would even grant the possibility that Martin, in private, now that his hair was turning gray, feared death. But she would never know. The guiding principle of Martin’s personality, the sum of his interior existence, was the desire to be left alone. If all those years he’d sought attention, even novelty, and if he still relished them, then that was because attention proved him different and solitude begins in difference.

She remembered the election night party they’d had in their house on Algonquin Place, on the night Humphrey lost. The Animals raging in the living room, the undergraduates dancing in the front hall. Barbara had been upstairs checking on Luisa. At the bottom of the stairs she saw Martin talking with Biz DeMann’s young brother-in-law Andrew, a plump law-school student in blazer and tortoiseshell glasses.

“Harvard,” Martin was saying. “…Harvard. Somehow I thought it was a restaurant.”

Young DeMann: “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of it.”

“Listen, Andrew.” Martin put his arm around Andrew’s shoulders and drew him close. “There’s something I’ve always wondered. Maybe you can help me. What does alma mater mean?”

“I don’t know exactly. Something like Our Mother.”

Martin frowned. “Whose mother?” He was doing his dumb act.

“Metaphorically. Like: Harvard is my alma mater.”

“I see. It’s your Our Mother.”

Andrew smiled indulgently. “Sure. Why not.”

“Why not?” Martin took Andrew by the collar and tossed him against the front door. “Because it means nurturing mother, you asshole!”

Barbara, turning white, dragged Martin into the dining room. “Martin, Martin, Martin—”

“I ask the kid where he went to school,” he told her in a caustic whisper. “I’m pretty sure he went to Harvard, I’m just being polite. He tells me: ‘Oh, a little school near Boston.’” He pulled away. “Lemme go kick his head.”

“He’s a guest, Martin.”

She dragged him out to the back patio and sat him down. She realized he wasn’t drunk at all. “All these people,” he said. “All these people, worrying about the poor. They don’t have the faintest idea what it’s like to be poor…All these people studying. It makes me uncomfortable. It seems so…so small. I mean, how do they justify themselves? All these people. All these people. They’ve never in their lives had to work a job they didn’t like.”

All these people were Barbara’s people.

If she stopped trying, she and Martin wouldn’t see them anymore.

She stopped. The parties stopped. She stayed at home; she got a sinus infection. Men were circling the moon, and she sat and rested in a kitchen chair, wishing she could taste. It was the worst infection of her life. In the shower she licked the soap off her lips and found it sweet, like one of the more congenial poisons. Cooking was a chemistry lab. Heated beef turned gray, heated chicken white. Bread had low tensile strength. A liquid could be extracted from an orange, it was volume in a glass, it was 150 milliliters.

The infection continued out of February and into March, but spring was just a change in the light, a dampening of the cold, nothing more. She saw a doctor, who told her it was only viruses, she needed to sleep a lot and let it run its course. Eventually she could breathe freely, but she still couldn’t taste. She started smoking again. The smoke was frosty and almost chewable, and the pain in her throat, divorced from flavor, had an electrical quality, like a leakage of current. Was it possible that people tasted what they spoke? It was possible. Words dwelt in her skull like hammerheads, falling around on their rigid claws. Martin blamed her. “What’s wrong with you?” Go to hell, I have a cold. “You should try to get some sleep.” Go to hell. A steak could be bent. Radishes couldn’t. Every morning she licked at the soap, always hoping, and then, in April, something gave and she realized in her closet that she was smelling No-Moth. It was exactly as she remembered it. But now with each taste she rediscovered there came a sense of private ownership. Tastes and smells no longer seemed like communal stocks of which each person partook according to need and predisposition. They seemed like property. She was reading Sartre, and he hit her like a ton of bricks. She felt wild. She had insides, and at the time they weren’t lonely places. Ask Martin about those years, and he’d tell you a different story. Hers was simple: she’d started to live for herself, not both of them. She’d noticed that she had a daughter.

“And how is this different from the San Andreas fault?”

“The San Andreas is on the edge of the continental plate — plates, of course, are the rigid pieces of the earth’s crust that make up the continents and ocean floors…”

The oven was warming the kitchen, but Barbara didn’t smell cake, only the heat of her sinuses. The dishes seemed a creation of the sink, which heaved them onto the counter, weird saucers, wooden spoons. In December more people from House magazine, including a writer named John Nissing whom Barbara had so far met only by telephone, would be coming to shoot the house’s interior. They should have come today instead, she thought, and caught the house au naturel, caught Barbara in her chair, bowing in confusion and looking at the flour-dusted wrists in her lap. In her dream last night Luisa had had these hands, these rings, these wrinkles.

