Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  Albie walked his bike down the street. Did he see himself in the Danish detective novels? In the postapocalyptic thrillers? Was there any chance the problem was that he put himself in the center of everything?

  That wasn’t the problem.

  When he got back to the apartment it was almost two o’clock in the morning. He went into their bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed, Jeanette and Fodé and Dayo all sound asleep. Maybe their subconscious minds had accepted that he lived there now and so no longer heard the sound of his footsteps, or maybe they were so dead tired at the end of their day that anyone could be standing in their bedroom now and they’d sleep right through it. Even with the shades down there was light in the room. That was New York. Nothing was ever really dark. Dayo was in the bed with them, between them, sleeping on his back. Jeanette had her hand on his chest. It was almost unbearable to watch other people sleep. Had she told Fodé what had happened? She would have told him she had a brother who died but what did he know beyond that? Albie had told no one. Not the boys on the bikes or the messengers he had coffee with in the mornings or Elsa in San Francisco with whom he had shared a needle. He had never mentioned Cal. Albie covered his sister’s foot with his hand, her foot and then a sheet, a blanket, a bedspread. He squeezed her foot and in her sleep she tried to pull away but he held on until she opened her eyes. No one wants to wake up to see a man in their bedroom. Jeanette made a noise that was small and choked, a sound of pure fear that broke her brother’s heart. Her husband, her son, they slept right through it.

  “It’s me,” Albie whispered. “Get up.” He pointed to the bedroom door and then went out into the living room to wait for her.

  6

  Leo Posen had taken a house in Amagansett for the summer. There was no view of the ocean, a person would have to write an entirely different kind of book in order to afford an ocean view, but it was a beautiful house with wide halls and sunny rooms, a porch swing the size of a daybed, a kitchen with an enormous table that looked like it had been pegged together by Pilgrims to celebrate a later, more prosperous Thanksgiving. The house belonged to an actress who was shooting a movie in Poland for the summer, and summer was the only time she used it. The real estate broker had made it clear that this property was never rented, but the actress was a great admirer of Leo’s. In fact, she was hoping for a part in the movie of Commonwealth. She wanted to play the doctor who was having the affair, and hoped that Leo, surrounded by her pretty things, her pictures, would think of her.

  In the spirit of full disclosure, Leo told the broker there was no movie deal.

  The broker was stopped by this. Even she, who knew next to nothing about the movie business, knew that the rights should have been snapped up before publication. For the briefest instant she wondered if the option for Commonwealth was something she herself could acquire. “Don’t worry about that,” the broker said. “When they do make the movie she’s still going to want the part.”

  Leo had rented the house in hopes that he would spend the summer working on a new novel, the one his literary agent had sold to his publisher without so much as an outline while Commonwealth was ringing the slot machines. He had also rented the house in hopes of pleasing Franny. He’d told her she wouldn’t have to do anything but lie on the big down sofa in the front room and read all day, or she could ride her bike to the beach and read. “Sand, waves, beach roses,” he said, picking up a strand of her fascinating hair and letting it fall between his fingers. At night after dinner they would sit together on the porch and he would read her everything he’d written that day. “That doesn’t sound like such a bad vacation.”

  But it was a bad vacation. The problem, they realized much too late, was the glorious house itself, which sat atop a hill to catch the afternoon breeze while a great hedge surrounded the property for privacy. The fruit trees scattered over the wide lawn had been late to bloom because of the long, hard winter, so that even now in early June the cherry trees were weighted with dark pink blossoms. The jumbled flower beds that spoke of glorious disarray were tended by a gardener who came on Wednesdays, the same day a Peruvian man with a skimmer net came to remove the cherry blossoms from the swimming pool. There were five bedrooms with variations on the sloping-ceiling-dormer-window theme: window seats, puffy comforters, hand-braided rugs over floors of quarter-sawn oak. Leo Posen had told the broker that he was looking for something considerably smaller but she dismissed the idea. “Smaller will still be more expensive because of the deal you’re getting,” she told him. “You cannot imagine what this house would cost you if you were renting at fair market value. If you don’t want to use the extra rooms I suggest you close the doors.”

  That might have solved the problem were it not for the fact that nature abhors an empty bedroom in summer in Amagansett, especially when those rooms are owned by an actress and rented by a novelist. People wanted to visit. Eric, his editor, who should have been the one to hire a sentry to patrol the property line with a gun, was the first to call and say how nice it would be to get together outside of the city and talk over Leo’s ideas for the new book. Eric could come out Thursday, beating the rush, but Marisol, his wife, had an opening she needed to go to that night. He supposed that Marisol would have to brave the Jitney on Friday.

  Marisol? Leo stumbled for an instant but then agreed pleasantly to everything—yes, yes, a great time would be had by all. He hung up the phone and looked at the yellow legal pad in front of him, then he looked out the window. It was raining, and for a while he sat and admired the cherry trees, wondering if anyone had ever made a legal pad out of a cherry tree. Then he went downstairs to see if Franny thought they should drive into town for lunch.

