by Ann Patchett
After their father had finished the second day of the California State Bar Exam, he called the girls in Virginia to tell them how crazy people were. They came into the test lugging their own desk chairs, their lucky study lamps. One guy was so superstitious he came with a friend and together they dragged in the guy’s desk. Crazy! The test was long and hard, like running all the way from MacArthur Park to the police academy in summer, but that’s why you practice, so that when the time comes to perform you’ll be ready. Fix had been ready, and the test was behind him now. He was done.
Franny told Bert. She went into his study and shut the door before she told him, and even then she kept her voice down. “Dad took the bar.”
Franny and Bert got along, even when Bert and Beverly no longer got along, even though Caroline and Bert had never gotten along. Bert looked up from the stack of file folders in front of him. “Did he pass?”
“He just took the test,” she said. “But I’m sure he passed.” Four years of doing nothing but working and studying and going to school, sacrificing vacations and what money he had—he had passed. There was no other possible outcome.
Bert shook his head. “California’s tough. A lot of people have to take the bar a couple of times before they pass.”
“Did you take it a couple of times?”
Bert, who was quick to be brash with everyone else, was kinder to Franny. He looked at her there, her very straight shoulders, and gave his head a shake as if he were sorry about it, then he went back to his work.
Fix didn’t pass the bar.
Marjorie was the one who called and told the girls. “Nobody passes the first time. I know plenty of lawyers and they all say forget it. Your dad is just going to have to take it again. The second time you know what you’re up against. The second time it all makes sense.”
“Will it be the same test the second time?” Caroline wanted to know. Caroline was crying and she was trying to be quiet about it, keeping her hand over the receiver.
“I don’t think so,” Marjorie said with hesitation. “I think the test is always different.”
“So what did he do?” Franny said from the extension, knowing that it was up to her to carry the conversation now. “What happened when he found out?” Fix had asked Franny and Caroline to pray for him on the day of the test, and they had. They had asked the nuns at Sacred Heart to pray for him too, and still he hadn’t passed.
“We went to my mom’s and she made your dad a nice dinner.”
“Oh, that’s good,” Franny said, because Marjorie had a mother who could make anybody feel better about anything.
“She made him a gin and tonic and fixed a meatloaf. She told him it was a shame that he didn’t pass the test but at least he’d get to take it over. She said most of the tests you take in life you only get one shot at. I think that made him feel better.”
For the second test Fix made index cards. He knew a guy who had done that the second time and that guy had passed. Fix showed the cards to the girls that summer. He kept them lined up in a shoebox, divided by topic. There were more than a thousand cards. Caroline quizzed him even when the car was going through the car wash, except she wasn’t quizzing him. She was telling him the answers, holding the card flat against her chest. “The doctrine under which a person in possession of land owned by someone else may acquire a valid title to it, so long as certain common law requirements are met, and the adverse possessor—”
Franny stood at the long set of windows and followed the car as it passed down through the slapping clothes that dangled from the ceiling (continuous), through the soap suds (hostile), the rinse (open and notorious), the spray wax (actual). She let the car wash fill her, every part of her, but still it was not enough to bear away the four elements of adverse possession.
As brilliant as the index cards were they didn’t work, even though the second time he took the test he brought his own desk lamp. Marjorie’s mother made him dinner again and told him he was going to have to take the bar a third time, nothing to be ashamed of, plenty of people had, and so Fix sat for the test the third time, and when he didn’t pass it then, he stopped. No one talked about law school anymore, except insofar as it applied to Caroline and Franny.
By the time Caroline took the LSAT her senior year at Loyola, her Kaplan guide was held together by duct tape, highlighted in three colors, and bristling with Post-it notes. Test takers are a superstitious breed, so while she was careful to read updated versions in her study groups, the copy she read in bed in her dorm room before going to sleep was the one her father had given her that Christmas in Virginia. Fix’s and Bert’s mutual theory that a consistent practice over so many years would result in a perfect score had not been correct. A perfect score on the LSAT is 180. Caroline Keating came in at 177. She didn’t know where she had lost those three points but she never forgave herself for them.
* * *
Almost two weeks after Franny had so miraculously deduced that Leo Posen’s room number was 821, and had gotten him to that room and gotten herself out of the hotel without anyone’s being the wiser, she got a phone call at the bar. Ten minutes past six and every table was full, every barstool taken. People stacked up behind the people in the chairs, drinks in hand, laughing and talking too loudly while hoping that a seat would open up. One of the other waitresses, the girl named Kelly who had the ex-husband and the child, put her hand on the small of Franny’s back and nearly touched her lipsticked lips to Franny’s ear while whispering to her. Everything these people did was intimate, even the delivery of messages. “Phone call,” she said, her voice slipping beneath the din.
