The Twenty-Seventh City

“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?”

“Well.” Jack pulled a fatherly smile. “I’ll tell you. You’ve got a lot going for you, and I know for damn sure we’re not the only ones who can see that. You’re twenty years old, you’ve finally got a little money to throw around, you’ve got looks, brains …”

Probst laughed. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that I, personally. Jack DuChamp”—-jack pointed at himself—“kind of envy you sometimes.”

Probst glanced at the kitchen window. Dishes plopped in the sink.

“Not like that,” Jack said. “I’m a lucky man, and I know it. It’s just we like to speculate.”

“About what?”

“Well, we like to speculate—you ready?” Jack paused. “We like to speculate about your sex life, Martin.”

Probst felt his face go pale. “You what?”

“Speculate. At parties. It’s kind of a party game whenever you’re not around. You should’ve heard what Dave Hepner said last Saturday. ‘Satin sheets and three at a time.’ Yeah, Elaine was really mad, she thought it was getting kind of dirty—”

“Jack.” Probst was aghast.

A moment passed. Then Jack shook his head and gripped Probst’s arm. He had always been a kidder, a winker, a prankster. “No,” he said, “I’m only teasing. It’s just sometimes we worry you might be workin’ a little too hard. And – well. We know a girl you might be interested in meeting. She’s actually a cousin of mine. Her name’s Helen Scott.”

For nearly a month Probst did nothing with the number Jack had given him, but the name Helen Scott slowly gave birth to a vision of feminine splendor so compelling that he had no choice, in the end, but to call her. They made a date. He picked her up on a Sunday afternoon at the rooming house where she was living (she’d moved to the city to take a job with Bell Telephone) and drove to Sportsman’s Park to watch the Browns play the Yankees. There was nothing wrong with Helen Scott. As Probst had hoped, she bore little resemblance of any kind to her cousin Jack. She had a throaty rural voice. Her hair was waved and her skirt high-waisted in accordance with the fashion of the era, which, more democratic than later fashions, at least did not detract from any woman’s native looks. Probst’s preconceived love kept him from apprehending her any more specifically. They sat in the bleachers. The Browns, whom the Yankees immediately jumped all over, were the perfect team to be watching on a first date, their wobbly pitching and general proneness to error giving them an innocence that the Yankees seemed wholly to lack. Probst, with a pretty girl at his side, felt a charity bordering on joy.

After the game he and Helen went to Crown Candy for sandwiches and milkshakes (here he was able to observe that she had a wide mouth and no appetite) and then they stopped in at his apartment, which was actually the basement of his Uncle George’s house. There, on his daybed, with an alacrity that implied she’d been impatient with the long preliminary afternoon, Helen kissed him. As soon as he felt how she moved in his arms he knew he could have her. His head began to pound. She let him take her blouse and bra off. His uncle’s footsteps, gouty and halting, depressed the floorboards above them. She unzipped her skirt and Probst kissed her ribs, and pinched her nipples, which he had heard women found intensely pleasurable.

“Don’t do that.”

There was pain in her voice. She drew away and they sat up on the bed, panting like swimmers. Probst thought he understood. He thought she meant he’d gone too far. And then she really did change her mind; as he sat there, mortified and uncertain, she put her clothes back on, defending herself (as he saw it) against his hurtful male hands.

He drove her back to the rooming house, where she kissed him on the forehead and ran inside. For a while he waited in the darkness, somehow hoping she might come back out. He found it too cruel that his business accomplishments had counted for nothing on the daybed, that to be a man in the world did not make him a man of the world. And either then, as he sat in the car, or in later years, as he remembered sitting in the car—the location of the moment had the shifting ambiguity, now you see it, now you don’t, of a self-deception one is conscious of committing—he resolved to wait until his accomplishments were so great that he no longer needed, as the male, to make the moves. He wanted to be desired and taken. He wanted to be all object, to have that power. He wanted to be that great.

And so it happened that he was a virgin when he met Barbara and had been faithful to her ever since.

Barbara turned out her light.

“You’re going to sleep?” Probst asked.

“Yes. You’re not?”

He tried to make his voice sound casual. “No, I think I’ll wait up for Luisa.”

She kissed him. “Hope it won’t be long.”

“Good night.”