When Audrey’s younger daughter Mara was Luisa’s age she’d already run away from home three times. She’d been expelled from Mary Institute and arrested for shoplifting and possession. Concerned relatives, namely Barbara and her father, agreed that the Ripley household was (to say the least) doing Mara little good, and Barbara overrode Martin’s objections and offered to take the girl in until she cooled off or got a diploma. Mara had always, to Barbara’s discomfiture, looked up to her and liked her, as the token grownup she could stand. She accepted the invitation, and Barbara tried to be understanding and be a good foster mother, and repair some of the damage. But after two months, on a Sunday in March, she and Martin returned from a brunch and found Luisa, who was ten, sitting in the kitchen with a frown on her face. Her indirection was elaborate.

“Sometimes,” she said, “I think about rooms we don’t use?” She felt sorry for the unused rooms. And all the things in them? Like in the basement. And on the third floor? It was funny how she never went up there? Did Mommy ever go up there? Wasn’t there an old sewing machine with pedals? And lots of things of Daddy’s? And an old sofa, sort of?

Barbara calmly cored an apple for her and sent Martin up to the third floor, where Mara (who was supposedly “outside someplace”) and a boy her age were hastily dressing. Martin said Mara had to go, and Barbara agreed. She was chastened to discover that only Luisa mattered to her, that a scratch on her daughter’s psyche worried her more than a festering hole in Mara’s. Did Luisa know the suitcases in the front hall were the direct result of her testimony? Had she made a connection between having sex and getting thrown out? Did she know it was done on her behalf? A very peculiar sort of distrust arose in Barbara: how much are we really keeping from her? A lot, or only a little? She wished she’d been granted a mind unable to perceive so clearly the mathematics of Luisa’s growth, or a body that could have given her more than one child, anything to relieve the terrible specificity of her conscience. If only it didn’t matter exactly what became of Luisa, and what she became, and how it happened, through what fault and what virtues of Barbara’s. If only she were like Audrey, to whom things happened unaccountably. Or like Martin, who didn’t seem to care.

Upstairs she heard footsteps. The thump of books. Luisa had come in through the front door and gone straight to her room.

Three weeks passed. It was the day before Thanksgiving, and the high school was in turmoil. After fifth hour the clots of pep, the organizers and combatants, began to rove the halls at will. They carried orange and black threats, threw orange and black confetti, stapled orange and black crepe paper to the ceiling tiles. It was Pep Wednesday, the day before the Statesmen played the Kirkwood Pioneers. At three o’clock the Rally would be held, and then at eight o’clock the Bonfire, when five hundred of the faithful would gather at Moss Field to witness the burning, in effigy, of Kirk E. Wood. This true Pioneer would be roasted, tossing in a danse macabre, while smoke and cheers drove the school spirit to painful heights for tomorrow. Tomorrow was Turkey Day. Tomorrow was the day.

Mr. Sonnenfeld shut the door. He cast his pinkened eyes on the class before him. He stuck out his lower lip and blew air through the thin hair on his forehead. “Forty-five minutes to go,” he said. “Be glad when it’s all over.”

The class did not look at him. They heard his words in mute boredom, as a humbling judgment on them. Yes, sir, it’s just like you say. Fluorescent light filmed their tired hair, tired jeans, tired purses. They were a group as gray as the cold clouds outside. They came because Sonnenfeld would not fail anyone who attended class regularly. The boy next to Luisa in the back row was slouched so low in his seat that his knees butted the underside of his desk. His name was Archie. He was black. He was drawing on his desk with a pencil, expanding a solid gray dot into a larger dot.

Luisa rubbed the back of her hand across her nostrils. Whenever she did this she could smell Duane. Washing masked the smell, but not for long. He came from inside her. More and more his smoky human smell lodged even in her nostrils; in her brain.

Her mother had said: “What do you keep doing that for?”

“Doing what?” She’d dropped her hand, locking it between her legs. She saw how people accidentally develop disgusting nervous habits.

“Smelling your hand like that.”

“I’m — not.”