Franny had never gotten a phone call at the bar. Kelly got them all the time, from her ex-husband and her babysitter and her mother, who sometimes watched the baby. The child was never able to make it through the entire shift without facing some unsolvable need. Franny did a quick scan in her mind of all the people who might be dead, then realized there was no guessing. The room was so loud—competing voices, the eternal clink of glasses, Luther Vandross on the goddamn tape which meant that Bing Crosby was coming next. Heinrich held the phone straight out to his side as if it were some nasty bit of carrion scraped up off the road, while continuing his conversation with a customer. He kept his chin down slightly, his shorthand for disapproval. He didn’t need to say it. She put a hand over one ear as if that could actually block out the noise.
“It’s Leo Posen,” the voice said.
“Really?” she said. It’s not what she would have said had she taken a moment to think about it. She had reread First City since escorting him to his bed and that had kept him very present in her mind. Franny doubted he would have remembered any aspect of that evening, and even if he had, it would never have occurred to her that she would hear from him again. Thinking that Leo Posen might call her required a level of self-aggrandizement that Franny Keating did not possess.
“I should have called sooner.”
“Why?” she said.
“I put you in a bind. I never checked to see if you got in any trouble.”
“Oh, no trouble,” she said. She looked out over the bar and imagined they were his characters drinking there, Septimus Porter himself holding a highball glass, his girls making all the racket.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“I said it was no trouble. It’s really noisy in here. It’s happy hour.” Heinrich was staring at her and she put her hand over the receiver. “Leon Posen,” she said to him, but he only shook his head and turned away.
“Could you come to Iowa City on Friday?”
“Iowa?”
“There’s a party I have to go to and I thought you might like it.” He stopped for a minute and Franny strained to hear any noise from where he was calling but the bar was too loud. She pressed the receiver even harder against her poor ear.
Finally he started to speak again. “Actually, that’s not true. I don’t think you’d like it, but I thought I might be able to stand it if you came. I’d get you a
room at the hotel. It’s not the Palmer House but it would be okay for the night.”
“I don’t have a car,” Franny said.
“I’ll send you a bus ticket! That’s even better. You never know about the weather out here. I’d worry about you if you were driving. Would you mind taking the bus? I could send the ticket to you in care of the hotel. Franny of the Palmer House bar. What’s your last name?”
From across the room she could see a man at one of her tables holding up a glass, tilting it side to side. It should never come to that, customers having to beg for a drink. “Keating. Listen, I have to run,” she said, her eyes fixed on that one glass, how the ice caught the light above the heads of the crowd. “I’m going to lose my job again. I can take a bus.”
Franny was on the schedule but there was never any problem getting someone to take a Friday. That’s where the money was, and as soon as she had given the night away she felt the loss of it. Even if she wasn’t paying for her ticket or her room, the trip was going to cost her.
“He wants to sleep with you,” Kumar said when she told him about the phone call. He was still up when she came home from work, sitting at the kitchen table amid piles of books and Post-its. He seemed the slightest bit dejected, even though he had to expedite a review of an article that was a hundred pages long with over a hundred footnotes. He didn’t have the energy to think about Franny, much less sleep with her.
Kumar was right, of course—why else would anyone import a cocktail waitress from another state?—but somehow that wasn’t what it felt like. Leo Posen had waited two weeks before he’d called her, which meant what? That he’d tried to forget her and couldn’t? That the cocktail waitresses in Iowa weren’t putting out? “Maybe he likes my mind,” she said, and laughed at her own cheerful stupidity. “My charming company.”
He gave her a small, conciliatory shrug but said nothing.
She had woken Kumar up the night she met Leo Posen and told him the story just like she knew she would. It was nearly two o’clock in the morning when she’d climbed into his bed in the dark room and shaken his shoulder. “Guess who I met! You have to guess!” Kumar loved those books. They had talked about them not long after they’d met. He’d been looking at her bookshelves when she went into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee and when she returned with the cups he was holding her copy of Septimus Porter. He left the Updike on the shelves, the Bellow and the Roth.
“You read Leon Posen?” he said, just to make sure they hadn’t been left behind by some old boyfriend.
Franny and Kumar had met not long after coming to the University of Chicago. They sat beside each other in torts and decided to study together. They had become friends without realizing that soon there would be no time for friendship. Now that Franny was broke and sleeping on his couch, it was hard to say what was bothering him most about her trip to Iowa, that a woman he would have liked quite a bit had there been time was going to a party in another state with another man, or that he wished he were going with her, or that he wished he were going instead of her.
