Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  “Hello,” he said. Leon Posen, sitting two seats away from her. He was wearing a dark-gray suit and a white shirt with only the top button of his collar undone. He may well have had a tie folded in his pocket. Had he reached out his hand and she reached out her hand their fingers very easily could have touched. As a rule Franny didn’t pay attention to the people at the bar. They were people who had chosen not to take a table and therefore were not her responsibility. She had no idea how long he’d been sitting there. Ten minutes? An hour?

  “Hello,” she said.

  “You’re shorter than you were,” he said.

  “Am I?”

  “You’ve taken off your shoes.”

  Franny looked down at the sore red curve bitten into the top of either foot, clearly visible through her stockings. It was an impression that stayed for hours after she was home. “Yes.”

  He nodded. His hair was iron gray, sheeplike. Effort must have gone into combing it down. “It’s a nice effect but I’d think it would destroy your feet after a while.”

  “You get used to it,” Franny said, and thought of Fred, and how he had told her she’d get used to it. She made herself listen now as a way of orienting herself in the world, in the bar where she stood across from Leon Posen. Lou Rawls was singing “Nobody But Me,” which was funny because that was the one song in the rotation she never got tired of, the perfect union of nouns and verbs. I’ve got no chauffeur to chauffeur me. I’ve got no servant to serve my tea.

  Leon Posen nodded, his fingertips resting on a drained glass of ice. Franny was shaping the story in her head even as he was sitting in front of her. She was thinking of how she would pull out her copies of First City and Septimus Porter as soon as she got home. She would go back over the parts she had underlined in college and read them again. Then she would wake Kumar up and tell him she had talked to Leon Posen in the bar, and how he had asked her about her shoes. Kumar, who was a genius when it came to not being interested in anything, would want to hear every detail, and when she was finished he would tell her to start again. Even as it was happening, she knew that the story of meeting Leon Posen at the Palmer House was one she was going to tell for a long time. If I hadn’t gone to law school in Chicago and then dropped out, I wouldn’t even have been working in the bar. She would tell that to her father and to Bert.

  But Leon Posen hadn’t finished. He was still in front of her, waiting for her attention while she imagined him. “Why get used to it?”

  “What?” She had lost her place in the conversation.

  “The shoes.” He looked like his pictures, the nose taking up all the real estate, and then the soft, hooded eyes. His face was a caricature of his face, a face that was meant to be sketched beside a book review in The New Yorker.

  “Well, you have to, the shoes are part of the uniform, and you wear the uniform because you make more money.” And though she wouldn’t mention it, the uniform was polyester, which you can laugh at all you want but it washed really well and didn’t need to be ironed. Franny never had to figure out what she was supposed to wear to work, which had also been the great thing about Catholic school.

  “You mean I’ll tip you more for wearing uncomfortable shoes?”

  “You will,” she said, because she’d been there long enough to know how things work. “You do.”

  He looked at her sadly, or maybe that was just the way he looked, as if he felt the pain of every woman who had ever crammed her feet into heels. It was a beguiling effect. “Well, I haven’t tipped you yet so if that’s the reason you might as well put your shoes back on. We could see what happens.”

  “I’m not your waitress,” she said, regretting it deeply. Leon Posen, step away from the bar! Come and sit at one of the little tables with the flickering candles. Make yourself comfortable in the rounded, red leather chairs.

  “You could be if I ordered another drink.” He held up his glass, rattled the lonesome ice. “What’s your name?”

  She told him her name.

  “I never meet Frannys.” He said it like her name was a favor to him. “Franny, I’d like another scotch.”

  It was her job to get him a drink if he was sitting at a table but not if he was sitting at the bar. They were not union workers at the Palmer House but the division of labor was ironclad. She knew her place. “What kind of scotch?”

  He smiled at her again. Two smiles! “Dealer’s choice,” he said. “And remember, I may be that rare individual who tips off the percentage of the bill instead of your heel height so knock yourself out.”

  She had just worked her left foot back into the shoe when Heinrich, fresh from his cigarette and breath mint, rounded the edge of the bar and came towards them. He was raising two fingers to Leon Posen, a gesture that asked if he was ready for another without troubling himself to form the question into words, as if theirs was a relationship so sacred it had transcended language. Franny, stepping out of her left shoe as she rushed to cut him off, all but threw herself into the bartender, who in turn was forced to catch her. He looked down at her stocking feet. Heinrich was a man of Leon Posen’s age, her father’s age, which was to say somewhere in the dark woods past fifty. He came from a more decorous time. She had no business being behind the bar in the first place, she knew that. It was his country.

  “I need a favor,” she said. It was easy to be quiet. She was in his arms.

  Heinrich turned to Leon Posen and raised his eyebrows slightly, formally, asking the question. Leon Posen nodded.

  “Come with me,” Heinrich said. He steered Franny down to the end of the long bar where the curaçao and the Vandermint sat on high glass shelves, waiting to be dusted.

  “That’s Leon Posen,” Franny said, keeping her voice low.

