Commonwealth

by Ann Patchett

  She leaned over and kissed him then, as kissing was her best means of ending arguments. “Put your big brain to it,” she said kindly. “You can think of something better to fight about.”

  Franny went into the kitchen and called her mother in Virginia. “Fish for dinner,” she said, “four people, something I can’t screw up.”

  “Can’t you go out?” her mother asked.

  “It’s not looking that way. It turns out this house is the Hotel California. People walk in the door and they don’t want to leave again. I’d probably feel the same way if I wasn’t the one doing the cooking.”

  “You, cooking,” her mother said.

  “I know.”

  “Have you looked in her closet?”

  Franny laughed out loud. Her mother could go right to the heart of the matter. “Etro bikinis, a fleet of little silk slip dresses, lots of long cashmere sweaters, featherweight, shoes like you have never seen shoes. She must be the size of an eyedropper. You can’t believe how tiny everything is.”

  “What size are the shoes?”

  “Sevens.” Franny had tried to push her foot into a sandal, Cinderella’s ungainly stepsister.

  “If I came up I could help you cook,” her mother said.

  Franny smiled, sighed. Her mother had tiny feet. “No more company. Company’s the problem right now.”

  “I’m not company. I’m your mother.” She said it lightly.

  For a minute Franny thought how nice it would be, her mother on the other end of the sofa reading books. For the most part Franny went home alone to Virginia, or her mother came to visit when Franny was in Chicago working at the bar. The few times Leo and her mother had been together they were cool and polite. Her mother was younger than Leo. She had read Commonwealth, and while she was glad she got to be a doctor, she would have been gladder still to have been left out altogether. Beverly didn’t believe that Leo Posen had her daughter’s best interest at heart. She had told him that once when she and Leo were drinking. Franny’s mother was not what they needed to complete their summer vacation.

  “Please,” Franny said. “Just help me with the fish.”

  Her mother put the phone down so she could go and get her recipe for seafood chowder. “If you follow my instructions as you have never followed my instructions even once in your life you will be a tremendous success.”

  And oh, but her mother was right. They raved and praised. Eric and Marisol said they couldn’t have had a better meal in Manhattan. Franny’s mother had worked everything out, the salad with nectarines, which brand of cheese biscuits to buy, Franny was as impressed as her guests. But Leo again had failed to go to the grocery store with her, and none of them came into the kitchen to ask if they could chop the bell peppers, and when she came out to the porch to tell them dinner was ready, Eric, in the middle of another funny Chekhov story, had held up his hand so that she would know to wait until he was finished, but it took him nearly fifteen minutes to finish, and Franny could not help but think of the shrimp that were only supposed to simmer three minutes. By the end of the meal the guests were tremendously grateful, really, they couldn’t have been nicer, and Eric made a show of rolling up the sleeves of his blue linen shirt before he picked up the plates and put them in the sink, but that was it.

  Leo’s agent, Astrid, called the house on Saturday morning. Her secretary had called Eric’s office the day before on a matter having nothing to do with Leo and was told in the course of the conversation that Eric was at Leo’s place in Amagansett. Astrid had a house in Sag Harbor. She came out every Thursday night in the summer and went back Monday mornings. Did they really think they weren’t going to see her? Astrid said they were coming to Amagansett that afternoon. “They” included one of her authors, a young man of exceeding promise who was spending two weeks at her place while he nailed down a few last revisions.

  “I’ll give you the address,” Leo said with some resignation.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “Everyone knows the house.”

  “Astrid?” Eric’s face arranged into an expression of mild despair. He was working the crossword puzzle from the Saturday paper. He hadn’t shaved and didn’t want to shave.

  “She didn’t ask,” Leo said, though Leo liked Astrid. The very fact that Eric didn’t like her was proof that she was doing her job.

  “There goes lunch,” Eric said.

  Marisol came down the stairs in a red swimsuit and a wide-brimmed hat. “I’m going to the pool,” she said.

  “Astrid’s coming,” Eric said.

