The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

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.

       6

      Singh was all smiles; like a boy inventor, he’d used the word “results” a dozen times in half an hour. Blinking the eternal clove smoke from his eyes, he pressed the Rewind button on the tape deck, puffed, and tapped his ash onto Jammu’s office carpeting. With a lazy toe he smeared the ash to dust. He had just played, for Jammu, the scene of the arrival of Luisa Probst at the apartment of her boyfriend Duane Thompson, and then the recording of a phone call shortly following her arrival: an exchange between Thompson and Barbara Probst. “Tell her I called,” Barbara had said. “She does have our number, I believe. And if you change your mind about tomorrow, just come on over. We’d like to have you.”

      Jammu had bitten off so much thumbnail that it seemed only a single layer of cells kept the red flesh from bleeding. Though not intense, the pain was like an itch, inviting aggravation. She pressed the rough end of the nail into the exposed flesh and felt the pressure far away, in her anus.

      She’d never heard Barbara Probst’s voice before, or any local voice that sounded so aware of the wiretap and so contemptuous of its presence. The voice was controlled and dispassionate, its tones unmelodious but pure, as if in the woman’s throat there were a low-pass filter that eliminated the overtones, the rasp and tremor, the nasals, flutter, fear. The clarity made Jammu anxious. Not once in five months had she considered that there might be hidden elements of control in St. Louis, that behind Martin Probst there might stand not a twangy Bunny or a vapid Biz but a woman with a voice like her own. How could a voice like Barbara’s