  Heinrich nodded, though whether the nod meant I know that or What’s your point? there was no way of telling. Franny had heard Heinrich speaking on the phone in German once, his voice more forceful in his native tongue. What language did he read in, or did he read at all? Was Leon Posen well translated in German?

  “Just let me take care of him,” Franny said. “I’m asking you.”

  Franny’s skin was so translucent it acted more as a window than a shade. She was the only waitress who tipped the busboys out the full ten percent they were due, and she tipped the bartenders with equal consideration. Heinrich had always thought there was something German about her, the yellow hair, the clear blue ice of her eyes, but Americans were never Germans. Americans were mutts, all of them. “You’re not a bartender,” he told her.

  “I can pour scotch in a glass.”

  “You have tables. I do not serve your tables because I find the customer interesting.” He was wondering how much to ask for. Too much briefly crossed his mind. They wouldn’t be the first ones to retire to the storeroom.

  “For Christ’s sake, Heinrich, I was an English major. I can recite the first three paragraphs of Nevermore from memory.”

  Heinrich had been an English major himself when he was a student in West Berlin, though for him it had been English literature with a concentration in nineteenth-century British. What a luxury it was to read Trollope, knowing that one wall away such a thing would be impossible. He wanted to say to her, Where have these books gotten us? but instead he reached behind her, between her shoulder blades, and ran his hand down the length of her corn-silk braid. He had always wanted to do that.

  It didn’t matter. At that moment she would have cut it off and given it to him as a souvenir. She went back to her place at the bar and took down a bottle of the Macallan, not the twenty-five-year but the twelve. She had no intention of sticking him. She put fresh ice in a fresh glass and covered it over with scotch. The silvered spouts stuck into the top of every bottle made pouring an absolute pleasure. It gave her accuracy, control. No one could convince her that this was the more difficult job.

  Leon Posen glanced down to the end of the bar where Heinrich was unloading a rack of wine glasses, wiping out every one for good measure. “So what
do you owe him?”

  “I’m not sure yet.” She put down the napkin, the glass.

  “Always ask the price. That can be the lesson of our time together.” He lifted his glass to her, Thank you, dear Franny, and goodnight. But Franny, who knew that this was the point at which the conversation ended and she was supposed to go and check on her tables, didn’t go. It wasn’t that she wanted to ask him about the books, or what he had been doing with himself since the publication of Septimus Porter twelve years ago. She had no intention of spoiling his night. It was that she could see her own life very clearly standing there in front of him, and her life was boring and hard. Going to law school had been a terrible error in judgment that she had made in hopes of pleasing other people, and because of that error in judgment she was in debt like some sort of Dickens character, like the kind of person who wound up on the Oprah show weeping, without a single skill to show for it, when into the bar of the Palmer House came Leon Posen. He was drinking the drink she had poured in his glass. The brightness of him, the brightness that she felt standing just on the other side of the bar, was more than she was willing to let go of. It was like throwing out breadcrumbs to the birds day after day and then suddenly having a passenger pigeon alight on the back of the park bench. It wasn’t just that it was rare, it was impossible, and she wasn’t going to make any abrupt movements that could startle him away.

  “Do you live here?” she said. What’s it been like, she asked the passenger pigeon, the whole world thinking you’re extinct?

  He looked behind his shoulder at the room, the great eyelids lifting. “At the Palmer House?”

  “In Chicago.”

  A couple came in, unbundling a tangle of coats and scarves and hats, and sat at the bar two stools away. Why, she wanted to ask them, with all the empty stools to choose from, would they want to sit so close? She could smell the woman’s perfume, dark and not unpleasantly musky, from where she stood. Then she realized they had meant to sit in front of her. She was the bartender.

  “Los Angeles,” Leon Posen said, after a great deal of internal wrestling. “Depending on how you look at it.”

  “Whiskey sour,” the man said, heaping their winter wear on the stool beside them. The pile of woolens immediately began to slide off and he grabbed onto the sleeve of a coat and then tipped his head in the direction of the woman. “Daiquiri.”

  “Up,” the woman said, pulling off her gloves.

  Franny wasn’t sure how to tell them that this wasn’t her job, but Leon Posen knew how to say it. “She doesn’t mix drinks,” he told them. “She can pour scotch in the glass but if it’s got two ingredients or more you’re going to need someone else.” He looked at Franny. “Is that fair?”

  Franny nodded. She represented herself falsely just by standing there.

  “I could make you a whiskey sour,” he said to the man, then, looking at the woman, shook his head. “But not a daiquiri. I bet you there’s a mix back there somewhere.”

  “I don’t know,” Franny said.

  “You should ask the German.” Leon Posen pointed the couple to Heinrich, who was still polishing glasses at the far end of the bar, ignoring with intent. “It would be a gift to him. He’s had his feelings hurt.”

  “You know a lot about this place,” the woman said. It was very late. Underneath her glove there was no ring.

  “It isn’t this place,” Leon said. “It’s bars.” He asked Franny the name of the bartender, and Heinrich, with ears pitched to frequencies higher than a dog could imagine, heard the question and put his towel down.

  “Whiskey sour,” the man began again.