The bedroom windows rattled in the wind. It was 12:40, but Probst wasn’t worried about whether Luisa could take care of herself. He was all too certain that she could. Her control over her life was almost unnatural; the only thing that exceeded it was her control over other people’s lives, over the lives of boys like Alan. When Alan would come to see her, as he had nearly every day in the spring, she would talk on the phone with other friends for as long as an hour at a time. Alan would sit in the breakfast room smiling and nodding at the funny things he could hear her saying.

Rolf is seeing another woman. Yet again.

Luisa had dropped Alan in June, on her last weekend at home before flying to France. She made the announcement at the dinner table. It had seemed a very industrial decision, as if she’d been running cost/benefit analyses all along, and Alan had finally failed one. Though Probst approved of the decision, he didn’t let on. He believed that virtue grew best in an austere medium, in an atmosphere of challenging disapproval, and in Webster Groves, when one’s father paid himself a comfortable $190,000 annually and employed a full-time gardener and a part-time cleaning woman, austerity and challenges were hard to come by. He therefore took it upon himself to play the role of hostile environment for Luisa. He refused to give her a car. He said no to private school. He’d made her try Girl Scouts. He did not buy her the best stereo available. He imposed curfews. (She’d already trashed her weekend curfew of midnight to the tune of forty minutes.) She received a weekly allowance, which he sometimes pretended to forget to leave on her dresser. (She would go and complain to Barbara, who always gave her whatever she needed.) He made her cry when she got a B – in social studies. He made her eat beets.

Barbara had begun to snore a little. As if he’d only been waiting for this sort of signal, Probst heaved himself out of bed. He opened his closet and put on his robe and slippers. He was tired, but he was not going to sleep before Luisa got back. She’d gone out at seven and said she’d be home soon. It was nearly one o’clock now. It was the hour of Rolf Ripley, the hour of ugly men for whom strangers unaccountably shed their inhibitions, the hour of getting it.

Was Luisa getting it? Where was she? Her regular friends knew enough not to keep her out much past her curfew, so maybe she’d gone somewhere without them. She had a will of her own. She’d inherited Probst’s desires but not his disadvantages. She’d been born a girl—she was desired—and she hadn’t had to earn it. She hadn’t had to wait.

Downstairs, the air was cold, the weather seeping in at the windows. Mohnwirbel, the gardener, hadn’t put the storms on yet. Probst imagined Luisa someplace in the rain beyond the house’s walls, making it easy for some undeserving young man. He imagined himself slapping her in the face when she finally came in. “You’re grounded forever.” A spray of rain hit the windows in the living room. A hot rod turned off Lockwood Avenue and raced up Sherwood Drive. By the time it passed Probst it was doing at least fifty, and the blap-blap of the cylinders had become a hot moan. He felt a draft.

The front door was open. Luisa was slipping in. Turning back the knob with one hand and pressing on the weather strip with the other, she slowly eased the door shut. A hinge made a soft miaow. He heard a click. She switched off the outside light and took a cautious step towards the stairs.

“Where have you been?” lie said conversationally.

He saw her jump and heard her gasp. I le jumped himself, frightened by her fright.

“Daddy?”

“Who else?”

“You really scared me.”

“Where have you been?” He saw himself as she did, in his full-length robe, with his arms crossed, his hair gray and mussed, his pajama cuffs breaking on his flat slippers. He saw himself as a father, and he blamed her for the vision.

“What are you doing up so late?” she said, not answering his question.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“I’m sorry I’m—”

“Have a good time?” He got a strong whiff of wet hair. She was wearing black pants, a black jacket and black sneakers, all of them wet. The pants clung to the adolescent curves of her thighs and calves, the intersecting seams gleaming dully in the light from upstairs.

“Yeah.” She avoided his eyes. “We went to a movie. We had some ice cream.”

“We?”

She turned away and faced the banister. “You know—Stacy and everyone—. I’m going to bed now, OK?”

It was clear that she was lying. He’d made her do it, and he was satisfied. He let her go.

3

The thing was, Luisa had been bored. She’d been bored since she got back from Paris. She’d been bored in Paris, too. In Paris, people kissed on the boulevards. That was how bored they were. She’d participated in the Experiment in International Living. It had produced Negative Results. Her Experiment family, the Girauds, had apparently been specific about requesting a boy, an American boy. Luisa felt like a midlife “mistake” on the part of Mme Giraud. She’d eavesdropped on Mme Giraud in conversation with her neighbors. The neighbors had been expecting a boy.