  “It’s good that Eric’s coming,” Leo said to Franny. The rain was light and they sat outside under an awning at the café where they’d had lunch three days in a row. It was extremely pleasant. “I can ask him about finding you a job. You’re a terrific editor, you know, better than he’ll ever be, not that I’d mention that.”

  Franny shook her head. “Don’t ask him.”

  The waitress came by and Leo touched the rim of his empty wineglass. It was after two o’clock, a very late lunch. “If I don’t ask him he’ll figure it out himself. I might just mention that you’re looking for something. Or maybe I’ll mention it to Marisol.”

  “Eric knows me,” she said. “If he wants to hire me he knows where I am.” Of course, Eric had probably noticed that Leo and Franny didn’t live in New York, and in fact didn’t live anywhere for more than four months at a time, which would make taking on a regular job difficult. Anyway, Franny wasn’t sure she wanted to be an editor.

  “Eric knows you from dinner parties. He hasn’t gotten to spend any real time with you. That’s why this is going to work out so well.”

  When Eric came on Thursday afternoon he said he’d rather stay in for dinner. He’d been out every night that week, and anyway it would be so much easier to talk at the house. Eric was in every sense a wiry man, a runner with a small frame who must have once been told that blue complemented his eyes. Franny had never seen Eric in anything other than blue. He looked up the staircase, touching the banister with affection.

  Leo looked at Franny. “That would be all right, wouldn’t it?”

  She should have seen it right then but she didn’t. She was thinking in terms of one dinner, one night. Franny went into the kitchen and called Jerrell at the Palmer House to ask him how to cook steaks. He would just be at the beginning of his shift now. He would be chopping parsley.

  “Little House,” he said. “Get the fuck back here. You know can’t nobody else fill my cup.”

  She laughed. “I’m going to give up my summer to go get your lemonade at the bar? Be a friend and help me here.”

  Jerrell was standing in the manager’s office and the manager was staring at him. The cooks never got calls. He told her to rub a little bit of Old Bay on the meat and let it sit. “I mean a little bit. That shit is not for steaks.” Then he wa
lked her through the basics of asparagus and baked potatoes. “You buy the salad and a cake. Somebody out there’s got money. Don’t you go doing everything yourself.”

  Franny went to the grocery store, the butcher’s, the bakery. She went to the liquor store and picked out the wines, stocked up on scotch and gin. When she got back to the house she unloaded the car. Leo and Eric had begged off the trip to town, saying they were going to talk about the novel first, get business out of the way. She could hear them laughing out on the screened porch on the side of the house where Leo had decided it would be all right to smoke. Great, raucous laughter. Franny carried out two glasses of ice and a bottle of Macallan to be friendly. She was wearing her beach clothes: cut-off shorts and flip-flops, a plain white T-shirt. She was twenty-nine years old. They were playing house. She was playing hostess.

  “Eric, will you look at this girl?” Leo said from his chair, putting his arm around her hips and pulling her towards him. “Is she a dream?”

  “A dream,” Eric said, and then asked Franny if he could have a tall glass of Pellegrino or Perrier with ice.

  Franny nodded, glad that she’d thought to buy seltzer. She went back to the kitchen. They were talking about Chekhov, not the novel. Eric was wondering whether there was a market for a new translation, a series of ten volumes, all of it. She wondered which of the stories had struck them as funny.

  As a feminist, Franny had to ask herself why it was she’d made dinner for Leo and Eric on Thursday night without ever expecting that they would offer to help her, but that when Marisol came out from the city the next day in her embroidered linen tunic and red linen scarf, and sat down on the screened-in porch and said what she could really use was a glass of white wine, a nice chablis if they had it, Franny felt a little ping, like someone had just shot her in the neck with a rubber band. She had asked Marisol what she could get for her, and Marisol, digging in her purse to find her own cigarettes, so thrilled to see that someone else was smoking, had answered. What was the problem with that?

  “This place is gorgeous!” Marisol said, smiling as she took the glass from Franny’s hand. “But then I’ve never known anyone as lucky as Leo.”

  For much the same reason as the night before, it was decided that they wouldn’t go out for dinner that night either. Marisol gestured in the direction of the cherry trees. “Leave this place and go into town? Have dinner with all those people from the Jitney? Not on your life.” Marisol managed an art gallery in SoHo. The thought of staying in the actress’s house, listening to the actress’s crickets, was enchanting.

  Franny kept her face neutral but Leo was able to catch just a flicker of the problem. He clapped his hands in a single burst of good cheer. “We can do the exact same thing we did last night. Last night’s dinner was perfect. We’ll have it again. That shouldn’t be any problem, do you think?” he said to Franny.

  “Marisol doesn’t eat meat,” Eric said, using his nicest smile. Eric and Marisol were more or less Leo’s age, in the general camp of just past sixty. They had a son who was completing his residency in dermatology at Johns Hopkins and a daughter who was home with a baby.

  “Fish,” Marisol said, holding up her hand in a Girl Scout pledge. “I’m really a vegetarian but I’ll eat fish socially.”

  They looked at Franny, all innocence and expectation, the three of them nestled into the soft ivory cushions that covered the wicker chairs. She couldn’t call Jerrell again. He’d just tell her she was a fucking idiot. For fish she’d have to call her mother. “Anything else?” Franny asked.

