The Twenty-Seventh City (Bestselling Backlist) (7 page)

“I have an apartment near Wash U. I just moved out of a dorm.”

“You go to school there?”

“I did, but I dropped out.”

He didn’t look like a dropout, but she was cool enough to say only, “Recently?”

“A week ago Tuesday.”

“You really dropped out?”

“I barely even matriculated.” He was slowing down, perhaps wondering which of the cars parked on Euclid was hers.

“Don’t you love that word?” she said.

“Yeah,” he said, not sounding like he loved it. “They gave me sophomore standing for my year in Munich—I was in Munich last year.”

“I just got back from Paris.”

“Was it fun?”

“Oh, non-stop, non-stop.” Luisa nodded him into the alley.

“This is your car?”

“Sorry, but. It’s my mother’s.” She stuck her hands in her back pockets and looked into his face. There was a meaningful pause, but it went on too long. Duane was very cute, his eyes deepset and blackened in the dim light. She remembered the bruise. “What’d you do to your eye?”

He touched his eye and turned away.

“Or shouldn’t I ask.”

“I ran into a door.”

He said this as if it was a joke. Luisa didn’t get it. “Well, thanks for walking me here.”

“Sure, you bet.”

She watched him head back up the alley. What an obtuse
person. Luisa would have jumped at the chance to jump in a car with someone like herself. She unlocked the door and got in, started the engine, gunned it. She was quite annoyed. Now she had to drive home and sit around and watch TV and be bored. She hadn’t even explained what she was doing down here in the first place. Duane probably thought she’d come looking for a fun time and was going home disappointed. She drove up the alley and turned onto Euclid and pulled up towards the bar.

Duane was on the sidewalk, smoking a cigarette. Luisa pressed the button for the passenger-side window. “You need a ride someplace?” she yelled.

He reacted with such surprise that the cigarette sprang sideways from his hand and hit a building, showering orange sparks.

“You need a ride someplace?” she said again, stretching painfully to keep her foot on the brake while she leaned and opened the door.

Duane hesitated and then got in.

“You scared me,” he said.

She stepped on the gas. “What are you, paranoid or something?”

“Yeah. Paranoid.” He leaned back in the seat, reached out the open window, and adjusted the extra mirror. “My life’s gotten kind of weird lately.” He pushed the mirror every which way. “Do you know Thomas Pynchon?”

“No,” Luisa said. “Do you know Stacy Montefusco?”

“Who?”

“Edgar Voss?”

“Just the name.”

“Sara Perkins?”

“Nope.”

“But you knew who I was?”

He stopped playing with the mirror. “I knew your name.”

Well then. “I remembered you and what’s-her-face.” Luisa held her breath.

“Holly Cleland? That was years ago.”

“Oh. Hey, where are we going?”

“Take a left at Lindell. I live right off Delmar in U-City.”

So she was driving him home. They’d see about that.

“I didn’t pay for my beer,” Duane said.

She decided to let him live with that remark. She drove augustly, queen of the road, up Lindell. The silence crept along the floor between them. A minute went by.

“So are you still paranoid?” she said.

“Only around doors.”

“What?”

“Doors.”

“Oh.” She wasn’t following.

Duane cleared his throat. “What kinds of things are you taking?”

“Taking?” she said coolly. They were in downtown University City now, riding a wave of green lights.

He cleared his throat more strenuously. “At school.”

“Are the open windows bothering you?”

“No.”

“We can close them.”

“No.”

“I was kind of mad about the frost last week.” She just tossed this out. “It destroyed most of the bugs you can catch with a net. Basically I’m a net person. I mean, when I’m collecting. I had entomology last fall, and if you’re good with nets you can really prosper. But Mr. Benson started thinking I was his protégée or something. He came up to me in April and he asked me if I wanted to go collecting larval stages with him. Larvull stages. I’d hardly talked to him since first quarter. He thought it was some kind of treat. He was asking
me
to go collecting larval stages, because of my special
interest
in bugs.”

Duane craned his neck.