  When they had placed their orders and Heinrich had made a tasteful showing of his skills with a cocktail shaker, the couple did indeed gather up their belongings and carry them off to a small table in the corner, a table that would have been Franny’s except for some unspoken exchange in which it was decided that Heinrich would serve the drinks as well, taking both the table and the tip.

  “I was born in Los Angeles,” Franny said, once the couple were mercifully gone. She’d been waiting such a long time to say it she wasn’t sure the point still had any conversational relevance.

  “But you had the sense to get out.”

  “I like Los Angeles.” In Los Angeles she was always a child. She swam the length of Marjorie’s mother’s pool, skimming its blue bottom in her two-piece bathing suit. The shadow of Caroline, half-asleep on her inflatable raft, was a rectangular cloud above her. Their father was just at the water’s edge in a lounge chair reading The Godfather.

  “You say that because we’re in Chicago and it’s February.”

  “If L.A.’s so awful why do you live there?”

  “I have a wife in Los Angeles,” he said. “That’s something I’m working on.”

  “That’s why people come to Chicago,” Franny said, “To get away from wives.” She was thinking of divorce law, thinking now there was a practice she’d never touch, before she remembered that she’d never touch any of them.

  “You sound like a bartender.”

  She shook her head. “I’m a cocktail waitress. I can’t mix a drink.”

  “You’re the bartender to those of us who don’t need their drinks mixed, and I’d like another scotch. You did a very good job getting that first one in the glass.” He studied her then as if she had only now stepped in front of him. “You’re taller again.”

  “You told me it might improve my tip.”

  He shook his head. “No, you told me it might improve your tip, and it won’t. I don’t actually care how tall you are. Take off your shoes and I’ll buy you a drink.”

  When had Leon Posen finished his scotch? It was a remarkable trick. She hadn’t seen a thing and she’d been watching. Maybe it had happened while the whiskey sour was being made. She had been distracted for a minute. Franny took the bottle from the counter behind her. “You can’t buy me a drink. It’s against the rules.”

  Leon leaned forward. “Verboten?” he asked quietly.

  Franny nodded. The ice in the glass looked bright and undiminished so she didn’t see the point in changing it. She didn’t measure out the scotch either, she just poured it in on top of what had been there before. The silver spout made her overconfident and she poured the scotch from too great a height and spilled some on the bar beside the glass. She wiped up her mistake and set the glass on a fresh paper napkin. In truth, she wasn’t a good bartender, even for drinks containing a single ingredient. “So why are you in Chicago?”

  “Maybe you’re an analyst.” He took his cigarettes out of his jacket and shook one free from the pack.

  “When I tell people I waited on Leon Posen they’ll ask me what he was doing in Chicago.”

  “Leon Posen?” he asked.

  This was a possibility she hadn’t considered, but it wasn’t as if she’d ever met him. She was working off jacket photographs, old ones at that. “You’re not Leon Posen?”

  “I am,” he said. “But you’re younger than my regular demographic. I didn’t think you’d know.”

  “Did you think I was just an extraordinarily helpful cocktail waitress?”

  He shrugged. “You could have been trying to pick me up.”

  Franny felt herself blush, something that didn’t usually happen in the bar. He waved his hand as if to dismiss the observation. “Strike that. A ridiculous thought. You’re a smart girl, you read books, and now you’ve poured a scotch for Leon Posen, but you should call me Leo.”

  Leo. Could she call Leon Posen Leo? “Leo,” she said, trying it out.

  “Franny,” he said.

  “It isn’t just that you’re Leon Posen,” she said. “Leo Posen. I’m interested in people in general.”

  “You’re interested in why I’m in Chicago?”

  Somehow this wasn’t going the way she had intended it. “All right, I’m not interested. I’m conversational.”

  He lifted his glass and took the smallest sip, dipping in his upper lip as if he
were only tasting it to be polite. “Are you a journalist?”

  She put her hand on her heart. “Cocktail waitress.” Actually, Franny had been saying this to herself every day in front of the bathroom mirror, after she brushed her teeth, before she left for work, I am a cocktail waitress. Practice had made perfect. She took the heavy Zippo lighter out of her apron pocket and flipped open the lid with her thumb. He leaned forward and then back, shaking his head.

  “No, you don’t look at the cigarette, you look at me. When you light a cigarette you have to look the person in the eyes.”

  So Franny did this, even though it was nearly impossible. Leo Posen leaned towards the little flame in her hand and kept his eyes steady on her eyes. She felt a rocking in her chest.

  “There,” he said and blew the smoke aside. “That’s how you get a better tip. It isn’t the shoes.”

  “I’ll remember that,” she said, and shut down the flame.

  “So I’ve come to Chicago to have a drink,” he said. “I’m living in Iowa City for now. Have you ever been to Iowa City?”

  “I thought you lived in Los Angeles.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t be slippery. I asked you a question.”

  “I’ve never been to Iowa City.”

  He took another sip to see if his drink had improved now that he had a cigarette, and obviously it had. “It’s not the kind of place you go unless you have specific business there. If you grow corn or trade in pigs or write poetry then you go to Iowa City.”