  Marisol stopped and put on her sunglasses. “Well, she lives in Sag Harbor. It’s not like she’s going to stay over.”

  Franny drove to Bridgehampton and bought lunch at a ridiculously expensive gourmet shop that sold prepared foods, put the food in the car, and then, struck by the clear and sudden understanding that no one would be leaving, walked straight back in and bought dinner. Leo had given her his credit card. The total for the two meals came to an unspeakable fortune. By the time she got back to the house Astrid was there with a pale young writer named Jonas who had shiny black hair and yellow linen pants. He ate twice as much as the rest of them put together. Franny realized sadly there would be no leftovers for tomorrow’s lunch.

  “Why reprint Chekhov?” the young writer said to Eric, taking both the herbed chicken breast and the lemon-poached salmon to his plate. “Why not have the courage to publish some young Russian writers instead?”

  “Maybe because I don’t work at a publishing house in Russia.” Eric poured himself a glass of wine and then topped off Marisol’s glass. “Oh, and I don’t speak Russian.”

  “Jonas speaks Russian,” Astrid said, the proud mother.

  “Konechno,” Jonas said.

  Astrid nodded. “He’s very involved with the refuseniks.”

  “There are no refuseniks,” Leo said. “They opened up the gate and let them out in the seventies.”

  “The refuseniks were my field of study,” Jonas said. “And believe me, there are still plenty of oppressed Jews in Russia.”

  “So shouldn’t I be publishing some young Russian writing about the refuseniks instead of an American who’s studied them? Wouldn’t that show more courage?”

  “You don’t publish me.”

  Eric smiled at so pleasing a thought. “Let’s call it a draw, shall we? Chekhov is my field of study, the refuseniks are yours. We’re both old news.”

  “Is that couscous?” Marisol asked Franny, pointing at the salad with the cucumbers and tomatoes.

  “Israeli,” Franny said, passing the dish. “It’s just bigger.”

  Franny’s premonition in the gourmet shop proved to be correct. Come dinner, Leo and the guests were still lounging on various sofas throughout the house. Jonas appeared to be working on a manuscript, or at least he had a stack of paper in his lap, a pencil between his teeth. It was odd to think he’d brought a manuscript to lunch. Eric came in from the pool and allowed that while the idea of more food had seemed impossible just two short hours ago, he thought he might be getting hungry again. At the very least he needed a drink.

  Leo looked up and smiled. “Now there’s a thought.”

  After a very long evening, in which Franny didn’t have to cook but did need to heat and plate and serve, after the consumption of an extraordinary amount of wine and then the raiding of the actress’s Calvados and Sauternes for after-dinner drinks (“Franny, make a note of what we’re stealing,” Leo said, rifling through the rack in the pantry. “I want to remember to replace it.”) when everyone had wandered back out to the side porch to smoke, Franny was left with a dining room that looked like Bacchus had thrown a bash. She drew in her breath and began to stack plates.

  The tall young novelist followed her to the kitchen. For a minute she thought he was interested in helping before realizing that he was in fact just interested. He was wearing glasses now, though she didn’t remember him wearing them earlier when he was reading.

  “My contra
ct is with Knopf,” he told her, picking up a wineglass and holding it in a dish towel. “Entre nous, I was hoping for FSG. Ever since I was in college I’ve wanted to be published by FSG, but”—he shrugged at Franny and leaned against the sink—“you know.”

  “They didn’t want the book?” she asked.

  Jonas looked hurt. “Money,” he said. “Everyone knows FSG never has real money.”

  Franny was rinsing the plates when Leo came in. “There you are!” he called to the young novelist. His arms were wide open and he was holding a highball glass in one hand. “I’ve been wanting to show you a tree.” He could bellow sometimes when he was drinking, and Franny wondered, with all the windows open, if the neighbors could hear him.

  “A tree?” Jonas said. His glasses were lightly steamed from his proximity to the sink.

  Leo put his arm around the young man’s shoulder and led him away. “Come and see it. There’s a beautiful night sky.”