Mr. Sonnenfeld moistened his fingertips and walked up and down the aisles distributing copies of poems. “I’ve selected four poems to introduce you to the work of William Carlos Williams,” he said. Luisa took her copies but was careful not to show immediate interest in them. She was only here because this course fit into her unruly schedule this quarter. She felt conspicuous. One row over, in the corner, a girl named Janice Jones was watching her. Janice was wearing loose jeans with no belt, a biker’s jacket, and an embroidered Indian shirt with the top four buttons unbuttoned. She had tiny, stoned-looking eyes. Her name was scrawled on lockers and walls around the school. JANIS JONES GIVES GOOD HEAD. JJ = JOBS. Every day she stared at Luisa for no apparent reason; no malice when their eyes met, no smiles, no connection.

“…I think when you look at these poems you’ll see a lot of similarities with Ezra Pound and the other imagists we started with.” Sonnenfeld’s collar bit deeply into the roll of fat around his neck as he handed the mimeographs across two empty desks to Janice Jones. He nearly lost his balance. Archie sniffed. He seemed to have seen it without looking up.

“Now, first of all, has anyone ever read anything by Williams?” Sonnenfeld hopped backwards and sat on his desk. He pulled up his pants legs to relieve the stretch.

White pages turned. No one answered. This was the only class Luisa had in which she hardly knew anyone. People she knew would have said something.

“Does anyone know what Williams did for a living?”

“He’s a faggot,” Archie muttered.

“Archie?”

Continuing to draw his dot, Archie smiled and did not elaborate. Trouble had been brewing between him and Sonnenfeld since the quarter started two weeks ago, and the mood was dangerous today. Usually Archie was silent in class. He was loud in the halls, though, where all the black kids lost their shyness. They scared Luisa. They didn’t like her, and she felt she’d never be able to relax enough to indicate neutrality, to give them even a small sign that she didn’t necessarily dislike them.

Sonnenfeld put his hands on his hips and assumed a disappointed tone. “William Carlos Williams was a doctor. He lived all his life in Paterson, New Jersey. As we go on, we’ll find that it’s not unusual for American poets to have other full-time professions. Many have been teachers. Wallace Stevens, who’s perhaps our greatest poet of this century, a very hard poet, worked for an insurance company. He was a vice president when he died. Sylvia Plath, whom I’m sure you’ve all heard of, was a mother and a housewife.”

Vague guilt fluttered in Luisa’s stomach. The Wallace Stevens book her mother had given her.

“Archie?”

Archie shook his head patiently. Luisa looked at his long, angular fingers. She thought of Duane’s hands. On the palm of her own left hand his name was written in black ballpoint ink. She’d written it in Calculus, half-asleep. She’d hardly slept last night. For the third time in a month, she’d sneaked out to be with Duane. She’d gotten to the sundeck from her bedroom window, and from the sundeck she’d climbed, knees cracking, feet trembling, down the step-like quoins to the front yard. It was amazingly easy, like an open cash register and no one around. Her parents never went into her room after 11:00. The last Lockwood Avenue bus to U-City came at 12:05. She could see Duane any night she wanted to, and she liked it better at night, when she could see herself, a white semi-reflection in the bus window staring into her face and unmoved by the streetlights and neon floating through her. Duane was waiting at the bus stop, his scarf under his chin, a lock of hair above his eyebrows. He shook his head. He could never believe she was actually on the bus.

“…Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound, who were both profound influences on Williams.”

“Bow bow bow,” said Archie, snatching at an imaginary bug in the air.

“Archie?” Sonnenfeld was getting mad. The pitch of his voice had risen.

Janice Jones had fallen asleep.

Luisa looked down at the copies on her desk. THE RED WHEELBARROW. So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with water beside the white chickens. That was easy enough. She liked short poems. She went on to the next one and, finding it just as easy, kept reading. She didn’t stop until she sensed an unanswered question hanging in the air. Sonnenfeld had asked them something. She ran the preceding seconds through her memory and heard, from afar, “What was imagism?”

Without raising her hand she called out, “Free verse, strong images that appeal directly to the emotions.”

“What did you say to me?”

She looked up with a start. Sonnenfeld had gotten down from his desk. He wasn’t talking to her. He was talking to Archie. He hadn’t even heard her answer. Archie was enlarging the gray dot, smiling.

“What did you say?”

“Fag,” Archie said.

“I didn’t hear you.”

