The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

not twenty-one, are you?” she asked Duane.

      “Not exactly.”

      The bartender moved away. It was time for Luisa to leave. But she didn’t want to go home.

      “Are you waiting for somebody?” she asked Duane.

      “No, not really.”

      “You want to walk me to my car?”

      His expression grew formal. “Sure. I’ll be glad to.”

      Outside, after all the smoke, the air tasted like pure oxygen. The Algerian had left, probably to hide in the back seat of Luisa’s car. She and Duane walked in silence down Euclid. She wondered whether he was attached to someone.

      “So,” she said, “do you, like, live around here?”

      “I have an apartment near Wash U. I just moved out of a dorm.”

      “You go to school there?”

      “I did, but I dropped out.”

      He didn’t look like a dropout, but she was cool enough to say only, “Recently?”

      “A week ago Tuesday.”

      “You really dropped out?”

      “I barely even matriculated.” He was slowing down, perhaps wondering which of the cars parked on Euclid was hers.

      “Don’t you love that word?” she said.

      “Yeah,” he said, not sounding like he loved it. “They gave me sophomore standing for my year in Munich—I was in Munich last year.”

      “I just got back from Paris.”

      “Was it fun?”

      “Oh, non-stop, non-stop.” Luisa nodded him into the alley.

      “This is your car?”

      “Sorry, but. It’s my mother’s.” She stuck her hands in her back pockets and looked into his face. There was a meaningful pause, but it went on too long. Duane was very cute, his eyes deep-set and blackened in the dim light. She remembered the bruise. “What’d you do to your eye?”

      He touched his eye and turned away.

      “Or shouldn’t I ask.”

      “I ran into a door.”

      He said this as if it was a joke. Luisa didn’t get it. “Well, thanks for walking me here.”

      “Sure, you bet.”

      She watched him head back up the alley. What an obtuse person. Luisa would have jumped at the chance to jump in a car with someone like herself. She unlocked the door and got in, started the engine, gunned it. She was quite annoyed. Now she had to drive home and sit around and watch TV and be bored. She hadn’t even explained what she was doing down here in the first place. Duane probably thought she’d come looking for a fun time and was going home disappointed. She drove up the alley and turned onto Euclid and pulled up towards the bar.

      Duane was on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. Luisa pressed the button for the passenger-side window. “You need a ride someplace?” she yelled.

      He reacted with such surprise that the cigarette sprang sideways from his hand and hit a building, showering orange sparks.

      “You need a ride someplace?” she said again, stretching painfully to keep her foot on the brake while she leaned and opened the door.

      Duane hesitated and then got in.

      “You scared me,” he said.

      She stepped on the gas. “What are you, paranoid or something?”

      “Yeah. Paranoid.” He leaned back in the seat, reached out the open window, and adjusted the extra mirror. “My life’s gotten kind of weird lately.” He pushed the mirror every which way. “Do you know Thomas Pynchon?”

      “No,” Luisa said. “Do you know Stacy Montefusco?”

      “Who?”

      “Edgar Voss?”

      “Just the name.”

      “Sara Perkins?”

      “Nope.”

      “But you knew who I was?”

      He stopped playing with the mirror. “I knew your name.”

      Well then. “I remembered you and what’s-her-face.” Luisa held her breath.

      “Holly Cleland? That was years ago.”

      “Oh. Hey, where are we going?”

      “Take a left at Lindell. I live right off Delmar in U-City.”

      So she was driving him home. They’d see about that.

      “I didn’t pay for my beer,” Duane said.

      She decided to let him live with that remark. She drove augustly, queen of the road, up Lindell. The silence crept along the floor between them. A minute went by.

      “So are you still paranoid?” she said.

      “Only around doors.”

      “What?”

      “Doors.”

      “Oh.” She wasn’t following.

      Duane cleared his throat. “What kinds of things are you taking?”

      “Taking?” she said coolly. They were in downtown University City now, riding a wave of green lights.

      He cleared his throat more strenuously. “At school.”

      “Are the open windows bothering you?”

      “No.”

      “We can close them.”

      “No.”

      “I was kind of mad about the frost last week.” She just tossed this out. “It destroyed most of the bugs you can catch with a net. Basically I’m a net person. I mean, when I’m collecting. I had entomology last fall, and if you’re good with nets you can really prosper. But Mr. Benson started thinking I was his protégée or something. He came up to me in April and he asked me if I wanted to go collecting larval stages with him. Larvull stages. I’d hardly talked to him since first quarter. He thought it was some kind of treat. He was asking me to go collecting larval stages, because of my special interest in bugs.”

      Duane craned his neck.

      She guessed they were passing his street. “So we go out at about six in the morning to this pond near Fenton, and the first thing I think is oh god he’s going to molest me and dump me in the pond. He’s kind of creepy-looking to begin with. I could just see the headlines, you know, BUGGER BUGGERS BUGGER, DROWNS HER IN LAKE.”

      She’d thought this up in April. Duane laughed.

      “But instead he just gives me these special rubber boots that are about forty sizes too big for me, and then we start wading into this gloop with his special device for collecting larvae. He dips down in the water—I mean, it’s absolute gloop, I think no wonder it’s full of bugs. He dips down and the first thing he drags up is this disgusting little organism, I don’t know, some rare gadfly larva, which he shoves in my face and says, ‘Would you like to have it?’ Special treat, see. I’m about to woof it. I say, ‘That?’ I’ve probably mortally offended him, which is fine with me because it means he’ll never invite me again. With larvae and me, it’s no thank you. The first thing he’d said was, he’d said, ‘I think this will be very interesting for you. To pursue entomology properly you have to collect all the stages.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s exactly why I’ll never pursue entomology.”

      “What about caterpillars?”

      “They’re