  “Really, Leo?” Franny called after them. “A tree? That’s the best you can come up with?”

  Astrid didn’t spend the night but somehow the young writer did. Jonas said he was prone to car sickness if he’d been drinking and certainly he’d been drinking. He looked around the house and declared the entire situation straight-up Fitzgerald, so much so that sleeping over would have to be part of it. Astrid, who would have stayed herself had an invitation been extended, volunteered to drive back for him tomorrow around lunch.

  When the last of the actress’s Danish china had been returned to the glass-fronted cabinets and the zinc countertops had been wiped down and the trash taken out, Franny stopped to survey her good work. The houseguests had provided her with three days’ hard labor, but it was a kind of labor she was used to. Not the cooking maybe, but the refilling of glasses and the emptying of ashtrays, the straightening and fetching, the quiet audience to conversation. Tomorrow was Sunday and on Sunday it would be over. Franny felt proud of herself: she’d been a good sport. Leo would be grateful for all the many kindnesses she’d shown his friends.

  After a hungover breakfast in which everyone who requested eggs requested them cooked a different way, Leo announced that he had to work. He put his legal pad and pens and scotch and two volumes of Chekhov (Eric had convinced him to write the introduction to the new edition, though, of course, not until his own novel was finished) in a canvas tote bag and walked across the lawn to the tiny one-room cottage at the back of the property. With its little desk and single bed and overstuffed chair, its ottoman and floor lamp, it was easy to imagine that the place had been built for exactly this purpose: not to write, because Leo was not writing, but to get away from the hordes of moths that had been drawn to the house’s magnificent flame.

  “It’s good that he’s working,” Eric said to Franny. He was holding his coffee cup with both hands, looking wistfully in the direction where Leo had disappeared, the way a woman standing on the beach will look at the place on the horizon where the whaling vessel had disappeared. “We’ve got to encourage him, make sure he keeps at it. He can’t lose his momentum again.”

  Franny didn’t mention that there was no momentum because there was no book. She wondered what Leo had told him. “He will,” she said vaguely, “once everything settles down and gets quiet.” Could she ask him what Jitney he was planning to take back to the city? She looked at Eric, his gray hair long and curling, his glasses pushed to the top of his head. “Let me know about the Jitney,” she said. “I’ll drive you down. There can be a line on Sunday if you wait too long.”

  Marisol shook her head. “Friday was enough for me. I can’t even imagine Sunday.” She looked at her husband. “When are you going back?”

  Eric tilted his head back and forth as if he were trying to calculate a tip. “Tuesday? Maybe Tuesday. I’ll have to check and see.”

  Marisol nodded and pulled the style section out of the paper. “Well, I get an extra day. I came out a day later than you did.”

  Jonas arrived in the kitchen wearing green swim trunks and a T-shirt. “Can I just have coffee for now?” he said, squinting against the morning light. “I’m going for a swim.”

  Franny had so much to say, but in that exact moment she was distracted by the writer’s swim trunks, stunned by them. “Where did you get swim trunks?”

  Jonas looked down at himself. “These? I don’t remember. REI?” In the T-shirt, in the bright light, he looked no more than twenty.

  “They’re yours? You brought them here?”

  They were all looking at her now.

  “I brought them here,” he said. He plucked at the fabric with two fingers. “Are they okay?”

  “You brought extra clothes?”

  He caught her line of questioning and came back at his hostess with an ill-prepared defense. “I get carsick. And I don’t like to ride in cars at night. Astrid said it was a big house.”

  Franny had been at the market when they arrived. She hadn’t seen him come in with a suitcase. She would need to wash the sheets in his bedroom unless he wasn’t planning to leave. The phone started to ring and Jonas, in a gesture of independence, poured his own coffee and went out the back door.

  “I want to talk to my father,” the voice on the phone said.

  “Ariel?”

  There was no answer, because the answer would be that Leo had three children and two of them were boys and only the girl was speaking to him these days, so if a woman called asking for her father, then, yes, it was going to be Ariel.