  Eric nodded. “Something crunchy? Some nuts or little crackers, maybe a mix?”

  “Bar snacks,” Franny said, and went to the kitchen to find her keys.

  This was not the way things went between Leo and Franny. Their relationship, which had been going on five years, was built on admiration and mutual disbelief. After all this time he could not believe that she was with him: not only was she young (not just younger but categorically young) and more beautiful than he had any right to deserve at this point, but she was the cable on which he had pulled himself hand over hand back into his work: she was the electricity, the spark. Franny Keating was life. For her part, Franny could say the name Leon Posen, like she was saying Anton Chekhov, and find him there in the bed beside her. It did not cease to be astonishing with time. And more than that, he had found her life meaningful when she could make no sense of it at all.

  Which was not to say they were without problems: there was the future, always unknowable but, realistically speaking, doomed at some point by the thirty-two-year spread in their ages, and the past, because Leo was still technically married. His wife in Los Angeles was holding out for a cut of future royalties, a touchingly optimistic demand considering how long it had been since he’d published a book. Leo flatly refused to give up any piece of work he had not yet written. Then he had published a best seller that came with a sizable advance which had already earned out, prize money, and extensive foreign sales. As they entered into the new phase of royalty checks, his wife confirmed her belief to her lawyer that she had been right to dig in her heels.

  Leo should have been rich at this point but he had to keep accepting prestigious visiting-author positions at various well-heeled institutions just to make ends meet, and these positions made it nearly impossible for him to work on his new book. Yes, there was a tremendous amount of money but it flowed from a single river and into countless tributaries. He already had one ex-wife, truly divorced and behind him, to whom he paid a significant alimony, as well as payments to the wife who should have been his second ex-wife. She cost him a fortune. His daughter from the first marriage always needed money because she needed so much more than money but money was the easiest way for her to express those needs, and then there were two sons from the second marriage who refused to speak to him at all—one a sophomore at Kenyon and the other a junior at Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles. Their tuition, along with their every wish, was Leo’s command.

  Franny knew it was past time for her to figure out her life but Leo clung to her like a child to a blanket, and honestly, it was a wonderful thing to be needed by the person she most admired, to be told she was indispensable. It was infinitely preferable to applying to graduate schools when she didn’t know what she wanted to study, and so she tended to go with him, showing up in pretty dresses to faculty dinners at Stanford or Yale. Sometimes she would go back and work at the Palmer House for a couple of months, living in the apartment they kept on North Lake Shore Drive. Leo made the payments on her loans so she was safe, but she missed making money of her own. Anyway, it was good to see her friends. The Palmer House would always take her in.

  “This is madness,” he would say to her over the phone, too many drinks past the point at which he should have been calling. “I’m here by myself so that you can be a waitress? Go to the airport, please, tonight, first thing in the morning, just get on a plane. I’ll send you a ticket.” It was something of a joke between them, him sending her a ticket, though in this case he wasn’t joking.

  “You’re going to be fine.” Franny made a point not to say anything that mattered in conversations like these. Tomorrow he wouldn’t remember a word of it. “And this is good for me. I need to work every now and then.”

  “You have worked! You have consistently inspired me when the entire world failed at the job. I’ll give you a salary. I’ll write you a check. It’s your fucking book, Franny. It’s you.”

  Of course, when he was writing the book he said that wasn’t the case. He said that what she had told him was nothing but the jumping-off point for his imagination. It wasn’t her family. No one would see them there.

  But there they were.

  Other than the difference in their ages, and the fact he had an estranged wife, and had written a novel about her family which in its final form made her want to retch even though she had found it nothing less than thrilling when he was working on it, Franny and Leo were great. And it wasn’t as if she
begrudged him the novel, it was a brilliant novel, it was the brilliant work of Leon Posen which she had brought down on herself.

  But as long as anyone was making a list, there was one other problem that deserved mention, even if Franny refused to acknowledge it as a problem: Franny didn’t drink. Leo felt her abstinence as a judgment no matter how lightly she passed it off. He noticed it when they were with friends, and he noticed it when she went around to the driver’s side of the car after lunch in town because he’d had three lousy glasses of pinot gris. He noticed it when he was alone, when she was on the other side of the country. What she had told him was that she had been in an accident a long time ago, that she had caused the accident because she’d been drinking, and so she stopped drinking. He brought this up again on several occasions but he always felt like he was talking to the part of her that had gone to law school. Franny, he believed, was missing out on a great opportunity by not going back to finish her education.

  He would begin: “Did you kill anyone in this car accident?”

  “I did not.”

  “Injure anyone? Run over a dog?”

  “Nope.”

  “Were you hurt?”

  She gave him a deep sigh and closed the book she was reading, The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth. He had recommended it to her. “Could you give me a pass on this?”

  “Are you an alcoholic?”

  Franny shrugged. “Not that I know of. Probably not.”

  “Then why won’t you just have a drink, keep me company. You could have a drink in the house. I’m not going to ask you to drive the car.”