Mme Giraud sold magazine subscriptions to her neighbors and also to strangers, by telephone. M. Giraud was vice-director of a Saab dealership. They already had two girls, Paulette (she was nineteen) and Gabrielle (she was sixteen). It was for the girls’ sake that Luisa was there. She was supposed to be fun. On her second night in France, her fun American Express card had come to the attention of the sisters. Paulette had snatched the card away and held it up before Gabrielle’s eyes as if it were a rare and beautiful insect. The girls smiled at each other and then at Luisa, who made goo-goo eyes and smiled back. She was trying to be friendly. When they looked away, she turned and scowled at the audience she often felt behind her.

The next day the three of them went shopping, which in French meant Luisa plodded in and out of dressing rooms while the sisters pulled item after item off the racks. They were good salespeople. Luisa bought 2,700 francs’ worth of clothes. Back at home, Mme Giraud took one look at all the boxes and suggested that Luisa go take a bath. At the top of the stairs, Luisa sniffed her armpits. Did Americans smell bad to the French? She thought she’d locked the bathroom door, but no sooner had she stripped and stepped into the tub than Mme Giraud came bustling in with a towel for her. Luisa cowered. She already had a towel. Mme Giraud told her that usually they didn’t fill the tub so full. Then she told her she’d help her return all her purchases tomorrow. Then she asked her how she’d slept the night before. Did she still have zhet leg? Luisa checked her legs. Oh. Jet lag. Then Mme Giraud wanted to know whether Luisa ate liver. It was like the French Inquisition: manges-tu le foie? By the time she left, the water was tepid. Luisa scrubbed her pits exhaustively. At supper, over thick slices of liver, M. Giraud asked what business her father was in.

“Mon papa,” she said happily, “il est un constructeur. Un grand constructeur, un—”

“Je comprends.” M. Giraud pursed his lips with satisfaction. “Un charpentier.”

“Non, non, non. Il bâtit ponts et chemins, il bâtit maisons et écoles et monuments—”

“Un entrepreneur!”

“Oui.”

She hated France. Her mother had urged her to go. Her father had urged her to go humbly, with the Experiment. She’d got what he paid for. So she was a snob; so what? She was bored with the Girauds. She should have been sitting in cafés with guys and colored drinks. Mme Giraud wouldn’t let her go out alone after dark. Paulette and Gabrielle were drafted to show her a good time, and they took her to an empty bar in the Latin Quarter where campy disco played on a jukebox. They watched her with eyes as hard and shiny as stuffed-animal eyes. Fun? Are you having fun? On Sundays the elder Girauds drove her places like St. Denis and Versailles. On weekdays she helped Mme Giraud with the garden and shopping, which was more than her own daughters ever did. Luisa even helped her with her subscriptions until M. Giraud got wind of it. She accompanied the family to a rented house in Brittany for two weeks and gained five pounds, mainly on cheese. She grew pimples in patches, little archipelagos. She missed her parents, her real ones. It rained in Brittany. In a field near the Atlantic, a sheep tried to bite her.

She was bored in August, bored in September, and bored in October now, too. It was another Friday afternoon. She walked out the high-school door into the sunlit dust raised by football practice across the street. The weather was fine because a harvest moon was coming, but Stacy Montefusco, her best friend, had been home for a week with bronchitis. Sara Perkins was getting a cold and was irritable. Marcy Coughlin had sprained her ankle in gymnastics the day before. No one felt like going birdwatching. No one felt like doing anything at all. Luisa walked home.

The kitchen radio was playing the four o’clock news when she came in. She took her mail from the table and went upstairs. The door to the sundeck was open. Her mother, around the corner on the lounger, cast a shadow across the graying rattan mat. Luisa shut her bedroom door behind her.

In her mail was a postcard of the Statue of Liberty. It was from Paulette Giraud.

LOUISA,

I AM IN THE UNITED-STATES! I AM COMING

I THINK TO ST. LOUIS! OUR GROUP STAYS

ONE NIGHT. ARE YOU HOME ON OCTOBER 20?

I WILL CALL YOU!

