The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

awaiting further congratulation. When Elaine began to clear the table, Jack opened fresh Falstaffs and led Probst onto the back porch. The sun had sunk behind the haze above the railyards beyond the DuChamps’ back fence. Bugs were rising from the weeds. “Tsk,” Jack clucked. “Things can be pretty nice sometimes.”

      Probst said nothing.

      “You’re going places, old buddy, I can tell,” Jack continued, his voice all history-in-the-making. “Things are happening fast, and I kind of like the way they look. I just hope we can still see some of you once in a while.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “Well.” Jack pulled a fatherly smile. “I’ll tell you. You’ve got a lot going for you, and I know for damn sure we’re not the only ones who can see that. You’re twenty years old, you’ve finally got a little money to throw around, you’ve got looks, brains …”

      Probst laughed. “What are you saying?”

      “I’m saying that I, personally. Jack DuChamp”—-jack pointed at himself—“kind of envy you sometimes.”

      Probst glanced at the kitchen window. Dishes plopped in the sink.

      “Not like that,” Jack said. “I’m a lucky man, and I know it. It’s just we like to speculate.”

      “About what?”

      “Well, we like to speculate—you ready?” Jack paused. “We like to speculate about your sex life, Martin.”

      Probst felt his face go pale. “You what?”

      “Speculate. At parties. It’s kind of a party game whenever you’re not around. You should’ve heard what Dave Hepner said last Saturday. ‘Satin sheets and three at a time.’ Yeah, Elaine was really mad, she thought it was getting kind of dirty—”

      “Jack.” Probst was aghast.

      A moment passed. Then Jack shook his head and gripped Probst’s arm. He had always been a kidder, a winker, a prankster. “No,” he said, “I’m only teasing. It’s just sometimes we worry you might be workin’ a little too hard. And – well. We know a girl you might be interested in meeting. She’s actually a cousin of mine. Her name’s Helen Scott.”

      For nearly a month Probst did nothing with the number Jack had given him, but the name Helen Scott slowly gave birth to a vision of feminine splendor so compelling that he had no choice, in the end, but to call her. They made a date. He picked her up on a Sunday afternoon at the rooming house where she was living (she’d moved to the city to take a job with Bell Telephone) and drove to Sportsman’s Park to watch the Browns play the Yankees. There was nothing wrong with Helen Scott. As Probst had hoped, she bore little resemblance of any kind to her cousin Jack. She had a throaty rural voice. Her hair was waved and her skirt high-waisted in accordance with the fashion of the era, which, more democratic than later fashions, at least did not detract from any woman’s native looks. Probst’s preconceived love kept him from apprehending her any more specifically. They sat in the bleachers. The Browns, whom the Yankees immediately jumped all over, were the perfect team to be watching on a first date, their wobbly pitching and general proneness to error giving them an innocence that the Yankees seemed wholly to lack. Probst, with a pretty girl at his side, felt a charity bordering on joy.

      After the game he and Helen went to Crown Candy for sandwiches and milkshakes (here he was able to observe that she had a wide mouth and no appetite) and then they stopped in at his apartment, which was actually the basement of his Uncle George’s house. There, on his daybed, with an alacrity that implied she’d been impatient with the long preliminary afternoon, Helen kissed him. As soon as he felt how she moved in his arms he knew he could have her. His head began to pound. She let him take her blouse and bra off. His uncle’s footsteps, gouty and halting, depressed the floorboards above them. She unzipped her skirt and Probst kissed her ribs, and pinched her nipples, which he had heard women found intensely pleasurable.

      “Don’t do that.”

      There was pain in her voice. She drew away and they sat up on the bed, panting like swimmers. Probst thought he understood. He thought she meant he’d gone too far. And then she really did change her mind; as he sat there, mortified and uncertain, she put her clothes back on, defending herself (as he saw it) against his hurtful male hands.

      He drove her back to the rooming house, where she kissed him on the forehead and ran inside. For a while he waited in the darkness, somehow hoping she might come back out. He found it too cruel that his business accomplishments had counted for nothing on the daybed, that to be a man in the world did not make him a man of the world. And either then, as he sat in the car, or in later years, as he remembered sitting in the car—the location of the moment had the shifting ambiguity, now you see it, now you don’t, of a self-deception one is conscious of committing—he resolved to wait until his accomplishments were so great that he no longer needed, as the male, to make the moves. He wanted to be desired and taken. He wanted to be all object, to have that power. He wanted to be that great.

      And so it happened that he was a virgin when he met Barbara and had been faithful to her ever since.

      Barbara turned out her light.

      “You’re going to sleep?” Probst asked.

      “Yes. You’re not?”

      He tried to make his voice sound casual. “No, I think I’ll wait up for Luisa.”

      She kissed him. “Hope it won’t be long.”

      “Good night.”

      The bedroom windows rattled in the wind. It was 12:40, but Probst wasn’t worried about whether Luisa could take care of herself. He was all too certain that she could. Her control over her life was almost unnatural; the only thing that exceeded it was her control over other people’s lives, over the lives of boys like Alan. When Alan would come to see her, as he had nearly every day in the spring, she would talk on the phone with other friends for as long as an hour at a time. Alan would sit in the breakfast room smiling and nodding at the funny things he could hear her saying.

      Rolf is seeing another woman. Yet again.

      Luisa had dropped Alan in June, on her last weekend at home before flying to France. She made the announcement at the dinner table. It had seemed a very industrial decision, as if she’d been running cost/benefit analyses all along, and Alan had finally failed one. Though Probst approved of the decision, he didn’t let on. He believed that virtue grew best in an austere medium, in an atmosphere of challenging disapproval, and in Webster Groves, when one’s father paid himself a comfortable $190,000 annually and employed a full-time gardener and a part-time cleaning woman, austerity and challenges were hard to come by. He therefore took it upon himself to play the role of hostile environment for Luisa. He refused to give her a car. He said no to private school. He’d made her try Girl Scouts. He did not buy her the best stereo available. He imposed curfews. (She’d already trashed her weekend curfew of midnight to the tune of forty minutes.) She received a weekly allowance, which he sometimes pretended to forget to leave on her dresser. (She would go and complain to Barbara, who always gave her whatever she needed.) He made her cry when she got a B – in social studies. He made her eat beets.

      Barbara had begun to snore a little. As if he’d only been waiting for this sort of signal, Probst heaved himself out of bed. He opened his closet and put on his robe and slippers. He was tired, but he was not going to sleep before Luisa got back. She’d gone out at seven and said she’d be home soon. It was nearly one o’clock now. It was the hour of Rolf Ripley, the hour of ugly men for whom strangers unaccountably shed their inhibitions, the hour of getting it.

      Was Luisa getting it? Where was she? Her regular friends knew enough not to keep her out much past her curfew, so maybe she’d gone somewhere without them. She had a will of her own. She’d inherited Probst’s desires but not his disadvantages. She’d been born a girl—she was desired—and she hadn’t had to earn it. She hadn’t had to wait.

      Downstairs, the air was cold, the weather seeping in at the windows.