Luisa drove her nails into her palms and stared at her desk, the way everyone else was staring. She tried to force the blush back out of her cheeks. What an idiot she was. The halls had grown quiet for a moment. Sonnenfeld was walking down the aisle. She heard the unhurried scratching of Archie’s pencil. Then a scuffle, the rumble of a desk’s metal feet on linoleum, the plink of a pencil. She stole a glance. Sonnenfeld had grabbed Archie by the collar and was hauling him towards the door. He pushed him out and followed him. From the hall, the class heard, “What’d you call me?”

There was a murmur from Archie.

“What?”

“Fag.”

“What, nigger?”

“Fag.”

“Nigger!”

FAG!

NIGGER!

It stopped. It had to. Sonnenfeld was dragging Archie down to the vice-principal’s office. Still feeling the pressure of attention on her, Luisa laid her cheek on her desk and shut her eyes. Outside, a pep parade was approaching to the tune of “Old Wisconsin.”

The trumpeter had to slur and blurt to keep up with the singers. As the group passed the door, Luisa heard footsteps. Some of the class was deserting. She heard a match struck and raised her head. Janice Jones was lighting a cigarette.

Tonight Luisa was supposedly going to the Bonfire and then staying over at Stacy’s. Actually she was going out to dinner with Duane and spending the night with him. There had been a lot of this supposedly-actually in the last three weeks. On her birthday it had gotten complicated. Stacy had even called Luisa’s mother for suggestions about what kind of breakfast and what kind of presents. Stacy had a mother like Duane’s, the convenient sort of parent who worked full-time and who’d believe there had been a party in her house even if there hadn’t been. Luisa wasn’t as much afraid of getting caught as she was sure that one of these weeks, in her tiredness, she’d forget which side of the window she was on and do something stupid at home, like French-kissing her mother or calling her father “Baby.” She could feel the impatience inside her. Why don’t people who like each other kiss all the time? Why do people have to lie? She was feeling more honest and acting less honest. It was a dangerous mixture, like gasoline and wine, like fever and chills. She still had a cold, sort of a permanent cold, the sense that none of the things that used to matter mattered anymore. She could do whatever she wanted. She could just say: “Give me a cigarette.”

Janice Jones looked astonished. “They’re menthol.”

Luisa shrugged. When the match was held she inhaled lightly to keep from coughing. To her relief the smoke was mild, like a breath of mothballs. Janice Jones folded up her poems and stuffed them roughly into her purse. She looked at Luisa. “Bye,” she said. It was the friendliest she’d ever been.

“See you.” Drawing on the cigarette, Luisa felt almost as cool as Janice. Unfortunately the only two kids left in the room to appreciate her now were Alice Bunyan, who sketched horses during class, and Jenny Brown, who had large sad eyes and a lisp, wore overalls, and never knew the answers. Neither cared about Luisa. She closed her eyes. She felt a tiny breeze, a feathery impact on her stomach — the ash breaking loose. She opened her eyes.

Sonnenfeld.

He was leaning with both hands on the front desk in her row. He was staring at her. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

She didn’t answer. She dropped the cigarette and smashed it with her heel. Sonnenfeld laid a green slip on her desk. Smokig i classmm. “Sorry,” he said coldly. “I’d expected more from you.”

She gathered her books and shouldered her purse. Somehow her body couldn’t believe it was leaving. The vice-principal could suspend her for three days for smoking, and barring that, a call to her parents was virtually assured. At the door she stopped and looked into the hall. There were ruptured oranges on the floor, and construction-paper artwork on the doors of lockers belonging to members of the football team. The pep club had drawn crude portraits of each member and given him a slogan. #65 WILLY FISHER “DR. MEAN GUY.” The lockers looked like tombs. Luisa turned back uncertainly to Sonnenfeld.

He was seated on his desk with a book in his hand. He licked a finger, turned a page, and addressed his two remaining students. “So much—depends,” he said.

“Just leave those spaces blank, White.”

“Done. What do we say? Gateway Arch?” RC’s fingers played the keys. Gateway Arch. “Address?”

“Forget the address.”

“Shot in the leg, right?”

“Very funny. Southern leg, eastern face, hit by automatic fire.”

…automatic fire. “Means?” RC said.

“High-powered automatic rifle firing steel bullets.”

…steel bullets.

“Object of attack unknown. Distinctive feature: pattern of dents traced the letters O and W. Rest of that column blank.”

…letters O and W. “Now, I know the suspects,” RC said.