She guessed they were passing his street. “So we go out at about six in the morning to this pond near Fenton, and the first thing I think is oh god he’s going to molest me and dump me in the pond. He’s kind of creepy-looking to begin with. I could just see the headlines, you know,
BUGGER BUGGERS BUGGER, DROWNS HER IN LAKE
.”

She’d thought this up in April. Duane laughed.

“But instead he just gives me these special rubber boots that are about forty sizes too big for me, and then we start wading into this gloop with his special device for collecting larvae. He dips
down in the water—I mean, it’s absolute
gloop
, I think no wonder it’s full of bugs. He dips down and the first thing he drags up is this disgusting little organism, I don’t know, some rare gadfly larva, which he shoves in my face and says, ‘Would you like to have it?’ Special treat, see. I’m about to woof it. I say, ‘
That?
’ I’ve probably mortally offended him, which is fine with me because it means he’ll never invite me again. With larvae and me, it’s no thank you. The first thing he’d said was, he’d said, ‘I think this will be very interesting for you. To pursue entomology properly you have to collect
all
the stages.’ I didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s exactly why I’ll never pursue entomology.”

“What about caterpillars?”

“They’re larval. They squish.”

The frosty glow of a Hammaker Beer sign flashed by on the right, trailing a liquor store. Luisa pulled over and braked to a hard stop by a hydrant. “Buy some wine?” she said.

Duane looked at her. “What color?”

“Blanc, s’il vous plaît. Something with a screw cap.”

She turned the car around and met him across the street. In a bag in the back seat there were big paper cups. She poured some of the Gallo into two of them and handed one to Duane. He asked where they were going.

“You tell me,” she said. Traffic sounds filled the car, the continuous kiss of tires and asphalt.

“My decision-making apparatus is paralyzed.”

“You talk funny.”

“I’m nervous.”

She didn’t want to hear about it. “What happened, you run into another door?”

“I’m not used to being out with people like you.”

“What kind of people am I?”

“Ones who go to dances.”

She blinked, unsure whether this was meant as a compliment, and put the car in gear. They’d go hit the warehouse site.

“What schools are you applying to?” Duane cleared his throat as though the question had left junk in it.

“Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, Amherst, and—what? Swarthmore. And Carlton. Carlton’s my safety.”

“Do you know what you’ll study?”

“Biology maybe. I guess I wouldn’t mind being a doctor.”

“Both of my parents are doctors,” Duane said. “And my brother’s in med school.”

“My father built the Arch.”

Ulp.

“I know,” Duane said.

“Did people talk about it at Webster?”

He turned to her and smiled blandly. “No.”

“But you knew.”

“I read the paper.”

“Is that why you remembered me?”

“You just never let up, do you?”

For a second she didn’t breathe. She made a right turn onto Skinker Boulevard, feeling agreeably mortified, like when her mother criticized her.

A cigarette lighter rasped.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” she said.

“Clearly.” Duane flicked sparks out the window. “I haven’t been smoking long. Like a month and a half. I came back from Germany and got grossed out by how conceited people are about their health. My family especially. I figure as soon as I’ve gotten Webster Groves out of my system I’ll kick the habit. In the meantime it’s kind of entertaining. These keep me company when I’m alone.”

“Then what are you smoking one now for?”

He threw it out the window. Luisa followed an Exxon truck onto Manchester Road. To the right, ambiguous amber signals glowed along railroad tracks on an elevated grade. Four blocks further east she swerved off the road. Gravel flew up and hit the chassis of the car. She drove back between a pair of metal sheds.

“Where are we?” Duane asked.

“Construction site.”

“Hey.”

She cut the lights. The chalky moonlit whiteness of the area leaped into prominence. On black trailers beyond the chain-link fence, tall red letters spelled out
PROBST
. Duane took a small camera pouch from his jacket pocket and got out of the car. Luisa followed with her paper cup of wine. “What’s the camera for?”

“I’m sort of a photographer.”

“Since when?”

“Since, I don’t know. Since a few weeks ago. I’ve been trying to sell some things to the Post-Dispatch.”

“Have you had any luck?”

“No.”

There was enough slack in the chain on the gate to let them slip through easily. They walked down a set of wooden steps to the warehouse skeleton, which was 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
.