ALL MY LOVES,

Paulette

October 20? That was tonight. She threw the card aside. Mme Giraud must have told Paulette to call. Luisa didn’t want to see her. She put on some music, did a back-drop onto her bed, tuck and fall, and looked at the rest of her mail. There was another letter from Tufts and a thick packet of material from Purdue. She opened the letter from Tufts, and her mother knocked on the door. Luisa spread her arms like Jesus on the cross and stared at the ceiling. “Come in.”

Her mother was wearing one of her father’s white shirts, with the front tails knotted. She held her place in a book with her finger. “You’re home early.”

“There’s no one to do anything with.”

“Come again?”

Luisa raised her voice. “Everybody’s sick.”

“Who’s the postcard from?”

“You didn’t read it?”

“It wasn’t addressed to me,” her mother said. She had disgustingly good manners.

“It’s from Paulette Giraud. She’s coming to town today.”

“Today?”

“That’s what she says.”

“We should have her over for dinner.”

“I thought you and Daddy were going out.”

“We were thinking of going to a movie, but it’s not important.”

“I don’t want to have her over.”

“All right.” Her mother’s interest in the conversation withered: she seemed to sigh inaudibly, her shoulders going slack. “Suit yourself.” From a pile near the closet she snagged two dirty blouses. “I’ve got to change for tennis. Will you be home till dinner?”

“Maybe.” Luisa kicked her calculus book onto the floor. “Does Daddy have any other old shirts like that?”

“Daddy has fifty other shirts like this.”

Luisa turned up the stereo and waited for her mother to come back with a shirt or two. Ten minutes later she heard the BMW whirring down the driveway. No shirts. Had her mother forgotten? She went to her parents’ bedroom, and there, lying folded on the bed, were three of the shirts she’d had in mind. She struggled out of her sweater and put a white one on, knotting the tails and rolling up the sleeves. In front of her mother’s mirror she unbuttoned the second and third buttons and flipped back the collar. She had a good chest complexion. The shirt worked for her. She spread her hands on her hips and shook her hair back. Then she pulled down her lower eyelids and made blood-rimmed Hungarian eyes. She pulled on the corners and made Chinese eyes. She smiled at the mirror. She had nicer teeth than her mother.

At 7:30, just after her parents had sung their chorus of goodbyes, the telephone rang. A voice, Paulette’s, floated above the sounds of a noisy bar or restaurant. “Louisa?”

“Bonjour, Paulette.”

“Yes, yes, it is Paulette. Did you—receive my card?”

“Oui, Paulette. Aujourd’hui. A quatre heures. Merci beaucoup.”

“Yes, yes. Em, I am on Euclid Avenue?”

“You’re where?”

“Em, Euclid Avenue? It is close?”

“Um, no, that’s not very close. I don’t live in the city.”

“I am at a bar? Yes?”

“You can speak French,” Luisa said.

“This bar is called Deckstair?”

“Well, could you – Do you have any way of getting out of the city?”

“No. No. You would come to the bar, Deckstair? Yes?”

Luisa didn’t remember her English being even this good. But then, they’d hardly ever spoken it.

“Yes?” Paulette repeated.

Maybe her mother had made her promise to call. But she still could have broken the promise.

“Oh, all right,” Luisa said. She knew where Dexter’s was. “Will you be there in twenty minutes?”

“Yes! Yes, right here. Deckstair.” Paulette laughed.

Luisa tried to call Marcy Coughlin to see if she wanted to come along, but the line was busy. She tried Edgar Voss and Nancy Butterfield. Their lines were busy, too. The busy signals sounded faint, like the phone was out of order, but it obviously wasn’t. She wrote a note for her parents and gave them the name of the bar.

It was almost 8:30 when she reached the Central West End, the home of a variety of up-to-the-decade bars and restaurants and specialty stores. Luisa parked the BMW in the Baskin-Robbins loading zone and crossed the alley towards Euclid Avenue. Dumpsters yawned disagreeably. In the apartment windows above her the shades were drawn down so far that they buckled and gaped.

It was strange that a tour group from Europe would want to see St. Louis. Then again, the people Luisa had met in France hadn’t seemed to know what a boring place it was. Even the grownups had thought she must have a great old time living in San Louie and listening to the blues every night on a riverboat. People in Europe were convinced that St. Louis was a really hot town.