“Shut up, White. I’m dictating. Understand? Name unknown, sex male, height five-ten to six-two, everything else unknown.”

Unknown. Unknown. Unknown.

“Bottom of the page. Three-sixteen a.m., November et cetera, Donald R. Colfax of Gateway Security Systems, 1360 DeBaliviere, telephone three three six, one one seven one — reported the sound of gunfire near the southern end of the Arch. New paragraph. Three-eighteen a.m., Officers Dominick Luzzi and Robert Driscoll — double z-i, White — dispatched to the scene by radio. New paragraph. Three-twenty a.m., Colfax stated that upon hearing the gunfire he hastened in that direction from his desk in the northern underground lobby of the Arch.”

“Hastened,” RC said, “in the direction of a machine gun?”

“Appearing at the location of the shooting, he glimpsed—”

…lobby of the Arch.

“—the above-described suspect fleeing through the trees to the south of the Arch. Colfax stated that the suspect was carrying—”

“Luzzi, phone!” Desk Sergeant McClintoch barked.

“Take a break, White. Appreciate the circumstances. My wife’s ten months pregnant. Relax, take a break.”

RC relaxed. He peered into the lunch bag Annie had filled for him. Egg salad on rye, brownies, and an apple. He was starving, but he wanted to eat late because he had a Legal Procedures class from six to eight at the Academy. Then tomorrow he had the day off. Tomorrow was Thanksgiving. The precinct-house atmosphere was pre-holiday, a little frantic.

The man at the next desk was scowling as he hunted and pecked. RC, who’d typed a million histories in the Army, was a ten-finger man. In the Army he’d trained on a machine gun, too. “Aim, don’t spray. Pick a target, five shots, next target, five shots. Atababy.” But machine guns weren’t precision instruments; you’d need damn strong arms to write something with one, even just the initials of your terrorist group. If RC ever got challenged to a duel at dawn, he’d choose a typewriter for his weapon. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat. The alphabet at ten paces.

He took another look at his lunch. Ten more minutes, he told himself, picking at the rip in the vinyl cushion of his chair. On the green wall two desks to his right was a 12×15 glossy of Chief Jammu with Sergeant Luzzi, taken in August on the steps of the precinct house. RC himself had only talked to the Chief that one time after the explosion, before he’d signed up, and he’d only seen her in person one other time, when she gave a talk to the new recruits at the end of their first week. He couldn’t remember a word of what she’d said, but it was good, whatever it was. And he had no problem with how they’d been treating him, aside from some superciliousness on the part of the younger white officers. It was a tight ship, this department, a lot more electrifying than the Cold Ice Company and a lot less dumb-assed than the Army. When they tested his gun skills here and he passed the test, they told him to stop going to the range and assigned him extra hours of office work. He put in thirty hours a week — work-study, the Chief’s idea. With all this plus the classes too, he was busy. But in February he’d graduate and things would be a little easier.

Luzzi was still gabbing on the phone. Didn’t look like his wife was delivering yet. It would have taken Luzzi nearly an hour (plus however long he spent on the phone) to type this report that RC could do in ten minutes. As far as RC knew he was the fourth-best typist in the whole first precinct. He’d heard officers say: “In a hurry? Take it to White there, if you don’t mind his lip.”

The only real ragging these days came from Clarence. “I swear to God,” he said, “I never thought I’d be sorry to see you moving up. But even ice beats the heat. I hate to see you playing their game.” Their game was the Chief’s game. Lately Clarence had been hitting his golf drives too fat. He wasn’t on speaking terms with Alderman Struthers, and his business was hurting. Not hurting too bad (this city never ran out of junk to demolish) but still hurting. RC couldn’t make Clarence see that this had nothing to do with the Chief.

“Read it back, White?”

Luzzi had returned, and RC turned back to the typewriter. “Colfax,” he read, “stated that the suspect was carrying…”

“A weapon,” Luzzi said. “A weapon.”

“Big surprise,” RC said, and waited to be told to shut up.

At company headquarters in South St. Louis, Probst watched Bob Montgomery and Cal Markham, his vice presidents, file into his office and take chairs. They were here to plan Westhaven strategy. “Well?” Probst said.

“We get a day like this,” said Cal, “it changes things. This is snow weather.”

Outside the window, in an afternoon sky that was almost black, a pigeon spread its wings and decelerated, like a newspaper unfolding in the wind. They always flocked around the precinct house across the street.

