The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

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      It was raining hard by the time he got home. Reluctantly he left the warm and jazz-filled privacy of his car, shut the garage door, and hurried across the lawn to the house. Wet dead leaves were in the air.

      Upstairs he found Barbara asleep in bed with the latest New Yorker drooped over her stomach. The television was on, but the sound was turned down. He avoided the known squeaky boards underneath the carpeting.

      In the bathroom, as he brushed his teeth, he noticed some gray hairs behind his right temple, a whole patch of them. They held his eyes like a running sore. Why, he wondered, should he suddenly be going gray? He was ahead of schedule on the Westhaven project, somewhat short of manpower, maybe, concerned about the weather to a certain degree, but definitely ahead of schedule and not worrying about it, not worrying about anything at all, really.

      Then again, he was almost fifty.

      He relaxed and brushed vigorously, straining to reach the back sides of all four wisdom teeth, danger zones for cavities. Recalling that Luisa wasn’t home yet, he padded down the hall to her room, which seemed colder than the rest of the house, and turned on her nightstand light and turned back her covers. He padded out into the hall and down the stairs. He unlocked the front door and switched on the outside light.

      “Is that you, honey?” Barbara called from the bedroom.

      Probst padded patiently up the stairs before he answered. “Yes.”

      Barbara had turned up the TV volume by remote control. “Do I call you ‘honey’?”

      Forty-second Street may not be the center of the universe but—

      “How was the meeting?” she asked.

      “A total bust.”

      And I’d tell you the whole story but we’ve got censors—

      The picture crumpled as Probst turned off the set. Barbara frowned, briefly annoyed, and picked up her magazine. She was wearing her reading glasses and a pale blue nightgown through which he could just make out her breasts, their tangential trajectories, their dense brown aureoles. Her hair, which lately she’d been letting grow a little longer, fell in a broad S-curve across the right side of her face, shading her eyes from the reading lamp.

      When he climbed into bed she listed towards the center of the mattress but kept her eyes on the page. He couldn’t believe she was really concentrating this hard. Hadn’t she been asleep two minutes ago? He fanned a stack of magazines on the nightstand and selected an unread National Geographic. On the cover was a smiling stone Buddha with sightless stone eyes. “Your brother-in-law missed the meeting,” he told Barbara. “It’s the kind of favor I’ve really come to appreciate.”

      Barbara shrugged. Her older sister Audrey was married to Rolf Ripley, one of St. Louis’s more prominent industrialists. Neither Probst nor Barbara enjoyed Rolf’s company (to put it mildly) but Barbara felt a responsibility towards Audrey, who was emotionally disaster-prone, and so Probst, in turn, was required to be civil to Rolf. They had a weekly tennis date at the old Racquet Club. They’d played this morning and Rolf had slaughtered him. He frowned. If Rolf had time for tennis, then why not Municipal Growth?

      “Do you have any idea where he was? Did you talk to Audrey today?”

      “Yesterday.”

      “And?”

      “And what?”

      “Did they have any plans for tonight?”

      Barbara pulled off her glasses and turned to him. “Rolf is seeing another woman. Yet again. Don’t ask me any more questions.”

      Probst looked away. He felt a curious lack of outrage. Barbara always got mad enough at Rolf for the two of them combined; he’d ceased to bother. Rolf ran the Ripleycorp electrical appliances empire (only Wismer Aeronautics had a longer payroll) and was acknowledged to be the grand financial wizard of St. Louis, but he had the habits of an idle playboy and a seedy slenderness to match. About ten years ago he’d begun to speak with a British accent. The accent grew thicker and thicker, as if with each of his affairs. He was too weird to really offend Probst.

      “And here we played tennis this morning,” he said. “Where’s Lu?”

      “I’m surprised she isn’t here. I told her to be in early. Her cold’s getting worse.”

      “She’s out with Alan?”

      “Good grief, Martin.”

      “Of course, of course, of course,” he said. Luisa had terminated her relationship with Alan. “So where is she?”

      “I have no idea.”

      “What do you mean you have no idea?”

      “Just that. I don’t know.”

      “Well didn’t you ask her?”

      “I was up here when she left. She said she wouldn’t be gone long.”

      “When was that?”

      “Around seven. Not long after you left.”

      “It’s almost midnight.”

      A page turned. Rain was splashing on the windows and pouring through the gutters.

      “I thought it was our policy to know where she is.”

      “Martin, I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking. Just let me read for a while, all right?”

      “All right. All right. I’ve got policy coming out of my ears, I’m sorry.”

      Practically, in appearance, in the verifiable fact of never having sinned much, Probst had an undeniable claim to moral superiority over Rolf Ripley. From the very beginning his ambitions had kept him moving like a freight train, hurried and undeviating. By the time he was twenty, his married friends had to take steps to make sure he got out for dinner at least once a month. Chief among these early friends was Jack DuChamp, a neighbor of Probst’s and a sharer of his loneliness at McKinley High. Jack had been one of those boys who from puberty onwards want nothing more than to be wise older men like their fathers. Marriage and maturity were Jack’s gospel, and Probst, inevitably, was one of the first savages he tried to convert. The attempt had begun in earnest on a muggy Friday night in July, in the tiny house that Jack and his wife Elaine were renting. Jack’s chest still had its matrimonial swell. All through dinner he smiled at Probst as though 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?”

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