The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Post-Dispatch into the driveway. Luisa went down to fetch it.

      Her father was on his business line in the study, ordering eighteen beef Wellingtons for some kind of meeting. Her mother was baking in the kitchen. Luisa heard the rolling pin click and the cadences of the three o’clock news.

      The air outside was both warm and cold, like fever and chills. Mr. LeMaster, who thought she was spoiled, did not say hello.

      She unsheathed the Post and left all of it at the foot of the stairs except for the big funnies and the Everyday section, which had the small funnies. These she took back up to her bedroom and lay down with. She started to turn to the small funnies, but a picture on the first page stopped her. It was a picture of a black man giving the photographer the finger. The credit read: D. Thompson/Post-Dispatch.

      Luisa shivered. How could they print a picture like that? And so quickly? Duane had said he hadn’t sold anything.

      A FOREST PARK SATURDAY was the page’s headline. Other pictures gave glimpses of anonymous revelers, and in the background of Duane’s picture some kids were playing football on the field by the Planetarium. The lips of the man in the foreground were parted in derision. His finger was aimed at the unseen photographer. Shirts and Skins in the Park, the caption read. Benjamin Brown, foreground, has been unemployed since last November. The man, right, was unidentified.

      The man, right, was a hawk-nosed Asian in a turban, a passerby. He was glancing aside so severely that his eyes were all whites. He looked like a blind man.

      Eight hours later she and Duane were necking in the rain in Blackburn Park. When the rain got too heavy they went and necked in his mother’s silver Audi, which he’d borrowed for the evening. The windows fogged up solid. People walking by on Glendale Road couldn’t see a thing inside the car.

      Luisa was running a temperature, maybe a hundred or a hundred one, but she didn’t feel the least bit sick. It was Duane who kept asking if she had to get home. When she did get home, the house was dark; she was happy she was only an hour late. But as soon as she closed the front door her father ambushed her. First he scared her and then he was horrible to her. She couldn’t understand how anyone could get so pissed off about an hour either way. Before she fell asleep she decided to keep Duane to herself for a while, even if she had to lie.

      When she woke up in the morning the sun was shining and the air near her bedroom windows was much warmer than it had been the night before. After breakfast she told her mother she was going out birding with Stacy. She told her father she thought his pants were too short. Then she drove over to University City and picked up Duane, and phoned Stacy from a gas station and asked her to cover for her.

      In the middle of the big field in Washington State Park she spread a blanket and lay down. Half a mile away, further up the Big River valley, smoke was uncoiling from dying fires. Campers were pouring water on the coals, packing tents into trunks. For them it was the hour of damp sleeping bags and desolation, their thoughts turning to tomorrow’s practicalities while Luisa beamed in the sun. Her new boyfriend’s eyes were bright. He’d slept well, he said. He’d brought a camera, a larger one, a Canon.

      “Psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Birds like it,” she said. “Psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh. Psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh-psh.”

      “What birds?”

      “All birds. СКАЧАТЬ