“It’s not snowing in Ballwin, is it?”

“No,” Cal said.

Bob gave Cal a sharp glance. “Flurries.”

“How’d we get into this mess?” Probst said.

“We didn’t know how big the sucker was. We knew, but we didn’t.”

“Or how far out it was,” Bob added. “Those last three miles.”

“I’ll tell you what it is, it’s we didn’t think we’d get the contract.”

“Let’s think a minute,” Probst said.

“I’ve been thinking all month,” Cal said.

“Let’s think.”

The problem was concrete: how to get 23,000 cubic yards of it mixed, transported to Westhaven and poured for foundations, all in the next four weeks. By Christmas or New Year’s snow and ice would make further pouring impossible, and without foundations no further work could be done. But further work had to be done. The contract called for model units to be completed by April, the entire development by next October. And Cal was right. They’d known, but they hadn’t known. They’d known it was a huge amount of acreage, they’d known it was too far out in the country (and the last three miles of road were maddeningly roundabout), they’d known they were under time pressure, but no single factor had seemed prohibitive. They’d bid high, padding every figure except the time estimates. They’d won the contract anyway, and now they were in trouble. The obvious solution—

“Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Probst,” said his secretary Carmen on the intercom, “but your wife is on the phone.”

“Tell her I’m in conference. I’ll call her back.”

The obvious solution was to subcontract. But Probst hated to subcontract, hated to spend the money, hated to give up any control over the quality of the work, hated to endanger his reputation for doing complete jobs. There was a cash problem, too. The developer, Harvey Ardmore, wasn’t scheduled to pay the second 25 percent of the contract until the foundation was laid, and Ardmore was notorious for refusing to renegotiate. Probst didn’t want to pay the subcontractor out of his own cash assets. And worse, it would be hard to find someone willing to buck the unions. Only Probst could buck with impunity, and not even he, really, because the other solution to the concrete problem was to hire extra shifts for a month and do the work himself. He’d need drivers. Drivers were Teamsters. Even if they did agree to work for him—

“I’m sorry, Mr. Probst,” said Carmen on the intercom, “but she says—”

Probst grabbed the phone and took the call. “Is this an emergency?”

“No, not exactly,” Barbara said. “Although—”

“I’ll call you back, I’m sorry.” He hung up. Barbara knew damned well he didn’t like to have his train of thought broken, and just this morning he’d told her how tense he was…

The Teamsters. If they did agree to work for him — never before had he had to ask, and they’d probably refuse just to spite him — they would drive a hard bargain. They might demand the right to approach Probst’s men again. At the very least, they’d drag their heels. So if Probst didn’t subcontract, the only acceptable way of keeping the job in the house would be to use what manpower he had now, spend the eight weeks it would take, and risk getting stung by bad weather. Cal, the daredevil, favored this alternative. Bob preferred to subcontract. Either way, they sacrificed something, either reputation or security. The problem was the very idea of Westhaven, the grandness of the conception. It was too large a project, too far out in the western boondocks, and the market out there was too cutthroat. Harvey Ardmore set deadlines (not that you could blame him, he was racing his competitors and creditors) that Probst couldn’t meet without compromising himself.

“Have you sounded out the Teamsters, Bob?”

“I have.”

“And?”

Bob smiled. “I think they’d sooner haul for the devil.”

From the black trees along Swon Avenue snowflakes swirled like tiny lovers, meeting and parting, falling, melting. Luisa shivered in her jacket, breathing easily in the cold outdoor air. She’d gone straight from Sonnenfeld’s room to the vice-principal’s office, but when she got there she found that the vice-principal had already left to supervise the Rally. The vice-principal’s secretary sent her to her counselor, and her counselor accepted her ridiculously sincere apologies and said, “We’ll let it go this time.” She felt rescued; she’d been given special treatment; she felt all right.

She stopped in the plot of land called the Plant Memorial Wildlife Sanctuary (it was dedicated to a man, a Mr. Plant, not a kingdom) and casually looked for birds. She spotted a female cardinal and a woodpecker, but mostly there were jays and starlings. Since she met Duane, she hadn’t once gone seriously birding.

A gust of snowflakes flew by. This little park had been the destination of many of the walks she took with her father when she was little. She remembered she was always surprised when he held out his hand and said, “Would you like to go for a walk with me?” Sure, she would think, but we never go for walks. But apparently they did go for walks. But there was something fake about them. Her father seemed to have some other daughter in mind.

