The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

looked at her. “What color?”

      “Blanc, s’il vous plaît. Something with a screw cap.”

      She turned the car around and met him across the street. In a bag in the back seat there were big paper cups. She poured some of the Gallo into two of them and handed one to Duane. He asked where they were going.

      “You tell me,” she said. Traffic sounds filled the car, the continuous kiss of tires and asphalt.

      “My decision-making apparatus is paralyzed.”

      “You talk funny.”

      “I’m nervous.”

      She didn’t want to hear about it. “What happened, you run into another door?”

      “I’m not used to being out with people like you.”

      “What kind of people am I?”

      “Ones who go to dances.”

      She blinked, unsure whether this was meant as a compliment, and put the car in gear. They’d go hit the warehouse site.

      “What schools are you applying to?” Duane cleared his throat as though the question had left junk in it.

      “Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Amherst, and—what? Swarthmore. And Carlton. Carlton’s my safety.”

      “Do you know what you’ll study?”

      “Biology maybe. I guess I wouldn’t mind being a doctor.”

      “Both of my parents are doctors,” Duane said. “And my brother’s in med school.”

      “My father built the Arch.”

      Ulp.

      “I know,” Duane said.

      “Did people talk about it at Webster?”

      He turned to her and smiled blandly. “No.”

      “But you knew.”

      “I read the paper.”

      “Is that why you remembered me?”

      “You just never let up, do you?”

      For a second she didn’t breathe. She made a right turn onto Skinker Boulevard, feeling agreeably mortified, like when her mother criticized her.

      A cigarette lighter rasped.

      “You shouldn’t smoke,” she said.

      “Clearly.” Duane flicked sparks out the window. “I haven’t been smoking long. Like a month and a half. I came back from Germany and got grossed out by how conceited people are about their health. My family especially. I figure as soon as I’ve gotten Webster Groves out of my system I’ll kick the habit. In the meantime it’s kind of entertaining. These keep me company when I’m alone.”

      “Then what are you smoking one now for?”

      He threw it out the window. Luisa followed an Exxon truck onto Manchester Road. To the right, ambiguous amber signals glowed along railroad tracks on an elevated grade. Four blocks further east she swerved off the road. Gravel flew up and hit the chassis of the car. She drove back between a pair of metal sheds.

      “Where are we?” Duane asked.

      “Construction site.”

      “Hey.”

      She cut the lights. The chalky moonlit whiteness of the area leaped into prominence. On black trailers beyond the chain-link fence, tall red letters spelled out PROBST. Duane took a small camera pouch from his jacket pocket and got out of the car. Luisa followed with her paper cup of wine. “What’s the camera for?”

      “I’m sort of a photographer.”

      “Since when?”

      “Since, I don’t know. Since a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying to sell some things to the Post-Dispatch.”

      “Have you had any luck?”

      “No.”

      There was enough slack in the chain on the gate to let them slip through easily. They walked down a set of wooden steps to the warehouse skeleton, which was three hundred feet long and nearly that deep. Vertical steel members punctuated the structure every twenty feet or so, and here and there a prefabricated staircase rose pointlessly to the top plane of beams. Light bulbs were strung on posts above the foundation.

      “You can’t take pictures here.”

      “Why not?”

      “We’re not supposed to be here.”

      All around them lay hasty piles of plywood pouring forms and bundles of reinforcing rods, knobby and sagging. Duane’s sneakers made soft pings on the undamped metal as he ran up a staircase. Luisa thought of her parents at the movies. They’d gone to see Harold and Maude. She imagined her mother laughing and her father watching stone-faced.

      Through the iron parallelograms above her she could make out the W of Cassiopeia. To the south, two vertical strings of TV-tower lights competed in the night like the stations they belonged to. Trucks rumbled by on Manchester Road, and Luisa swayed in the darkness, and drank her wine, her eyes on Duane.

      The next morning she woke up at seven o’clock. Her father was leaving for work and then tennis, his Saturday routine, and she could hear him whistling in the bathroom. The tune was familiar. It was the theme from I Love Lucy.

      In the kitchen she found her mother reading the stock-market pages of the Post, her coffee cup empty. She was chewing her nails as she had every morning for the last nine years in lieu of a cigarette. “You’re up early,” she said.

      Luisa dropped into a chair. “I’m sick.”

      “You have a cold?”

      “What else?” She reached for a waiting glass of orange juice and coughed decrepitly.

      “You were out pretty late.”

      “I was with this guy from school.” She explained, in sentence fragments, what had happened at the bar. She rested her face on her palm, her elbow on the checkered tablecloth.

      “Were you drinking?”

      “This is not a hangover, Mother. This is the real thing.”

      “Maybe you should go back to bed.”

      She didn’t want to. Her bed was burning hot.

      “Can I make you some breakfast?”

      “Yes please.”

      She was in her room watching Bullwinkle when her father returned from the courts. He was still whistling the theme from I Love Lucy. His face appeared at her door, pink with tennis. “Your mother tells me you’re sick.”

      She rolled onto her back and made an effort to be friendly. “I’m feeling a little better now.”

      “Getting up is always the worst.” Daddy was sententious.

      “Uh huh. Did you win?”

      He smiled. “Your uncle’s a very good player.” His eyes grew distant, his smile false. Uncle Rolf always beat him.

      “How was the movie?” she asked.

      “Oh, very funny. A good choice. Your mother loved it.”

      “What about you?”

      “I liked the Maude character. She was very well done.” He paused. “I’m going to take a shower. Will you be down for lunch?”

      Sick of records and TV, she spent the early afternoon simply kneeling by the window, her chin on the cleft between her clasped fingers. The trees were in motion, and puffy white clouds were in the sky. Mr. LeMaster across the street was doing his best to rake leaves. A man in a blue van threw the weekend