Leo Posen was waiting for her in the bus station in Iowa City. He was wearing his black topcoat and gray felt hat, studying the bus schedule that was mounted under Plexiglas on the wall as if he might be thinking about going somewhere himself. When he saw Franny coming towards him he smiled a smile much larger and more grateful than any he had given her at the bar.
“I didn’t think this would actually work,” he said, showing her for just a second the sweet, awkward overlap of his lower teeth. He held out his hand to shake her hand. She would remember to tell this to Kumar because if the plan was to sleep with her, if that was his sole intention, he would have kissed her right off.
“It was an easy trip,” she said.
“You don’t understand,” he said with great cheer. “I thought I was going to sit here freezing my ass off and watch every person get off the bus from Chicago and that none of those people would be you. I might even have come back to check the next bus from Chicago just to see if maybe I’d gotten the time wrong. After that I was going to feel like an idiot, tell myself how ridiculous it was to think I could send a bus ticket to a stranger and expect that she would get off the bus just because I wanted her to. I had it all planned out. In fact, I was so sure that you weren’t coming I had thought about not even coming to the station just to show you.”
“That would have been awful,” Franny said, because she realized now she didn’t have his phone number or his address.
He shook his head. “I was going to feel terrible and foolish and old for the rest of the day, and then I was going to call the department chair and tell him that given the circumstances I couldn’t possibly come to his party.”
“Well,” Franny said, not quite understanding any of it, “I guess I ruined your plans.”
“Oh, you did, you did! You shot the entire day.” He rubbed his hands together to warm them up and then sank them deep into his pockets. It was a nicer bus station than she expected to see, the floors were swept and there was no one sleeping on the benches in the waiting area, but it was nearly as cold inside as it was outside, the deepest cold of the windswept midwestern prairie in late February. The one ticket agent in his window wore a hat and gloves along with his heavy coat.
“Do you want to go to your hotel first, freshen up? Take a rest?”
Franny shook her head. “Not particularly.” It didn’t make any sense that he should be so surprised: of course Franny Keating would visit Leo Posen. The question then, she supposed, was to what extent did he see himself as Leon Posen? If he saw himself as a famous novelist then he would have known she would be there, but if he saw himself as someone she had met in the bar, well, he was right. She never would have gotten on a bus for anyone she’d met in the bar, not for a single other circumstance that she could think of. She wouldn’t have taken anyone else to his room either, in fact the thought of it gave her a chill that was in no way connected to the freezing bus station. Still, when she looked at him, she didn’t feel that familiar sensation of having made a real mistake. She only saw Leo, and was glad to be in Iowa.
He took the canvas bag off her shoulder, the one she’d used to carry her schoolbooks in back in her school days. It had always been so heavy. Now there was just a nightgown and toothbrush, a change of clothes for tomorrow, the volume of Alice Munro stories she’d been reading on the bus.
“It doesn’t seem like you’re planning to stay,” he said.
“Just the night.”
“Well then, I should show you a little bit of Iowa before it gets any darker.”
“I saw an awful lot of it on the bus coming in. It looks like Illinois, the parts that aren’t Chicago.” The ride had taken five and a half hours. In between the Munro stories, she’d watched all of those endless snowy fields poked through with a hundred thousand broken stalks of corn, and the long shadows those stubbled cornstalks threw across the snow in the late-afternoon light. She’d leaned her head against the window. Field after field after field, and not an inch of space wasted on something as decorative and meaningless as a tree.
“You’ve already figured it out then,” he said, and pointed to the big double doors that led out to the parking lot. “I’ll take you to dinner instead.” Together they stepped into frozen air, a soft sweep of snow just beginning to cover the recently shoveled walks.
Old snow was layered over the ground, the parked cars that hadn’t been disturbed, the tough little shrubs that would bear the snow’s impossible weight until spring. She could feel her own brittleness as the frozen air did battle with her coat. It was no worse than Chicago, it might even have been two degrees warmer, and still it was like walking into a wall of broken glass. She pictured those early settlers in their covered wagons crossing the prairies in search of a better life. Why did they stop here? Were the horses lame? Was it springtime? Were they so hungry that they brought their wagons to a halt and said, This is far enough?
“Tell me again why this is better
than Los Angeles?” Franny asked. She wished she could put her arm through his arm and lean into him. He was tall enough to block the wind.
“I’m not married to anyone in Iowa.”
“Let’s hope that’s true for most of the states.”
“That’s what I like about you. You have a positive take.” He put his hand flat on her back and steered her into an Italian restaurant which looked like it might have recently been a diner. “I’m overestimating,” Leo said, looking at his watch. “There probably isn’t time for dinner. There’s probably only time for a drink. Can you manage with just a drink for now? There’ll be plenty of food later on.”