The Twenty-Seventh City. Jonathan Franzen

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       5

      “Barbie?”

      “Hi. I was going to call you.”

      “Are you in the middle of something?”

      “No, I haven’t started yet. I have to bake a cake.”

      “Listen, did the package come?”

      “Yeah, on Monday.”

      “You know, the receipt’s in the box.”

      “She’ll like it, Audrey. She saw something similar the other day at Famous that she liked.”

      “Oh good. Do you have any special plans for tonight?”

      “Lu’s going over to a friend’s after dinner to spend the night.”

      “On a week night?”

      “It’s her birthday. Why would she want to stick around here?”

      “I just thought. You used to do special things. I just thought – How are you feeling?”

      “Well, I’m tired. My cold kept me awake last night. I could hear myself starting to snore—”

      “Snore!”

      “I’ve always snored when I’ve had a cold. It used to drive Martin crazy. That terrible infection I had, whenever it was, the three-month infection, I remember he’d wake me up in the middle of the night with this completely crazed look on his face and he’d say something like IF YOU DON’T STOP SNORING – Dot dot dot.”

      “Then what?”

      “Then he’d go sleep on the couch.”

      “That’s funny”

      Dropping the receiver into its stirrup, disposing of Audrey for another couple of days, Barbara rested in a kitchen chair. It was the first of November, and she had a spice cake to bake before Luisa came home. Although she was going out after dinner, Luisa had a keen sense of responsibility for juvenile ritual (a willingness to use hotel swimming pools, to eat the chicken drumsticks) and she might insist on doing something traditional as soon as Martin came home, something like watching home movies of herself (there were no other home movies) or even (conceivably) playing Yahtzee. At the very least she would demand (and receive) a cocktail, and Martin would bring down the gift Barbara had bought for him to give (a typewriter) and add it to the boxes from relatives and to Barbara’s own more ordinary (more motherly) contributions (socks, sweaters, tropical-colored stationery, Swiss chocolate, a silk robe, the much-discussed set of birdsong recordings, hardcover Jane Austen and, for the hell of it, softcover Wallace Stevens) which Luisa, demanding a refill (and receiving it) would unwrap. Then the three of them would make formal conversation as if Luisa were the adult which the gifts at her feet, their ready enjoyability, indicated she had not yet become. Grandparents would have helped tonight. But Barbara’s parents had just left for a month’s vacation in Australia and New Zealand, and even before Martin’s mother died she never left Arizona for anything but funerals. Martin himself would not help tonight. He’d been on the outs with Luisa lately. On Monday night he’d come home deep in thought (about the Westhaven project, he said), and at the dinner table, still thinking, still off in his world of timetables and work crews, he’d begun to grill Luisa on what she wanted to major in at college. The grilling went on for ten minutes. “English? If somebody with a degree in English comes to me looking for a job, I just shake my head.” He cut a neat rhombus of veal. “Astronomy? What do you want to do that for?” He speared a bean. Luisa stared hopelessly at the candles. Barbara said:

      “Leave her alone, Martin.”

      He looked up from his plate. “I was just trying to be helpful.” He turned to Luisa. “Was I bothering you?”

      Luisa threw her napkin in the marsala sauce and ran upstairs. She’d lost her appetite this fall, and lost some pounds with which (in Barbara’s opinion) she could ill afford to part. At breakfast this morning she’d looked much older than eighteen. Barbara had just awakened from a dream where Luisa was a skeleton in a stained white gown, and where the hands reaching to comfort her, the mother’s hands, were gray bones.

      “Can I make you some waffles?”

      “Can I have some coffee?”

      “Yes. СКАЧАТЬ