  “Hold on a minute,” Franny said. “He’s out in the back. I’ll have to get him.”

  Eric gave her a look to inquire as to the nature of Ariel’s call but Franny ignored him. She crossed through the wet grass, beneath the cherry trees and past the pool where Jonas was already lying shirtless on the diving board, the cup of coffee beside his head. When she got to the cabin door she didn’t knock.

  “Ariel’s on the phone,” she said.

  Leo was stretched across the single bed with a volume of Chekhov in his hands. He looked up at Franny and smiled. “Would you tell her I’m working? Tell her I’ll call her back.”

  “Not on your life,” Franny said.

  “I can’t talk to her now.”

  “Well, neither can I, so I suggest you go down to the kitchen and hang up the phone.”

  She walked out of the cabin and to the back of the property. She knew where there was a break in the hedge and she took it: through the neighbor’s yard, down their driveway, and out onto the street, her flip-flops slapping against her feet. She wished she had her bicycle, a hat, some money, and at the same time she wished for nothing in the world but to be alone. Franny couldn’t help but believe that she had brought every discomfort she experienced down on herself. Had she done something with her life no one would be asking her to make them cappuccino, and had she done something with her life she would be perfectly happy to make them cappuccino, because it would not be her job. She would make the coffee because she was a gracious and helpful person. She could feel good about being kind without continually wondering if she were anything more than a nice-enough-looking waitress. She wished, as she approached thirty, that she had figured out how to be more than a muse, or, as her father had put it the last time she had seen him in Los Angeles, “Being a mistress isn’t a job.”

  Her father hadn’t read Commonwealth but her sister had.

  “There’s nothing particularly libelous about it,” Caroline said to Franny. “He’s covered his tracks.”

  “I’m grateful that you don’t review for the Times.”

  “I’ll put it another way: I didn’t enjoy it but I’m not going to sue him.”

  “You’re hardly even in the book.”

  Caroline laughed. “Maybe that’s what irritated me about it. Anyway, if I was going to sue I’d make it a class-action case, get the whole family involved.”

  “Well,” Franny said, “that would be one way to get us all together again.”

  It was funny how much Franny
missed Caroline now. For as much as they’d hated each other growing up, a peculiar fondness had crept in somewhere along the way. Franny and Caroline knew all the same stories. Caroline practiced patent law in Silicon Valley. There was nothing harder than that. She was married to a software designer named Wharton. Wharton was his last name but no one ever called him anything else because his first name was Eugene. Franny believed that Wharton had softened her sister up. He made Caroline laugh. Franny had no memory of her sister ever laughing about anything when they were growing up, at least never in front of her. Caroline and Wharton had a baby named Nick.

  Franny got to spend a lot of time with Caroline the semester Leo was teaching at Stanford. Caroline still badgered her about going back to law school, and Franny was able to believe that the badgering came from a place of affection.

  “Believe me,” Caroline said, “I know school is miserable. I even know that practicing law can be miserable. But sooner or later you have to do something. If you think you’re going to find one thing that will be perfect for you, you’re going to spend your eightieth birthday reading the want ads.”

  “You sound like you’re trying to talk me into a bad marriage.”

  “But it doesn’t have to be a bad marriage. Why can’t you see that? Get a law degree and go fight housing discrimination, or go get a job for a publisher and write book contracts for authors.”

  Franny smiled and shook her head. “I’ll figure it out,” was what she had said to her sister.

  But she hadn’t figured it out, and now she was in Amagansett walking through town in order to avoid the man she loved and his friends. Franny looked in shop windows, and when she saw a newspaper on a bench she sat down and read the entire thing. The light was so soft, so honeyed, that she could almost forgive her houseguests for wanting to stay. She waited until she was sure it was too late for anyone to ask her to make them lunch. She passed the restaurant she and Leo liked, hoping that by some chance she would see him there. Finally she decided to go back. There was nothing else to do. She had planned to sneak up to the bedroom undetected, but they saw her from the side porch and waved.