The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

himself slapping her in the face when she finally came in. “You’re grounded forever.” A spray of rain hit the windows in the living room. A hot rod turned off Lockwood Avenue and raced up Sherwood Drive. By the time it passed Probst it was doing at least fifty, and the blap-blap of the cylinders had become a hot moan. He felt a draft.

      The front door was open. Luisa was slipping in. Turning back the knob with one hand and pressing on the weather strip with the other, she slowly eased the door shut. A hinge made a soft miaow. He heard a click. She switched off the outside light and took a cautious step towards the stairs.

      “Where have you been?” lie said conversationally.

      He saw her jump and heard her gasp. I le jumped himself, frightened by her fright.

      “Daddy?”

      “Who else?”

      “You really scared me.”

      “Where have you been?” He saw himself as she did, in his full-length robe, with his arms crossed, his hair gray and mussed, his pajama cuffs breaking on his flat slippers. He saw himself as a father, and he blamed her for the vision.

      “What are you doing up so late?” she said, not answering his question.

      “Couldn’t sleep.”

      “I’m sorry I’m—”

      “Have a good time?” He got a strong whiff of wet hair. She was wearing black pants, a black jacket and black sneakers, all of them wet. The pants clung to the adolescent curves of her thighs and calves, the intersecting seams gleaming dully in the light from upstairs.

      “Yeah.” She avoided his eyes. “We went to a movie. We had some ice cream.”

      “We?”

      She turned away and faced the banister. “You know—Stacy and everyone—. I’m going to bed now, OK?”

      It was clear that she was lying. He’d made her do it, and he was satisfied. He let her go.

       3

      The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.

      Mme Giraud sold magazine subscriptions to her neighbors and also to strangers, by telephone. M. Giraud was vice-director of a Saab dealership. They already had two girls, Paulette (she was nineteen) and Gabrielle (she was sixteen). It was for the girls’ sake that Luisa was there. She was supposed to be fun. On her second night in France, her fun American Express card had come to the attention of the sisters. Paulette had snatched the card away and held it up before Gabrielle’s eyes as if it were a rare and beautiful insect. The girls smiled at each other and then at Luisa, who made goo-goo eyes and smiled back. She was trying to be friendly. When they looked away, she turned and scowled at the audience she often felt behind her.

      The next day the three of them went shopping, which in French meant Luisa plodded in and out of dressing rooms while the sisters pulled item after item off the racks. They were good salespeople. Luisa bought 2,700 francs’ worth of clothes. Back at home, Mme Giraud took one look at all the boxes and suggested that Luisa go take a bath. At the top of the stairs, Luisa sniffed her armpits. Did Americans smell bad to the French? She thought she’d locked the bathroom door, but no sooner had she stripped and stepped into the tub than Mme Giraud came bustling in with a towel for her. Luisa cowered. She already had a towel. Mme Giraud told her that usually they didn’t fill the tub so full. Then she told her she’d help her return all her purchases tomorrow. Then she asked her how she’d slept the night before. Did she still have zhet leg? Luisa checked her legs. Oh. Jet lag. Then Mme Giraud wanted to know whether Luisa ate liver. It was like the French Inquisition: manges-tu le foie? By the time she left, the water was tepid. Luisa scrubbed her pits exhaustively. At supper, over thick slices of liver, M. Giraud asked what business her father was in.

      “Mon papa,” she said happily, “il est un constructeur. Un grand constructeur, un—”

      “Je comprends.” M. Giraud pursed his lips with satisfaction. “Un charpentier.”

      “Non, non, non. Il bâtit ponts et chemins, il bâtit maisons et écoles et monuments—”

      “Un entrepreneur!”

      “Oui.”

      She hated France. Her mother had urged her to go. Her father had urged her to go humbly, with the Experiment. She’d got what he paid for. So she was a snob; so what? She was bored with the Girauds. She should have been sitting in cafés with guys and colored drinks. Mme Giraud wouldn’t let her go out alone after dark. Paulette and Gabrielle were drafted to show her a good time, and they took her to an empty bar in the Latin Quarter where campy disco played on a jukebox. They watched her with eyes as hard and shiny as stuffed-animal eyes. Fun? Are you having fun? On Sundays the elder Girauds drove her places like St. Denis and Versailles. On weekdays she helped Mme Giraud with the garden and shopping, which was more than her own daughters ever did. Luisa even helped her with her subscriptions until M. Giraud got wind of it. She accompanied the family to a rented house in Brittany for two weeks and gained five pounds, mainly on cheese. She grew pimples in patches, little archipelagos. She missed her parents, her real ones. It rained in Brittany. In a field near the Atlantic, a sheep tried to bite her.

      She was bored in August, bored in September, and bored in October now, too. It was another Friday afternoon. She walked out the high-school door into the sunlit dust raised by football practice across the street. The weather was fine because a harvest moon was coming, but Stacy Montefusco, her best friend, had been home for a week with bronchitis. Sara Perkins was getting a cold and was irritable. Marcy Coughlin had sprained her ankle in gymnastics the day before. No one felt like going birdwatching. No one felt like doing anything at all. Luisa walked home.

      The kitchen radio was playing the four o’clock news when she came in. She took her mail from the table and went upstairs. The door to the sundeck was open. Her mother, around the corner on the lounger, cast a shadow across the graying rattan mat. Luisa shut her bedroom door behind her.

      In her mail was a postcard of the Statue of Liberty. It was from Paulette Giraud.

      LOUISA,

      I AM IN THE UNITED-STATES! I AM COMING

      I THINK TO ST. LOUIS! OUR GROUP STAYS

      ONE NIGHT. ARE YOU HOME ON OCTOBER 20?

      I WILL CALL YOU!

      ALL MY LOVES,

      Paulette

      October 20? That was tonight. She threw the card aside. Mme Giraud must have told Paulette to call. Luisa didn’t want to see her. She put on some music, did a back-drop onto her bed, tuck and fall, and looked at the rest of her mail. There was another letter from Tufts and a thick packet of material from Purdue. She opened the letter from Tufts, and her mother knocked on the door. Luisa spread her arms like Jesus on the cross and stared at the ceiling. “Come in.”

      Her mother was wearing one of her father’s white shirts, with the front tails knotted. She held her place in a book with her finger. “You’re home early.”

      “There’s no one to do anything with.”

      “Come again?”

      Luisa raised her voice. “Everybody’s sick.”

      “Who’s the postcard from?”

      “You didn’t read it?”

      “It