She proceeded up Jefferson Avenue. Around Duane she’d been acting critical of her parents. She had to give him reasons why he couldn’t call her at home or meet the folks, and there weren’t any obvious reasons. So she talked about the way her father had treated her and Alan, his phony respect. For the purposes of mocking her, he’d acted like she and Alan might get married. He made everything seem ridiculous. It was like he couldn’t bear to let Luisa forget that her friends weren’t as important as he was, that nobody but he had built any Arch.

Her mother was the opposite. From the very beginning she’d felt obligated to find Alan even more interesting than Luisa did. Wasn’t Alan cute and funny and sweet? And awfully smart, too? It made Luisa uncomfortable. Her mother was lonely.

With an ache in her throat she crossed Rock Hill Road, which was so deserted that the snowflakes dotted the pavement uniformly, undisturbed by tires. The reasons she came up with for keeping Duane to herself never seemed quite good enough to justify climbing out her window and missing so much sleep. The main thing was, she hadn’t felt like sharing Duane. But now she wondered. Maybe when she got home now she should let her mother have a piece of him. Not say she’d been lying, just that she’d seen Duane a couple of times at Stacy’s and really liked him. The ache faded from her throat. She was getting butterflies instead. She wasn’t sure she’d have the nerve to tell her mother as soon as she walked in.

A triangle of blue sky had opened in the black clouds above her house. Mr. Mohnwirbel was digging up the brick border along the front walk. “Hi, Mr. Mohnwirbel!”

He looked up. “Hi,” he said in his gruff German voice.

“Going to the game tomorrow?” she asked loudly.

He shook his head.

“Going to have a turkey dinner?” she said, even louder.

He shook his head.

“Going to take the day off?”

“I make a vacation.”

“You’re going to make a vacation? Wow. Where to?”

“Illinois.”

“Boy.” Luisa rocked on her heels. “I sure hope you have a good time.”

He nodded and picked up another brick.

The butterflies were rising higher in her stomach. She marched around to the back door, gathering courage, and crashed inside.

The kitchen was dark and smelled. Her mother had been smoking. It smelled like grade-school afternoons, when she’d smoked all the time. She was sitting at the table and looking bad, all pinched and pasty. This probably wasn’t the time to tell her.

“Hi,” Luisa said.

Her mother gave her a baleful glance, and brushed some ashes off the table. Had her counselor called about the smoking after all?

“What’s up?” Luisa said.

Her mother looked at her again. “I don’t understand you.”

“What?” Maybe it wasn’t the smoking. Maybe — Her stomach fell a mile.

Her mother looked at the sink. “I was picking up the turkey at Straub’s,” she said, speaking to a nonexistent person. “I was standing in the checkout line. The woman ahead of me was looking at me. She seemed vaguely familiar. She said, You’re Barbara Probst, aren’t you? I said, Yes, I am. She said, I guess our daughters are good friends. I said—”

Enough. Luisa ran down the hall and locked herself in the bathroom. In the mirror she caught a glimpse of herself smelling her hand and spun away.

“Luisa!” Her mother’s voice was harsh. “Luisa, what kind of stunt is this?”

“I have to go to the bathroom.” She hoped the tinkling would drive her mother away. Arguing was out of the question. Anything she said would humiliate her.

She jerked up her pants and flushed the toilet. Under the cover of the rushing water, she cleared her mother’s bud vases off the windowsill and parted the curtains. Snow was falling again. From the dark bathroom the sky looked light and unbounded.

The toilet fell silent.

“Luisa, I’m not going to be understanding this time. I’m sorry, but I’m not, because for one thing, I don’t understand, and for another, I don’t think you want me to. But if you want me to treat you like an adult you’d better come out here and start acting like one. What are you doing in there?”

Luisa hardly heard the words. It was just pathetic bleating to her. She felt evil and she wanted Duane. She was glad she’d lied. She was sorry she’d been caught.

“Imagine how I felt,” her mother said. “Imagine me standing there trying to smile and hold up my end of the conversation while this woman I don’t even know is telling me—”

She flushed the toilet a second time, for noise, and unlatched the window. Fortunately it didn’t stick. She raised it and eased up the storm window. The toilet bowl gurgled as it emptied. She planted one foot on the tiled sill, squeezed through the window, and jumped into the yews outside. Her mother was still talking to her.